Fireball Wenz recently posted an intriguing little quiz recently in Reader’s Posts that tied in neatly with an oddity I’ve been tracking down, as yet another digression in my study of Batter’s Families.  (Isn’t this a terrific gig? I keep getting sidetracked, and I keep getting more article-ideas from every new sidetrack.)  Looking through the numbers on bbref splits, I was surprised to learn that, alone among the great hitters on the all-time list of plate appearances, Carl Yastrzemski stood out like a gangrenous big toe for having a sizable difference in his OPS facing right-handed and left-handed pitching, very nearly a .200 difference in OPS over a 23-year career.

That’s a lot, but not necessarily a lot for an average player, who will routinely sit on the bench on days when an especially tough pitcher for him is on the mound.  Even Willie Stargell and Willie McCovey (about whom, more later), lefty sluggers I studied in the last Batter’s Families piece, had significant platoon differences, but that was one of my main points about the WiIlies: they got platooned a lot, maybe even, in retrospect, too much.  What sticks out about Yaz was how little he got platooned, with that sizable platoon split, and how much time he spent high up in the Red Sox batting order against left-handed pitching with so many other good batters in the lineup.

I noticed Yaz’s platoon split because it was by far the largest of the twelve career plate-appearances leaders I looked at in that Batter’s Families study. The split was much more typical of a player who was platooned for much of his career, or at least who was "rested" frequently against tough same–side pitchers. (In Yaz’s case, that same side was the left side. Yaz batted lefty, as you no doubt recall, but he threw right-handed, which allowed him to play a little third-base in 1972, an oddity I wrote about in my first contribution to Bill James’ work in the 1986 Baseball Abstract. There are a few more moments where my own life intersected with Yaz’s career, which motivates me to explore that career in a little depth. Though I might seem to be making observations about Yaz that are a little negative, rest assured I’m interested because I’ve been a fan of his for over fifty years, a fanship I’ll raise here where it seems even vaguely relevant. This is a labor of love, I assure you. Tough love, maybe, but love nonetheless.)  With that sort of platoon split, you’d wonder, as I did, how it was that Captain Carl avoided being platooned substantially.  After all, I reasoned, you don’t get on the list of all-time leaders in plate appearances without playing every day for decades. (Yaz is actually #2, behind only Pete Rose in Career Plate Appearances.)  I even expressed in my splits article the heretical view (in New England anyway) that some Sox manager might have noticed somewhere along the line, "Hey, Carl isn’t doing too well facing lefties lately, maybe I should give him a day or two off."

With that kind of platoon disadvantage, there must have been periods when Yaz wasn’t hitting lefties at all. Further, I reasoned that Yaz also had (as all Sox hitters do) a significant advantage hitting at Fenway, meaning that he was at a similar disadvantage on the road (.904/.779 OPS, Fenway/Road), so facing a lefty on the road when he was going through a particular down period makes it seem almost inevitable that Yaz must have had some road trips when he not only couldn’t hit lefties in theory but wasn’t hitting lefties at all in practice. And still he played every day for decades on end.

By way of an (admittedly unfair) comparison, look at Yaz next to Henry Aaron. It’s fair, in that this comparison is between the two highest platoon differences among the top 12 all-time PA leaders, but of course it’s mostly unfair because, well, it’s Hank Aaron I’m comparing Yaz to, and very few players’ records will look good next to his. Still, it’s instructive: Aaron’s second highest platoon difference on the PA leaders chart is much lower than Yaz’s, as I noted in the previous article, .102 OPS points, a little more than half of Yaz’s .199 point difference. More significant is the level of Aaron’s overall OPS, .944 (Yaz’s lifetime OPS was .841.) The .944 OPS meant that even when Aaron lost .102 OPS points he could clearly outplay anyone else in baseball, while Yaz’s losing .199 OPS points off a smaller base reduced him to a lifetime .642 OPS facing lefties,  not a distinguished mark and especially not for a corner OFer/DH/ 1Bman playing in Fenway Park.  Including pitchers, the team OPS on the Sox during Yaz’s career was higher than .642, meaning that Yaz probably could have been replaced easily against lefties, and helped his team, at some point during the weaker second half of his career. As I say, he played day-in and day-out for decades.

To forestall any thinking that I’m negative on Yaz here, I’ll document my fanship with the coincidence that his career was a lot of peaks and valleys, some of which I witnessed personally. He was a very durable player from his rookie year, 1961, through 1979, when he stopped hitting lefties, almost entirely and almost permanently. I was a resident of Boston in 1978 and the first half of 1979, studying creative writing at BU, so my first office as a graduate instructor was just a few blocks from Fenway Park, and several afternoons during my MA year (Masters degree and Massachusetts) were spent in the cheap seats in Fenway’s grandstand, rooting for Captain Carl and all the Sox. Although I didn’t know it until years afterwards, the first ballgame I’d ever attended, at Yankee Stadium when I was 8, also featured Yaz as a rookie, so I literally witnessed at least some of each end of his productive career, which lasted through those 19 seasons.

Yaz was elected to the Hall of Fame his first shot of the box, in 1989, gaining over 96% of the vote, and no one doubts that he deserves that honor richly, so please don’t get the idea that I’m running him down. But many of his 23 seasons with the Sox were surprisingly unproductive years. He had about the same number of outstanding years as Sandy Koufax did, which surprised me when I looked up his records, not only because Yaz played almost twice as long as Koufax but because I’d thought of their records as being extremely divergent, Yaz getting into the Hall on the basis of a long and stellar career and Koufax getting in on the basis of a much shorter but far more stellar career. As it happens, though, they had about the same number of spectacular seasons, a half dozen or fewer, depending on your definition of "spectacular," and a small number of mediocre seasons in Koufax’s case and a large number of mediocre seasons in Yaz’s. But both their cases for the Hall rest on their five or six best years alone, all of which took place in the decade 1961-1970.

Without getting into the WAR wars, I’ll just note that bbref in its latest WAR 2.2 iteration defines an MVP-type season as being above 8.0 WAR, and an All-Star year as being 5.0 or better. Seasons below 5.0 (down to 2.0 WAR) are those of a regular player. It’s a convenient scale, conforming to a shorthand scale from 1-10 that I’ve used myself from time to time, with a 10 or better being a strong MVP year, a 9 being a regular MVP year, an 8 being a weak MVP-type year, a 7 being a strong All-Star year, a 6 being a regular All-Star year, a 5 being a weak All-Star year, a 4 being a strong regular, a 3 being a regular, a 2 being a weak regular and below a 2 being a substitute.  My system is just shorthand, as I say, the numbers not representing anything besides a 1-10 scale, but it does conform almost exactly to bbref’s careful measurement of WAR values, to which you may or may not subscribe. Its usefulness here is just to indicate Yaz’s and Koufax’s cases for the Hall of Fame.

Simply, I don’t really count anything below 5.0 as qualifying. Decades of 4-4.9 type play qualify, of course, as a good MLB player, and I give lots of credit for good regular play, just not a lot of credit towards the Hall. This is the old argument against "compilers," of course, players who accumulate lots of counting stats due to years of average to above-average play, but who never or rarely rise to the level of exceptional talent which is what the Hall of Fame (to my mind) is intended to honor. I don’t even know if any HoFer is actually there on the basis of compiled records, and I don’t really want to engage in this tedious discussion again, but I do think that some are in on the basis of a half-dozen or more years of excellent play, and others are in on that basis plus numerous years of compiled numbers. Koufax is in on the first score, and Yaz is in on the second. So no one mistakes my purpose here, let me repeat one final time: I think they’re both over-qualified for the HoF.

But year-by-year it may be closer than you’d think, and I was surprised by whose peak seasons ranked higher:

Yaz’s best year was clearly 1967, when he accumulated 12.4 WAR. Koufax’s best was 1963 with 10.7. Advantage Yaz, 1.7 WAR.

Second-best, 1968 for Yaz with 10.5 WAR, and 1966 for Koufax with 10.3. Yaz’s advantage is now 1.8.

Third-best is 1970 for Yaz with 9.5, and 1965 for Koufax with 8.1, almost doubling Yaz’s slim lead to 3.2.

Yaz’s fourth best year in WAR was 1963 with 6.6, Koufax’s fourth-best being 1964 with 7.4.  Yaz’s advantage is down to 2.4.

Yaz’s fifth-best season was 1969 with 5.5, while Koufax’s was 1961 with 5.7, cutting that advantage down to 2.2.

Beyond this point, all the WAR advantages are Yaz’s, so you could say he has an unquestionable edge over Koufax in every way conceivable: He has the three-best individual seasons, he leads by 2.2 WAR over their five best seasons, and he has a huge lead over the remainder of their careers. Furthermore, Koufax’s best years are diminished if you count his negative WAR points as a batter. (I’m not sure if they are already factored in to his pitching numbers, but they’re only a very small negative in any case, ranging from +0.5 to -0.8 WAR.) Yaz accumulated a few more years in the high 4s and low 5s, meaning years as a strong regular/ weak All-Star, while Koufax only put up one more year, 1962, in even that range (4.4)—otherwise, Koufax’s other years don’t amount to anything worth a mention.

It’s on the basis of those five superb years that make both men into first-ballot HoFers. Koufax has zero argument for the HoF outside of those five years, but some folks might argue that Yaz is completely different, playing for 18 other seasons in which he put up, let’s say, weak or arguable HoF numbers. I would dispute that case. Yaz’s case outside of his five best years is pretty weak.

He made the All-Star team in many of those years, won Gold Glove awards aplenty, and put up some decent counting stats in several of those years, though I would argue against each of those qualifications.  The other All-Star game selections, I would argue, are partly due to his reputation from his peak seasons. In themselves, they’re, well, what my counting system (and bbref’s by extension) calls "weak All-Star years" meaning that they’re years in which several players are at that level, some of whom make the All-Star team and some of whom don’t. Yaz did. His career numbers gave him the edge in many of those latter All-star appearances. Since the All-Star team is whatever the voters decide it is, I’m not arguing against Yaz’s selection, simply pointing out that in many of those years (Yaz made the All-Star team in 18 seasons, at LF, at CF, and once at 1B), he wasn’t among the half-dozen best outfielders in the American League, for what that’s worth. (At a guess, he probably deserved about a dozen All-Star appearances at most, selected purely on merit, which is still a dozen more than most players earn.)

Likewise with the Gold Gloves: it’s somewhat unusual to get (and to deserve) a Gold Glove for playing LF, however well, and most of those years there were at least three AL CFers and RFers who deserved a nod over Yaz as one of the league’s three best fielding outfielders. Again, the overall reputation he earned in 1967 and 1968 and 1970 won him his Gold Gloves in 1971 and 1977.  The 1977 Gold Glove is especially suspect: Chet Lemon, Ruppert Jones, Mickey Rivers, and Fred Lynn all made more than a half a play per game than Yaz did in 1977, among those who didn’t win a Gold Glove that season. (Two other AL outfielders who did win a Gold Glove, Juan Beniquez and  Al Cowens , also put up better defensive numbers than Yaz did in 1977, as did several other outfielders who didn’t win the award, like Amos Otis and Lyman Bostock. Most of these players were in their twenties and hadn’t yet built their reputations for defensive excellence. Yaz was 37 years old in 1977.)  But it’s the "counting stats" argument that I’d mostly like to address for a moment here.

It’s well known that Fenway Park is a great advantage for a hitter to have, but it’s no doubt true that Yaz’s strongest years were great offensive years wherever he played, hitter’s park or no. His career year, 1967, when he won the Triple Crown, is famous but it’s less well-known that he actually put up a slightly better OPS in 1970, 10.44 to 10.41 (though relative to league, 1967 is the better year.) And Yaz had a slightly off-setting disadvantage to the great advantage gained by playing in Fenway: his peak career years were in the late 1960s, a notorious down-era for offensive stats.  Still, there’s no denying that Yaz benefitted overall from playing in a hitter’s park for his entire career, or that his entire argument for the Hall of Fame rests on his numbers over his first ten seasons.

From 1961 to 1970, he put up amazing numbers, numbers so spectacular that he could get in the Hall of Fame on them alone: he played 1544 games (out of about 1620 Red Sox games in those ten years) and batted .297 with a .390 OBP and .496 SLG for an overall .887 OPS, in the toughest decade for batters since the dead-ball era.  In 1961-70, he won three batting titles, one Home Run championship (plus two other 40 HR years) and one RBI championship. Would this decade alone qualify Yaz for the HoF? If he had been forced to retire after the 1970 season, I could make a case for him to be inducted, and it’s not the weakest case for the Hall of Fame I’ve seen, by a long shot. But it’s a very solid basis for the Hall as buttressed by a few more years of accumulating counting stats.

Which, I would argue, is essentially what he accomplished, only with many more than a few years of accumulating counting stats: the remainder of Yaz’s career, from 1971 through 1983, is pretty weak sauce, especially when considering what Fenway adds to batters’ stats (plus the improved offense of the 1970s compared to the 1960s). Over the next 13 seasons, Yaz played in 1764 more games and put up a .275 BA with .370 OBP and an .800 OPS. He drove in almost a thousand runs during this period (975) and hit over 200 HRs (210), which sounds very impressive until you realize that he never came very close to leading the league in either category ever again, and only led in a single category (runs with 93 in 1974) in this entire period. His slash figures for the years he played over 144 games during this period is as follows:

	HR	RBI	BA
1971	15	70	.254
1972	12	68	.264
1973	19	95	.296
1974	15	79	.301
1975	14	60	.269
1976	21	102	.267
1977	28	102	.296
1978	17	81	.277
1979	21	87	.270
1971-9    (average 146 games)	18	83	.278

 

That might not look so bad, 18/ 83/ .278, for the downside of a career, but I want you to consider four factors that all degrade the somewhat limited superficial appeal of 18/ 83/.278:

1)     This was achieved batting half his games in Fenway Park

2)     This was achieved playing corner outfield, 1B, and DH

3)     This was achieved playing full-time

4)     This was achieved with a huge platoon split

It is the final one I’d like to focus on here—this is really what this essay is about, though I was distracted by how much of Yaz’s case is based so few dominant seasons. He was a great ballplayer, a deserving Hall of Famer, and at his peak the most riveting player in the game to me—but over these final years he averaged 18/ 83/.278 WHILE BATTING SUBSTANTIALLY WORSE AGAINST LEFT-HANDED PITCHING.  In other words, the Red Sox continued to play him every day with ordinary stats (in addition to the 146 game average, Yaz averaged 610 PAs during this 9-year period) even though he had truly awful stats against left-handed pitching.

Let me show what I mean, though you can extrapolate easily enough from the lifetime .199 career OPS difference that piqued my interest in the first place.

From 1971 through 1979, here’s what he did against left-handed pitching:

	G	PA	AB	R	H	2B	3B	HR	RBI	SB	CS	BB	SO	BA	OBP	SLG	OPS
1971	76	174	142	15	29	3	1	3	24	2	1	28	32	.204	.333	.303	.636
1972	71	183	155	23	37	5	0	3	24	0	1	21	23	.239	.333	.329	.662
1973	64	166	138	18	32	5	1	3	25	0	2	26	25	.232	.349	.348	.697
1974	76	187	160	27	48	4	1	4	30	1	3	23	24	.300	.380	.413	.792
1975	66	162	146	15	31	4	0	3	17	1	1	14	29	.212	.278	.301	.579
1976	82	179	159	18	37	2	0	6	27	1	0	17	27	.233	.307	.358	.666
1977	76	161	149	19	40	7	1	4	29	2	0	8	10	.268	.298	.409	.708
1978	60	150	131	17	33	3	1	6	22	0	0	14	14	.252	.329	.427	.756
1979	62	134	120	14	26	4	0	1	14	0	0	10	17	.217	.276	.275	.551

 

Now that’s a lot of playing time against left-handed pitching with not very impressive results over a long period of time, between 120 and 160 ABs every single year, exactly 1300 ABs and 313 hits, a .241 batting average over nine seasons, two very full 650 AB seasons to notice that the numbers aren’t maybe so hot. The BA, for example, is actually in line with his previous performance against lefthanders even during his peak decade because his overall BA against lefthanders for his entire career, remember, is a mere .244.  So it wasn’t as if the Sox were waiting for him to revert to previous form—this WAS Yaz’s consistent performance against lefthanders, and they kept sending him out there to face them every day.

In the Sox’ defense, there could be good reasons to keep sending someone out to play every day against left-handed pitching when he wasn’t very good against left-handed pitching:

1)     Yaz played good defense. If your star isn’t good against a certain type of pitcher but you need him in the field, well, bat him lower in the order maybe, and get your offense elsewhere. (414 career games at DH somewhat undermines this argument.)

2)     Platooning Yaz would have been a very unpopular move. Yaz was and is a revered figure in Boston, and platooning him would have taken an awful lot of guts for any manager to decide.

3)     If you don’t have anyone better, clearly better, to replace him with, you have to live with what he gives you.

This is where the Fireball’s quiz comes in. In summary, for those who skipped it, the Sox in 1975 had 8 players with very impressive resumes, five former or future Gold Glove outfielders (Evans, Lynn, Miller, Beniquez, and Yaz), one future HoFer (Rice), one former HR champ (Tony C.), and one current player with a 143 OPS+ in over 400 ABs (Carbo).  It’s a little misleading, in that it takes in four positions, not three (Yaz played almost exclusively at 1B that year, so the implication that the question is about outfielders is wrong, if you took it like that) or really five, since Tony C. played DH that year, and some of the years are pretty flukey (Miller and Beniquez didn’t really do much in MLB, despite their Gold Gloves). But a cool question nonetheless.

As the Fireball noted, the Sox had recently traded away outfielders Reggie Smith and Ben Ogilvie, who would go on to have very productive careers (Smith got them Carbo and Rick Wise, Ogilvie got them a washed-up Dick McAuliffe.). He didn’t mention Cecil Cooper, who had a pretty good year in 1975 (.311 BA in over 100 games at DH and 1B) and who would be traded soon for Boomer Scott, the once and future Sox slugger, nor did he mention Danny Cater, whom they jettisoned that spring.   And for that matter, he might have included 1B-man and DH Deron Johnson (for 3 games) who once upon a time drove in 130 runs in a season.  But my point here, if not the Fireball’s, is that the Sox had corner OFers and DHs and 1B-men coming out of the wazoo in the mid-1970s, whom they discarded like so many deuces in a poker game, yet kept batting Yaz in the middle of the lineup against lefthanded pitching when his numbers were screaming "Hey, I can’t hit these guys anymore!"

If they couldn’t hang onto their own righthanded 1B-DH-corner OF types anymore to platoon with Yaz, you’d think that they could pick one up in a trade or purchase one pretty easily, as they had in 1973, when they got a productive year out of a 35-year old Orlando Cepeda. After all, finding a platoon partner for Yaz, in the form of an aging righthanded bat who can play DH or 1B, sometimes in a corner OF spot (rarely necessary, as Rice and Evans established themselves) just wouldn’t be that hard. Every winter, nearly every NL team has available for trade (or waivers or release) some right-handed slugger  who can’t play the field well or hit righties anymore but who could do a decent job in those 120-160 ABs.

It wasn’t until Yaz had reached the age of 40, after 19 seasons of playing over 93% of Red Sox games, that he became a part-time player in 1980, when he was mostly sit down against left-handed starters.  You can almost date the collapse of the 1979 season, and Yaz’s career, very precisely: the morning of July 8, 1979, Boston was in the middle of a road series in Seattle, and it was almost exactly the halfway point of the season. Boston had just played its 81^st game of the year (they would play 160 games, so it’s not exactly halfway) and Yaz had played in 76 of them, starting 74. Here’s how his numbers stood that morning:

AB	R	H	HR	RBI	BA	OBP	SLG	OPS
275	44	84	16	56	.305	.397	.553	.950

 

That’s pretty damned good, right? You might even say spectacular, especially for a man a month shy of his 40^th birthday. He was halfway to a slash year of 30 HRs, 100 RBI and a .300 BA, even if he dipped slightly in the second half. That .950 OPS, playing every day, would have been the third highest of his long career, behind only the legendary 1967 and the should-be-legendary 1970.  Then in the second half of the season, the racecar that was Yaz’s 1979 blew a tire. And then blew another tire. And then the water pump exploded. Still the Red Sox kept putting him out there every day, and this is how he did, in the remaining half-season starting that afternoon:

 

AB	R	H	HR	RBI	BA	OBP	SLG	OPS
243	25	56	5	31	.230	.285	.333	.619

 

He was chasing 3,000 hits at the time (he got it, off the Yankees, on September 12^th)  The Red Sox were 51-30  on the morning of July 8th, 2 games behind the Orioles, but well ahead of them on Pythagorean percentage (.627 to .586) so there was every reason for optimism on their part.  From that point on, however, they played .500 ball (40-39, actually) and finished 11 and a half games out.  Yaz’s OPS against lefthanders for the season was .551 and while I don’t want to claim that was more significant than any other factor in the Red Sox’ collapse, it certainly made them reconsider the wisdom of playing Yaz every day. By 1980, he played against lefthanders less than half as often, minimizing the effect of his sub-.600 OPS.

Even after 1979, when the Sox started sitting Yaz down now and then, he still batted remarkably high in the order when he played:  in 1981, he started 85 games, and 80 of them were batting #3 or #4 in the order. (In the other five, he batted fifth.) In 1982, he started all 116 of his games in the cleanup spot.  The Sox had several righthanders I can name in both years who probably should have gotten a few of those at-bats (Lansford, Rice, Evans, Stapleton, Perez) and some younger lefties in need of at-bats (Gedman, Miller, and especially Wade Boggs, who should have been called up in retrospect about a decade before he made the team). The early ‘80s Sox were managed by Ralph Houk, never known for his brilliance in filling out a lineup card nor his boldness in replacing veterans with untried rookies. 

The real question is, What took them so long?  When you look at how he had done for his entire career against left-handed pitching, and the number of righthanded batters sitting on the bench, or available cheap, you have to question playing Yaz everyday past his 40^th birthday.

Two of Yaz’s contemporary LFers/1B-men in the NL, whom I’ve written about extensively, are Willie Stargell and Willie McCovey, both of whom had pronounced platoon advantages like Yaz, though slightly less severe:  Stargell’s was  .170 OPS points, and McCovey’s .150.  Both of them were platooned, as I noted, both at the beginnings of their careers and, more significantly, at the ends.  In McCovey’s last ten years in MLB, 1971-1980, he played every day (over 130 games) only one season, and in Stargell’s final decade, 1974-83, he played in over 130 games only twice.

There is something wrong, in my own personal view, with giving at-bats to players when their play no warrants those at-bats, particularly when they’re on a contending team. I’ve witnessed several frustrating scenarios that, in retrospect at least, cry out "Sit the old guy down, awready! Jeez! We’re tryina win a pennant here facryinoutloud!"  Bill has cited Willie Mays with the Mets in 1972 and ’73 as his justified examples of a great player getting playing time, and not disgracing himself, despite his diminished skills at age 40+, and that was one of the first examples I can remember vividly. Willie, like Yaz, was a beloved figure in the city he had begun his career in, but I’d draw a distinction here in that the Mets did not bat Willie in a power slot exclusively (he batted leadoff, or #3 when their weak, injury-ridden roster demanded it) and most of all he didn’t play on a daily basis—far from it.  The Mets later played another HoFer, Mike Piazza, in the middle of their lineup far too long and far too often. His loyal fans continued to insist well into his thirties that Piazza was just in an extended slump, that’s all, and besides his defense wasn’t THAT bad and he might yet improve, citing tiny samples to buttress their case. Across town a few years later, the Yankees continued Derek Jeter’s everyday play after he had clearly demonstrated that it warranted fewer at-bats, a lowered batting order position, and possibly a position move. 

These four (Yaz, Willie, Piazza, Jeter) just come my mind as handy examples of great players past their primes whose playing time can be attributed to their popularity.  (Piazza didn’t actually retire with the Mets. They actually let him go when his contract was up in 2006, and lived out his days playing DH in the AL, a long-overdue venue for him. If he’d been signed through 2017, I suspect Mets fans would still be seeing him behind the dish next opening day.)  I didn’t follow quite as closely the retirement processes for other elderly stars, such as Pete Rose, Cal Ripken, et al, but they were purported to be ill-advised and sad and somewhat ego-driven as well. To the degree that they still had some hits in their bats and could turn a skillful play in the field once in a while, just not as often as they had formerly, of course their fans clamored to see them play their final games. I just wonder about the damage these teams did to themselves by playing them even a little more than their play strictly warranted.

You hear stories to the contrary sometimes, of teams that sat their future HoFers down, kicking and screaming and protesting violently, or even cutting them from a team in contention: the story I remember best along these lines comes from Peter Golenbeck’s Dynasty (generally not the most reliable of sources) in which an aged but still adequate Phil Rizzuto was released in mid-season from a contending Yankee team that had more than its share of adequate middle infielders.  When I first read this tale, a few decades ago, the lesson I took from it was how heartlessly the Yankees, and particularly their GM, George Weiss, treated their great players, but now I’ve come to think otherwise: that was a big reason they won so much, Stengel on the field and Weiss in his office, facing reality head-on and trusting what their eyes told them and not so much their hearts.

Golenbeck’s story about Rizzuto is also poignant, as I recall, for the way the Yankees cut him: instead of telling him, "Phil, you’re out," in Robert Duvall’s blunt tone to Abe Vigoda in The Godfather (or was that Pacino to Duvall in Godfather II?), they handed him a roster and asked him to suggest whom they should cut. They gave him many guesses before he realized what they were trying to tell him.

Cruel, I know, and unpleasant and unpopular. In a way, you almost hope your aging stars are beset with health problems as their skills vanish, so your reluctance to play them can be explained as concern for their well-being. But a farewell tour might not serve anyone concerned, except the fans and perhaps the front office looking to sell a few extra tickets. (I remember thinking in Brooks Robinson’s final season that I should get out to Yankee Stadium sometime and see him play–I had never seen BRobby in person, and I felt this was my final chance to compensate for what I’d missed. Of course, he wasn’t really BRobby by that time, but I suspect that’s the motivation for a lot of fans making the "We-Love-You" tour.)   I kind of miss the practice of just putting popular stars who can’t really play very well anymore into the coaching box at first base, where their fans can cheer them to their hearts’ content with no harm done to the team on the field. Every so often, the playing-coach can get a pinch-hit appearance and a standing O for continuing to inhale oxygen.

I found one other oddity while looking through Yaz’s splits and game-by-game performances: he started 11 games in his career in the # 8 slot, an ignominious fate for a HoF slugger, and I assumed those came in his very final days, but no.  They all came in his rookie season. By the time I saw him play, very late in the 1961 season, he had put a pretty good year together, but what I didn’t realize at the time (or any time really in the past 55 years, until this past weekend) was how amazing it was that Yaz was able to hold his starting job in 1961. He played a lot for a rookie (643 plate appearances) but got off to such a crappy start that I was surprised he was dropped only to the #8 hole, and not back to Minneapolis, or at least the bench:  through June 25^th, he had a .229 batting average, a .276 OBP and a .356 SLG, usually a sure-fire formula for losing your hold on a starting position. The Sox manager that year, Pinky Higgins, gets some credit for his faith in the young man’s abilities. After June 25^th, Yaz added about 40 points in each category to his season’s totals, and locked up the left field gig for most of the next two decades. Whether he should have held his everyday starting job for all those years, I’ll leave to you to decide.