Ron Santo, RIP: Soul

I had forgotten about Clete Boyer being on those great Yankee teams in the early 1960's. When I started to follow baseball big, the Yankee franchise was already falling apart.

You can thank in large part then-owners Dan Topping and Del Webb, who parched the once-formidable Yankee farm system (not including the Kansas City Athletics, heh heh heh) in order to streamline the franchise to make it attractive for CBS to buy the team, which it did in 1964 in a deal that still rankles old-line baseball people for it having been all but a ram down the throat of the American League owners who were barely afforded a chance to vote properly on the sale.

You can thank CBS further because, bless them, the network had little enough clue about how to operate a baseball franchise overall and tended not to lend full backing to the very few in the network who did.

As you said, it is easy to see why Boyer didn't get much attention when he was with the Yankees given his poor performance with the bat. Playing alongside guys like Mantle, Maris, Bobby Richardson, Tony Kubek, Yogi Berra and Whitey Ford will do that.

I'm not so sure that playing on those Yankee teams hurt Boyer in the attention-getting department---he had several pennant races and World Series to show what he could do with his glove, and he was considered in his time and prime to be at least one of the most spectacular third basemen in the game. (Joe Pepitone, the talented but shaky Yankee first baseman, once made a dazzler in which he dove for a ball, grabbed it, and threw to Ford covering first while still prone: Clete Boyer's famous for throwing runners out on his knees. I just showed I could do it on my back!). There's no question but if Brooks Robinson wasn't in the league and a better hitter (he was named the American League's Most Valuable Player in 1964, a year in which he led the league in runs batted in, games played, and sacrifice flies), Boyer would probably have bagged the Gold Gloves Robinson didn't in that scenario. (The Hoover won sixteen straight Gloves.) It probably surprises people to discover that Boyer statistically was actually a little bit better than Robinson at third base over the full course of the years they played in the league together.

Bobby Richardson and Tony Kubek were terrific defencive middle infielders and overrated as early-in-the-order hitters. At least, Richardson looked like a terrific defencive second baseman because he played in an infield that included Tony Kubek and Clete Boyer. Richardson won five Gold Gloves and probably didn't deserve more than one. He was actually an average-to-below average second baseman whose fielding percentages were exactly in line with the league and whose range factors were actually below the league average. He also has a bigger reputation as a leadoff hitter than he deserves for one reason---he had an image, very well deserved, as being impossible to strike out. (At least, he did until Sandy Koufax opened the 1963 World Series by doing just that to him, en route a then-record fifteen punchouts in Game One.) Richardson averaged---hold onto your jaw---28 strikeouts per 162 games. The greatest players the game's ever seen would kill for a rap sheet like that. I'll run a few of them down for you, chosen at random from among Hall of Famers:

Henry Aaron: 68
Ernie Banks: 79
Johnny Bench: 96
Yogi Berra: 32
Wade Boggs: 49
George Brett: 54
Roberto Clemente: 82
Joe DiMaggio: 34
Lou Gehrig: 59
Hank Greenberg: 98
Tony Gwynn: 29
Rickey Henderson: 89.
Rogers Hornsby: 49
Ralph Kiner: 82
Willie Mays: 83
Mickey Mantle: 115
Joe Morgan: 62
Stan Musial: 37
Albert Pujols: 67
Cal Ripken: 70
Frank Robinson: 88
Jackie Robinson: 34
Babe Ruth: 80
Ryne Sandberg: 94
Mike Schmidt: 127
Duke Snider: 94
Billy Williams: 68
Ted Williams: 50
Dave Winfield: 92
Carl Yastrzemski: 68

If only Bobby Richardson could do more at the plate, because if you take him on his strikeouts per 162 games he's traveling in some very exclusive company---only Tony Gwynn among a random sample of Hall of Famers joins him as having fewer than thirty strikeouts per 162 games. On the other hand, Richardson also drew as many walks, almost, as he struck out---he had thirty walks per 162 games lifetime.

The best reason anyone can think of as to why Richardson was made a leadoff hitter is because that's what you did with middle infielders; only twice was he higher than 1.0 wins above a replacement player on defence.

I think another reason Richardson is remembered as being better than he really was is because of his 1960 World Series performance---he is still the only man to be named the World Series' most valuable player on the losing side---in particular and his lifetime .305 batting average in postseason play. In the 1960 Series, Richardson drove in twelve runs on eleven hits, seven of which were singles. He had a .387 on-base percentage and a .667 slugging percentage (four of his hits were extra bases: two doubles, two triples). In other words, in the 1960 World Series Bobby Richardson---whose lifetime on-base percentage was .299; whose lifetime OPS was .634---was playing way over his own head.

A single season or a single performance can leave you with an image out of all proportion to your reality. Phil Rizzuto, to name another Yankee middle infielder, was elected to the Hall of Fame in due course based on three factors, I think:

1) He won a Most Valuable Player award in 1950 in a season in which he, too, played way over his own head.
2) He was a Yankee, he was remembered, and all his years as a beloved broadcaster probably had a lot to do with his being that well remembered in the first place.
3) The election of Pee Wee Reese to the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 1984 put a shot of rocket fuel into the idea of Rizzuto being elected . . . even though the statistical case for Reese was ten times as strong as that for Rizzuto. By no means is Phil Rizzuto the worst player ever elected to the Hall of Fame, but Reese had a more powerful case.

I don't know that even his most ardent admirers would have considered Bobby Richardson a Hall of Famer on the best day of his life, even if he's long respected as a genuine gentleman. He played the game right but he just didn't play it well enough, and he shakes out as an overrated leadoff hitter who's probably remembered as being greater than he was because he played on several remarkable Yankee teams before the organisation began to collapse.

Tony Kubek wasn't that much better a hitter than Richardson---his lifetime on-base percentage is only four points higher than Richardson, and you have to wonder what the Yankees were thinking other than middle infielders hit at the top of the order and that's that, folks---but he was a terrific defencive shortstop who usually shook out above the league averages. I submit that having Clete Boyer and Tony Kubek as his infield partners makes Bobby Richardson look that much better than he actually was.

Old Honus is still a legend here in Pittsburgh, although there is nobody alive who was old enough to have seen him play. I've seen the gloves those guys played with and have seen oven mittens with more sophistication and design to catch. The earliest motion pictures I've seen of baseball date from the 1920's, when the gloves had made small improvements and you nearly always see the players using both hands to catch. I don't know if it was even physically possible to make one-handed catches with even anything nearing the ease that players do it today.

When I was a child, I had one of those ancient gloves, a pass-down from my paternal grandfather. If the fingers were long enough you could, theoretically, make a one-handed catch on a not-too-hard-hit ball. You'd probably have to pound the pocket furiously enough (a kitchen mallet or a ball-peen hammer would do the job), though. Especially if it was one of those gloves where one fat finger held your ring finger and pinkie in it.

The guys I really pitied in that era---the catchers. Imagine trying to catch Walter Johnson's heater or Burleigh Grimes's wet one two-handed, without your throwing hand being turned into a piece of raw, aging meat. The gloves weren't improved that much when Pittsburgh Pirate catchers began thanking God for Rip Sewell . . .

That day ALWAYS reminds me of being 5 or 6 years old again and the folks waking me up on Christmas morning! Darn it is FINALY here! Baseball is back!......Except that pitchers and catchers report ‘Christmas morning’ day last over 6 months! I bet you might have the same feelings.

I bet you forgot how foolish it is to bet on a sure thing. ;)

Do you see them white lines? They are there to hit the ball on. And them fellas in the middle are called fielders.---Casey Stengel, sending up a pinch hitter for the 1962 Mets, Jim Marshall. (P.S. Marshall promptly whacked a double . . . right down the right field line)
We try every way we can do to kill this game but for some reason nothing nobody does never hurts it.---Sparky Anderson.
The only problem with baseball is that, by the time you learn to play the game right, you can't play anymore.---Frank Howard.
It don't matter if you're ugly in this racket. All you have to do is hit the ball. And I never saw anybody hit one with his face.---Yogi Berra.
The World Series comes four times as often as the Iowa caucuses. What a wonderful country America is.---George F. Will.
The umpire doesn't say, "Work ball." I asked to be a ballplayer.---Willie Stargell.
Do you know what those Kamikaze pilots were screaming when they flew down the smokestacks? Not "Knute Rockne" or "Bronko Nagurski" but "Babe Ruth!"---Bo Belinsky.
The game is quintessentially American . . . in the way it tells us that much as you travel and far as you go, out to the green frontier, the purpose is to get home, back to where the others are, the pioneer ever striving to come back to the common place.---A. Bartlett Giamatti.
You've gotta let it grow up with you.---Babe Ruth.
Baseball is a dull game only to dull minds.---Red Smith.
That guy pitched the greatest game in baseball history and he still couldn't beat me, so I must be the greatest pitcher of all time!---Lew Burdette, bucking for a raise, the winter after he went the distance to win when Harvey Haddix of the Pirates lost his perfect game in the thirteenth inning. (P.S. Burdette got his laugh . . . and his raise.)
In baseball, there's just one word---you never know.---Joaquin Andujar.
An old man once said that if he could get through March, he usually found he lived 'til the end of the year. Old man, wherever you are: We made it.---George F. Will, spring training 1983.
@$%#&%$#@$%!!!!!---Ted Williams.

From the Babe Ruth era until the collapse of the Yankees after the 1964 World Series, were their ever three consecutive years when the Yankees missed playing in a World Series? I'll except the World War II years where the best talent was off fighting in the war.

Yes, there were:

1929-31, when the Philadelphia Athletics won three straight pennants (and back-to-back World Series in 1929-30) with their last truly great teams.
1933-35, when the Yankees finished second thrice in a row while pennants were being won by the Washington (First in war, first in peace, last in the American League!) Senators (1933) and the Detroit Tigers (1934-35).

The Yankees between the Ruth and CBS eras also lost back-to-back pennants in 1924-25 . . . to (you can look it up) the Senators. The Senators won their only World Series ring as the Senators in the first of those, with Walter Johnson winning the deciding game . . . in relief. Mark Gauvreau Judge, the grandson of Senators first baseman Joe Judge, has written a charming book about that championship season, Damn Senators: My Grandfather and the Story of Washington's Only World Series Championship.

The younger Judge (his father was the youngest of Joe Judge's four children) argues, in fact, that Joe Judge may have been the model for Joe Hardy in The Year The Yankees Lost the Pennant, the novel that seeded Damn Yankees!---author Douglas Wallop had once dated one of Judge's daughters and impressed the Judge family with how much he knew of the Senators' history. Hardy was established as living in Chevy Chase, Maryland---where Judge happened to live. And 24 September, the date Applegate established as the date on which Joe Hardy must turn in his soul in return for having become a baseball superstar, is Mark Gauvreau Judge's own birthday . . .

Joe Judge has been spoken of, sometimes, as a left-field candidate for the Hall of Fame. My read of his record is that he has a Bill Mazeroski-style case: he has lots of defence to sell that the Hall of Fame wouldn't buy for years and years. He was an off-the-charts defencive first baseman (he was a fair hitter who could drive in runs and had occasional power) who led the American League in fielding percentage seven times (including two spurts of three-in-a-row leadership). He may have been the best defencive first baseman the game had known in the pre-World War II era, and this at a time when Lou Gehrig was coming into the league and making everyone else forget every other first baseman in the game because he could plain hit the living crap out of everything thrown his way.

(I'll go out on a limb and suggest that Gehrig's arrival more than that of any other player probably did turn the Yankees into a no-questions-asked powerhouse: led solely by Babe Ruth, they went to three World Series in four years and won only one of them; led by Ruth and Gehrig they went to four World Series and won three of them; led by Gehrig primarily, but with Joe DiMaggio arriving in 1936, the Yankees went to four World Series and won all four of them, even with the fourth [1939] finishing the season in which Gehrig's illness forced his May retirement. In fact, the Gehrig-DiMaggio Yankees were the first Yankee teams to win four straight World Series; the only other Yankee teams to do that were the Stengel-DiMaggio-Berra-Mantle Yankees, winning five straight in Stengel's first five years managing them, DiMaggio's final three seasons, Berra's third through seventh seasons, and Mantle's first three. Babe Ruth may have finished making the Yankees formidable---it's often forgotten now, but the Yankees were actually predicted to have a clean shot at the 1920 American League pennant even before they bought Babe Ruth from the Red Sox---but Lou Gehrig secured them as a powerhouse.)

I was watching the Blackhawks hockey game and when I found out that Ron has passed, I left that game and went browsing for further info regarding Ron. Most of what I have read has been very positive and in line of what I know of him.

The only black mark I ever knew to be affixed to Ron Santo occurred during the 1969 pennant race. A nervous Cub rookie, Don Young, made two miscues in center field and Santo ripped thekid to the writers, making remarks about Young being more concerned about his batting average than what was happening in that inning.

The next day, Santo's remarks appeared all over the Chicago papers and he got booed lustily enough by his own home crowd when he batted in the game---even though he apologised to Young personally and to the team.

How key was Santo to the Cubs? Whenever a Cub pitcher knocked down or drilled an opposing hitter, Santo was the Cub most likely to be targeted for a retaliation pitch. Such an incident happened to open the two-game set with the Mets that ended up helping to send the Cubs on their way out of the race: Bill Hands, the Cub starter for the first of the two, opened the game by drilling Tommie Agee on the first pitch. Met starter Jerry Koosman waited until Santo's turn at bat in the bottom of the second, and every Cub knew what was coming. (Reserve catcher Gene Oliver: We just knew Santo was going on his ass.) Koosman drilled Santo on the wrist on the first pitch. The Cubs didn't even think about retaliating or even fighting, which relief pitcher Hank Aguirre swore to the day he died might have been an indicator that the Cubs were being worn down at last, which is just what they were---Leo Durocher's stubborn insistence on refusing to afford his regulars occasional rest, his refusal to trust his younger players, and his absolute refusal to trust just about anyone in his bullpen who wasn't named Phil (The Vulture) Regan, is precisely what took the steam out of the Cubs when the Mets re-heated to stay down the stretch. (Regan, a splendid relief pitcher who had come into his own since a sterling 1966 season with the pennant-winning Dodgers---Sandy Koufax hung his nickname on him, in fact---would never again be the same pitcher after 1969; Durocher's overuse pretty much burned him out for keeps by the end of 1970.)

This was also the set in which Durocher's season-long umpire baiting came home to roost but good; he'd already turned most of the National League's umpires against the Cubs with the tactic, to the point where the Cubs lost calls on a number of close plays that a) could have gone either way, or b) should have gone in the Cubs' favour. In the second game of the Met set, Agee was called safe at the plate even though Cub catcher Randy Hundley, who had to spin and sweep to get him, may have tagged him out just in time. Hundley exploded in a fit probably unseen around the plate since Ralph Houk went nuclear in a key game down the stretch in the 1950s, but the call stood and Agee's run proved to be the winning run.

William Barry Furlong wrote a sober article in Look early the next year, "How Durocher Blew the Pennant."

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