Hall of Famer Carl Yastrzemski is third in Red Sox history with 452 career home runs, trailing only Ted Williams (521) and David Ortiz (483). Yaz was in second place for nearly five decades, until being passed by Ortiz in Big Papi's final season.
Yet, Yaz didn’t begin as his career as a slugger and, aside from a few freak seasons, he never really was one. Yaz's career home run total was the product of consistency and longevity.
In 1961, his rookie season, Yaz hit just 11 homers. He didn't reach the 20-homer mark until 1965, his fifth season. But Yaz regressed the very next year, falling back to 16 home runs.
Look at his home run total by year:
1961 - 11
1962 - 19
1963 - 14
1964 - 15
1965 - 20
1966 - 16
There was nothing remarkable or auspicious about those yearly totals. Actually, for the first six years of his career, Yaz looked like a pretty ordinary home run hitter. He was a line-drive hitter, who hit the ball into the gaps.
That all changed in 1967, when Yaz blasted a career-high 44 homers, while knocking in 121 runs and batting .326, which earned him the rare and illustrious Triple Crown. That year, Yaz also led the American League in runs, hits, OBP, slugging and OPS. It was a season for the ages; Yaz was the total package.
The winter before that famed season, he trained like a fighter, hitting a speed bag and skipping rope. He lifted weights attached to pulleys and swung a lead bat. “It was the first time I really worked out hard during the off-season,” he later said. By sheer force of will and with a purposeful approach, Yaz became a power-hitting pull hitter by putting more of his hips into his swing.
Officially listed at 5-11, 175lb, Yaz was not a big man. He had to employ perfect technique in order to launch 40 homers into the stands. Once he reached that mark, he felt tremendous pressure to keep clearing fences around the league. Such feats didn’t come naturally and the stress of it ate at him.
“I wish I could have played for 23 years at Ted Williams’ size [6’3”, 205 pounds],” he told Sports Illustrated 1983, at the end of his final season. "I was 5'11½", about 185 pounds. When I went to hitting home runs in 1967, it took a whole change. It got to a point where I had to be a perfectionist at the game, where I couldn't make a mistake because of my size. Everything had to be perfect. Absolutely perfect. I wish I’d had Williams' ability."
Yaz’s home run total fell back to 23 in 1968, before surging up to 40 in both the 1969 and 1970 seasons. But that was his last hurrah as a raw, home run hitter. Yaz never again reached the 30-homer plateau for the rest of his career, which stretched through 1983, a span of 13 additional seasons.
In fact, Yaz only reached the 20-home-run threshold three times in that span, hitting 21 in 1976, 28 in 1977 and 21 in 1979.
The pursuit of perfection, or at least home runs, seemed to burden him after his historic ’67 season. Sadly, the game was often a joyless pursuit for Yastrzemski, as he lamented in his autobiography, "Yaz: Baseball, the Wall, and Me."
"I never had any fun at the game... I had to work so hard. It's a funny thing to say. I loved the game. I loved the competition. But I never had any fun. I never enjoyed it. All hard work all the time. I let the game dominate me. It ate me up inside. I could never leave it at the ball park. I thought, as I got older, it would be easier, but it got harder as I got older because then I had more to prove...."
First and foremost, Yaz was a true hitter — not a power hitter. The Red Sox famed left fielder won three batting titles (’62, '67, '68), while also leading the league in OBP five times, OPS four times and slugging three times.
Yaz is often perceived as a slugger due to his 452 career homers and the fact that from 1970 until 2016, when he was surpassed by Ortiz, he was second only to The Splendid Splinter on Boston’s career home runs list. However, the 18-time All Star hit as many as 20 home runs just eight times in his 23 seasons. Captain Carl himself admitted that he wasn’t an elite home run hitter, despite his career total.
“I would say as a hitter, [David Ortiz] is next to Ted,” Yastrzemski told The Boston Globe’s Dan Shaughnessy in 2014. “…I would put him ahead of me. He had more power than I had.”
However, Yaz is a member of the 3,000-hit club and is the first American League player in that club to also accumulate over 400 home runs. He is second in MLB history for games played and third for total at-bats. However, it’s the combination of his home run and hit totals that makes him most satisfied.
“I'm very pleased and very proud of my accomplishments, but I'm most proud of that (hitting 400 home runs and 3,000 hits). Not (Ted) Williams, not (Lou) Gehrig, not (Joe) DiMaggio did that. They were Cadillacs and I’m a Chevrolet,” Yaz once said, quite humbly.
One of Yastrzemski’s greatest attributes was his ability, or sheer will, to play through injuries.
“You see, I was a guy who always played with injuries,” Yaz recounted in his autobiography. “When I retired I had played in more games than anyone in baseball history, with the most 100-game seasons… It had always seemed to me that not playing, whatever the reason, was a signal that you didn’t care… All in all, I was on the disabled list only once. I don't know whether it was luck that had kept me off or that I just refused to yield to the pain and injury."
That is the definition of a “gamer.”
Yaz's place in Red Sox history is secure. He the club’s all-time leader in career RBI, runs, hits, singles, doubles, total bases and games played. He was also an excellent defender, as evidenced by his seven Gold Gloves.
The reality is that Carl Yastrzemski was a complete player. He was so much more than just a home run hitter, and that’s how he should be remembered.
