‘Once in a generation' – The All-Star throw that rocketed Dave Parker to Cooperstown

New York Times

11-07-2025

Welcome to Sliders, a weekly in-season MLB column that focuses on both the timely and timeless elements of the game.
They had been teammates for one day, nearly four years earlier. One hit a game-tying homer and drove in the go-ahead run with a walk. The other nailed two runners on the bases with some of the most hellacious throws anyone had ever seen.
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Dave Parker, the fielder, was the Most Valuable Player of that 1979 All-Star Game. Lee Mazzilli, the hitter, was not. Reunited with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1983, Parker reveled in the reminders.
'If you knew the Parkway, he was a trash talker, in a good way, to everyone,' Mazzilli, a Met in 1979, said by phone this week. 'It didn't matter who you were. It was always a good back and forth. I'd say, 'Yeah, the only reason you won it was because you misjudged the ball!''
Actually, Mazzilli said, Parker lost a Jim Rice pop-up in the roof of the Seattle Kingdome, only to recover it — in foul territory by the right field bullpen mounds — and fire a one-hop strike to third base to nail Rice.
But that play, in the seventh, merely foreshadowed an even better one in the eighth, when Parker unleashed a rocket, on the fly, to cut down the go-ahead run.
It was the kind of moment that sent a signal from the spire of the Space Needle to the halls of Cooperstown. And while it took decades to receive that message, the Hall of Fame finally elected Parker last December in a vote by the Classic Baseball Era committee. He will be inducted on July 27, four weeks after his death from Parkinson's Disease at age 74.
'He had a cannon,' said Larry Bowa, the National League's starting shortstop for the Philadelphia Phillies in 1979. 'Not only did he throw good, the ball was always low, one-hop to the catcher. It was of those where you say: 'Once in a generation.'
'He took a lot of pride in defense, he could steal bases, hit home runs, hit for average. And he had that saying: 'When the leaves turn brown, I'll be wearing the batting crown.''
Parker had indeed won the NL batting title in 1977 and 1978, his MVP season, when he also led the majors in OPS (.979) and won his second of three Gold Gloves. Keith Hernandez, then with the St. Louis Cardinals, followed Parker as batting champion in 1979 and was co-MVP with Pittsburgh's Willie Stargell.
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When Parker's Pirates won the World Series that fall, it further cemented a status widely shared by Hernandez and his peers.
'He was the best player in the game from '78 to the early '80s,' Hernandez said last week. 'I can only speak for myself, but he was the best player in the game.'
Hernandez made the last out in the top of the eighth inning in the 1979 All-Star Game, after Mazzilli's leadoff homer off Jim Kern had tied it, 6-6. Leading off for the AL in the bottom of the eighth was Angels catcher Brian Downing, in the only All-Star appearance of his career.
Downing played 20 seasons and actually compiled more bWAR than Parker (51.5 for Downing, who walked a lot, compared to 40.1 for Parker, who didn't). This was Downing's best season, and he made the most of his chance with a single off future Hall of Famer Bruce Sutter, a master of the split-finger fastball.
After a sacrifice bunt, an intentional walk and a strikeout, Graig Nettles came up. Here's how the play looked on NBC:
Downing, 74, lives on a ranch in Texas now and said he has never watched any highlights from his career. But, he said in a rare interview late last year, the details of the Parker play are etched in his memory. We'll let Downing describe it in full:
'Okay, so I'm thinking Bruce Sutter and Graig Nettles — just looking at the way Sutter throws it and Nettles' swing, he's going to either hit a hard ground ball up the middle for a hit, a hard grounder to right for a hit or, more likely, a one-hop drive right at frickin' Parker in fairly shallow right on a fast Astroturf field.
'So I'm going to get the best lead I can without getting picked off, and I'm going to get as good of a secondary lead as I can, which I've always done. And I have to assume he's going to hit that line drive on one hop, which, to my chagrin, that's exactly what happened.
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'I got as good a jump as I could get. I'm happy with all that because I was ready for it. And I made the turn and now I'm coming around third. And I have no problem with violence. Full speed, I don't care. But as I'm coming, I'm thinking of the Pete Rose play (with Ray Fosse in 1970) and all that, I don't want to hurt somebody. Because if you run into a catcher, which I was at that point, you're out 99 percent of the time, automatically. You're not knocking it loose unless you're Bo Freaking Jackson. And my theory when I was on second is that I'd have to run into him, assuming there's going to be a play at the plate.
'But from my vantage point coming around third, the front of the plate was wide open, if not the whole plate. And I don't even see Gary Carter because I'm concentrating on the plate. He's at least a full step away from the plate. So the plate is wide open and I'm going to take a headfirst dive, which I've always done, and try to grab the top, left-side corner. And at that point, when I start to do that, he's not around.
'So I'm in the slide, and all of a sudden he comes up and blocks my hand off. Carter made an awesome play. I was headed to a wide-open plate, and I never saw any of that. It was just like a magic trick. It showed up on me, there it is. I thought it was something I've done many times — headfirst, grab the plate before they can get me — and it didn't happen because two Hall of Famers made Hall of Fame plays, both of 'em.'
Two years earlier, in 1977, Parker had recorded 26 outfield assists, a total unmatched in the major leagues since. Most runners knew better than to bait Parker, who gleefully accepted the challenge.
'I loved throwing out runners,' he said in December, in his conference call with reporters after the Hall of Fame election. 'And if they kept running, I would hit him in the back of the head with the ball.'
In interviews after the All-Star Game, Parker said that he had wanted to make a one-hop throw to the plate, but it took off. He credited Carter — as Joe Garagiola did, effusively, on NBC — for saving the play. Carter, who was then with the Montreal Expos, told reporters it was 'the biggest play of my career.'
Like Parker, Carter relished the spotlight. He would win two All-Star MVPs himself, in 1981 and 1984, but this one belonged to Parker, who was brash enough to tell his Pirates teammates, before leaving for Seattle, that he would win it.
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In 'Cobra,' his 2021 memoir with Dave Jordan, Parker said that when commissioner Bowie Kuhn handed him the trophy, it meant more to him than his batting titles.
'I carried that thing through the dugout, up the stairs to the clubhouse, out the stadium, back through the doors of the Olympic Hotel,' Parker and Jordan wrote. 'It sat beside me on the hotel bar while I cooled out with some of the fellas. I might've even bought it a drink. I stared at the trophy before I fell asleep. I carried it through Sea-Tac Airport like a damn Cabbage Patch doll.
'If you've ever won something you really wanted and everyone mocked you for holding on to it for days, guess what. I was right there with you, baby.'
Parker won't be there in Cooperstown for the biggest honor of all. But he always knew his day was coming. When asked in December if he considered himself a Hall of Famer when he played, Parker had no hesitation.
'Without a doubt,' he said.
One month ago Friday, the Mets' David Peterson fired the first shutout of his career, a six-hitter with no walks and six strikeouts in a 5-0 victory over the Washington Nationals. He seemed bound for another in Baltimore on Thursday, but manager Carlos Mendoza pulled him with a 1-0 lead after a leadoff single in the eighth.
'You're already in the eighth inning, 90 pitches,' Mendoza explained later, after the Orioles came back off Ryne Stanek for a 3-1 win. 'He did his part.'
OUTS RECORDED AFTER THE SIXTH INNING THIS SEASON BY METS STARTERS
David Peterson: 25
Everyone Else: 8
— Tim Britton (he/him) (@timbritton.bsky.social) July 10, 2025 at 1:56 PM
Mendoza's decision – despite Peterson's reasonable pitch count – highlights the relative disappearance of the shutout, something only seven others have accomplished this season: Cincinnati's Andrew Abbott, Detroit's Tarik Skubal, St. Louis' Erick Fedde and Sonny Gray, San Diego's Michael King and Stephen Kolek and Texas' Nathan Eovaldi.
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Baseball, then, is on a single-season record pace for fewest complete-game shutouts. Last year, teams threw 321 shutouts but pitchers went the distance just 16 times, tied with 2022 for fewest in a full season in AL/NL history. No active pitcher has more than three in a season, and the active leader, Clayton Kershaw, hasn't had one since 2016.
Peterson, a first-round pick from the University of Oregon in 2017, threw 106 pitches in his shutout, seven shy of his career high from 2023. After Thursday's start, he is 6-4 with a 3.06 ERA, and his 109 innings easily lead the Mets' battered pitching staff.
Here's Peterson with a few thoughts on the increasingly rare pitching gem.
Strikeouts and shutouts don't always mix: 'I'm trying to go as deep as I can in every game. My goal is if I can go all nine, then I'll go all nine. But there's a lot to do with pitch counts and workload management and all that stuff that kind of gets in the way of guys getting to that position. A lot of people are fascinated with chasing the strikeouts and doing all this and doing all that. There's a price to pay that comes with that, which is usually the pitch count goes up if you're going to be trying to chase punchouts.'
His last shutout, in 2017, was a big one: 'It was very special — I struck out 20 guys. It was like 128 pitches, I think. (Writer's note: Actually 123.) I knew (the strikeout total) because earlier in the year I had struck out 17 against Mississippi State, and after the eighth inning, I overheard somebody say where I was at. But it wasn't really like a thought in my mind until I overheared something.'
Overanalysis hurts the cause: 'For me growing up, watching guys in the '90s and 2000s, they would be regularly at 110 pitches in a start. But now I feel like teams can take so many things into account, they probably overanalyze the situation a little bit: 'Well, he went 100 last start and he's getting close again now, and where are we in the season?' I think early in the year somebody had a chance to get a complete game, and they got pulled at like 85 pitches or something like that. So it feels like there's a lot more factors that work against it.'
It helps to be a student of pitching: 'Andy Pettitte was a huge guy that I watched growing up — Randy Johnson, Roger Clemens, Pedro Martinez, all those guys. It didn't really matter for me, left or right. Josh Beckett, (Jered) Weaver for the Angels. And then Kershaw, (Max) Scherzer, (Justin) Verlander, that next wave, I felt like there was such an abundance of good starting pitchers to watch. There's a ton of guys and everyone did stuff differently and they had their own way of going about it. I felt like you could learn a lot from people just in terms of the individuality of their pitching style or the mechanics or how they go about the game on the mental side.'
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One for the trophy case: 'Pete (Alonso) gave me the final out and then I got the lineup card, too. It was special for me and it was especially special to share with my teammates, because you only see it every now and then. As the game changes, some of those things get held in a different regard over time.'
The Chicago White Sox's All-Star next week will be pitcher Shane Smith, a Rule 5 draft choice who earned the spot with a 2.37 ERA in his first 13 starts. Alas, Smith has lost his four starts since then, with a 12.33 ERA. It will be another year without a South Side Cy Young Award winner.
The White Sox franchise has had only three, including Early Wynn, who fit last weekend in the square for a Cy Young winner with 200 career wins. Wynn, who shares a name with the stat (or a pronunciation, anyway) actually collected 300 exactly on his way to the Hall of Fame.
Wynn won the MLB Cy Young in 1959, followed by LaMarr Hoyt (1983) and Jack McDowell (1993), who won the AL awards. Those were the only years the team made the postseason from 1920 to 1999, and the similarities don't end there.
All three Cy winners led the majors in victories — Wynn and McDowell were 22-10, Hoyt 24-10 — and all three had an ERA over 3.00. They also rated lower than you'd think, analytically, collecting fewer than 5 bWAR in their award-winning seasons.
The deserving winners, by bWAR: Larry Jackson in 1959, Dave Stieb in 1983 and Kevin Appier in 1993. Then again, this stuff tends to even out over time. The White Sox have had three pitching bWAR leaders in the Cy Young Award era, and all fell short: Wilbur Wood in 1971, Britt Burns in 1980 and Dylan Cease in 2022.
If you're looking for a summer beach read, no matter how many times you've read it, 'Ball Four' always delivers. There's never been a more hilarious, insightful peek into the life of a ballplayer than Jim Bouton's diary of his 1969 season as a reliever for the Seattle Pilots and Houston Astros.
In the years that followed the book's publication, Bouton, who died six years ago Thursday at age 80, became a celebrity, appearing in movies, working as a sportscaster, writing more books and turning inventions like 'Big League Chew,' with Rob Nelson, into reality.
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Lesser-known, perhaps, is Bouton's sitcom, also called 'Ball Four,' which ran for five episodes on CBS in the fall of 1976. Co-created with TV critic Marvin Kitman and sportswriter Vic Ziegel, Bouton starred as a pitcher for the fictional Washington Americans.
'We wanted 'Ball Four,' the TV show, to be like 'M*A*S*H,' only in a locker room,' he wrote in the 1990 update to his seminal book. 'Instead it turned out more like 'Gilligan's Island.'… We were first in the American League and last in the hearts of our countrymen, according to the Nielsen ratings.'
Officially the show ranked 76th in the ratings, and as you can tell from the opening credits, there was little star power in the cast. Bouton auditioned his old Pilots teammate Gene Brabender for the role of 'Rhino,' but it went instead to a retired football player, Ben Davidson.
'Our main problem with the show was a difficulty in conveying reality,' Bouton wrote. 'The CBS censor wouldn't let anybody spit, burp, swear or chew tobacco. Any similarity between the characters in the show and the real ballplayers was purely coincidental.'
The credits open with an exterior shot of RFK Stadium in Washington, D.C., and an interior shot of Veterans Stadium in Philadelphia. A shirtless Bouton chuckles to himself as he writes in a diary, while game footage (from the Vet) mixes with scenes of clubhouse hijinks.
And naturally, this being the 1970s, there's a delightfully cheesy theme song:
There's a boy in me who comes alive each summer/Won't you come play ball with me?
(Top photo of Dave Parker after the 1979 MLB All-Star Game: Associated Press)