Billy cox pueblo co

Imagine an infielder who played his last game more than half a century ago, who appeared in 1,058 games and batted .262 lifetime. Probably only his family and his most diehard fans would know his name. But that’s not so in the case of William Richard “Billy” Cox. Anchoring the infield on three Brooklyn pennant winners assured Cox of lasting fame — but his immortality was guaranteed when Roger Kahn featured him along with many of his teammates in The Boys of Summer, one of the most enduring baseball books of the 20th century.

During his time with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Cox was hailed by many of his contemporaries as the finest fielding third baseman of his era. “He’s not a third baseman, he’s a blankety-blank acrobat,” Casey Stengel said after witnessing Cox in action in the World Series.1 And after seeing Cox’s steady glove and powerful arm in the 1952 Fall Classic, future Hall of Fame third baseman George Kell declared, “I never dreamed third base could be played with such artistry until I saw Cox in that series.”2

When the Dodgers sold Cox to Baltimore in 1954, o

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