Matty Alou

Bajos de Haina, Dominican Republic, produced three big-league outfielders named Alou, and for a long time the middle one was the least of them. Felipe was the trailblazer, the one who signed first and got there first. Matty was the kid brother nobody worried about -- a slap of a ballplayer at 5-foot-9 and 160 pounds who couldn't hit enough to hold a regular job.

Then a trade and a hitting coach happened to him at the same time, and by 1969 Matty Alou owned more hits than anyone in the National League had collected in over thirty years. By 1973, he was wearing pinstripes for one strange, forgettable season that ended with him and Felipe getting sold off the same afternoon.

The Kid Brother Who Couldn't Hit

Alou signed with the Giants organization in 1957, following Felipe's path north exactly the way little brothers do. He hit .306 with some pop for Tacoma in 1960 and got a September call-up to San Francisco (only the seventh Dominican-born player to reach the majors, a detail that mattered a lot more in the Dominican Republic than it did in the Giants' clubhouse).

For six seasons with the Giants, he was fine. Useful, even. Not much more. He was a pull hitter with an uppercut swing, and in 1965 it caught up with him completely -- .231 in 324 at-bats, the worst season of his career. The Giants had seen enough. On December 1, 1965, they shipped him to Pittsburgh for pitcher Joe Gibbon and infielder Ozzie Virgil Sr.

It looked like a throwaway deal for a player running out of chances. It became one of the more lopsided trades of the decade.

Harry Walker Rebuilds a Swing

Pirates manager Harry "The Hat" Walker took one look at Alou's low-handed, uppercut, pull-happy stroke and tore it down. He handed Alou a heavier bat -- 38 ounces -- and told him to hold it high and swing down on the ball instead of trying to pull everything. Roberto Clemente, already a future Hall of Famer roaming the same Pittsburgh outfield, reinforced the same message: choke up, use your legs, slap the ball the other way.

Alou had speed nobody was using. Walker and Clemente gave him a swing built to use it.

The results arrived immediately. In his first season in Pittsburgh, Alou hit .342 and won the 1966 National League batting title -- with his own brother finishing second. Felipe, by then with Atlanta, hit .327. Brothers finishing 1-2 in a batting race doesn't happen twice.

That wasn't a one-year fluke, either. Alou strung together four straight .300 seasons with the Pirates:

• 1966: .342 (1st in NL, batting champion)
• 1967: .338 (3rd in NL)
• 1968: .332 (2nd in NL, three points behind Pete Rose)
• 1969: .331, 231 hits, 41 doubles -- led the majors in at-bats, hits, singles, and doubles

Those 231 hits in 1969 were the most by a National League player since Joe Medwick's 237 back in 1937. He'd gone from a guy the Giants gave up on to the toughest out in baseball, and he did it by getting smaller as a hitter, not bigger -- shortening up, slapping singles, running like hell down the line. Two All-Star selections came out of that stretch, in 1968 and 1969.

A Ring, a Ninth Inning, and a Long Way from the Bronx

Before he ever put on pinstripes, Alou had already brushed up against the Yankees in October -- from the wrong side of the biggest at-bat of his career.

In Game 7 of the 1962 World Series, Alou's Giants trailed the Yankees by a run in the bottom of the ninth. He led off as a pinch-hitter against Ralph Terry and beat out a bunt single. Terry struck out Felipe Alou and Chuck Hiller. Willie Mays then ripped a double to right -- and a strong throw from Roger Maris held Matty Alou at third instead of scoring the tying run. Willie McCovey then lined out sharply right at Yankees second baseman Bobby Richardson, and that was the Series -- a 1-0 Yankees win. Eleven years before he ever wore the interlocking NY, Matty Alou was ninety feet from tying up a Game 7 the Yankees eventually won.

He got a ring, eventually -- just not with the Yankees. Oakland grabbed him from St. Louis late in the 1972 season, and the A's went on to win the World Series that October. Alou barely played a part in it, going 1-for-24 in the Series itself (a batting line that would get most players benched for good), but a championship counts the same whether you hit .042 or .420.

One Season in Pinstripes

The Yankees traded for Alou that November, sending Rob Gardner and a player to be named later to Oakland to get him. It reunited him with Felipe, who'd already been playing in the Bronx since 1971 -- for the first time since their Giants days, two Alou brothers were teammates again, this time in New York.

Manager Ralph Houk made Matty his Opening Day right fielder and No. 3 hitter for 1973. He held his own -- hit right around .300 for a Yankees club that finished up the standings, playing alongside Bobby Murcer, Graig Nettles, Thurman Munson, Roy White, Horace Clarke, and Fritz Peterson.

He's also buried inside one of the odder footnotes in franchise history. On Opening Day at Fenway Park, Alou doubled with two outs in the top of the first, then scored the very first run charged to a designated hitter in Major League Baseball history when Ron Blomberg walked with the bases loaded off Luis Tiant. Alou crossed the plate before Blomberg ever got the chance to swing a bat as a DH. The Yankees still lost that one, 15-5, but Matty Alou is the answer buried inside the answer -- the guy who actually scored on the most famous walk in baseball history.

It didn't last past Labor Day. The Yankees fell out of the pennant race, and on September 6, 1973, they let both Alou brothers go on the exact same afternoon -- Felipe claimed off waivers by Montreal, Matty sold outright back to St. Louis. One trade brought them together in the Bronx. One transaction wave, on one single day, sent them out different doors.

That was it for pinstripes. One season, one Opening Day footnote, one brotherly reunion cut short by a fourth-place club looking to clear the roster before the leaves changed (the Yankees finished 80-82 in 1973, 17 games behind Baltimore).

The Actual Ending

Here's where the record needs straightening, because it's easy to assume a guy's Yankees stint was also his last stop. It wasn't. St. Louis used Alou as a pinch-hitter down the stretch of 1973, then sold him to the San Diego Padres for 1974. He hit just .188 in 81 at-bats there and drew his release in July, his final big-league game coming June 21, 1974, against Houston. His major-league career ended in San Diego, not New York -- the Yankees were his second-to-last stop, not his last one. He kept playing two more years in Japan with the Taiheiyo Club Lions before he was done for good, a decade and a half after a scared kid brother from Haina got a September call-up nobody expected much from.

He finished with 1,777 hits and a .307 career average across fifteen seasons and six organizations (numbers that dwarf anything he did in his one summer in the Bronx), and none of it would have been believable to anyone watching that miserable .231 season in San Francisco. Sometimes a guy just needs the right voice and the right bat to find out what he actually is.

He crossed the plate at Fenway Park that afternoon before Ron Blomberg ever got the chance to swing a bat and make history. Fifty years later, everybody remembers Blomberg's name. Almost nobody remembers who actually scored -- which is about the most Matty Alou way possible to spend a career.