Bobby Shantz

October 13, 1960. Forbes Field, Pittsburgh, the New York Yankees down 4-0 in the third inning of Game 7. Casey Stengel walked to the mound and handed the ball to a pitcher who stood 5-foot-6 in his spikes -- smaller than half the infielders he'd faced that October (smaller than most of the batboys on either roster, too). Bobby Shantz threw five innings of one-hit relief, carried the Yankees to a 7-4 lead, and pitched the best World Series baseball almost nobody remembers, because the bullpen gave it back behind him -- Jim Coates allowed three runs in a five-run Pirates eighth (the other two were runners Shantz left on base), and Ralph Terry inherited the mess in time to serve up Bill Mazeroski's home run, the most famous in World Series history. That's the whole career in miniature. Bobby Shantz did the hard, quiet work. Somebody else got remembered for the ending.

Too Small, Too Good

Robert Clayton Shantz was born September 26, 1925, in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, the youngest of nine children. He served in the Army in World War II, signed with the Philadelphia Athletics in 1948, and made the majors by May of 1949. Every scout who looked at him said the same thing first: too short. At 5-foot-6 and about 140 pounds (the baseball card probably rounded up), Shantz looked like the guy who parked the players' cars, not one of the players.

The scouting report stopped mattering in 1952. Pitching for a fourth-place Athletics team that finished a middling 79-75, Shantz went 24-7 with a 2.48 ERA and won the American League MVP over a ballot that included Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra. A pitcher single-handedly outperforming his own team by that much is the kind of thing that used to win MVPs outright. It barely happens anymore.

The Bronx, By Way of Kansas City

The Athletics had relocated to Kansas City by 1957, and on February 19 of that year the Yankees pulled Shantz out of a 13-player transaction that also delivered Art Ditmar and, eventually, Clete Boyer (the Kansas City pipeline was already running hot by then, and it wasn't close to finished). It looked, at the time, like a depth move. It turned into one of the shrewder pickups of the 1957 season.

Working as a swingman -- spot starts mixed with relief -- Shantz went 11-5 and led the American League in ERA at 2.45, the best mark on a staff that also featured Whitey Ford and Tom Sturdivant. That same year, Rawlings handed out its first Gold Glove Awards -- one winner per position, across the whole major leagues, no league split yet. Shantz won it at pitcher, the single best fielder at the position in all of baseball. Once the award split by league in 1958, he kept winning the American League's version three more years running. Four straight Gold Gloves, every one of them in pinstripes.

A Ring He Didn't Pitch For

The 1958 World Series rematch against Milwaukee should have been Shantz's stage -- he'd started and lost Game 2 of the 1957 Series to Lew Burdette's complete game the year before, and the Yankees wanted a rematch. He never got one. An injured finger kept him off the mound entirely, and the Yankees won the title anyway, clawing back from down 3-1 to beat the Braves in seven. Shantz got a ring. He watched it happen from the dugout.

He got his measure of revenge two years later, even if the ending swallowed it whole. By 1960 Shantz was strictly a reliever, and Game 7 against Pittsburgh gave him the biggest stage of his career -- five innings, one hit, a Yankees lead built almost entirely on his arm. Then Gino Cimoli looped a single to lead off the eighth, Bill Virdon hit a routine double-play ball that took a bad hop into Tony Kubek's throat instead, and the inning got away from New York. Stengel lifted Shantz for Jim Coates. Terry came on to face Mazeroski in the ninth. Nobody remembers the five scoreless-adjacent innings that came before it.

What Came After

The Yankees left Shantz unprotected in the December 1960 expansion draft. Washington grabbed him, then flipped him to Pittsburgh two days later, and the Gold Gloves kept coming -- four more in the National League, running his streak to eight straight years, 1957 through 1964, spanning both leagues and four different teams. Nobody else has ever strung together anything like it at his position (eight years is a long time for anybody to stay the best at anything, let alone the smallest guy on the field). He finished his career in 1964 with the Phillies, 119 wins over sixteen seasons, built almost entirely on command and glovework instead of velocity nobody ever mistook him for having.

He's the last man alive who played for Connie Mack. The last surviving Philadelphia Athletic. The oldest living MVP baseball has. He turned 100 in September of 2025, still the shortest answer to a very specific trivia question: who pitched the best five innings of the most famous Game 7 ever played, and got remembered for none of it.