Dixie Walker Marquee

He hit .357 in 1944, the best average in the National League, and led it with 124 runs batted in the following year. Eighteen seasons gave him 2,064 hits, 376 doubles, 1,023 runs batted in, 817 walks and a .306 average, with five All-Star selections. Brooklyn crowds called him the People's Cherce and meant it.

In spring 1947 he wrote to Branch Rickey asking to be traded rather than play alongside Jackie Robinson, and circulated a petition among the Dodgers to the same end. Rickey traded him that winter. He said in later years that he had been wrong, that he regretted it, and that he had feared for his family's hardware business in Birmingham; the letter is the fact and the rest is what he said about it.

His brother Harry Walker had the best average in the league in 1947, the year after Dixie finished second in the Most Valuable Player voting; their father pitched in the major leagues too. He coached and managed for twenty years afterward. Four writers' ballots gave him no more than nine votes. He died in 1982, at seventy-one.