Bob Kuzava

Casey Stengel didn't blink at bringing a lefty in to face Duke Snider, one of the most dangerous left-handed bats in baseball. He cared more about getting outs than textbook platoon matchups when the whole season was sitting on one pitch. So with the bases loaded, one out, and Vic Raschi cooked from throwing 7 2/3 innings the day before, Stengel walked out to the mound in Game 7 of the 1952 World Series, took the ball from his exhausted ace, and handed it to a guy who'd been on the Yankees for barely a year.

Bob Kuzava got Snider to pop out on a full count. Then Jackie Robinson lifted a short popup that Joe Collins lost in the sun, Billy Martin ran it down at his shoetops, and Kuzava retired the Dodgers in order the rest of the way. Four straight championships. Nobody remembers the guy who threw the pitches. Everybody remembers the catch.

That's been Bob Kuzava's whole deal ever since -- and it undersells him badly.

The Sergeant Who Threw Left-Handed

Robert Leroy Kuzava was born May 28, 1923, in Wyandotte, Michigan, and the nickname came before the baseball career did. Three years in the Army during World War II, two of them overseas as a military policeman in Burma, India, and China, came out a buck sergeant. Teammates called him "Sarge" for the rest of his life, and it fit a guy who'd already done something harder than getting a big-league hitter to chase a curveball.

He debuted with Cleveland on September 21, 1946, at 23, then spent the next five years getting passed around the American League like a hot plate -- the White Sox in 1949 and 1950, then Washington. Covering first base on a double play with the Senators in 1950, he tore his Achilles tendon after getting stepped on by former White Sox teammate Nellie Fox. He was still on crutches after surgery on June 15, 1951, when the Senators shipped him to the Yankees for three pitchers -- Tom Ferrick, Bob Porterfield, and Fred Sanford -- plus a reported $100,000 in cash. Yankees GM George Weiss reportedly didn't know how bad the injury was when he made the deal. It worked out fine anyway.

Stengel needed a left-handed arm for the bullpen, and once Kuzava's leg came around, he had one. A spot starter when the rotation needed length, a fireman when it didn't (nobody drew up a job description for that in 1951, but it's basically what a modern swingman does) -- that was the job, and Kuzava did it without complaint for four seasons.

Three Rings, One Reputation

The regular-season numbers were solid, not spectacular: 23-20 with a 3.39 ERA and 13 saves across four years in the Bronx, four shutouts mixed in. His best season came in his first partial one -- 8-4, a 2.40 ERA over 23 games in 1951 after the trade. But nobody remembers Bob Kuzava for a regular-season line. They remember him for what happened every October.

In the 1951 World Series against the New York Giants, the Yankees carried a 4-1 lead into the ninth inning of Game 6 at Yankee Stadium when Johnny Sain gave up three straight singles to load the bases with nobody out. Stengel brought in his new lefty reliever despite two right-handed bats due up next -- Monte Irvin, then Bobby Thomson, who'd hit the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" against Brooklyn exactly a week earlier (Giants fans were still hoarse from that one). Thomson got him to a sacrifice fly, 4-3, but that's all he got. Kuzava retired the side and closed out the championship in his first-ever postseason appearance.

A year later came the one everybody knows. Ebbets Field, October 7, 1952, Game 7 against Brooklyn, Yankees up 4-2. Vic Raschi walked Carl Furillo, got Rocky Nelson to pop out, then let a Billy Cox single and a Pee Wee Reese walk load the bases again with one out. Stengel came out and took the ball. Kuzava got Snider on the full-count popout, then watched Billy Martin sprint in from second base to save Jackie Robinson's popup out of the sun before it hit the ground. Kuzava didn't let another Dodger reach base the rest of the way -- 2 2/3 innings, the save, and the Yankees' fourth straight championship.

"The biggest thrill I have is having back to back (1951-52) World Series clinching saves," Kuzava said years later. "No one else has done that!" He wasn't exaggerating. Nobody else has.

The 1953 World Series against Brooklyn was quieter -- two-thirds of an inning in Game 5, one earned run charged, no real drama -- but the Yankees won that one in six games too, their fifth title in a row, and Kuzava collected his third ring in three years.

The Guy They Named a Nickname After

Kuzava had a second nickname during his playing days -- "The White Rat" -- and as the story goes, it outlived his own career in an odd way. In 1955, longtime big-league infielder Johnny Pesky, by then coaching in the Yankees' farm system with the Denver Bears, took one look at a rookie named Dorrell Herzog and figured his bristly white crew cut looked just like Kuzava's (Kuzava himself was already with Baltimore and Philadelphia by then, the resemblance apparently outlasting the actual overlap). Pesky started calling the kid "White Rat" too, and Herzog never shook it. Four decades of "Whitey Herzog, the White Rat" managing in the big leagues, and the nickname started with a journeyman Yankees reliever from Wyandotte, Michigan.

After Baltimore claimed him in 1954, Kuzava bounced through the Phillies, the Pirates, and the Cardinals before retiring in 1957. He scouted for about a decade, decided the pay and the travel weren't worth it for a family man (a rare admission from anyone in that line of work), and went home to Wyandotte to work in the beer distribution business until he retired for good. The National Polish-American Sports Hall of Fame inducted him in 2003.

He wasn't a star, and he never pretended to be one. He was the guy Casey Stengel trusted with a baseball when the whole season came down to one at-bat -- twice, in back-to-back Octobers, against Hall of Famers, with the bases loaded both times. Nobody else in the history of the sport can say that.