When actor Robert Redford passed away on September 16, 2025, exactly 53 years to the day after former major leaguer Eddie Waitkus died, it was a coincidence almost seismic enough to make you believe in a baseball god.
Redford and Waitkus are forever linked in a legendary baseball tale that sits at the intersection of books, movies and the National Pastime – my kind of locale, for sure. Unknown to many, the Orioles play a role.
I’ll start at the beginning, with Waitkus, a slender first baseman with a slick glove and sweet left-handed batting stroke. Born in Cambridge, Massachusetts, he could’ve gone to Harvard but elected to become a baseball pro when the Chicago Cubs beckoned. He began his career with the Class B Moline (Illinois) Plow Boys in 1939 and took over at first for the Cubs seven years later, following a harrowing Army deployment during which he earned four Bronze Stars in World War II combat.
He hit nearly .300 over three seasons with the Cubs, but they were a losing club and they traded him to the Philadelphia Phillies as part of an attempted rebuild. Waitkus picked right up in Philadelphia, hitting over .300 early in the 1949 season. But on a trip to Chicago for a series with the Cubs, he was lured to a hotel room by a young woman who’d sent him a note saying she had important information for him. It turned out she was mentally ill, a stalker obsessed with him. She shot him with a .22 caliber rifle, apparently believing that if she couldn’t have him, no one would.
The bullet pierced a lung and was lodged near Waitkus’ spine. Surgeons saved his life, and miraculously, after months of rehab, he was in the Phillies’ lineup on Opening Day in 1950. At age 30, he hit .284 and scored 102 runs on a pennant-winning club that became known as the Whiz Kids.
Two years later, a young novelist from New York, Bernard Malamud, published The Natural, a book about a baseball prodigy, Roy Hobbs, whose career is sidetracked when a mysterious woman shoots him in a Chicago hotel room. Malamud never revealed whether he patterned Hobbs after Waitkus; there were few similarities other than the hotel shooting. But the shooting certainly made it seem that Hobbs was a fictional Waitkus.
At heart a fable, The Natural focused on the high drama that unfolds when Hobbs makes a comeback years later wielding a magical bat. It was an instant classic and is still rightfully regarded as one of the best books ever written about baseball. (As a sports-mad college English major, I was thrilled to see it on a syllabus.)
Back in real life, Waitkus had another solid year in 1952, the year Malamud’s book came out, compiling a .371 on-base percentage as an everyday player. But the Phillies wanted more power out of first base — Waitkus never hit more than two home runs in a season for them — and in 1953 they traded for another first baseman, relegating Waitkus to a backup role. He reluctantly signed a 1954 contract that included a significant paycut. It was clear his time with the Phillies was about over.
They sold him to the Orioles shortly before the 1954 season began. Arthur Ehlers, the Orioles’ first GM, gave the Phillies $40,000 for him.
The Orioles were in their first season in Baltimore, having just moved from St. Louis. They were a last-place club in need of quality players. Waitkus batted second and played first base in the Orioles’ first-ever game, a 3-0 loss to the Tigers in Detroit. He drew a walk and scored a run in another loss the next day.
In the Orioles’ first game at Memorial Stadium, Waitkus went 3-for-4 and scored a run in a 3-1 victory over the White Sox.
At age 34, Waitkus was happy about getting to play more again. As noted in a Society of American Baseball Research profile of Waitkus, he wound up splitting time at first with Dick Kryhoski but ended the season with solid numbers — a .283 batting average, a .341 on-base percentage, and most impressively, a perfect fielding percentage. He didn’t commit a single error all season.
Paul Richards arrived in Baltimore after the 1954 season with a mandate to rebuild the club. Waitkus began the year on the injured list with back spasms — apparently related to the surgery that had saved his life years earlier — and was released in July. (He re-signed with the Phillies. It was his last year in the major leagues.)
Sadly, his life spiraled in the wrong direction after baseball. Haunted by his combat experience and the hotel shooting, he drank heavily and battled depression. A hip fracture led to him using a cane. He contracted pneumonia and went to a hospital, where it was discovered he had esophageal cancer. He died in 1972 at age 53.
Twelve years later, a film version of The Natural was released, directed by Barry Levinson — a Baltimore native who had a small ownership stake in the Orioles at one point — and starring Redford. Though pointedly different from Malamud’s book — Hobbs is a hero in the movie, but not in the book — the movie immortalized the Waitkus-like true story of a player getting shot by a mysterious woman in a Chicago hotel room.
For Redford, the movie was a chance to live out a dream. He grew up loving baseball, and according to his New York Times obituary, he played it well enough to earn a scholarship to the University of Colorado. His favorite player reportedly was Ted Williams because, like Williams, he batted left-handed. His life went in a different direction, of course; he’d already appeared in a series of huge movie hits when he portrayed Hobbs/Waitkus on-screen. But the role gave him a chance to use that left-handed swing he’d favored as a younger man. He was 47 when the movie came out but sufficiently in shape and adept at baseball to pull off being much younger.
That he died recently on the same day as Waitkus is almost enough to make one look skyward in search of a sign of that elusive baseball god.
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