242. "I Shot Eddie Waitkus!" 7" x 10.5"
Size: 7 × 10.5 inches art print (not a comic book) Availability: Pre-order ends Sunday, May 24th at 3 PM PT / 6 PM ET Shipping: Expected to ship approximately 40–60 days after the purchase window closes. Estimated timeframe. Not guaranteed. From the Artist: In the summer of 1949, baseball still felt untouchable. Ballplayers were heroes in flannel uniforms. America was settling into the glow of the postwar years. The game was supposed to be safe. Familiar. Clean. Then Eddie Waitkus walked into Room 1297 at Chicago’s Edgewater Beach Hotel. A young woman named Ruth Ann Steinhagen had written him letters for years. She asked him to come upstairs because she “had something important to tell him.” Waitkus reportedly thought it might be a prank. Instead, Steinhagen pulled a rifle from a closet and shot him point blank. For a moment, the entire country stopped. The story became front page news across America. A real life collision of celebrity obsession, loneliness, romance, violence, and baseball mythology. It was shocking not only because it happened, but because it happened to a ballplayer. The national reaction carried a kind of innocence lost quality to it, as though something larger than Eddie Waitkus himself had been wounded that night. Against all odds, Waitkus survived. Years later, the incident would partially inspire Bernard Malamud’s The Natural, helping transform the story into something even stranger: part true crime, part American folklore. Some baseball stories live in box scores. Others linger in hotel hallways forever.