RetroSimba

There was a time in the late 1950s when the Cardinals thought a left-handed slugger from the streets of New York City might be the successor to Stan Musial.

Duke Carmel certainly fit the part. He was named after Duke Snider, had the mannerisms of Ted Williams and could hit with the power of Mickey Mantle.

Rangy (6-foot-3) and strong (200 muscular pounds), “Duke Carmel on a baseball field looks like the player you’d put together if somebody asked you to draw a picture of a prospect destined for major-league stardom,” The Buffalo News reported. “The throwing arm, the running speed, the hitting power, the ideal size, the versatility.”

Problem was, he also had a hitch in his swing.

From city to country

Born and raised in East Harlem (“A pretty rugged neighborhood,” he told The Sporting News. “I’ve had to fight my way through all my life.”), Leon James Carmel was nicknamed Duke for his favorite player.

“All the kids there at the time rooted for either the Yankees or Giants,” Carmel told The Sporting News. “When I took up for the Dodgers, and particularly for Duke Snider, they started calling me Duke, too, and it stuck.”

As for his given name of Leon, Carmel said, “If anyone called me that, I might not turn around. I wouldn’t know who they meant.”

A first baseman and pitcher at Benjamin Franklin High School, Carmel, 18, was signed by Cardinals scout Benny Borgmann in 1955.

His breakout season came in 1957 for the Class C farm club at Billings, Mont., 2,000 miles (and worlds apart) from East Harlem. Carmel, 20, hit .324 with 29 home runs and 121 RBI. Moved from first base to the outfield, he had 18 assists. “The best prospect I have ever managed,” Billings manager Eddie Lyons told The Sporting News.

Though Carmel tried to downplay the achievements _ “The pitchers there are mostly throwers and sooner or later they run out of gas,” he told The Sporting News _ the Cardinals were intrigued and brought him to spring training in 1958.

Carmel has “a batting form and a willowy swing that remind observers of Ted Williams,” The Sporting News reported in February 1958.

A manager in the Cardinals’ farm system, former pitcher Cot Deal, said, “Carmel reminds you of Ted Williams.”

J. Roy Stockton of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch noted, “Carmel seems to have most of the requisites _ sharp eyes, lithe muscles, a cocky, happy disposition, and a sparkling desire to bash a baseball to distant places.”

Blind spot

Facing better pitching at Cardinals camp than he did at Billings, Carmel struggled to hit pitches with movement, especially those that jammed him. That’s when the flaw in his swing became evident.

Cardinals hitting coach Stan Hack, who batted .301 in 16 seasons in the majors, told the Post-Dispatch, “He has a hitch. He lowers his hands, holding the bat, and when the pitch is high, he’s helpless. He can correct it if he listens, understands and keeps trying, but it takes a lot of work. You can’t correct a thing like that in an hour, or a day, or a month.”

Carmel said to The Buffalo News, “You have to stay loose and relaxed to play this game, and every time I go up to the plate determined to hit that long ball, I hitch too much. Then I get upset, and before you know it, I’m in a slump. I have to conquer myself, not the pitcher.”

Looking to find a groove, Carmel spent most of 1958 and 1959 at the Class AA and AAA levels of the minors. He played for Johnny Keane at Omaha, Cot Deal at Rochester, Harry Walker at Houston and Vern Benson at Tulsa. There were flashes of brilliance, but nothing like the kind of season he’d had at Billings.

Carmel, 22, got called up to the Cardinals in September 1959. He and teammate Tim McCarver, 17, made their big-league debuts in the same game. After striking out against Braves reliever Don McMahon, Carmel told The Sporting News, “I still haven’t seen any of the three pitches he threw by me.” Boxscore

Cardinals general manager Bing Devine said Carmel was in the club’s plans for 1960. “He’s showing signs of arriving,” Devine told the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle. “His possibilities for the future look very good.”

Traveling man

Carmel went to spring training with the Cardinals for the third straight year in 1960, and, like the other times, didn’t make the Opening Day roster.

The Cardinals traded him each of the next three seasons and reacquired him every time. They traded him to the Dodgers in 1960, reacquired him that year, traded him back to the Dodgers in 1961 and reacquired him again. In 1962, Carmel was sent to the Indians, then the Cardinals got him back a third time. In his stints with the Dodgers and Indians, Carmel never got out of the minors.

Carmel was not on the Cardinals’ roster when he went to spring training with them in 1963. Little was expected, but he became “the pleasant surprise of the spring,” The Sporting News reported. In his first 29 at-bats in the exhibition games, Carmel made 14 hits, including two home runs, two doubles and a triple.

The performance earned him a spot as a reserve outfielder and first baseman on the 1963 Opening Day roster of Cardinals manager Johnny Keane.

In his first at-bat of the season, Carmel hit his first big-league home run, tying the score in the bottom of the ninth against Pirates closer Roy Face. Boxscore

The highlights, though, were too few. Carmel was batting .227, with more strikeouts (11) than hits (10), when the Cardinals traded him for the fourth time. He was shipped to the Mets on July 29, 1963. This time, there would be no return.

Carmel had mixed emotions about departing. “I had been with that organization for eight years and it had become like a home to me,” he said to The Sporting News. However, he told the New York Daily News, “I didn’t want to sit around there, playing maybe 60 games a year. I want to make money in this game, and if I do the job, I’ll make it here (with the Mets).”

Meet the Mets

In joining the Mets, Carmel, 26, became a teammate of his boyhood idol, Duke Snider. In his Mets debut, Carmel started at first base and Snider was the right fielder. Boxscore

A week later, Aug. 8, 1963, Carmel hit a game-winning home run against Cardinals left-hander Bobby Shantz at the Polo Grounds in New York. Shantz threw him a slow curve and Carmel propelled it “onto the overhanging scaffold which fronts the upper tier in right,” the New York Daily News reported. Boxscore

(That was the first major-league game I attended. I was 7, and to my eyes, Duke Carmel was quite a mighty player.)

Carmel hit .235 with three home runs for the 1963 Mets. After the season they acquired two outfielders who, like Carmel, batted from the left side (George Altman from the Cardinals and Larry Elliot from the Pirates). Another left-handed batter, Ed Kranepool, 19, was projected to take over at first base.

Carmel did himself no favors at spring training in 1964, hitting .217 and getting into a personality clash with manager Casey Stengel, according to the New York Daily News.

Expecting to make the 1964 Mets’ Opening Day roster, Carmel instead was sent to the Buffalo farm club. “I don’t think they have anybody on the Mets better than I am,” Carmel told The Buffalo News.

Playing for Buffalo manager Whitey Kurowski, a former Cardinals third baseman, Carmel, 27, had a big season _ 35 home runs, 99 RBI and 100 walks. In August, the Yankees tried to acquire him for the 1964 pennant stretch but the Mets wouldn’t deal, general manager Ralph Houk told United Press International.

(If the Yankees, who won the 1964 American League pennant, had gotten Carmel, he would have faced the Cardinals in the World Series.)

New York, New York

After the Cardinals won the 1964 World Series title, manager Johnny Keane left for the same job with the Yankees. Two of the coaches he hired were Vern Benson and Cot Deal. All three had managed Carmel in the Cardinals’ system. On their recommendations, the Yankees chose Carmel in the November 1964 draft of players left off big-league rosters.

Keane told Carmel he would open the 1965 season as a Yankees utility player. “He had a golden chance to have a glorious new life in his hometown, playing for the team that cashes checks every fall,” George Vecsey wrote in Newsday. “All he had to do was not get hit by the D train.”

Carmel avoided getting hit by a train, but also avoided getting any hits for the Yankees. He was 0-for-26 in spring training exhibition games and then 0-for-8 in the regular season.

Released in May 1965, Carmel returned to the minors. His last season was in 1967 with Buffalo, then a Reds farm club. Among his teammates was a 19-year-old catching prospect, Johnny Bench.

New game

In 1972, five years after Carmel’s professional baseball career ended, Joe Gergen of Newsday found him playing as a ringer for a CBS-TV softball team in New York’s Central Park.

At 230 pounds, Carmel was the team’s catcher and slugger. In the game Gergen saw, Carmel had a single, a triple and a three-run home run, “a towering fly ball which carried over the right fielder’s head.”

“Between innings,” Gergen wrote, “there was time for Duke to eat an ice cream pop, drain a bottle of soda, puff on a cigarette and sit with the kids.”

Carmel said, “I enjoy this. Here, there’s no curfew.”