By RICK CLEVELAND • Photography by JOHNNY JENNINGS
Hailing from Greenwood, Cincinnati Reds second baseman Hugh Critz is still known as one of the finest fielders in baseball history
Baseball Hall of Fame
It was the first week of April 1935. Greenwood—the self-proclaimed Cotton Capital of the World—was home to just over 11,000 folks, including one famous Major League baseball player. It was almost time to plant that year’s cotton crop, but that’s not what had Greenwood’s citizenry so excited on April 4, 1935.
That Thursday, Greenwood went baseball crazy. That day, the New York Giants, one year removed from a World Series championship, came to town to play the Cleveland Indians in an exhibition game that featured Greenwood’s own Hugh Melville Critz, known to his friends and neighbors as Hughie, the team’s star second baseman.
The Indians were managed by Walter “Big Train” Johnson, who would become one of the five charter members of baseball’s Hall of Fame just two years later. Bill Terry, another future Hall of Famer, managed and played for the Giants, whose roster included such baseball greats Mel Ott and Carl Hubbell, two more future Hall of Famers. The Indians featured hard-hitting center fielder Earl Averill, another future Hall of Famer.
Understand, these were all baseball gods, and this was back when baseball really was our national pastime. The Mississippi Delta was no exception. Every town and community had its own team—either semi-pro or minor league. What’s more, Greenwood was dedicating a brand, spanking new ballpark, Legion Field, located about two miles east of downtown on Carrollton Avenue, just past Odd Fellows Cemetery, where Critz, who died in 1980, is buried.
Greenwood showed out that day. Businesses took a holiday. Schools let out. More than 6,500 fans, the largest crowd ever to watch a baseball game in Mississippi at that time, jammed into the new wooden structure. The grandstand and bleachers overflowed, and estimates were that another thousand fans stood back against the fencing in the outfield.
The mayor declared it Hughie Critz Day. Johnson, Terry, and Critz all spoke in pre-game ceremonies. Critz, who received by far the biggest cheers, was the recipient of several gifts. Critz rewarded the home crowd with a hard-hit single in his second turn at bat and, naturally, saved the day for the Giants in the ninth inning with a splendid running catch in shallow right field.
It turns out Critz was about to enter his twelfth and final season as a Major Leaguer. His is a remarkable story. The Baseball Encyclopedia tells us Critz was born in Starkville in 1900 and died in Greenwood in 1980 at age 79. It tells us Critz was a wee man, standing just 5 feet, 8 inches tall, and weighing but 147 pounds, that he mainly played second base and batted .268 over a twelve-year career with the Cincinnati Reds and New York Giants.
The Encyclopedia, baseball’s bible, tells us that in 1933, Critz helped the Giants win the National League pennant and then the World Series in five games over the Washington Senators, that he hit .322 for the Reds as a rookie in 1924, and that he finished second in National League Most Valuable Player voting in 1926.
Clearly, Critz excelled as a baseball player and was one of the finest Major Leaguers Mississippi has ever produced. A dependable hitter, he was better known as perhaps the best fielding second baseman in all of baseball. He also was known as a clever and speedy baserunner and was inducted into the Cincinnati Reds Hall of Fame.
But there’s so much about Critz that baseball’s bible does not tell us, so much any Mississippi baseball fan—or any lover of Mississippi history, period— should know. And for all that, you would need to visit the Greenwood home of Jenny Payne Gardner, one of Critz’s four grandchildren who houses the unofficial Hugh Melville Critz baseball museum in her den.
The place is filled with baseball treasures, including a pair of Hughie’s size seven baseball cleats, which seem freshly shined but still have the residue of infield dirt on and about the steel spikes.
Says Gardner, “I wasn’t about to clean that dirt off. Would you?”
The unofficial Hughie Critz museum also houses trophies, plaques, scrapbooks, photos, most of his Major League contracts, autographed baseballs, and news clippings. Peruse the scrapbooks, and you learn so much about the man no lesser an authority than Baseball Hall of Fame charter member Honus Wagner, a shortstop himself, called “the greatest infielder I have ever seen.”
Wagner was speaking after watching Critz help the Giants defeat the Washington Senators four games to one in the 1933 World Series, which naturally ended with Critz turning a double play for the final outs.
We can learn so much more from those scrapbooks, such as how Critz, who hit only thirty-eight Major League home runs, once hit two in one game to beat the great Dizzy Dean and the St. Louis Cardinals’ famed Gashouse Gang.
There’s plenty more:
Critz never planned to play baseball for anything other than fun and didn’t play on the Mississippi State team until his junior year of college. His father, Hugh Critz, had captained one of State’s earliest baseball teams and, years later, would be the college’s president. The father suggested the son go out for baseball. The son did. He not only made Coach Dudy Noble’s team, he was elected team captain, just as his father had been.
How, in 1927, Critz was a late holdout, an All-Star second baseman asking for a three-year contract worth $50,000. The Cincinnati Redlegs were offering a one-year contract for $10,000. (Today, Texas Rangers second baseman Marcus Semien makes $25 million per season.)
About how Cincinnati baseball fans strongly protested Hughie’s 1930 trade to the New York Giants, so much so that a Cincinnati newspaper columnist penned a letter to Hughie headlined “A Farewell to Critz” in which he wrote: “You’ve shown Red fans and the fans of the National League the best baseball they’ve ever seen at second base. You’ve been a bright spot in many a dark game and in several dark seasons…”
There’s so much more to the Hughie Critz story. After he graduated from State in 1920, Critz had no plans to continue in baseball. His chosen profession was in the cotton business, and he moved to Greenwood, the cotton capital, to become a broker. That was just in time for a farm depression that sent cotton prices plummeting. He played a little semi-pro baseball on the side, and when his Greenwood team joined the Class D Mississippi State League, he quit the cotton business and excelled as a hard-hitting third baseman. Modern baseball fans might be shocked to learn that the Greenwood team’s owner sold Critz to the Memphis Chicks for a sum of $2,000. Critz agreed to the sale on the condition that he receive half of the sales price. Funny thing: Critz had to lend the owner his $1,000 share so the franchise could survive. Critz eventually got his money, and the Chicks got one of the best players in franchise history.
Critz excelled as a shortstop for the Chicks and moved to Class AA Minneapolis in 1923. He made his Major League debut with the then-Cincinnati Redlegs 101 years ago, getting two hits in the first Major League game he ever saw. Furthermore, those two hits were against Hall of Fame pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander, winner of an incredible 378 Major League games.
Another funny thing: Hughie Critz never talked much about baseball with his four grandchildren: Jenny Payne Gardner, Julie Pillow Crosthwait of Brandon, Durden Pillow Moss of Jackson, and Robert Leslie “Bob” Pillow of Ridgeland. They knew him as a doting grandfather who had long since retired as a baseball player and owned a car dealership in Greenwood and a nearby cotton plantation. His grandchildren didn’t call him Grandpa, or Gramps, or Papa. No, they called him Hughie.
“Hughie was such a kind man,” Bob Pillow said. “He was a great storyteller and a prankster, too. He sure did love his grandchildren. I’ll tell you that.”
They loved him back. Still do. Durden Moss says, “My fondest memory is probably just sitting in his lap and him drawing me little pictures of animals and then letting me draw for him. For me, it sparked a lifelong love of art and becoming an artist myself.”
Says Julie Crosthwait, “It’s funny what you remember. I remember lying in bed with him, watching and listening to Lawrence Welk. He’d massage my feet, and then I’d massage his. He was such a sweet, sweet man.”
Jenny Gardner, keeper of the unofficial Hughie Critz museum, tears up when talking about her grandfather, who died forty-five years ago. “When I get to heaven, I want to see Hughie,” she says. “I’ll get around to everyone else, but I want to see him first.”
