I will put this directly and succinctly: Carl Yastrzemski is 80 today. Please. How is this even possible? When did this happen? Who stole him from the Summer of Love and turned him into an old man?
Carl Michael Yastrzemski. The Man We Call Yaz. He was the principal architect of the best year of my life as a baseball fan.
That seems counterintuitive. The Red Sox have won four world championships, all of them in my adult life. But as an adult, it’s easier to put these things in their proper context. Life goes on one way or the other. Things don’t change, even if — for a few days — you’re walking on air over things you had nothing to do with causing.
But as a kid, none of that matters. Whatever you see is real and relevant. And what I saw was Yaz having the season of a lifetime. And in so doing, he thrust the Red Sox into one of the most magical years in baseball history.
And if you think that’s an exaggeration, all I can say is you are wrong. He single handedly saved the Red Sox. They were headed for nowhere, except maybe out of town. From about the middle of the 1950s through 1966, the Red Sox were horrible. So bad, in fact, that they lost 100 games in 1965.
As a rookie in 1961, Yastrzemski played with the heavy weight of expectations. He was going to be the next Ted Williams — as if anyone ever could.
Yaz could be moody. Even at his best, he wasn’t very gregarious. He wasn’t a barrel of laughs when thrust into the spotlight. Let’s just say he was more Belichickian than Gronkian.
Part of that could have been those expectations. Mickey Mantle didn’t handle the job of being the next DiMaggio well in the beginning either. He was never allowed to be “just Yaz.” He was compared to Williams, and like everybody else on the planet, came up short.
“Just Yaz” wasn’t a bum, though. He won the American League batting title in 1963 and hit .312 in 1965 — one of the team’s few bright spots.
But the issue wasn’t hits. The issue was power. Only once during that time did he get out of the teens in home runs, and that was in 1965.
He had, for him, a subpar 1966 season, sporting .278-16-80 numbers. By then, the whispering about his moodiness got louder.
He set about to change those perceptions. He hired trainer Gene Berde, who put him through torturous workouts at Lynnfield’s Colonial Country Club (Yaz lived in Lynnfield).
Berde got him into animal shape, and that, combined with new manager Dick Williams’ no-nonsense style (which included choosing to go without a captain, which meant stripping Yaz of the title), put the Red Sox on a different path.
The Sox entered the ’67 season at 100-1 odds to win the pennant. But Yaz signaled that it might be a special season for him when he raced to deep left field in Yankee Stadium, dove and made a tremendous catch of Tom Tresh’s liner to save Billy Rohr’s no-hitter (at the time; Elston Howard’s single actually broke it up).
His final 1967 numbers were .326-44-121, good enough to win the American League’s triple crown. Yet they don’t tell half the story. It was more than numbers. Time and time again he stepped up. He threw runners out trying to advance. He took the extra base. He won a Gold Glove as a left fielder.
I saw a lot of it from Friendly Fenway. I was deemed old enough by Mr. and Mrs. Krause to ride the subway to Boston by myself for day games, and bleacher seats were 50 cents. Do the math.
In the final two games against the Minnesota Twins, Yaz went 7-for-8. Included was a three-run homer that gave the Sox a little breathing room at 6-2 in the penultimate game. They ended up needing it, winning 6-4.
Then, in the final game, with the Red Sox trailing, 2-0, in the sixth inning, he hit a two-run single as the Sox went on to win, 5-3.
In a crazy race that involved four teams surviving into the final weekend, the Red Sox prevailed to complete the “Impossible Dream” season. Without Yaz who knows where they’d have wound up?
He was almost the unanimous MVP, and if some churl from Minnesota hadn’t voted for César Tovar, he would have been.
His fame spread outside the ballpark. He lent his name to Yaz Ford on the Lynnway, and to “Big Yaz Bread,” and won the “Hickok belt” as the nation’s top professional athlete. Radio personality Jess Cain wrote a song about him.
But if Ted Williams chased him from 1961 through ’66, that ’67 season chased him the rest of his career.
Yet he had his moments. He played left field like a 20-year-old, as opposed to a 36-year-old, in 1975 after Jim Rice broke his arm. Even in 1978, when he was 39, he got around on a Ron Guidry fastball and parked it around Pesky Pole in right field at Fenway in that one-game playoff.
And who could ever forget his final at-bat in that game, when everyone in the ballpark expected him to hit the two-run homer that would win the game and the AL East. Instead, he popped up to Graig Nettles of the Yankees. But it had to be the most dramatic popup ever.
He ended up with 3,419 hits and 452 homers in a 23-year career, and was a first-ballot Hall of Famer.
And now … he’s 80. His grandson is tearing it up with the San Francisco Giants. Just thinking about it makes me simultaneously 14 again, as well as 10 years older than I am.
One of my favorite stories comes from 1979, when Luis Tiant was spending his dotage with the Yankees. He pitched a game against the Red Sox, and Yaz pulled him into the right field stands. Tiant, who was close to Yaz in Boston, was visibly steamed.
“It proves,” said Fred Lynn, who always reminded me of Yastrzemski, “that fossils can hit fossils.”
Happy Birthday, Yaz.