Hall of Famer Johnny Mize, Demorest highlighted in book that was a long time in the making
Although Baseball Hall of Famer Johnny Mize plied his trade in St. Louis and New York City and spent a memorable winter in the Dominican Republic, he is most closely associated with Demorest, Georgia, the Habersham County town of his birth.
Author Jerry Grillo, who worked for the Athens Banner-Herald and Daily News as a copy editor and reporter in the early 1990s, was interested in Mize as the subject for a book, in no small part because of his life in Demorest both before and after his big league career.
“Demorest is a small town and when Johnny Mize was young it was in the middle of nowhere,” said Grillo, who lives in Sautee Nacoochee in White County. “It was a train ride away from Atlanta and it was known for having Piedmont College, and not much else.”
Last month, Grillo’s second book, “Big Cat: The Life of Baseball Hall of Famer Johnny Mize” was released by the University of Nebraska Press. His previous book, a biography of iconic Atlanta musician Col. Bruce Hampton, came out in 2021 and was released by the University of Georgia Press.
Demorest and Piedmont College are jumping off points for Mize, who played for the Cardinals, Giants and Yankees in a career that began in the late 1930s and ended in the early 1950s and included 359 home runs with 2,011 hits and 1,337 runs batted in. The community also sets the scene for one of the many compelling stories about Mize’s life.
“Johnny played baseball for Piedmont College from the age of 15 until he was 19,” said Grillo, an award-winning journalist who by day works as a writer and communications officer for Research Communications at Georgia Tech. “He was proud to say he held the record for playing college baseball for four years and never going to college. He was a high school kid but he was so big and strong and good that the coach recruited him to play for the college team. And he was a stud – a 15-year-old kid hitting .400 against college-age pitchers.
“That fascinated me. The fact that he was close to where I live – he lived 15 miles from here – was a big driver for writing the book. I’ve always loved community news and felt comfortable with it. And Johnny Mize was a local guy and I loved that. He had a cussed independence that we know exists in Northeast Georgia.”
“Big Cat” was 20 years in the making, starting with a friendship Grillo developed with Judi Mize, the daughter of Johnny Mize, when he worked as the editor of the Northeast Georgian weekly newspaper in Cornelia in 1999. Grillo began working on a biography of Mize (who died in 1993 at the age of 80) and secured a contract from a small North Carolina publisher.
A few days after Grillo received the contract, his wife Jane gave birth three months early to a baby boy, Joe. Diagnosed with spastic quadriplegia cerebral palsy a few months after his birth, Joe required care over and beyond the usual baby concerns, and Grillo had to put his dream of writing a book on hold.
“We realized we had some challenges and we knew he would require a different kind of focus,” said Grillo. “It hurt me to say that I couldn’t commit to the book.”
Fast forward a decade or two. After the release of the Hampton book drew critical and commercial attention, Grillo decided to return to his Mize manuscript, which included interviews with several of Mize’s former Yankees teammates conducted years ago.
“I had worked on the book about Bruce, off and on, for years,” said Grillo, who was a finalist runner-up for Georgia Author of the Year by the Georgia Writers in 2022. “And then he died (in 2017) and I figured I needed to finally get this book finished and get it out there. When it was done, I realized I’d already started the Mize book, and I’d interviewed people like Whitey Ford and Bobby Brown and other former ballplayers who are now dead.
“I took their time up 20-some years before with the intention of writing a book and didn’t do anything with it. I didn’t want to have wasted their time. And then Judi Mize died and I had a real sense of urgency to write this book.”
One of the destinations in the Mize story that fascinated Grillo was his wintertime stint playing baseball in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, teaming up and competing with (possibly for the first time) Latin and African-American players.
“Here’s a 20-year-old guy from white, Southern Appalachia, barnstorming in Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic,” said Grillo. “I love that sense of openness and adventure. He goes down and spends the winter with some of the best players in the world that no one has ever heard of but are now in the Hall of Fame He played against Josh Gibson.
“It was a wild, wild west atmosphere and he’s on this super team of Latin American players. This was a story I really had to research and dig out.”
Grillo devotes a chapter in “Big Cat” for Mize’s Caribbean experience, but said that even given the scarcity of information available, he could have written a whole book on that subject.
“A lot of this stuff is unknown,” he said,” although bits and pieces of it are on the web. I devoted a whole chapter to that and that was a chapter that really drove me – I almost wrote a whole book just on that winter of this Southern guy playing ball in the Caribbean. I just fell in love with that story. It’s just one chapter in the book, but it helps define who he was – a quiet Southern gentleman who was always up for an adventure.”
For more information about “Big Cat: The Life of Baseball Hall of Famer Johnny Mize,” visit www.nebraskapress.unl.edu. For more information about Jerry Grillo, visit Blog – JerryGrilloWriter.com.
This article originally appeared on Athens Banner-Herald: Johnny Mize book published by former Athens Banner-Herald writer
