Charlie Muse, Innovator Behind Modern Batting Helmet, Dies at 87
NY Times
PITTSBURGH, May 19 (AP) - Charlie Muse, a longtime Pittsburgh Pirates executive who helped create baseball’s modern batting helmet, died on May 5 in Sun City Center, Fla. He was 87.
His death was announced by the Pirates.
Muse spent 52 years with the Pirates, many as their traveling secretary. He was nicknamed the Colonel because of his all-business approach, and it was his military-like ability to improvise that helped speed the invention of the batting helmet.
Until Branch Rickey, the Pirates’ general manager, pushed in the early 1950’s for the creation of a protective helmet, batters traditionally wore only their cloth caps to the plate. At the time, Rickey owned American Baseball Cap Inc., and he chose Muse to run the company and design a suitable helmet.
“It was more difficult than people would think,” Muse told The Associated Press in a 1989 interview. “The players laughed at the first helmets, called them miner’s helmets. They said the only players who would wear them were sissies.”
Muse worked with Ralph Davia, an inventor, and Ed Crick, a designer, to perfect a helmet. They went through numerous designs before coming up with a comfortable plastic helmet that provided maximum protection above the ears.
The Pirates were the first team to wear the helmets, in 1952 and 1953, and their adoption was speeded after the Braves’ Joe Adcock, wearing a helmet, was beaned so severely by the Dodgers’ Clem Labine in 1954 that he was unconscious for 15 minutes.
