Cubs hold MLB record for most players shot by disturbed women

 

Cubs hold MLB record for most players shot by disturbed women

Could this have happened in any other city but Chicago?

The Cubs have had 2 players (one ex) shot by young women in hotel rooms near Wrigley Field in the space of 17 years. That’s just one less than Cubs’ 3 World Series Wins.

On July 6, 1932, 21 year old Violet Popovich, a burlesque, performer, shot star Cub shortstop Billy Jurges. Popovich, apparently upset Billy was breaking up with her, barged into his Hotel Carlos room and pulled out a .25 caliber pistol. In the struggle both were wounded and wound up in Illinois Masonic Hospital…but not in the same room. Violet’s wound was superficial but Jurges was lucky to be alive. The bullet bounced off a rib, just missing his liver.

Arrested for attempted murder, Violet walked as the noble Billy refused to press charges. He claimed she was going to shoot herself in grief when he grabbed the gun from her setting off the fireworks. But a letter Violet penned shortly before implied murder-suicide.

Jurges recovered quickly, rejoining the Cubbies just 16 days later. He even got to see another shot….Babe Ruth’s ‘Called Shot’ in the ’32 World Series. He went on to a lifelong baseball career becoming in instructor and Boston Red Sox manager after his 17 year career. He died in 1997 at 88, largely unaffected by shooting 65 years earlier.

Fast forward 17 years. Former Cub star Eddie Waitkus, who’d been traded to the Phillies after the 1948 season, arrived back in Chi Town on June 14, 1949, to face his former teammates. Late that night he was given a note by the bellboy to visit the room of a woman on an “urgent matter.” Waitkus was greeted by 19 year Ruth Ann Stein Hagen, who plugged Eddie in the chest with a .22 caliber rifle. Then she called the desk clerk to report “I’ve shot a man.”

 Steinhagen was no jilted lover. She was a mentally deranged groupie, who had developed an obsession with Waitkus over the past 3 years when a Cub. She turned her room into a shrine for him with wall to wall photos and news stories, some even on the ceiling. Seeing him play frequently as a Cub appeared to keep her obsession in check. But his departure to Philly may have ignited an imaginary jilted lover syndrome like Violet’s real one.

Steinhagen was never prosecuted due to obvious mental illness. After 3 years of electroshock and hydrotherapy she was deemed cured, spending her last 60 years in obscurity in her parents’ Chicago home.

Waitkus wasn’t as lucky as Jurges. He nearly died on the operating table and missed the rest of the ’49 season. He did win the Comeback of the Year Award in ‘his stellar 1950 return, but quickly went downhill emotionally after his 1955 retirement, dying at just 53 in 1973.

The Waitkus shooting gained immortality, serving as the inspiration for Bernard Malamud’s 1952 novel ‘The Natural’ and even more so by the 1964 Robert Redford film version.

The Jurges shooting was quickly forgotten and largely ignored in any Cubs history discussion. Popovich actually exploited her notoriety, assuming the stage name Violet Lilly, ‘The girl who shot for love.’ Her new burlesque review appearing in the Loop was ‘Bare Cub Follies ‘

You cannot make that up.