Mike Torrez

Mike Torrez pitched a single season for the New York Yankees, in 1977, and made the most of it: 14-12, 3.82 ERA, and two complete-game wins in the World Series, including the clincher in Game 6. A year later, in a Red Sox uniform, he threw the pitch Bucky Dent lifted over the Green Monster. No pitcher in history has authored a Yankees championship and a Red Sox collapse in consecutive Octobers. Torrez did both.

Path to the Bronx

Torrez was already a well-traveled arm by the time he got here. Born August 28, 1946, in Topeka, Kansas -- the fifth of eight kids to Mexican immigrant parents who'd settled in the city's Oakland Barrio -- he signed with the St. Louis Cardinals out of Topeka High in 1964 and spent a decade bouncing through four organizations before anyone in New York gave him a second thought. Montreal got 16 wins out of him in 1972. Baltimore got 20 in 1975, the only 20-win season of his career. Then, on April 2, 1976, the Orioles shipped him to Oakland in the trade that sent Reggie Jackson the other way -- Torrez, Don Baylor, and Paul Mitchell for Jackson, Ken Holtzman, and minor-league pitcher Bill Van Bommel (a lopsided swap in retrospect that it's almost funny nobody remembers Torrez's name from it). Baseball trades used to move players around like this was Monopoly.

He didn't stay in Oakland long, either. On April 27, 1977, the Yankees sent problem pitcher Dock Ellis, outfielder Larry Murray, and infielder Marty Perez to the A's for Torrez -- a trade one retrospective later called "headaches for a workhorse" (the Yankees, it turns out, had plenty of their own headaches already and didn't much need to import one). The Yankees got the better end of that math anyway. By June, Torrez was durable enough to be on the mound for one of the defining Bronx Zoo scenes of the season: the June 18 game at Fenway where Billy Martin pulled Jackson out of right field mid-inning over a lazy jog on a bloop single, and the two nearly threw hands in the Yankee Stadium -- well, Fenway Park -- dugout on national television. Torrez just kept pitching through it. That was sort of his whole deal.

Game 6, October 18, 1977

The Yankees led the Series 3-2 heading into Game 6 at Yankee Stadium, and Torrez took the ball for the second time that October, having already thrown a complete game to win Game 3 in Los Angeles. Reggie Jackson turned that night into the stuff of legend, three home runs on three swings against three different Dodgers pitchers. Somewhere in the noise of that, Torrez went the distance -- nine innings, four runs, the kind of stubborn, workmanlike outing that never gets its own highlight reel when a teammate is redefining October. The final was 8-4. Torrez threw his second complete game of the Series, and when Lee Lacy popped a bunt into foul ground for the final out, it was Torrez himself who caught it. He'd started the Series with a win in Los Angeles and ended it by catching the ball that clinched New York's first title since 1962.

None of that was even his first big moment of that October. In the winner-take-all Game 5 of the ALCS against Kansas City, Torrez came out of the bullpen in relief of Ron Guidry in the third inning with the Yankees trailing 3-1, and held the Royals scoreless for 5 1/3 innings before Sparky Lyle finished it off in a New York rally. It never shows up on Torrez's stat line as a decision. It shows up in the record of a team that needed him twice in one postseason and got two different kinds of excellence out of the same arm -- a complete-game killer as a starter, and, when Billy Martin needed outs from anybody who could get them, a guy who'd go get them out of the pen too.

Free Agency, and the Twist Nobody Saw Coming

Torrez became a free agent that winter -- the first full offseason of the modern free-agency era -- and on November 23, 1977, he signed with the Boston Red Sox for seven years and $2.5 million, one of the biggest contracts in the sport at the time. "The Red Sox offered me a seven-year guarantee," he said of the decision, which is about as straightforward an explanation as you'll ever get for why a guy leaves a champion. It made sense on paper. Nobody could have written what happened next.

The Pitch That Followed Him to Boston

October 2, 1978. Fenway Park. Boston led 2-0 in the seventh inning of the AL East tiebreaker, and Torrez -- entering that day 16-12 on the year -- was two outs from sending the Yankees home. Bucky Dent, who'd hit four home runs all season, lofted a fly ball off a hanging breaking ball that just cleared the Green Monster for a three-run shot. Manager Don Zimmer pulled Torrez a few batters later, Boston lost 5-4, and Torrez took the loss that sent the Yankees to the ALCS and turned Boston's season into ash. He'd go on to finish 1978 at 16-13, 3.96 ERA -- a perfectly good season, forever overwritten by one pitch.

Torrez has spent decades since fielding questions about that at-bat with more grace than the situation probably required. Asked about it at a 40th-anniversary reunion with Dent in 2018, he leaned into the only joke that ever made the story bearable.

Nobody ever proved that (nobody ever tried very hard, either -- everyone involved seemed to prefer the joke to the investigation). Nobody ever needed to. It's just the kind of thing a guy says after four decades of being remembered for the worst pitch of an otherwise decent career.

What Came After

Torrez pitched four more years in Boston -- 16 wins in 1979, a second-place finish in AL winning percentage in 1981 -- then closed out his career with the New York Mets in 1983 and 1984, finishing back with Oakland for one last month. He retired with 185 career wins, still the most by a Mexican-American pitcher in major league history, and a career nobody ever quite got to see clearly because one October pitch kept getting in the way.

He's not in the Hall of Fame, and he was never really a Hall of Fame case. What he was, for one full season in pinstripes, was the guy the 1977 Yankees needed twice in October and got twice. That's not a bad way to spend a summer in the Bronx. It just happens to come with an asterisk that follows you to Boston.