RIP Ray Sadecki

[Dagonet]

I was too young to remember him in 1964, but remember seeing him in highlights of the 64 WS in the old HOF at Busch 2. I definitely remember him pitching for the Giants.

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/base...cle_72a6c4f0-fbbb-5e35-8ea6-51b9a02926ae.html

Ray Sadecki, the lefthander from Kansas City, Kan., who won 135 games in his 18-year major-league pitching career — and the 1964 World Series opener for the Cardinals — died Monday afternoon in Mesa, Ariz., from complications of blood cancer, according to his family.

Sadecki was 73.

He reached the majors as a 19-year-old lefty and started 26 games for the Cardinals in 1960. Sadecki enjoyed his best years in St. Louis and posted a 20-11 record in 1964, the season of the amazing Cardinals’ charge.

St. Louis trailed the first-place Phillies by 6 1/2 games with 12 games remaining when the Cardinals started a rally that would earn them the National League pennant.


Sadecki got the ball in the World Series opening game, survived a three-run second inning by the Yankees and became the winning pitcher as the Cards won 9-5. Sadecki drove in a run with a single in the victory, which turned out to be the final World Series game for Yankees pitcher Whitey Ford. The Cards went on to a seventh-game triumph.

Sadecki was traded to the Giants in May 1966 for Orlando Cepeda, and later pitched for the Mets, Braves, Royals and Brewers. With the Mets, Sadecki appeared in his second World Series, in 1973, allowing one run in 4 2/3 relief innings over four games.

He was workhorse, pitching 2,500 1/3 innings over 563 appearances (328 as a starter, including 80 complete games and 20 shutouts) in a career that ended in 1977 without having spent a day on the disabled list.

His major-league record: 135-131, with 1,614 strikeouts and a 3.78 ERA.

After his playing days, Sadecki worked for an office supply company until 1990, when he was hired by the Cubs as a minor-league coach and roving instructor. He worked with Chicago for three years before spending one season as a roving instructor with the Giants.

In 2007, Sadecki was inducted into the National Polish-American Sports Hall of Fame. In an interview with The Star upon his induction, Sadecki reminisced about his career and keys to his longevity.

“I’m bullheaded, I admit that,” he said. “But I’m just not of the era of pitch counts. I could not care less about radar guns. I would like to see these young pitchers pitch, build up their arm strength, get out of their own messes. I just don’t think your arm will fall off. But I guess most folks don’t feel that way now.”

He was inducted into the Kansas Sports Hall of Fame in 2010.

The family will hold a private service.

 

[den-the-coach]

Remember him pitching for the Mets against the A's in 73 when I was 7. Solid pitcher and back then there was no such thing as a pitch count...RIP Ray!

 

[Dagonet]

I had forgot he was part of the Torre trade sending him back here.

http://www.stltoday.com/sports/base...cle_54e29aa2-cf56-5820-b9f2-53ab35769074.html


Sadecki gave spark to Cards’ magical 1964 season


Print By Dan O’Neill doneill@post-dispatch.com

Ray Sadecki, what a name.

It’s a perfect floor exercise in enunciation, slides to the “d,” somersaults off the consonants and sticks the landing.

If you were a kid clipping baseball cards to bicycle spokes, playing “Hot Box” in the street, listening to “Do Wah Diddy Diddy,” hearing it takes you back.

Sadecki grew up in Cardinals country, on the Kansas side of Kansas City. His hero was another guy with a Polish name, Stan Musial.

Sadecki signed as a 17-year-old out of Bishop Ward High. In 1959, he and Bob Gibson helped Omaha win the West Division of the American Association and the next thing you knew, he was in the big leagues.

At the age of 19, he won nine games for the 1960 Cardinals, won 14 the following year.

Then in 1964, he and 22-year-old catcher Tim McCarver embodied the innocence and wonder of baseball’s most improbable championship. Lou Brock was the spark, Gibson the hammer, Ken Boyer the captain and Barney Schultz the savior.

Sadecki and McCarver? They were just kids having the time of their lives, like so many of us. With wacky Bob Uecker, they infused the ’64 Cardinals with the perfect dose of exuberance.

Baseball wasn’t so enormous back then. It was fanciful.


Sadecki and McCarver kept teammates loose by creating a “Crazy Guggenheim” routine, with McCarver impersonating the rubber-faced Frank Fontaine character and Sadecki playing Jackie Gleason’s “Joe the Bartender.” It became a clubhouse staple.

After a night game in Houston, Sadecki and McCarver carried a chair down five flights of hotel stairs, stuffed articles of clothing with pillows, tied a perfect Windsor knot and topped the figure with a rubber mask. They set the freak outside Uecker’s hotel room, knocked on the door, and hid around the corner, giggling like school girls.

“We just did it to hear Uecker laugh,” McCarver said, laughing all over again. “It was so immature and childish, and so much fun. Ray was the architect of a lot of that.”

Sadecki could annoy managers and executives with outspokenness, but he endeared himself to teammates. He was emblematic of so many on that ’64 team: Gibson, Bill White, Dal Maxvill, Curt Flood, Dick Groat, Mike Shannon. There wasn’t an ambivalent bone in their bodies.

They were confident. They were incorrigible. And they didn’t take Jack Schimdt, from anyone. They won because they refused to accept the alternative.

“The one thing more than anything else is that team was stubborn, to a man, and certainly that was Ray,” McCarver said. “They all became men unto themselves.

“Perhaps that stubbornness was the thing that put us over the top, that made a game better than the Reds and Phillies. It’s a unique trait for a team.”

Most talented, no. Best balanced, no. Highest paid, c’mon. But if charisma is the measuring stick, the ’64 Cardinals were in a league of their own. “Of all the teams I was on — of all the teams I’ve ever seen,” Gibson said in his autobiography, “there was never a better band of men than the ’64 Cardinals.”

St. Louis hadn’t seen a pennant in 18 years, but those men didn’t know any better. They didn’t know you can’t come from 6 ½ back with 13 to play. They didn’t know you had no chance against Mickey Mantle and the mighty Yankees. They didn’t know and neither did we.

Sadecki pitched 220 innings and went 20-9 that season, one more win than Gibson. He got to 20 by going 8-2 after Aug. 4 and the Cardinals won 10 of his last 13 starts. He also won Game 1 of the World Series.

In late September, with the season on the brink, he pitched 17 consecutive scoreless innings to beat the Reds and Pirates in back-to-back starts.

On a Tuesday night at Grand and Dodier, he beat the Phillies 4-2 on Sept. 29 and put the Cards in first place alone for the first time all season.

“It’s funny, we never really felt any pressure that season,” Sadecki said a while back. “It was almost like we weren’t in a pennant race. And to be honest, we weren’t until the very end of the season. I mean, the Phillies only needed to win one game and it was over.”

Interestingly enough, it might never have happened. Sadecki was the pitcher the Chicago Cubs truly were pursuing in the Brock trade. When the Cardinals refused to budge, the Cubs took Ernie Broglio instead.

Sadecki eventually was traded, a deal nearly as profound. Desperately needing a bat, the club sent the lefty to San Francisco in May 1966. In return they got Orlando Cepeda, who became the 1967 National League MVP and face of the world champion “El Birdos.”

Cepeda later was traded for Joe Torre, who also became a Cardinals MVP in 1971. Then in October, 1974, in remarkable symmetry, Torre was traded to the Mets with Sadecki coming back in return. What went around, came around.

Sadecki was 73 when he passed away last week, succumbing to blood cancer. He never approached his ’64 totals, but he had much of which to be proud. He twice won 12 games with ERAs under 3.00 for the Giants. He compiled 18 seasons and 135 wins in the big leagues.

Not bad for Joe the Bartender.

“It’s funny how life works out,” Sadecki once said, with a laugh. “If I’d have known in ’64 that I would never win 20 games or start a World Series game again, I probably would have appreciated it more.

“But I don’t think I could have enjoyed it any more.”

I know for certain we couldn’t have enjoyed it more. Thanks for the memories, Ray Sadecki.