Dodgers legend and DC native Maury Wills dies at 89

[DCSportsFan.com]

Legendary shortstop Maury Wills, a three-sport star at Cardozo High School in Washington, D.C., who went on to win three World Series titles with the Los Angeles Dodgers, died Monday at 89, the team announced Tuesday. Wills hit .281 during his 14-year major league career and stole 586 bases, including a then-single-season record 104 in 1962, when he was named National League MVP.

The greatest baseball player to come out of D.C., Wills grew up as the seventh of 13 children in the Parkside public housing project in Northeast. He said he first dreamed of becoming a professional baseball player after meeting Washington Senators second baseman Jerry Priddy at a youth clinic in the 1940s.

“I was barefoot and he said, ‘Don’t you have any spikes?’ ” Wills recalled in 1975. “ ‘You tell your folks to get you some; you’re a good little player.’ So he was always a favorite person of mine.”

For many years during his retirement, Wills returned to D.C. to hold clinics and camps in the summer. There’s a baseball field named in his honor across Georgia Avenue from Howard University.

A standout quarterback at Cardozo, Wills received nine scholarship offers to play college football, but he instead signed with the Dodgers. Wills spent nearly a decade in the minors, during which time he learned to switch hit, before making his major league debut at 26 in 1959. He was the Dodgers’ starting shortstop by the end of the season, which culminated in a World Series win over the Chicago White Sox.

Read more here: https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2022/09/20/maury-wills-dodgers-dead/

[Author]

Posts