The Times - Serving Waitsburg, Dayton and the Touchet Valley

Baseball lost two Hall-of-Famers this week. Tom Seaver and Lou Brock passed within six days of each other. Tom Seaver was seventy-five years old, and Lou Brock was eighty-one. During their careers, they would face each other one hundred and fifty-seven times. Brock hit .250/.274/.362 off of Seaver with ten doubles and a home run. Seaver struck Brock out twenty-one times and walked him four times in all of those at-bats.

The two first met in a locker room before the 1967 all-star game. Tom Seaver told the following story during a SportsNet New York (SNY) interview many years ago. Seaver arrived at the park early and had to show his identification just to get in since he looked so young. He was walking around the locker room, and Lou Brock came in and said to him, “Hey kid, get me a Coke!” Seaver responded, “Get your own (bleeping) Coke! I’m on the team.” Lou Brock “Who are you?” Seaver laughed and said they shared the line every year at Cooperstown. Lou Brock went hitless in two at-bats and was replaced by Willie Mays. Tom Seaver entered the game in the 15th inning and got the save as the National League won 2-1.

Lou Brock won World Series titles with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1964 and 1967. He had 3,023 hits in his career and held the all-time record for stolen bases with 938. How long the record stood before Lou Brock surpassed it is debatable. If you only consider “modern” after 1900, baseball records, then he passed Ty Cobb, who finished with 897 stolen bases in 1928. If you want to look at recorded history, Billy Hamilton held the record with 914 stolen bases in 1901. Brock still has the National League record, but Rickey Henderson broke the major league record in 1991. Lou Brock was at his best in World Series games. In ninety-two plate appearances, he hit .391/.424/.655 with four home runs, thirteen runs batted in, and fourteen stolen bases.

Tom Seaver won his only World Series title in 1969 with the “Miracle” Mets. Throughout his career, he would win three hundred and eleven games, receive the CY Young Award three times, and be named to the All-Star team twelve times. Seaver hit twelve home runs and knocked in eighty-six runs during his career. But the most impressive statistic is the 106 WAR he put up as a pitcher. That is good for seventh on the all-time list above Greg Maddox 104.8 and Randy Johnson 103.5. To put that in perspective for readers, it’s like adding the careers of Sandy Koufax 53.1 WAR and Whitey Ford 53.6 together, both Hall of Famers themselves.