Tony Bartirome, a member of the 1956 Williamsport Grays, and winner of that year’s Eastern League batting crown, died in Bradenton, Florida on June 22 at the age of 86.

According to his obituary, Tony is believed to be the only man in the history of the game of baseball to participate as player, trainer, and coach at the Major League level.

He was born in Pittsburgh in 1932 and by his mid-teens was excelling on the sandlots of Pittsburgh’s Hill District, where he was discovered by Pirate Hall of Fame third baseman, Pie Traynor.
In 1952, at the age of 19, he became the Pirates’ starting first baseman for a full season. Then Uncle Sam called him to duty in the Army during the Korean War, and he was out of baseball until 1955 and had to start the climb back to the majors.

One of the places he had to climb from was here in Williamsport in 1956, which was then the Pirates’ farm club in the Eastern League.

Bartirome, in one of the most heated batting races in the history of the Eastern League, won the batting crown by a single point with a .305 average. Manager Jack Fitzpatrick, who succeeded Larry Shepard as Grays’ manager, offered Bartirome the option of sitting out the last game to insure his batting title. Bartirome, perhaps inspired by Ted Williams example in 1941, declined to take the backdoor to the title and went 4 for 4 to claim his batting crown. He was voted the Grays’ Most Valuable Player for the ’56 season.

I met Bartirome in Pittsburgh in 1995 at the Society For American Baseball Research’s (SABR) National Convention and he remembers his season in Williamsport with great fondness.

“I really liked playing in Williamsport,” Bartirome told me. “The fans there were great and very knowledgeable and enjoyed and supported players who hustled.”
He never did make it back to the majors as a player.

By the mid-1960s, he transitioned from player to player/coach to trainer. He treasured his 18-year term as the head and sole trainer for the Pittsburgh Pirates from 1967 to 1985, and, most especially, his time tending to the World Championship teams of 1971 and 1979. He served as a coach with the Atlanta Braves in 1986.

Bartirome was what is known as a baseball “lifer,” someone who gives almost their entire life to the game, and being around it, and he was widely respected and loved by all he was around in his beloved game of baseball.

Interestingly, I found out about his death last week at this year’s SABR National Convention, also in Pittsburgh. It would have been so interesting to have had the chance to talk with him again.