HORNSBY, Rogers ("Rajah")

(b. 27 April 1896 near Winters, Texas; d. 5 January 1963 in Chicago, Illinois), baseball player whose .358 lifetime batting average in the major leagues is the highest ever compiled by a right-handed batter and second only to Ty Cobb's among all players.

Hornsby was the youngest of five children born to Aaron Edward Hornsby, a farmer and rancher, and Mary Dallas Rogers, a homemaker. When he was two years old, his father died, and his mother moved the family from their small farm in Runnels County in west-central Texas back eastward to Travis County, where both father and mother had grown up. A few years later the Hornsbys moved to Fort Worth, a thriving meat-packing center. At Fort Worth, Hornsby attended school through the tenth grade, worked as a checker at the stockyards, and developed his skills as a baseball player on stockyard and city-league teams.

Hornsby began his professional baseball career in 1914 at the bottom of the minor leagues at Hugo, Oklahoma. That summer and the next season, which he spent at Denison, Texas, in the Western Association, Hornsby batted only .232 and .277 and, playing shortstop most of the time, erred frequently. However, a scout for the St. Louis Cardinals of the National League (NL) liked what he saw in the youngster, who stood just under six feet tall but weighed only 135 pounds. Lacking the finances to purchase proven players from the higher minor leagues, the Cardinals paid Denison $500 for Hornsby's contract. During one month of the 1915 season with the St. Louis team, Hornsby could manage only fourteen hits in eighteen games.

Although he had done little to impress Cardinal manager Miller Huggins, Hornsby was determined to stick in the major leagues. He spent the off-season at his uncle's farm at Lockhart, Texas, eating heartily and gaining at least thirty pounds. When he reported for spring training with the Cardinals at San Antonio, he was bigger and stronger. Standing as far back in the batter's box and as far away from home plate as possible and holding his 36-inch, 38-ounce bat at its end, he repeatedly sent the ball to the far distances of the outfield. Kept on the St. Louis roster when the season began, Hornsby established himself as a big-leaguer, batting .313, which was the fourth-best mark in the league. Although the financially strapped Cardinals remained a run-of-the-mill team, Hornsby emerged as a full-fledged star, averaging .327 in 1917, slumping to .281 in the war-shortened 1918 season, climbing back to .318 in 1919, and then, in 1920, winning his first batting title at .370 and also leading the NL with 98 runs batted in. For the next five seasons, Hornsby led the NL in batting. After .397, .401, and .384 seasons, the Texan reached his peak with a .424 average in 1924, the highest batting average for any major-leaguer in the twentieth century, and came back to hit .405 the next season. He also became the NL's foremost power hitter in a decade when the baseball was livelier, the spitball and other "trick pitches" had been made illegal, and increasing numbers of players were emulating the free-swinging style of Babe Ruth in the American League (AL). Hornsby's forty-two home runs in 1922 and thirty-nine in 1925 were more than anyone other than Ruth had hit up to then.

Settling at second base by 1921, Hornsby was never more than passable as a fielder, but no one doubted his greatness as a hitter. In 1926 he struggled most of the season with a back injury and batted only .317, but as player-manager, he led the Cardinals to their first NL pennant and then to an upset of Ruth and the mighty New York Yankees in a legendary seven-game 1926 World Series.

Hornsby read little and rarely attended motion pictures, convinced that both reading and moviegoing were bad for a hitter's eyesight. He lived by the admonitions of his widowed mother (who died in 1926): shun tobacco and liquor, and always tell the truth. However admirable in principle strict truthfulness may be, Hornsby frequently came across as caustic, insufferably tactless, and totally insensitive to the opinions and feelings of others. He did indulge in one major vice—gambling on horse races. Although he made some of the biggest salaries of his time, he lost substantially, ran up debts to bookmakers and other players, and repeatedly antagonized club officials and Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball's dictatorial commissioner.

After the brilliant 1926 World Series triumph, Hornsby quarreled with Cardinal business manager Branch Rickey and owner Sam Breadon and was traded to the New York Giants. He played one season with the Giants for the legendary John McGraw, then was traded to the lowly Boston Braves, where he managed the team for most of the 1928 season and won his seventh and last batting title. Traded yet again, Hornsby helped power the Chicago Cubs to the 1929 NL pennant, and at the end of the following season, succeeded Joe McCarthy as Cubs manager. His chronic horse-playing and plainspoken ways got him fired midway through the 1932 season. After a brief stint as a player back with the Cardinals, Hornsby took over managership of the woeful St. Louis Browns in the AL. A desultory four years with the Browns ended in July 1937, when he was fired again.

For the next fifteen years Hornsby was a baseball vagabond, managing in the minor leagues and even briefly in Mexico, and working in radio and television. Finally, after his teams won pennants in the Texas League and Pacific Coast League in 1950 and 1951, he returned to the majors as manager of the Browns. There he lasted only fifty games before he was fired by Bill Veeck, the equally headstrong president of the struggling franchise. Later in that 1952 season, Hornsby signed to manage the NL's Cincinnati Reds; that job lasted only until September 1953, when he was fired again—for the last time. From then on, Hornsby worked in youth baseball clinics in Chicago and as a batting coach for the Cubs and the expansion-franchise New York Mets. He was still employed by the Mets when he died of a heart attack following cataract surgery, and his body was buried in the Hornsby family cemetery near Austin, Texas.

Hornsby was married three times. He wed Sarah Martin in 1918, but that marriage ended in 1922 as a consequence of his well-publicized affair with Mary Jeannette Penning-ton Hine, a St. Louis divorcee. Married in 1924, Hornsby and his second wife were estranged for several years before her death in 1956. The next year he married Marjorie Bernice Frederick Porter, a Chicago widow, and they were married until Hornsby's death. He was the father of two sons, the first with Martin, and the second with Hine.

Hornsby was a great baseball player, but he never learned much about human relations. "I have never been a yes man," he boasted a few years before his death. Baseball was his life; he cared for little else—except which horse looked good that day. Asked what he had gotten out of life, he said simply, "I wore a big-league uniform, and I had the best equipment, and I traveled in style, and I could play baseball every day. What else is there?"

The National Baseball Library in Cooperstown, New York, and the Sporting News archives in St. Louis have substantial collections relating to Hornsby. The only full-fledged biographical treatment is Charles C. Alexander, Rogers Hornsby: A Biography (1995). Two books were published under his name: My Kind of Baseball (1953), with J. Roy Stockton; and My War with Baseball (1953), with Bill Surface (1953). For Hornsby's career records, see Craig Carter, ed., Daguerreotypes (1990).

Charles C. Alexander