Bill Wakefield Shaped the 1964 Mets *and* Cardinals
Baseball history just wouldn't be the same without him
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1966 Topps Bill Wakefield (#443) - Card of the Day
Can you name the top ten players on the 1964 New York Mets roster?
I know, I know, that’s a little like asking you to name the ten most delicious hunks of raw liver you’ve ever eaten.
Still, Baseball Reference is up to the task, courtesy of their version of WAR. So here are the top ten from that 53-109-1 last-place club:
Ron Hunt - 3.2 WAR
Joe Christopher - 2.8 WAR
Galen Cisco - 2.8 WAR
Tracy Stallard - 2.3 WAR
Chris Cannizzaro - 1.6 WAR
Jim Hickman - 1.4 WAR
Jesse Gonder - 1.4 WAR
Ed Kranepool - 1.1 WAR
Larry Elliot - 1.0 WAR
Not a lot of household names there, though Kranepool became a Mets legend and Stallard shared that one special moment with Roger Maris.
Ah, but if you’re counting, you’ll realize I shortchanged you — there are only nine names up there. So who’s the tenth?
Well, if you were paying attention to the title and card-le of this post, you’ll no doubt guess the answer is Bill Wakefield. And you’ll be right.
Wakefield’s 3-5 record and 3.61 ERA in 119.2 innings across 62 appearances was good for 0.8 WAR. That was pretty heady stuff for the 23-year-old after he had spent the first three years of his career in the Cardinals minor league system before the Mets traded two-time 20-game loser Roger Craig for him (and George Altman) in November 1963.
Even headier was that Topps included Wakefield in their 1965 set.
Less heady was that Wakefield spent the next two seasons back in the minors, with 1965 split between the Cubs and Mets systems, and 1966 back in Double A for the Mets.
But Topps wasn’t giving up on Wakefield quite yet, and they plopped him down — as a Met — on his second card in their 1966 set.
And so it was that Wakefield’s baseball career and his baseball card career ended the same year and that he landed on career-cappers two years in a row.
Today, Bill Wakefield turns 83 years old.
Backing Into History
Wakefield’s last major league appearance was a relief stint in the last game of the 1966 season. In St. Louis, he gave up a hit and a walk in two-thirds of an inning and allowed two runs to score in the fifth, but both were charged to Galen Cisco.
After Wakefield yielded a single to Dal Maxvill to put men on first and third, Mets manager Casey Stengel brought in Jack Fisher to retire Cards hurler Bob Gibson.
That three-run inning left the Cardinals up 5-3 in a game they won 11-5 to win the wild National League pennant chase that featured a historic collapse by the Phillies.
Wakefield didn’t pitch the day before, but the man he was traded for in 1963 did. Craig gave up three runs in one and a third innings of relief as the Cards lost to the Mets, 15-5, to find themselves in that must-win last-day situation.
Craig’s 1963 Topps card captured the hurler right in the middle of his run through baseball purgatory in the Queens. You can bet plenty of Mets fans were laughing at that card as Craig was coughing up those runs at the end of 1964.
Read all about that Craig card right here.
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That’s another week of ramblings in the books. Hope your weekend is less suspenseful than the denouement of the 1964 season.
No one needs that kind of stress, especially when you could just be sorting baseball cards and chomping Big League Chew instead.
Thanks for reading.
—Adam