He Played for Huhhhhh? (Part 1)

You see him in a Mets uniform — tight, in the style of the ’80s, and with a big brown stain on the right hip of the home whites. The image is indelible, alongside the likes of Joe Carter’s trot, Carlton Fisk’s wave and Kirk Gibson’s fist pump, and the passage of time has only further preserved, without damage or revision, the optic gospel of that fateful play and its two perpetual players. Poised in the left-handed batter’s box and with the artificial light of an October night glimmering off his blue helmet, he hacks at the hard sinker and sends a slow roller to first — a roller that is, in effect, still rolling. Disastrous for one city and fortuitous for the other, the moment is as enduring as the phrase that still describes it:

“Behind the bag! It gets through Buckner!”

His legacy, in a sense, would end in a Mets uniform. His career would not.

On Oct. 13, 1991 — nearly five years after his Game Six heroics — Mookie Wilson played in his final big league contest, going 1-for-4 for Carter’s Blue Jays in their Game Five loss to the Twins to close the American League Championship Series. Carter would have his own Game Six moment two years later, bounding around the bases after his Series-clinching homer off Phillies closer Mitch Williams, long before finishing his career in the uniform of the — huhhhhh? — Giants.

No, you won’t remember Carter in a Giants jersey, or Mookie in that of the Jays. The Jays jersey is Carter’s forever now, the Mets Mookie’s for all time.

…

Wilson and Carter are just two of dozens of big leaguers who made their marks in one uniform but appeared, often forgetably, in the cap and colors of at least one other franchise. What follows is a look at many of those men, all famous but each by degrees unremembered.

One Defining Moment, Three Additional Teams

His moment is more of a museum piece than Mookie’s, more specific in its focus and peculiar in its imagery. Then, now and forevermore, he is pumping his fist in a manner that many now can imitate but none had seen before. It remains, and will remain, among the most iconic images in baseball history, a timeless impression from an instant in time, and the player who made permanent his triumph will remain in Dodger blue until time erases our shared recollection.

Astute baseball fans will remember, however, that Kirk Gibson wore a Detroit uniform for nine seasons before signing as a free agent with LA just prior to his legend-making season of 1988. In fact, he won a World Series in Detroit, four years before turning a one-handed swing and a pair of brake lights into accessory Series icons. Fans might also recall that Gibson finished his career in his native Michigan, playing his final three seasons in the cap with the Old English D.

But only the astutest might recall that after a season in Kansas City, Gibson played 16 games for the Pirates in 1992. He played so poorly — a .196/.237/.304 slash line — that the Bucs released him, and he promptly retired from the game. The 35-year-old former gridiron star then got an offer to return to Detroit, not to play for the Tigers but for the Arena Football League’s Detroit Drive. He returned to Detroit, all right, but owing only to the subsequent pull of Tigers manager Sparky Anderson.

As it stands, the image of Gibby in a Pirates uniform is as absurd as Gibby in a Drive uniform, chinstrap secured to his stubbly chin. An instant has obscured what scarcely happened at all. No, he is not in a Pirates uniform for 16 games. He is in a Dodgers uniform forever.

The Colonel and the T206

In our collective unconscious, the card is secured, an image as fixed and famous — well, nearly — as Mona Lisa’s smile. Nondescript but for the lottery-like value it would assume, it shows Honus Wagner in a stoic pose, his dark hair parted and cheeks lightly rouged. It also shows, beneath the big blue collar and buttoned top button, the name of the city, Pittsburg(h), for which he starred. History’s greatest shortstop would play 17 seasons for the Pirates, winning the first of his eight batting titles in 1900 and racking up a metric he would never come to know: a WAR of 127.2.

Today, thanks to his T206 baseball card and the statistical resonance of his Pirates tenure, the Flying Dutchman is as Steel City-associated as U.S. Steel itself. It’s easy to forget, then, that Wagner came to town (with 11 of his teammates) in December of 1899, after the National League contracted from 12 teams to eight and eliminated the squad with which he’d debuted, at age 23.

Merry Christmas, Pittsburgh! And while we’re at it, Happy New Year and Joyous Century!

Indeed, after toiling for the minor league Lima/Mansfield Kids and Paterson Silk Weavers, Wagner began his big league career with the Louisville Colonels, in 1897, ultimately playing three seasons in the yellow and red while compiling 10.9 of his lifetime WAR of 138.1. But for league contraction, would Wagner have been as Kentucky-associated as Colonel Sanders? Would his remarkably valuable card read “Louisville” instead of “Pittsburg”? One can scarcely picture it.

Fade To Red

In sepia tone or standard black-and-white do we see him, a striking figure who appears to inhabit an era devoid of primary colors. So how can we comprehend that the Dead-Ball Era’s greatest pitcher spent his final season — indeed, his one and final game — with a team called the Reds? How can we possibly grasp, or even imagine, that a man who had racked up 372 wins somehow managed — literally managed, as he had become Cincinnati’s player/manager — to notch his 373rd and final win in something other than the black-and-white uniform of the New York Giants?

To do so, it seems, is to colorize Casablanca.

As if to not only initiate the Dead-Ball Era but also personify it, Christy Mathewson began his big league career in 1900, when the pitching-dominant period is considered to have started. Early on, however, his own pitches appeared to reject the dead-ball theme, and the Giants returned the rookie right-hander to minor league Norfolk after he posted an 0-3 record and a 5.08 ERA.

Sensing an opportunity, the Reds promptly selected the 19-year-old in the Rule 5 Draft but just as promptly traded him back to the Giants for future Hall of Famer Amos Rusie. Sixteen years later, after winning a World Series with New York and becoming the game’s most popular figure, Mathewson came full chromatic circle by rejoining the Reds and pitching for a final time on Sept. 4, in Chicago, earning the complete-game victory despite allowing eight earned runs to the Cubs.

Though red was the color on his cap that day, we might still imagine the game in the brownish patina that defines our view of that era. It is an appropriate hue. His opponent? Mordecai Brown.

Still Seeing Red

From the moment the hair sprouted on his childhood head, he seemed fated for the color red.

He rooted for the Cardinals while growing up 40 miles east of St. Louis. Then, as a 19-year-old, the red-headed infielder attended an open tryout in St. Louis. The Cardinals signed him to a contract and sent the six-footer to their Class D Kitty League team. Three years later, he made his major league debut, replacing the war-bound Stan Musial in left field before going on to play 10 All-Star seasons at second base for the red-and-white team from St. Louis.

Today, having finished his playing career in St. Louis — and having managed the Cardinals from 1965 to 1976 and then again on an interim basis in 1980 and 1990 — he seems to have worn the namesake color his entire pro career. In fact, he still holds a position in the St. Louis front office.

Somehow, though, fate conspired with the color wheel to put Red Schoendienst in a shade other than red for five of his 19 big league seasons. Halfway through the 1956 season, the Cardinals traded the perennial All-Star to the Giants. (As if to confirm their separation from Red, the Cardinals received Alvin Dark and Whitey Lockman, among others.)

In a midseason deal the following year, the Giants sent Schoendienst to the Milwaukee Braves, where he played through the 1960 season. Then, as if to color our lasting impressions, Red signed with the Cardinals as a free agent in 1961. After they released him, he signed with them again. After they released him again, he signed with them again. He played his final game on July 15, 1963, against the San Francisco Giants at Candlestick Park. The game went 15 innings — as if it just couldn’t let go.

Perm-anent Impressions

Don Sutton’s career is divided into two distinct eras: B.P. and A.P. — Before Perm and After Perm. You see him on his ‘60s Dodgers baseball cards, clean-cut, almost Army-like in tonsorial style, a respectable young man who could give you eight strong innings before helping an old lady cross a corner full of hippies.

Then you see him on another Dodgers card, this one 23 years after the first. On it, his white perm is sprouting from beneath that familiar LA cap — blue atop white, indeed. He looks for all the world like an old lounge singer, one whose period-specific hair is his final, if fading, hold on the glories of the American ‘70s — assuming, that is, he isn’t wearing a gold medallion beneath his jersey while listening to a reel-to-reel tape of Bread’s Greatest Hits.

As the visual bookends of a Hall of Fame career, those images might make you forget that Sutton spent seven of his 23 seasons in threads other than Dodger blue. True, he got his perm in 1975 while still pitching for the Dodgers, prompting manager Walter Alston to say that “as long as (he) gets batters out, he can wear pink curlers or shave it all off,” but then at age 36, in 1981, Sutton took his graying perm to Houston and squeezed it beneath a bright orange cap.

Ahhhhh, now you remember. Clownish! He also squeezed his enduringly anachronous hairstyle into a Brewers cap for three seasons and an Angels cap for another three, parading his perm yet further by pitching for both teams in their respective American League Championship Series.

Yet it’s another cap — one you might not recall — into which Sutton shoved those trademark locks before his 1985 trade to the Angels in exchange for a pair of players to be named later. (Unless you are related to them, you’ve never heard of Robert Sharpnack and Jerome Nelson). Yep, Hall of Famer Don Sutton started 29 games and went 13-8 for the 1985 version of the Swingin’ A’s.

Teams to Remember, Times to (Never) Forget

Some men are not stars in their own right but are accorded elite status and lasting fame based on their supporting roles for legendary teams. Outfielder Hank Bauer accrued a lifetime WAR of 24.3, placing him alongside the likes of Joe Kuhel — Joe Whohel? — and Mike Napoli in that statistical category, but it was his collection of jewelry — specifically, his seven World Series rings — that informed our lasting impression of his playing days. To imagine him in anything but a Yankees cap is to imagine Bill Russell, or, rather, his lesser teammates, in Pistons uniforms.

With teammates like Yogi Berra, Joe DiMaggio and, later, Mickey Mantle, Bauer manned the outfield for the Yankees teams that won the title in each season from 1949 through 1953. Then with teammates like Berra, Mantle and Whitey Ford, he won rings again in 1956 and 1958.

It is jarring to realize, then, that Bauer did not wear the deep blue-and-white cap of the New York Yankees his entire career. Instead, owing to the trade that brought Roger Maris to New York, he wore the red-and-blue cap of the Kansas City Athletics in 1961 and in his final season of 1962.

You could argue that given his lifetime marks, he should have retired when he left New York.

Rings with the Athletics: 0.

WAR with the Athletics: -1.7.

Then again, speaking of war, he also wore the uniform of the U.S. Marine Corps at Guadalcanal. This, too, is an impression that lasts.

Fall Classics and New Springs

The World Series, like the Super Bowl, can make permanent imprints of passing moments. It also can create lasting impressions of players in the winning uniform, men whose performances and celebrations can make you forget they ever played anywhere else. On Oct. 8, 1956, Don Larsen pitched the first and only perfect game in World Series history, defeating the Brooklyn Dodgers, 2-0, to propel Yogi Berra into his arms — a permanent imprint if ever there was one — and the Yankees to the title. It was, and is, his defining moment, a snapshot that will outlast every first-hand memory, and thus it seems oddly superfluous that the big right-hander spent all but five of his 14 major league seasons in uniforms other than the pinstripes, a half dozen in all.

Like Larsen, Johnny Podres was a good but not great pitcher, but, like Larsen, he made his mark on autumn’s canvas. In the 1955 World Series — against Larsen’s Yankees, in fact — the Dodgers lefty pitched a complete-game victory in Game Three and a 2-0 shutout in Game Seven to give Brooklyn its first and only championship while generating an indelible impression of himself: a black-and-white picture in Dodger blue, and celebrating in the arms of Roy Campanella. Yet, somehow there he is, after a year away from the mound, playing his final season with the Padres and pitching his final game — a scoreless inning — in the Houston Astrodome.

Like Larsen and Podres, Toronto’s Pat Borders earned World Series MVP honors while also winning more than one ring with the same franchise. Close your eyes and picture him in the postgame locker room, his sleeveless blue undershirt dripping with champagne, as he hoists the 1992 World Series MVP trophy. Keep them closed and see him in front of home plate, ready to embrace Carter as he approaches the party that awaits his arrival. Keep them closed a bit longer and see him catching Dave Stieb’s only no-hitter after three near misses.

Now open your eyes and see him in seven other uniforms.

From Unforgettable Seasons to Forgotten Years

They are poster boys for squandered potential, teammates whose injuries and drug use first damaged and then destroyed what appeared to be Hall of Fame tracks. Back-to-back winners of the NL Rookie of the Year award, in 1983 and 1984, Darryl Strawberry and Dwight Gooden were superstars by age 22, each a preternaturally gifted athlete who enjoyed the advantages of playing for a great team, Mookie’s Mets, and in the biggest media market of all, the Big Apple.

Then came the injuries, the arrests, the suspensions, all doing harm to tremendous promise.

Near the end of their still-impressive — but nonetheless disheartening — careers, each would gain a measure of redemption by returning to the Big Apple and providing glimpses of what was — oh, absolutely what was — and yet what might have been, Gooden by pitching a no-hitter for the Yankees at age 31 and a scoreless 2.1 innings in the ALDS at age 35, and Strawberry by using his whip-like swing to hit a critical three-run homer against the Texas Rangers in the 1999 ALDS and help the Yankees advance to the ALCS and then to the World Series, where, with the likes of Derek Jeter and Bernie Williams, he won his third ring for a Big Apple team.

After those respective performances, each retired to a legacy that seemed fractionally complete.

Prior to finishing their careers in the Big Apple, though, each wore other colors. After his release from the Dodgers, Strawberry played 29 games for the Giants in 1994. In 2000, five years after his year-long suspension, Gooden pitched one game for the Astros, giving up four earned runs in four innings. We haven’t just forgotten what was, briefly. We’ll also remember what wasn’t, always.

Crowns of Immortality

Men are made immortal, or something very like it, in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Judged superior, they are accorded a kind of deathlessness, and their caps are the crowns they wear as their lives become something beyond themselves. On each cap, of course, is the logo of a team that employed them and enjoyed, through seasons long and competitive, the best of their services. The caveat to remember, though, is that each might have worn at least one other cap, especially near the end of his playing days.

Like so many men, Tony Lazzeri is sporting on his Hall of Fame plaque the cap of the New York Yankees. Today’s visitors might forget, however, that after 11 seasons in pinstripes and five World Series rings, he played his final 81 games with the Cubs, Dodgers and Giants. Lloyd and Paul Waner are depicted in Pirates caps, and rightfully so. Both spent 14 seasons in Pittsburgh, the bulk of their careers. But in their waning days, Big Poison played for three teams in four years, while Little Poison played for four in as many years.

Robin Roberts and Steve Carlton are both wearing Phillies caps, and why not? Beneath the “P,” Roberts won 20 or more games in six straight seasons, and Carlton won four Cy Young Awards. Harder to envision and easier to forget is that Roberts pitched for three teams in his final seven seasons, posting a 2-3 record and 6.14 ERA for the Cubs after the Astros released him 1966. Carlton? He pitched for five other teams, two each in 1986 and 1987. He finished his career in Minnesota, posting a 16.76 ERA in four games.

The choice of Hall of Fame cap is often as easy as it is right, but it might also deprive posterity of the sense that these men were, after all, just men, with caps that marked their declines.