John Danicki – (2002)

Life in the 1930’s and 1940’s was exciting, and hard, for folks who grew up in Lorain, many of them foreign-born. That was the way it was for young John Danicki, perhaps one of the finest righthanded pitchers from that era on the Steel City’s amateur baseball sandlots.

Danicki left Lorain High School early to take on jobs for as little as 25 cents an hour to help his parents put food on the table. Work was scarce as the country worked its way out of the infamous Depression years. So Danicki did what many of his buddies did. They played baseball.

Tonight, his outstanding baseball career impressed his peers and those who followed him enough to select Danicki for enshrinement into the Lorain Sports Hall of Fame. He joins his younger brother, Alfred (Fritz) Danicki, a powerhouse softball pitcher in Lorain and throughout Ohio, who was inducted into the LSHOF in 1986.

John, “known as Lardy,” was such a dominant pitcher in the 1930’s, many batters who faced him were odds-on candidates for becoming strikeout victims. While records are not as readily available from those years, his teammates, and especially one of his managers, Ed Molnar, a LSHOF committee member for the past 20 years and a 1983 enshrinee, still remember Danicki as the key player on championship teams of that era. Danicki played on at least three Lorain Class A championship teams—Lyon Tailors, Duskey Brothers and the Lorain Pulaski’s who also played in the “AA” Greater Cleveland Traveling League—from 1934 to 1940.

Danicki achieved a special niche in Lorain sandlot baseball history in 1938 pitching for City Class A League champion Lyon Tailors. In the title game against IWO played at City Field, he logged a league record 17 strikeouts to lead the Lyon nine to a 9-3 victory. That Lyon team was the first and only team in the senior circuit to go through the season undefeated.

Following an interruption by World War II when he served in the U.S. Army, Danicki returned to Lorain, worked at National Tube Co. as a crane operator in No. 3 Seamless Mill, and, of course, returned to baseball. Molnar was his manager with the Chicks Dairy team. John also was an excellent golfer and bowler. Danicki, who died in August 2001, and his wife, Mary (Waldecki), who died in 1994, had three children: Sue Bennett, of Westlake, the late Joan Hanna, and John T. Danicki, of Chilicothe.