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Growing Up With a Naugatuck Legend

Spec Shea's son recalls a lifetime sprinkled with Yankee memories.

What was it like to grow up as the oldest child – and namesake – of a prominent professional athlete?

Frank Shea Jr. minces no words. “I was so lucky, so fortunate to be a baseball fan, my father being an ex-player,” he says. “When he’d take me to Yankee Stadium, we’d go down to the clubhouse and they’d let us in. I met Mickey Mantle when I was 10 years old.”

Frank, who will mark his 60th birthday in October, is one of three children of the late Frank “Spec” Shea and Genevieve Martino Shea. A finance guy, he earns his livelihood in the business office at Housatonic Community College in Bridgeport and also teaches an economics course at the college each semester. He and his wife, Noreen, still call Naugatuck home. His brother, John, 57, settled in nearby Southington, while their sister, Barbara Woolfrey, 46, resides in the Shea home on Johnson Street.

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Their dad may be the most prominent person to come out of Naugatuck, Hollywood designer Adrian, World War II Brig. Gen. James Dalton and U.S. Open golf champion Billy Burke (born Burkowski) notwithstanding.

For Francis Joseph “Spec” Shea, the timing was perfect. The war had ended, and people were flocking to ballparks in record numbers. He was a mature – and colorful – 26-year-old first-year pitcher in 1947, a veteran of three years service in the Army Air Corps, much of that time in Europe.

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He produced a whale of a rookie season for the world champion New York Yankees, compiling a 14-5 record, leading the league in winning percentage (.737) and fewest hits allowed per nine innings (6.40), while ranking eighth with a 3.07 earned run average. Three times he defeated the Tigers’ ace, Hal Newhouser, in head-to-head meetings that summer, twice winning by a shutout.

The “Naugatuck Nugget,” proclaimed the Yankees announcer, Mel Allen, a nickname that endured until the end.

What a summer. On June 22, an estimated 5,000 fans from Naugatuck and environs descended on Yankee Stadium for Frank “Spec” Shea Day. The town’s warden (mayor), Harry L. Carter, presented the keys to a 1947 maroon Hudson, complete with “Spec” license plate. Tom Rowley, who had been Shea’s catcher at Naugatuck High School, gave his old batterymate a gold watch.

On July 8, Shea pitched the middle three innings of the All-Star Game at Wrigley Field in Chicago, becoming the first rookie pitcher to receive credit for an All-Star victory. The American League edged the National, 2-1.

Then the Naugatuck Nugget capped his memorial year by winning two games over the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series. He was the winner in the opener at Yankee Stadium, allowing just two hits and one run before departing for a pinch-hitter in the sixth inning. The Yankees prevailed, 5-3, in front of a record crowd of 73,365.

After the Dodger tied the Series at two games apiece, Shea reestablished the Yankees’ advantage by shackling the Dodgers on a four-hitter, 2-1, in game five at Ebbets Field. He also drove in the first New York run with the first of his two hits.

He ended the game with a flourish by striking out pinch-hitter Cookie Lavagetto – whose two-run double with two outs in the ninth inning had broken up Bill Bevens’ no-hitter and given the Dodgers a 3-2 victory the previous day – for the final out.

Frank Jr. tells the story how his father volunteered to start game seven, although he had pitched nine innings just two days earlier. “He was knocked out in the second inning. But the Yankees won and afterward (General Mgr. George) Weiss, I think it was, put his arm around my dad and said that because he had the courage to pitch the game, he was going to get a bonus of $1,000. My dad always used to say, ‘You know, I never got that $1,000.”

If there had been separate Rookie-of-the-Year awards for each league, Shea would have been an overwhelming choice as the American League’s best freshman. Instead, he placed third in the overall balloting behind two National Leaguers, Jackie Robinson of the Dodgers and pitcher Larry Jansen of the New York Giants.

“Everything I touched turned to gold that year,” he once told me. “How fortunate I was. It was a year you dream about. The only thing I feel bad about was I hurt my arm that year.”

In actuality, the injury was a pulled neck muscle, which kept him on the sidelines for some seven weeks in the second half of the 1947 season. “I could have won 20 (games) that year,” Frank Jr. recalls his father saying.

The neck injury hampered him the next few seasons, and he was sent to Triple-A Newark for a spell in 1949 and to Triple-A Kansas City for all of 1950. The May, 1952 trade to the Washington Senators revived Shea’s career. With fifth-place Senator teams, Spec was a solid No. 2 starter behind Bob Porterfield, turning in records of 11-7 in ’52 and 12-7 in 1953

As a boy, Frank Jr. had baseball aspirations himself, but “lost interest” after playing Little League and Babe Ruth League. “People used to ask, ‘Are you going to follow in your father’s footsteps?’ Well, he never pushed us to do it,” he says.

Young Frank has a dim memory of watching his father pitch for the Senators in 1954 or ’55 at Griffith Stadium in the nation’s capital. “It was probably the only game I saw him play in. There were people there who were dressed as Native Americans. Arthur Godfrey (a television star of the era) was there riding a horse,” he says.

“We lived in Washington, D.C., during the season. An aide to Richard Nixon, who was then the vice president, lived upstairs.”

His dad’s eight-year playing career ended with the Senators in 1955 (lifetime record: 56 wins, 46 losses), and Clark Griffith, the club owner, broached the idea of making Shea the team’s pitching coach the following season. Spec liked that idea.

“But Griffith died that winter,” says young Frank, still wondering how the Shea family’s life would have been altered if his dad had become the Washington pitching coach.

Instead, Spec Shea returned to the Borough and eventually became the town’s superintendent of parks and recreation, a position he held for 20 years until his retirement in 1989.

Loquacious and likeable, he remained active on the banquet circuit and made annual appearances at Old Timers’ Day at Yankee Stadium. Accompanied by my good friend Ron Diorio and other retired major leaguers such as Ralph Branca, Willard Marshall, Sal Yvars and Mike Sandlock, Spec also participated in charity golf tournaments throughout the state and Westchester County, helping to raise funds for non-profits.

In the early 1980s, the Naugatuck Nugget had one more brush with fame. The telephone rang in the Shea household one day, and Spec asked his daughter to answer it.

“May I ask who’s calling, please,” said Barbara Shea, then 19. “It was Robert Redford. I think he said ‘Bob Redford.’”  

Indeed, Robert Redford was preparing for the role of Roy Hobbs in the 1984 film, “The Natural,” and he was asking Spec Shea to teach him how to pitch and hit, 1930s style. “I don’t want to embarrass myself,” Redford told Shea.

So, on at least one Sunday, perhaps on a few occasions (stories differ), Shea provided the rudiments of pitching and hitting to the Hollywood actor at Breen Field.

“People were walking by, saying, ‘Is that Robert Redford?’” Frank Jr. recalls.

“It was supposed to be a big secret, but the word got out,” Barbara says.

Like his dad, Frank Jr. grew up rooting for the Yankees, too, but he is less of a fan these days. “I don’t follow it the way I used to, ever since free agency. You didn’t have guys going from one team to another,” he says.

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