Also, if you’re liking what you read here, I’ll make you a deal as further thanks. For the rest of June, if you upgrade to a paid annual subscription it’s half-off the usual price for the first year. Usually that’s $60, but we’ll make that $30 if you sign up between now and June 30. Here’s the link to do that:

Thank You Special - 50% Off

Thanks again everyone!

When I was a kid, I was convinced that Dave Cash was just about the coolest player in baseball.

I’m not sure why, exactly, because he didn’t play for my team and wasn’t in the same league, either, so I never got to see him play very much. But I always thought he looked cool on his baseball cards, and he had that awesome name, Dave Cash, and smiled a lot, and wore his hat just so. All of that led me to conclude that he just exuded an aura of coolness, and if I’d been lucky enough to have a Dave Cash signature model Wilson glove as a kid, I’d have been pretty proud of it.

It wasn’t until much later that I learned of Cash’s start with the Pirates, the history he and that team made in the early 1970s, and the central role he played in shifting the balance of power in the National League East across the state of Pennsylvania from Pittsburgh to Philadelphia. He then further contributed to the rise of another NL East team, the Expos, and ended his career as Ozzie Smith’s favorite double play partner in San Diego. It was quite a ride when all was said and done.

And the most consistent part of it, besides his winning attitude, was his glove.

Thank You Special - 50% Off

Cash was born in Utica, New York, and ended up spending nearly all of his big league career playing in the cold weather of the northeast. Drafted by the Pirates out of high school in 1966, he joined a burgeoning juggernaut, one that was built largely upon Black ballplayers.

That wasn’t always easy, like when Cash was assigned to Pittsburgh’s rookie team in Salem, Virginia. He and teammate Gene Clines regularly found themselves having to enter restaurants and hotels through the back door to comply with Jim Crow laws, or find alternate places to eat or stay altogether. Even so, Cash quickly established himself as a top prospect, particularly when he batted .335 and led the Western Carolina League in hits in 1967 when he was only 19. By 1969 he was in Triple-A and got called up to the Pirates in September.

The problem Cash faced at that point was twofold. First, as a member of the Army Reserve, he faced several years of interruptions as he was called away to to serve on weekends or during the summer, causing him to miss significant time during the Pirates’ seasons. The other problem was that he was battling not only a deep roster of prospects in Pittsburgh’s system, but one of the team’s legends as well.

Bill Mazeroski remained a fan favorite in Pittsburgh and was still an outstanding defensive second baseman when Cash arrived in the big leagues. Taking his place was always going to be hard, but it was made more difficult by a large group of middle infielders all battling for playing time. That included veteran Gene Alley , who was moved off shortstop in favor of Freddie Patek, and Rennie Stennett, who blew through three minor league seasons with successively better batting averages of .288, .327, and .344, which increased as he rose to face better competition.

It made for a tough set of circumstances for Cash, who found himself on the bench or back in Triple-A for most of 1970 despite batting .314 in the limited playing time he got with the Pirates. In 1971 he took over as the main second baseman, helping the team to their first World Series title since 1960, but both Mazeroski and Stennett still got significant playing time that season, forcing Cash to third base for two dozen games. Moving him to third in one of those games allowed the Pirates to field the first all-Black lineup in major league history on September 1 that year.

Still, the playing time situation got even worse in 1972 and 1973, as his Army Reserve commitment really kicked in and Stennett’s play demanded more time on the field. Cash was limited to less than 500 plate appearances in each of those seasons, and his offense suffered a bit as a result. He had a combined OPS+ of 93 in those two years, down from 103 in his first three big league seasons, but he didn’t let that impact his defense. He’d learned well from Mazeroski, an 8-time Gold Glove winner who had been very generous in helping Cash improve. In 1972 Cash led the league in range and fielding runs but was robbed of a Gold Glove when it went to Félix Millán of the Braves. He again demonstrated above average range in 1973, but missed nearly 50 games due to his Army service and the emergence of Stennett.

The situation clearly needed a resolution, and Pittsburgh decided to handle it by trading cash to the Phillies for Ken Brett on October 18, 1973. It wasn’t a terrible deal for the Pirates because it allowed Stennett to play every day and Brett made the All-Star team for them in 1974, but it turned out to be a fantastic trade for Philadelphia.

For several years the Phillies had been surviving with Denny Doyle as their second baseman and a rotating cast of characters at first base. That right side of the infield contrasted sharply with the defensive brilliance of third baseman Mike Schmidt and shortstop Larry Bowa on the left side, so acquiring Cash went far in stabilizing their infield defense. It also coincided with the end of his Army commitment, allowing Cash to miss only two total games in the next three seasons combined.

His offense blossomed with the regular play. Cash batted .300 and made his first All-Star team in 1974, as he set new career highs with 206 hits, 26 doubles, 11 triples, 58 RBI, and 20 steals. He also played exceptional defense, as usual, leading the league in assists and fielding runs and combining with Bowa to form a league-leading double play combination. Again he lost the Gold Glove, this time to Joe Morgan.

More important than his play on the field was Cash’s leadership in the Phillies’ clubhouse. He brought an upbeat attitude to the ballpark every day, and instilled a sense of confidence that the young team was on the brink of being able to unseat the powerhouse Pirates for the division. They took a huge step toward that in 1975, posting their first winning record in eight years and finishing second to Pittsburgh. Cash stepped up his offense yet again, leading the league with 213 hits and setting new career highs with a .305 batting average, 111 runs scored, and 40 doubles on his way to another All-Star selection.

It was 1976 when the Phillies finally broke through. Cash established the team slogan, “Yes We Can,” in their quest to unseat his former team at the top of the division, and remained an All-Star on the field as well, leading the league in triples and pacing all second basemen in double plays turned for the third straight season while also leading the league in fielding percentage. Philadelphia won the division, the first of four title in five years, and Cash batted .308 in the NLCS against the Reds.

Unfortunately, it couldn’t last. Cash was part of the first-ever free agent class after the 1976 season, as the Phillies had not yet grasped the new economics in baseball. While they limited themselves to signing less expensive players like Richie Hebner and Davey Johnson, Cash was allowed to move on to the Expos for a 5-year, $1.5 million deal.

That worked out well for both Cash and the Expos, as he continued his solid play for the next couple of years and brought veteran leadership to a talented but very young team that had never produced a winning season. New manager Dick Williams installed Cash as the regular second baseman in 1977 and the team’s win total jumped by 20 over the prior year. A year later Cash was again leading all second basemen in putouts and fielding percentage, and in 1979 he batted .321 as the team produced their first winning record and nearly beat Pittsburgh for the division title.

That proved to be Cash’s last good year in the big leagues. With youngster Rodney Scott ready to take over the position, Montreal traded Cash to the Padres before the 1980 season. He remained a solid glove next to the brilliant Ozzie Smith, but his offense crashed to a .227 average and he missed more than 30 games with a nagging knee problem. San Diego released him after the season, and he wasn’t able to latch on with another club, ending his playing career.

Cash moved to Florida with his family and went on to a long career coaching and managing in the minor leagues, with periodic stops in the big leagues, too, before retiring for good in 2011. He remains a fixture at reunions for both the Pirates and Phillies teams of the 1970s, enjoying his distinctive place as the steady glove and strong leader who was a member of the two organizations that accounted for nine of the ten NL East titles in that decade.

That doesn’t make Dave Cash the coolest player of those years, but it makes him cool enough to me.

Share

Also, if you’re liking what you read here, I’ll make you a deal as further thanks. For the rest of June, if you upgrade to a paid annual subscription it’s half-off the usual price for the first year. Usually that’s $60, but we’ll make that $30 if you sign up between now and June 30. Here’s the link to do that:

Thank You Special - 50% Off

Thanks again everyone!

Sometimes it’s good to walk off in a huff. Usually not, because having a snit is generally an immature response to whatever is happening, but sometimes you just have to take a stand for what’s right.

That’s what happened to Al Brazle, and it eventually led him away from a life of tough farm work during the Great Depression and into the life of a professional baseball player. But not without some detours along the way.

Brazle was born in Oklahoma in 1913, and faced some difficult circumstances in his youth. His family was from the town of Kiel, which had a large community of German immigrants that felt targeted once World War I began. To demonstrate their commitment to their new country the town name was changed to Loyal. That didn’t make life much easier, though, so Brazle’s family moved about 80 miles south soon after.

That’s where his father, Willis, died when Al was only 10 years old, leaving his mother to raise him and his two siblings on her own. That situation made school a luxury for Al, so he stopped going when he was 15 in order to have more time to help on the farm. For most of the next seven years, that situation became progressively more difficult as the Depression began and the Dust Bowl ruined farms across the state. Brazle’s family farm was spared, but they didn’t exactly have an easy life.

During those years, Brazle’s only outlet from it was to play for his town’s baseball team. A left-handed pitcher, he was good enough to latch on to a semipro team and bring some extra money home. It was in 1935 when Brazle had the snit that turned into the break he needed.

While playing in a semipro tournament, Brazle learned that the promoter had refused to pay him and the rest of his team the amount that he been agreed upon beforehand. Rather than take the lesser amount, Brazle told the promoter what he thought of it and then left, determined to walk home in his uniform rather than pitch any more for the double-crossing promoter.

Both his pitching to that that point in the tournament and the grit he showed in walking away impressed a scout named Bully McLean who had been in attendance. Rather than let a pretty good player out of his sights, McLean hopped in his car and drove down the road until he found Brazle walking alongside it. He stopped him, told him that he thought he had the makings of a professional pitcher, and would happily recommend Brazle to his friend who managed the Little Rock Travelers of the Southern Association.

There wasn’t an immediate spot for Brazle on the Little Rock roster, so he pitched for another semipro team for the rest of the year, well enough that he earned a contract with Little Rock for the 1936 season. That same offseason, Little Rock became affiliated with the Red Sox, so Brazle inadvertently became a Boston farm hand when he signed. He had an unspectacular first year, finishing with a record of 7-8 and an ERA of 5.92. That led to a demotion to the Hazleton (PA) Red Sox the following year, where his 10-14 record and 4.02 ERA weren’t great but proved good enough to be returned to Little Rock in 1938.

During the next three years the most notable thing that happened to him was that he got married to a Little Rock native, Helen Blankenship, midway through the 1939 season. Otherwise, his time with the Travelers was undistinguished. Brazle was a combined 27-34 with a 4.06 ERA. It was fine but nothing special, and it led the Red Sox to trade him to the Cardinals after the 1940 season for 37-year old reliever Mike Ryba.

When he arrived in camp with St. Louis, Brazle’s hopes of continuing his career didn’t look very good. The Cardinals had a deep pitching staff and plenty of live arms in their minor league system. They were particularly stacked with left-handed pitching, including Max Lanier, Ernie White, Howie Pollet, Harry Brecheen, and Preacher Roe. On top of that, Brazle was hurt. During the 1940 season he’d developed a sore arm, and it hurt badly enough that he had to abandon his usual over the top delivery and start throwing sidearm.

And that’s when something finally clicked. Brazle’s arm hurt during the entire 1941 and ‘42 seasons, but it was helped by the new delivery, and the slider he used to throw suddenly became a deadly effective pitch when thrown from the new angle. Despite being hurt he managed a record of 12-5 with a 3.56 ERA in 1941, and followed that up with a 3.45 ERA in 1942.

Brazle was 29 years old by the time the 1943 season began, but his arm was finally healed and he had his best season yet while assigned to Sacramento of the Pacific Coast League. He was 11-8 with a 1.69 ERA by the middle of the season, and when Pollet left the Cardinals to join the military that July, it was Brazle he was called upon to replace him.

Instantly, he was sensational. Making his first big league appearance on July 25, Brazle started the first game of a doubleheader against the Braves in St. Louis and proceeded to throw a complete game while winning, 3-1. He then went to the bullpen and appeared in relief in his next four appearances before being inserted into the starting rotation in the middle of August and going 6-2 with a 1.54 ERA in his final eight starts, helping St. Louis secure the pennant. Brazle even started Game 3 for the World Series against the Yankees, and pitched well until his defense blew up behind him in the 8th inning, resulting in three unearned runs and a 6-2 loss. He was slated to start Game 6 as well, but the series ended in a Yankee victory before it could be played.

Al Brazle had finally arrived. After several years of semipro ball, and seven and a half more years in the minor leagues, including an injury and a reworked delivery, he had not only reach the big leagues but excelled once he got there.

And then it was all put on hold, because Uncle Sam came calling for him, too.

Thank You Special - 50% Off

Even before the 1943 World Series began, Brazle was advised that he would soon be drafted into the Army. About a month after the season ended he reported to Jefferson Barracks in St. Louis with his teammate, Harry “The Hat” Walker, for induction. Both were ultimately assigned to the 65th Reconnaissance Troop of the 65th Infantry Division.

Known as the Battle-Axe division due to their distinctive shoulder patch, the division had been activated in Louisiana that summer and spent the next 18 months training and then being shipped to Europe. They arrived in early January 1945 and were attached to General George Patton’s Third Army as it advanced into Germany and then Austria. Brazle and Walker both saw extensive combat during the final four months of the war in Europe, with Walker being slightly wounded.

Brazle was shipped home at the end of 1945 and officially discharged the following April, just in time for baseball season. Now 32 years old, he faced the full competition of the deep St. Louis pitching staff that now had everyone available. Despite his age, the two-year layoff, and his comparative inexperience, Brazle earned a spot on the St. Louis staff and proved to be an invaluable swing man, not only that season but for the eight that followed as well.

Between 1946 and 1953, Brazle averaged 46 appearances per year, including 14 starts, and threw about 150 innings annually. He went 84-58 in that time with a 3.38 ERA and 119 ERA+. In the final several seasons of that span he was almost exclusively a reliever, and led the National League in saves in both 1952 and 1953 before it was an official statistic. He was 38 and 39 years old at the time, making him one of the oldest pitchers to ever lead the league in saves.

Both Brazle and the Cardinals finally slipped in 1954. The team finished with a losing record for the first time in Brazle’s tenure with them, and he, as the oldest player in the league at 40, saw his ERA+ drop to 99, just a tick lower than league average. The team went into rebuilding mode after the season and released Brazle. He signed with the White Sox that offseason and spent Spring Training in their camp, but he was released before the season began, ending his big league career.

He moved to Florida after retiring and became a building contractor and manager of an apartment complex. He also served briefly as head coach of the baseball team at Florida Presbyterian College. A well-liked, soft-spoken man, Brazle eventually moved to Colorado and died in a veterans hospital of a heart attack in 1973.

He was only 60 years old at the time, but it had been an eventful life. Farming, poverty, injury, and war had aged him rapidly, not to mention the daily stress of being one of the earliest relief specialists in baseball for nearly a decade. It took its toll, but it also led to a life off that farm and out of poverty.

And it all began by walking away.

Share

Also, if you’re liking what you read here, I’ll make you a deal as further thanks. For the rest of June, if you upgrade to a paid annual subscription it’s half-off the usual price for the first year. Usually that’s $60, but we’ll make that $30 if you sign up between now and June 30. Here’s the link to do that:

Țhank You Special - 50% Off

Thanks again everyone!

There are no defined start and end dates for the Big Red Machine.

We can come closest to agreeing on the start, which is generally fixed at 1970. That was the year Sparky Anderson took over as the manager and they won their first National League West division title. They also went to their first World Series in nearly a decade, the first one Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, and Tony Pérez played in.

The end is murkier. Certainly it ran through at least 1976, the year of their second consecutive World Series title. You could argue it went through the end of the decade, because they won the NL West again in 1979. But that team didn’t look much like the teams that had preceded it. Anderson, Rose, and Pérez were gone, and the pitching staff had almost completely turned over. General manager Bob Howsam had also given up that role, and the Dodgers, Phillies, and Pirates had ascended to the top of the National League. The mystique of The Machine pretty much ended in 1977, when Pérez was traded and L.A. passed the Reds in the standings.

It’s sort of fitting that 1977 was also the year George Foster had the best season of his career, because to that point he was the hidden star of the team. His emergence only once the team’s fortunes faded a bit was sort of a fitting.

Foster wasn’t with the team in 1970. That team was still owned by Johnny Bench, who had arrived for good two years earlier to join Rose and Pérez as the team’s stars, and exploded into the best player in the league as Anderson took over. That was Bench’s first MVP season, and both Pérez and Rose were still stars.

Foster was still struggling to break into the Giants’ plans despite three great seasons in the minor leagues and a pair of brief but successful stints with San Francisco. That club had a crowded outfield with Willie Mays, Bobby Bonds, and Ken Henderson, and had emerging stars Dave Kingman, Gary Matthews, and Garry Maddox waiting in the wings. Foster was surplus, so he was dealt to the Reds a couple of weeks before the trade deadline in 1971.

It was an odd time to make his debut, because that was the rare down season in Cincinnati, the only season in the decade of the 1970s that the team had a losing record. Foster took over center field for the injured Bobby Tolan and handled the defense of the position pretty well, but he batted just .234/.289/.386 and didn’t exactly make anyone miss Tolan. That team was still dominated by their three big stars, plus power-hitting first baseman Lee May, who had the highest WAR total on the team that year. Foster was an afterthought.

When Tolan returned in 1972, Foster went to the bench and the team rebounded to 95 wins, a division title, and a pennant before falling to the Oakland A’s in seven games. There was no room for Foster, not only because Tolan was back, but also because they’d swung a deal with the Astros to bring Joe Morgan to the team but also outfielder César Gerónimo. Not only was the outfield full, but now Morgan gave them another star player casting an enormous shadow. Foster didn’t get a single plate appearance during the team’s postseason run.

In 1973 the situation got even worse for him. Anderson went with an outfield of Rose in left, Gerónimo in center, and Tolan in right all year long, even though Gerónimo had a terrible offensive season and Tolan was a shadow of the great player he’d been before his injury. With veteran Andy Kosco on the bench and rookie Ken Griffey making a strong debut, Foster was shuffled off to Triple-A for nearly the entire year. He was fine there, and played well when he was called up in September, but he was about to be 25 years old and it still didn’t look like the Reds had any place for him to play.

That finally changed a bit in 1974. Tolan was traded before the season, opening up right field. Anderson elected to use both Griffey and Foster to cover the position, mostly in a left-right platoon. That wasn’t terribly fair to Foster, because he didn’t have an enormous split between righties and lefties, but at least he had a defined role on the big league roster for the first time in three years.

By now, though, the Big Red Machine was a fully operational Death Star. Bench, Morgan, Pérez, and Rose were still in their primes, as was dependable, Gold Glove shortstop Dave Concepcíon. Gerónimo had added average offense to his exceptional glove work in center field, and Dan Driessen had arrived to play third, first, and even a little outfield. Both Griffey and Foster had hit well enough in 1974 that Anderson moved pieces around to find them regular playing time in 1975, but they were essentially the relatively anonymous new members of the lineup. Just look at the rest of it:

• C, Bench: Two-time MVP, former Rookie of the Year, seven-time Gold Glove winner and All-Star.

• 1B, Pérez: Five-time All-Star, four-times finished in the top-10 in MVP voting, five 100-RBI seasons.

• 2B, Morgan: Five-time All-Star, two-time Gold Glove winner, three straight top-ten MVP finishes, former league-leader in runs, triples, walks, and on-base percentage.

• SS, Concepción: Former All-Star, defending Gold Glove winner.

• 3B, Rose: Shifted there for 1975, former MVP, eight-time All-Star, Rookie of the Year, three-time batting champ, six times over 200 hits.

• CF, Gerónimo: Defending Gold Glove winner.

Then Griffey proceeded to bat .305 as the new regular right fielder and also drive in eight runs and go 5-for-5 in steals during the team’s ten postseason games as they drove to their first World Series title. That left Foster, who might have been the team’s third-best player that season after Morgan and Bench, largely overlooked despite hitting .300 and setting new career highs with 23 homers and 78 RBI.

But, in the team’s last hurrah in 1976, George Foster finally stepped into the spotlight. A little bit, anyway, before taking center stage in 1977 just as the Big Red Machine started losing its steam.

Thank You Special - 50% Off

The critical difference between the Reds of 1975 and the Reds of 1976 was that Foster and Griffey emerged as All-Stars just as Bench and Pérez took a step back. Everyone else in the lineup played at their expected levels, but 1976 was the first season since 1968 that neither Bench nor Pérez hit at least 20 homers. The 2.6 WAR managed by Pérez was nearly a career low, as was Bench’s 4.6, and while both marks made them productive players, it showed a definite decline from their prior production levels. Both of them remained All-Stars and had one or two excellent years ahead of them, but they were past the point of playing at MVP levels.

Not so for Griffey, who nearly won the batting title at .336, while stealing 34 bases, scoring 111 runs, making the All-Star team, and finishing eighth in MVP voting. And it really wasn’t true of Foster, who settled into his new full-time role in left field and set new career highs with 5.9 WAR, 29 homers, 172 hits, 86 runs, 17 steals, a .306 batting average, and a league-leading 121 RBI. That was good enough for him to finish second in MVP voting behind Morgan, more than replacing the diminished production of Bench and Pérez. He was an All-Star for the first time, like Griffey, and at 27 was poised for the best years of his career.

Unfortunately, the 1977 season brought drastic changes to baseball and the Reds. That was the first season after free agency was in full flower, and the Reds were heavily impacted by it, mostly because Bob Howsam was so thoroughly opposed to it that he refused to have the Reds draft a single player during the re-entry draft in November. They were the only team to do so, and would remain so for several years, putting them at a competitive disadvantage as they tried to defend a now-dead way of building a team.

Staff ace Don Gullett was lost to the Yankees, and Howsam traded Pérez away in the hope of bringing back pitching to replace Gullett. He later said it was the worst mistake of his tenure, because even though Pérez was no longer the player he’d been, he was still the same outstanding leader in the clubhouse, the heart and soul of the team. His presence was missed, particularly as the team faced a challenge from the resurgent Dodgers for the division title. Los Angeles got off to an incredible start, going 17-3 in April and ending the month already ahead of the Reds by 7.5 games.

Cincinnati never recovered from that, even after trading for Tom Seaver in June. They managed to win 88 games and finish second, but it was a far cry from the Big Red Machine years when they terrified everyone in the league. The player who kept them from falling even further from their old selves was Foster, who had the year of his life. Not only did he defend his RBI crown, but him upped it to a new career high of 149, while blasting 52 home runs. He was the first player in baseball to top 50 homers since Mays did it in 1965, and, despite his team falling short, Foster easily won the Most Valuable Player Award over Philadelphia’s Greg Luzinski.

He was never that good again, but he continued playing at an All-Star level for the Reds during the next four years. From 1978 to 1981, Foster averaged 29 homers and 100 RBI to go along with a 146 OPS+, figures that were depressed by the strike in 1981. On a per 162-game basis Foster averaged 5.4 WAR, 36 homers, and 122 RBI during this span, and made three more All-Star teams.

But the Reds kept sliding further and further away from greatness. After the ‘78 season both Rose and Anderson departed, then Morgan left after that final division title in 1979. The club slid to third place in the division in 1980, which was Gerónimo’s final year with the team, and the funky split format of the 1981 season bit the Reds when they finished with the best overall record in the league but missed the playoffs anyway since they’d finished second in their division in each of the season’s two halves.

That also marked Foster’s final years as an All-Star and MVP candidate. Knowing he would demand an enormous salary increase after the season when his contract expired, the Reds traded Foster to the Mets before Spring Training began in 1982. He signed that big extension with New York and promptly took an enormous step back in his production. From 1982 to 1985, Foster averaged 22 homers and 81 RBI, with a 103 OPS+ that was barely above league average. His defense slipped even more.

By 1986 he was largely replaced in left field by Mookie Wilson and Kevin Mitchell, and found himself released in early August, missing out on the team’s run to their more recent World Series title. He was picked up by the White Sox, but struggled though only three weeks with them before they, too, sent him packing. Though he was interested in continuing his career in 1987, no teams offered to sign him.

Foster was a quiet, professional player who went about his business without fanfare. He fit perfectly with the Reds because that was their style and he didn’t mind the bigger stars getting the most attention. That same style was a terrible fit in New York, where the Mets were under constant scrutiny from a more vocal media and fan base, and where Davey Johnson was building a team full of fiery, aggressive personalities that were the opposite George Foster.

The end result was that this really good player had a hard time making a name for himself despite playing for two of the best teams of that era.

Share

If you’re still sitting by the phone waiting for a call from a big league team when the draft is at round 50 or later, the baseball world is sending you a message.

That’s particularly true if you’re a college player. A high schooler might delude themselves into thinking that they only slid to round 50 or more because teams assumed they were going to college and didn’t want to waste an earlier pick. College players don’t have that delusion available to them. They don’t have anywhere else to go. Over the years, rounds 50 and later were full of such long shots that they don’t exist anymore.

And so, on this date in in 1988, Al Bacosa didn’t have many hopes as the draft kept rolling along and his phone didn’t ring. This should not have been a surprise. He was a run-of-the-mill righty swing man on an undistinguished San Jose State team for four years. If you hunt through the school’s baseball record book, Bacosa only appears on the page listing letter-winners (he got four, from 1985 to 1988) and on the page that lists the highest walk totals in school history (he walked 65 in 1987, tied for the sixth-most in school history). He never led his own team in anything, let alone the conference, and had no accolades of any kind.

Still, he had hope, so he continued to sit by the phone, round after round, hoping it might ring. Round 50 passed, then 51, and 52, and on, and on. They were well into the part of the draft when teams simply stopped making picks, as if to say, “Yeah, we know we’ve got a pick in this round, but we’re good. Thanks anyway.” Only 15 picks were made in round 50, and that number slowly eroded the longer the draft progressed.

By round 60 just ten teams were still picking, and a lot of them weren’t very good. They were the teams hurting for talent throughout their entire organization, so they were still rolling the dice in these later rounds, hoping one of the picks would turn out to be a winner. The players being picked mostly knew where they stood. Of the ten players taken that round, only three bothered to sign. What use was it at that point? If they signed, they’d have at least 59 rookies ahead of them in their own system. The odds of clawing over all of them, plus everyone else already on minor league rosters, to eventually make the big leagues were astronomically low. Better to just move on with their lives outside of baseball.

But then round 62 began, and suddenly Al Bacosa’s phone rang. His sister answered it, then handed the phone to their father when they asked for Paul Bacosa. (Al’s full name is Paul Alan Bacosa, and goes by Al to avoid confusion with his father.) That’s when the Atlanta Braves let him know he’d been drafted with the first pick of the 62nd round. Al’s dad had a good sense of humor about it, telling them “That’s cool, but I haven’t thrown a ball in 20 years.” Then he handed the phone to Al. He was elated to find out that were offering him $3,500 to sign, plus a $575 monthly salary and an apartment lease in Idaho Falls, where the Braves’ affiliate in the Pioneer League was located. He knew his odds of making it as a pro were pretty slim, but he signed on anyway.

There’s no happy baseball ending for Al Bacosa, at least not as a professional. He pitched one season in Idaho Falls, appearing in 21 games in relief. He had a great strikeout rate, whiffing 49 hitters in only 39.1 innings, and didn’t really walk many batters either. He had a respectable 5-2 record and six saves, and though his ERA looks unremarkable at 4.35, that was actually pretty good for that league, where the league-wide ERA was 4.77. He was asked to come back to Spring Training the following year.

But Bacosa decided to pass. He hadn’t lit the minors leagues on fire as a rookie, and knew the long road in front of anyone who was approaching 23 years old and hadn’t pitched above rookie ball. He let the Braves know he was done, finished his degree at San Jose State, then went to work at the family photography studio. He and his wife still operate it to this day. Al didn’t completely abandon baseball, though. He was the pitching coach for many years at Bellarmine College Prep in San Jose, a really good program that sent several players to the big leagues, including Pat Burrell and Mark Canha. He doesn’t have a single regret about the path he chose.

But the Braves might regret picking him in that spot. One pick later, the Dodgers selected Mike Piazza.

Read more

I’m sorry, that’s just the way it is sometimes. No offense to him as a person, but as a manager he took some incredibly talented teams and drastically underperformed with them, leaving kids like me with nothing but heart-wrenching disappointments and the need to blame them on someone. Zimmer was as good a target as anyone. Much of that is fair, including what follows below, but years and perspective have taught me that there was plenty of blame to go around with those teams.

The primary culprits were in the front office, which was in thorough disarray after the passing of Tom Yawkey in 1976 and subsequent firing of general manager Dick O’Connell. New GM and part owner Haywood Sullivan really didn’t know what the hell he was doing, and both he and Jean Yawkey, the new majority owner, were unprepared for the new era of free agency that dawned right as they took over. They were also parsimonious, to be polite. More frankly, they were cheap, shutting down any further forays into high-priced talent acquisition while simultaneously failing to spend on their farm system. It was a bad recipe.

I include all of that by way of noting that what follows about Zimmer didn’t happen in a vacuum. I wrote this piece about him in early 2024, and I think it’s still accurate and fairly represents one of his more obvious failures as Red Sox manager. But try to keep in mind that he took on the job when the team was still willing to spend what was necessary to remain competitive, only to have the entire ownership and front office leadership of the franchise switched on him, and an entirely new, frugal way of operating installed, only a year later. All of that was going on while he was fumbling with his pitching staff in 1978, and it’s important context to acknowledge.

This edition first appeared in January, 2024, and is reprinted here unlocked for everyone.

Right off the top, let me be really clear that I don’t like Bill Lee. He pitched for my favorite team, so I wanted him to do well, but even as a kid I thought he was pretty much a jackass, long before my parents would let me use that word. Nothing in this edition should detract from that fact.

That said, Bill Lee’s undeniable jackassery should not overshadow the fact that he was a good pitcher. Not great, by any means, but good. A solidly above-average major league starting pitcher. For the Red Sox he had a 94-68 record with an ERA that was 10% better than the league average. That’s pretty good.

Despite this, Red Sox manager Don Zimmer absolutely hated Lee’s guts for any number of perfectly valid reasons, the principal one being that Lee was an iconoclastic jackass who publicly called Zimmer a gerbil. If Zimmer wanted to hate Lee’s guts for that, he certainly could.

The problem is that Zimmer let his hatred for Lee get in the way of properly managing the Red Sox, and at the end of the 1978 season, that came back to bite him, along with every Red Sox fan in the world.

On the morning of July 20 that year, the Red Sox woke up in first place, nine games ahead of the Brewers. The team was in Milwaukee, and when Bill Lee had a bad start that night against the Brewers, giving up six runs in less than four innings and taking the loss, the Boston lead dropped to eight games.

The team went into a bit of a skid after that. They saw their lead drop to 4.5 games toward the end of the month before rallying in the first half of August and building their lead back to nine games again by August 13. The only difference was that it was the Yankees instead of the Brewers who then sat in second place.

While the team had righted itself, Lee’s personal losing streak had continued. He gave up six hits and six walks while taking the loss in Minnesota on July 25. Five days later he held the Royals to two runs while pitching a complete game, but took a tough-luck loss, 2-1. Then came an ugly start against the Brewers again in which he failed to get out of the first inning, followed by a solid outing against the Indians (3 earned runs in 8.2 innings), but lost again as the Sox only scored one run. His streak reached six straight losses in another unlucky outing on August 14, surrendering three earned runs in a complete game against the Brewers again but losing 4-3 on an unearned run. The streak reached seven in his next outing, an ugly 8-4 loss to the A’s.

Overall during the streak Lee was 0-7 with a 5.18 ERA, but the team wasn’t materially in worse shape than when the streak began. After his seventh straight loss, Boston still held a comfortable 7.5 game lead over New York.

Zimmer didn’t care. Tired of Lee’s mouth, he used the streak as an opportunity to pull Lee from the rotation, and nothing could change his mind.

Subscribe now

Rookie Jim Wright got five starts from August 17 to September 14, going 1-2 with a 6.35 ERA, but Zimmer didn’t go back to Lee. Another rookie, Bobby Sprowl, started three games in September, losing two of them and posting a 6.39 ERA, and still Lee sat in the bullpen. Even though Lee relieved Wright in one of the infamous “Boston Massacre” games against the Yankees in September and gave up just one earned run in seven innings of relief, Zimmer still wouldn’t give him back his rotation spot.

Boston’s lead continued to shrink, forcing Zimmer to go with a four-man rotation of Dennis Eckersley, Luis Tiant, Mike Torrez, and a host of people filling that fourth spot, but he refused to give the ball back to Lee. He’d dug in his heels, determined to make an example out of Lee because he just didn’t like him.

To be clear, Zimmer had plenty of opportunities to make examples of others on the staff. Most of them had similarly bad stretches during the season without losing their jobs. Torrez had an eight-start stretch from August 23 to September 24 in which he went 0-6 with a 4.98 ERA but kept his job. Tiant had a seven-start streak from June 30 to August 1 in which he was 0-4 with a 4.17 ERA and 5.00 FIP, but he kept his job, too. Even their ace, Eckersley, lost his first three starts of September when the Sox badly needed him to be a stopper, posting an ugly 6.00 ERA, without a hint of him needing bullpen time to figure things out. All of Zimmer’s wrath appeared to be reserved for Lee.

So, when the season came down to a one-game playoff at Fenway against New York, Zimmer didn’t even consider pitching the fully-rested Lee. He stuck with Torrez, ignoring the fact that he had a 4-7 record and 4.12 ERA over his last 15 starts. Zimmer also ignored the fact that Torrez was 1-3 against the Yankees, with an ERA of 6.16. He’d been particularly terrible against New York in Fenway Park, losing both games by scores of 10-4 and 15-3, surrendering 10 runs in 4.1 innings.

Meanwhile Lee had pitched against New York twice in relief in September, allowing just one earned run in 9.1 innings. He had a lifetime record of 48-29 in Fenway, with a 3.90 ERA, compared to Torrez, who to that point of his career had a 10-10 Fenway record, with a 4.29 ERA.* Zimmer didn’t care, just as he didn’t care that the Yankees hit a bit better against righties like Torrez than they did against lefties like Lee.

(*Note: Torrez never did get comfortable in Fenway. He finished his career with a losing record of 31-32 and a 4.49 ERA in Fenway Park.)

The result of Zimmer’s stubbornness is etched in baseball history. Torrez surrendered four earned runs and didn’t get out of the seventh inning. With Boston down 4-2 and in desperate need of preventing further damage, Zimmer let righty Bob Stanley stay in the game in the 8th inning to face lefty Reggie Jackson, who promptly homered to give the Yankees their fifth run. It would prove to be the game-winner in the 5-4 New York victory.

Bill Lee never left the bullpen, and never pitched for the Red Sox again. Apparently Zimmer’s disgust with Lee extended to the Boston front office, which wanted him gone so badly that they gave him away for basically nothing. He was traded to the Expos that offseason for utility infielder Stan Papi, who batted .188 in 51 games for Boston while Lee won 16 games with a 3.04 ERA as part of Montreal’s rotation in 1979.

The job of a baseball manager is to put the team in the best possible position to win. Managers can’t afford the luxury of grudges or vendettas against players they don’t like. If a guy is doing the club more harm than good, then you have the front office get him off the roster. What you don’t do is leave him taking up a roster spot but bury him in your doghouse when he can still contribute on the field. It’s both self-destructive and counterproductive.

That’s a lesson Don Zimmer apparently hadn’t learned by the end of the 1978 season, and it cost his team dearly.

Share

He doesn’t score well in modern analytics because he had some holes in his game, particularly after he suffered a terrible ankle injury in 1975 that robbed him of the speed and defense he displayed as a younger player. I’ve written about him before, and it’s worth repeating that the image of Buckner from his later years when he was hobbling around first base for the Cubs and Red Sox is an unfair memory that doesn’t represent his overall career.

So I’m sympathetic to the cause of rehabbing his image a bit. When I see social media posts like this one, my natural inclination is to smile and click on the “like” button.

But, in this case I didn’t, for a very simple reason: It’s bullshit.

Read more

It can be frustrating at times, digging for clues and trying to piece together what happened. That’s particularly true when participants in historical events have decided to give their personal version of things. First-hand accounts are notoriously inaccurate, for a variety of reasons. Where a person was sitting or standing when it happened, which direction they were looking, how much background noise there was, what they were preoccupied with doing at the time, and a million other factors limit how accurately a person might have witnessed what took place.

Then there’s the amount of time that has elapsed between the event in question and their re-telling of it. Are they giving an immediate reaction, which is the best possibility since it’s undiluted by fading memories and other factors, or is it delayed by an hour, a day, a week, or twenty years? What other versions have they seen or heard before offering their own?

And, of course, we have to know their motives. Did someone ask for their view, or are they providing it for their own reasons? What are those reasons? Are they in agreement with other accounts, or are they claiming something new? Do they have obvious biases or conflicts of interest that have to be accounted for before we can decide how much weight to give their views?

All of that can be frustrating, and it’s often not possible to reach a conclusion with any reasonable degree of certainty. The best we can do when recounting that historical event is to present the most likely scenario and the evidence to support it, while also not ignoring anything contradictory. We don’t want to take sides when it’s not clear which side should be taken. That’s particularly true when everyone involved is being truthful and just saw things differently. It’s not their fault if their view was blocked by a tall guy in front of them, or by the catcher applying a tag, or if a loud cheer drowned out the sound of the ball hitting the glove. They’re human beings, after all. The laws of physics apply to them.

Muddling through all of that can be exhausting. I don’t have the energy on some days to sort through the rights and wrongs of Billy Martin versus Reggie Jackson, for instance. I know what each has said about the other. I’ve read their books, and books written by others about them. I’ve read news accounts, and interviews, and magazine profiles. They’ve said literally opposite things about identical events. Literally opposite things have been said by others about them. Sorting through all of that to find the closest version of the truth drains a lot of mental energy.

So it’s nice when diversions pop up that don’t require that kind of brain power. Sometimes, an object of historical note comes to your attention and a much more simple form of sleuthing can be used. No opinions involved. No biases to decipher. No contradictory views to unwind. That’s always a refreshing change.

For instance, this Slugger Poosh-M-Up game caught my eye at an antique store/junk shop a few weeks ago.

Read more

Thompson had two and a half years with the Monarchs under his belt at the time, having entered the season with a career OPS+ mark of 127 despite missing two full years during World War II. He was still only 21 and could play multiple positions in the infield and outfield equally well. He’d ultimately spend parts of 12 seasons in the big leagues and hit .275/.376/.461, including playing a key role on the 1954 New York Giants team that swept to a World Series win while Thompson hit .364/.611/.455 in the series.

As for Brown, he was arguably the best outfielder in the Negro Leagues at that point. He was already 32 years old, but had batted .331 the year before and had led the Negro American League in homers five times, led in RBI six times, and was a career .348/.393/.570 hitter. He’d also been in the postseason with Kansas City four times to that point and had a career postseason batting line of .329/.365/.571 that included a 1.446 OPS in the Monarchs’ win over the Homestead Grays in the 1942 Negro Leagues World Series.

Not only were Thompson and Brown excellent players still in their primes, but the Browns desperately needed them. After surprising everyone by winning the only American League pennant in franchise history in 1944, the team had watched their annual win totals drop from 89 to 81 to 66, and at the time of the signings they were in last place with a record of 28-50 and were 26 games out of first place. They’d also been getting pretty bad play in the outfield and at second base, the two positions Brown and Thompson were most likely to fill. From a baseball perspective, this was a win.

From a societal perspective, though, this was a pretty risky move. St. Louis was the only major league city that resided in a former Confederate state, and was the furthest south in all of baseball. It was the last major league city to desegregate its ballpark, Sportsman’s Park, and remained one of the cities where Jackie Robinson couldn’t stay with the rest of the Dodgers when they came they came to town to play the Cardinals, a team that had been accused of threatening to boycott games rather than play against Robinson and had several run-ins with him on the field. Not an enlightened environment for race relations, in other words. That was made worse by some of the players in the Browns’ clubhouse, many of whom ignored their new Black teammates while a few were openly hostile.

The Browns’ primary motivation in signing the pair had little to do with baseball. The team was floundering financially under owner Richard Muckerman, who had only taken over as the majority owner two years earlier and had little baseball experience. He saw the increase in attendance the Dodgers enjoyed in Brooklyn that season with Robinson on their roster and decided it would help attract Black patrons to the ballpark if the team included a couple of Black players.

As you can imagine considering the circumstances, what followed was a bit of a mess. Thompson was installed as the regular second baseman right away, and though he struggled in his first three games, he then ran off a four-game hitting streak and appeared to be finding his stroke when he was suddenly benched. He didn’t start again for two weeks, but when he was returned to the starting lineup on August 9 he proceeded to bat .300/.417/.375 over his next 13 games, but continued to find himself riding the bench at odd times.

Brown struggled even more. Both he and regular right fielder Al Zarilla were unhappy with dividing time. Brown didn’t play at all in the first two games he was on the roster, then went 0-for-3 in his major league debut. He was unhappy with the bats he’d been provided by the Browns, having arrived without any because he’d been told by the Monarchs he wouldn’t need them because his new club would get him whatever he needed. But these were the Browns, and no such thing happened, so he ended up having to use whatever was available, which generally meant the pitchers’ bats that were far lighter than the heavy bats he preferred.

His hitting suffered as a result. After that debut he had a nine-game stretch in which he started regularly and batted .257, but had little power in his swing since he was using those lighter bats. He was also playing, like Thompson, with no margin for error. The moment he had a couple of oh-fer games, manager Muddy Ruel benched him and generally left him there except for some pinch-hitting appearances and spot starts. In one of those appearances, Brown used a discarded bat from outfielder Jeff Heath to hit an inside-the-park home run, the first home run by a Black player in American League history. Heath promptly destroyed the bat so it couldn’t be used again.

It should surprise no one that Brown didn’t hit well overall under the circumstances. He was batting .179 with an OPS of .448 after the Browns played a doubleheader on August 17. He hadn’t played on either of the two previous days, remained benched for the first game of the twin bill, and got only a pinch-hitting appearance in the second game before returning to the bench. Thompson was actually hitting pretty well at that point. He was 3-for-8 in that doubleheader, and was also 3-for-8 in the next three games as well, but the Browns decided the experiment was at an end. On August 23, they released both players.

Read more

Josh Beckett would qualify as a workhorse now. In 2009 he threw 212.1 innings, a figure that was only ninth in the American League that year but would have been good enough to lead that league in every year since 2019. In the last decade, only Sandy Alcantara pitched more complete games (13) than the 12 Beckett had in his career, and no one in that span could match Beckett’s six career shutouts.

Those aren’t terribly impressive career totals when all of baseball history is reviewed, nor were they the top marks in baseball during Beckett’s career. During the 14 years he pitched, Beckett was 23rd in innings pitched, tied for 45th in complete games, and tied for 32nd in shutouts, so while he was viewed as a good pitcher, he wasn’t viewed as being particularly durable. In large part that was because he was hurt a lot. Beckett only made 30 or more starts in a season four times in 14 years, and never did it more than two years in a row.

When he was healthy and on his game, though, he was really tough to hit, as the 2003 Yankees could attest, or any of the three teams the Red Sox faced in the postseason in 2007. A healthy Josh Beckett was a problem. That’s something the Phillies learned on this date in 2014.

Beckett was in his final season, and was coming off two bad years when he was hurt and struggling to a combined record of 7-19 with a 4.76 ERA. He looked like he might just about be done, but he returned in 2014 and got off to a good start. He had a 2.89 ERA heading into his ninth start of the season and was striking out a batter per inning.

Then he took the mound in Philadelphia and proceeded to pitch the sixth and final shutout of his career. It was also his first, and last, no-hitter.

Three years earlier Beckett had thrown as one-hitter against Tampa Bay, and he’d famously thrown a dominating two-hitter against the Cubs in the 2003 NLCS, but he’d never thrown a no-hitter before. The Phillies were a good candidate, being a subpar team with a below-average offense, and Beckett took advantage. His teammates spotted him to a 1-0 lead in the first inning and Beckett never looked back. He issued three walks, but never came close to giving up a hit and at one point he set down 18 straight batters, completing the no-no with a strikeout of Chase Utley.

It was his last hurrah in the big leagues. He made 11 more starts that season and had a 3-5 record with a 3.30 ERA, but he went on the disabled in early July with a hip impingement, tried to come back, but was shut down in early August when an MRI showed a torn labrum and two cysts in the hip, ending his season and his career.

But, for at least that one day in May, he was the dominant Josh Beckett he’d always been when health allowed it.

Read more

The title of that film always seemed off to me. From the movie poster it seems clear that the real name of the film was supposed to be just Breaking Training, and the Bad News Bears part of it was just supposed to let you know this was the sequel to the popular film that had come out the year before.

It’s like someone pitched it to the studio as, “Here are all of these whacky players doing things kids shouldn’t be allowed to do while practicing for a baseball game at the Astrodome. They’re breaking the training they should be doing. Get it?” To which the studio person inevitably said, “Yeah, I get it. But you’ve got to stick Bad News Bears in the title somewhere or we won’t give you any money.” The result is this clunky, long title that doesn’t exactly roll off the tongue. The whole thing should have just been called "Bad News Bears 2.” The Breaking Training part just seemed weird.

Even more weird in retrospect is that the producers had the entire Astros roster to choose from, and yet in the climactic “Let Them Play” scene it was César Cedeño the kids surged past as they ran onto the field.

It wasn’t an odd choice because Cedeño was a bad player. He was one of the best on the team. It was odd because he was only about three years removed from killing someone.

I wrote about Cedeño and that particularly ugly episode a couple of years ago, and I think it’s a good time to remind everyone of it since we’re coming up on the 50th anniversary of his big screen debut. Here it is, unlocked for everyone.

As a child of the 1970s, I take great enjoyment out of following Super70sSports on Twitter. Sure, the stuff they post is usually profane, and sometimes not politically correct, but it exactly matches the tone of the 1970s and stirs a lot of memories for those of us who grew up in that decade.

I should have known there was some love for the Astros going on with Ricky Cobb, who runs that account, based solely on their logo.

I mean, pretty obvious, isn’t it? The distinctive “Tequila Sunrise” uniform is one of the iconic images of 70s baseball. Close your eyes and you can picture the Astrodome, with J.R. Richard, and José Cruz, and Larry Dierker standing on that terrible artificial turf that bore its name. You can hear Bob Watson in The Bad News Bears in Breaking Training telling the bad guys to let the kids play.

The team was pretty good, largely built upon good pitching and defense in the cavernous dome they called home, and fast players who could rip the ball into those big outfield gaps and rack up a lot of doubles and triples.

And no one embodied that image more than César Cedeño, their all-star centerfielder who won five straight Gold Gloves and for a five-year stretch was probably the best player in the National League who wasn’t part of the Big Red Machine. So it should surprise no one at this point that the first glove for an Astros fan like Ricky was a Cedeño signature model that’s so well-worn you can’t even read the full model number anymore.

As Cobb says, they’ve been through some s#@t together. The glove shows it.

And he got it nearly a decade after César Cedeño killed someone.

Subscribe now

From 1972 to 1976, Cedeño really was on a Hall of Fame track as a player. His 31.4 WAR in those seasons was the fifth-most in baseball. The only players in the National League he trailed were Joe Morgan (47.8) and Johnny Bench (32.4), with Pete Rose just a tick behind him (31.3). That was an unknown stat at the time, but Cedeño filled up the traditional stat sheet more than enough to build a reputation as a remarkable player.

• 1972: Made the All-Star team, finished 6th in MVP voting, and won his first Gold Glove. Was fourth in the league with 8.0 WAR and a .320 batting average, fifth in runs scored, second in total bases, third in steals with 55 and triples with 8, and led the league with 39 doubles.

• 1973: Made another All-Star team, was 11th in MVP voting and won another Gold Glove. He had 7.4 WAR, a .320 batting average again, a .537 slugging percentage, stole 56 bases, and had an OPS+ of 152.

• 1974: An All-Star for the third time to go along with his third Gold Glove and 16th-place finish in MVP voting. He had 5.8 WAR, stole another 57 bases, set career highs with 26 homers and 102 RBI, and had an OPS+ of 128.

• 1975: Didn’t make the All-Star team, but did win his fourth straight Gold Glove while stealing another 50 bases. He missed over 30 games with various injuries, but still had a 133 OPS+ and 4.4 WAR.

• 1976: Made his fourth and final All-Star team, won his fifth and final Gold Glove, batted .297/.357/.454, had a 139 OPS+, stole 58 bases, had 18 homers and 83 RBI and finished with 5.9 WAR.

For those years, Cedeño was truly a five-tool player. His weakest tool, home run power, was greatly impacted by playing in the Astrodome. He hit more home runs on the road than at home in every one of those five seasons, and slugged just .433 in that building for his career compared with .450 everywhere else.

He could really, really play is what I’m saying. And it’s sort of remarkable that he accomplished most of this as a convicted killer.

On December 11, 1973, while living back in the Dominican Republic ostensibly resting a knee he injured playing winter ball, Cedeño checked into a motel a 2AM with a nineteen-year old woman who was not his wife. They had been drinking, and had more alcohol in the room before witnesses heard arguing followed by a gunshot. Cedeño, very drunk at that point, left the room, told a motel employee that there was a dead woman in it, and drove home in his sports car to his wife. A few hours later he turned himself in to the police and was charged with voluntary manslaughter.

Cedeño’s version of the events was that he carried the gun for protection, and when the victim, Altagracia de la Cruz, asked to see it and he refused, she tried to wrestle it away from him. The gun went off, the shot hitting de la Cruz in the right temple, killing her instantly. When police conducted gunshot residue tests, only the victim tested positive, but Cedeño had been out of pocket for eight hours between the shooting and turning himself in, so he had plenty of time to clean his hands. In fact, since his story was that they were struggling for the gun at the time the shot was fired, he should have had residue on his hands, right?

Alas, the police saw it differently. Three weeks later the charge was reduced to involuntary manslaughter and he was released on $10,000 bail. Two weeks after that he was found guilty of the reduced charge, but rather than being sentenced to three years in prison, Cedeño was only assessed a $100 fine for “imprudently allowing the victim to obtain the firearm he was carrying.”

None of this seemed to bother Cedeño as much as it should. His reaction when describing the event and his actions immediately following were primarily based on a concern for how it would impact his career. “I went to my house, told my wife what happened, then went to the police. I was scared. I saw my baseball career was in danger.” He needn’t have worried. The Astros were also remarkably unmoved by the killing, keeping Cedeño as their regular centerfielder for eight more seasons.

But, while his career wasn’t interrupted upon his return to the United States, he didn’t age very well. After 1976 he never again played more than 141 games in a season, never made another All-Star team, never won any more Gold Gloves, showed greatly reduced range in the outfield, and never stole even 20 bases in a season after turning thirty. He sort of slowly slid into mediocrity and unimportance, bouncing to three more teams before retiring at just thirty-five.

That’s probably for the best, all things considered. What’s kind of creepy about all of this, beyond his paltry fine for killing someone and the apparent disinterest of both him and the Astros, was that he still got to stand next to Bob Watson and a bunch of kids in that movie clip, grinning happily. And he still had baseball gloves being made with his signature as late as 1982, when Ricky Cobb came across one for his Kentucky Little League team.

Yeah, I guess they really have been through some s#@t together.

Share

The early years of his career certainly didn’t go exactly as planned. Growing up in Portsmouth, Ohio, he was a multi-sport star, playing alongside future big leaguer Al Oliver and playing American Legion ball with another future All-Star, Gene Tenace. Hisle was chosen as an All-American in both baseball and basketball in high school, on top of being a good student, so dozens of colleges wanted him for their basketball team. He ultimately accepted a scholarship from Ohio State and enrolled there in the fall of 1965.

That’s when the tough circumstances of his upbringing came into play and altered his path. When Hisle was only ten his father had a brain hemorrhage and never recognized him again, ultimately passing away five years later. His mother, a huge baseball fan who had named him after Hall of Famer Larry Doby, fell ill from a kidney infection shortly after his father’s brain hemorrhage, and died from it when she couldn’t afford to pay for the necessary treatment. Essentially orphaned, Hisle lived with his aunt for several years, where money remained tight.

Though he was ultimately sent to live with wonderful foster parents who eventually adopted him, that tough upbringing and financial insecurity stuck with him. When the Phillies made him their second round pick in the 1965 draft, Hisle originally wasn’t going to sign. He preferred basketball and continuing his education, but the Phillies were offering a healthy signing bonus in the mid-five-figures range, and he ultimately decided he couldn’t turn that down. His education was important enough to him that he eventually finished him degree from OSU, but at that moment having an immediate solution to poverty meant more.

Read more

That was the original plan, wasn’t it? Create tools for people to share their family photos, connect with people, get the news quickly, that sort of thing. That vision has obviously been corrupted over time, and now most social media platforms are sort of awful, but the original idea was a good one.

From time to time, they still live up to those aspirations. Not as often as they should, but there are moment when it’s not just a cascade of bots, “content creators,” “influencers,” trolls, and otherwise angry citizens of the interwebs. Sometimes we get real information, or shared purpose, or a good deed is done. Stuff like this:

Thank you, Barry Schustermann, whoever you are. I’m even going to overlook your misspelling of Ron Santo’s name because I can tell your heart’s in the right place. Both Santo and Graig Nettles were fabulous third basemen. Their careers didn’t overlap very much because they mostly played in different leagues and Santo was a few years older and got an earlier start, but both were in that Golden Age of Third Basemen that I’ve written about before.

Read more

It doesn’t happen as much as it used to, because modern life makes anyone’s disappearance a bit of a trick. One day you’ll be reminded of an old game or team and you’ll think, “I wonder whatever happened to Steve Dillard? I remember when the Red Sox thought he was a pretty good prospect.” You’ll hop onlin…

Read more

If you’re like me, you’ve probably never heard of Jim Russell.

He was an outfielder who mostly played in the 1940s and had his best seasons when most starting big leaguers were off fighting World War II. Also, he played for the Pirates in those years, and while they weren’t yet as awful as they would be about a decade later, it’s also true that no one was paying much attention to them. They had Bob Elliott and Vince DiMaggio and Johnny Barrett, along with some decent pitching, but they weren’t winning pennants or anything.

Russell played a pretty anonymous role in baseball, in other words. He was never an All-Star, never led the league in anything (other than being caught stealing; he did that three times), never played in the postseason, and once the better players came back from the war, his performance slowly declined until he was out of the big leagues for good in 1951 at the age of only 32. And yet, Jim Russell set a big league record that was broken by none other than Mickey Mantle.

Mantle, of course, is the best switch-hitter ever and probably the best-known as well, and Monday marked the date in 1956 when he homered from both sides of the plate in one game for the third time in his career. It was something he’d go on to do seven more times for a career total of ten, a record that stood for a long time and still remains tied for the sixth-most in history.

Mantle’s first homer of the day came batting right-handed against lefty Billy Pierce, a two-run shot in the fifth inning that increased the Yankees’ lead over the White Sox to 5-1. Four innings later, after Chicago had come back to take a 7-6 lead, Mantle homered from the left side against righty reliever Dixie Howell, a solo shot that tied the game. New York ended up scoring a run in the tenth inning to win, 8-7.

When Mantle hit that homer off Howell, he broke the current all-time record of two games with homers from each side of the plate, and that record was unexpectedly held by the aforementioned Jim Russell.

Russell wasn’t much of a power hitter. In over 4,000 career plate appearances he homered only 67 times, and never hit more than 12 in any season, and yet he was the only switch-hitter before Mantle to homer from each side in the same game more than once. And, oddly, in each case he was past his prime years playing for the Pirates.

In 1948 Russell was playing for the Boston Braves, having been traded by the Pirates during the prior offseason. He was having his last good year when he got injured in late July, barely played for a couple more weeks, and then was shut down in August and missed out on that year’s World Series as his teammates won the pennant. But before that, on June 7, Russell had a spectacular game in Wrigley Field against the Cubs, not only homering from each side of the plate for the first time in his career, but also doubling twice and driving in a total of five runs in the 9-5 Braves victory. He became only the second National League player ever to homer from each side of the plate, the first being the Cubs’ Augie Galan in 1937.

Two years later, after Russell had been traded to the Dodgers and served as a backup outfielder, he got a start at home against the Cardinals on July 26, and became the first player ever to homer from both sides of the plate a second time. The first one came from the right side, a first inning two-run shot off starter Harry Brecheen that gave Brooklyn a 2-0 lead. Then in the fifth inning, after Brecheen had been chased and righty reliever Red Munger was trying to keep Brooklyn’s lead to only 5-2, Russell led off the inning with a solo shot from the left side.

Oddly enough, those nearly proved to be the final two homers of Russell’s career. Six days later he hit a dramatic two-run homer in the ninth inning against the Pirates to tie the game, then won the game with a walk-off RBI single an inning later. That game-tying homer proved to the last he ever hit, preventing him from having the distinction of homering from each side of the plate as his final two big league homers.

But at least he had a major league record all to himself, one he held for nearly five years before the best switch-hitter ever finally broke it.

Read more

First, the details.

As Maris continued his fabulous season in 1961 it became more and more clear that he was going to challenge the record of 60 home runs in one season set by Ruth in 1927. Ruth’s mark was almost certainly the most beloved record in the game’s history, and fans weren’t thrilled to see a lesser light like Maris challenging it. They weren’t alone. Many crusty old sportswriters who had covered Ruth didn’t want to see the record broken either, and began searching for loopholes in the rules that would allow Ruth to remain in the record book.

Conveniently, they had two, both related to expansion. That was also the season that the American League added two new teams, the Angels and Senators. The addition of 50 new roster spots diluted talent at the big league level, the old scribes argued, making it easier for Maris to pop home runs against pitchers who wouldn’t have been in the majors just one year earlier. That was argument one.

Argument two involved the extra eight games that were added to the schedule to allow all teams to play each other now that two new clubs had been added. Baseball had been playing a 154-game schedule since 1904, and that was the number of games available to Ruth when he set the record in 1927.* As early as April some writers were suggesting that any records set only because of the eight newly-added games should be handled differently. Fred Lieb, writing in The Sporting News, went so far as to write that some people “recommend adding an asterisk to any new records.”

(*Note: I had to add my own asterisk to this edition, didn’t I? Anyway, it should be noted that the Yankees actually played 155 games in 1927, because their third game of the year ended due to darkness in a 9-9 tie with the A’s. Rather than find a date when they could continue it until it was settled, they later played an entire makeup game on September 27, resulting in 155 games played. The statistics compiled by players during both the tie game and the makeup game counted in the records. This will become really important in a moment, so hold that thought.)

Armed with those two loopholes, on July 18 Frick announced that if either Maris or Mickey Mantle, who was also ahead of Ruth’s homer pace at the time, broke the record but needed the extra eight games to do it “there would have to be some distinctive mark in the record books to show that Babe Ruth’s record was set under a 154-game schedule and the total of more than sixty was compiled while a 162-game schedule was in effect.”

It wasn’t a terribly popular decision in some circles, and Frick had to answer for that asterisk for the rest of his days. In fact, it was not only included in the title of the movie Billy Crystal made about Maris chasing the record, 61*, but it was also slapped onto the title of John P. Carvalho’s biography of Frick, titled Frick*: Baseball’s Third Commissioner. Behold:

Read more

Anyway, I was reminded again recently how awful Ford Frick was for baseball (you’ll see in tomorrow’s edition) so I decided to pull that first Decisions, Decisions edition out of the archives and reprint it here. It’s unlocked for everyone, to increase the number of people who learn more about what should be Frick’s awful legacy.

In 1955, Cy Young died. At the time, back when a pitcher’s win-loss record was regarded as the most important way to judge his success, Young was considered the best pitcher in baseball history. After all, he had the most wins, 511, a record that will never be approached, let alone broken. Ergo, he was the best.

Enter Ford Frick, who was commissioner of baseball when Young died. Being a very “back in my day” sort of guy, Frick decided to create an award in Cy Young’s name, and give it to the best major league pitcher each year. Frick was also a former sportswriter, so of course he had the Baseball Writers’ Association of America (BBWAA) decide who got the new award each year, just like they already did with the league MVP awards and Rookie of the Year awards.

There was one major difference with this new award; While each league had a separate MVP or Rookie of the Year to honor, only one Cy Young Award was given out each year for both leagues combined.

Why? I have no idea.

Since the other year-end awards were already split for each league, it was a non-sensical decision to do it this way with the pitching award. I’m guessing it was simply Ford Frick’s preference to have only one, because almost immediately the players and fans wanted each league’s best pitcher to be honored separately, but that change never happened while Frick was commissioner. As soon as Frick stepped down after the 1965 season, one of the first things new commissioner William “Spike” Eckert did in 1966 was announce that two Cy Young Awards would be given, one for each league, starting in 1967.

Subscribe now

Until that change was made, only one award was given each year for the first eleven years it existed, which means that the best pitcher in one of the leagues each season ended up not being honored in any way. Here are the 11 men who won those awards:

• 1956, Don Newcombe, Dodgers (NL)

• 1957, Warren Spahn, Braves (NL)

• 1958, Bob Turley, Yankees (AL)

• 1959, Early Wynn, White Sox (AL)

• 1960, Vern Law, Pirates (NL)

• 1961, Whitey Ford, Yankees (AL)

• 1962, Don Drysdale, Dodgers (NL)

• 1963, Sandy Koufax, Dodgers (NL)

• 1964, Dean Chance, Angels (AL)

• 1965, Koufax

• 1966, Koufax

Whether these pitchers actually deserved these awards is a conversation for another day. For today, what we know is that the American League’s best pitcher in 1956, ‘57, ‘60, ‘62, ‘63, ‘65, and ‘66 went unrewarded, and the National League’s best was left out in 1958, ‘59, ‘61 and ‘64. We can argue about who those eleven unfortunates would have been, but these are the likeliest candidates:

• 1956 American League: Herb Score, Indians. Score had a record of 20-9, with a 2.53 ERA and 263 strikeouts. Those marks were second, second, and first in the league. No one knew it at the time, but his 7.3 WAR was also second behind his teammate, Early Wynn, though Score had a better ERA and more strikeouts than Wynn, and the same number of wins. Ford had a better ERA, and Frank Lary had one more win, but Score had the best combination. Bob Lemon and Billy Pierce likely would have received some votes, too.

• 1957 AL: Jim Bunning, Tigers. Tied for the league lead in wins with 20, second in strikeouts (just two behind Wynn), and third in ERA, he was also second in WAR (6.3 to Frank Sullivan’s 6.4). He had the highest MVP finish among pitchers, so he’s the safe pick here.

• 1958 NL: Warren Spahn*, Braves. This one is tougher. Personally, I’d have given it to Sam Jones of the Cardinals, who led the league in strikeouts and WAR (tied with Robin Roberts) and was second in ERA, but he won only 14 games, and voters looooooved pitcher wins back in those days, so I don’t think he’d have won. They’d likely have rewarded Spahn’s league-leading 22 wins (tied with Bob Friend), since he also finished second in strikeouts and fourth in ERA for the pennant-winning Braves. (*Another ridiculous decision involving this award was that for its first three years there was a rule that said no pitcher could win it more than once, which would have made Spahn ineligible. Again, a really bad rule that eventually was changed, so we’re ignoring it for our purposes.)

• 1959 NL: Sam Jones, Giants. Redemption for Jones, who was traded to San Francisco before the season and wound up leading the league in both ERA and wins (21, tied with Spahn and Lew Burdette), while finishing second in strikeouts. A few guys probably deserved it more, but voters would have awarded Jones.

• 1960 AL: Chuck Estrada, Orioles. Wow, I really think Bunning deserved a second award here. He led the league in WAR and strikeouts and was second in ERA, but his record was just 11-14 and there’s no way voters would have seen past that. That leaves rookie Estrada being honored in an otherwise down years for pitchers in the AL. He tied Jim Perry for the league lead with 18 wins and was fifth in strikeouts. He was also the pitcher who finished highest in the MVP voting (12th) which tells you what voters likely thought of his competition.

• 1961 NL: Warren Spahn again. He led the league in wins (tied with Joey Jay at 21 each), ERA, shutouts and complete games, and that probably gets him a third theoretical Cy Young. That said, there’s a case to be made for Koufax winning his first. He was second in WAR, tied for fourth in wins, and led the league in strikeouts, but his ERA was half a run worse than Spahn’s, and that, combined with trailing Spahn by three wins, means he likely would have been passed over. There’s also a case to be made for Jay, with those 21 wins for the pennant-winning Reds. He was fifth in MVP voting, tops among pitchers, but his win total was really his only distinguishing stat.

• 1962 AL: Ralph Terry, Yankees. The best pitcher in the league was Hank Aguirre of the Tigers, with his league-leading 7.4 WAR and 2.21 ERA. But the voters had him just fourth among pitchers in the MVP voting behind Dick Donovan, Terry, and Camilo Pascual, likely because Aguirre won “only” 16 games. Terry led the league in wins and innings for the pennant winners, so I suspect he’d have won.

• 1963 AL: Camilo Pascual, Twins. This is probably some wishcasting on my part, because the voters likely would have given it to Whitey Ford with his league-leading 24 wins for the pennant-winning Yankees. But it’s possible they’d have been tired of giving awards to Yankees at that point and turned to Pascual, who was better than Ford in pretty much every way. He tied for second with 21 wins, was third in ERA (2.46 to Ford’s 2.74) and led the league in strikeouts and WAR.

• 1964 NL: Larry Jackson, Cubs. He led the league with 24 wins on a bad Cubs team, and received the most MVP votes among pitchers, so I suspect he’d have been given the award. That said, the best pitcher was Koufax, again. He was second in WAR and fourth in both wins and strikeouts despite missing 12 starts due to injury, and led the league with a sparkling 1.74 ERA.

• 1965 AL: Sam McDowell, Indians. Eye-popping numbers in both strikeouts (325) and ERA (2.18), with both marks leading the league, along with his 8.2 WAR. His 17 wins may have been a bit light for voters, so there’s a chance Mudcat Grant may have been honored instead with his 21 wins for the pennant-winning Twins.

• 1966 AL: Jim Kaat, Twins. With a league-leading 25 wins, Kaat probably walks away with this one. He was also second in strikeouts with 205 and sixth in ERA at 2.75. He also easily had the highest MVP finish among pitchers.

Projecting these awards lets us see some of the impacts of that terrible decision by Frick to limit the number of Cy Youngs that were handed out. For instance, with one (or even two) Cy Young Awards on his résumé, it’s doubtful that Jim Bunning would have sat on the Hall of Fame ballot for 15 miserable years, coming tantalizingly close to election but falling short time after time, then waiting another five years before the Veterans Committee finally put him in. The same would be true of Jim Kaat, who had to wait until he was 83-years old before finally reaching Cooperstown.

Great but overlooked pitchers like Pascual, or Pierce if he’d won in ‘56, would have been given much more serious consideration, and would be remembered much more now if they each had a Cy Young to their credit.

And what about the money these guys lost? Contract negotiations, or endorsement opportunities, would have taken on an entirely different tone if they could have walked into them saying, rightly, that they were the best pitcher in their league the year before.

Fans lost out, too. Some Cuban kid may have looked at Pascual’s award and viewed his circumstances a bit differently. People in Minnesota, who’d only had a big league team for a few years by the time of Kaat’s big season, might have felt a bit more like they belonged with the old guard fan bases. Faithful Cub fans might have had an easier time getting through their perennial disappointments if they could have pointed to a Cy Young for Larry Jackson and said, “The Cubbies still matter.”

But none of that happened, because one guy made a terrible decision in 1955 and never backed away from it.

Share

“Harmon Killebrew, noted glove man,” is a phrase that has never passed anyone’s lips unless sarcasm was involved. That’s because Killebrew was a designated hitter before the designated hitter position officially existed. In fact, once the position was officially created in 1973, Killebrew became mostly a DH for the remaining three years of his career, as he would have been all along in an alternate universe.

The Killer was on the field because of his bat. That was always understood. But to have his 40+ annual homers and 100+ annual RBIs in the lineup every day meant the Twins, and the Senators before they moved to Minnesota, had to find someplace for him to play.

I’ve written before that the Senators (technically the Nationals at the time) utterly botched Killebrew’s early career. He’d been signed as a so-called “Bonus Baby” in 1954, and at the time that meant he had to remain on the big league roster for two years before he could be sent to the minor leagues. Killebrew did precisely that from June 1954 to June 1956, and barely played in that time. He got into 71 ballgames and came to bat only 141 times in those two years combined, which is hardly the sort of professional development you want to give to a teenager you just paid tens of thousands of dollars.

When he did play, Killebrew was never used at the position he ultimately played the most during his career. His first four appearances in 1954 were, hilariously, as a pinch-runner.* Then he pinch-hit twice, then played three full games at second base. A year later it was more of the same, only with some work at third base added. He pinch-hit 15 times, played second three more times, and spent parts of 23 game at third, but he only played a complete game 15 times that season. In 1956, Killebrew got into 24 games before he finally passed the two-year mark and could be sent to the minors to play regularly. In those games he only started twice, both at second base. Every other appearance was as a pinch-hitter, though a couple of them led to him remaining in the game and playing third.

(*Note: And then he was never used that way again. Literally. He played 21 more big league seasons without ever pinch-running again.)

It would be hard to say Killebrew had any set position yet, but since everywhere they had allowed him to play was in the infield, it makes sense that the first baseball gloves with his signature inside were infielder’s mitts like this one:

Read more

Bibby was from tiny Franklinton, North Carolina, a town of roughly 1,500 people when he was growing up and not much bigger now. It’s a farming community tucked into the northern part of a state that’s mad about basketball, and the Bibby family certainly did their part in keep the traditions of both farming and basketball going. The family owned a 150-acre farm, and the three Bibby’s three sons all worked on it while also starring in sports at Franklinton High School.

The oldest son was Fred, who got a basketball scholarship to play at Fayetteville State University, a historically Black university. He was a three-sport star for the Broncos, captained the basketball team, was a two-time all-conference selection, and a Division II All-American as a senior. The youngest son was Henry, who earned a scholarship to UCLA, where he was the starting point guard for three straight national champions under John Wooden and later played in the NBA for nine years. He also had son, Mike Bibby, who had a 14-year NBA career after being an All-American and winning a national championship at Arizona.

And then there was the middle son, Jim. He certainly had the size to be a good basketball player at 6’5” and 235 pounds, and he was good enough in high school to follow Fred to Fayetteville State on a basketball scholarship. That’s where the similarities ended, though. Fred described his younger brother as “A hot dog, the 11th man. He’d get in a game, look up in the stands, score two points and think it was a big deal.” Not a serious college hoops player, in other words.

Fortunately, Jim did have a different athletic path to follow. He was also a pitcher for FSU’s baseball team, and was good enough that when the Mets held a tryout in the area in the summer of 1965, Bibby made an impression. It wasn’t a good enough impression to warrant a big signing bonus - or any signing bonus for that matter - but they did at least offer him a contract and he jumped at the opportunity.

Read more

When the Negro National League was founded in 1920, Dave Malarcher was just a third baseman.

He was a very good one, for a very good team. Malarcher wasn’t a great hitter, though he was a good one in many years, batting over .300 three times and leading the league in runs and steals one season. But he was an excellent defender who regularly led the league in putouts, assists, and fielding percentage. One top of that, he was a good guy, known as “Gentleman Dave,” an educated man who wrote poetry in his later years and interrupted his baseball career to serve his country in World War I.

His team, the Chicago American Giants, was the best in the league in those early years. It was the franchise owned and operated by the league’s founder, Rube Foster, who had recruited to Malarcher to play for him after seeing him play for the Indianapolis ABCs and Detroit Stars before the NNL started play. He saw in Malarcher the exact type of player he tried to create, a smart, disciplined, aggressive player with some speed.

It surprised no one, then, that it was Malarcher who took over the managing responsibilities for the team in 1926 when Foster had to step away from the team due to his failing health. He never returned, and Malarcher led the team to a 30-7 record over the final half of the season and then won the Negro Leagues World Series over the Altantic City Bacharach Giants. It was the first World Series win for the franchise, and then they came back the following season and won it again.

Unfortunately, Foster’s illness had eventually resulted in the team being sold to William Trimble, and he proved to be a pretty awful owner who was more interested in the racetrack he operated than the ball club he’d bought. Trimble routinely paid low salaries to his players, and refused to pay Malarcher for his managing duties, claiming that his salary as a player was more than enough. After the 1928 season, in which Malarcher guided the team to the league’s second half championship, he walked away from the club and spent the next two seasons working in insurance and real estate.

In 1931, he decided to re-enter baseball with a startup team called the Chicago Columbia Giants, but they were awful and the NNL was on its last legs, so that lasted only one year. Malarcher was going to go back to real estate and semi-pro ball when he was contacted by Robert Cole, an undertaker in Chicago who had just purchased the American Giants from Trimble and decided the best way to revive them was to hire Dave Malarcher to be the team’s manager again.

Malarcher agreed, and promptly guided the Giants to the pennant of the new Negro Southern League, which only lasted for that one season. But in 1933 the Negro National League was re-formed, and the Giants joined up again. Despite Malarcher leading them to a 41-22 record, the team barely lost the pennant to the Pittsburgh Crawfords. A year later they won the league’s second-half title again before losing in the championship series to the Philadelphia Stars.

At this point, Malarcher was just about to turn 40, and in part of seven seasons as a manager he’d won three pennants and led two other teams to the playoffs. He had a .628 career winning percentage, which is the highest mark in history for any manager with multiple World Series titles to his credit. If he’d wanted it, he had a long future ahead of him as the premier manager in Black baseball since Foster was dead, Bullet Rogan was retired, and Vic Harris hadn’t started managing yet.

But then he just walked away.

Malarcher didn’t like the direction baseball was going, both in terms of failing sportsmanship and poor management of the league. For one year only, 1940, he returned as the American Giants’ business manager, but otherwise he went back to working as a successful real estate broker and erstwhile poet.

Before he died on this date in 1982 at the age of 87, Malarcher joined the Society for American Baseball Research and used his poetry skills to pen an ode to the great Oscar Charleston, his former teammate, who has an argument for being the best player in baseball history. That’s fitting, because Malarcher had not only played with or managed Charleston and many of the best players in the history of Black baseball, but has an argument for being the best manager in Negro Leagues history as well.

Maybe one day the Hall of Fame will realize those great Negro Leagues teams didn’t manage themselves and will finally elect someone from that great group of managers. If so, Dave Malarcher would be on the very short list of those who should be considered.

Read more

A couple of things are worth noting right away. The first is that the pitcher on the left was mostly a reliever while the one on the right was mostly a starter. The second is that the right-hand player has some missing data, which tells you he probably played either a long time ago or in a league that didn’t capture certain information, or both.

A third thing worth mentioning is that 1,700 career innings mostly in relief is a lot. Among all players in history who were relief pitchers in at least 80% of their career appearances and started 50 or fewer games, only two exceeded 1,700 career innings. Both of them are in the Hall of Fame, including Rich Gossage, who tops the list with 1,809.1 innings pitched.

The other guy is our mystery reliever from the left-hand side of the graphic. That’s Rollie Fingers, famed closer for the A’s, Padres, and Brewers. He was a seven-time All-Star, a Cy Young and MVP winner, was the all-time leader in saves at the time he retired, and pitched for three straight World Series winners in Oakland. Throw in his famous handlebar mustache and unique name, and it’s safe to say that Fingers was easily one of the most recognizable players in baseball during his career.

Read more