Mickey Owen, who died Wednesday at age 89, was the jug-eared, brawling Dodgers catcher who became a Brooklyn byword for “goat” with his infamous dropped third strike in the 1941 World Series, versus the Yankees.

It was the third strike of the third out in the ninth inning of the fifth game. If Owen had held on to reliever Hugh Casey’s pitch, the Dodgers would have evened the series at two games apiece.

Instead, his muff allowed batter Tommy Henrich to take first. The Yankees rallied to win the game – and took the series the next day, four games to one.

Fans had to be restrained, and Owens wept, according to his manager, Leo Durocher, who took responsibility for having left a clearly rattled Casey in the game. Other players were sympathetic too. “I bet he feels like a nickel’s worth of dog meat,” Henrich said. The papers were meaner. “Mickey Owen Joins Historic Herd of World Series Goats,” the Chicago Tribune headlined the next morning. A sportwriter’s convention later voted the play the “sports freak of the year.”

It was an uncharacteristic lapse for Owen, his first and only passed ball of the entire season – one in which he had set a record for the most consecutive errorless chances by a catcher, 508. Casey later admitted that his pitch had been a spitter.

The error stayed with Owen, who ended up taking the Nietzschean point of view of the play: “The missed third strike, instead of ruining my career, will make me a better catcher,” he wrote in a 1942 Collier’s magazine article. Oddly, the week after the series, when he returned to his Brookline, Mo., farm for the winter, Owen sold his herd of goats. But he said it was “not because they reminded me of my part in the series.”

Owen did go on to have several more strong years as the first-string Dodgers catcher, but the prime years of his career were cut short after he briefly jumped to the Mexican League in 1946. Although he soon attempted to return, he, along with a dozen others, was banned from baseball by commissioner Happy Chandler, allowed to return only in 1949. Owen later called the episode “the worst mistake of my life.” By then, the Dodgers had a new young catcher named Roy Campanella. Owen, sold to the Cubs and later the Red Sox, was never the same.

Arnold Malcolm Owen was born near Springfield, Mo. His parents separated early – Owen didn’t meet his father until he was 12 – and he and his mother moved to Los Angeles when he was in the second grade. By the time he was 14, Owen was playing semipro ball, and he was just 21 when he made the majors, on the 1937 Cardinals. His teammates, who included Dizzy Dean and Johnny Mize, started calling him Mickey after the outstanding Detroit catcher Mickey Cochrane.

A maverick from the start, Owen made national news when he turned up in training camp in 1940 with a full-length red beard he’d grown while wintering at the farm. He joined the Dodgers in 1941 as starting catcher, and played in the All-Star game. In 1942, he hit the first-ever All-Star pinch-hit home run. It was an anomaly – the light-hitting catcher had 14 homers for his entire career, and batted an average .255.

Owen stayed with the Dodgers until he was drafted into the Navy, in 1945. The next year Owen quarreled with Dodgers President Branch Rickey and embarked upon his ill-fated stint in the newly formed Mexican Baseball League. Signed as a player-manager of the Vera Cruz Blues, Owen was soon fired as manager but retained as a player, an arrangement he disliked. His stay in Mexico was marred by a spectacular brawl at home plate in a Mexico City game against Monterray. Claro Danny, a Cuban left fielder, claimed Owen tagged him too hard. Fisticuffs at home plate ensued. A photo of the affray ran in papers around the nation. At least one caption writer with a memory noted, “Through all the mix-up, Owen held on to the ball.”

Owen already had a reputation as a brawler, having been charged with attacking Dodgers fans in the aftermath of an ugly loss to Pittsburgh in 1942. Later, in 1953, during a stint as manager of the Norwalk Tars of the Class-B Piedmont League, Owen was fined $2,500 for his assaulting a man during the playoffs. He “took a bite outta my ear,” the man told the court.

Owen retired after the 1954 season, and he worked for several years as a minor-league manager and as a scout. In 1960, he opened the Mickey Owen Baseball School in Miller, Mo., where hundreds of youngsters still come each year to work on their sports fundamentals. Although he sold his interest in the camp in 1963, he stayed involved as an instructor through the 1980s. Among the camp’s alumni are Michael Jordan, Charlie Sheen, Mike Marshall, and Joe Girardi.

In 1964, Owen was elected sheriff of Greene County, Mo., the first time a Democrat had held the office since 1936. He continued as sheriff until 1980, when he quit to make an unsuccessful run for lieutenant governor of Missouri. For publicity, he jogged across the state, 240 miles in 10 days.” I’ve got blisters on my blisters,” he groaned. “I wanted to prove to the voters of Missouri that when Mickey Owen makes a commitment, he keeps it.” Like virtually all news accounts about him after 1941, campaign stories that year included brief references to his World Series error.

Owen cheerfully answered fan questions about the play, but insisted the fault was not entirely his. His son, Charlie Owen, told the Toronto Star in 1999 that his father said it was a combination of a wild pitch, a wild swing, a catcher’s muff, and an overzealous Dodgers fan who had tried to kick the ball back to him and missed.

In recent years, Owen was stricken with Alzheimer’s Disease.

Arnold Malcolm Owen

Born April 4, 1916, in Nixa, Mo.; died July 13 at the Mount Vernon, Mo., Veterans Home after a long illness; survived by his son, Charlie.