Joe Pepitone

Sometime between 1965 and 1966, while the New York Yankees finished sixth, then dead last for the first time since 1912, a hair dryer hummed in the Yankee Stadium clubhouse. It belonged to Joe Pepitone -- reportedly the first player in the major leagues to own one, let alone bring it to work.

The rest of the room was falling apart around him. Mickey Mantle's legs were going. Whitey Ford's arm was gone. CBS had just bought the ballclub and had no idea what it had bought. And in the middle of it, blow-drying two hairpieces he'd nicknamed "my gamer" and "my going-outer," stood a first baseman from Brooklyn who was, by a wide margin, the most talented and most watchable player left on the roster.

Brooklyn, a Bullet, and a Break

Joseph Anthony Pepitone was born October 9, 1940, in Brooklyn, and nearly didn't make it out of his teens. In the spring of 1958, an acquaintance approached him outside his high school and pulled a .38 revolver in a mock stickup. The gun went off. The bullet clipped a rib and exited near his lower back, missing three vital organs by inches. He spent nine hours in surgery. (He'd later describe the whole thing so matter-of-factly you'd think he was recapping a rain delay.)

He signed with the Yankees anyway, worked his way through the system, and debuted on April 10, 1962, as insurance behind Bill "Moose" Skowron at first base. That rookie year didn't go smoothly -- a run-in with manager Ralph Houk over curfew got him shipped to Triple-A Richmond for a stretch. He hit well enough to come back.

A Ring He Never Played For

The 1962 Yankees beat the Giants in seven games for the franchise's 20th championship. Pepitone got a ring. He didn't get an at-bat -- he wasn't on the postseason roster, having spent part of the season in the minors. It's a strange footnote for the player who'd go on to become the last visible piece of that dynasty still standing on the field years after everyone else had aged out or been fired.

Nobody knew it yet, but that would be the franchise's last championship until 1977 -- a fifteen-year wait.

Three Straight All-Star Summers

Pepitone became the everyday first baseman in 1963 and made it count: .271, 27 home runs, 89 RBI, his first All-Star nod. The Yankees won the pennant and got swept by the Dodgers in the World Series -- a gut punch nobody in the Bronx had felt in years. In 1964 he was even better on the counting stats, 28 homers and 100 RBI, his second straight All-Star season, and the Yankees went back to the Series and lost again, this time in seven to St. Louis.

Two pennants, zero rings, and a first baseman who was quietly becoming one of the better players in the American League. In 1965 he made his third consecutive All-Star team and won his first Gold Glove -- the first Yankees first baseman in franchise history to win one. The award should've been a coronation. Instead it arrived the same year the whole operation came apart.

The Ballclub Falls, the Player Doesn't

CBS closed its purchase of the Yankees in November 1964. The on-field collapse followed almost immediately. The 1965 team finished 77-85, sixth place -- the franchise's first finish outside the first division since 1925. New manager Johnny Keane and Pepitone clashed almost from the start; Pepitone got fined twice that year for showing up late. It didn't matter much on the field. He kept hitting.

Then came the 1966 season, and it got worse before it got better for anybody else. The Yankees went 70-89, dead last in the American League for the first time since William Howard Taft was in the White House. Pepitone had the best season of his career in the middle of it: .255, 31 home runs (a career high), 83 RBI, a .753 OPS, and 152 games played -- more than anybody else on the roster. He won his second straight Gold Glove. He led the club in homers, RBI, and games played on a team that finished dead last.

Best player on the worst Yankees team in more than half a century. That's not a compliment with much company attached to it.

The Hair Dryer and the Nightlife

Pepitone wasn't subtle about any of this. He kept two hairpieces on hand at all times -- one for games, trimmed to satisfy the club's grooming rules, and a longer one for going out afterward. He brought a hair dryer into the clubhouse before that was a thing anyone did (teammates reportedly assumed he moonlighted as a hairdresser). He ran up bar tabs and personal debt with the same enthusiasm he brought to batting practice, and in the 1964 World Series he once "limped" toward Cardinals first baseman Bill White for an autograph, playing up sympathy, then forgot the limp on the walk back to the dugout. The New York Times noticed. Everybody noticed Pepitone, eventually.

In an era when the Yankees still carried themselves like the Yankees, on paper anyway, Pepitone was something new -- a ballplayer who understood he was also a personality, years before that became the norm.

Keeping Mantle Upright

By 1967, Mantle's knees had nothing left to give at the position he'd played his whole career, so the Yankees moved him to first base and shifted Pepitone out to center field for long stretches to make room. It was a strange arrangement -- a Gold Glove infielder learning center on the fly so a legend could finish his career without further destroying his legs -- and it says something about how much the front office trusted Pepitone's glove that they'd trust it anywhere on the diamond. He talked that year about wanting to become more of a leader as the Mantle era wound down. There wasn't much left to lead.

Traded to Houston

Pepitone played out 1968 and 1969 as the Yankees kept losing relevance if not always games, and on December 4, 1969, the club traded him to the Houston Astros for outfielder-first baseman Curt Blefary -- an even swap of two teams' respective headaches, by most accounts (Blefary didn't fit any better in Houston than Pepitone had started to fit in the Bronx). It closed out an eight-year Yankees tenure that ran from the last banner of the Mantle dynasty through the darkest stretch the franchise had seen in half a century, and handed the "colorful personality trying to survive the wreckage" job to the Horace Clarke era that followed.

Pepitone bounced from Houston to the Cubs to the Braves before retiring in 1973, then kept playing overseas in Japan. He wrote a tell-all memoir in 1975, "Joe, You Coulda Made Us Proud," that didn't spare himself or anybody else. Later years brought real trouble -- a 1988 stretch at Rikers Island on drug charges among them -- the kind of ending that fits nobody's highlight reel. He died on March 13, 2023, at 82.

The hair dryer is a museum piece now, donated to the Baseball Reliquary decades after it first started humming in a Yankee Stadium clubhouse that had far bigger problems than split ends. Pepitone was the last flash of personality the Yankees had before the lights went mostly out for a decade. Somebody had to be.