Late Bloomers: Eddie Joost

Eddie Joost once said of himself, “I’m a highstrung sort of guy.” Others called him “prickly,” or a “pepperpot.” In Ira Berkow’s book about Lou Brissie, The Corporal Was a Pitcher, he tactfully describes Joost as “outspoken and contrary.”

Basically, Eddie Joost was kind of a jerk. And, for the first thirteen years of his professional baseball career, he played like the sort of pest you would expect. He was a slender middle infielder with no power who slapped the ball around, bunted a fair amount, and was on the field mostly because he played good defense. If he’d remained that way you wouldn’t be reading this right now, because his career almost certainly would have ended when most of the best players returned from military service during World War II. Pests tend to have a short shelflife, because their skillset is more replaceable with younger, cheaper, peskier guys.

But, in Joost’s case, he became quite a bit more than a pest. By the time the war ended he had been a professional ballplayer for a dozen years. Having grown up in San Francisco, he’d signed with the Mission Reds of the Pacific Coast League when he was only 17 years old. Joost was mostly a third baseman there, a position that usually requires a better bat, but Mission already had former Cubs shortstop Clyde Beck playing shortstop for them, so Joost was moved over.