Cleaning Out the Inbox: Baseball Passings

     We move to tributes from the baseball world with three losses from the pitcher's mound and one professional hitter.

Goodbye to Luis Tiant at the age of 83. 

Known for his herky-jerky windup, Tiant won twenty games four times and led the American League in ERA twice in a career that saw him completely re-invent himself.

With the Cleveland Indians, Tiant was a fearsome young fireballer and in 1968, Tiant fired one of the best and yet unknown seasons in history when he finished 21-9, nineteen complete games, nine shutouts, 264 strikeouts, and an ERA of 1.61.

Hitters hit only .168 against Tiant in 1968 but an injury would see Tiant lose twenty games in 1969 and traded to the Minnesota Twins in 1970, who released him after the season.

Boston signed Tiant, who began to rotate his body with his back to the batter before turning around to throw, creating a deception for the hitter and arguably the most imitated windup on playgrounds and little league fields across the country!

Starting in 1972, Tiant won twenty games three times for the Red Sox and would win twelve games or more each season until he left Boston after the 1978 season.

Tiant retired after the 1982 season with 229 wins for his career.

Goodbye to Joey Jay at the age of 89.

The first player to make the majors after playing Little League baseball, Jay was also one of the most successful "bonus babies" of the 1950s ( if a player signed a bonus for more than $4,000, the player must remain on the big league roster for two years).

Jay signed for $20,000 with the Milwaukee Braves in 1953 and spent two seasons with the Braves before a seasoning stint in the minors.

After three seasons with the Braves, Milwaukee traded Jay to the Cincinnati Reds before the 1961 season, where Jay would win twenty-one games to lead the National League in wins for the surprising 1961 National League champions.

Jay won twenty-one games again in 1962 but Jay would pitch only four more seasons, winning thirty-three games with the Reds and the first season of the Atlanta Braves before retiring.

Goodbye to Rudy May at the age of 80.

A left-handed pitcher, who could start or relieve, May led the American League in ERA in 1980 for the Yankees and was known for his sharp curveball.

May won eighteen games for Baltimore in 1977 who rewarded him with a trade to Montreal.

May was also noted as the one pitcher that Hall of Famer Rod Carew would always ask out of the lineup when May was scheduled to be the opposing starting pitcher, due to Carew's struggles against May.

Goodbye to Rico Carty at the age of 85.

The National League batting champion in 1970 when he hit a sizzling .366, Carty was a career .299 hitter in fifteen seasons for six teams, most notably with the Milwaukee/Atlanta Braves and Cleveland Indians.

Carty was known as a deadly hitter, hitting over .300 eight times and reaching double-digits in homers eleven times with three seasons that are quite incredible and almost forgotten by most fans.

In 1969, Carty just missed the batting title by not having the required plate appearances when he hit .342 in 339 plate appearances and hit sixteen homers and then actually won the batting crown in 1970, hitting .366 with twenty-five homers and one hundred one RBI, both seasons with the Braves.

Carty was elected to the 1970 All-Star Game as a write-in candidate, one of the few to accomplish that honor.

Carty's most amazing season, however, was 1978 when at age 38 and splitting the season between two terrible teams (Toronto and Oakland), Carty hit .282 with a career-high 31 homers and 99 RBI.

Cleaning out the inbox-Baseball

The inbox is just overflowing, so to get a few things out of there, I'll be taking care of the baseball notes.

Bruce Markusen and his "Card Corner" on the Baseball Hall of Fame website takes a look at the career of the "Toy Cannon" Jimmy Wynn.
The smallish Wynn at 5'9 was the first true power hitter for the Houston Astros in the notoriously power sapping Astrodome.
Markusen selected Wynn as his player to write about since the parameters for the article was a player that played for both World Series teams (Astros and Dodgers).
Wynn's first year with the Dodgers was the last big year of his career and I've always thought that his .271/32/108 line should have been enough to beat out his teammate and eventual winner Steve Garvey for the 1974 National League MVP.

The SABR website has thousands of player profiles and a recent one that caught my eye was that of early 1960's thumping first baseman Jim Gentile.
It was a very intensive profile of Gentile's career and I found his years of being blocked by Gil Hodges in the Brooklyn/Los Angeles system a story that was interesting.
Two Gentile points that were new to me- the first was that it was Gentile, not Hodges that played first base for the final game of the Brooklyn Dodgers at Ebbets Field.
The other was a classy move by the Orioles back in 2010.
In 1961, Gentile had a clause in his contract that would have given him a $5,000 bonus for leading the American League in RBI, but his 141 RBI fell one short of Roger Maris for first place in the league.
Almost 50 years later, a SABR researcher found that Maris had been given an extra RBI in a July game and that it was Gentile and Maris that led the league.
The Orioles brought Gentile to Camden Yards and surprised him with a check for five thousand dollars fulfilling their commitment.
Very classy by Baltimore.

SABR's baseball card blog has two articles of note from the inbox.
The first discusses Luis Tiant in "An ode to El Tiante".
The author connects Tiant to his comeback from arm injuries to explode on the Boston sports scene
in 1972, his lack of an appearance in the 1972 Topps set and the resulting first card with the Red Sox in the 1973 release, which stood out to me as a kid when you didn't exactly see a lot of red gloves around.
I always like when an author explains his interest in the topic and the author (Mark Armour) attaches his Tiant fandom as part of the piece.

SABR also adds an article on Pat Neshek, ace reliever, card collector and autograph hound.
Neshek's the biggest collector that actually plays in the league and his interview discusses all of his memorabilia collections.
Neshek was also in the news for collecting earlier this season when Neshek ripped Zach Greinke for not signing cards for Neshek after allegedly promising that he would do so.

There aren't specifics, but it appears that Wichita Kansas might be bringing affiliated baseball back to their town after a reference to a December Chamber of Commerce meeting there.
Supposedly, it could be AAA ball from the Pacific Coast League, but no teams have been mentioned as possible prospects to make the jump.