He had quite a life after his family left Poland just before Nazis took over in the 1930s.
Sportswriter and author David Driver approached me some time ago with a proposal to post an article here on former major league pitcher Moe Drabowsky, who pitched for the Cubs from 1956-60. In fact, in my view the Cubs made a major mistake trading him away in March 1961, as he went on to have several fine seasons in Baltimore, pitching for them in the World Series in 1966 and 1970 and overall posting 19.9 bWAR in a 17-year big-league career.
I found this story to be fascinating so I’m posting it here for your enjoyment on New Year’s Day. The rest of this article is by David Driver.
THE CUBS’ CLOWN PRINCE
Poland native Moe Drabowsky was a winner on the mound while keeping his teammates in stitches.
WARSAW, Poland — Following the death of Moe Drabowky, who broke into the majors with the Cubs in 1956, a funeral was held for the former right-handed pitcher near his home in Sarasota, Florida.
Following the service, according to his second wife, about 100 people came to her home in Sarasota to pay their respects to perhaps one of the most fun-loving players to ever wear a jersey at Wrigley Field.
The group included several of his former teammates with the Orioles. “Some bigwigs came in from Baltimore for the funeral,” recalled Rita Drabowsky, well aware that her husband was the winning pitcher in Game 1 of the 1966 World Series with the Orioles with one of the best relief outings in Fall Classic history.
Rita Drabowsky summoned the two daughters from his first marriage and handed them a memorable keepsake that day in 2006.
“I gave them something special,” she said. “After we had the funeral for him, we came back to my house. I sat them down on the piano bench in the living room in front of everyone. I said your dad wanted you to have a special memory of him. He was very specific. His older daughter got the one he played in 1966 and the younger daughter got the second one that he played in. I made the presentation to them. They were just in tears and happy.”
“It was a very special memory. The next day one of them came over and she had a chain around her neck, and she said, ‘I am going to be wearing this ring around my neck.’ The two daughters each got a World Series ring,” Rita Drabowsky said. “He wanted to pass on something special. I have several things I donated to the Babe Ruth Birthplace Sports Legends Museum in Baltimore. I have not been in touch with them for a long time. It was his second marriage, and it was very difficult for his daughters to accept, well, not a stepmother but a second wife.”
It is totally fitting and a nod to baseball karma that Poland native Drabowsky would break into The Show with the Cubs, seeing that the city has been has been home to Polish immigrants for decades.
Drabowsky won a career-high 13 games with the Cubs in 1957. He appeared in 36 games, with 33 starts while hitting a league-high 10 batters. Drabowsky stayed with the club through the 1960 season, and later pitched for the Braves, Reds, A’s, Orioles, Royals, Cardinals, and White Sox before retiring after the 1972 season.
But the story of how he got to the North Side is both arduous and adventurous.
Storm clouds – and rumblings of war – permeated Eastern Europe in the spring of 1935.
It was under this backdrop that summer that Myron Walter Drabowski (later known as Drabowsky) was born on July 21, 1935, into a Catholic family in Ozanna, a small village in southeast Poland. His mother was an American citizen, and his father was Polish.
His mother, Frances Gaulus, was born in 1916 in Hartford, Connecticut. Her mother contracted tuberculosis when Frances was an infant, according to the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR), so neighbors in the apartment building helped raise Frances and eventually adopted her — she eventually returned to Poland and had a son who was given name was Myron Walter.
Drabowsky grew up on a small farm with his parents in Poland.
“They were raising chickens in their backyard,” said Rita Drabowsky, the widow of Moe. “He was out there and that was just toys for him at two or three years old. It was not a big farm thing; it was just raising these chickens. As a little boy, he would be out there playing.”
Any birth in Ozanna certainly when have been news back then – and now.
With just a few hundred people, Ozanna is three miles east of Kurylowka, four miles east of Lezajsk and a few miles west of Dabrowica.
The regional capital, Rzeszow, is about 30 miles northeast of Ozanna and has a population of about 195,000.
Today, there are just two items listed on Wikipedia about Ozanna – its geographic location and being the birthplace of Drabowsky. That is it.
The late Mike Royko, a famous newspaper columnist in Chicago, stated in 1968 that Drabowsky “is still considered the best pitcher that Ozanna, Poland ever produced.”
Left unsaid, of course, was that he was the only pitcher that Ozanna ever produced. Royko’s mother was Polish, and his father was Ukrainian; he grew up in an apartment above a bar in Chicago and was beginning a long newspaper career in Chicago when Drabowsky pitched for his beloved Cubs.
Poland wasn’t even on maps and didn’t exist as a country for 123 years, until returning in 1918. Many pundits have noted that Poland had the misfortune of being smack between Germany and Russia, two superpowers of the mid-20th century.
Wars were fought over those lands and most of the time it was the Polish people who suffered.
Today, Ozanna sits less than 60 miles west of the border with Ukraine, which has seen its share of bloodshed in the 21st century nearly 90 years after the birth of Drabowsky.
The future still didn’t look bright in the weeks and months after Drabowsky was born. The years 1936 and 1937 did not bring much comfort to the Drabowsky family in Ozanna.
“In 1937, with unrest of war, mom being a US citizen was able to book passage with her three-year-old son (Drabowsky), leaving my dad to wait for his papers to be processed for his passage to America,” according to Marian, the sister of Moe.
So, in the early fall of 1938, Drabowsky and his mother left the small village in Poland for the United States. His mother was more than eight months pregnant.
Beth Morris, one of two adult daughters of Drabowsky from his first marriage, said her grandmother took a side street to begin the trek toward Warsaw, about 180 miles to the north, and eventually the United States.
“They escaped,” Morris, who lives near Seattle, said as Germany invaded Poland on September 1, 1939.
There had been violence inflicted on extended members of the family by the Nazis, according to Morris, and it was time to leave – quickly. They eventually settled in Connecticut.
“He didn’t speak a word of English,” said Rita Drabowsky of her late husband.
Soon after arriving in the USA, Drabowsky’s mother gave birth to a girl, Marian, who has lived in Oklahoma for several years.
“His dad did not come over with them at that particular time,” said Rita Drabowsky.
“In those times, he had to have sponsor, a job secured, have $500 in the bank. He arrived in May of 1939,” according to Marian, of her father.
By the time Drabowsky made his Major League debut in 1956 with the Cubs, he would be the first native of Poland to play in the Major Leagues in more than two decades.
Nap Kloza, who was born in Warsaw, appeared in his last game on June 26, 1932, with the St. Louis Browns. Kloza appeared in just 22 games in the majors while Drabowsky pitched in 589 with 88 wins and 54 saves over 17 seasons.
More than 50 years after his final game, Drabowsky remains one of just four natives of Poland to play Major League Baseball. And he was the only one to appear in a World Series game and the only one of to last more than two years in The Show.
He was a trend-setter in several ways: Moe Drabowsky was among the first to make a living as a relief pitcher in an era when starters were king; he set the stage for a slew of practical jokers in the 1970s such as Jay Johnstone, who played with the Cubs from 1982-85; pitcher Larry Anderson; fellow reliever Al “The Mad Hungarian” Hrabosky, and Mark “The Bird” Fidrych, a pitcher who talked to the baseball before he threw it and captivated a national TV audience on Monday Night Baseball in the 1970s against the powerful Yankees.
But Drabowsky was on the scene long before those former big leaguers, including Johnstone, who like the Polish pitcher spent part of his youth in Connecticut.
“Number one prankster of all time,” said Denny Walling, a left-handed hitter who played in the majors from 1975 to 1992, of Drabowsky.
Larry Haney, a teammate of Drabowsky with the Orioles in 1966, recalls one time when the former pitcher set off fireworks in the tepee of the mascot of the Cleveland Indians, whose nickname is now the Guardians.
“He was a fun person to be around,” Haney said.
Haney recalls catching Drabowsky during a game in 1966 against the Red Sox when Drabowsky threw his nasty slider. The batter fouled off the 3-2 pitch and the ball smashed into the hand of Haney, causing an injury.
After his playing career, Walling became a hitting coach in the minor leagues with Baltimore. Around the same time, Drabowsky was a minor league pitching coordinator with the Orioles.
“I was a lot younger, but we hit it off right away,” Walling, who was born in 1954, said.
Walling spoke at the funeral for Drabowsky in Florida in 2006.
The practical jokes orchestrated by Drabowsky were legendary in the 1960s and 1970s.
He was a pioneer in that regard but also on the mound. In his era, being a relief pitcher was seen as a second-class role in the majors.
In the 1950s, poor starting pitchers were relegated to the bullpen. Some of them would only pitch in blowout games, coming on in place of the starting pitcher when games were one-sided one way or the other.
Drabowsky was also unique in that he had a college degree and worked as a stockbroker at times during the off-season. “He was really smart,” noted Walling, one of the all-time leaders in pinch-hits.
And those antics continued when he was coaching minor league players once he was done playing.
One of those tricks came in Sarasota when he brought a snake home to show his second wife, Rita.
“He stored it in a cage in the garage overnight,” she said. “The next morning, he played a joke on one of his players. It was hysterical. He was going to give this guy an award for something, and Moe stood behind of him. He was going to put a ribbon around his neck. Instead, the boa constrictor was laid on his shoulder. The guy literally ran out of the clubhouse. Moe said he is probably still running – he is probably down I-75 (in southwest Florida) by now.”
“He was just so active in practical jokes all the time,” Rita Drabowsky adds. “He had the biggest fun with it.”
He would sometimes get on the dugout telephone and call the opposing bullpen. Drabowsky would pretend he was the opposing manager and tell one of the opposing relievers to warm up. The pitcher also gave a hot foot to then MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn as the Orioles celebrated the 1970 World Series title.
Drabowsky is one of several baseball players in the Polish American Sports Hall of Fame in Michigan. Among them are Baseball Hall of Famers Stan Musial, Phil Niekro and Bill Mazeroski, as well as former Cubs infielder Mark Grudzielanek.
Drabowsky returned to Poland in 1987.
He brought with him Hall of Fame baseball star outfielder Musial, who was born in western Pennsylvania to a father from Poland and a mother who was also from eastern Europe. They gave a clinic to young baseball players in the town of Kutno.
The former pitcher and ex-outfielder were linked in baseball history long before that trip to Poland. It was Drabowsky who allowed the 3,000th hit of Musial’s career at Wrigley Field in Chicago in 1958. They also threw out the first pitch before Game 4 of the 1987 World Series in St. Louis, where Musial starred for the Cardinals.
Drabowsky lived for many years in Sarasota. But he passed away in Little Rock, Arkansas in 2006 at a hospital there. He was given six months to live after his diagnosis and he ended up living nearly six more years.
“We were living in Sarasota when he was diagnosed with multiple melanomas,” said Rita Drabowsky. “So, we tried everything help and we found nothing was going to work to fix this. He was interested in doing something experimental. So, we found out that in Little Rock, Arkansas there was a group of doctors that focused on this disease. He was willing to put himself out there for it. He made a huge commitment to the folks at Little Rock; it was rough for him and not a good thing. But he survived a little bit longer than they expected.”
That should be a surprise for someone who defied the odds, born in a faraway land with little baseball history during the rise of Nazism in the 1930s and ended pitching in the majors for nearly two decades.
Virginia native David Driver is the author of “From Tidewater to the Shenandoah: Snapshots from Virginia’s Rich Baseball Legacy” and “Hoops Dreams in Europe,” both available on Amazon. He is the former sports editor of papers in Baltimore and Virginia and covered the Washington Nationals from 2013-22 for various outlets, including the 2019 World Series. He and his wife moved to Poland in 2023 to work with an INGO dealing with humanitarian needs in Ukraine.