Sunday marks the 60th anniversary of one of the saddest days in Indians history.
It was on May 7, 1957 that former Cleveland pitcher Herb Score’s meteoric rise toward stardom came to a grinding halt after being hit in the eye by a ball off the bat of the New York Yankees’ Gil McDougald.
Score, who is remembered by many Indians fans mostly for his 34 years as one of the voices of the team on first TV and then for a much, much longer time on radio, was one of the best young pitchers the Indians ever had. The fireballing left-hander was in his third season and had already been the American League Rookie of the Year, a two-time All-Star and the league’s strikeout leader. With the fact he was not quite 24 years old, the sky seemed the limit for just how good Score might become.
The iconic Bob Feller had just retired after the 1956 season and the Indians were looking for their next great pitcher. In Score, they seemed to have him.
But it didn’t work out that way. After the injury, Score was never the same, being traded in 1960 to the Chicago White Sox, with whom he played the last three seasons of his eight-year career.
Score’s injury brings to mind former Browns players whose paths to greatness were halted by injury or, as it were, death.
In 1962, the Browns traded Pro Football Hall of Famer Bobby Mitchell to Washington for the rights to running back Ernie Davis, whom the Redskins had picked at No. 1 overall in that year’s NFL Draft. Davis had broken all the Syracuse rushing records of Jim Brown, who was set to be his backfield mate in Cleveland. But he never played a down for the Browns, being stricken with leukemia and passing away on May 18, 1963 at just 23 years old.
Just 2½ weeks later, on June 4, 1963, the Browns lost another key player when safety Don Fleming was electrocuted while working an offseason construction job in Florida. Just 25 years old, the native of tiny Shadyside, Ohio in Belmont County had started for three seasons after having been traded to Cleveland by the Chicago Cardinals in 1960. In 1962, he was named to the All-NFL team by The Sporting News.
Fleming was the last of the three Browns players who died in a 4½-month span in 1962, The first was back Tom Bloom, a sixth-round draft pick in 1963 from Purdue who was killed in a car accident on Interstate 70 near Dayton on Jan. 18, 1963. He never even got to meet his new teammates.
Another safety, hard-hitting Don Rogers, was a first-round draft pick of the Browns, at No. 18 overall, in 1984 out of UCLA. He had two fine seasons with the Browns while playing in a secondary that included cornerbacks Hanford Dixon and Frank Minnifield. That was the best young defensive backfield in the league.
But Rogers died of a cocaine overdose at his bachelor party the night before he was to have been married, on June 27, 1986. He was only 23.
There are many who think that had Rogers lived, The Drive, Denver Broncos quarterback John Elway’s late-fourth-quarter march through the Cleveland defense to tie the 1986 AFC Championship Game, never would have happened. The Browns lost 23-20 in overtime. It was – by far – the closest they have ever been to the Super Bowl.
The final blow to the late 1980s Browns was delivered on Sept. 4, 1988 when, against the Kansas City Chiefs in the season opener, quarterback Bernie Kosar blew out his elbow after being hit by blitzing safety Lloyd Burruss. Kosar, who had been brilliant the previous two seasons in leading the Browns to the AFC title game, never regained his prowess, changing his throwing motion to where he began “shot-putting the ball,” according to his former Cleveland teammate, quarterback Gary Danielson.
Kosar was only 24 years old.
