Gus Zernial...Chiefs

Quarterback Jalen Hurts led fans in a rendition of “Fly Eagles Fly” following Philadelphia’s 31-7 win over the 49ers for a trip to Super Bowl LVII, and I got to thinking of a story from long-ago baseball player Gus Zernial. Allow me to summarize it from We Played the Game, an oral history of baseball, 1947-1954, edited by Danny Peary. Zernial was a power-hitting outfielder who came up with the White Sox in 1949 and was part of a three-team deal with the Sox, A’s and Indians that brought Minnie Minoso to the South Side two years later. Unfortunately for Zernial, he drew the short straw and ended up in Philadelphia. Never mind that he batted in 100 or more runs in his first three seasons in the City of Brotherly Love. Philadelphia fans are a hard lot, which Zernial learned one day in 1954. He’d been having a bad day in the field during a blowout loss to the visiting Red Sox, and it got significantly worse when he tried to catch a line drive off the bat of Billy Consolo. Zernial tripped and broke his left shoulder. “The fans were booing me,” Zernial recalled for Peary decades later. “I said [to myself], ‘Thank God I don’t have to come out here anymore.’” And how did those Philadelphia fans react as he was carted off the field? They used “a lot of foul language and such sentiments as, ‘You should have broken your neck!’” I wonder, how many fans filling Lincoln Financial Field last night are descended from the fans who booed Zernial that day, or the Easter Bunny, for that matter? In the likelihood it’s more than a few, I’ll be pulling for the Chiefs thirteen days from now.