Hall of Fame
The way Steve Senko recalls it, they were in some parking lot bracketed by the edge of the beautiful Passaic River and the exhaust fumes of beautiful McCarter Highway (which is to say they were in the heart of the old Rutgers-Newark campus) and they were preparing to leave for a baseball game when they looked around and the world seemed to stop.
“Where’s Egnatuk?” he began to scream with all the subtlety of a wounded water buffalo. “Dammit, where the hell is he?” Reminded by one of his players that this was Rutgers-Newark and a bad traffic light could keep half the student body from crossing Broad Street on time for class much less insure prompt departure for a game, Senko explained his panic:
“Nobody goes nowhere without Egnatuk. Without our catcher, we got nothing.”
Which may be as good a way as any to explain why he is headed for Rutgers-Newark Athletic Hall of Fame today. The book says that he was the starting catcher here from 1953-56 but what it doesn’t say is that he is probably the best catcher ever to play at this school. The face that he finished with a career average of .300 is impressive in its own right but even more significant, he averaged at least one RBI in every game in which he played.
Against Upsala he dominated a doubleheader as no Rutgers-Newark baseball player has before or since, collecting eight – count ‘em, eight – hits, including two doubles and a triple. Today he is vice president of finance for Goodall Rubber Co., and lives with his wife, Jane and two sons in Union, New Jersey.
