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35 Chapter 7. Ted Kluszewski Paul Ladewski The area known as Argo is located eight miles west of Chicago’s old Comiskey Park in Summit, Illinois, a low-down, five-figure village in Cook County known for a corn milling and processing plant that is among the largest of its kind—and has the odor to prove it. It was also home to Ted “Klu” Kluszewski, the 6-foot-2, 225-pound mountain of a man with the famous fifteen-inch biceps whose legend in baseball history will live even longer and go farther than the home runs he hit decades ago. Kluszewski has often been referred to as one of the most underappreciated players of the post–World War II era, one whose accomplishments as a player and a coach have remained under the radar far too long. In the mid-1950s Klu was the original Big Red Machine, a long-ball hitter and run producer without peer. In the four seasons from 1953 to 1956, he averaged 179 hits, 43 homers, and 116 rbis, numbers every bit as impressive as those of Eddie Mathews (152-41-109) of the Milwaukee Braves and Duke Snider (180-42-123) of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the same period. It’s not a stretch to believe that if Kluszewski had stayed healthy and productive for four or five more seasons, he would have joined Mathews and Snider in the Hall of Fame. Despite an abbreviated career, his 251 homers while he was with Cincinnati rank fifth on the Reds’ all-time list. Born on September 10, 1924, Theodore Bernard Kluszewski attended Argo High School in Summit, where he excelled in football. His father worked in a local factory. As a youth, Klu’s baseball experience consisted mostly of sandlot games. Indiana University recruited him primarily as a football player, but he also played baseball there, and his 1945 season ranks as one of the best for a two-sport athlete in the school’s history. As a center fielder, Kluszewski hit .443, a school record that stood for fifty years; then the star end and kicker helped lead the Hoosiers to their only outright Big Ten football championship . The squad, which also included future nfl players Pete Pihos and George Taliaferro, finished with a 9-0-1 mark, the only unbeaten Hoosiers football team. A longtime hero in Cincinnati as a power hitter, Ted Kluszewski was the hitting coach for one of history’s greatest offenses. 36 paul ladewski If not for World War II, Kluszewski most likely would have embarked on a professional football career . During the war the Reds held spring training at the Indiana campus in Bloomington because Major League teams were forbidden to train in the South. One day they invited the kid to take some hacks at batting practice. As legend has it, Big Klu promptly launched a few rockets over an embankment nearly four hundred feet away. After they picked their jaws up off the ground, team officials offered him a $15,000 contract, which he accepted. With the bonus in hand, Kluszewski married Eleanor Guckel in February 1946. Eleanor was a fine athlete herself, excelling at softball, and Klu later credited her with helping his Major League career by taking films of him at bat and in the field from seats close to the field. Making his professional debut for the Reds’ Columbia (South Carolina) farm team in the Class A South Atlantic League in 1946, Kluszewski was an immediate sensation, leading the league with a .352 batting average and driving in eighty-seven runs in ninety games. He made his Cincinnati debut in April 1947 but logged only ten at bats with the Reds, spending most of the season with Memphis of the Double-A Southern Association. Again he tore up the league, winning the batting crown with a .377 average. In 1948 Kluszewski returned to Cincinnati to stay for ten full seasons. It wasn’t long before his large biceps prompted Klu to cut off the sleeves of his jersey, one of the boldest fashion statements in baseball history. At first he did it because the sleeves were restricting his swing, but after a while it became part of his persona. “I remember the first time that I saw Ted in those cutoff sleeves,” former White Sox teammate Billy Pierce said of Klu’s trademark style nearly a half century later. “They were goodsized . He was a big man. A big man...

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