MLB MVP & World Series Champ Dick Groat was the First Duke Basketball Star
Before he was the 1960 National League Most Valuable Player, Dick Groat may have been Duke basketball's first superstar.
Before Cooper Flagg, before JJ Redick, before Jay Williams and Shane Battier, and Grant Hill and Christian Laettner; the original point-guard sensation predating Johnny Dawkins and Bobby Hurley; and a multiple-time All-American before Art Heyman, Dick Groat shined as Duke basketball’s first superstar.
The late Dick Groat is perhaps most recognized as a star of the 1950s and early ‘60s Pittsburgh Pirates. Groat is an eight-time All-Star, two-time World Series champion, winner of a batting title and a National League Most Valuable Player, and he retired with 2,138 hits on a career .286 batting average.
Two years of military service following his 1952 rookie campaign may have impacted Groat’s overall numbers, most notably his hit total. He connected for 109 knocks his first season, then returned in 1955 to hit 139, 142 in ‘56, 158 in ‘57 and 175 in ‘75. A similar upward trajectory beginning two years earlier may have pushed Groat’s career hits closer to 2,500.
While not the Golden Ticket to Cooperstown that 3,000 hits adds up to, the group of big leaguers to rack up at least 2,500 and not reach the Hall of Fame is minuscule — and mostly a reflection of those players’ conduct rather than their play.
It’s also a club with a number of former MVPs not in the Hall, a dubious club to which Dick Groat belongs. In 1960, Groat claimed the prestigious individual honor for the National League along with his batting title, all in a season culminating with the Pirates beating the New York Yankees in seven games in the World Series.
The championship was Pittsburgh’s first since Hall of Famer Kiki Cuyler led the 1925 Pirates to the crown. Both the ‘25 and ‘60 Fall Classics went to seven games and produced some of the Series’ most significant moments: The 1925 Pirates rallied from a 3-1 deficit to topple the Washington Senators, overcoming a 6-3 deficit and legendary pitcher Walter Johnson in Game 7; while the ‘60 Pirates won on Bill Mazeroski’s walk-off home run.
The 10-time All-Star and eight-time Gold Glove-winning Mazeroski earned a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame by way of the Veterans Committee in 2001. And while Maz is most synonymous with that World Series championship, Dick Groat was the star of the 1960 Pirates as evidenced in his MVP selection.
Groat nearly won a second MVP in 1963 as a member of the St. Louis Cardinals, batting .319 — the second-best average of his career behind his NL-leading .325 in 1960 — driving in a career-high 73 runs, and leading the league in doubles with 43. Applying more modern metrics, his .827 OPS in ‘63 was another career-high. Groat finished second to Hall of Fame pitcher and all-around legend Sandy Koufax in MVP balloting that year.
In 1964, Groat was chosen for the last of his eight All-Star appearances and contributed to his second World Series championship with a .292 batting average and 70 runs driven in.
When Groat came up for enshrinement into the Baseball Hall of Fame during the latter half of the 1970s, he fell woefully short of inclusion in Cooperstown. He never garnered even two percent of the ballot.
Perhaps with the benefit of more sophisticated statistical analysis, Hall of Fame voters in the 1970s may have held Groat’s defensive prowess in higher esteem. As of 2025, he ranks No. 82 all-time in career defensive WAR at 17.3.
For some context, that’s only 0.9 behind Willie Mays, rightfully considered the greatest defensive center fielder of all-time.
However, Groat’s career defensive WAR isn’t quite on the same tier as Hall of Fame shortstops Ozzie Smith, Cal Ripken Jr., Pee Wee Reese or (if you want to go WAY back into the Dead-Ball Era) Rabbit Maranville. And while Groat’s defense was better than that of Hall of Famers Ernie Banks (5.1), Robin Yount (6.8) and exponentially better than Derek Jeter, who doesn’t crack the top 1,000 of MLBers in defensive WAR, all three called it a career with more impressive offensive numbers.
His Baseball Hall of Fame candidacy is reflective the concept that it’s better to be excellent at one facet of the game then to simply be good at several.
But while Dick Groat isn’t immortalized in Cooperstown, he does have a place in Kansas City at the National Collegiate Basketball Hall of Fame. That puts him in a class by himself among former big leaguers — including some of the best who ever played in MLB — as well as occupying a unique place in the illustrious history of Duke basketball.
Here at Press Break in 2025, you have perhaps noticed that I’ve had an itch to dig deeper into multiple-sport stars of yesteryear. Major League Baseball has had plenty of players, including some of the most celebrated talents ever to take the professional diamond, star in another sport while in college.
Some of these are well-known, like 1988 World Series hero Kirk Gibson’s College Football Hall of Fame-earning career at Michigan State.
After leading Washington State to a rare NCAA Tournament in 1994, Mark Hendricks joined the elite fraternity of two-sport pros with a stint in the NBA and a remarkable, 10-year career in MLB.
Meanwhile, Baseball Hall of Famers Dave Winfield, Tony Gwynn and Bob Gibson all stood out on the college hardwood — Winfield at Minnesota, where he became a two-time pro basketball draftee; Gwynn at San Diego State before his NBA selection to the San Diego Clippers; and Gibson, averaging 20-plus points per game twice for Creighton before a stint with the Harlem Globetrotters1.
Groat’s noteworthy in that he both went onto an impactful MLB career after his college basketball days, and was among the first of the 14 all-time big leaguers to also play in the NBA. He put solid numbers in his one season with the Pistons (then still in Fort Wayne, Indiana), averaging 11.9 points in 26 games. Only All-Star big man Larry Foust averaged more at 14.7.
Groat spent only that portion of the 1952-53 season in the fledgling NBA before his enlistment. Had he returned to the hardwood in 1955, it’s worth pondering if he could have developed into a star proto-combo guard in the vein of Groat’s contemporary and Boston Celtics legend Bill Sharman.
After all, the two posted similar scoring averages upon breaking into the NBA, with Sharman posting 12.1 points per game as a rookie with the Washington Capitols and 10.7 points per game the next year in Boston.
Both Sharman and Groat starred in college, garnering All-American honors. Whereas Sharman was named a consensus All-American in only his senior season at USC, however, Dick Groat was twice named an All-American at Duke.
Only 11 players ever in Blue Devils history landed consensus All-American distinction twice, and it’s a who’s who of college basketball lore:
Art Heyman, 1962 and 1963
Bob Verga, 1966 and 1967
Mike Gminski, 1979 and 1980
Johnny Dawkins, 1985 and 1986
Danny Ferry, 1988 and 1989
Christian Laettner, 1991 and 1992
Grant Hill, 1993 and 1994
Shane Battier, 2000 and 2001
Jay Williams, 2001 and 2002
JJ Redick, 2005 and 2006
Groat was the first, landing All-American honors in 1951 and 1952. He’s also the first of Duke’s National Player of the Year recipient, a list that grew to 13 this year with Cooper Flagg’s addition. Groat earned the Helms and UPI versions of the award in a 1951-52 class that also included two of the absolute best college basketball players of the era, Kansas center Clyde Lovellette and Kentucky scoring machine Cliff Hagan.
Now, any time one touts the greatness of players from the past, they tread onto potentially dangerous territory. Mentioning the excellence of early basketball pioneers like Bob Cousy sends modern-day commentators into obscenity-laden tirades. Hell, even Michael Jordan’s accomplishments are not-infrequently met with a dismissive suggestion that he played against plumbers.
There are valid criticisms of past stars, most notably segregation. While Dick Groat played in Major League Baseball after Jackie Robinson’s debut, college basketball remained under the poisonous cloud of Jim Crow-fueled segregation.
Other criticisms of previous generations are not so valid, often that a star in the ‘50s, ‘60s, etc. would not match up with even a pedestrian player today. I’ve always found that to be an incredibly shortsighted, if not outright stupid position from which to denigrate an athlete’s accomplishments. We can only judge a players’ greatness within the context of their time.
So, to that end, we have to rely on the evaluations of their contemporaries. And Dick Groat’s basketball contemporaries could not heap enough praise on the Duke Blue Devils guard.
Echoes of this celebration for Groat’s hardwood exploits resonated more than a half-century later, when he became Duke’s first-ever player induction into the College Basketball Hall of Fame.
Yes, Press Break will indeed look at Bob Gibson’s Globetrotters tenure in the near future.