Bruce Hurst 1989 Topps Traded

        

On June 25, 2016, I received the above card, I took to Facebook and wrote the following:

“Once again back is the incredible, baseball card animal, the unhittable BCB. 

Dropping off Bruce Hurst as a Padre! The former Sox lefty was nails in 86 Postseason and was a solid number two behind Clemens. No thanks to all time jackass who almost ran the Morman lefty out of Spring Training back when Hurst was a rookie. 

Zimmer was a nincompoop who never understood pitching (only that he couldn't hit it).”

I’m not sure why I started this post with a Public Enemy quote because if there was one person in all of Major League Baseball who was un-PElike, it would be Bruce Hurst.

Bruce Vee (that is his real middle name and I swear to Joseph Smith I did not look this up) Hurst was a Mormon left handed pitcher out of St. George, Utah. He kinda looked like a gym teacher or a banker or a dude that spent every weekend in his backyard barbecuing. He just seemed to be a really nice guy.

Too bad that Don Zimmer, who was his manager his rookie year, hated him. According to Peter Gammons’ phenomenal book, “Beyond the Sixth Game” (if you haven’t read it, you should) Zimmer used to give Hurst a lot of crap because he wasn’t a “real ballplayer”. Because he was a Mormon, Hurst didn’t drink, smoke or cuss; so Zimmer thought that he was a pussy. Zimmer used to give Hurst so much crap, that Hurst almost quit baseball.

Don Zimmer seems like a hell of a guy. Fuck him.

In any event, Zimmer was canned by the end of the 1980 season and Bruce Hurst worked his way to a stable major league career. In 1983, I bought a scorecard magazine at the first Red Sox game that I went to and there was an article titled, “The Sox Southpaws are HOT!” It was about the trio of young Sox lefties: Hurst, (Bob) Ojeda and (John) Tudor. The article was correct, because during the next five or so years, this trio would be amongst the best pitchers in the league.

In fact, of the eight teams that played in the World Series from 1985 through 1988, these players pitched on five of them. Of course, Hurst with the Sox in 1986, Ojeda with the Mets in 1986 and the Peabody, MA-native Tudor with the Cardinals in 1985, 1987 and the Dodgers in 1988. The strange thing about Tudor is that the team that he contributed the least to, the 1988 Dodgers, is the one team that he won the Series with. Of the three, only Hurst was picked for an All-Star team (1987), though I thought for sure that Tudor would have been a lock in 1985 when he was 21-8 and Ojeda in 1986 when he was 18-5. But they weren’t.

Tudor was traded from Boston to Pittsburgh for Mike Easler. Easler spent a season in Boston (Tudor spent a year as a Pirate) before being flipped to the Yankees for Don Baylor. Ojeda was sent to the Mets in 1985 for a package of prospects that included Calvin Schiraldi, Wes Gardner and Laschelle Tarver. 

Hurst was a vital cog in the Red Sox rotation and was the perfect number two guy behind Roger Clemens. He never struck out a ton of batters, but he had this big looping curveball that he could get over for a strike anytime he wanted to. It must have been something for a batter to see Clemens pumping fastballs by you one night and then facing this crafty lefty and his weirdo curveball the next. And on the follow through after one of those curves, Hurst always had his right leg up in a weird angle. He was a real joy to watch.

While you could argue that either 1987 or 1988 was his best year, his absolute peak performance came in the 1986 World Series. Hurst absolutely stymied the Mets for two games and was cruising along in the seventh until he just ran out of gas. Had Boston got that final out in Game 6, it was Hurst who would have been the Series MVP.

The Sox had a pretty good front three in 1988 with Clemens, Hurst and new pitcher Mike Boddicker. They just got overwhelmed by an awesome Oakland Athletics team. If they could have kept that front three together for a couple of more years, I think that they would have made some noise in the American League. 

People really liked Bruce Hurst and when he left, I don’t recall too many fans being pissed off that he took a lot of money and moved to San Diego. Everyone said that he wanted to be closer to his family in Utah, that he had a West Coast mentality and that the money that Padres were offering was too good to turn down.

Funny enough, the only person that people seemed to be pissed off at after Hurst bolted was Roger Clemens. I think. I did very minimal research on this, but I could have sworn that Clemens’ “Luggage Interview” occurred immediately after Hurst left. Clemens went on TV with Channel 5’s Mike Dowling and started jabbering on and on about why players leave Boston. He mentioned something about how the team does nothing for them and that “they have to carry their own luggage” when they go on the road.

People flipped out. Seriously. People lost their god damn minds about this. If you look at it, all Clemens is saying is that other teams do things for their players; get their luggage to and from the airport, sets their family up when they get to town, things like that. Things, that teams do now. But New Englanders went into hissy fit mode and accused Clemens of being a prima donna baby whose too good to carry his own bags. Clemens didn’t mean that, only he’s too damn inarticulate to say what he meant.

Anyway, according to the site I just checked, this interview was given on August 12, 1988. Maybe he was responding to a “what if” question from Dowling. Like, “If Hurst leaves, what would be the reason?” or something like that.

In any event, Hurst went to the West Coast and teamed up with slugger Jack Clark (another prized free agent that the Padres signed that winter) and Tony Gwynn and proceeded to lead the Padres to an 89-73 record which was good for second place behind the Giants. He pitched well for the Pads (55-38) record, but wasn’t ever outstanding. Kind of like how he was in Boston. All of his pitching stats (aside from strikeouts) were a tick or two better in San Diego than when he was a Red Sox, though I bet that had more to do with playing half of your games in Jack Murphy Stadium rather than Fenway Park.

He finished his career with stints with the Colorado Rockies (he was an original Rocky) and the Texas Rangers where he finished his career at 36-years-old.

All-in-all, not a bad career for a guy who almost quit the sport because Don Zimmer wasn’t able to size him up right. I bet no one cheered louder than Hurst when Pedro Martinez put that douchebag on his ass—though I bet he cheered in the most polite, Mormonly way possible.