Career
Mungo averaged 16 wins per season from 1932 through 1936 and led the National League in strikeouts with 238 in 1936. He was named to the All-Star team in 1934, 1936, and 1937. However, following an arm injury in 1937, he won only 13 major league games over the next six seasons. He completed his major league career with a 120-115 won-lost record over 2113 innings pitched, with a 3.47 earned run average.
Stories and anecdotes about Mungo tend to emphasize his reputation for combativeness, including episodes of drinking and fighting. The most widely told story concerns a visit to Cuba where, supposedly, Mungo was caught in a compromising position with a married woman by her husband. Mungo punched the husband in the eye, leading him to attack Mungo with a butcher knife or machete, requiring Dodgers executive Babe Hamberger to smuggle Mungo in a laundry cart to a seaplane waiting off a wharf in order to escape the country.
Mungo returned to the public eye in 1969 because of the use of his prosodic name as the title of a novelty song by Dave Frishberg. The song lyrics consist entirely of the names of baseball players of the 1940s, strung together to a bossa nova beat. Mungo is one of only five players mentioned more than once and his name functions as a kind of refrain. According to Frishberg, The Dick Cavett Show arranged to have him sing the song to Mungo in person, and Mungo asked him backstage if there would ever be any financial remuneration for the use of his name in the song. Frishberg told him no, but maybe Mungo could make some money if he wrote a song called "Dave Frishberg". Ironically, today Mungo is remembered primarily because of the song.
Read more about this topic: Van Lingle Mungo
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