Roy Campanella, the power-hitting Brooklyn Dodgers catcher whose Hall of Fame career was ended by an automobile accident after the 1957 season, died Saturday night at age 71 of a heart attack.
Campanella joined the Dodgers in 1948, a year after Jackie Robinson broke baseball's color barrier. In 1969, Campanella again followed Robinson, this time as the second black player elected to the Hall of Fame.During a 10-year major league career with the Dodgers, Campanella was named the National League's Most Valuable Player in 1951, 1953 and 1955. He set major league records for catchers with 41 homers and 142 RBIs in 1953.
Campanella died at his home in suburban Woodland Hills, according to a spokesman for the Los Angeles Dodgers.
While Robinson pioneered the difficult desegregation of baseball, Campanella was no less a popular figure. As a measure of his appeal, the Dodgers and New York Yankees drew an unprecedented 93,103 to the Los Angeles Coliseum for a Campanella benefit game in 1959. Thousands more were turned away from what is still the largest crowd ever for a major league game.
"No one had more courage than Roy Campanella," Dodgers owner Peter O'Malley said. "To me, he was the greatest Dodger of them all. My thoughts are with his loving wife Roxie and his family."
Son of a black mother and father of Italian descent, Campanella was born Nov. 19, 1921, in Philadelphia.
In his early teens, he was considered a child prodigy.
At 15, after a $15-a-week stint with the Bacharach Giants of Brooklyn, he left school to join the Baltimore Elite Giants of the Negro National League. Nine years later, he was still there at $3,000 a season, but playing the rest of each year with Latin league teams.
It wasn't easy work for Campy. In one memorable day with the Baltimore Elites, he played four games - a daytime doubleheader in Cincinnati and a twi-nighter in Middletown, Ohio.
In 1945, a week before the Dodgers made Robinson the first black player signed by a major league team, Brooklyn mogul Branch Rickey asked Campanella to "play for me." The language he used led Campanella to refuse in the belief that Rickey was referring to a Negro club he was rumored to have formed. The club was fictional, invented by Rickey as a cover for scouting black players.
The next season Rickey repeated the offer, in clearer language, and this time Campanella signed a contract with the Dodger organization. With pitcher Don Newcombe, Campanella was sent to the Dodgers' Class-B New England farm team in Nashua, N.H.; another farm club had rejected non-white players.
In his first major league at-bat with the Dodgers, Campanella hit a home run, a double and two singles. He kept No. 39 for 10 seasons in Brooklyn.
The years that followed were a series of triumphs, distinguished by awards, All-Star team memberships and numerous individual National League records.
Shortly before the 1958 season, as Los Angeles was beckoning the Dodgers, tragedy struck in Campy's career and personal life. On a wintry night in January, driving alone to his Long Island home, his car skidded and overturned. He arrived at a hospital, paralyzed by spinal nerve damage. He was a quadriplegic, immobilized from the chest down - and his playing days were over.
In his major league career, Campanella played in 1,215 games, scored 627 runs, had 1,161 hits, including 178 doubles, 18 triples and 242 home runs. He drove in 856 runs and had a career batting average of .276. In five World Series appearances with the Dodgers, Campanella hit .237 with four home runs and 12 RBI.
Behind the plate, Campanella caught three no-hitters in 1956 and led National League catchers in double plays with 12 in 1948.