By any measure, Bill Dickey is an all-time great in both Yankees’ and baseball history. He was an 11-time All-Star, helping the Yankees to eight World Series titles, and was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. However, he doesn’t quite get the recognition that you might expect someone with those accolades to get.
That’s probably because during his time with the Yankees, he was teammates with the likes of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig at the beginning of his career, and then the likes of Joe DiMaggio at the end. Also, while he deservedly has his number retired by the team, he’s not even the most famous Yankee catcher to wear No. 8, as protégé Yogi Berra also wore that number before the team retired it for both of them.
However, today is a day for him, as Dickey was born 119 years ago today. In honor of that, let’s look back at the life and times of “The Man Nobody Knows,” who we once named the ninth-best Yankee in franchise history.
William Malcom “Bill” Dickey
Born: June 6, 1907 (Bastrop, AL)
Died: November 12, 1993 (Little Rock, AR)
Yankees Tenure: 1928-43 (player), 1946 (player/manager)
One of seven children of John and Laura Dickey, William Dickey was born in Louisiana in 1906. However, he primarily grew up in Arkansas, where the family moved to so John could work as a railroad brakeman.
From a young age, Bill was involved in baseball. His father had played semi-professional baseball, as did his older brother, Gus. Bill wouldn’t even be the only major leaguer to come out of his family, as a younger brother, George, would play six MLB seasons for the Red Sox and White Sox.
Dickey played second base and pitched in his youth, but his big break came when a friend suggested he fill in at catcher for a semipro team in Hot Springs, Arkansas. Despite some initial hesitancy, Dickey quickly took to it, and soon caught the eye of the minor league Little Rock Travelers, who inked a deal with the 18-year-old in 1925. He worked his way to the Jackson Generals in 1927. Despite having a good year there, Jackson waived their rights to Dickey after that season, which would up being very fortuitous for the Yankees. The Generals had an affiliation with the White Sox, but Jackson’s declining Jackson allowed Yankee scout Johnny Nee to swoop in. Nee told GM Ed Barrow that he would “quit scouting if (Dickey) did not make good.”
That review led the Yankees making that bet and signing the catcher for $12,000.
After starting the 1928 season back in Little Rock, the Yankees moved Dickey to a brief pit stop with the Buffalo Bisons before calling him up in August. He made his MLB debut as a late-inning replacement for Benny Bengough, going 0-for-2. He stayed in a bench role for the remainder of that season, recording his first hit on August 24th against the St. Louis Browns. While he didn’t appear in the Yankees’ sweep of the Cardinals in the 1928 World Series, Dickey was on the roster for the first of his many championships.
While he started the 1929 season in a reserve role, the catching job for the Yankees was there for the taking, and Dickey took it and didn’t let it go for a very long time. His first full saw in ’29 saw Dickey post a 117 OPS+, but those totals would only keep rising from there. Over 11 years from 1929-39, Dickey hit .320/.386/.510 (131 OPS+), with 178 home runs and over 1,500 hits. In 1936 in particular, Dickey hit .362, which stood for 73 years as a record batting average for catchers until fellow Hall of Famer Joe Mauer surpassed him during his MVP-winning 2009 with the Twins. Those are some remarkable hitting figures considering Dickey was also a catcher, and a pretty good one at that.
In a lot of those seasons, Dickey was the third-best Yankee position player behind Ruth and Gehrig, and then later behind Gehrig and DiMaggio. Besides that, the Yankees added another five World Series titles in that period, including four in a row from 1936-39. Dickey had a particularly good moment in the last one, when he walked off the Reds in Game 1 en route to a sweep.
As the years turned to the 1940s, the wear and tear of catching all those games started to catch up to Dickey. While he still had a couple good hitting seasons after the turn of the decade, he began to split playing time with his backups more and more. Even after that, he still helped the Yankees to two more championships in 1941 and ’43. In the latter of those, his two-run home run ended up providing the only offense in a series-clinching Game 5 victory over the Cardinals.
Following the victory in ’43, Dickey was drafted into the military and spent the next two seasons away from the Yankees. He returned for 1946 and resumed his role behind the plate. However, 35 games into the season, Joe McCarthy left and resigned from the team after continued quarrels with the front office. The team decided to elevate Dickey into a player-manager role. He led the team to a 57-48 record and a third-place finish, but he gave up the role after the team wouldn’t guarantee that Dickey would continue on as manager. Instead, Bucky Harris got the job and was the man behind the dugout for the 1947 championship team that bore a strong resemblance to Dickey’s 1946 squad.
Dickey hung up his playing spikes after 1946, eventually earning Cooperstown enshrinement in 1954.
After some time coaching and managing in the minors, Dickey eventually returned to the Yankees as a coach on Casey Stengel’s staff. One of his duties over the years was mentoring the team’s up-and-coming young catchers, and a couple of them — Yogi Berra and Elston Howard — ended up becoming quite good themselves. Both catchers gave a lot of credit for their successful careers to the tutelage of Dickey; Yogi of course had his own way of saying it: “He learned me all his experience.”
Dickey also passed down the No. 8 to Berra, and the team would later jointly retire the number for the both of them in 1972; they were also awarded plaques in Monument Park 16 years later. Following his long life in baseball, Dickey returned to his native Arkansas, where he resided until he passed away in 1993 at age 86. He was survived by his wife and three children.
When you’re naming the all-time greats in Yankee history, Dickey might be a name forgotten about by the more casual fans. However if you know ball, you know that he was a crucial part of the most successful era in franchise history.
See more of the “Yankees Birthday of the Day” series Yankees Birthday of the Day: Bill.
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