Return of the Prodigal

Mickey Owen is one of baseball's better catchers, but when he makes an error it is a beaut. The third strike he dropped at Ebbets Field in 1941 cost Brooklyn a World Series game. Last week Mickey decided that joining the Mexican League was his big error for 1946. He recrossed the Rio Grande so suddenly that his wife left most of her clothes behind.

Back in the U.S., he cut loose with a Jan Valtin horror story of Mexican beisbol. Mickey recalled the first time he saw Mexico City's Nuevo Laredo Park. At first he wondered why it looked so familiar; then he realized he had seen it before in nightmares, bumpy infield, wobbly stands and all. "If some of those Mexican henchmen didn't think you were hustling to their satisfaction," said Mickey, "they'd sidle up to you and stick a gun in your ribs. . . . It just scared the hell out of me." To hear Mickey tell his yarn, Mexican beisbol was fearsome: he said darkly that "they" opened his mail, tailed him with detectives. Then came the last straw: they made him play first base.

Mickey went over the hill and abandoned his fine contract with Mexico's Pasquel brothers. The Pasquels promptly hollered that he owed them $26,000. Said Mickey: "I don't owe them nothing." Presumably, under Baseball Commissioner Happy Chandler's rules, Mickey Owen was banned from U.S. organized ball for five years. But Brooklyn Dodger President Branch Rickey, badly in need of a catcher for his team's stretch drive, was ready to forgive & forget. He argued that Mickey's case was different, since he went straight from the Navy to Mexico, without signing a 1946 Dodger contract. Other ballplayers (the loudest of them on the second-place St. Louis Cards) demanded that the ban be kept on. Happy Chandler's office, postponing the tough decision, found a technicality that ruled Runaway Mickey out of U.S. baseball for the rest of 1946.

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