Goodbye to Dick Groat at the age of 92.
An All-American in both baseball and basketball at Duke, Groat was the first hoopster at Duke to have his number retired and is a member of both the college baseball and basketball Hall of Fame.
Groat would play fourteen seasons in the majors, mostly with Pittsburgh, where he would win the 1960 batting title and was named the league MVP for the World Champion Pirates of that season.
Groat was named to eight All-Star teams and would win another World Series ring as the shortstop for the 1964 Cardinals, finishing his career in 1967 with the Giants with over 2,100 hits.
Groat was also the first-round pick of the then-Fort Wayne Pistons of the NBA in 1952, where he would average almost twelve points a game in his only season in the league as Branch Rickey was hired to run the Pirates organization and forbade Groat from continuing in the NBA.
Groat was recently named to the second class of inductees to the Pirates Hall of Fame, which the team started last year.
Goodbye to Mike Shannon at the age of 83.
The long-time commentator for the St.Louis Cardinals on both their radio and television networks from 1972 to 2021, Shannon spent his entire playing career with the Redbirds as well as a third baseman and outfielder.
Shannon won two World Series titles with the 1964 and 1967 Cardinals and played for the 1968 National League champion Cardinals and holds the honor of hitting the final home run in St.Louis's Sportsman's Park in 1966 and slammed the first homer in Busch Memorial Stadium in 1967.
Shannon's playing career ended prematurely at 31 when he caught nephritis, a kidney disease in 1970 after which he worked in the front office for a season before moving to the broadcast booth.
Goodbye to Bob Berry at the age of 81.
Berry served as the backup to Fran Tarkenton during both of Tarkenton's tenures with the Minnesota Vikings and like Tarkenton left Minnesota in between to be the starting quarterback elsewhere, Tarkenton with the Giants and Berry with the Atlanta Falcons.
Berry would start for the Falcons from 1968 through 1972 when Minnesota traded with Atlanta to return Berry to the Norsemen as Tarkenton's backup until Berry's retirement during training camp in 1977.
Berry made the Pro Bowl in 1969 for Atlanta when he threw ten touchdowns against two interceptions.
Goodbye to Petr Klima at the age of 58.
Klima was one of the first defectors from then-Czechoslovakia to play in the NHL and was the first Czech player to defect directly to an American-based team when he signed with the Detroit Red Wings in 1985.
Klima was only twenty when he defected, the youngest player to leave the Czech national team to move to the NHL and was known for his speed and skating ability but struggled with the Red Wings off the ice due to a serious drinking problem.
Klima scored over thirty goals three times with Detroit before being traded to Edmonton, where he would score a career-high forty goals in 1990-91 and would score his most famous goal, his game-winning goal in the third overtime of game one of the 1990 finals against Boston to end the longest game in Stanley Cup Finals history.
Goodbye to Lance Blanks at the age of 56.
After starting his college career at Virginia. Blanks transferred to Texas where along with Travis Mays and Joey Wright, and new coach Tom Penders, took the "Runnin' Horns" to the Elite Eight in 1990, where they would lose to then-fellow SWC member Arkansas for the trip to the Final Four.
Blanks was drafted by Detroit in 1990 in the first round and played for the Pistons for two seasons as a seldom-used reserve before finishing his playing career with one season in Minnesota.
Blanks would have a long career working in various NBA front office positions, such as director of scouting for San Antonio, assistant general manager for Cleveland, and general manager for the Phoenix Suns from 2010-13.
In recent years, Blanks had served as the color analyst for Texas basketball games on the Longhorn Network.
Goodbye to Havre De Grace at the age of 15.
The horse of the year for 2011, Havre De Grace won multiple stakes races in her career, including three Grade I victories, one of those wins over male horses in the Woodward Stakes.
Havre De Grave was the post-time favorite for the Breeders Cup Classic but would finish fourth to winner Drosselmeyer in what would be her final race.
Havre De Grace passed away from hemorrhaging issues after producing a colt, which has been placed on a nurse mare.
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