Baseball Remembers: Ken Keltner

For a very brief time in 1941, Ken Keltner was one of the most unpopular people in America.

It wasn’t because he was a bad guy. Generally he was viewed as “affable,” a friendly guy from Milwaukee who played for Cleveland and exuded all the Midwestern humbleness you’d expect. It also wasn’t because he was a bad ballplayer. He’d just played in his second All-Star game and singled in the ninth inning to start a rally that helped the American League win in dramatic fashion. In fact, the problem was directly tied to the fact that he was a really good player, particularly defensively.

On July 17 of that year, Keltner made two great back-handed plays to rob Joe DiMaggio of hits and bring an end to his 56-game hitting streak.

That did not make him a popular man. “My wife met me outside the clubhouse and we had a police escort to the parking lot,” he later said. “There were four of them. Joe had a lot of friends in Cleveland.” For years DiMaggio would jokingly refer to Keltner as “The Culprit.” There was no real animosity involved, and was said more out of respect for Keltner’s defense than anything else, but the fact remains that the hitting streak had become a bit of a national obsession and Keltner playing the largest role in ending it would earn him more than a few scornful comments through the years. It remains the thing he’s most well-known for.

But he was so much more than that.