Happy birthday Vic Raschi - March 28, 1919

Today, we say happy birthday to pitcher Vic Raschi who was born on March 28, 1919 and died on Oct. 14, 1988. Raschi spent less than seven full seasons with the Yankees, but during that time they won the World Series six times and his winning percentage was a whopping .706 which ranks third all-time among Yankees starting pitchers. Lets get to it.

During the winter months before the start of the 1949 season, Vic Raschi was enrolled at William and Mary College finishing his Bachelor of Science degree which was 10 years in the making, and in a conversation with someone, he made three predictions about what was to come that year for the Yankees.

First, after finishing a distant third to the Indians in 1948, Raschi said they would win the AL pennant. Second, he would do his part by winning 20 games along the way. And third, he was going to beat the Red Sox, “If it’s the last thing I do.” That last point was a reference to 1948 when he’d started seven games against Boston and the Yankees were 2-5 in those starts with two of the losses landing on Raschi’s ledger.

I’m not sure Raschi played the lottery, or if he ever made the trip over to nearby Atlantic City to gamble, but maybe he should have because all three of those predictions came true on the afternoon of Oct. 2, 1949.

In the winner-take-all final game at Yankee Stadium, concluding one of the few truly torrid pennant chases between the Yankees and Red Sox, Raschi delivered one of the biggest performances of his eight-year Yankees career. He earned his 21st victory by defeating Boston 5-3 which sent the Yankees to the World Series opposite the Brooklyn Dodgers.

“I don’t know whether the game was the best one I pitched all season,” Raschi said that day, “but it certainly was the best, if you get the difference.”

The inference there was that to that point, it was the biggest personal victory he had achieved. There would be many more to come because Raschi played on six world championship teams and he won five of his eight Fall Classic starts while compiling a miniscule 2.24 ERA, but this one against the Red Sox was really special.

The reason the Springfield, Mass. native was at William and Mary was because after he had been discovered by Yankee scout Gene McCann when he was just 14 years old, he made a unique request, one scouts didn’t usually hear in those days: He wanted to finish high school and then he wanted to go to college and if the Yankees paid for his higher education, in return he promised to sign with them after he graduated.

The Yankees agreed and were patient most of the way, but before Raschi completed his junior year at William and Mary in 1941 they told him now or never, so Raschi put his schooling on hold and signed his contract and reported to the low minors.

However, in 1943 baseball and college took a back seat to World War II and he spent three years in the Army Air Force as a physical education instructor. Once he was discharged he rejoined the Yankees’ minor league system in 1946, first in Binghamton and then Triple-A Newark, before getting the call-up to the Bronx.

And for the next three offseasons, he returned to William and Mary from October to February until he received his diploma in 1949 which paid dividends after his baseball career ended in 1955.

Raschi’s promotion to the Yankees came at a turbulent time for the franchise. Joe McCarthy’s spectacular 15-plus-year managerial run - which included seven world championships - ended when he decided he needed to quit in May 1946. Yankee legend Bill Dickey took the reins but he lasted only 105 games before he, too, resigned, leaving the other assistant coach, Johnny Neun, to manage the last 14 games.

Neun had a sparse MLB playing career with the Tigers and Braves between 1925 and 1931 including one game against the 1927 Yankees when he had five hits and five stolen bases before retiring and spending a decade as a manager in the Yankees’ farm system. But he could always lay claim to the fact that during his brief stint, he served as the first big league manager for the three hotshot prospects the Yankees called up for the final week of the 1946 season - Raschi, catcher Yogi Berra and infielder Bobby Brown.

Berra and Brown debuted on Sept. 22, playing both games of a doubleheader against the A’s, and then Raschi made his first appearance the next day and with Berra behind the plate, he pitched a complete game as the Yankees won 9-6 in front of just 2,475 fans at Yankee Stadium. Raschi also beat the A’s 2-1 in the season finale, a game shortened to seven innings which he also completed.

Raschi took a step backward in 1947 and spent the first half at Triple-A Portland, but when pitcher Spud Chandler suffered an injury, Raschi was summoned to New York by mid-July and he never pitched another game in the minors. That year he went 7-2 with a 3.87 ERA and in the World Series, manager Bucky Harris used him twice in relief.

In 1948 Raschi became a star as he won 19 games and playing in the first of his four All-Star games, Raschi pitched three scoreless innings and hit a game-winning two-run single for the AL. And then starting in 1949 when Casey Stengel was hired, Raschi became part of a three-headed rotation monster with Allie Reynolds and Eddie Lopat who helped lead the Yankees to five straight World Series championships.

Between 1949 and 1951, Raschi made 103 starts and went 63-28 with a 3.53 ERA, and if there was anything more consistent than his performance on the mound, it was his insistence on getting paid. In 1952, after three straight 21-win seasons, he signed for a reported $40,000 which made him the highest-paid Yankee pitcher ever, but it came with a warning from penny-pinching GM George Weiss: “Don’t you ever have a bad year.”

Raschi only won 16 in 1952, but he also had a career-best 2.78 so that worked out fine, but in 1953 he slipped to 13-6 with a still very solid 3.33 ERA. Not good enough for Weiss and he offered him a new contract at a 25 percent pay cut. Raschi, then 35 years old, refused to sign and thus, the cold-blooded Weiss sold him to the Cardinals before the 1954 season.

With the Yankees he went 120-50 with an ERA of 3.47. We don’t pay much attention anymore to pitcher wins, but Raschi’s .706 winning percentage ranks fifth all-time in Yankee history and third-best among starters behind only Chandler (.717) and David Wells (.708).

With the Cardinals and later the Kansas City A’s, Raschi wasn’t the same pitcher and he retired after the 1955 season with a final record of 132-66 and an ERA of 3.72.

That’s when he put that hard-earned college education to use. Raschi and his family settled near Conesus Lake in upstate New York where he taught elementary school and coached baseball and basketball at the State University of New York at Geneseo where the ballfield is named in his honor. Raschi died of a heart attack in 1988 at age 69 and in 2001 he was posthumously inducted into the school’s athletic Hall of Fame.