Tommy Brown, the last surviving member of the 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers and the youngest player to homer in a Major League Baseball game, died on Wednesday. Brown was 97 years old and died after contracting pneumonia while recuperating from a fall, his daughter told The Ringer’s Ben Lindbergh.
Brown appeared in parts of nine big-league seasons, with seven of those coming as a member of the Dodgers. He would also suit up for the Chicago Cubs and the Philadelphia Phillies. Overall, he hit .241/.292/.355 (75 OPS+) across 494 career games.
Brown debuted at age 16 during the 1944 campaign, at a time when key players across the league were enrolled in military service during World War II. Brown homered the following season, in his 66th career game and about a month prior to his 18th birthday. He would homer again about a week thereafter. No other player in MLB history has homered before turning 18, according to SABR.
“I quit school at 12 years old to work with my uncle on the New York docks unloading barges and everything,” Brown later said of his baseball journey. “I only played baseball with the local neighborhood teams. We didn’t have a field. We usually played on pavement or cobblestones. Sometimes we found a schoolyard to play.”
A teammate later convinced Brown to attend a Dodgers tryout — a decision that helped him land in the record books.
Brown would eventually report for his own military duty before being discharged ahead of spring 1947. He then reported for camp and competed for playing time at first base alongside the legendary Jackie Robinson. Suffice to say, Robinson won the competition and successfully integrated Major League Baseball.
Brown, for his part, refused to partake in a petition started by other Dodgers players who didn’t want to share a team with Robinson. “I didn’t like it, because he was a man,” he said. “Color didn’t bother me.”
