The shooting of Eddie Waitkus

Today marks the 76h anniversary of 29-year-old first baseman Eddie Waitkus – the original “Natural” – being shot in a Chicago hotel room by a deranged, rifle-toting, 19-year-old fan named Ruth Ann Steinhagen.

Waitkus, traded the previous offseason from Steinhagen's beloved Cubs to the Philadelphia Phillies, is batting .306 at the time and misses the rest of the 1949 season before returning in 1950 to help Philadelphia’s Whiz Kids reach the World Series.

Ruth Ann Steinhagen

“I haven’t got over the whole surprise. It’s just like a bad dream,” Waitkus later tells reporters during his recovery from the gunshot wound he suffers shortly after midnight on this day in 1949.

“I would just like to know what got into that silly honey picking on a nice guy like me. She must be crazy, charging around with a rifle. It was safer for me (during World War II) on New Guinea, wasn’t it?”

Steinhagen ends up spending nearly three years in a psychiatric hospital before getting her release and disappearing into anonymity before passing away in 2012.

Waitkus, though, never fully recovers – mentally or physically – from being shot in the chest and is out of the game by 1956.

Billy Jurges

His story, some believe, becomes the inspiration behind Bernard Malamud's 1952 novel The Natural.

Others believe Malamud’s inspiration may be Billy Jurges, the former Cubs shortstop who in 1932 suffers a similar fate as Waitkus as he, too, gets shot in a Chicago hotel room by another crazed fan.

Waitkus finishes his career batting .285 with 1,214 hits in 1,140 games and a sparkling .993 fielding percentage in 9,938 chances at first base.

Alas, just distant memories by 1972, when Waitkus – suffering from depression and cancer – dies at the all too young age of 53.