I take us back to 1966
With the trading deadline coming soon, I thought I’d use this as an opportunity to look back on a year in transition from the past. We’re going to go quite far back into the past in fact and at a season where there wasn’t even a move at the deadline. There was an important deal made in the middle of the season, but that’s not really why I’m writing this post. I’m writing this post, because the Cardinals moved on from established, older stars in an effort to get younger after a disappointing season. The results were mixed. The payoff was a year later.
In 1965, the Cardinals tried to run it back with a very similar team to the one that won it all in 1964. In fact, they had Lou Brock for the entire season instead of just 103 games. Both the ‘64 squad and the ‘65 team couldn’t really figure out who to pair with Brock and Curt Flood. Mike Shannon ended up being the best option simply by not being awful, and he didn’t crack 300 PAs either season. The major change was that they swapped Roger Craig for Bob Purkey and Purkey was so bad that it ended up being almost a 4 win swing.
There were some performance differences too. Brock was worth less on the field despite playing in more games, though he still had quite a good season. Julian Javier had an injury-plagued down year. Ken Boyer had entered the first year of his decline phase unexpectedly. And somehow similar to the Craig to Purky switch, Ray Sadecki was about that much worse than his 1964 self in 1965, being worth -1.2 bWAR. They ended the season with a losing record at 80-81.
Things needed to change. Cardinals attempted to get younger. They didn’t even wait until November to start making moves. The first domino was moving on from the best player on the Cardinals for about a 7-year-period, Ken Boyer. Boyer was traded for his replacement, Charley Smith, and left-handed starting pitcher Al Jackson. This ended up being an important trade, but probably not for the reasons the Cardinals anticipated.
They then got to work on trading soon-to-be 35-year-old Dick Groat, starting SS for the last three seasons and 2nd in MVP voting back in 1963, and 31-year-old Bill White, coming off three straight 5+ bWAR seasons. Along with Bob Uecker, the three were paired together to acquire backup catcher Pat Corrales, mostly reliever Art Mahaffey, and outfielder Alex Johnson. This was not a good trade.
Johnson was the prize, being a 23-year-old coming off a 119 wRC+ season in 280 PAs. Mahaffey was a formerly good starter who hadn’t been good in a few years and was slated for relief, and Corrales was a backup they planned to play as little as possible, which they did (28 games, 79 PAs). They traded White a year too early, as he had his fourth straight 5 WAR season in 1966. Johnson had a few good years, just none of them happened to be on the Cardinals.
Boyer’s replacement was Smith, but neither of Groat or White’s replacements were in those trades. They were replaced internally. And somewhat fascinatingly, manager Red Schoendienst seemed to almost immediately abandon the original plan for the season. Jerry Buchek, 24 who had a reasonably promising season they year before in a bench role, started Opening Day and lost his job in little more than a week. Dal Maxvill became the primary shortstop and held onto that job past the 60s.
At 1B, George Kernek was a 26-year-old who had a 112 wRC+ the year before in just 33 PAs. He lasted until May, and then he gave way to career backup Tito Francona. Yes, Terry’s dad. This team also featured a bench player named Ed Spiezio, Scott’s dad. Fun fact for you. On May 8th, they found themselves with a record of 8-14. They were happy enough with Maxvill, but wanted a viable hitter at 1B.
Enter: Orlando Cepeda. The Cardinals appear to have had phenomenal timing for Cepeda to essentially fall into their lap. You see way back in the winter of 1962, Cepeda suffered a knee injury and he played through the 1963 season with that injury. It remained a problem during the 1964 season. During the 1965 season, he experienced swelling in his knee and a group of doctors advised him to stop playing. He only came to the plate 40 times and he was quite bad when he did come to the plate.
But he came to spring training healthy in 1966 and hit 3 homers in the first 19 games. But since the knee had been a recurring issue, the Giants probably thought “let’s get ahead of the game while we can still get something for him,” so they traded him for another underperforming player, Ray Sadecki.
Sadecki was a phenom prospect, debuting at 19, but never really lived up to the hype. He had one great season and he timed it well so the Cardinals could win the World Series in 1964 (though he was bad in that series). After a disappointing 1965, his role had been downsized. He had thrown 24 innings in 5 appearances and 3 starts. He had a 2.22 ERA. Sadecki was quite bad the rest of 1965, though he did follow that with two of his best seasons in 1967 and 1968.
Sadecki’s role was essentially replaced by 22-year-old Larry Jaster, who had three solid years with the Cardinals. Honestly, it is completely mystifying how rotations worked back then. Try to follow game to game and look at the starting pitchers. It’s extremely random and starters come in relief all the time. The end result was that he was a 4th starter, in the sense that he made the 4th most starts on the team.
Jaster wasn’t the only reason they were willing to trade Sadecki. They also had 22-year-old Nelson Briles and 21-year-old Steve Carlton. Confusingly, Curt Simmons pitched on Opening Day despite the fact that Bob Gibson had pitched Opening Day the year before and for the next 9 years after, and it’s confusing because Simmon’s 2nd game was in late April and he only pitched 33 innings when he was purchased by the Cubs in June. He was 37 and had been a Cardinal for six years, so maybe it was a seniority thing, but nonetheless the rotation staple became a nonfactor pretty quickly in 1966.
The most disappointing result may have been Alex Johnson, the centerpiece of the trade involving Groat and White. He lasted 25 games and 91 PAs, but with just a 41 wRC+, Red started giving his starts to Mike Shannon, who proceeded to homer three times in a four-game span and that was pretty much the end of Johnson playing that year.
The end result is that they found an effective replacement for Bill White, though Cepeda had a worse 1966 than him. They found an effective replacement for Dick Groat. Al Jackson had essentially replaced Curt Simmons and had a career year in 1966. Charley Smith was perfectly adequate, which was actually a little better than Boyer had been. But… they didn’t really get better. And the 1965 team won 80 games. So the 1966 team finishing with a few more wins but not making the playoffs is not a shock.
It did however set the stage for 1967. Which was simply a perfect storm. The Cardinals made one really slick move. They traded Charley Smith for Roger Maris and moved Shannon to 3B. Though if the defensive numbers are to be believed, Shannon was a pretty bad defender at 3B, so it didn’t quite work as well as planned.
No, the reason it was a perfect storm was because quite a few players had career years. Orlando Cepeda, in a Hall of Fame career, had the best season of his life and won MVP. Tim McCarver placed 2nd in MVP voting. McCarver had a 5.9 fWAR season and his next best was the year before at 3.4. He didn’t get more than 2 fWAR the rest of his career. Julian Javier was an above average hitter for the first time in a career where he was frequently quite a bad hitter. (This only wasn’t true from 1967 to 1969).
I don’t know which season was Lou Brock’s best, but 1967 was certainly one of the three contenders for his best season (the others being oddly 1964 and 1968). Curt Flood arguably had a career year. Roger Maris, well he didn’t have a career year, but it was his last good season.
The pitching joined the party. Nelson Briles had a career low ERA in 155 innings. Someone named Dick Hughes threw 222.1 innings with a 2.67 ERA and he never pitched in the majors again after 1968. What is funny is that Bob Gibson had a down year. After three straight 5+ fWAR seasons and right before his string of 8.5+ fWAR seasons, he threw less than 200 innings for the first time as a full-time starter and he wouldn’t do it again until he was 37. He, uh, made up for it in the 1967 World Series though.
The 1967 team won 101 games and the World Series basically because nearly every starter had a career year, with the exceptions being oddly enough two starting pitchers who made the Hall of Fame (Carlton had a pretty good year, but it’s probably his 10th best season.)
Do I have a point to this post? Not really. I played an Opening Day Sporcle, which included the 1966 team, and I found it peculiar how random the names were. Jerry Buchek, Alex Johnson, George Kernek, Charley Smith, and much less random, but still weirdly timed Curt Simmons. So I investigated. And it seems like there was a plan. A plan abandoned after a month.
- I have to ask. How the hell did Julian Javier last a decade without getting traded? I ask this because the Cardinals made a million trades and frequently would trade guys as soon as they had a down year and Javier wasn’t particularly good at the beginning of his career, had a couple horrible seasons, and… eventually rewarded their patience in his 8th season. I’m guessing he had a good defensive reputation (not totally backed up by the stats, I mean he’s in the positive but hardly close to what would be needed with his offense; doesn’t mean those numbers are correct of course), but is this a case where the era treated 2B similar to SS? Maxvill has unimpressive numbers but I get him. You see poor hitting defensive-oriented SS all the time and back then they didn’t really distinguish between a 40 wRC+ and a 70 wRC+. Just they’re great on defense, I don’t care how bad they are on offense. That is something I understand. Similar situation with Javier?
- It’s truly comical how much they failed to find a third outfielder in the early 1960s. Again, I refer to the Opening Day Sporcle I played. Flood emerged in 1961 and he was a fixture for nearly a decade. For his first three seasons, his partner-in-crime was Stan Musial and when Musial retired in 1963, Brock directly took over the reliable 2nd OF spot. The Cardinals moved on from long-time RF Joe Cunningham after the 1961 season. The succession of Opening Day corner outfielders until Maris, and I think that’s a decent barometer for who they intended to play for most of that season: 36-year-old Minnie Minoso, George Altman, Carl Warwick, Charlie James, and Johnson. They tried every variation to fill that spot. The old guy past his prime (Minoso), a 30-year-old (Altman) coming off back-to-back elite hitting seasons whose bat promptly took a nosedive as soon as the Cardinals got him, the hotshot prospect (Johnson), the young bench player they wanted to give a more expanded role to (James – and to be fair, this essentially describes Shannon too, who did work out), and the journeyman competent guy in Warwick. Altman at least provided a league average season, everyone else was on the way out of the league after their Opening Day start season.
- I will get to the pitching update for the minors at some point, but inspiration struck and I have series previews coming on my next days. And I can at least fake that this post is timely, but that ends as soon as the deadline is over. So it may be a minute to be honest.