RetroSimba

One year after they traded Steve Carlton because he wanted a $65,000 salary, the Cardinals offered a college pitcher a six-figure contract.

Michigan State’s Brad Van Pelt, a right-hander with a 100 mph fastball, was the prospect who prompted the Cardinals to consider coughing up the cash. He also was a football talent, a recipient of the Maxwell Award presented to the most outstanding college player in the sport.

Drafted in January 1973 by the baseball Cardinals and the NFL New York Giants, Van Pelt opted for pro football. He went on to play 14 seasons, helping to form one of the all-time best linebacking units.

Abundant athleticism

Van Pelt was from Owosso, Mich., a town 90 miles northwest of Detroit. Thomas Dewey, twice the Republican nominee for president, was from there, too. (Dewey lost to Franklin Delano Roosevelt in 1944 and to Harry Truman in 1948.)

An athlete who excelled in every sport he tried, including bocce, golf and soccer, Van Pelt was a high school sensation as a quarterback in football, a rebounder in basketball (he hauled down 42 in one game) and a pitcher in baseball (consecutive no-hitters as a senior).

The Tigers, his favorite team, chose Van Pelt, 18, in the 14th round of the 1969 June baseball draft but he took a football scholarship from Michigan State instead.

(It was the first of five times Van Pelt was selected in the baseball draft. He declined to sign each time. After the Tigers in June 1969, others to draft him were the Angels in June 1972, Cardinals in January 1973, Pirates in June 1973 and Indians in January 1974.)

“Rangy, fast and strong,” Van Pelt, 6-foot-5, 220 pounds, had the “defensive end’s body with the receiver’s speed,” according to the Lansing State Journal.

Michigan State guard Joe DeLamielleure (elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame for his skill as a Buffalo Bills and Cleveland Browns lineman) told the newspaper, “Van Pelt was the modern day Jim Thorpe, and that’s no exaggeration … He could have been our starting quarterback because he could throw the ball a mile.”

Michigan State head coach Duffy Daugherty said Van Pelt could have played any position on the football team. “He is the most versatile athlete I’ve ever coached,” Daugherty told the Associated Press.

Daugherty dubbed Van Pelt his “secretary of defense” and put him at safety. Often called a rover back, Van Pelt had the size and speed to intimidate receivers, stuff rushers and pressure quarterbacks with blitzes. “I’ve never seen a safety able to come up to the line of scrimmage to make tackles as quick as Brad can,” Daugherty said to the Flint Journal.

George Perles, an assistant on Daugherty’s staff before eventually becoming head coach, told the Lansing newspaper, “During his college career, he (Van Pelt) might have been the biggest safety in the Big Ten (Conference), if not the country.”

In his three varsity seasons (1970-72), Van Pelt totaled 256 tackles and 14 interceptions. “He (Daugherty) gave me the freedom to blitz when I wanted and to go to the ball on every play,” Van Pelt said to the State Journal. “I can’t thank him enough.”

Man for all seasons

Described by Joe Rexrode of the Lansing newspaper as “the purest all-around athlete in Michigan State history,” Van Pelt played varsity basketball and baseball.

He got into 31 basketball games for head coach Gus Ganakas, who told the State Journal, “Van Pelt helped define the position of power forward.”

In baseball, Van Pelt pitched for head coach Danny Litwhiler, a former big-leaguer who played in two World Series (1943 and 1944) as the Cardinals’ left fielder.

As a sophomore, Van Pelt was on the 1971 Big Ten championship baseball team. The next season, he struck out 84 in 56.1 innings and had a 2.07 ERA. The Angels picked Van Pelt in the 13th round of the June 1972 draft and offered $100,000 _ “The first three days after they made the offer I really thought about signing,” Van Pelt told the Flint Journal _ but he chose to return to college for senior year.

Instead of spending the summer of 1972 pitching in the Angels’ system, Van Pelt went to the Netherlands with an amateur team from Grand Rapids, Mich., to compete in an international honkbal (Dutch for baseball) tournament.

Cardinals calling

After Van Pelt’s senior football season, big-league baseball held a winter draft on Jan. 10, 1973. In those days, a secondary phase was conducted for players who had been drafted in prior years but hadn’t signed.

Selecting seventh in the first round, the Cardinals chose Van Pelt. “He was one of a few premium players available,” Cardinals director of player procurement George Silvey told the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.

Cardinals general manager Bing Devine said to United Press International, “He’s an all-American boy in every sense of the word.”

(The Tigers, who had the next pick after the Cardinals, were planning to draft Van Pelt, the Post-Dispatch reported. When the Cardinals beat them to it, the Tigers went with Van Pelt’s Michigan State teammate, pitcher Larry Ike.)

Van Pelt told the Cardinals he’d wait until the NFL draft was held on Jan. 30, 1973, before making a decision.

When the Cardinals made it known they intended to sign Van Pelt, NFL teams didn’t want to risk losing a first-round pick in a bidding war with a baseball team. As the New York Times put it, Van Pelt became “a player of unquestioned ability but highly questionable availability.”

New York Jets head coach Weeb Ewbank told the Times, “We just didn’t see any sense in fighting baseball for him, but he is one hell of an athlete.”

The Giants, who had traded their first-round pick to the Browns for defensive end Jack Gregory, grabbed Van Pelt in the second round, where, as head coach Alex Webster noted to the Times, “he was worth the risk.”

Decision time

A year earlier, the Cardinals reportedly offered Steve Carlton a 1972 salary of $57,500. Carlton wanted more. As spring training got under way, Carlton said he and the club were less than $10,000 apart, The Sporting News reported, but owner Gussie Busch, angry when the pitcher didn’t sign, ordered Bing Devine to trade him. Carlton was sent to the Phillies, who gave him $65,000 in 1972, and he won 27 games for them that season.

Devine offered a lot more than that to Van Pelt in February 1973. Braving a snowstorm, Devine met with Van Pelt in Owosso and made an enticing pitch. “We went to a peak level with the offer we made him,” Devine told Milton Richman of United Press International. “By that I mean over $100,000.”

Giants owner Wellington Mara followed Devine to Owosso and presented Van Pelt with a three-year, no-cut contract worth $300,000.

Van Pelt said the money offered by the Cardinals and Giants was about the same. “The two offers were so close that I almost thought they had gotten together,” he remarked in an article published in the Post-Dispatch.

Van Pelt chose the Giants primarily because he could begin his pro career in the NFL rather than in baseball’s minor leagues.

(Danny Litwhiler told United Press International that Van Pelt would need at least two years of total concentration on baseball to become ready for the majors. Van Pelt acknowledged to the Jersey Journal, “I know I have a major-league fastball, but my curve leaves a lot to be desired.”)

As Devine said to Milton Richman, “With us, he would have had to go to the minor leagues to develop. With the football Giants, he went right to the big-league club. That was the key.”

Crunch Bunch

The Giants tried Van Pelt at tight end and strong safety during a frustrating rookie year. After Bill Arnsparger replaced Alex Webster as head coach in 1974, Van Pelt shifted to outside linebacker. His career soared when Marty Schottenheimer arrived as linebacker coach in 1975. “I’d say 85 percent of what I am now, I learned from him,” Van Pelt told the Detroit Free Press in 1979.

Van Pelt was named to the Pro Bowl five years in a row (1976-80) and was chosen as the Giants’ player of the decade for the 1970s. “If Brad Van Pelt played on a good team, he would be a household name,” Los Angeles Rams general manager Don Klosterman said to Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News.

The Giants had one winning record in Van Pelt’s 11 seasons with them. As club executive John Mara told the Daily News, “If you look at those (Van Pelt) years, our teams were as bad as could possibly be. We really had some awful teams in the 1970s. He was the one guy who was consistently a good player.”

Van Pelt played for five Giants head coaches _ Alex Webster, Bill Arnsparger, John McVay, Ray Perkins and Bill Parcells. (Bill Belichick was a Giants assistant coach from 1979-84 and Van Pelt’s linebacker coach from 1980-83.)

When Parcells joined the Giants as defensive coordinator on Perkins’ staff in 1981, he installed a 3-4 defense after the club drafted Lawrence Taylor. From 1981-83, the Giants’ four hard-hitting starting linebackers _ Harry Carson, Brian Kelley, Taylor and Van Pelt _ became known as the Crunch Bunch. (Carson and Taylor were elected to the Pro Football Hall of Fame.)

According to Newsday, Taylor called Van Pelt “one of the greatest players I ever played with.”

The arrival of linebacker Carl Banks, a first-round pick from, of all places, Michigan State in 1984 prompted the Giants to break up the Crunch Bunch. In July 1984, Van Pelt was traded to the Minnesota Vikings for fullback Tony Galbreath.

Van Pelt refused to report, telling the Vikings he preferred to be with a team either in California or Florida. He never played a game for the Vikings. They traded him to the Los Angeles Raiders for two draft choices. Van Pelt spent two seasons (1984-85) with the Raiders and one (1986) with the Browns.

In 1998, Van Pelt returned to Michigan State and completed his school work, earning a degree in health and physical education. Three years later, he was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame. A son, Bradlee, was a quarterback for Colorado State and played in three games for the 2005 Denver Broncos.