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122 Chapter 25. John Vukovich Andy Sturgill Hitting mammoth home runs and striking out ten hitters a game look great in highlights or on the back of a baseball card, but those who excel at these feats are few and far between. The soul of the game is the baseball lifer. Lifers count their number of spring trainings in decades, not just years. Lifers have played and coached in a dozen Major League parks that have long since been demolished. Lifers are men you would not recognize if they weren’t wearing turf shoes or carrying around a fungo bat. Lifers are men like John Vukovich. John Christopher Vukovich was born on July 31, 1947, in Sacramento, California, to John and Lena Vukovich and grew up in Sutter Creek, about forty-five miles from Sacramento. His father worked hard—very hard—to provide for his family. He ran a small beer distributorship, taught high school, and coached three sports, often working sixteen hours a day. Despite limited sight in one eye, he possessed enough baseball talent to have had the opportunity to play professional baseball, but his father (John’s grandfather) had immigrated to America and taught his son that you work for a living, you don’t play a game.1 Vukovich inherited his father’s work ethic and carried it with him even from a young age. In addition to starring as an infielder for the baseball team at Amador County High School in Sutter Creek, Vukovich began driving a truck for his father’s distributorship at the age of sixteen. After graduating from high school in 1965 he enrolled at American River College, a junior college in nearby Sacramento for which Dusty Baker and Dallas Braden also played. Vukovich was a first-round selection of the Philadelphia Phillies in the January 1966 phase of the amateur draft. He signed with the Phillies in May and used his $10,000 signing bonus to buy his father a new truck and himself a new Dodge Coronet 500, for which he paid $3,400 in cash.2 Thus began a relationship with the Phillies organization that endured for most of his life. (Larry Bowa of Sacramento , a year and a half older than Vukovich, had been drafted by the Phillies the year before—both age g ab r h 2b 3b hr tb rbi bb so bav obp slg sb gdp hbp 27 31 38 4 8 3 0 0 11 2 4 5 .211 .286 .289 0 0 0 John Vukovich parlayed a .161 lifetime average into a long professional playing career and another two decades as a beloved coach. john vukovich 123 were scouted by Eddie Bockman. During their offseasons as Minor Leaguers Vukovich and Bowa would find empty fields in Sacramento and pitch to each other for hours.) The 6-foot-1, 187-pound Vukovich broke in with the Huron (South Dakota) Phillies of the Class A Northern League. He moved up through the Philadelphia system, playing excellent defense at third base and showing flashes of hitting ability, climaxed by a .275 season at Eugene (Oregon) of the Pacific Coast League in 1970 with twenty-two home runs. The also-ran Phillies brought Vukovich up in September 1970 and he made his Major League debut on September 11 at Jarry Park in Montreal. He started at third base that evening and at shortstop in the following two games against the Expos, his only appearances with the Phillies that season. He got his first Major League hit, a single, off Expos starter Mike Wegener in the final game of the series. Vukovich split his time between Eugene and Philadelphia in 1971. He began the season at Eugene and hit .308 in fifty-eight games before being called up in mid-June after veteran infielder Tony Taylor was traded to Detroit. With the Phillies, Vukovich hit .166 in seventy-four games, including sixty-two starts at third base. One highlight of the season came on June 23, when he grabbed a soft liner hit by Pete Rose for the final out of Rick Wise’s no-hitter against the Reds, a game in which Wise also hit two home runs. That season Vukovich began dating Bonnie Loughran, an usher at Philadelphia’s Veterans Stadium. They were married after the 1972 season, which Vukovich spent at Eugene. While the couple were on their honeymoon, Vukovich was traded on October 31 to the Milwaukee Brewers with infielder...

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