1941 MVP Camilli Dead at 90

Dolph Camilli, the National League’s most valuable player while leading the Brooklyn Dodgers to the pennant in 1941, died Tuesday. He was 90.

Camilli, who recently underwent spinal surgery and suffered from pneumonia, died at Hillsdale Manor in San Mateo, Calif.

Born in San Francisco on April 23, 1907, Camilli came to the majors in 1933 with the Chicago Cubs. After a stint in Philadelphia, the hard-hitting first baseman was sold for $50,000 to the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1938.

Three seasons later, he helped Brooklyn win its first pennant in 21 years.

During that 1941 season, Camilli won the MVP award by hitting .285 while leading the league with 34 homers and 120 runs batted in.

He had a career average of .277 in 1,490 games with 239 homers and 950 RBIs. He retired in 1945.

In recent years, Camilli was active in a group of former major leaguers trying to obtain pension payments denied them because they retired before the game’s pension plan was established in 1947.

He claimed that no other professional sport treated its former players as badly as baseball.

“The owners were greedy, and they had no regard for the future of their ballplayers. We had to go out and work in the wintertime to make ends meet,” Camilli said last year. “If you had a family, it wasn’t easy to make it on the salaries they were paying us.”

Camilli earned his largest salary--$24,000--in 1941.

His son, Doug, also was a major leaguer, a catcher for the Dodgers and the Washington Senators in the 1960s.