This is one of those articles where the author gets to sound smart because he's looking at everything with 20/20 hindsight. But 20/20 hindsight is kind of the point of this article.
Loyalty is a wonderful thing, and it can serve you well in many areas of your life. But there have been some teams who were blinded by the past and held on to a player just a little too long.
Now, in some of these cases, the teams in question didn't have another player ready to step in or an obvious replacement on the roster. But that's the point. The teams should have realized that these players were done much sooner than they did, and that's a big part of why they lost close races.
So the criteria for making this list is:
1. A player who had done well with his team in previous years
2. and had a brutal season in his last or next-to-last year with the team
3. and that team lost a close division or pennant race.
That's why Frankie Crosetti with the 1940 Yankees doesn't make the list. Crosetti hit .194 in 1940 as the Yankees lost their only American League race between 1936 and 1943, and ended up on the bench the next year. But Crosetti was a regular in 1942 and 1943, when the Yankees won. He wasn't good in those years, by any means, but on this one, I'm going to defer to Joe McCarthy.
Here is the list of some players who did make the cut (Statistical data from Retrosheet and the Baseball-Reference Play Index, which is more commonly known as the wonderful Baseball-Reference Play Index):
Bobby Thomson and Danny O'Connell, 1956 Braves: Thomson, of course, is best known for his home run in the 1951 playoff and several insomnia-curing television interviews in later years, but he was a decent player for a long time.
After missing most of 1954 with an injury, Thomson was Milwaukee's regular left fielder in 1955, as Hank Aaron moved to right and Andy Pafko moved to the bench. In 1956, Thomson hit 20 home runs, but that was his only good stat. Among the eight Braves regulars, he ranked eighth in on-base percentage and seventh in slugging.
Thomson's stats from June 14 to the end of season: 298 at bats, .211 batting, 286 on-base and .369 slugging. The Braves lost four one-run games he started in September, and lost the race by one game.
The Braves had Wes Covington on the bench, who hit .283 as a rookie. Covington was hitting .405 at the end of June, and admittedly didn't hit as well when he started (.262) as when he didn't (.343). Still, the Braves were 21-12 in his starts, and Covington had only eight plate appearance in September. He was intentionally walked twice and had two hits.
Having Covington in the lineup would also have given the Braves three left-handed batters in their regular lineup (Eddie Mathews and Bill Bruton were the others). Three lefties might have meant more lefty pitchers facing the Braves. Based on what's available of the platoon data, Hank Aaron hit .373 against lefties in 1956 and .375 with nine homers in 112 at bats in 1957.
O'Connell is a different problem, as the Braves were actually 9-13 when he sat and 83-49 when he started. But from June 22 to the end of the season, his stats in 335 at bats were .215 batting, .324 on-base, .281 slugging.
O'Connell, Thomson and Ray Crone were traded to the Giants for Red Schoendienst on June 15, 1957. The Braves, 32-21 at that point, went 63-38 the rest of the way, and won the World Series.
Don Buford, 1972 Orioles: In a pitcher's year, everyone on the Orioles except Don Baylor, Bobby Grich and Boog Powell spent 1972 in a funk. Buford's drop was the most sudden.
Buford played at a Hall of Fame level when the Orioles won the American League East from 1969-71. He scored 99 runs in each of those three years, and added 47 homers with a cumulative on-base percentage over .400.
He started off well in 1972 (.286 with a .402 on-base percentage on May 15) but then lost it, and never came close to getting it back. After May 15, Buford hit .187 in 393 plate appearances, with a .308 on-base percentage and a .248 slugging average.
What was especially frustrating that season was that Buford kept doing just enough to make you think he was breaking out of his slump. After a 2-for-52 stretch dropped Buford to .186, he ran off a six-game hit streak. In all, Buford had 16 multi-hit games after May 15, and in one stretch in July had 10 hits in five games.
Which makes one thing pretty obvious: When Buford wasn't getting multiple hits, he was pretty worthless. Overall, he finished at .206, with career lows as a regular in virtually every offensive category. In the only year they would fail to win the division from 1969-74, the Orioles finished third, five games back, and Buford never played in the majors again.
Gene Alley, 1972-73 Pirates: Alley, a regular in the 1960s, was a bit player when the Pirates won the World Series in 1971. But he became a full-time regular at shortstop again in 1972.
Alley started the year well enough at the bat, and was hitting .281 in mid-June. The rest of the year, he hit .222 in 194 at bats. Still, the Pirates won the division by 11 games, and faced the Reds in the National League Championship Series.
PIrates manager Bill Virdon had his options limited in the NLCS because Bob Robertson drove off a cliff and never came back in 1972. Robertson, who could have played first base for Pittsburgh with Willie Stargell in left field, skidded from .271 with 26 homers in 1971 to .193 with 12 homers.
That left Virdon with two reasonable options against the Reds. He could play Rennie Stennett at shortstop and bench Alley, with Gene Clines (a .334 hitter in 1972) in the outfield, or he could play Stennett in left, Alley at short and put Clines on the bench (Dave Cash was still on the Pirates at this point, which is why Stennett wasn't at second base.)
Virdon went with his defense, and got an 0-for-16 performance from Alley in the NLCS. The Pirates lost in five games.
in 1973 the Pirates were dealing with the death of Roberto Clemente, and Steve Blass acquiring the mental disease that would take on his name. Down a right fielder and a starting pitcher, the Pirates still should have won in 1973. The only two other decent teams in the division were the Cardinals (who started off 5-20) and the Mets, who lost just about everyone to injuries.
And you can make a pretty good case that Gene Alley kept the Pirates from winning the NL East in 1973. Alley kept his starting job, and again started off well at the bat. On April 24, he was hitting .293, and the Pirates had won seven of his 10 starts.
The problem was the rest of the season. From April 25 on, Alley hit .171 with three extra-base hits and zero RBI in 117 at bats. His on-base plus slugging was 468 -- and he started 31 times!
The Pirates finished with a record of 21-22 with Alley starting (at one point they were 7-1 with him starting). Seven of those losses were by one run.
Alley's last start was on July 20. Virdon realized a player with those numbers shouldn't play a key offensive role, so he made Alley a pinch hitter. That, and a pinch runner (he stole one base on the season) and defensive sub.
As a pinch hitter, Alley was, somewhat unsurprisingly, 0 for 11. He pinch ran eight times, and came around to score once.
The Pirates lost the division by 2.5 games. Alley never played after 1973, and the Pirates won the division in 1974 and 1975.
Darrell Evans, 1988 Tigers: Unlike the other players on this list, Evans actually hit better toward the end of the season.
Not much better, mind you (.229 from August 31 on) but at least with enough walks and power to make him a valuable player.
Which he wasn't for most of the season. Evans had given the Tigers four excellent years, but he struggled from the start in 1988. Evans did hit 22 homers and walked 84 times, but added only nine doubles, grounded into 14 double plays and was 1-for-5 as a base stealer. He finished at .208, with his lowest on-base and slugging averages since he became a regular. The Tigers lost the race by one game.
Unlike the other examples here, the Tigers did not rebound after Evans went to the Braves in 1989. They crashed right to the bottom of the American League East.
If you look at this list, these are all good players. They just weren't dropped by their teams quickly enough.