Murray Asher Franklin (April 1, 1914 – March 16, 1978) was a

Major League Baseball Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball organization and the oldest major professional sports league in the world. MLB is composed of 30 total teams, divided equally between the National League (NL) and the American League (AL), ...

shortstop Shortstop, abbreviated SS, is the baseball or softball fielding position between second and third base, which is considered to be among the most demanding defensive positions. Historically the position was assigned to defensive specialists wh ...

who played for the Detroit Tigers in and .

Biography

He was born in

Chicago, Illinois (''City in a Garden''); I Will , image_map = , map_caption = Interactive Map of Chicago , coordinates = , coordinates_footnotes = , subdivision_type = Country , subdivision_name ...

, and was Jewish. He attended

Schurz High School Carl Schurz High School is a public 4–year high school located in the Irving Park neighborhood on the northwest side of Chicago, Illinois, United States. The school is named after German–American Carl Schurz, a statesman, soldier, and advocat ...

in Chicago, and the

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign The University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (U of I, Illinois, University of Illinois, or UIUC) is a public land-grant research university in Illinois in the twin cities of Champaign and Urbana. It is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

Champaign, Illinois Champaign ( ) is a city in Champaign County, Illinois, United States. The population was 88,302 at the 2020 census. It is the tenth-most populous municipality in Illinois and the fourth most populous city in Illinois outside the Chicago metro ...

. In the minor leagues, in 1938 he led the Mountain State League in batting (.439), triples (13; tied),

home run In baseball, a home run (abbreviated HR) is scored when the ball is hit in such a way that the batter is able to circle the bases and reach home plate safely in one play without any errors being committed by the defensive team. A home run i ...

s (26), and slugging percentage (.790). Franklin made his Major League debut on August 12, 1941 and played briefly for the rest of the season, before playing 48 games in 1942. He did not play after that, and finished his short career with 43 hits, 2 home runs, 16 RBIs and a .262 batting average.

References

External links

1914 births 1978 deaths Baseball players from Chicago Burials at Hillside Memorial Park Cemetery Detroit Tigers players Illinois Fighting Illini baseball players Jewish American baseball players Jewish Major League Baseball players Major League Baseball shortstops Carl Schurz High School alumni 20th-century American Jews {{US-baseball-shortstop-stub