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Talkin’ baseball

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A father of three, Russell poses with young son Steve.

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Fayette City’s Jimmy Russell spent five-plus seasons with his hometown Pirates.

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A sliding Russell beats the throw home.

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Russell, at spring training with his wife, Theresa, ended his major-league career with Brooklyn.

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Jack, left, and Carl Russell sail into the Pirates’ dugout to visit their brother.

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As if being a Depression-era child weren’t daunting enough … Jimmy Russell had two grueling bouts with rheumatic fever. He won both, but the inflammatory disease compromised a valve in his heart that, ultimately, shortened his professional sports career and later, his life.

Mon Valley living was gritty, hard-scrabble and generally miserable back then. The complementary industries of steelmaking and coal mining, which operated full bore during prosperous times, languished during the Depression (1929-39), leaving large numbers out of work.

The Russells lived in Fayette City, a Fayette County hamlet across the river from Allenport and Washington County. James “Doc” Russell, the family patriarch, scratched out a living in the local mines, but not a prosperous one. When his three sons played baseball in the alleys, they used rocks for balls and tree limbs for bats.

As a ninth-grader, when he was mature enough to contribute to the family coffers, Jimmy, the oldest of four siblings, dropped out of school and followed Doc underground. He also succeeded him on the local sandlots, where Doc was a Valley legend, an accomplished infielder with a mighty bat who was sought by teams organized by many of the mines.

But eventually, Jimmy outdid his dad on the diamond. He survived rheumatic fever, the mines, a truncated education and the Depression to become the envy of hundreds of Valley boys. Jimmy became a major-league baseball player, and a Pittsburgh Pirate.

Exempt from military service because of his coronary condition, but a talented, able-bodied athlete, Russell spent parts of 10 seasons (1942-51) in the bigs. He was a swift switch-hitting outfielder who posted solid career numbers: .267 batting average, .760 OPS, 959 hits, 293 extra-base hits, .981 fielding percentage, 64 outfield assists.

After five years in the minors, where he usually hit over .300, the 6-foot-1, 175-pound Russell broke in with his hometown Bucs in September 1942 after they purchased his contract at the height of World War II. He played five end-of-season games, stroking only one hit in 14 at-bats, but at 24, became an everyday starter the following year and continued to be one through 1947.

Russell had his best season in 1944, helping the Pirates win 90 games and finish second to the St. Louis Cardinals in the National League in the pre-divisional era. He batted .312, with 109 runs scored and an .859 OPS, all team highs. Somehow, his 14 triples were only third best. Oh, and he rripped the first pinch-hit home run in club history that August.

He stayed with the Pirates through the 1947 season, which included a position move. His road roommate, slugger-on-the-rise Ralph Kiner, was in his second season in the majors, and established home run basher Hank Greenberg was acquired. Billy Herman, who had replaced Frankie Frisch, the only manager Russell had known with the Pirates, moved the Fayette City kid from left to center field to cover all of the turf those leadfoots couldn’t.

Russell was traded after that season to the Boston Braves, another National League team, in a five-player deal that brought a recognizable name to Pittsburgh – Danny Murtaugh, a second baseman who, years later, would manage the team to World Series titles in 1960 and 1971.

Russell helped the Braves win a pennant in 1948, which included a June game in which he crashed two doubles and two home runs, one each batting right-handed and left-handed. But six weeks later, his season was over. Russell contracted bacterial endocarditis, related to the rheumatic fever he had twice as a child. He wouldn’t get to play in his first World Series, one the Braves lost to the Cleveland Indians.

Russell would not be the same player again.

He did play in 130 games the next year, but batted only .231 and was dealt to Brooklyn during the offseason. His contract was assigned to the Dodgers’ top minor-league affiliate, Montreal, but Russell threatened to retire. He was given a shot at making the team and did, but hit .229 in 1950, then after failing to get a hit in 13 at-bats in 1951, his major-league career was over. Russell played for the minor-league Portland Beavers in 1952 and 1953, with marginal success, before retiring as a player, then scouted for two years for the Dodgers and Washington Senators.

James William Russell made a name for himself in the Valley at a time when it was easy to do that.

The diamond star, who died in 1987 at age 69, was a gem unto himself. He married a Canadian woman, Theresa Coreau Russell, with whom they had three children: Steve, Jim and Janet. Jimmy was a private, modest man, according to his sons, and ruggedly handsome, bearing a resemblance to current Pirates third baseman David Freese.

“People were attracted to him. He had a presence about himself,” says son Steve Russell, retired superintendent of the Belle Vernon Area School District. “Players carry themselves with a certain dignity. Dad carried himself in the way John F. Kennedy did, self-confident, not arrogant or condescending.”

Steve, as a devoted son and general chairman of the Mid Mon Valley All Sports Hall of Fame, has an extensive collection of memorabilia on his father, a lot of it from his paternal grandmother, Lillian. The items include Jimmy Russell’s card from the original Topps set in 1952.

One piece in Steve’s collection underscores his dad’s popularity among his baseball peers. There is a Western Union telegram saying, simply, “Happy birthday Jimmy boy – Joe DiMaggio.”

Joltin’ Joe was never a teammate.

Russell was the best man in teammate Frankie Gustine’s wedding; was a friend of Donora icon and baseball Hall of Famer Stan Musial, and once partied at the home of Bing Crosby, then a Pirates vice president.

Jim Russell says, “Dad, more or less, was a guy who never talked much about his career with me. He was a hard man, but he was always ready to help people out.”

He recounted a story from when his father helped shield Jackie Robinson, a Dodgers teammate who broke the game’s color barrier – an unpopular occurrence among some fans. “He walked out to the team bus with Jackie, and people were throwing stones,” Jim says. “Dad told him to ‘keep your head down.'”

He also claims that “Dad was one of the first to start (the players’ union). Dad didn’t make a lot of money.”

Jimmy and Doc haven’t been the only talented ballplayers in the Russell clan. Jimmy’s two brothers, Carl and Jack, played in the minor leagues, and son Jim played at the University of Alabama for coach Eddie Stanky, a former teammate of Jimmy’s.

Jim is retired from Belle Vernon schools, where he was head baseball and golf coach and food service director. Janet Russell resides in Chicago and is a national trainer for Elizabeth Arden beauty products.

Steve says his father cherished the pennant ring he got with Boston in 1948, along with a black bat players from the participating Series teams received.

Before retiring as a player, Jimmy Russell prepared for life after baseball by investing in Russell Brothers Beer Distributorship in Fayette City with Carl and Jack, a business they sold in the late ’50s. Jimmy later served on the Belle Vernon School Board for 13 years, but moved from Rostraver Township to the Tampa, Fla., area in 1978 for a sales job with Smith-Corona. Nine years later, while on a flight from Tampa to Pittsburgh, he died of a heart attack.

Jimmy Russell endures today in the Mid Mon Valley and Pennsylvania Sports halls of fame. He deserves to be there – hitting rocks with tree limbs doesn’t usually lead to a decade in the majors.

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