He Walked Quietly But Swung Loud Bat
Steve Urick would have made an ideal designated hitter. One of the greatest sluggers in Flint history was born about 35 years too early for that role, or he might have enjoyed a long Major League career.
Urick, who died in 1978 at age 61, tore up opposing pitchers at every level he played, but he never got above Class C in professional baseball because of a sore arm he had since childhood. “We were in a calisthenics class and he hurt his arm on the horizontal bars,” said Al Urick, Steve’s younger brother. “He was probably 12 years old.
From then on he had a bad arm, and it showed up in everything he did.” Except at the plate. After a three-sport, seven-letter career at Northern High, Urick played five years of college and pro ball, from 1936-40. He hit for both power and average and always batted in the heart of the order-third, fourth or fifth. “Anything I ever saw in his scrapbooks, he was always hitting .330, .340, .350,” said Vic Urick, Steve’s oldest son.
As a sophomore at the University of Michigan in 1936, Urick batted .403 in a year no other Wolverine was over .300. As a junior he hit .370, and the following year coach Ray Fisher chose Urick for his all-time UM team. In between college years, he helped Buick Realization win the state championship in the summer of 1936. That club and six of his teammates preceded Urick into the Greater Flint Area Sports Hall of Fame.
He turned pro after his junior year at UM and eventually signed with the Detroit Tigers. But there were already signs that his arm would be a problem. “He went down to Florida and tried out with the Cincinnati Reds first,” said Al Urick. “He was playing third base, and after a couple of throws to first, a coach said, ‘The ball is dropping when it reaches the pitcher’s mound.’ “
The Tigers took a chance and sent Urick to their Class D team in Beckley, W. Va. Through the first 23 games of 1938 he was second in the Mountain State League with a .398 average. Through 68 games he was still hitting .344, 11 points higher than a Williamson pitching prospect named Stan Musial.
Years later, Urick recalled hitting a home run off Musial. “I’ve never had much trouble hitting him,” he told Journal sports editor Tom Mercy in 1953. (Urick probably helped change baseball history. Musial eventually moved to the outfield and became a Major League Hall of Famer with the St. Louis Cardinals after collecting 3,630 hits in his career.
Urick ended the 1938 season with a .355 average and led the Beckley Bengals to the play off championship. The following year he hit .360 for the Ashland Colonels, and on opening day, 1940, he belted a two out two run homer in the ninth inning to give the Blueridge Blue Grays a one run victory over the Welch Miners.
But 1940 was his last year of pro ball. Despite another strong year at the plate and a promotion to Class C Topeka, Urick did not report to the Western Association Club in 1941. “I’ve been away from home so much I decided to pass it by,” Urick told Maurie Cossman in a 1941 Journal article. “It almost broke my heart not to be playing ball, but there’s no use kidding myself. l haven’t a strong arm and it meant more months away from home. So I figured I’d get out of it before I got to be a minor league tramp.”
Two new loves help make up Urick’s mind. He married Pauline Agnew in December, 1940, and he started playing golf. Urick had been a football quarterback and a basketball guard at Northern, helping the Vikings to state championships in both sports. But his versatility didn’t really become apparent until after his baseball career.
“He had good hands, good eyes, and he could pick up on fundamentals like nothing,” said Al Urick. Six years after he took up golf, Urick led the 1947 City Municipal Courses Tournament by two strokes after an opening-round 73 at Kearsley Lake. He wound up third, eight strokes back, but his ability to master a sport in a short time was becoming legend.
He excelled at bowling, won a croquet tournament the first time he ever played the game and was unbeatable on a pool table. “He ran 85 balls on me one night in our basement,” said Vic. “We’d play five or six hours and all I’d ever do was rack. He had a great touch.”
A serious traffic accident changed Urick’s life at age 31. On Sept. 11, 1947, his car was hit head-on on N. Saginaw Road near Stanley Road. Pauline was among three people killed, and Urick hovered near death for 10 days. Serious head and pelvic injuries kept him hospitalized for five weeks. Four months later, a touching photo in The Journal showed a still-recuperating Urick at home in an easy chair, showing a scrapbook to his motherless boys, 5-year-old Vic and 2-year old Roger. He remarried in 1953 and had two more children, including a son, Kirk, who married Debbie Herzog, daughter of Major League manager Whitey Herzog.
The accident led to a long, steady decline in Urick’s health. He contracted diabetes and lost a leg to the disease in the mid-1970’s. Doctors were considering amputating the other leg when Urick died on March 22, 1978. “He had a terrible time the last 25 years of his life,” said Vic. “We’d play golf and he’d conk out on us after a few holes, go into insulin shock. My brother or I would run up and get him a candy bar to revive him, then play the last five or six holes.”
But even illness and injuries couldn’t diminish Urick’s ability to hit. “We used to say our golf game was ‘hit and drag Steve,’ ” said Al. “He’d go under and we’d have to revive him. And the heat bothered him real bad, too. But, you know, that son of a gun would still out-hit us.”
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