A salute for player from yesteryear

If you're not a cult baseball fan or from the Worcester area, you've probably never heard of Jack Barry.

Retired banker Tom Rooney of Shrewsbury wants to change that.

Barry, a former Shrewsbury resident, will be inducted this summer into the College Baseball Hall of Fame in Lubbock, Texas. The news brought hoots of joy from Barry's most ardent fans, who have struggled for years to get him the recognition they think he deserves.

"Everybody knows him," Rooney said. "Everybody says, 'That's Jack Barry's house' when they go by it."

Well, maybe not everybody. The legend has faded despite grand efforts on the part of Rooney and his friends to keep Barry's legacy alive. About three years ago, town officials declined to erect a bronze plaque that Rooney had made in Barry's honor. The woman who bought Barry's former house in Shrewsbury didn't want it, either.

So, who was Barry? He played for the Red Sox nearly 90 years ago, became a longtime coach at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, and died in 1961. But he is best known as a member of the "$100,000 infield" of the Philadelphia Athletics. Barry was the starting shortstop, playing alongside Stuffy McInnis, Eddie Collins, and Frank Baker. It was said that Connie Mack so valued the crew that he wouldn't take even $100,000 to part with them all.

Barry was later sold to the Red Sox in 1915, and played second base for the next four years, until he retired with a lifetime batting average of.243.

After he retired from professional baseball, Barry returned to Massachusetts and coached at Holy Cross for the next several decades. A local celebrity, he hired a contractor to build the house in Shrewsbury. It still stands on Maple Avenue, one of the town's busiest roads. It's a plain stucco home, with one distinguishing feature -- the crossed baseball bats carved into its green shutters.

Rooney and a few friends pushed to have the town memorialize Barry, spending $1,000 to have the plaque crafted in his honor. The group asked the selectmen to put it on open space owned by the town across from Barry's former home. They declined.

The board's chairman, John LeBeaux, said such honors are reserved strictly for veterans.

"Over time, people tend to forget," he said of local celebrities. "Many of our roads are named after people no longer with us and the name on the sign doesn't mean anything."

LeBeaux, who said he is a baseball fan and familiar with Barry, said that other noted people with Shrewsbury connections have yet to be memorialized. There's no plaque for Dr. Min Chueh Chang, who helped invent the birth-control pill; nor is there a memorial for 1939 Red Sox player Eldon Auker, who became a business executive at Bay State Abrasives in Westborough.

And how might the town commemorate the accomplishments of University of Massachusetts Medical School researcher Craig Mello, a Shrewsbury resident who won the Nobel Prize in medicine last year? At least for now, he is the town's most famous resident.

When the selectmen refused to grant Rooney's request, he approached the owner of Barry's former home. Lorraine Covino and her husband, a physician, had bought it in 1972 from Barry's widow.

Covino said Barry's name does not come up often. Sometimes plumbers and electrical contractors who go to her home to do work know it was Barry's home and ask to be shown around. (Some even want to see the upstairs.) But that's about all the attention it gets nowadays, she said.

Of her decision to decline putting up Rooney's plaque, she said this week, "I really didn't want it. I just didn't think it was appropriate."

Rooney persisted in his campaign, though, and eventually persuaded the daughters of the late Anthony "Spag" Borgatti (the local retail legend) to erect a memorial near the Route 9 store. The dedication ceremony took place in 2003. The event drew a crowd of about 75 people, including town officials, members of the Holy Cross athletic department, and former Holy Cross athletic director Ronnie Perry. Even Covino went (her husband, now deceased, was a Holy Cross alumnus and Barry fan.)

The plaque is still there, outside the now-defunct Spag's Schoolhouse store. It's not a high-traffic area, but Rooney said he is pleased to see Barry get the recognition he deserves.

"I thought it was a nice thing to do," he said. "It's quite an honor to have a former Boston Red Sox player live here and coach Holy Cross for so many years."

Megan Woolhouse can be reached at mwoolhouse@globe.com.