Meet Jerry
Jerry Grillo has been making stories since he learned that crayons, though they look delicious, were best used for writing and drawing. A cartoonist in college, he shifted gears when drawing proved too difficult and became a sports writer. For almost 30 years he worked as a staff editor, writer (occasional photographer and designer) for newspapers and magazines in New York, Pennsylvania, Illinois, South Carolina, and Georgia, where he learned to write about himself in the third person. He left that scene to join the mad scientist beat at Georgia Tech. He also writes on a variety of topics for a variety of publications as a freelancer.
The Music and Mythocracy of Col. Bruce Hampton is his first book. Col. Bruce was often called the godfather of the jam band scene. The truth is, he was one of the most influential performing artists in Southern alternative music, a master builder of great bands and a facilitator of genius who surrounded himself with free-range talent and let it run slightly wild. Bruce created a controlled sonic frenzy that resulted in some of the best music ever played in America. He was an icon of the Atlanta music world and a mentor for many artists.
Jerry has just completed his second book, a biography titled, Big Cat: The Life of Baseball Hall of Famer Johnny Mize. While the title should be self-explanatory, this book will include stories that haven’t been told before. It is the only complete biography of the quiet giant of the Northeast Georgia mountains, a complex character who came from humble beginnings to become one of the best hitters in the history of baseball. Stay tuned for Big Cat, coming in Spring 2024 from University of Nebraska Press.
About the Book
Johnny Mize was one of the greatest hitters in baseball’s golden age of great hitters. Born and raised in tiny Demorest, Georgia, in the northeast Georgia mountains, Mize emerged from the heart of Dixie as a Bunyonesque slugger, a quiet but sharp-witted man from a broken home who became a professional player at seventeen, embarking on an extended tour of the expansive St. Louis Cardinals Minor League system.
Mize then spent fifteen seasons terrorizing Major League pitchers as a member of those Cardinals, the New York Giants of Mel Ott and Leo Durocher, and finally with the New York Yankees, who won a record five straight World Series with Mize as their ace in the hole—the best pinch hitter in the American League. Few hitters have combined such meticulous bat control with brute power the way Mize did. Mize was a line-drive hitter who rarely struck out and also hit for distance, to all fields, and usually for a high average. Nicknamed the Big Cat, “nobody had a better, smoother, easier swing than John,” said Cardinals teammate Don Gutteridge. “It was picture perfect.”
Tabbed as a can’t-miss Hall of Famer, then all but forgotten, Mize spent twenty-eight years waiting for the call from Cooperstown before he was finally inducted in 1981, delighting fans with his straightforward commentary and sly sense of humor during a memorable induction speech.
From the backroads of the Minor Leagues to the sunny Caribbean, where he played alongside the best Black and Latin players as a twenty-one-year-old, and to the Major Leagues, where he became a ten-time All-Star, home run champion, and World Series hero, Mize forged a memorable trail along baseball’s landscape. This is the first complete biography of the Big Cat.
