Few baseball fans recall Hughie Critz, but his grandchildren surely do

The Baseball Encyclopedia tells us Hugh Melville “Hughie” Critz was born in Starkville in 1900 and died in Greenwood in 1980 at the age of 79.

It tells us Critz was a wee man, standing just 5 feet, 8 inches tall and weighing but 147 pounds, that he played second base and batted .268 over a 12-year career with the Cincinnati Reds and New York Giants.

Baseball’s “bible” also tells us Critz hit .322 for the Reds as a rookie in 1924, that he finished second in the National League’s Most Valuable Player voting in 1926, and that he helped the Giants win the National League pennant and then the World Series in five games over the Washington Senators in 1933.

Clearly, Hughie Critz excelled as a baseball player and was one of the finest Major Leaguers Mississippi has ever produced. He was a dependable hitter during baseball’s “dead ball” era, but 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 that 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 full of treasures, including a pair Hughie’s size 7 baseball cleats, which seem freshly shined but still have the residue of infield dirt on and about the steel spikes.

Says Jenny Gardner, “I wasn’t about to clean that dirt off. Would you?”

Certainly not. 

The unofficial Hughie Critz museum also houses trophies, plaques, scrapbooks, photos, most of his Major League contracts, autographed baseballs, 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. That World Series featured two Mississippi State graduates playing second base: Critz for the Giants and Buddy Myer of Ellisville for the Senators. And that World Series ended appropriately with Critz turning a double play for the final outs.

We can learn so much from those scrapbooks such as how Critz, who hit only 38 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:

• About how 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 “The Colonel” 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. Hughie not only made Coach Dudy Noble’s team, he was elected team captain, just as his father had.
• About 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. (Compare that to today when Houston Astros 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…”
• About how the legendary Giants manager John McGraw believed Critz was the last piece of a World Series puzzle for his club, which proved prescient when the Giants won it all in 1933.
• About how in spring of 1934, the Giants paid tribute to Critz by playing a spring training game in Greenwood against the Cleveland Indians. A sellout crowd of 6,500 cheered Critz and his world champion teammates. Greenwood stores closed for the afternoon and schools let out for Hughie Critz Day. The Giants won 5-1.

There’s so much more to the Hughie Critz story. After his graduation 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 to become a cotton broker, just in time for a farm depression that sent cotton prices plummeting.

He was playing 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 share of $1,000 back so the franchise could survive. Critz eventually got his money and the Chicks got one of the greatest 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 as a second baseman with the then-Cincinnati Redlegs 100 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.

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 as a doting grandfather, who had long since retired as a baseball player and who owned a car dealership in Greenwood and a nearby cotton plantation. His grandchildren didn’t call him Grandpa or Gramps or Papa. No, they simply called him Hughie.

Bob Pillow remembers a lazy Saturday afternoon 60 years ago, sitting with Hughie, listening to Dizzy Dean and Peewee Reese on the “Game of the Week,” when out of the blue Ol’ Diz started talking about the great second baseman from Mississippi, Hughie Critz. Bob Pillow couldn’t believe his ears.

“Did you hear that, Hughie!” he excitedly asked his grandfather.

“Yes, I did,” Hughie said, and then went back to napping.

“He was such a kind and humble 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. Says Durden Moss, “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 life-long love of art and becoming an artist myself.”

Says Julie Crosthwait, “It’s funny what you remember. I remember lying in bed with him and 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 44 years ago.

“When I get to heaven, I want to see Hughie first,” she says. “I’ll get around to everyone else, mind you, but I want to see him first.”