Sometimes you hear it said that Ralph Terry was a pretty good pitcher who had a short if decent peak for the Yankees in the early 1960s, or that he’s largely forgotten as an ace pitcher because of the brevity of his peak years (which were strong: at the peak of his peak, 1961 through 1963, he went 19-10 on average with a 3.19 E.R.A., in a league that went about 3.85 in those years. He was good, no question, and he was a horse, averaging 252 IP and 34 starts in those three seasons.) But those peak numbers are regular-season numbers, and the case against him has to be made on the basis of one post-season conclusion: he could not pitch in the clutch.
Just had absolutely no ability to pitch well in a high-pressure situation. To this day, he is the only pitcher to blow leads in the 9th innings of TWO Games Seven of a World Series. The gopher ball he gave up to Bill Mazeroski to lose the 1960 Series is well documented, and is galling enough, but when you consider that he did the same thing again in the 1962 World Series, how can you conclude anything other than the guy lacked guts or competitive fire or courage when it really counted?
The Yankees, you will recall, led narrowly in that final inning of that final game. Going into the bottom of the ninth, Terry’s Yankees were ahead by one run, but the Giants got their leadoff man, pinch-hitter Matty Alou, on base with a bunt single, and the next two Giant batters struck out. Willie Mays was up next, and Terry gave up a resounding double to Mays, with Alou stopping at third base. Okay, maybe this was excusable—Mays was a good hitter, and there’s no shame in giving up a hit to him, even if the game, and Series, and season is on the line.
But now Terry has surrendered all his wiggle room. If the next batter, Willie McCovey, gets even a single, both Alou and Mays will score, and the Giants, not the Yankees, will win the World’s Championship. And Terry understood this well—in the history of the game, there has never been a more skillful runner than the man on second base. Mays would find a way to score from second base on virtually any hit to the outfield, so Terry knows he needs to get McCovey out.
And as we all know, he did not. McCovey cracked Terry’s pitch on the hardest, sharpest, meanest line-drive most of us had ever seen. Some folks maintain that Yankee second baseman Bobby Richardson could have caught it, that if Richardson were a little taller (he stood only 5’9") he might have nabbed the fatal line-drive, or if he were a better jumper, or if he had had slightly faster reflexes, he might have caught the line-drive in the webbing of his glove at the apex of his leap, but if "if"s and "but"s were candied nuts, we’d all have a hell of a Christmas, wouldn’t we?
The damning fact remains, sadly, that McCovey’s drive sailed over Richardson’s head into right field, scoring Alou on a slow trot, with Mays, who of course began running with the crack of McCovey’s mighty truncheon, right on his heels. The Series ended with the ball skipping between centerfielder Mickey Mantle and rightfielder Roger Maris, all the way to the wall in right-center, and the Giants celebrating deliriously around their star player as Mays stomped on home plate with the winning run.
Was there something in Ralph Terry’s character that simply broke down in the clutch? Did he lack perhaps the self-esteem that would have let him stand up against Mazeroski and then, two years later, against McCovey? Why, in the crucible of pressure, did Terry cave in, time and again, entering the 9th inning of season-ending games with his team leading narrowly or tied but leave the field having surrendered the winning runs?
I know, these are questions that have been posed many and many a time before, but every so often I will come across someone, perhaps naively, praising Ralph Terry as a skilled pitcher because of his regular-season stats, and I feel the need to remind him of the utter inability of the man to perform even adequately in the clutch. Some folks say there is no such thing as "clutch," but I will always point to Ralph Terry as the best evidence that clutch is real, and that some players are equipped to excel in it while others inevitably fall short.
[play-by-play of the 7th game of the 1962 World Series: https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/SFN/SFN196210160.shtml ]