Sports Poets Society

Eddie Waitkus faces Ruth Ann Steinhagen in felony court, Chicago, 1949.  ST-17500605-E1 , Chicago Sun-Times collection, CHM https://www.chicagohistory.org/shooting-of-eddie-waitkus/ By: Heidi Samuelson Jun 13 2023 On June 14, 1949, former Chicago Cub Eddie Waitkus was shot at the Edgewater Beach Hotel by 19-year-old Ruth Ann Steinhagen in what is thought to be one of the first recognized cases of criminal stalking in the United States. Edward Stephen Waitkus was born in 1919 to Lithuanian immigrant parents and grew up in Boston, Massachusetts . He attended Boston College, and his professional baseball career began with a semiprofessional team in Maine. Waitkus made his Major League Baseball debut for the Cubs in 1941, but paused his baseball career to serve in World War II, where he participated in the fighting in the Pacific theatre and earned four Bronze Stars. When Waitkus returned to the Cubs in 1946, the first baseman was a popular player with the media and a solid hitter, wi...

Ruth Ann Steinhagen, then-19, in the Cook County Jail  after she shot Philadelphia Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus in 1949.  On the table: a photo of Waitkus taken in the hospital where he was recovering from his bullet wound. The story of his shooting was the inspiration for Bernard Malamud's novel The Natural.  Steinhagen died this past December. AP https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2013/03/18/174623312/stalker-who-inspired-the-natural-dies-lived-real-life-in-obscurity MUST READS MARCH 18, 2013 - 11:50 AM ET HEARD ON ALL THINGS CONSIDERED By   Mark Memmott Though we've seen The Natural many times, we have to confess we didn't know that a real woman shot a real baseball player in 1949 and that their story inspired Bernard Malamud's 1952 book and Robert Redford's 1984 movie. But over the weekend, obituaries appeared about Ruth Ann Steinhagen, 83, who "disappeared into near obscurity" as the Chicago Tribune says and died last Dec. 29 with li...

https://royhobbs.com/about-us/who-is-roy-hobbs#:~:text=According%20to%20Wikipedia%2C%20Author%20Malamud,in%201941%20and%201946%2D55. Roy Hobbs is the character in the book, “The Natural,” by Bernard Malmud, written in 1952 , and turned into a Hollywood production in 1984 , thrusting the fictional baseball hero Roy Hobbs on the American public. The book was hardly a best seller … the movie, however, has survived 25+ years and remains a staple of cable television, with Robert Redford playing the role of Roy Hobbs. Ron Monks chose the name “Roy Hobbs” for his baseball organization in 1989 . For Monks, the choice of Roy Hobbs was easy as he could see the parallels from the Roy Hobbs character to our own participation in baseball as adult amateurs. Roy Hobbs is drawn away from baseball at an early age and returns in later life to enjoy and appreciate the game for what it is. The history of Roy Hobbs as a fictional character is interesting since it brings several of our oldest mythological...