Don Gullett

October 16, 1976. Riverfront Stadium, a World Series opener, and Don Gullett is doing to the New York Yankees what he'd done to National League hitters for six years -- making them look overmatched. He works into the eighth, protects a four-run lead, and pulls a calf muscle doing it. Final score: Reds 5, Yankees 1. He doesn't throw another pitch that October. Cincinnati sweeps the Series in four games. Five weeks later, the pitcher who'd just helped bury the Yankees signs with them.

That's the deal with Don Gullett's career -- it's full of turns like that. A left-hander good enough that sportswriters were comparing him to Sandy Koufax before he turned 25 (premature, Sparky Anderson said at the time, though he didn't disagree about where the kid was headed), whose body simply refused to let the talent finish the job. He gave the Yankees two seasons on the mound in 1977 and 1978, a championship, and a cautionary tale about how fast an arm can go from can't-miss to done.

The Big Red Machine's Left Arm

The Reds took Gullett 14th overall in the 1969 draft out of McKell High School in South Shore, Kentucky, and rushed him to Cincinnati at 19. He was raw, hard-throwing, and immediately good -- Sparky Anderson said in 1970 that he was watching "a star being born right before our eyes." By 1974, with Johnny Bench catching him, Anderson called it "the only Hall of Fame battery active in baseball today." Nobody in Cincinnati thought that was a stretch.

1975 was his best season anywhere -- 15-4, a 2.42 ERA, fifth in NL Cy Young voting, and three World Series starts that October, including Game 7 against Bill Lee and the Red Sox (Cincinnati won it in seven). Cincinnati repeated in 1976, sweeping the Yankees behind a lineup -- Morgan, Bench, Rose, Perez -- built to embarrass people. Gullett went 26-7 with a 2.68 ERA across those two championship seasons. He was 25 years old and had already made four career World Series starts, one of them a Game 7. Then his contract ran out.

Signing With the Enemy

On November 18, 1976, five weeks after that Game 1 masterclass in Cincinnati, Gullett signed with the Yankees -- six years, $2 million, one of the first free-agent deals George Steinbrenner ever wrote (right behind Catfish Hunter's from two years earlier). Reggie Jackson followed him to the Bronx eleven days later for five years and $3.5 million, and the two signings together became the blueprint for how Steinbrenner would build a champion: buy the best players other teams couldn't keep. Gullett got there first. He was the guy who'd just shut the Yankees down in October, and Steinbrenner wanted him wearing pinstripes instead of beating them in them.

Two Seasons in Pinstripes

The 1977 season looked like exactly what New York paid for. Gullett went 14-4 with a 3.58 ERA over 22 starts and led the American League in winning percentage at .778 -- this despite slipping on wet grass in Baltimore in April, hurting his shoulder, and missing the entire month of August. He pitched hurt and still won at a rate nobody else in the league matched. October didn't go as well. He lost ALCS Game 1 to Kansas City after just two innings, then got the ball for World Series Game 1 against the Dodgers and had a 3-2 lead with one out left before Los Angeles tied it (the Yankees eventually won in 12 innings, so Gullett escaped with a no-decision). Game 5 was worse: Steve Yeager took him deep for three runs in the fourth, and Gullett was charged with the loss. His postseason line read 0-2. The Yankees won the World Series anyway, in six games over the Dodgers, and Gullett had his ring.

The Arm That Gave Out

The 1978 season never really started for him. Gullett opened the year on the disabled list with recurring pain in the same left shoulder that had bothered him since Cincinnati, and didn't make his season debut until June 3. He looked like himself for a month -- four wins in his first six starts, two complete games, a 2.86 ERA. Then came July 9 against Milwaukee. He didn't survive the first inning, walking four and allowing four runs in two-thirds of an inning. He never pitched in the majors again. On September 29, surgeons found a double tear of his rotator cuff. The Yankees repeated as champions that October, beating the Dodgers again, and Gullett watched it from the sideline, recovering from surgery instead of starting a game he'd earned the right to start. He was 27.

What Was Left On the Table

Gullett finished with 109 wins and 50 losses -- a .686 winning percentage that stood for decades as the best of any modern left-hander not named Whitey Ford (.690) among pitchers with at least 100 career wins, before Clayton Kershaw eventually passed both of them. He got there in nine seasons, not twenty. He came back to Cincinnati in the 1990s as a minor league instructor and big-league pitching coach, spent more than a decade in the organization's uniform a second time, and went into the Reds' team hall of fame in 2002 -- the Reds' hall, not Cooperstown, a distinction that matters and one the numbers never got the chance to argue against. He died on February 14, 2024, in Columbus, Ohio, at 73.

The 1976 World Series was the last time Don Gullett pitched against the Yankees. It was also, in a way, the best case anyone ever made for signing him. Steinbrenner watched an arm carve up his team into the eighth inning and decided he'd rather have it on his side. He got two years of it before the arm gave out for good.