Willie Randolph

October 18, 1977. Fifth inning of Game 6 of the World Series, Yankee Stadium. Elias Sosa was on the mound for the Dodgers. Willie Randolph was on first base. Reggie Jackson was in the box.

Reggie hit the next pitch into the lower right-field deck. His second home run of the night. The crowd came off its feet.

"Once he hit the second home run," Randolph said years later, "I knew he was going to hit another one, because he was in such a good groove."

He was right. An inning later, Jackson hit another -- off Charlie Hough -- and the Yankees won 8-4 and took their first World Series title in fifteen years. Randolph was twenty-three years old. He'd grown up in the Tilden Housing Projects in Brownsville, Brooklyn, six miles from this stadium, rooting for the Mets. "When the Mets won in 1969," he said, "my friends and I were dancing in the streets." Now he was in the pile at second base, a championship ring on the way.

History remembers the Bronx Zoo Yankees for Reggie and Billy Martin and Steinbrenner's phone calls and the daily tabloid circus. History should also remember the second baseman who showed up every day, got on base, and held the whole infield together for thirteen seasons.

Brownsville to the Bronx

The Randolph family moved from Holly Hill, South Carolina to Brooklyn in the fall of 1954 -- Willie was a few months old. He grew up in the Tilden Houses on Dumont Avenue, attended Samuel J. Tilden High School a few blocks away, and came up in a neighborhood that had no patience for anything soft.

"No matter where I go or what I do," he said, "Brownsville is always there inside me. It gave me my biggest strength, my street smarts, my instincts. To know how to deal with everything that's thrown at me. When you grow up in a hard environment like the ghetto, you better have strong, solid instincts -- or else you get eaten up alive."

The Pittsburgh Pirates drafted him in the seventh round of the 1972 amateur draft out of Tilden High. He spent three years in Pittsburgh's system, hit .339 at Double-A Charleston in 1975, and got a brief look with the big club: 30 games, .164 average, no path to a starting spot on the defending World Series champions. Pittsburgh had plenty of infielders.

What happened next remains one of the worst trades in Pirates history.

December 11, 1975

At the Winter Meetings, the Yankees sent pitcher Doc Medich to Pittsburgh. Pittsburgh sent pitcher Dock Ellis, pitcher Ken Brett, and Willie Randolph to New York. (Ellis and Brett were the salary-clearing component. Randolph was the reason.) Pittsburgh historians remember it differently.

Randolph won the starting second base job in spring training 1976 without much resistance. In his rookie season, he hit .267 with a .356 on-base percentage, drew 63 walks, stole 37 bases, and led all rookies with 4.6 fWAR. He made the American League All-Star team at twenty-one -- the third second baseman ever named to the AL squad as a rookie, after Rod Carew and Bobby Richardson.

In the ALCS against Kansas City, he was in the lineup when Chris Chambliss hit his walk-off home run in Game 5, ending twelve years of Yankees futility and sending the franchise to its first World Series since 1964. The Yankees lost that Series to the Reds in four. The machine was assembled anyway.

The Bronx Zoo's Second Baseman

The next two seasons were the loudest in franchise history. Jackson arrived and declared himself the straw that stirred the drink. Billy Martin managed at a constant simmer. Steinbrenner fired people, reinstated people, fired them again. The tabloids covered all of it like a daily drama with no intermission.

Randolph played second base.

In Game 1 of the 1977 World Series, with the Yankees trailing 2-1 in the sixth inning, Randolph hit a home run off Don Sutton to tie the game. In the twelfth inning, Paul Blair singled him home with the winning run. That's how the Series started -- the overlooked second baseman doing the exact work the moment required. Then came Game 6, and Reggie made it impossible to notice anyone else. (His contribution to Jackson's second home run was to stand on first base and watch it leave the park. He was, as he later acknowledged, already thinking about what Reggie was about to do next.)

The 1978 Yankees came back from fourteen games behind in July, won the AL East on a tiebreaker at Fenway, and beat the Dodgers in six games for back-to-back titles. One of the great championship seasons in franchise history. Randolph watched every postseason game in street clothes.

A hamstring injury in Game 160 of the regular season knocked him out of the postseason entirely. Backup infielder Brian Doyle took his place in the lineup and hit .438 for the Series -- two RBI, several defensive plays that kept innings from falling apart. Doyle became the unlikely hero of the thing. Randolph got the ring and didn't play a single pitch of October baseball.

The On-Base Machine

In 1980, Randolph had one of the quietly exceptional offensive seasons in franchise history: .294 average, .427 on-base percentage (second in the AL), 119 walks (which led the AL), 99 runs, 30 stolen bases. He won the Silver Slugger Award -- the first Yankees position player ever to do so. This was the inaugural year of the Silver Slugger, which didn't make the achievement smaller.

George Brett won the AL MVP that year with a .390 average. Randolph finished fifteenth in the voting.

The defensive numbers are where it gets harder to look away. He ranks fifth all-time among second basemen in career defensive WAR (20.2) and third all-time in double plays turned (1,547). He led American League second basemen in Range Factor per Game twice. He never won a Gold Glove -- Frank White and Lou Whitaker blocked him throughout his prime -- but every advanced metric of that era says the same thing: one of the best defensive second basemen of his generation, possibly of any generation, who happened to come up during the same decade as two other excellent ones.

By WAR, Randolph was the second-best second baseman of the 1980s (36.1 over the decade), behind only Lou Whitaker's 40.1.

In March 1986, Steinbrenner named Randolph and Ron Guidry co-captains of the Yankees. He held the title through 1988, his final season in pinstripes. The owners' collusion scheme of the mid-1980s had already squeezed his free agent market -- he'd re-signed below what the market should have yielded, as part of the same scheme that cost dozens of players across the league. He left after 1988 as a free agent and signed with the Dodgers.

He made his sixth and final All-Star selection in 1989 -- with Los Angeles, at thirty-four years old, after leading the Dodgers in batting average and hits. Three years after that, at thirty-seven with Milwaukee, he hit .327 -- third in the American League -- and posted a .424 on-base percentage. The career-high batting average came long after his Yankee career ended, in what should've been his twilight. (The story of Willie Randolph is largely a story of things that happened without anyone watching.)

Six Rings

After 1988, Randolph played four more years -- Dodgers, A's, Brewers, Mets -- before retiring after 1992. He returned to the Yankees organization in 1993 as an assistant general manager, shifted to the coaching staff in 1994 as third base coach, and moved to bench coach in 2004.

The dynasty followed. Four World Series in five years. Randolph was in the dugout for all of them.

Add the 1996, 1998, 1999, and 2000 championships to the 1977 and 1978 rings, and the total is six. Along with Chris Chambliss -- who returned as the Yankees' hitting coach for those same four Torre-era titles -- Randolph stands as one of the only people to have worn a Yankees uniform for every one of the franchise's six World Series championships between 1977 and 2000.

His career bWAR sits at 65.9, thirteenth all-time among second basemen -- a fraction above Craig Biggio's 65.4. Biggio is in the Hall of Fame. Randolph received 1.1 percent of the BBWAA vote in 1998 and was gone from the ballot immediately.

He managed the Mets from 2005 until June 17, 2008, when the organization fired him by phone shortly after 2 in the morning on the West Coast, hours after a road win, in a way that felt -- even by baseball's standards for how these things tend to go -- unnecessarily small. Six championships, thirteen seasons in pinstripes, and a lifetime of getting on base without anyone writing about it.

The kid from Brownsville never did go anywhere loud.