I'm sure I'll soon start droning on at length again about various moments of defeat and longing from my past, but right now I'm kind of sick of the word I. It happens sometimes. It happened in a primordial form all the time when I was a kid, and I escaped my I-ness in various ways, including deep plunges into my baseball cards, especially those that included names so cartoonishly exotic that they could never be confused with being from the same world as my own.
So here's the king of those names, Sixto Lezcano, 23 years old, looking young and confident, as if he has never in his life gotten sick of being the person inside the word I. He has just completed a 1977 season in which he swatted 21 home runs in just 109 games. He seems to sense that he and the Brewers are poised on the brink of a breakthrough season.
In 1978, with Lezcano providing stellar defense in right field and a .292 average at bat, the Brewers recorded not only the first winning season in the history of their previously nondescript franchise but a blistering 93-win campaign that would have catapulted them into the playoffs in many other years (or even in the same year had they been a member of the American League West). But this 1978 season by the Brewers has pretty much been lost to history, eclipsed by the battle royale that year between the 99-win Red Sox and 100-win Yankees. The Brewers got even better the next year in what would be Lezcano's finest season (he drove in 101 runs and finished 15th in league MVP voting), tallying 95 wins, enough to pass both the Red Sox and the Yankees in the standings. Unfortunately, the Brewers' excellent 1979 season is also obscure, as they finished a distant second in the division behind a Baltimore Orioles squad that won 102 games. It was a tough time to get noticed in the AL East: the following year the Orioles would tally 100 victories and have to settle for second behind the Yankees. The Brewers, still good, still unnoticed, finished far behind both with 86 wins, a dropoff for them that could be attributed to the dip in play of Sixto Lezcano, whose average plummeted from .321 in 1979 to .229 in 1980.
He was traded in December 1980 and so wasn't around when the Brewers finally broke through with half of a division win in the strike year, then a trip to the World Series in 1982. In the World Series the Brewers fell to the Cardinals, the team Sixto Lezcano had been traded to, but he wasn't on that team either, having been traded again to the Padres. The Padres made it to the World Series a couple years later, but by then Sixto Lezcano had been traded to the aging, fading Phillies. The Phillies, composed mostly of geriatric former members of the Big Red Machine, made an improbable run, or walker-limp, to the World Series the year Lezcano joined them, but even though he played well in limited action during the regular season he seems to have been left off the postseason roster (correction: as pointed out in the comments below, Lezcano actually played several playoff games that year). He contributed the next year as a competent part-timer (from playing Strat-O-Matic I know that he generally raked left-handed pitching) but within a year was out of the league for good.
It's now 30 years since the time of the photo in the card above, 30 years since the dawn of the single golden age of the Brewers. Robin Yount and Paul Molitor and the 1982 pennant-winners are remembered, but who remembers all the wins in the preceding years, years when the charisma of newness and promising youth on the team emanated most strongly from the rightfielder with the cannon arm and mesmerizing name. Who remembers the Age of Sixto Lezcano?
Sixto's stats show so many good years in his early 20s, but a part-time by late 20s and out at age 31. Wonder if he hadn't been an age-fudger.
But better that, I suppose, than "Meow meow meow meow, meow meow meow meow..."
... and it is we who shall remember those Brewers. They had a certifiable gorilla in Gorman Thomas. I remember staring for long periods at the cards of Don Money, Robin Yount, Moose Haas -- all fascinating, for different reasons. They had Cecil Cooper, who I vaguely remember doing ... well, SOMETHING, something that was so unbelievably funny that it became a staple inside joke between me and Josh for years. And they had Sal Bando. Who pitched 3 innings in a game that year, giving up 2 runs.
5 : Yes, in my mind Cecil Cooper will always be one of the funniest humans ever, on the strength of that incident alone. I can't quite recall the specifics of it either, but whenever I hear the phrase "mugging for the camera" I think of Cecil Cooper.
While I would have loved to have been able to swing the Phillies giveaway bottle bat--I still have no idea how they were able to get away with distributing 35-inch, 45-ounce black bats with an enormous barrel on one Sunday in 1976--I swung a blue band Don Money model Adirondack. I loved that bat. I remember breaking it on a single to left at the filed across from the Pep Boys service station. I don't think I hit with wood ever again.
Here I am to prevent that. I met a Sixto once, and he pronounced it "SEES-toe", where the second S was a very soft S (not a Z) sound and nearly lisped, as in Castillian Spanish, almost like "SEETH-toe".
Sixto does mean "sixth", from the Latin "sextus", although the Spanish word is "sexto".
Lezcano apparently had good trade value; he was part of the package that netted Ted Simmons, Pete Vuckovich and Rollie Fingers, all important to the aforemention Brewers WS team, and, with Garry Templeton, what brought Ozzie Smith (and a mediocre pitcher) to the Cardinals.
In today's game, a 32-year old Lezcano would still be playing.
http://www.sixtolezcano.com/
I do think "Tribute to A Legend" is a bit of a stretch however.
Josh, here's your big chance to interview a Cardboard God via the email link on Sixto's site.
My first question would be whether he named his son Seveno.
8 : Yeah, the scariest of the real-sized bat days of the 1970s was at Yankee Stadium, sez I. Here, 50,000 people, here are your large wooden cudgels, now fill up on beer and blazing sun for a few hours then walk in a snarled throng out into the gentle Bronx night.
There are new comments on Ben Oglivie (Ramblin' Pete fleshes out the view of me and my brother's old bulletin board of fame), Joe Wallis, Reggie Jackson (Yankee card), and Mario Guerrero (1974 Red Sox card). I can't remember right now any others of less recent vintage, but I did want to direct readers to an entertaining comment that I do recall, attached to the beautiful 1975 Ed Brinkman card.
http://tinyurl.com/349wsz
Seriously, though. Am I the only person who remembers hearing that Sixto Lezcano was missing a sizable portion of one (or both) of his feet? The story I read was that he had a hunting accident as a child.
Is my memory playing tricks on me?
Beer Please!
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