Talk:Elden Auker

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Some comments[edit]

Auker died in Vero Beach, Fla., where he had lived since 1974.

Yes. Auker was a regular at meetings of the Central Florida chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research. Although ninety years old, he was a great story teller. WHPratt (talk) 20:33, 14 June 2011 (UTC)[reply]

Among other things, Auker spoke of the closing cerermony at Tiger Stadium. After Elden's stirring speech that charged athletes with providing good examples for youth, a later-generation Tiger star got arrested on the spot for unpaid child support. See the Ron LeFlore article. WHPratt (talk) 12:33, 19 June 2012 (UTC)[reply]

An occasional visitor at old-timers' events and a regular on the golf course until recent years, Auker used his unique delivery to go 130-101 for the Tigers, Boston Red Sox and St. Louis Browns from 1933-42.

"He threw it from about as low as you could go without untying your shoes," Hall of Fame pitcher Bob Feller said by telephone Friday. "Any lower and you'd scrape your knuckles on the pitching rubber."

Feller, in fact, hit his first major league home run off Auker, in 1940 at the first night game played in St. Louis.

"He found my bat, somehow," Feller said.

Yet as a rookie, Auker fanned Ruth on four pitches with his unorthodox motion. Auker recalled how one of the New York Yankees' bench jockeys heckled him, shouting, "You got the Bam real upset."

Ruth was not the only big hitter who got bamboozled by Auker's right-handed, drop-down pitches. During the 38th game of his 56-game hitting streak in 1941, Joe DiMaggio grounded a hard double off Auker in his final at-bat to extend the string.

"I used to have pretty good success against him. He used to tell me that he had trouble picking up the ball the way I threw it underhanded," Auker remembered, the day after DiMaggio died.

"A few years later, he signed a picture to me," he said. "He wrote,

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WikiProject class rating[edit]

This article was automatically assessed because at least one WikiProject had rated the article as start, and the rating on other projects was brought up to start class. BetacommandBot (talk) 18:54, 5 January 2008 (UTC)[reply]