Hilly Flitcraft

Hildreth Milton Flitcraft

• Bats Left, Throws Left
• Height 6' 2", Weight 180 lb.
• School Rutgers University
• High School Woodstown High School
• Debut August 31, 1942
• Final Game September 17, 1942
• Born August 21, 1923 in Woodstown, NJ USA
• Died April 2, 2003 in Boulder, CO USA

BR page

Biographical Information

Hilly Flitcraft attended Rutgers University in 1942, where one of his roommates remembered him as a "good Quaker from Jersey". Later that year, he pitched 3 games in the majors for the Philadelphia Phillies just after he turned 19. He was not in professional baseball in 1943 and 1944, as he would have been eligible for the draft, but coming from a Quaker family morally opposed to war, he got to serve on the family dairy farm instead, since it was considered part of a vital industry.

Flitcraft was roughly half the age of 36-year-old teammate Lloyd Waner while with the Phillies.

His service requirement complete, Flitcraft went 15-4 for the Wilmington Blue Rocks of the Inter-State League in 1945. A source refers to him as a pitcher and outfielder while in the minors, leaving unclear if he did both in the same season. He retired after 1945, but came back with the Carbondale Pioneers in 1946 and then with a team in Portsmouth in 1947 as a position player. With Carbondale his pitching record was 10-5 and his batting average was .333.

After baseball he ran an insurance agency with his wife. He was sometimes known as "Hill".

Flitcraft bears the same unusual name as the character in the famous "Flitcraft parable", a story-within-a-story from Dashiell Hammett's Maltese Falcon. Flitcraft came to the majors in 1942, one year after the Maltese Falcon became a movie.

Related Sites

• Hilly Flitcraft at the SABR Bio Project
• BR Minors page