patterj

Significant injuries. I was a young kid in Maine (Reds Sox territory) in 1967. I painfully recall the Red Sox beating the twins in the final game of the regular season to win the the pennant.Two minor injuries that year cost the twins a chance to go to their second world series. Gary Bell, a Boston pitcher, plunked Killebrew on the left upper arm on August 4th. The arm swelled up terribly. He didn't hit a homer for about two weeks and the Twins slumped. The twins probably lost a couple of games as a result. That same year Jim Kaat was hot and the starting pitcher in that final two game series.: "A disappointing 9-13 through August that year. Kaat in September produced what he said was the best pitching of his career: Going 7-0 in seven starts, averaging nine innings per outing, heading into his start at Fenway Park on Sept. 30. He remembers talking to Koufax, then a TV analyst, in the trainer’s room before that game. “I was as confident at the time as any pitcher could be,” he said. Kaat lasted only 2-1/3 innings. But it wasn’t the Sox who knocked him out of the game. Pitching with a 1-0 lead, Kaat in the third inning injured a ligament in his throwing elbow, an injury which these days is corrected with Tommy John surgery. To that point, he had surrendered three harmless hits, walked one, and struck out four. Many years later, after their baseball playing days, Kaat and Boston’s Carl Yastrzemski both lived in Boca Raton, Fla. Kaat was out for a bike ride one day and came by Yaz who told him if the lefty hadn’t gotten hurt that day, the Sox weren’t going to win the game. “We wouldn’t have beaten him,” echoed Swansea’s Russ Gibson, the Sox’s starting catcher that day and one of Kaat’s four strikeout victims. “You couldn’t believe the stuff he had. He was pin-point. He was on the black. His breaking ball was working.”