Vida Blue 1949-2023

Vida Blue, 1949-2023.

Vida Blue spent almost his entire career pitching for Bay Area teams.

My signed 1983 Topps Vida Blue card. (Photo by Mark C. Taylor)

Vida Blue had one of the best baseball names ever. I was just starting to become a baseball fan in 1986-87, at the very end of Blue’s career. He was one of those players that I was drawn to because of his cool name, like Buddy Bell. Back in those pre-internet days, baseball cards were one of the only ways that I knew anything about baseball players, so I’d become a fan of someone just based on their name. My baseball card collection included many players who I found in the commons bin who had cool names, like Enos Cabell, Kurt Bevacqua, and Mike Lum. And Vida Blue is a really fantastic name. I mean, his last name is a color, how cool is that? And it helped that Blue’s final baseball card appearances were in the iconic 1987 sets, which was my favorite year of baseball cards.  

Vida Blue died on Saturday, May 6th, at the age of 73. The cause was complications from cancer, the Oakland A’s said. Blue played a key role in the Oakland A’s dynasty of the 1970’s, as the team won 3 World Series in a row from 1972-74.

As I grew older, I learned about Vida Blue’s fantastic 1971 season, when he won the AL Cy Young and MVP awards. Blue is still the answer to a great trivia question: who is the last switch-hitter to win the AL MVP award? In 2017 Vida Blue was at a card show in the Twin Cities. I brought my son Miles along; he would turn 3 a couple of weeks after this card show, but he was already a big baseball fan. We met a lot of great players like Bob Gibson, Tim Raines, Amos Otis, Rod Carew. And Vida Blue, who was one of the nicest baseball players I’ve met. I told Vida that he was one of my favorite baseball players from the 1970’s, and he said, “Thanks for being a fan.” He shook my hand twice and gave Miles many fist bumps. About an hour later, as Miles and I were just about to leave the card show for the day, Vida was walking by and called out “Go team Blue, Mark!” I had to turn around to see if Vida was talking to someone else, but he was calling out to me. I was very impressed that he remembered my name an hour later. So that’s my encounter with Vida Blue, and he was just as cool as I had hoped he would be. He was just a really nice, positive person in my brief interaction with him, and I’ll always appreciate that.  

In November of 2021, I wrote a couple of long articles about Vida Blue: “A Baseball Career Overview” and “Vida Blue: 110 Baseball Cards.” I don’t want to sound too self-congratulating, but my article “A Baseball Career Overview” is more in-depth than many of the obituaries I’ve read of Vida Blue today. Because Vida Blue’s first full season in the major leagues was 1971, which was also his greatest season in the major leagues, much of the writing about him focuses on how Blue “never lived up to the promise” he showed that year.  

As I attempted to show in my article, Vida Blue’s 1971 season was not merely a very good season, it was an historic season that very few pitchers in the last 50 years have come close to approaching. In 1971, Blue finished the season with a 24-8 record, a 1.82 ERA, and 301 strikeouts. I looked at all of the other pitchers to strike out 300 batters in a season since 1971 to see if any of them also won 24 games during the same season. Oddly enough, Mickey Lolich achieved the same feat in 1971, as he won 25 games and struck out 308 batters. (It was Lolich’s bad luck to have his finest season the same year that Vida Blue captured the nation’s attention.) Since 1971, only two pitchers have matched Lolich and Blue’s feat. Like Blue and Lolich, these two pitchers were also left-handers.  

Steve Carlton in 1972: 27 wins, 310 strikeouts, and a 1.97 ERA. Won the pitching Triple Crown. (Leading the league in wins, strikeouts, and ERA.) 

Randy Johnson in 2002: 24 wins, 334 strikeouts, and a 2.32 ERA. Won the pitching Triple Crown.  

And that’s it. As starting pitchers throw fewer and fewer innings, it seems unlikely that anyone will join Blue, Lolich, Carlton, and Johnson in this illustrious group.  

And Vida Blue still had other fine seasons: he won 20 games in 1973 and 22 games in 1975. He also won 18 games in 1976 and 1978. He was hardly a one-season flash in the pan.  

Of course, many of the obituaries of Vida Blue focused on his jail term and baseball suspension for cocaine use and possession. But few of them noted that Blue worked his way back into baseball, making the roster of the San Francisco Giants in 1985 after being suspended for the 1984 season. Blue wasn’t overpowering during his second tenure with the Giants in 1985 and 1986, going 18-18 with a 3.87 ERA, but the fact that he returned at all was a victory. And during those two years, Blue got his 2,000th strikeout and his 200th win, significant milestones in any pitcher’s career.  

Should Vida Blue be in the Baseball Hall of Fame? I don’t know, but he definitely deserves more consideration than he has received. It’s past time for Vida Blue to be considered on an Era Committee ballot and have his baseball peers decide if he’s worthy to be enshrined. As I wrote in 2021, I think a Black pitcher who had a fine career and also struggled with drug addiction during his career might find a more sympathetic audience now than Blue did in 1992 when he debuted on the Hall of Fame ballot. There’s also less emphasis on pitcher wins than there was in 1992, when Blue was overshadowed by the stunning group of 300-game winning pitchers he was competing with on the ballot. Blue’s career win total of 209 seems more impressive now, as well it should. And, as I never tire of reminding people, Vida Blue had a better career winning percentage than Don Drysdale.  

One of my favorite Vida Blue cards that I own is a signed 1983 Topps card. It shows Vida with the Royals, the team he spent the least amount of time with during his career. The card shows Blue wearing the powder blue road uniforms the Royals sported throughout the 1970’s and 1980’s. So, you have Vida Blue wearing powder blue, Royal blue even, and the icing on the cake is that the card is signed by Vida using a blue sharpie. It’s just perfect. 

Vida Blue was a player who will live on in the hearts and minds of baseball fans, and I’ll end this tribute with the same quote I ended my 2021 article with: In a 2017 interview with The Sporting News, Blue had this to say about the Hall of Fame: “I think if I could get in there, it would be a great honor. But until then, I’ll just bide my time and continue to be Vida Blue.” 

An Appreciation of Jim "Mudcat" Grant, 1935-2021

 

Jim "Mudcat" Grant, firing one in there for the Minnesota Twins.

Jim "Mudcat" Grant, 1935-2021.

Jim “Mudcat” Grant died on June 11, 2021. I never met Mudcat, but he’s always been an important player in the history of the Minnesota Twins. I saw Grant a couple of times, at a reunion of the 1965 Twins in 2005, and at Harmon Killebrew’s memorial service at Target Field in 2011. It was clear that he had a larger-than-life personality, and a charisma that drew people to him.

Mudcat Grant only pitched for the Twins for 3 full seasons, and half of a 4^th, but he’ll always be remembered for his 1965 season, in which he led the American League in wins with 21, and led the league with 6 shutouts. Grant also started 3 games of the 1965 World Series against the Dodgers. In Game 1, in Minnesota, Grant outdueled future Hall of Famer Don Drysdale. (Sandy Koufax famously didn’t start Game 1 because it fell on Yom Kippur.) Drysdale was knocked out of the game in the 3^rd inning, while Grant went the distance, holding the Dodgers to 10 hits and just 2 runs. Game 4 was a rematch of Grant versus Drysdale, this time in Los Angeles. Drysdale emerged the victor, as he pitched a complete game, held the Twins to just 5 hits and 2 runs, and struck out 11. Grant lasted 5 innings and gave up 5 runs. With the Twins down 3 games to 2, Grant came up big in Game 6. On just 2 days’ rest, he pitched a complete game gem, holding the Dodgers to a measly 6 hits and 1 run. In the bottom of the 6^th, with the Twins up 2-0, Bob Allison walked and then stole second base. With first base now open, the Dodgers intentionally walked Frank Quilici, to bring Grant to the plate with 2 outs. Grant made the Dodgers pay, launching a 3-run homer to left-center field. The Series would go to a Game 7. Unfortunately, the Twins had to face Sandy Koufax in Game 7. Working on just 2 days’ rest, Koufax threw his second shutout of the Series, striking out 10 Twins, even though over the last few innings Koufax’s curveball wasn’t working and he was only throwing fastballs.

After the 1967 season, the Twins traded Grant to the Dodgers. Grant pitched all of 1968 for the Dodgers, and then bounced from the expansion Expos to the Cardinals, to the A’s, the Pirates, and then the A’s again. Grant was very effective pitching in relief for the A’s and Pirates in 1970 and 1971, but he was released by the A’s after the 1971 season ended. Grant’s career record was 145-119, with a 3.63 ERA, 18 shutouts and 54 saves.

I knew that Grant won 21 games for the 1965 Twins, but until I read his obituaries, I had forgotten that he was the first Black pitcher to win 20 games in the American League. I thought “That’s a really cool fact.” And then I thought about it more, and it hit me: that was 18 years after Jackie Robinson integrated major league baseball. 1965 was the 19^th season played since both leagues integrated in 1947, and it took that long for a Black pitcher to win 20 games in the American League. That’s a very long time.

I’ve known for a long time that the National League was much quicker to embrace Black and Latin players than the American League. This is one of the reasons why the National League crushed the American League in the All-Star Game from 1950-1987, going 33-8-1 over that span. And I’ve known for a long time that it took the Boston Red Sox 12 years after Jackie Robinson’s debut to integrate. Way to go, Boston.

As I was thinking about Grant’s achievement in becoming the first Black pitcher in the American League to win 20 games, I was wondering, who was the Black pitcher who came the closest to winning 20 games in the American League before Grant did it in 1965? I tried to think of Black pitchers in the American League during the 1950’s, and I came up with…not much in the old memory bank. So, I scoured baseball-reference and looked team by team through the AL during the 1950’s. Suffice it to say, there was not a lot of diversity on those teams.

In my searching, I separated players into Black and Latin. This gets a little hazy, especially in the case of someone like Juan Pizarro, a Black Puerto Rican pitcher who won 19 games for the Chicago White Sox in 1964. But I was looking specifically for U.S.-born Black pitchers. What I found was that while there were Latin pitchers like Camilo Pascual and Pedro Ramos who were in the top 10 in the American League for wins, the first U.S.-born Black pitcher to show up in the top 10 in the AL for wins was Connie Johnson, who won 14 games for the Baltimore Orioles in 1957. It was Mudcat Grant himself who was the first Black pitcher in the AL to win 15 games, for the Cleveland Indians in 1961. And that was the closest a Black pitcher in the AL came to 20 wins until Grant won 21 games in 1965.

Reading more about Mudcat Grant made me think a little more about Black players like him, who debuted a decade after Jackie Robinson and Larry Doby, but who still had their own barriers to break. Too often with history, we remember the groundbreaking event, but then we don’t follow up on what happened next. “Oh yeah, Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, and then everything was fine, right?” Nope, not really.

In retirement, Grant wrote a book about the Black pitchers who had won 20 games in a season. The Black Aces came out in 2007, and it tells the stories of Grant, Vida Blue, Al Downing, Bob Gibson, Dwight Gooden, Fergie Jenkins, Sam Jones, Don Newcombe, Mike Norris, J.R. Richard, Dave Stewart, and Earl Wilson. It sounds like a fascinating book, and a fitting tribute to the legacy of the AL’s first Black 20-game winner.