Author’s Flashback — Nick Testa: Portrait of a Baseball Success

By Stephen Hanks,
Published on March 29, 1987 in New York Daily News Sunday Magazine

NICK TESTA PLAYED IN HIS ONE CAREER MAJOR LEAGUE GAME FOR THE SAN FRANCISCO GIANTS IN 1958. HE NEVER HAD AN AT-BAT IN THE MAJORS.

Author’s Note: Additional text added that had been edited out of the original manuscript for space considerations.

Nick Testa is a baseball immortal? Never heard of him? Well, his name is etched firmly in the Bible of the National Pastime — MacMillan’s Baseball Encyclopedia — with the Ruths and the Aarons and the Berras and the Seavers, which only means that he will live forever.

Testa’s stats are listed between those of second baseman Al Tesch, who played eight games for the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1915, and Dick Tettelbach, an outfielder for 29 games with the New York Yankees and Washington Senators from 1965–67. In April 1958, Nick Testa, then a 30-year-old journeyman catcher, played his first and last major league game for the San Francisco Giants. Career line in the Baseball Encyclopedia? Games Played: 1. Everything Else: 0.

Nick Testa began his professional baseball career in 1946 at the age of 17 with the Class D Newburgh (New York) Hummingbirds. As a 5-foot-8-inch right-handed hitter, he was one inch taller than another Italian catcher named Yogi Berra. After playing in eight different minor league cities over the next 11 years (batting over .300 just once), Nick made his major league debut as a pinch runner in the bottom of the eighth inning of a game in which the Giants were behind 6–2 to the St. Louis Cardinals. San Francisco made it 6–4 that inning and Testa stayed in the game behind the plate. In the top of the ninth, he was charged with an error when he muffed a wind-blown popup and the Cardinals were now up by two runs. In the bottom of the ninth, the Giants rallied to tie the game and Nick was two batters away from his first major league at-bat when Darryl Spencer’s two-run homer sealed the victory.

The next day, Giants manager Bill Rigney told Testa he was being cut but Nick agreed to stay with the big club the rest of the season as a bullpen coach. The next season, he was back in the minor leagues. For good.

In 1960, SPORT Magazine profiled Testa in a feature called “Portrait of a Baseball Failure.” It was a story about a career minor-leaguer; a short Italian kid from…