James Dean could play baseball. As a behind-the-scenes TV-show stuntman, he was considered the best-coordinated and conditioned individual the producers ever encountered.

Their fans were accustomed to losing, and the 1952 Pittsburgh Pirates didn’t disappoint: They had one of the worst seasons in Major League Baseball history. The Buccaneers finished with 42 wins and 112 losses—an execrable 54.5 games behind the National League Pennant-winning Brooklyn Dodgers.

From the same general era and in this downtrodden spirit, longshoreman Timothy J. Dugan would part with his coat in On the Waterfront: “Mine’s more full of holes than the Pittsburgh infield.” Even Hollywood knew how bad the Pirates were.

Hall of Famer Ralph Kiner, about whom we’ve written in this blog, skidded to a still-most-impressive total of 37 home runs for Pittsburgh. When he asked for a raise, management is purported to have responded with this wheeze: “Ralph, we could finish in last place just as well without you.” In fact, Kiner would be traded to the Chicago Cubs in 1953.

About the only spot of light on the 1952 Pirates was Joe Garagiola. Better known for his colorful announcing and television work in the 1960s and 1970s, Garagiola batted a respectable .273 and played 105 games at backstop. It was his best season.

Garagiola’s backstop backup was Clyde McCullough. Like Kiner, McCullough would find himself with the Cubs in 1953. Altogether, McCullough had a fifteen-season career, catching all but four of his 1,098 games when not inserted as a pinch runner or pinch hitter. He was a solid if unspectacular ballplayer.

According to James Dean’s biographer David Dalton, between the disastrous finish of 1952 and Cactus League 1953 (the Cubs would have just relocated training to Mesa, Arizona) McCullough was tooling down a highway—either in New Jersey or Pennsylvania, in a Nash Rambler—when three bohemian hitchhikers caught his attention. Improbably, one would catapult to legend fewer than three years later.

Jimmy was discouraged by two things that fall of 1952: no roles outside of commercials and the turn-down of his marriage proposal to modern-dancer Liz “Dizzy” Sheridan—who would attain some fame forty years later as Jerry Seinfeld’s TV-mom. The third hitchhiker was a budding screenwriter and Dean’s best friend, Bill Bast, who narrates the story that Dalton picked up.

At Dean’s instigation, the three struggling and half-starving showbiz-bitten youths were returning to his hometown, Fairmount, Indiana, and his immediate-adoptive family, the Winslows (along with other relatives), for home cookin’…seasoned with Hoosier-commonsense.

As far as McCullough transported his motley crew, Bast sat next to McCullough. Dean and Sheridan—sans engagement-ring—cuddled in the backseat. Regarding the arts, McCullough displayed a welcome-sensitivity toward his passengers. It’s reported he offered money, which was declined.

So this story ends. There’s no additional record of this encounter between a largely forgotten major-leaguer and a mercurial, soon-to-be-silver-screen superstar.

One could only imagine.

(Postscript: James Dean’s first supporting-stage role, in See the Jaguar, was announced via a long-distance, person-to-person call or telegram to the Winslows’ farm. Dean was summoned to tread the boards on Broadway. An ill-rated play it would be, even if Dean’s notices were encouraging. Regardless, the three tyros would return to New York—likely not hitchhiking this time in the Heartland, for pick-up by, say, Ralph Kiner chasing dreams of his own, in that famous home-run hitters’ Cadillac of his.)