Baseball player born in Waterbury, Connecticut, perhaps best remembered for suffering a nervous breakdown. His Major League career began in 1950 with the Boston Red Sox. Just 2 years into his career, he was admitted to a sanitarium and missed virtually the second half of the 1952 season. He later chronicled this period in the book Fear Strikes Out, which was made into a motion picture in 1958 starring Anthony Perkins as Piersall. In 1963, as a member of the New York Mets, he hit his 100th career home run and proceeded to run around the bases backwards, that is he ran from first to second to third to home, but with his back first.