Eddie Fisher made sweet music with a pitch that could dance. That’s why the Cardinals wanted his help in their bid for a division title.
On Aug. 29, 1973, the Cardinals purchased the contract of Fisher, 37, from the White Sox. The right-handed knuckleball specialist was in his 15th and final season in the majors.
On the day Fisher was acquired, the Cardinals (67-64) led a weak National League East Division. They were two games ahead of the second-place Pirates (63-64) and 6.5 in front of the last-place Mets (60-70).
With Diego Segui, Orlando Pena, Al Hrabosky and Rich Folkers, the Cardinals had a reliable bullpen but wanted the insurance of another experienced reliever for the title run. Fisher fit the bill.
Home on the range
Fisher attended grades one through 12 at Friendship School in Altus, Okla. “There were only 16 in my graduating class, nine boys and seven girls, including Betty Hudgens, whom I later married,” Fisher recalled to The Sporting News.
He excelled in baseball and basketball. His Altus American Legion baseball teammate, Lindy McDaniel, also became a big-league pitcher. As a high school senior, Fisher was a principal player in a major upset. He shut out state powerhouse Capitol Hill, ending its 66-game winning streak in 1954.
“I could throw the knuckler then, but I could win with just a fastball and curve, so I never used it in a game,” Fisher said to The Sporting News.
After graduating, Fisher got a job in Oklahoma City reading gas meters. He also pitched for the company baseball team. Its manager, Roy Deal, was the father of Cardinals pitcher Cot Deal. Roy helped Fisher get an athletic scholarship to the University of Oklahoma.
Fisher didn’t throw the knuckleball in college either. “Eddie didn’t need the knuckler to win in college ball,” head coach Jack Baer explained to The Norman Transcript, “and there are very few catchers, let alone college catchers, who can handle a knuckler.”
As a college junior, Fisher got an offer from the Kansas City Athletics but opted to return to Oklahoma for his senior year. When no offers came after Fisher completed his college career, Roy Deal contacted a minor-league team in Corpus Christi, Texas, and helped him get a roster spot there.
Tuning up
Corpus Christi, a farm club of the Giants in 1958, was managed by a former American League catcher, Ray Murray, who encouraged Fisher to add the knuckler to his assortment of pitches.
A year later, in July 1959, Fisher, 23, was called up to the Giants. For Fisher’s debut, a start against the Pirates, manager Bill Rigney used backup catcher Jim Hegan, 38, who was in his 16th season in the majors. Experienced catching the knuckler, Hegan guided the rookie through the game. Fisher pitched seven innings, limiting the Pirates to one run and three hits, and got the win. Boxscore
A popular singer at the time also was named Eddie Fisher. The singer’s marriages to actresses Debbie Reynolds (their daughter is actress Carrie Fisher), Elizabeth Taylor and Connie Stevens added to his fame. Asked about sharing a name with the crooner, baseball’s Eddie Fisher told The Norman Transcript, “I can’t sing, and what’s more, I don’t like to.”
Teammates nicknamed the pitcher Donald Duck “because of the excellent imitation he does” of the Walt Disney character, The Sporting News noted.
Higher education
After the 1961 season, Fisher was sent by the Giants to the White Sox for pitchers Billy Pierce and Don Larsen. Pierce and Larsen helped the Giants win the 1962 pennant. The White Sox helped Fisher find his niche. The turning point came during the 1964 season when his teammate, knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm, persuaded him to use the knuckler as his main pitch.
“We’d be out there together in the bullpen and we’d talk shop,” Fisher told The Sporting News. “He kept hammering away at me to throw the knuckler more. He insisted it was my out pitch and he finally convinced me.”
The bullpen combination of Wilhelm and Fisher confounded American League batters. With the 1964 White Sox, Wilhelm was 12-9 with 27 saves and a 1.99 ERA. Fisher was 6-3 with nine saves and a 3.02 ERA. In 1965, Fisher led American League pitchers in appearances (82) and was 15-7 with 24 saves and a 2.40 ERA. Wilhelm was 7-7 with 21 saves and a 1.81 ERA.
Their knucklers baffled White Sox catcher J.C. Martin as well. Martin had 24 passed balls in 1964 and 33 in 1965.
Fisher was effective against all styles of hitters. Contact hitter Bobby Richardson batted .103 in 29 at-bats against him. Slugger Jim Gentile came up empty _ hitless in 15 career at-bats. “If it’s a good knuckleball, it doesn’t just float. It moves,” Gentile told The Oklahoman. “Swing at it, it might dip, might rise.”
American League batters hit .192 versus Fisher in 1964 and .205 in 1965.
That’s a winner
On June 13, 1966, the White Sox traded Fisher to the Orioles for second baseman Jerry Adair. Fisher joined a bullpen with Stu Miller, Moe Drabowsky and Dick Hall.
Fisher made an immediate impact, earning a save or a win in five of his first seven appearances with the Orioles. He pitched in 44 games for them and was 5-3 with 14 saves and a 2.64 ERA. The Orioles (97-63) won the pennant.
Though Fisher led the league in appearances (67 combined for the White Sox and Orioles) for the second year in a row, he didn’t pitch in the 1966 World Series versus the Dodgers. The Orioles swept, getting shutouts from Jim Palmer, Wally Bunker and Dave McNally. The only Orioles reliever to appear in that World Series was Drabowsky, who pitched 6.2 scoreless innings and struck out 11 in Game 1.
Fisher never got to play for another World Series participant. He was with the Indians in 1968 and the Angels from 1969-72 before returning to the White Sox.
Final season
At spring training in 1973, Fisher, 36, had a 1.33 ERA in 27 innings pitched in exhibition games. White Sox manager Chuck Tanner and pitching coach Johnny Sain decided to open the season with Fisher as their No. 3 starter behind another knuckleballer, Wilbur Wood, and Stan Bahnsen.
Fisher won four of his first five decisions, but the good times didn’t last. He slumped in June (10.67 ERA in five starts) and was moved back to the bullpen. In 10 relief appearances covering 35.1 innings, he had a 3.57 ERA, prompting the Cardinals to acquire him. Barney Schultz, Cardinals pitching coach in 1973, helped St. Louis win a World Series title in 1964 as a knuckleball reliever who joined the club in August.
Cardinals manager Red Schoendienst put Fisher to work, pitching him in three consecutive games. In his second appearance, on Sept. 2, 1973, Fisher got the win with a scoreless inning of relief against the Mets. The triumph gave the Cardinals (69-67) sole possession of first place in the division, a game ahead of the Pirates (66-66), and pushed the Mets (63-72) nine games below .500. Boxscore
The next day, the Cardinals played a doubleheader against the Pirates. In the opener, with the score tied at 4-4, Fisher entered in the bottom of the 13th inning. The first batter he faced, Richie Hebner, clobbered a knuckleball to deep right.
“I definitely thought it was gone,” Cardinals catcher Ted Simmons told The Pittsburgh Press. “I was ready to walk off the field.”
Instead, the ball hit the wall and caromed past right fielder Jose Cruz. Center fielder Luis Melendez didn’t back up Cruz as he should. The ball bounced along the artificial surface of the outfield as Hebner steamed around the bases.
Melendez said to The Pittsburgh Press, “I’ve got to be there (backing up the play). If I get there when I was supposed to, it only would have been a double.”
When Melendez finally got to the ball, he reached for it and didn’t come up with it. He reached a second time and again couldn’t grab it. Pirates third-base coach Bill Mazeroski told The Pittsburgh Press that he intended to hold Hebner at third, but when Melendez twice failed to retrieve the ball, “I sent him in. If he picks it up the first or second time, I don’t send him in.”
Hebner scooted to the plate with a walkoff inside-the-park home run, and Fisher was the losing pitcher. Boxscore
Two weeks later, on Sept. 17, Fisher got a win, pitching two scoreless innings and driving in a run with a single against the Expos’ Mike Marshall. Boxscore
By then, though, the Cardinals (74-76) were sliding. The Mets won seven in a row from Sept. 18 to Sept. 25 and finished as the only team in the division with a winning record (82-79).
(The 1973 Cardinals ended 81-81, sixth overall in the National League, a finish that today would have them popping champagne corks and selling postseason merchandise as lame playoff qualifiers.)
Fisher was released by the Cardinals after the season, ending his playing days. He was 2-1 with a 1.29 ERA for them. For his career in the majors, Fisher was 85-70 with 82 saves.
RetroSimba 
Fisher was fourth in the 1965 AL MVP voting. “The Cardinals win the third-place wild-card! The Cardinals win the third-place wild-card!”
Yep, Eddie Fisher got the most AL MVP votes of any pitcher in 1965. The award went to Twins shortstop Zoilo Versalles, who led the AL in total bases (308), extra-base hits (76), runs scored (126), doubles (45) and triples (12). Tony Oliva placed second in the voting and Brooks Robinson was third.
You got it right with the laughably pathetic imitation of a team broadcaster hyping the clinching of a third-place wild card spot.
1973 is such a tragic miss. If Twitter were around who would have taken the most heat!
When the Cardinals began the season by losing 20 of their first 25 games, the players who took the most heat were the rookies on the left side of the infield, shortstop Ray Busse and third baseman Ken Reitz. Spectators in St. Louis booed them. Here’s the story: https://retrosimba.com/2013/03/05/cardinals-betting-pete-kozma-isnt-another-ray-busse/
The Chicago White Sox teams that Eddie Fisher was a part of during the early 60’s were a very good team that unfortunately always came up short. The 1973 Chicago White Sox pitching staff sure was fascinating. What would today’s analyitcs fanatic say about the amount of innings and starts by Wilbur Wood and Steve Bahnsen? That extra inning game you mention against the Pirates was a brutal loss. And to quote a song from Eddie Fisher the singer, made Cardinals fans feel “downhearted”.
Yes, indeed, you are right about that 1973 White Sox pitching staff being fascinating. Wilbur Wood made 48 starts, pitched 21 complete games and 359.1 total innings, and was 24-20. Stan Bahnsen made 42 starts. The staff included Rich Gossage, Terry Forster and Steve Stone. In August, after he was placed on waivers by the Twins, Jim Kaat joined the 1973 White Sox. He made seven starts and was 4-1.
I like your line from the Eddie Fisher song. Thanks for joining in with the spirit of the post.
As a kid getting Eddie Fisher baseball cards, I recall being a bit confused as to whether or not he was also the crooner Eddie Fisher. :-) Very good pitcher and was always a high grade in the APBA game. Those early and mid ’60s White Sox teams had great pitching, but just never quite had enough offense to win a pennant.
Early on this 2023 Cardinal team reminded me a bit of ’73. That team was horrible early on, recovered, but just could not put it together enough to win a lousy division. A series of terrible trades by Bing Devine after the 1968 season and for about the next 10 years kept the Cardinals as anywhere from medicore to bad. I just hope 2023 is blip in the radar and not history repeating, and we are not bad for the rest of the decade or longer!
It would have been fun if Topps had produced a card of crooner Eddie Fisher…
Indeed, those 1960s White Sox pitching staffs you cite had stalwarts such as Joe Horlen, Gary Peters, Ray Herbert, Juan Pizarro and Tommy John. Dave DeBusschere was a promising White Sox pitcher then before deciding to focus on a NBA career. Manager Al Lopez and pitching coach Ray Berres knew how to get the most from their pitchers.
Fascinating that Fisher pitched on not one, but two White Sox teams with fellow knucklers. I wonder how many times that has happened? I can’t get over that 1964 White Sox knuckleball bullpen. Such an amazing pitch. My brother was telling me yesterday that the knuckleball was revived earlier this season…a pitcher for the Padres named Matt Waldron.
Good point about the White Sox having multiple prominent knuckleballers both in the 1960s and again with that 1973 team.
Wilbur Wood surely must be the greatest left-handed knuckleball pitcher of all-time. Wood was especially tough versus the Brewers. His career record against them (not counting the 2-1 mark he posted against the 1969 Seattle Pilots) is 21-9. Those 21 wins are the most Wood had against any opponent in his career.
Here’s a link to the game where Phil Neikro wins his 300th game as a Yankee of all things VS the Jays: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RLzYJ-tpFEM
That win, Phil Niekro’s 16th of the season, came on the last day of the 1985 regular season and was witnessed by his brother, fellow knuckleballer Joe Niekro, who was acquired by the Yankees from the Astros on Sept. 15 that year.
In 1970 and 1971, Joe Niekro and Eddie Fisher pitched in the same game three times when Niekro was with the Tigers and Fisher was with the Angels. The first time was Aug. 15, 1970, at Anaheim. Joe Niekro got a complete-game win, holding the Angels to one run. Fisher pitched three scoreless innings of relief. The knucklers were really working that day: https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1970/B08150CAL1970.htm