Piersall made a remarkable recovery and quickly revived his baseball career. He became the starting centerfielder for Boston in 1953 and was named to play in the All-Star Game in 1954 for the first of two occasions.
by Andy Piascik
If Jimmy Piersall accomplished nothing else in his long, colorful life, he certainly did a great deal to draw attention to the issue of mental illness. Because he was a major league baseball player, his battles became very public in ways that were undoubtedly quite painful for him. He struggled on, documented his illness and the impact it had on his life in a best-selling book he wrote when he was just 25 years of age, and went on to several careers after baseball.
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| Jimmy Piersall |
Piersall was not the easiest person to be around. He was prone to vicious outbursts that were often aimed at complete strangers and that were often in response to things of no consequence. Such behavior was not confined to the time when he was often cruelly taunted on major league baseball fields, either, but persisted deep into his long life.
His inappropriate behavior notwithstanding, Piersall should be viewed first and foremost as someone who struggled with illness, did so in a very public way, and persevered for 65 years from the time of a public breakdown to his death. The world in which his troubles became public was very different from our own. It may not be accurate to say Piersall was the first person to struggle in such a public way with issues the general population either didn’t know about, didn’t want to know about or else or had a superficial understanding of, but it wouldn’t be far from the truth, either. Whatever his flaws, he did the world a great service for that alone.
Early Life
Piersall was born in Waterbury on November 14, 1929. He was an outstanding athlete from a young age and starred in baseball and basketball at Leavenworth High School, leading the basketball team to the New England championship in 1947. During much of his early life, his mother battled mental illness and was a regular inpatient in psychiatric hospitals. Piersall was a serious, introspective youth and his family’s descent into poverty after the 1929 stock market crash troubled him greatly and undoubtedly impacted his mental health.
Piersall was signed to a contract by the Boston Red Sox in 1948 and played his first major league baseball game in 1950 at the age of 20. After displaying increasingly erratic behavior for a period of months, Piersall suffered a serious breakdown in 1952. He spent time in a psychiatric hospital in Massachusetts, where he was diagnosed as manic depressive and treated with electric shock therapy. He was also prescribed lithium and took it for most all of the rest of his life.
Fear Strikes Out
Piersall made a remarkable recovery and quickly revived his baseball career. He became the starting centerfielder for Boston in 1953 and was named to play in the All-Star Game in 1954 for the first of two occasions. He also began working on a book about his ordeal, Fear Strikes Out, that he coauthored with Al Hirschfeld and that was published in 1955. The story was made into a television drama as an episode of the anthology show Climax! a short time later with Tab Hunter playing Piersall.
Two years after the release of the book, a Hollywood movie version of Piersall’s story was made. Also called Fear Strikes Out, the movie featured Anthony Perkins as Piersall and Karl Malden as his father John Piersall. Though Piersall has written that he did not much like the film, it was successful and well-received and remains a staple on television channels that feature old-time movies.
Whatever its flaws, the movie was a fairly powerful depiction of a young man struggling with mental illness that was likely seen by hundreds of thousands at the time of its release and many more over the decades on television. Though any number of movies prior to Fear Strikes Out included characters with serious psychological problems, they overwhelmingly were superficial and/or violent, unsympathetic criminals like James Cagney’s over-the-top performance in 1949’s White Heat. Unlike pretty much any mentally ill movie character prior to the 1957 movie, Perkins as Piersall is depicted sympathetically. Scenes like his breakdown during a game remain quite powerful 60+ years later even if it was one of the scenes Piersall objected to, as his breakdown did not actually occur on the field during a game.
Abusive Fans and Players
Piersall endured a great deal of abuse from opposing players and fans in the years after the book and movie were released. He was even attacked by two fans on the field at Yankee Stadium during a game. Piersall never spoke or wrote much about the taunts and slurs he had to listen to over many years, but he undoubtedly had to tap a deep reservoir of inner strength to withstand them.
Piersall sometimes responded quite forcefully including several fistfights he had with opposing players. At other times, he displayed a light comic touch on the field. When he hit the 100th home run of his career in 1963 while playing for the New York Mets, for example, he marked the milestone by circling the bases backwards. On another occasion when he came up to bat, he doffed his cap and several birds he had hidden under it took flight, to the delight of many in attendance.
While Piersall continued to live in Waterbury through much of the 1950s, he did not maintain a close relationship with his hometown thereafter. He visited the city after moving away while his parents were still living but rarely did so after their deaths. Given how he wrote about the poverty of his childhood and the mental stress he experienced, themes that are brought to even greater life in the movie version of Fear Strikres Out, it’s quite possible his memories of Waterbury were mostly painful ones that he preferred to keep at a distance.
Painful memories notwithstanding, Piersall remains one of the best-known Waterbury natives and one of the greatest athletes born in the city. The building where Piersall attended high school in the Brass City still stands, though it is no longer a school. The name of his high school has changed several times and is today known as John F. Kennedy High School. He is enshrined in the Waterbury Hall of Fame maintained by the city’s Silas Bronson Library.
An Elite Outfielder
The fact that Piersall is well-known for his struggles should not overshadow his career as a ballplayer. He was an especially accomplished fielder who won Gold Glove awards in 1958 and 1961 as the American League’s best defensive centerfielder. Since the Gold Glove award was not begun until 1957, well after the start of his career, he might have won as many as four more. He is a member of the Red Sox Hall of Fame alongside the likes of Babe Ruth, Cy Young and long-time teammate Ted Williams.
While there’s no way to quantify Piersall’s contribution to our collective understanding of mental illness, the fact of that contribution is undeniable. He was a person whose career unfolded in front of millions and who lay bare a problem that remained largely in the shadows in the 1950s. Everyone who struggles with mental illness or cares about someone who does should be grateful that Piersall was willing and able to confront his problems so forthrightly.
After playing 17 seasons in the major leagues, Piersall worked as a minor league fielding instructor, a broadcaster and a radio talk show host. He died in Illinois on June 2, 2017 at the age of 87.
Bridgeport native Andy Piascik is a long-time activist and award-winning author whose most recent book is the novel In Motion. He can be reached at andypiascik@yahoo.com.
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