Eddie Waitkus Marquee

A nineteen-year-old named Ruth Ann Steinhagen, who had never met him but had built a shrine to him in her bedroom, lured him to her hotel room on June 14, 1949, and shot him in the chest with a rifle. He nearly died, missed the rest of that season, and required surgery to remove the bullet, which stayed lodged near his spine.

He came back in 1950 to hit .284 with 182 hits and made the All-Star team, helping Philadelphia's Whiz Kids win the pennant. The shooting and his comeback partly inspired Bernard Malamud's novel The Natural.

Eleven seasons gave him 1,214 hits, 215 doubles, 528 runs batted in and a .285 average across 1,049 games at first base. He finished with Baltimore in 1955 at thirty-five. He struggled with the trauma for the rest of his life and died in 1972, at fifty-three.