Lloyd Waner - Professional Career

Professional Career

Waner started his professional baseball career in 1925 with the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League, but he hit poorly. The next season, however, he batted .345 in the Class B South Atlantic League. He also won the league's most valuable player award. He was offered a tryout for the Pirates at the urging of his brother, who by then was already a star player.

Waner broke into the majors with the Pirates in 1927 and quickly built his reputation as a slap hitter with an astute sense of plate discipline. In his rookie campaign, he batted .355 with 223 hits while only striking out 23 times (the highest strikeout total of his career). As the leadoff hitter of the powerful Pittsburgh offense, he led the National League with 133 runs scored. The runs scored mark set an MLB rookie record.

The Pirates won the 1927 NL pennant; Lloyd then batted .400 in his first and only World Series, but the New York Yankees won in four games. He continued to bat well early in his career. Coming off a .353 season, he missed most of 1930 due to appendicitis but returned with a vengeance in 1931, leading the NL with 214 hits and 681 at-bats while hitting .314.

Waner was also an accomplished center fielder. He led the league in putouts four times, using his excellent speed to cover the spacious Forbes Field outfield.

Waner played for the Pirates until the beginning of the 1941 season. In the preceding years, he batted .300 or higher ten times, finished in the top ten in MVP voting twice (1927 and 1929), and was an All-Star once (1938).

After splitting time in the early 1940s with the Boston Braves, Cincinnati Reds, Philadelphia Phillies, and Brooklyn Dodgers, Waner returned to Pittsburgh, where he finished his career in 1945. He compiled a career .316 batting average.

He (2,459) and his older brother Paul (3,152) hold the career record for hits by brothers (5,611), outpacing the three Alou brothers and the three DiMaggio brothers, among others. For most of the period from 1927 to 1940, Paul patrolled right field at Forbes Field while Lloyd covered the ground next to him in center. On September 15 1938, the brothers hit back-to-back homeruns against Cliff Melton of the New York Giants. Paul was known as "Big Poison" and Lloyd as "Little Poison." They got their nicknames from a Brooklyn Dodgers fan's pronunciation of "Big Person" and "Little Person," which was then picked up by a sportswriter in the stands. In 1927, the season the brothers accumulated 460 hits, the fan is said to have remarked, "Them Waners! It's always the little poison on thoid (third) and the big poison on foist (first)!"