June 23, 1964: The high point of Fred Talbot’s career

 

How did Fred Talbot and Jim Bouton not like each other? Let us count the ways. On May 12, 1969, shortly before Talbot was traded from the Yankees to the Mariners, the two teams had a bench-clearing brawl. From Bouton’s Ball Four: “There are a few guys on the Yankees I knew would love to have a shot at me, especially Fred Talbot, who I don’t think would know the meaning of the word quit if he ever got into a fight with me. So I kept one eye out for Fred and the other for my friend Fritz Peterson … After the game Fritz and I went out to dinner and I asked him what he would have done if Talbot or somebody else from the Yankees came over to help him out. ‘I’d have to tackle the guy,’ Peterson said.” Eight days later Talbot and Bouton were temmates. The literary baseball gods, apparently, have a sense of humor. They maintained a truce, uneasy at times, during the next few months while Talbot was served with a fake paternity suit not written by Bouton and a fake promise of $5,000 for Talbot after he homered and won $27,000 for Donald Dubois during the Home Run for the Money inning. That was written by Bouton, who probably took special delight in misspelling Talbot’s name. In July, the prank revealed, Talbot went to Gladstone, Oregon, where Dubois lived, for public appearances according to Ball Four. Dubois never offerered any compensation, and according to Talbot, asked for the bat. “And when the whole thing was over, Talbot said in the book, “it wound up costing me $2.75 for parking.” Bouton was traded to Houston in late August. Five days later Talbot was dealt to Oakland, where he pitched the last 20.2 innings of a 38-56 career.

Note: This is one in an occasional series chronicling the 1964 season since there is no 2020 season. Why 1964? Perhaps this time it will end before the Phillies lose 10 in a row.

Given the image of Fred Talbot delivered in Jim Bouton’s Ball Four — uneducated, untalented, ungentlemanly, uncouth — it’s hard to picture him as a young, aspiring prospect.

Which he once was. In the same way we can look at an old photo and shake our head, thinking of the difference between the subject then and now, we can do likewise with Fred Talbot’s career.

On this night in 1964, the foil of Ball Four pitched the first of four shutouts in an eight-season career, allowing eight hits and 10 baserunners but no runs in a 2-0 victory for the White Sox over the Red Sox. The win ended a four-game losing streak and a stretch of seven losses in eight games to the Orioles and Yankees, the two teams ahead of them.

The win left the White Sox three games behind the Orioles, who beat the Yankees, 9-8, to move into first place, and two-and-a-half behind New York.

Pete Ward homered off Red Sox starter Jack Lamabe to break up a scoreless tie in the sixth and J.C. Martin, whose big blow for the Mets would be a bunt and wayward journey to first in Game 4 of the 1969 World Series, doubled in a second run.

Talbot was helped by two double plays and what has to have been a bonheaded baserunning move in the ninth. Eddie Bressoud, who had two of the eight hits, singled to right and was thrown out at second. Where were you going Eddie Bressoud?

The shutout was part of a streak in which Talbot threw 14 consecutive scoreless innings over four games, and it lowered his ERA to 0.87. For a pitcher who retired with a 4.12 ERA in a pitchers’ era (81 ERA+), his career never looked better.

It wasn’t a surprise to the White Sox. Despite the journeyman pitcher he was to Bouton, Talbot was a few days short of his 23rd birthday when he blanked the Red Sox. And he earned his promotion from AAA like any highly touted prospect — he dominated. He was 8-2 with a 2.31 ERA and averaged a strikeout an inning at AAA — when strikeouts weren’t so easy to get.

Talbot had 78 of them in 78 innings for Indianapolis and just 53 hits and 20 walks allowed. No wonder the White Sox, a contending team for whom pitching was their strength, fit Talbot into a deep rotation.

Over time, Talbot’s career did more than revert to the mean. It sank below it. His rookie season was respectable — 4-5 with a 3.70 ERA and a second shutout in 12 starts and 17 appearances — but before the next season he was traded to Kansas City, where a lot of careers went bad.

You can’t blame the White Sox. They were the winners in the three-team trade in which they acquired pre-surgery Tommy John and Tommie Agee from the Indians, who were the losers. The A’s, like their franchise at the bottom of the standings, were just there. Three weeks after the deal was announced, Talbot was named the player to be named later — the eighth player in the trade — and it was Kansas City here he comes.

(The White Sox didn’t hold on to Agee very long at all, but John was moved to give them the last, great act of Dick Allen’s should-be Hall of Fame career).

Talbot was 14-16 in a year-plus with the A’s and then it was New Yortk here he comes. The Yankees still thought Talbot was the prospect the White Sox had. To get him (and a backup catcher), they dealt three players on June 10, 1966, including Roger Repoz, who slugged .454 in 1965, was still only 25, and the kind of lefty bat they needed in Yankee Stadium.

Though often injured that season, it was Bouton’s first introduction to Talbot. No word if it was mutual dislike at first sight.

“… the key man in the exchange today was Talbot, a 24-year-old righthander, who said (Yankees manager Ralph) Houk, was the man ‘everybody’s been after,'” according to Joe Durso’s New York Times story the day after the deal.

It’s easy to look back now and say Houk was exaggerating, because it was probably easy then to say he was exaggerating. Talbot was 18-21 with a 4.16 ERA and 190 strikeouts in 344 innings. It’s a safe bet the Dodgers, who had a rotation of three Hall of Famers (Sandy Koufax, Don Drsydale and Don Sutton) and Claude Osteen, and a fifth starter, Joe Moeller, who had a 2.52 ERA, weren’t clamoring to get Talbot.

So it was somewhere short of everybody who was “after” Talbot. But it wasn’t unreasonable to project an improved Talbot, more like his AAA stats of two seasons previously. Many has always been the major-league pitcher who doesn’t fully apply his talent until his second or third attempt.

Alas, that wasn’t Talbot. He pitched with the Yankees as he had with the White Sox and Athletics — delivering more hope than results. He was 7-7 with a 4.13 ERA for the rest of 1966 and 6-8 with a 4.22 ERA in 1967.

“(Talbot) gives us a pretty good pitching staff,” Houk said, according to Durso’s story. “Mel Stottlemyre is 24. Al Downing is 24. Fritz Peterson is 24 and Talbot is 24. And if (Whitey) Ford and Bouton come back, as we expect, we’ve got a solid staff.”

It was a wonderful working theory. Kind of like some of Sparky Anderson’s: if Chris Pittaro was as good as Sparky thought he was he could visit his plaque in Cooperstown each summer.

Bouton and Ford didn’t come back, Stottlemyre lost 20 games, Downing got hurt, pitching was commonplace and the Yankees were horrible. They were last in 1966, ninth in 1967.

And Talbot was Talbot, Archie Bunker with a fastball, unlucky as he was unbeloved by Bouton. The Yankees improved by 11 games in 1968, had a winning record, climbed out of the second division, and none of it trickled down to Talbot. He had a 3.36 ERA, .696 OPS and .241 average against … and a 1-9 record for a winning team. If Talbot had ever pitched a no-hitter, he probably would have lost it.

Which brought Talbot, after a trade for Jack Aker, to a reunion with Bouton in Seattle in 1969, fortunately for readers. Aker might have been a better pitcher, but Talbot was better copy.

Talbot was dealt on May 20. On May 31, wrote Bouton in Ball Four, he was revealing a positive reference old roommate Peterson had given the new Talbot in a letter to Bouton.

“Fritz said that Talbot seemed to have changed a lot in the last year and that I’d probably like him now,” Bouton wrote. “I showed Talbot the letter and he said, ‘That son of a bitch. I thought he always liked me.’ I guess Fred is changing. The other day, after he won in Cleveland, I reminded him that he’d already matched last year’s output of wins (one). A couple of years ago he’d have gotten angry. Now he just laughed.

“Of course, he was damn lucky to get that win. …”

That Bouton followed up a compliment with a dig told the readers all they needed to know. Thankfully. It wouldn’t have been as good a book without the friction.

• Cubs 2-0, Phillies 0-9: Dick Ellsworth outdueled Chris Short in the opener, but Ray Culp nearly threw the Phillies’ second no-hitter in three days in Game 2 to salvage a split. The Phils, 39-24, remained a game-and-a-half ahead of the Giants, who split a doubleheader at Cincinnati, losing Game 2 in 11 innings. Ellsworth threw a five-hitter in the opener for his ninth win, but Culp threw a one-hitter in the nightcap, allowing only a sixth-inning single by Len Gabrielson, who pinch-hit in the third and stayed in the game on a double switch. Culp fanned seven, walked one and faced only 29 batters two days after Jim Bunning’s perfect game. John Hernstein doubled twice and went 4-for-4, Wes Covington hit his seventh homer and Richie Allen had three hits for the Phils, who routed the unfortunate Sterling Slaughter in the first inning.