Joe Cronin was from San Francisco. He played soccer, ran track, and won the boys’ city tennis championship in 1920. But baseball was his first love.

In 1922 Joe teamed up with Wally Berger to help win the city baseball championship at Mission High. The following year he transferred to Sacred Heart, a Catholic school a few miles north of his home. where he starred in several sports while his baseball team won the citywide prep school title in 1924, his senior year. By this time, he was also playing shortstop for a semipro team in the city of Napa.

After signing with the Pittsburgh Pirates in late 1924, he joined the Johnstown club of the Middle Atlantic League. At the end of the season, Joe joined the Pirates, working out with major leaguers and sitting on the bench while Pittsburgh beat Washington in the 1925 World Series.

The Pirates were a strong club, especially at shortstop where Joe would most likely play, and the 19-year-old had very little hope of playing much in 1926. He traveled with the team early in the season before being assigned to New Haven in the Eastern League.

By midsummer, Joe was hitting .320 and earned another recall to the Pirates. After spending spring training of 1928 with the team, he was sold by the Pirates to Kansas City (American Association) in early April.

The Washington Senators needed a shortstop and Joe was signed as a back-up in 1929, but he began playing most of the time. He hit just .242 in but played excellently. The next year, Joe hit a solid .282, but made 62 errors, due mainly to overaggressive throwing.

In 1930 Joe took his game up another notch, becoming the best shortstop and one of the best players in baseball. He hit .346 with 203 hits and 126 RBIs. The baseball writers voted Joe the league’s MVP, ahead of Al Simmons and Lou Gehrig, and the Sporting News also gave him its "Player of the Year" award.

Joe maintained his excellence in 1931 as he hit .306 with 126 RBIs. The next year he overcame a chipped bone in his thumb, suffered when he was struck by a pitch in June, but still hit .318 with a league-leading 18 triples.

He silenced all of the doubters in 1933 by hitting .309 and a league-leading 45 doubles, while simultaneously managing his team to a pennant, in his first season as the youngest manager in World Series history.

The next season was a difficult one for him. At the end of May his average had dropped to .215, before he finally began to hit. He got his average up, but as the team’s manager he was more distressed by the showing of his club. Then in September he collided broke his left forearm, finishing his season on the field.

When Tom Yawkey bought the Red Sox, he offered Washington $250,000 for Joe, and agreed to sign him to a five-year contract as player-manager at $30,000 per year. During the height of the Great Depression, this was an unfathomable sum, an offer Washington could not refuse.

When Joe joined the Red Sox, they were dubbed as the "Gold Sox" and were expected to win. But they did not win, and press around the country typically blamed the high-priced help, including Joe. Even worse, many of the veteran players Yawkey had acquired like Wes Ferrell, Lefty Grove, and Bill Werber, did not like or respect their younger manager. The team was filled with temperamental head cases.

In July 1936, Ferrell called Joe to the mound and told him he would not throw another pitch until the pitcher warming up in the bullpen sat down. A month later he stormed off the mound and back to his hotel room after a Joe made an error at short. When informed by a reporter of his $1,000 fine, he shot back, "Is that so? Well, that isn't the end of this. I'm going to punch Cronin in the jaw as soon as I see him." A month later, Werber cursed at Joe during a game and was ordered off the field.

After a fine year at bat in 1935, Joe suffered through a frustrating season in 1936. The acquisition of Jimmie Foxx and others from the Athletics made the Red Sox a supposed pennant contender, but Joe had an injury-plagued season and the Red Sox finished a disappointing sixth. At this point many observers thought Joe might be through at just 30 years old.

Instead, Joe rebounded to hit .307 with 18 home runs and 110 RBIs in 1937, then .325 and a league-leading 51 doubles in 1938, as the Red Sox finished in second place with 88 wins, their most as a team in 20 years.

The Red Sox had a fine year in 1939, and Joe had another good season at the plate. He hit .a career-high 24 home runs in 1940, then hit .311 with 95 runs batted in 1941.

Joe started in seven All-Star games, including the first three, and would have started a few more had the game existed earlier in his career. After his All-Star season in 1941, he quietly stepped aside for rookie Johnny Pesky in 1942.

After that, he became a utility infielder and pinch-hitter, setting a league record with five pinch home runs in 1943. In April 1945 he broke his leg in a game against the Yankees, missed the rest of the reason, and hobbled away from his playing career.

By then Joe was no longer the young upstart manager, but was a veteran on a team that was developing young talent. The new generation, men like Ted Williams, Dom DiMaggio and Bobby Doerr, admired and respected him. After the war for the first time in 1946, Joe managed the Red Sox to the AL pennant, but lost the World Series to the Cardinals.

At the end of the 1947 season, Joe took off his uniform for good, and became the club's general manager. The Red Sox competed for the AL pennant in 1948 and in 1949, finishing second by a single game both seasons, thanks to Joe's aggressive trades.

But they began a slow decline during the 1950s and did not seriously contend. One factor was a large number of "bonus babies" who never panned out.

During his time, Joe made some unsuccessful efforts to integrate the team, including attempts to sign or trade for black players, such as Bill Greason, Larry Doby and Charlie Neal. In 1949, he sent a scout to evaluate the 18-year-old Willie Mays. But they passed on Mays and instead signed 32-year old, Lorenzo "Piper" Davis, who became the first black player to sign with the Red Sox organization in 1949. However, he was released after one season.

As the GM, Joe had to deal with occasional controversies with Ted Williams, the mental breakdown of outfielder Jimmy Piersall, and the shocking death of young first base star Harry Agganis. Meanwhile, his power and prestige within baseball continued to grow. When AL President Will Harridge left, Joe was quickly hired to succeed him.

In 1966, Joe hired the first black major league umpire, Emmett Ashford. In an interview Ashford stated, “Jackie Robinson had his Branch Rickey, I had my Joe Cronin.”

Joe Cronin, one of the greatest shortstops in the game’s history, spent 50 years in the baseball without being fired or taking a year off. Every job was a promotion, and he came within a whisker of being baseball’s commissioner. He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1956.

Joe was battling cancer, when he came to Fenway Park for one of his last public appearances, his jersey number #4 being retired on May 29, 1984. He died at the age of 77 in September.

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Joe Cronin (pic)

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