Remembering Dick Groat
Submitted photo
Dick Groat was the National League MVP and batting champion in 1960 when he helped lead the Pittsburgh Pirates to the World Series championship over the New York Yankees.
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Pirates shortstop Dick Groat (right) and second baseman Bill Mazeroski combined to lead the National League in double plays five times, a record that still stands.
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Dick Groat is shown during his playing basketball playing days at Duke. A two-time All-American, Groat was the first Duke player to ever have his number retired.
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Dick Groat, one of only 13 athletes to ever play in both the NBA and Major League Baseball, poses for a photo with George Von Benko in July of 2022.
One of my Boys of Summer, Dick Groat, passed away on Thursday, April 27 after suffering complications from a stroke.
As a young baseball fan, I revered the 1960 World Champion Pittsburgh Pirates. The never-say-die Pirates conquered the mighty New York Yankees in the World Series.
Groat was a catalyst for that team, helping the Battling Bucs to their first World Series championship in 35 years while winning the National League’s batting championship and Most Valuable Player Award.
I sat down with Groat at his Champion Lakes Golf Club in Ligonier on July 19, 2022. Looking back I am so glad that my friend Bill Priatko and I spent part of that day with Groat.
Groat’s passing is bittersweet because it comes days after it was announced he would be one of the inductees into the 2023 class of the Pittsburgh Pirates Hall of Fame. The Induction ceremony will take place in August.
Here is a segment of the Memory Lane article I wrote about Groat after my visit with him in July 2022:
Many sports fans regard Groat as the best athlete to come out of Western Pennsylvania, and there is ammunition to back up that claim.
Groat a former professional baseball and basketball player, was an eight-time All-Star shortstop and two-time World Series champion in Major League Baseball. He rates as one of the most accomplished two-sport athletes in American sports history, a college All-America in baseball and basketball as well as one of only 13 to ever play both at the professional level.
“I’ve always been very proud of that,” Groat stated that afternoon at Champion Lakes. “Bill Hillgrove started that and other people have carried it on a little bit. I’m very proud that anybody would think that highly of me.”
Groat revealed that he attempted to play football at Swissvale High School, but that never got off the ground.
“There was no chance they were going to let me play football,” Groat recalled. “When I went out for football I was only a sophomore in high school and was small. They told me to get the heck out of there.”
Following an outstanding baseball and basketball career at Swissvale, Groat attended Duke University.
Groat was more naturally gifted in basketball, which was his real passion. The 5-foot-11 guard attended Duke, where he was a two-time All-American, two-time McKelvin Award winner as the Southern Conference athlete of the year and the first basketball player to have his number (10) retired in school history.
Groat was selected for the 1950-51 Helms National Player of the Year Award, when he became the first and still only player to lead the nation in points (26.0) and assists (7.6) per game in one season.
“Basketball was always my first love,” Groat said. “I thought I was a much better basketball player than I was a baseball player because I had the drawback in baseball. I couldn’t run very well. In basketball if you were quick nobody knows how slow you are.”
Former Homestead and Duquesne University basketball star Paul Birch, who coached the now-defunct Pittsburgh Ironmen of the Basketball Association of America (a forerunner of the NBA) in 1946, and the NBA’s Fort Wayne Pistons from 1951 through 1954. Birch had played for the Pistons during the early 1940s, and the Youngstown Bears of the NBL. Birch coached Groat with the Pistons and used to tell people how great Groat was in basketball. He even said he thought Groat could have been better than the great Bob Cousy.
“That sure is high praise,” Groat opined, “Bob Cousy was one of those people I looked up to. A story that I have never told before, Cousy made a complete ass out of me the first time I played against him in the NBA, and I never forgot it. We got a second rematch and I was able to do the exact same thing to him. That was the only two times I ever played against Cousy. He won the first one and I won the second one.”
In 1952, the Fort Wayne Pistons selected Groat at the No. 3 pick of the National Basketball Association draft, but his early success was interrupted by a two-year stint in the military. Upon his return from the service the Pirates management forced him to make a career decision.
“I was finishing up on my degree,” Groat recalled. “A man by the name of Branch Rickey gave me the chance to go right to the Major Leagues out of Duke. He said enjoy that time in the NBA because you are never going to play again, and I was never allowed to play basketball. Mr. Rickey would not allow me to play basketball again.”
Groat went on to have a marvelous career in Major League baseball. For seven seasons (1956-62), Groat teamed with future Hall of Fame second baseman Bill Mazeroski to give the Pirates a tremendous keystone combo, but when he first started playing with the Pirates in 1952 he got off to a slow start at the plate. He turned to a Hall of Famer and one of the greatest players in Pirates history, Paul Waner, to turn things around at the plate.
“Waner owned a batting range in Pittsburgh,” Groat recalled. “I went out to see him and I used to go there every morning and he helped me because he was obviously a great hitter and he used to hit against the batting machine, and everything he told me turned out to be a plus and I ended up leading the Pirates in hitting that year.
“He made some adjustments with me. He was up in years, but he got in the cage and was spraying line drives everywhere. I mean he had a great batting stroke. He couldn’t have been nicer and he really helped me.”
One of the highlights for Groat was the 1960 season as the team captain became the first Pirate to be selected Most Valuable Player since Waner in 1927. He hit .325 to become the first right-handed Pirates hitter to win the batting title since Honus Wagner in 1911.
Groat sat out 20 days after his right wrist was fractured by a Lew Burdette pitch on Sept. 6. Originally, Groat was expected to be sidelined for at least one month. But he claimed to be a quick healer and lobbied hard for an early return in order to be better prepared for the expected trip to the World Series. He helped the Pirates defeat the mighty New York Yankees on Bill Mazeroski’s dramatic Game Seven home run.
“To beat the Yankees, it was something special. The 1960 Pirates were a team of destiny,” Groat stated.
The 1960 Pirates were on Groat’s mind when we met as teammate Dick “Ducky” Schofield had just passed away.
“I think about those guys,” Groat stated. “As soon as Ducky died the first thing I thought of was the Pirates. Schofield was the reason I ended up playing for St. Louis, Joe Brown thought Schofield was a better shortstop than I was and so they traded and I had another great year in St. Louis.”
Groat won another World Series Championship with the Cardinals when they beat the Yankees in 1964. Groat played 14 years in the big leagues and had a career batting average of .286 with 39 home runs and 707 RBIs.
Groat is in the WPIAL Hall of Fame, Western Chapter of the Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame, Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame and Missouri Sports Hall of Fame. In 2011, Groat was inducted into the National College Baseball Hall of Fame. In doing so, he became the first person to be admitted to the college basketball and baseball halls of fame.
In 1964, Groat and Pirates teammate Jerry Lynch designed and built Champion Lakes Golf Course in Ligonier.
From the 1979-80 to 2018-19 seasons, Groat spent 40 seasons as the radio color analyst for Pittsburgh Panthers men’s basketball games. In that period, he and play-by-play partner Bill Hillgrove were the longest tenured broadcast team in the college game.
Hillgrove reflected on Groat after learning of his passing.
“His legacy is that he was a sports legend, but a better human being,” Hillgrove stated. “I think that’s what people should know about him. Anybody who ever went up to Champion Lakes to play golf would find Dick the consummate host. He would answer questions, he would spend time with people. He was just built that way. A lot of athletes and a lot of super athletes unfortunately don’t fall into that category.
“I miss him on a lot of levels and I feel as though I had lost a big brother. He taught me more about basketball and baseball than I ever would know and was just a pleasure to be not only along side him, but to be his roommate and to travel with him especially to New York where those Yankee fans had a love-hate relationship with him. They respected him in their way because he beat the Yankees twice, once as a Pirates and once as a Cardinal, but they respected the fact that he was just a great athlete.
“Interestingly enough, North of the Mason-Dixon Line he was a shortstop and South of the Mason-Dixon Line a lot of people didn’t know he was a shortstop, he was a basketball legend.”
Hall of Fame basketball writer Dick “Hoops” Weiss had this memory of Groat.
“I used to love seeing him at Pitt games. 1960 legend. Never heard anyone say a bad word about him. A class act!”
Richard Morrow Groat was 92 years old. RIP!
George Von Benko’s “Memory Lane” column appears in the Sunday editions of the Herald-Standard. He also hosts a sports talk show on WMBS-AM radio from 10 a.m. to noon on Saturdays.