George Frazier, Reliever From the 1987 World Series Team, Dies at Age 68

The game was well in hand. The Twins took a quick 1-0 advantage off a Greg Gagne homer, but Jim Lindeman almost immediately tied the match with a single in the bottom half of the frame. Then Tom Lawless hit the most infamous homer of his career, flipping his bat with the kind of swagger baseball would only begin to accept decades later, and the dam broke on the Twins. The inning drowned them. George Frazier finally entered in the seventh inning with a five-run deficit, struck out two over a pair of frames with a few fly balls along the way, and left the mound as one of the only successful Minnesota pitchers that night. No one knew it, but that would be Frazier’s final MLB career outing.

Oklahoma-born and drafted, George Frazier journey-manned his way through a 10-year MLB career, evolving from back-end reliever on the pre-Herzog Cardinals, to stunning Yankee discovery, to 1981 World Series goat, to an often-traded commodity fortunate enough to latch onto the 1987 Twins for his last go-around in the majors. Typically traded for players more famous than himself—he left Cleveland with Rick Sutcliffe to join the Cubs; Joe Carter returned in the deal—Frazier worked to carve out his MLB career.

'I wasn't entitled to pitch in the 1981 World Series. I wasn't entitled to pitch in the 1987 World Series. It was a privilege I had an opportunity to do that, and I still feel that every day.'

When much-maligned reliever Ron Davis was in the midst of a disastrous 1986 campaign, the Twins packaged him and Dewayne Coleman to acquire Frazier along with Ray Fontenot and Julius McDougal. McDougal never made the majors, and Fontenot’s MLB career quickly ended, but the trade accentuated the need for the Twins to fix their abysmal bullpen. Frazier helped, but major aid came in Minnesota signing Juan Berenguer and trading for Jeff Reardon—two arms critical to the World Series victory.  

"George was always a friendly face that came into the visiting clubhouse and came into the visitors' manager's office," [Rockies manager Bud] Black told MLB.com. "I always enjoyed my conversations with George. He'd come in, sit down on the chair, and we'd talk baseball. We were contemporaries, to a certain extent. Our timelines overlapped, and it was an easy conversation. It really was."

Frazier’s Twins career was brief—he threw far more innings with the Yankees and Cubs—but he reliably gobbled up frames for a 1987 team desperate for any reliable arms. The same team that handed 42-year-old Steve Carlton 43 innings of work called on Frazier 54 times, often calling upon him in the eighth inning to keep the game close. He did just that, putting up the fourth-best ERA amongst the typical group of relievers Tom Kelly relied on that year.

He was a true character—the kind of guy seemingly inevitably attracted to baseball. In an alleged meeting with then-commissioner Peter Ueberroth, he fought back against allegations that he used foreign substances, claiming that “[a]ll of the substances [he used] are made in the US."

Following his playing career, Frazier tried his hand at broadcasting. Although he was known to be a wild quote, often speaking his mind when others would find such comments uncouth, Frazier latched on with the Colorado Rockies in 1998, becoming “a mainstay and the voice behind many classic calls on Rockies broadcasts,” as the official Rockies Twitter account wrote on June 19th.

"I had more fun when I made $216.84 every two week in Class A ball and I didn't have to pay Uncle Sam $285,000 a year in taxes. ... The money's great, but all of it goes to my ex-wife [slight laugh], to be honest. She's driving a Mercedes and I'm driving a van, if that tells you anything."

He provided color commentary on the TV broadcast through 2015, sitting front-row for a tremendous era of Rockies baseball, highlighted by the team’s magical 2007 run to the World Series. 

Frazier is survived by his sons, Matthew and Parker, the latter who was drafted in 2007 by the Rockies, and a daughter, Georgia, who was crowned Miss Oklahoma in 2015.

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Sources:

B/R Bullpen - George Frazier.

Gaydos, Ryan, World Series champ George Frazier dead at 68, FoxNews.

Raskin, Alex, George Frazier, major league pitcher who played in the World Series for the Yankees and Twins, dies at 68 after battling undisclosed illness, DailyMail.

Rockies, Twitter post, June 19th, 2023, 4:20 PM.

Star Tribune Staff, George Frazier, member of Twins 1987 World Series championship team, dead at 68, StarTribune.