Vic Raschi

Vic Raschi pitched for the New York Yankees from 1946 to 1953, anchoring the "Big Three" rotation with Allie Reynolds and Ed Lopat through Casey Stengel's five consecutive World Series titles. He won 120 games and lost only 50 in pinstripes -- a .706 winning percentage -- and strung together three straight 21-win seasons that few pitchers in franchise history have matched. Ted Williams, who saw him from 60 feet, six inches away more times than he probably wanted to, once said it plainly: "Vic Raschi is the best pitcher alive. There just can't be anyone as good."

They called him "The Springfield Rifle." It was a double meaning -- his fastball had the velocity of one, and the Springfield Armory sat just up the road from his boyhood home in West Springfield, Massachusetts. Off the mound, teammates described a quiet, almost shy man. On it, something else entirely took over.

A Scholarship for a Fastball

Yankees scout Gene McCann found Raschi as a freshman star in baseball, football, and basketball at Springfield Tech High School. In 1936, the club made an unusual arrangement -- they'd pay for his college education at William & Mary in exchange for the first shot at signing him once he graduated. Raschi enrolled in Williamsburg in 1938, and the Yankees eventually decided not to wait, signing him to begin his pro career in 1941. He kept taking classes in the offseason for years afterward, wartime included, and didn't actually finish his degree until 1949 (a busy year by anyone's calendar) -- the same year he won 21 games and helped Stengel win his first championship. Not a bad semester.

The Big Three

Raschi didn't have Reynolds' power arm or Lopat's junk-ball trickery. What he had was command -- the ability to put a fastball exactly where he wanted it, over and over, in games that mattered most. Jerry Coleman, his double-play partner for years, put it best: "Allie Reynolds had a better arm, but Raschi was a great competitor. Off the field he was shy and unassuming, nothing like he was on the mound. There he was a beast."

Tommy Henrich went further. "If there was only one game I had to win," he said, "the man I'd want out there on the mound for me would be Vic Raschi." Stengel agreed, and said so in his own roundabout way: "I thought Raschi was the best pitcher I had on the team for nine innings ... Boy, he was the best on the club in the eighth and ninth inning." That's a manager describing a pitcher he trusted with everything on the line -- which, across eight seasons in the Bronx, was most of the time.

1949: The Complete Game That Won a Pennant

Raschi's first 21-win season doubled as the moment the whole Stengel dynasty got off the ground. He led the American League with 37 starts that year, and on the final day of the season -- with the Yankees and Red Sox dead even at the top of the standings -- he took the ball at the Stadium and didn't come out of it. Complete game, 5-3, pennant clinched by his own right arm. New York went on to beat Brooklyn in the 1949 World Series, Stengel's first of five straight.

He didn't slow down. In 1950, Raschi went 21-8 and led the league in winning percentage at .724, then helped sweep the Phillies in the 1950 World Series with a two-hit shutout in the opener. In 1951, he won 21 again and led the AL in strikeouts with 164, closing out the year with another title over the Giants in the 1951 World Series. Three years, three 21-win seasons, three rings. Nobody else on that staff -- not Reynolds, not Lopat -- matched that specific run.

By 1952, the Yankees were paying him like it mattered. Raschi signed for $40,000, reportedly the highest salary any pitcher in franchise history had commanded to that point. GM George Weiss made the stakes clear when he handed over the contract: "Don't you ever have a bad year." Raschi's win total dipped to 16 that season, but his 2.73 ERA was the best of his career, and the club still won the 1952 World Series over Brooklyn. A year later, the Yankees beat the Dodgers again to close out the run at five consecutive titles -- a mark no franchise has matched since.

Four All-Star Games, One Rainout

Raschi made the All-Star team four times, and each appearance had its own flavor. In 1948, his first selection, he won the game outright -- three scoreless innings on the mound, then a two-RBI single that put the American League ahead. In 1949, he closed it out with three more scoreless frames. In 1950, he started and worked three innings. In 1952, he started again at Shibe Park and ran into Jackie Robinson, who took him deep in the first inning. Rain ended that one early, National League winning 3-2 in a game called after five innings (still the only All-Star Game in history stopped short by weather).

The Telegram

Weiss didn't warn him twice. After the fifth straight championship in 1953, the Yankees sent Raschi a contract for 1954 that cut his salary 25 percent, down to $34,000 from the $40,000 he'd made the two years prior. Raschi held out. He wasn't alone -- eleven other Yankees were holding out that spring too -- but Weiss decided somebody needed to go, and he'd already been eyeing a younger pitching staff. "This club is complacent," Weiss said. "Raschi's attitude was like so many other attitudes on this club."

On February 24, 1954, the Yankees sold Raschi to the St. Louis Cardinals for $85,000. He found out from a newspaper photographer before he heard a word from the organization (the only official word from the Yankees came by telegram, and it wasn't quick about it either).

Raschi pitched two more seasons -- a 13-6 year for the Cardinals in 1954, then a brief, injury-shortened stint in 1955 that ended with his release in April and a short run with the Kansas City Athletics before he retired. He finished with 132 career wins across three teams. He appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot nine times and never got close -- his best showing was 10.2 percent of the vote in 1975, his final year of eligibility. The Big Three broke up the way a lot of great things break up in this sport: not because the talent ran out, but because somebody in the front office decided the math worked better without him.

Key Moments

What Might Have Been

Raschi never got a Cooperstown plaque, and the case against him is the case against a lot of pitchers from short, dominant windows -- eight great years in New York, then a quick fade once he left (a bad back and two new addresses will do that to a fastball pitcher in his mid-thirties). But for that eight-year stretch, from 1946 to 1953, nobody in the American League won at a higher clip in a Yankees uniform. Three 21-win seasons back to back to back. Six rings. A 2.24 ERA when the games mattered most. Stengel trusted him with the ball in the ninth inning of anything. That's not a Hall of Fame résumé by the voters' math. It's still the résumé of a pitcher good enough that Ted Williams, of all people, called him the best alive.