Tom Tresh

October 10, 1962. Yankee Stadium, Game 5 of the World Series, tied 2-2 in the eighth inning. A 24-year-old rookie shortstop-turned-outfielder steps in against Jack Sanford, a 24-game winner for the Giants that year, and drives one into the right-field stands for a three-run homer. The New York Yankees win 5-3, take a 3-2 series lead, and close it out two games later. "The hit that always was my biggest individual thrill," Tom Tresh called it years afterward -- and given everything else he did that season, that's saying something.

The Kid Who Had to Play Shortstop

Tresh grew up around the game in a way most rookies didn't. His father, Mike Tresh, caught for the White Sox for over a decade (two career home runs in more than a thousand games -- glove-first doesn't begin to cover it), so young Tom had a big-league clubhouse in his blood before he ever put on a Yankees uniform. He starred at Central Michigan University, signed for a reported $30,000 bonus in 1958, and kept a promise to his parents by going back to campus every offseason until he finished his phys-ed degree. Scout Pat Patterson, who signed him, put it simply: "I knew his dad and had seen Tom play high school ball in Detroit."

The Yankees needed him sooner than anyone planned. Tony Kubek was off on military service to start 1962, and Tresh -- a natural outfielder -- got handed the shortstop job instead. He didn't just hold the fort. He hit .286 with 20 home runs and 93 RBI, made the All-Star team, and won the AL Rookie of the Year Award (not unanimously -- Angels infielder Buck Rodgers picked up a handful of first-place votes too, but Tresh ran away with it). He was the first rookie in franchise history to open a season as the Yankees' starting shortstop, a distinction that stood until Derek Jeter came along in 1996 (that's not a typo -- I mean it stood, alone, for 34 years, which tells you plenty about how rare what Tresh did really was).

Left Field, Three Straight Pennants, and a Career Year

When Kubek got back for 1963, Tresh moved permanently to left field, and the position switch didn't slow him down. He posted an .858 OPS that year -- 25 homers, 71 RBI, his best all-around season -- while Mickey Mantle battled injuries and the Yankees leaned on everyone else to keep the pennant streak going. It wasn't enough that October. The Dodgers swept the 1963 World Series in four straight, and Tresh, like the rest of a lineup that included Mantle, Roger Maris, and Elston Howard, never got the offense untracked.

He kept producing anyway. Twenty-plus homers again in 1964 as the Yankees won a third straight pennant (and lost a second straight World Series, this time in seven to St. Louis), then a Gold Glove and a career-high .279 average in 1965 even as the roster around him started falling apart. He hit a career-high 27 home runs in 1966, the year the Yankees finished dead last in the American League -- his father, Mike, died two days after that season ended, which makes a 27-homer year feel like a strange kind of gift, one Mike got to see in full before he was gone.

The Knee That Ended It

The injury that undid everything was almost nothing, at first. In the second spring training game of 1967, Tresh planted to throw and felt his right knee give out along the foul line. "It felt like the bottom part of the leg had separated from the top part," he said. The club diagnosed it as a sprain and told him to keep playing. It was actually torn cartilage, and by the time he finally had surgery that winter, the damage was done. He moved back to shortstop in 1968 hoping a change of scenery on the field would help; instead he hit .195, the worst season of his career. The Yankees traded him to Detroit on June 14, 1969, for outfielder Ron Woods, and he retired at the end of that season at just 31 years old.

Tresh went home to Michigan for good after baseball, working as an administrator at Central Michigan and spending 14 years as the school's assistant baseball coach -- the same campus where he'd kept his word to his parents about finishing that degree. He died of a heart attack in Venice, Florida, on October 15, 2008, at 70.

He never got back to full strength after that knee injury, and the Yankees never got back to the World Series until 1976, seven years after they let him go. The two things aren't a coincidence so much as they're the same story, told from different angles -- a dynasty and one of its everyday building blocks breaking down on roughly the same schedule.