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.
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.
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.
I remember Clete Boyer playing for the Braves in late 60’s and early 70’s. As a kid 1969 was the first year I remember following baseball and Boyer played for the NL West winning Braves team that had Aaron, Rico Carty and Orlando Cepeda.
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: 68If 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.
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
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.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.
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.
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 . . .