Saturday, March 18, 2017

#361 Mike Andrews

Above average 2nd baseman for 5 of 8 seasons...Rookie year of 1967 he was a contributor to the team’s road to the WS hitting .253...no votes for ROY....improved his hitting stats in 1968 when most of the league batsmen regressed in the year of the pitcher....around this time Andrews got involved with a Boston charitable organization “Jimmy’s Fund” for cancer research....numbers improved in 1969 hitting eight points short of .300...Average dropped to .253 in 1970 but Mike was able to improve power and RBIs figures.....Nevertheless traded to woeful Sox team in Chicago...Hit .282 in an admirable comeback....As in 1967, Mike’s new team made vast improvement from previous season....Andrews faltered in 1972 hitting a weak .220....Things didn’t get better in 1973 and Mike lost the starters spot to Jorge Orta....enter the bizarre ending of his career...sent to Oakland for their playoff run....made the post season roster....made two errors in game 2 prompting Charlie Finley to strong arm Mike into stating he injured so Rookie Manny Trillo could be called up....The stunt made headlines and Baseball Commissioner intervened and Andrews was reinstated to the roster....Finish from there on....had a brother, Rob play for Astros and Giants....for many years was  Chairman of the Jimmy Fund.


Posted by at
Labels: ,

4 comments:

  1. Jim from DowningtownMarch 21, 2017 at 8:25 PM

    Mike Andrews started 135 games at 2B as a rookie in 1967, then the veteran Jerry Adair started 5 of the final 7 regular season games there, and the first 4 WS games. Andrews started the final 3 games of the Series (maybe he was injured?)

    ReplyDelete
  2. DouglasMarch 22, 2017 at 7:23 PM

    I've cross reference other data sources and nothing shows up but injury sans DL info is hard to come by....but one thing I've learned in doing is that there a lot moves one would find odd today, trading off players after very productive year, a pitcher not being started in a critical game, ownership and management was just different then.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Saul WisniaMarch 16, 2019 at 11:02 PM

    I interviewed Mike Andrews several times about his '67 season and the stretch drive. He actually hit .342 in September, and was one of the hottest hitters in the AL not named Yastrzemski that month, but Dick Williams wanted to go more with the vets down the stretch and that meant Jerry Adair. I did a SABR bio on Andrews where this is discussed in full -- here's a link: https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/7f1f5b41

    p.s. Andrews is a great guy who spent 30 years as chairman of The Jimmy Fund of Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. He always says his second career was the more meaningful one even though he loved baseball.

    ReplyDelete
  4. DouglasMarch 24, 2019 at 12:08 PM

    Thank you for your information. Williams certainly seemed to be a veteran's manager based on his Oakland days. Hope you liked the blog. I've based the format on the Complete Handbook of Baseball series but with a career wide perspective.

    ReplyDelete

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)