Ed Figueroa

July 19, 1978. The New York Yankees are a mess -- 14 games behind Boston, Billy Martin is five days from a resignation forced by his own mouth, and the whole operation looks like it's playing out the string. Ed Figueroa takes the mound in Minneapolis carrying a 7-7 record and a 3.91 ERA, nothing special. He throws a complete-game shutout. He wins his next start. And then the next one. By the time the season ends, Figueroa has gone 13-2 down the stretch, the Yankees have run down the Red Sox from 14 back, and the kid from Ciales, Puerto Rico has become the first pitcher born on that island to win 20 games in a major league season.

Nobody from Puerto Rico has done it since.

From Ciales to California

Eduardo Figueroa Padilla was born October 14, 1948, in Ciales, a mountain town in the interior of Puerto Rico better known for coffee than baseball. He broke into the majors with the California Angels in 1974, working as a swingman -- 12 starts, 13 relief appearances, a modest 2-8 record that undersold a legitimate 3.67 ERA. He had a sinker that dove hard and a temperament that didn't rattle. The Angels just didn't have much else around him.

That changed on December 11, 1975, when general manager Gabe Paul and new manager Billy Martin sent Bobby Bonds to California for Figueroa and center fielder Mickey Rivers. It's one of those trades that looks like theft in hindsight (the kind Yankees fans didn't fully appreciate until Rivers was stealing bases and Figueroa was eating innings a full year later). Rivers gave the Yankees a leadoff spark plug. Figueroa gave them innings -- durable, dependable, sinker-ball innings, exactly what a rebuilding rotation needed.

The Workhorse Years

Figueroa didn't take long to matter. In 1976, his first season in pinstripes, he went 19-10 with a 3.02 ERA and finished fourth in AL Cy Young voting as the Yankees won their first pennant since 1964. He started Game 5 of that year's ALCS against Kansas City and pitched into the eighth, leaving with a 6-3 lead before the bullpen let it slip away. Chris Chambliss settled matters an inning later with the pennant-winning homer, but Figueroa's seven innings that afternoon were part of the reason the Yankees had a lead to protect in the first place. The World Series that followed was a sweep -- Cincinnati's Big Red Machine was simply better -- and Figueroa took the loss in Game 2 after Johnny Bench found him for a home run.

1977 brought a second straight pennant and the Yankees' first championship since 1962, with Figueroa contributing 16 wins against 11 losses and a 3.57 ERA. He didn't get a World Series start that October -- Martin held him back, citing lingering effects of nerve damage in his throwing hand -- so Reggie Jackson's three-homer night in Game 6 became the signature moment of a title Figueroa had helped build all summer without getting to close it out himself.

1978: The Season That Made History

Then came 1978, and the shutout in Minnesota that turned everything around. The Yankees had crawled out of a 14-game hole by September, and nowhere was that comeback more visible than in Boston, where the Yankees swept a four-game series that Red Sox fans still wince at -- the Boston Massacre. Figueroa started and won the finale on September 10, going six innings before handing the ball to Rich Gossage for his 23rd save. Both clubs finished that day tied at 86-56. A month later, Ron Guidry and a one-game playoff at Fenway settled the division -- Guidry's own historic season (25-3, a unanimous Cy Young) got most of the ink that October, and deservedly so, but it was Figueroa's rotation spot behind him that let the Yankees survive the stretch in the first place.

Figueroa finished the year 20-9 with a 2.99 ERA. He got two World Series starts against the Dodgers that October. Game 1 didn't go well -- he lasted just two innings, allowing home runs to Dusty Baker and Davey Lopes in an 11-5 loss. Game 4 was a different story: a scoreless duel with Tommy John, broken up by a Reggie Smith three-run homer in the fifth, in the same game where Jackson's hip deflected a relay throw and helped the Yankees claw back to a 4-3 win. Figueroa's postseason numbers with New York never matched his regular-season work -- 0-4 with a 7.47 ERA across seven appearances -- but the rings came anyway. Twice.

The 20-win season made him something more than a very good Yankees pitcher. It made him a piece of Puerto Rican baseball history. When he'd won 19 games two years earlier, in 1976, the island had already treated him like a hero -- Governor Carlos Romero Barcelo hosted a luncheon in his honor, and former governor Luis Munoz Marin invited him to his home. The 1978 season just confirmed what everyone on the island already believed: nobody from Puerto Rico had ever pitched better in a single big-league season.

Nobody has since, either.

The Decline

Baseball has a way of collecting on workhorse seasons. Figueroa had thrown 253 innings in 1978 on top of heavy workloads in each of the two years before it, and his elbow started sending signals in 1979. He made just 16 starts, going 4-6 with a 4.13 ERA, and had bone spurs removed from his throwing elbow that August. He never got the velocity back. The Yankees designated him for assignment on July 22, 1980, with his record sitting at 3-3 and his ERA a grim 6.98. Six days later, they sold his contract to the Texas Rangers.

He pitched two more injury-slowed seasons with Texas and, briefly, for Billy Martin's Oakland A's before retiring after 1981. It wasn't the ending anyone would have scripted for a pitcher who'd been the Yankees' biggest winner across three straight pennant seasons -- 55 victories from 1976 through 1978, more than anyone else on the staff. But arms only have so many bullets, and Figueroa had already spent his on a Puerto Rican-record season that nobody else has matched.

Figueroa never made an All-Star team, never won a Cy Young (Guidry took care of that in '78), and today gets remembered, if he's remembered at all, as a name buried in the box scores of a dynasty built around bigger personalities. But for three seasons, he was the most reliable arm the Yankees had -- 55 wins from 1976 to 1978, two championships, and a piece of history that's now nearly fifty years old and still uncontested. Ciales still claims him.