Thanks to Salem’s Staley Hester for bringing to my attention an article that appears in the current edition of Sports Illustrated magazine.
On page 40 of the July, 2021, edition you can find a terrific story by Tom Verducci about Pablo Cruz, who is a member of our Salem-Roanoke Baseball Hall of Fame. Pablo was inducted into the third class of the Hall of Fame, which was founded in 1992.
Cruz is a long-time Major League Baseball scout who has signed some of the top stars in the game, and the story chronicles his work bringing talented Latin American players to the Pittsburgh Pirates and other big league teams. However, the crux of the story is about how he has dealt with an episode that happened in Salem in August of 1974 when he was playing for the Salem Pirates of the Carolina League.
Cruz was involved in an outfield collision with a budding young star from the Dominican Republican, then 20 year old Alfredo Edmead. It was one of a very few incidents in the history of baseball where a player died playing the game, as Edmead suffered head injuries from the collision and died on the way to the hospital.
I remember it, I was there.
I started working for the Salem Times-Register the second week of July, 47 years ago. I was in the press box with Bob Tietlebaum of the Roanoke World-News, Doug Doughty of the Roanoke Times, who had started there just a few weeks after I started at Salem, public address announcer Dickie Walthall and scoreboard operater Richard Epperly. It was 47 years ago next month, but I remember it like it was yesterday.
I won’t go into the story of how Cruz was on the team to be a “father figure” to the young Spanish speaking players, or the details of the accident. You can read all about that in the Sports Illustrated article, which is complete and quite detailed. I will say that the five of us in the pressbox received a call from the hospital telling us Edmead had died, but not to say anything as the Pirates’ manager, John Lipon, wanted to break the news to the club before it spread around what was then called Salem Municipal Field.
Edmead was a very talented and popular player, and I can remember many fans coming up to the press box at the top of the bleachers and asking if we’d heard anything about his condition. We knew he had died, but didn’t say a word in respect to the team. It was a very difficult night.
Cruz was one of the all-time most popular players to have played for our local team. He played here in 1968, then rose to Class AAA before returning to Salem in 1974 to mentor the young players. He was on our team through the 1977 season as a player-coach and became quite involved in the community. In the article Cruz is quoted as saying, “In Salem people are good. If I can’t go to the big leagues I prefer to stay here all my life.”
Dan Kinder, the 1974 general manager of the Salem team, is quoted in the story as well as several players, including some who went on to big league careers, like Miguel Dilone and Steve Nicosia, and some who didn’t, like Tom Prazych who lived in the apartment next to me in what was then called “Greenbriar Salem” on Craig Avenue in Salem. Many of the players lived there and 21 year old Brian Hoffman, fresh out of Roanoke College, was a willing party mate for the ballplayers that summer.
Murray Cook was a 14 year old clubhouse attendant and “ballpark rat” during the 1974 season. He went on to international fame as one of the top turf and ballfield consultants in the world, and is now the president of BrightView Sports Turf Division, the official field consultant for Major League Baseball. Murray is also a member of our Salem-Roanoke Baseball Hall of Fam, and he’s quoted extensively in the Sports Illustrated article.
“It was a great article for Pablo,” he wrote to me in an e-mail this week. “The writer and SI did some crazy homework for this article. I have no idea how they found all those guys. I received a call out of nowhere one day a couple months ago and talked to Verducci. I have no idea where he got my number.”
I can go on and on, but it’s all in the article that covers 10 pages of the magazines with many photos. In fact, there’s a photo of Edmead batting in Salem with Cruz in the on deck circle that first appeared in the Salem Times-Register. I assume Robert Downey took the photo, as he was our main photographer at the time, but I have no idea how Sports Illustrated managed to get ahold of that picture.
“That caught my attention because there’s a sign in the background for Hester Coal & Oil,” said Staley Hester, as that was his family business. You can also see the old Andrew Lewis High School football scoreboard in the background, as that’s where the Wolverines played when the Pirates left town.
Thanks to Staley’s call, this was the first time I looked at Sports Illustrated in some time. With all the sports sites on the internet I get plenty of sports news to read, and I’m sure the magazine is affected just like the print newspapers these days. In fact, I had to hunt to find a copy. I went to two drugstores and two super markets that didn’t carry “SI” before I finally found it at Wal-Mart. I didn’t know that it only comes out monthly now, except for a couple special issues.
One thing I did discover is that the swimsuit issue comes out next in late July, so you still have time to pick up the copy with the Pablo story before it goes off the newsstands that still carry it.
You wouldn’t want to buy that swimsuit issue by mistake, would you?
