Cookie Lavagetto
American baseball player and coach (1912-1990)

Harry Arthur "Cookie" Lavagetto (December 1, 1912 – August 10, 1990) was an American professional baseball player, coach, and manager. He played in Major League Baseball (MLB) as a third baseman from 1934 to 1947.
Lavagetto started his major league career with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1934. After the 1936 season, he was traded to the Brooklyn Dodgers and was a National League (NL) All-Star from 1938 to 1941. He then missed four full seasons due to World War II service in the United States Navy. He returned to the Dodgers and finished his MLB career with them in 1946 and 1947.
Lavagetto is best-known for his performance in game four of the 1947 World Series, when he drove home the winning run with a double while New York Yankees pitcher Bill Bevens was one out away from throwing what would have been the first no-hitter in World Series history.
After his playing career ended, Lavagetto became a coach. He was the last manager of the American League's first Washington Senators franchise, from 1957 through 1960, and the first manager of the Minnesota Twins when the Senators relocated there for the 1961 season.
Early playing career
Lavagetto, the son of a trash hauler, was born in Oakland, California, in 1912.
Begin with the source’s own compact description: “Cookie Lavagetto” is american baseball player and coach (1912-1990). The dossier treats that line as a proposition to test through Cookie, Lavagetto and American, not as a finished interpretation.
Why this record matters
The phrase “american baseball player and coach (1912-1990)” supplies a clear boundary for inquiry. It also exposes the unanswered questions: who defined that boundary, when it became stable and which sources sit outside it.
Biographical claims are most persuasive when dates, appointments and relationships can be traced to records created close to the events described. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jul 27, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q5167082. VIAF identifies the subject as 2688154076028211860009. The Library of Congress control number is no2018138740. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1912, 1990, 1934 and 1947.
Later biographies can compress uncertainty and repeat inherited reputations, so apparently settled claims may still require comparison. The lead is largely declarative, so disagreement and counter-evidence require a deliberate search beyond the opening account. Authority statements aid reconciliation but still require their own references, qualifiers and ranks to be checked.
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Three-step research path
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This entry incorporates text from “Cookie Lavagetto” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.