Villanova Univeristy Athletics

Ben Geraghty played baseball and basketball at Villanova before going on to play in the major leagues and later enjoy a long career as a manager in the minor league and winter ball ranks.  He is a 1936 graduate of Villanova and was inducted to the Varsity Club Hall of Fame in 1984.
 
Geraghty played baseball for the Wildcats during the 1934 and 1935 seasons.  He batted .379 in 1935 for a team that went 9-3, and he eventually earned the attention of a scout from the Brooklyn Dodgers who would improbably make Geraghty a member of the 1936 Opening Day roster before he had even graduated from Villanova.

During his years on the baseball team, Geraghty competed with teammate Frank Skaff for the team’s starting third base job.  The two would both go on to play in the major leagues and they also eventually squared off against each other as minor league managers.  Geraghty and Skaff also were teammates on the Berwyn team in the Main Line Baseball League, a semipro league formed in 1904 which was one of the earliest such leagues in the country.
 
As a basketball player, Geraghty was a 5-11 forward and a three-year starter for the Wildcats from the 1933-34 through 1935-36 seasons.  He led the team in scoring with 114 points during the 1933-34 campaign and later went on to become team captain as a senior in 1935-36.  Villanova went 28-22 overall during his years on the team.
 
Geraghty played in 51 games for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1936, starting 36 games in the infield as a 23-year-old rookie.  He later saw action with the Boston Braves during the 1943 and 1944 seasons.  During his minor league managerial career, Geraghty was at the helm of the 1953 Jacksonville Braves squad in the South Atlantic League.  That team starred 19-year-old future major league legend Hank Aaron, who called Geraghty the greatest manager he ever played for.
 
“He was the greatest manager I ever played for, perhaps the greatest manager who ever lived,” and that includes managers in the big leagues,” Aaron said in “Hammerin Hank of the Braves” (Joel H. Cohen; New York: Scholastic Book Services, 1971, page 32).  “I’ve never played for a guy who could get more out of every ballplayer than he could.  He knew how to communicate with everybody and to treat every player as an individual.”
 
Geraghty was already viewed as managerial timber when he survived one of baseball’s most terrible accidents: the June 1946 bus crash in Washington state’s Snoqualmie Pass that killed nine of his teammates on the Spokane Indians and injured five others.  Geraghty suffered a broken kneecap in the crash and a V-shaped cut on his head that required 28 stitches.
 
Much of the information in this biography is courtesy of an article written by Rory Costello and which appears in Geraghty’s bio on the site for the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR).