Sports

George ‘Shotgun’ Shuba and the handshake of the century

December 11, 2024 William A. Gralnick

The Brooklyn Dodgers, National League champions, pose for a team photo, Sept. 26, 1952, at Ebbets Field, Brooklyn. Seated on ground: Charlie Di Giovanna. Seated in first row, from left: George Shuba, Andy Pafko, Pee Wee Reese, George Pfister, Cookie Lavagetto, Chuck Dressen, Jake Pitler, Billy Herman, Billy Cox, Roy Campanella, Carl Furillo, Dr. Harold Wendler. Second row: John Griffin (in T-shirt), Lee Scott (in suit), Jim Hughes, Gil Hodges, Ben Wade, Johnny Rutherford, Jackie Robinson, Clem Labine, Clyde King, Chris van Cuyk, Preacher Roe, Joe Black, Ralph Branca, Rocky Nelson. Last row: Joe Landrum, Ed Amoros, Rube Walker, Carl Erskine, Bobby Morgan, Tommy Holmes, Rocky Bridges, Billy Loes, Duke Snider, Dick Williams, Ken Lehman, Ronnie Negray, Steve Lembo, Ray Moore. AP Photo

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Ball players are remembered for different things. Some pitchers were known to throw at a batter’s head (Sal Maglie, Don Drysdale, Bob Gibson). Some ball players were wizards in the field (Pee Wee Reese, Phil Rizzuto, Ozzie Smith), and others on the base paths (Maury Wills, Pete Rose). George “Shotgun” Shuba was known for a handshake, a handshake dubbed, “The Handshake of the Century.” But we get ahead of the story.

Born Dec. 14, 1928, George Shuba, son of Czech immigrants, was one of 10 children. He was born, lived but for his years in Brooklyn, and died in Youngstown, Ohio. He played an injury-shortened seven big league years, all for the Brooklyn Dodgers. This is his story. Let’s start at the end and work forward to the handshake. First, his career.

He was brought up July 2, 1948, at 23 years of age, after a sensational year in the minors. Dodgers President and General Manager Branch Rickey didn’t think he had enough power and played good enough defense and sent word that Shuba shouldn’t be a starter. He was a utility outfielder and pinch-hitter. Baseball Research gives us his career numbers. Shuba had 814 career at-bats. He managed 211 hits, 24 of which were home runs. While he had a mediocre career batting average of .259, he scored 106 runs and knocked in 125. He did have an on-base percentage of .358. When we explore his nickname we’ll see no one expected him to have much of a slugging percentage (.413), but he was a timely and respected pinch hitter.

Here’s an example. The left-handed hitter was the first National League pinch hitter to homer in the World Series, connecting in Game 1 against the New York Yankees in 1953. His career was featured in a chapter of Roger Kahn’s book, “The Boys of Summer,” a tribute to the 1950s Brooklyn Dodgers. He hit the ball off Yankee’s ace Allie Reynolds and had no idea he had just hit himself into the record books. He was just doing his job.

Shuba was a typical ‘50s ball player. He was a blue-collar worker. He didn’t have an agent, and he worked other jobs to make a living. In those days, the ball players were at the mercy of management. Like many others, he was known to have been outfoxed by Branch Rickey at contract negotiation time. Shuba wanted a salary increase to $23,000 and during his meeting with Rickey, the Dodger General Manager was summoned to another office for an important phone call. As he waited, Shuba noticed a contract with Jackie Robinson’s name on it for $21,000 sitting on Rickey’s desk. When Rickey returned, Shuba immediately agreed to take $20,000. Like many before him, he found out later that Jackie’s contract was a phony and that the important phone call had been a setup.

And the moniker “Shotgun?” There are several stories about how the name “Shotgun” was affixed to him. The Dodgers said Shuba earned his nickname after someone compared his line drives with the sound of buckshot. I’ll go with the one from his obit published in Legacy.com. “His smooth left-handed swing wasn’t a fluke. It was the result of a tenacious practice regimen when he was a teenager. He practiced his swing for hours with a rope tied to the ceiling, making knots in the rope where the strike zone would be. He swung a bat at the rope, helping to develop the powerful swing that later produced line drives in the major leagues.”

Shuba explains in his book My Memories as a Brooklyn Dodger (as told to George Gulas): “I got a bat and drilled a hole in it about six inches in the barrel. I put lead in it. Then in my basement, I had a ball of string hanging, and I would swing in 25-swing increments until I had 600 swings for the day. Sometimes I would do 400 swings in the day, go out on a date, and come back at 12:30 in the morning and do 200 more.”

Then there was that handshake. Kahn notes that even though Shuba had hit that first-ever National League pinch-hit homer in a World Series game, he is best remembered for a truly remarkable moment in baseball history that occurred while he was still in the minor leagues with the Montreal Royals. Kahn recounts that he was the first person to congratulate Jackie Robinson with a handshake on Jackie’s first home run in an all-white man’s league. As Jackie reached home plate at Roosevelt Stadium in Jersey City on April 18, 1946, Shuba extended his hand and shook Robinson’s hand, accepting Jackie as a respected teammate. The famous photo, ‘Handshake for the Century’, records a pivotal moment in Jackie’s career and marked the beginning of integration in professional baseball.

In a subsequent interview, Shuba answered a question about that historic moment:

“It didn’t matter that Jackie was black, he was the best guy on the team and he was my teammate. He could have been technicolor, it didn’t matter to me.”

“I could see in Jack’s eyes he was very happy I was at the plate to shake his hand,” George told his son Mike later. “But I do remember a few guys that didn’t want to bat after Jack.”

And there’s this from The Business Journal in Youngstown on January 1, 2019.

“A larger-than-life statue commemorating the inspiring 1946 handshake of Jackie Robinson, the first African-American Major League Baseball player, and George “Shotgun” Shuba, his white teammate from Youngstown, will inspire better relations among people of different racial backgrounds, say leaders of a group planning to build the statue in downtown Youngstown.

“A handshake at home plate by players of different races is no big deal in America today, but in 1946 it was a historic moment,” said Herb Washington, a local businessman, former Major League Baseball player and one of the co-chairs of the committee. We want to memorialize that moment in a way that inspires people to relate more respectfully to those of other races. We need more Americans to follow the examples of Jackie Robinson and George Shuba.” Given the recent Nazi march in Columbus, Ohio that’s worth re-reading.

The Shuba story speaks to a short career that was long in memorable happenings. And it ended that way. Roger Kahn tells it. “It was the ’55 World Series. The Dodgers were up 2-0. The game would see “Shotgun” Shuba’s final AB in the major leagues, again as a pinch hitter. Manager Walter Alston used him to pinch-hit for second baseman Don Zimmer. A hit at that time would have scored at least two runs in a tight final game that was eventually won by the Dodgers but it wasn’t to be. Shotgun’s pinch-hit at-bat did, however, become part of the famous Sandy Amoros catch.

“With Don Zimmer now out of the game (having been pinch-hit for by Shuba), Jim Gilliam was moved to second base and Sandy Amoros entered the game in left field. A short while later, Amoros made his impossible and historic catch which he turned into a double play. Most agree that because Gilliam was not as fast as Amoros and unlike Amoros wore his glove on his left hand instead of his right, Gilliam would not have made that catch in the left-field corner and thus, no double play.” In my neighborhood (Flatbush), we would have said, “He backed his way into history.”

After his playing days, Shuba returned home to Youngstown. He appeared at Dodger Stadium in 2005 when the club marked the 50th anniversary of its only championship in Brooklyn. He was joined by Carl Erskine, Roger Craig, Don Newcombe, Johnny Podres, Clem Labine, Sandy Koufax, Don Zimmer, Tom Lasorda and Duke Snider. It was la crème de la crème from Shuba’s Dodger days.

He lived to the ripe old age of 89 and is buried outside of Youngstown. One might say of George Shotgun Shuba he was one of the last of the good guys, a ball player who loved playing ball, he loved playing for the team he played for, and he loved playing with the guys he played with. That’s a happy ending.