Jim McAnany

James McAnany (September 4, 1936 – December 16, 2015) was an American professional baseball player. Primarily a right fielder, he played all or part of five seasons in Major League Baseball, from 1958 until 1962, for the Chicago White Sox and Chicago Cubs. He was in the White Sox starting lineup for three of the six games in the 1959 World Series.

The 1959 pennant-winning season was by far his best in the majors. It included 210 of his 241 career at-bats, as McAnany, a contact hitter with little power, batted .276 for the White Sox with no home runs but just 26 strikeouts.

A native of Los Angeles, he attended Loyola High School and the University of Southern California there.

McAnany was mentioned in Jane Leavy's 2010 book The Last Boy: Mickey Mantle. In it is a story in which McAnany was hit by a Mickey Mantle line drive during the 1959 season and stated, "I think I have a hole in my chest."

According to a Chicago Tribune column of Oct. 21, 2005 by Mike Downey, McAnany, employed by an insurance agency in Southern California, returned to Chicago to participate in a "Turn Back the Clock" weekend sponsored by the White Sox in June 2005 when the Los Angeles Dodgers played at Comiskey Park for the first time since the '59 World Series. Four months later, the White Sox would return to the World Series for the first time in 46 years.

McAnany died December 16, 2015.^[1]

Sources

• Career statistics and player information from Baseball-Reference, or Baseball-Reference (Minors)