Jeff Reardon 1992 Upper Deck

On July 1, 2016, the Baseball Card Bandit sent the above card. I took to Facebook that day to write this:

“The BCB is at it again but this time there's a wrinkle in his (I assume it's a man) game. Look at the postmark! This card, of Terminator Jeff Reardon, was sent from New York City where Reardon spent the last 11 games oh his career sans trademark beard. 

Reardon was needed when he was with the Sox (Boston had potential HoFer Lee Smith) but for some reason GM Lou Gorman picked him up. Maybe that's what led him to real world troubles he had in Florida after he retired. 

Or maybe it was just Florida. Man, that state just sucks.”

I was never a big Jeff Reardon guy. I just didn't think that he fit a need for the Red Sox and wondered why they were spending money on him. It was a needles bauble, as far as I was concerned. Sign a starting pitcher, an outfielder with pop, anything but another lights-out closer. We already had one. And he was good.  

When the Red Sox picked him up as a free agent after the 1989 season, I was a little shocked. Boston still had Lee Smith*, who had a really good previous year. Smith was 6-1 with a 3.57 ERA (which is unfair metric to judge for closers) and had 25 saves and a 12.2 strikeout over nine innings ratio. Reardon had a 5-4 record, a 4.07 ERA, saved 31 games and 5.7 SO/9. Plus, Reardon was two years older and cost more money. 

*The Lee Smith deal was probably Lou Gorman's best deal ever. He traded Calvin Schiraldi and Al Nipper to the Cubs for Smith. Gorman should have been arrested for larceny. It was that good of a deal. 

Why would you sign a closer when you already had a really good one in the back of your bullpen. I wasn’t sure what Red Sox General Manager Lou Gorman was thinking. But I assumed that since Reardon was signed in December 1989, Smith would be gone by Spring Training. Again, not true. When the Sox reported to Winter Haven, Florida both Reardon and Smith were there too. They spent a lot of time talking about who was the closer and they gave similar pat instances about how “these things have a way of working out” and “whoever had the hot hand”. Crap like that.

If there was ever a manager who could make this work, it was Sox skipper Joe Morgan. He said the same thing. When camp broke that April, both Reardon and Smith were on the roster. This lasted about a month before Gorman traded Smith to the St. Louis Cardinals for Reardon’s former Twin teammate Tom Brunansky.

Brunansky was slotted in right field and was the Red Sox only power threat in some very lean years. He did make a pretty awesome catch off of Chicago White Sox shortstop Ozzie Guillen to clinch the 1990 American League East. Other than that, he was completely adequate.

I often wondered why Reardon chose the Red Sox that off season. He knew about Lee Smith and he understood that the Sox really didn’t need a closer. Reardon grew up in Dalton, MA, so maybe he wanted to come home. Gorman gave him a crap-load of money to pitch here. Maybe Gorman told him that the team didn’t like Smith anymore and that he would be traded soon and that there was nothing to worry about.

I’m not sure. But he came in and pitched well. In two plus seasons, he had 88 saves for the Red Sox and made the All-Star team in 1991. That was also the year where he gagged the American League East flag. The Sox were making a pretty hard run late in the season when the Sox were on the verge of beating the New York Yankees to get closer to the league-leading Toronto Blue Jays.

With two outs in the top of the ninth and the Red Sox leading 5-4, Reardon gave up a game tying shot to Roberto Kelly. The next inning, Matt Young and Dan Petry couldn’t get out of their own ways and gave two runs to Bombers who won the game 7-5. From that game forward, the Sox lost 10 of their next 13 and finished in second behind the Blue Jays.

The Sox were never a serious contender until 1995 when another Massachusetts boy, Dan Duquette took the reigns as Boston General Manager and remade the Sox on the fly following the strike-shortened 1994 season. Duquette was Reardon’s catcher at UMass-Amherst.

Late in the 1992 season, Reardon was traded to the Braves for a minor leaguer. From there he bounced to Cincinnati and the Yankees—two teams that had strict rules of facial hair. If Reardon wanted to continue pitching, he had to shave off the beard that made him famous and intimidating. He retired after the abbreviated 1994 season.

Jeff Reardon was an interesting character. He looked like James Brolin from the original “Amityville Horror” movie. He was a Met for a while, but was traded to the Montreal Expos where he began his career as the unstoppable stopper. That’s also where he got his nickname “The Terminator”. He’d come in, throw gas by everyone, save the day and walk off the mound. He never showed a lot of emotion and when you mix his beard plus playing in the “wilds of Canada” he seemed scary as hell.

After the 1986 season, he signed with the Minnesota Twins and was dominant that year. He was probably their Most Valuable Player that year as he brought a ton of stability to the bullpen. The Twins believed that the game was over once Reardon was on the mound. Twins manager Tom Kelly used him brilliantly and was the best weapon in the American League that year riding him all the way to Minnesota’s first world championship in any sport.

The years after his retirement were not kind to Reardon. This is from Wikipedia (and references what I wrote about him in the original Facebook post):

“On December 26, 2005, Reardon was taken into custody and charged by the Palm Beach Gardens, Florida Police Department for allegedly committing armed robbery at a Hamilton Jewelers store at the Gardens Mall. Reardon attributed his actions to the influence of the medications that he had been taking since his son died in 2004. Soon after the episode at the mall and his release from an overnight stay in jail, Reardon returned to a psychiatric facility, and was an inpatient for nearly two months. His doctors drastically reduced his medications and began to administer electroshock treatments. However, Reardon still had to stand trial.

Reardon was eventually found not guilty of the charges by reason of drug-induced insanity. The judge ruled that because Reardon had been taking anti-depressants and mood stabilizers, and was distraught over his son's death, there was no reasonable explanation for the robbery. In addition, Reardon was not required to be committed after the ruling.”

I haven’t read much about Reardon since then, so I assume he’s doing okay. At least that’s what I want to believe. Because even dominant relievers need some relief.