Epic Yankees Flameout Seasons! Episode Seven!!

To quote Abraham Lincoln, all dreaded it, all sought to avert it.  But here it is anyway!  Epic Yankees Yankees Flameout Seasons, Episode Seven!

The year was 1975, and we had responded to President Gerald R. Ford’s bold “Whip Inflation Now” campaign by turning him into a human shooting gallery.  Fortunately, both nutbag attempts on the president’s life left him alive and unscathed, which was more than you could say for the New York Yankees.

Yankees 83-77, 3^rd in a six-team division.

This was the second year of the team’s exile in Queens—a.k.a., “the Flushing Remonstrance”—while the exciting new, plastic replica of the original Yankee Stadium was being slowly and incompetently erected in the Bronx, at huge cost overruns. 

Background:

The 1974 Yankees had made a surprising, late-season run at the division title, finishing just two games behind the Orioles, and staying in contention until the last weekend of the season.

Now, after considerable changes and additions, the 1975 team was favored to take the AL East, and maybe the whole cabana.  Unlike the 1973 fraud, this looked like the real deal, a deep, carefully constructed team built by a crack front office headed by a savvy baseball lifer, Gabe Paul. 

Paul had even had a relatively free hand to do this, as George Steinbrenner had been suspended by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, himself a future felon, for making illegal contributions to President Ford’s predecessor. 

Paul had taken full advantage of the opportunity.  First, he’d brought Chris Chambliss, a slick-fielding, good-hitting first baseman over from Cleveland as a matching Indian bookend to Graig Nettles, slowly coming into his own at third.  The price had seemed exorbitant—pitchers Fritz Peterson, Steve Kline, Fred Beene, and Tom Buskey—but was already proving to be a steal.

Up the middle were the Toe-like veteran, Sandy Alomar, who plugged a gap at second left by the departure of you-know-who, and Academy Award-winning actor James Mason—sorry, shortstop Jim Mason—who had been purchased from Texas and looked like a talented young player.

Behind the plate was Munson, and in the outfield were Piniella, White, and Elliot Maddox, another Rangers purchasee—apparently they were short on cash in Dallas, during those oil-boom years—who hit .303, played the entire last month with a hernia, and covered so much ground in centerfield that he finished 8^th in the AL MVP voting.

But the outfield also contained the second most dynamic acquisition by the Yanks since they had picked up Roger Maris before the 1960 season.  One-time franchise player and designated Mickey-Mantle successor Bobby Murcer, had dropped to just 10 home runs in 1974, which was generally blamed on Shea, a bad ballpark named for a good man.

In fact, though, all of Murcer’s hitting stats had declined precipitously for two years running, regardless of ballpark, and seeing this Paul dealt him for Bobby Bonds.  Bonds was seen as never having quite achieved his own potential because he was not the new Willie Mays, but he was a terrific ballplayer, a Gold Glove outfielder who constantly turned in 30-30 seasons at a time when nobody else did.

In pitching, though, was where the Yanks had made their biggest splash, signing Catfish Hunter, the 1974 Cy Young Award winner and veteran of the A’s great champion teams.  Behind him, they had Doc Medich, who had won 34 games in first two seasons and seemed ready to become a star; Pat Dobson, who’d won 19 games in 1974, and Rudy May and Larry Gura, who Gabe Paul had picked up for the stretch drive that year, and who both looked like real finds.

The bullpen wasn’t deep, but Paul had pulled in Dick Tidrow in the Chambliss deal, and there was the ace closer, Sparky Lyle.  On the bench was a wide collection of promising young players and still useful vets, including Ron Blomberg, Rick Dempsey, Chicken Stanley, Terry Whitfield, Rich Coggins, Alex Johnson, Kerry Dineen, and Otto Velez.  This Yankees team looked deep, and set.

Where have we heard that before?

What happened:

Once again, injuries and implosions.

The team got off to a very slow start.  The Yanks were picked to open against Cleveland, which had just hired Frank Robinson as the sport’s first black manager—believe it or not—and the Indians, for once, were stoked.  Playing before more than 56,000 fans, F. Robby served as his own DH and homered in the first inning.  Medich, who got the start by looking lights-out in spring training, was hammered—the start of a disappointing season.

From there, it only got worse, as the Yanks began 1-6.  Catfish started very slow, outside the friendly confines of Oakland-Alameda, going 1-3 with a 5.71 ERA in April. 

Slowly, the team started to turn it around.  They belted Boston, 12-1, in their traditional morning, Patriot’s Day game, then Medich shutout the Sox, 5-0.  But the following afternoon, the bullpen failed to hold a 7-3 lead for Hunter, losing 11-7, something that would augur much worse.

A pattern for the season had been set, in which the Yanks took one step forward, and another one back.  By May 1^st they were 10-10, but then they slumped to 12-18.  The pitching did kick into gear, and on June 25^th they reached the high point of the season, in first place by one-and-a-half games over Boston after sweeping a tough Orioles team in Baltimore, and holding them to just 1 run in all three games.

But the injuries had started to pile up—really horrible, career-wrecking stuff in some cases.  Blomberg got hurt, played just 34 games on the year, and was never an effective, regular player again.  Much the same happened to Maddox, who was having another terrific season when he caught his foot in, yes, another patented Mickey Mantle sprinkler divot and went down after just 55 games, never to regain his old form. 

So it went.  Piniella missed more than half the year with a freak, inner-ear infection, and hit all of .196 with ten ribbies.  Bonds badly injured his legs, but kept playing anyway, though at reduced effectiveness.  Alomar stole bases, but could do little else, while a star WASN’T born in Jim Mason, who collapsed completely, batting just .152 and making 25 errors in only 94 games, a season that made Stephen Drew look like a star.

Gabe Paul kept acquiring fresh platoons of players and rushing them into action—Ed Brinkman, Bob Oliver, Walt “No Neck” Williams.  Bobby Bonds kept dragging his battered body around the field.  In the famous “Three Catchers” game of June 15^th, Hunter shut out the White Sox with Munson in left, Rick Dempsey in right, and Ed Herrmann behind the plate.  But they could not keep it up.

The beginning of the end came, as it so often does, in Boston. Up in Beantown for a showdown on June 26^t, , they were shut down by Luis Tiant in the opener and lost three of four, when Catfish could not quite hold a 2-0 lead in the ninth. The bullpen then started to go south, with Lyle having one of his worst years as a Yankee.

The end came on July 27^th, in a Sunday doubleheader against the Sox at Shea.  The Yanks had split the first two games of the series, barely holding on at 8 games back.  But then Catfish lost a heartbreaker to Bill Lee, 1-0 in the opener, when they could not score despite loading the bases with two outs in the fifth, and two on with one out in the sixth (sound familiar?), Mason making a critical, game-losing error in the ninth.  In the nightcap, they started rookie Tippy Martinez, and got smoked, 6-0.

For the second year in three, the Yanks’ season had been upended by a lost doubleheader at home against the Red Sox, and somebody in the front office had seen enough.  Manager Bill Virdon was fired four days later, and unfortunately, Texas had just canned Billy Martin, who began his many visitations with the Yankees. The team played little better down the stretch with Billy at the helm, though, their only notable accomplishment was taking three-of-four against Baltimore at the end of the season…to give the Red Sox the division title.

Bright spots:

Bonds put up another, 30-30 season, despite playing on bum pins most of the year.  Nettles continued to progress, Chambliss hit .304, Roy White had an excellent, bounce-back season, and Munson had one of his best years ever.

Aside from Lyle and Pat Dobson, the pitching staff did very well, finishing third in the league.  Hunter, above all, deserved to have a 30-win season.  He finished 23-14, with 7 shutouts and 30—count ’em, thirty—complete games, and easly got seven or more losses or no-decisions due to the failings of Lyle, the fielding behind him, and the Yanks’ hitting meltdowns.

What happened next:

Gabe Paul reconfigured, reloaded, and put together a champion. 

Medich, who’d been a disappointing 16-16, 3.50 ERA, was traded to Pittsburgh for another Dock, Ellis, and Willie Randolph.  Bonds was rewarded for his valor with a trade to California, which brought in Ed Figueroa and Mickey Rivers. 

Rudy May and Rick Dempsey would go to Baltimore in the deal that brought us Doyle Alexander and Ken Holtzman—but which would cost us Tippy Martinez and Rick Dempsey. Fortunately, Rudy, at least, was retrieved for a couple more very good years in the Bronx.

Then there was Martin, whose style of play gave the team a vital jolt in 1976, but whose runaway, alcohol-fueled lunacy would prove debilitating in so many ways over the long run. 

Thanks to Billy, for instance, Gura was dealt away for just Fran Healey, because Billy never liked him.  Because Billy had seen him going off to play tennis once in spring training, and he didn’t think ballplayers should play tennis (Apparently, his old paisan Joe DiMaggio never told Billy he was a great tennis player.)

Worst of all was a little foreshadowing of horrors to come in the season Hunter had.  Twelve of Catfish’s complete games and 120 of his astonishing 328 innings came in August and September, when the Yanks were already hopelessly out of it.

Hunter, who was just 29, would never be quite the same pitcher again.  And Billy and his favorite drinking partner, pitching killer coach Art Fowler would go on wrecking one bright young Yankees hurler after another, for years to come.