Tragic Comedy of Baseball Sent Beradino Into Acting : Drama: A veteran of “General Hospital” looks back somewhat fondly on his diamond days.

The St. Louis Browns lost 111 games in 1939 and 102 in 1951. In 1952, the Pittsburgh Pirates lost 112.

Johnny Beradino played for all three of those miserable teams.

“Some of the worst teams there ever were,” Beradino said at lunch recently, chuckling at the thought. “And the cheapest.”

After the Pirates had finished 54 1/2 games behind the National League champion Brooklyn Dodgers, Beradino retired from baseball, returned to California and took up acting full time. Casting calls seemed more palatable than another season of playing utility infield in Pittsburgh.

Besides, Beradino was almost 36. His back had never healed after he had fallen off a Navy Jeep at Pearl Harbor and, truth be known, he had been acting longer than he had been playing ball. He was in a few “Our Gang” comedies as a youth.

Beradino suspected that wages for acting couldn’t be more paltry than what the doormats of baseball were paying him.

How cheap were they? Well, Beradino was an infielder for the Browns from 1939 to 1947, with more than three years out for military service in World War II, and the least he expected in 1944, when the Browns won their only pennant, was a token partial share from the World Series. During the war, it was a common practice for World Series teams to reward their absent service personnel.

Not long after the Browns were beaten by their intracity rivals, the Cardinals, in a six-game Series, a small package arrived for Beradino at Pearl Harbor. Inside was a deck of playing cards with the Browns’ logo.

“That was it,” Beradino said. “My Series bonus.”

The Browns paid their batboy, Bobby Scanlon, $500.

Beradino made his own good deal, though, after the 1947 season. The Browns had traded him to the Washington Senators for second baseman Gerry Priddy. Beradino told the Senators he wasn’t going to report because he was quitting to become an actor. A few days later, Bill Veeck, who owned the Cleveland Indians and needed a spare infielder, tried to talk Beradino out of retirement.

Veeck, who later became one of Beradino’s best baseball friends, agreed to double his salary and pay the premiums on a $1-million insurance policy in case a bad hop messed up Beradino’s face.

Beradino wanted a little more.

“For every 100,000 fans over 2 million, give me a $1,000 bonus,” he said.

“Johnny, that’s crazy,” Veeck said. “We’ll never draw 2 million.”

They struck the deal, though, and Veeck bought Beradino from the cash-strapped Browns for $65,000. Then the Indians, after a three-way pennant battle with the Red Sox and the Yankees, beat Boston in a playoff game and also won the World Series, drawing 2.6 million. Beradino’s bonus was $6,000.

He needed all of it. Waiting for Hollywood to call, Beradino hocked his Series ring and his golf clubs to ease a cash crisis. In downtown Los Angeles, a pawnbroker noted that Beradino’s name was engraved on the ring.

“Normally, I’d give $60 for a ring of this type,” he told Beradino. “But I think you’ll be back to get this. Make it $80.”

Beradino now wears the ring on his right pinky.

In 1964, he auditioned for the part of an internist in a new afternoon soap opera on television.

“If I get it, I don’t like the idea of being tied up,” he said to his agent.

“Don’t worry about that,” the agent said. “Do the pilot, and take the money and run.”

Afterward, Beradino realized that he had signed a five-year contract. The pilot had legs, though, and the 76-year-old Beradino is now in his 31st year on “General Hospital.” He has dropped the second R from his real name, Berardino, and his character, Dr. Steve Hardy, is now the chief of staff.

In the days when the show was done live, Beradino once asked if his friend, Yogi Berra, could do a cameo.

“We’ll use him, but not in a speaking part,” Beradino was told.

A few weeks later, the squat Berra waddled past the cameras. He might have been dressed in white, but he was still Yogi Berra.

“Who’s that?” said an actress playing a nurse.

“That’s Dr. Berra, the new staff psychiatrist,” the other nurse said.

When Beradino worked both sides of the street, prejudice was a two-edged sword. In a time when anything longer than a brush cut was considered radical, his hair showed slightly under his baseball cap. The bench jockeys were merciless.

In Hollywood, directors looked askance at Beradino, a boy of summer, a thespian wanna-be.

“They frowned on athletes acting,” Beradino said. “They never took an athlete seriously. They thought we were inept, that we couldn’t have any creative talents in us.”

That was quite an act those Browns put on in ‘39, imitating a ballclub while losing 111 times and finishing 64 1/2 games behind the Yankees. Beradino, whose lifetime average was .249, batted .256 in his first season, driving in 58 runs.

There was a strict major league rule against fraternization then, but the Yankees liked Beradino, and when they went to St. Louis for a series, the rookie was invited to the Chase Hotel for a long-running party the night before the first game. Lefty Gomez was one of the ringleaders.

Arriving at the suite, Beradino was greeted by a washtub of iced beer in the middle of the room, and a well stocked liquor bar on the side.

“The party went on forever,” Beradino said. “After a while, I thought to myself that no matter what my teammates were doing that night, they couldn’t be in as much trouble as the Yankees were. The series opener was the next afternoon, and I said to myself that now we’d probably beat these guys.

“I was a rookie, what did I know? The score was something like 14-2, Yankees. And that’s the way it went all year long.”

Beradino drove in 85 runs in 1940, and the next season, as a third-year man playing shortstop, he seemed on the verge of a breakthrough, batting .271 with 89 RBIs. In 469 trips to the plate, he struck out only 27 times.

But 1942 was mostly lost to the service and he missed the next three seasons, too.

“I hurt my back bad in that Jeep accident,” he said. “They had me in a plaster cast for eight weeks. It itched like crazy. I cut the damn thing off finally. When I went for my discharge a little later, nobody noticed. Nobody asked me what had happened to the cast.”

Beradino never played regularly after the war. By 1951, Veeck owned the Browns and he and Beradino had a reunion in St. Louis, Beradino joining the club as a player-coach.

“I did it as a favor,” Beradino said. “It saved Bill a salary.”

Beradino was on the bench, watching, that Aug. 19, when Eddie Gaedel, wearing uniform No. 1/8 and standing 3 feet 7, walked as a pinch-hitter against the Detroit Tigers. The American League in effect threw Veeck’s one-shot midget out of baseball the next day.

“Hardly anybody knew what was up,” Beradino said. “We couldn’t figure out what was happening when they brought that little guy out of the clubhouse to start the game.”

There was a big crowd that day, a notable exception that season.

“I couldn’t get over the Dodgers drawing 80,000 (a game) when they first moved to L.A. and played in the Coliseum,” Beradino said. “I thought back that we didn’t draw much more than that all year in ’51.”

Youngsters in St. Louis at the time all knew how easy it was to sneak into the empty box seats from the bleachers.

“Sure,” Beradino said, “Veeck couldn’t afford too many ushers.”

Some good fairies in Baltimore waved their magic wands over the Browns in 1954, turning them into the Orioles, and a franchise that never paid an annual salary higher than $25,000 was no more.