Dan Pfister: A Hall of Famer, if not in baseball

Pitcher Dan Pfister lost his first six major-league decisions, nine of his first 10 and 19 of 25 in all. That’s hardly the stuff of the Hall of Fame, and yet Pfister, who died last month at age 84, made it, if not to Cooperstown. Twenty-seven years old when he pitched his last major-league game in 1964, 28 when he pitched his last professional game a year later, Pfister returned to his native South Florida when he stopped playing. He became a fireman, and when not putting out fires, a standout softball shortstop. According to the website ripbaseball.com, Pfister twice beat Eddie Feigner, the king of The King of His Court, and was inducted into the National Senior Softball Hall of Fame in 1997. “I still like the thrill of competing,” Pfister told the Sun Sentinel in 1994. “You got guys 75 years old still doing what they do best, only slower. It also keeps yourself younger.” Pfister pitched for parts of four seasons from 1961-64 for the Kansas City Athletics when he was younger, debuting in 1961 after a 10-16, 5.39 season in AA. The Athletics of that era weren’t picky. A year later Pfister was in the A’s rotation. He one-hit the Tigers for seven innings in his first start on April 24, 1962, but lost, 1-0, to Don Mossi when Jake Wood doubled and Rocky Colavito singled in the eighth. Pfister from RIPbaseball.com: “That was the best game I ever pitched.” He had some other good ones — he fanned 11 and four-hit the Indians over 7.2 innings two starts later but lost 6-5 thanks to two John Romano homers and Cleveland’s four-run eighth; he threw a six-hitter and went the distance to beat the Senators, 2-1, for his first win; he four-hit the Indians over eight innings, fanned 10 and kept Romano homerless in a 3-2 win over Cleveland for his second win. But Pfister was 4-14 with a 4.54 ERA in 1962, mostly undone by the familiar bugaboos of walks and home runs. He fanned 123 in 196.1 innings and allowed just 175 hits, but 27 of them were home runs, and he walked 106. He never corrected either ill, and injuries didn’t give him much of a chance. He pitched three games in 1963 before surgery and 41.1 innings, mostly in relief, in 1964. His 6-19 career record might seem unsightly, but the A’s teams he played for from late 1961-64 were 263-384, a .406 percentage. Typical of what it must have been like to pitch for them was Pfister’s last loss in 1964, 4-3 in 15 innings on July 2, 1964 to the Yankees at Yankee Stadium. Pfister entered in the 11th inning of a 3-3 game, allowed a one-out Clete Boyer single and, after a sacrifice bunt and intentional walk, picked Boyer off second to end the inning. Pfister then retired the next 10 Yankees in order — Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Joe Pepitone among them — as the A’s failed to score in the 12th, 13th, 14th and 15th innings. With one out in the 15th, Mantle tripled, Pfister loaded the bases on intentional walks, and Hector Lopez singled to win it. After pitching four shutout innings, Pfister was saddled with a loss in the fifth (all three batters he walked that day were intentional). The A’s, who once led 3-0, failed to score in the last 12 innings against the American League champions. From a 2017 Sun-Sentinel story: “Sometimes Pfister hears: ‘Your record was 4-14. You’re an old has-been.’ ‘I say, would you like to have just one inning on a major league field? They say, yeah. That’s how I feel. I wish I could have won more. I enjoyed every minute of it.'” Ted Williams, infinitely more successful and a major leaguer far longer then Pfister, apparently understood the select fraternity they shared, no matter Pfister’s record. Pfister, who debuted the year after the Hall of Famer retired, said he met Williams in the Florida Keys, according to the 2017 Sun-Sentinel story, in the 1980s, when Williams saw the van Pfister was driving emblazoned with the name of a baseball school. From the Sun-Sentinel: “That was the ice-breaker for a conversation on theories about hitting. Pfister didn’t have a bat in his van, so Williams asked a worker who was trimming trees nearby to cut a stout stick from a branch so the two could compare techniques. That led to an extended discussion about the art of hitting, with Williams drawing diagrams in the dirt and demonstrating his famous swing. ‘It didn’t matter that he was the greatest and I was nobody — we were two old ballplayers that made it. Him and I had that camaraderie, and he didn’t want anybody else to get near us,’ says Pfister, who accepted Williams’ invitation for a tennis match the following day. He still has the makeshift stick bat as his most unusual baseball souvenir.” No word on who the tennis match. Given Williams’ ability to strike a ball cleanly, and Pfister’s errant control, Ted had to have been favored. Career numbers: 6-19, 4.87 ERA, 65 games, 29 starts, two complete games, one save, 249.1 innings, 238 hits, 142 walks, 156 strikeouts, 40 home runs, 85 ERA+, 5.34 FIP, .798 OPS against.