Cincinnati Reds: Rain Man’s Ted Kluszewski – “‘Big Klu.’ First base”
By Rick Soisson
The NFL Missed One
Born in 1924 in Summit, IL, Ted Kluszewski became a two-sport star in baseball and football who played on Indiana’s only Big 10 football championship team, a team that went 9-0-1. He was an end, outside linebacker, and barely passable placekicker.
And in 1945, when the football team found glory, he also hit .443 as a centerfielder for the baseball team.
At the end of high school, Kluszewski had been classified 4F for military purposes, despite his impressive physique, which he had developed in a corn mill, moving around 140-pound bags of the grain. A childhood pelvic surgery kept him at home.
Wartime reality also impacted the athlete’s course in life in another way. Travel restrictions related to military needs forced the Reds to hold spring training in Bloomington, IN during and after the war, and in early 1946, IU’s star outfielder was invited to take a few cuts during the pros’ batting practice.
After banging out a few 400-foot rockets, according to Sabr.org, Cincinnati Reds officials “picked up their jaws off the ground [and] offered [Klu] a $15,000 contract, which he accepted.”
In actuality, the legend of Ted Kluszewski as a power hitter was already a story being whispered around Bloomington before the Reds found him.
A notecard in the Indiana University athletic archives documents a report from a worker in the school’s physical plant that young Ted had launched a ball in ’45 that ended up smashing a window in the men’s gym approximately 570 feet away.
In his single full season in minor-league ball, Big Klu hit .352 with 11 homers and 87 RBI in 90 games. He stood 6-foot-2 and was probably near his football weight, 240 pounds, that year. His playing weight in 1947, when he joined the Reds at the age of 22, was probably down around 225.
But after only nine games he was returned to the minors, where he won the Southern Association’s batting title with a .377 mark at Memphis. In 1948, he returned to the Cincinnati Reds to stay for ten years.