It seems an unlikely description given his small stature, but baseball lost a giant yesterday in Phil Rizzuto. The oldest living Hall of Famer, Rizzuto, 89, was the last link to an ethos of professionalism in sport that, but for select practitioners, may well have become extinct with his passing.

For more than 50 years, Rizzuto was the quintessential Yankees booster, an enthusiastic presence first on the field as the shortstop of nine pennant winners and seven championship teams, and then as a welcoming presence on Yankees television and radio broadcasts, where his amiable but distracted approach, unabashed favoritism, and cries of “That huckleberry!” and “Holy cow!” became beloved trademarks.

When Rizzuto’s major league career began in 1941, baseball and the Yankees themselves were not long removed from a time in which ballplayers were as much roistering alcoholics as focused, career-minded athletes. Indeed, Miller Huggins, one of the predecessors of Rizzuto’s first manager, Joe McCarthy, had worried himself into a premature grave, but not due to what happened between the lines, but what happened outside them.

McCarthy, abetted by the day-in, day-out professionalism of Lou Gehrig and later the pride and perfectionism of Joe DiMaggio, helped change all the revelry. “You’re a Yankee,” McCarthy would say. “Act like one.”

“You had to eat, drink, and sleep baseball, 24 hours a day,” Rizzuto told Dom Forker in a 1989 interview. “There was no messing around.”
Rizzuto, who never concealed his awe of McCarthy, DiMaggio, and the shortstop whose job he took, Frank “Crow” Crosetti, absorbed their lessons. In part, his devotion to the rules of discipline were born out of the understanding that his size — he’s in the record books at 5 feet 6 inches and 160 pounds, with some sources saying 150 — meant that he would always be viewed with skepticism and that he’d better play fundamentally flawless baseball if he was going to hang around.

Indeed, Rizzuto had been dismissed several times before. As an 18-year-old, the Bronx native had tried out for the local Dodgers, Giants, and Yankees. Before the Yankees signed him, both National League clubs had turned him down with prejudice. Someone — Rizzuto often said it was then-Brooklyn manager Casey Stengel, but at times he blamed others — told him he was too small to play and should get a shoeshine box. He never got over the insult, eventually conflating it with the eve of the 1956 World Series, when Stengel, by then Yankees manager, and general manager George Weiss actually did dismiss him.

The two longtime baseball men, in a moment of calculated, undeserved cruelty, asked Rizzuto, by then a 38-year-old, rarely used substitute, who he would remove from the roster in order to make room for veteran pinch-hitter Enos Slaughter. It was only when Rizzuto’s several suggestions were turned down did he realize that he was being asked to suggest his own release.

Even McCarthy, nigh infallible in Rizzuto’s view, had hesitated when first considering him for a major league job. In 1940, with the Yankees struggling to defend their fourth straight championship, Rizzuto was tearing up the American Association for the Yankees’ top farm team at Kansas City. In the majors, Crosetti was failing to hit for the fourth year in a row, and in a close race his .194 AVG /.299 OBA /.273 SLG averages were killing the team’s chances. Worse, unlike his successor Stengel, McCarthy was not a manager who believed in shaking up his lineup (one of the many reasons that Stengel would always seem inferior to McCarthy in Rizzuto’s eyes), so Crosetti remained bolted to the leadoff spot.

In contrast, Rizzuto, 22, was on his way to batting .347 in his second year in the league and was drawing raves for his defensive abilities. McCarthy scouted Rizzuto, looking for a way to save the Yankees’ season, but decided the shortstop was not ready. By 1941, there was no avoiding bringing Rizzuto to the bigs. Crosetti was clearly through, Rizzuto had nothing more to learn in the minors, and the same press machine that exists today was hard at work for the young shortstop. But Rizzuto struggled in the early going, batting in the .240s. That was a robust figure compared to what Crosetti was now capable of, but McCarthy sent him to the bench and restored the veteran. Rizzuto spent a few weeks watching Crosetti hit into outs, then got back in the lineup and batted over .300 the rest of the season, finishing at .307/.343/.398. He was even better in 1942, though a general decline in league offensive levels distorted the fact that his .284/.343/.374 rates were actually an improvement. In the World Series that year, Rizzuto batted .381 with a home run.

World War II then disrupted whatever professional growth Rizzuto might have experienced. When he returned at 28, he wasn’t the same player. Still a defensive marvel and the ace bat-handler of his day (he led the league in sacrifices four straight times), he was at best an average offensive player. The one exception came in 1950, when, famously borrowing Johnny Mize’s heavy bat and finding that it helped him wait on pitches, he hit .324/.418/.434 and easily won the MVP award. It was a glimpse of the player he might have been.

Still, through it all was that aura of professionalism he had absorbed in 1941. Though a sometimes vocal critic of Stengel when on the bench, Rizzuto supported him with excellent play on the field. In some ways it was Rizzuto who made Stengel a genius; in Stengel’s first season, 1949, the Yankees suffered a rash of injuries. DiMaggio missed more than half the season, and just one player played in more than 128 games. That was Rizzuto, who sat down just once despite a painful arm that sometimes forced him to flip grounders to the third baseman, who would make the throw to first. Speaking in broad terms, DiMaggio once said Rizzuto held the Yankees together. In 1949, it was almost literally true.

Rizzuto turned to the microphone almost as soon as his playing career ended and remained a broadcast fixture through 1996. He was an entertaining but desultory broadcaster, often missing plays to shout out birthday wishes and sympathies to fans in the hospital, anticipate the delivery of cannolis to the booth, or get ready to beat the traffic across the George Washington Bridge. Yet even with all that random chatter, there was a consistent through-line. Whenever a new shortstop came up, Rizzuto waited to see if he could bunt, and he never stopped being an organization man, rooting for the Yankees on while in the booth. This was not because the Yankees paid him, but because he truly believed.

“The Scooter” may no longer be the greatest all-around shortstop in Yankees history — he ceded that title to Derek Jeter some time ago — but he might have been the truest Yankee. The era of free agency creates the possibility of loyalty for players, loyalty implies a choice rather than an obligation. For Rizzuto, loyalty was no choice at all. The Yankees had given him a chance, treated him respectfully (for the most part), and had made him famous and wealthy. No man ever seemed happier to carry such a debt.

Mr. Goldman writes the Pinstriped Bible for yesnetwork.com and is the author of “Forging Genius,” a biography of Casey Stengel.