Lawton Walter "Whitey" Witt (born ''Ladislaw Waldemar Wittkowski'', September 28, 1895 – July 14, 1988) was an American

professional baseball Professional baseball is organized baseball in which players are selected for their talents and are paid to play for a specific team or club system. It is played in leagues and associated farm teams throughout the world. Modern professiona ...

outfielder An outfielder is a person playing in one of the three defensive positions in baseball or softball, farthest from the batter. These defenders are the left fielder, the center fielder, and the right fielder. As an outfielder, their duty is to cat ...

. He played all or part of ten seasons in

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 (A ...

(MLB) with the

Philadelphia Athletics The Philadelphia Athletics were a Major League Baseball team that played in Philadelphia from 1901 to 1954, when they moved to Kansas City, Missouri, and became the Kansas City Athletics. Following another move in 1967, the team became the Oakla ...

New York Yankees The New York Yankees are an American professional baseball team based in the New York City borough of the Bronx. The Yankees compete in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a member club of the American League (AL) East division. They are one ...

, and

Brooklyn Robins The Brooklyn Dodgers were a Major League Baseball team founded in 1884 as a member of the American Association before joining the National League in 1890. They remained in Brooklyn until 1957, after which the club moved to Los Angeles, Califor ...

. In his career, he hit .287 (1,195-for-4,171) with 18 home runs and 300 RBI. He was the last surviving person to have played on the 1923 New York Yankees championship team, the first year the Yankees won the World Series. Witt was well known for having been knocked unconscious by a thrown soda bottle at a game in

Sportsman's Park Sportsman's Park was the name of several former Major League Baseball ballpark structures in St. Louis, Missouri. All but one of these were located on the same piece of land, at the northwest corner of Grand Boulevard and Dodier Street, on th ...

in St. Louis in 1922. The Yankees were locked in a tight pennant race with the St. Louis Browns that year. The person who threw the bottle from the stands was never identified, though the Yankees and Witt came back to win the series (thanks to a key hit by Witt) defeating the Browns by one game for the pennant.

External links

* Major League Baseball outfielders Philadelphia Athletics players New York Yankees players Brooklyn Robins players Kansas City Blues (baseball) players Mission Reds players Reading Keystones players Bowdoin Polar Bears baseball players Baseball players from Massachusetts People from Orange, Massachusetts 1895 births 1988 deaths American people of Polish descent {{US-baseball-outfielder-1890s-stub