Clete Boyer

October 15, 1964. Busch Stadium, St. Louis. Top of the ninth, one out, the Yankees down 7-3 and running out of outs. Clete Boyer stepped in against Bob Gibson and drove one out of the park -- 7-4. Two batters later Phil Linz went deep too, and it was 7-5 with the inning still alive. Bobby Richardson popped out to end it a few pitches later. The Cardinals were champions.

Buried in that ninth-inning rally was a piece of trivia that's never been repeated: two innings earlier, Cardinals third baseman Ken Boyer had hit a solo home run of his own. Ken and Clete Boyer -- brothers, sons of the same Missouri farmhouse, third basemen for opposing pennant winners -- became the first brothers in World Series history to each go deep in the same game. Nobody's matched it since.

That's the anecdote people remember. It undersells the player -- Clete Boyer played third base for the New York Yankees from 1959 to 1966, and for most of that stretch he was the best defensive infielder most people watching had ever seen.

A Yankee By Design

Boyer -- born February 9, 1937, in Cassville, Missouri, one of fourteen Boyer children raised in Alba, a town of roughly 350 people (three of the boys made the majors, which tells you something about how that household spent its evenings) -- signed with the Kansas City Athletics as a teenage "bonus baby" in 1955. That meant sitting on the big-league roster with no minor-league seasoning. The arrangement wasn't really about Kansas City, either. The A's had reportedly signed him with an understanding they'd ship him to New York once he became trade-eligible, a quiet piece of business in an era when Kansas City functioned as close to a Yankees farm club as a rival franchise could get. On June 4, 1957, it happened: a 13-player trade sent Boyer to the Bronx. He took over at third by 1960 and held it seven seasons, five straight World Series (1960-1964), two rings.

The Glove That Should've Won Gold

Here's the frustrating part of his Yankee career: by the testimony of everyone who played with him, Boyer was one of the best defensive third basemen the game has seen -- and he never won a Gold Glove in pinstripes. Not once, in eight years.

The reason has a name: Brooks Robinson, who won fifteen consecutive American League Gold Gloves at third, 1960 through 1975 (an entire baseball generation, more or less). Boyer's whole Yankee tenure sat inside that window. He finally got his lone Gold Glove in 1969, with the Atlanta Braves -- three years after New York let him go, and one league over from the guy who'd been beating him out for it the whole time.

In Game 1 of the 1961 World Series against Cincinnati, Boyer made two plays Whitey Ford still talked about years later -- a backhand near the bag on a Gene Freese grounder, throwing the runner out from his knees, then a diving stop in the eighth on a Dick Gernert ball, same result. Ford threw a two-hit shutout that day.

He could hit a little too, when the mood struck. His career year came in 1962: .272, 18 home runs, 85 runs, a .744 OPS, all career highs, as the Yankees beat the Giants in seven. He homered in Game 1 of that series, snapping a 2-2 tie in a 6-2 win -- the last World Series victory of Whitey Ford's career.

Brothers at the Hot Corner

Which brings it back to Ken.

Ken Boyer was ten years into a career that would end with a .287 average, 282 homers, and five Gold Gloves of his own, won in a league where he didn't have to share a position with Brooks Robinson. In 1964, playing all 162 games, he hit .295 with 24 home runs and a league-leading 119 RBI and won the NL MVP that fall -- his first World Series in eleven Cardinals seasons. His little brother was waiting, in his sixth Yankee season and his fifth straight October.

Third basemen don't face each other at the plate, so the Boyers never really squared off. But they played the exact same spot on opposite sides for seven games, and two moments made the family angle impossible to ignore. In Game 4, bases loaded, series tied, Ken guessed Al Downing would come back with the changeup -- guessed right, grand slam, 4-3 Cardinals win. Then Game 7: both brothers went deep in the same game, a feat no other pair of siblings has managed in a Fall Classic before or since.

Ken's Cardinals won it in seven. Clete's ninth-inning shot wasn't nearly enough -- down six before New York even started fighting back -- but it put the Boyer name in the record book twice in one afternoon.

Out of New York

The dynasty collapsed fast after 1964. By 1966 the Yankees finished last in the American League for the first time since 1912, and Boyer -- in a salary dispute with a club that had nothing left to sell -- didn't fit the rebuild. New York traded him to Atlanta that November for Bill Robinson and Chi Chi Olivo. He played five more seasons there, picked up the overdue Gold Glove in 1969, finished his playing days in Japan, then coached -- Oakland in the '80s, a stint back with the Yankees in the early '90s.

He died June 4, 2007, in Lawrenceville, Georgia, at seventy. Ken had gone twenty-five years earlier, in 1982, from cancer, at fifty-one.

Nobody in World Series history has matched Game 7 of 1964. Given how rarely brothers even reach the majors at the same position, it's a fair bet nobody will.