When the Pirates and Giants play into tonight’s Wild Card Game, it’ll be their first playoff meeting since the 1971 NLCS. The 1971 Pittsburgh Pirates were a fearsome offensive baseball team. They lead the National League with 788 runs scored and 154 home runs. Their .274 batting average was the second in the NL, their .330 OBP was second, and their .416 slugging percentage was first. You can sort of glean from those numbers alone how 1971 baseball was different from 2014 baseball (the Pirates’ rate stats then and now track really closely, but these Pirates have scored 100 fewer runs).
The Lumber Company was lead by two future Hall of Famers. Willie Stargell was in his prime in 1971, and I’m always surprised by just how lean, mean, and good Stargell was in the early 1970s compared to borderline teddy bearish Stargell figure from the Fam-a-lee of 1979, when Stargell was still good but no longer necessarily great. This is the nature of how history changes our perceptions: to someone born in the 1980s raised on Pirate VHS tapes, the 1971 Pirates belonged to Clemente and the 1979 Pirates belonged to Stargell and that’s that. Putting those perceptions aside, this is what Willie Stargell did in 1971: he hit .295/.398/.628 with 48 home runs and 26 doubles and drove in 125 runs. He finished second in the MVP voting and I suspect that if the 1971 MVP voting was repeated in 2014, he would’ve won (he lead the NL in strikeouts, which were stigmatized a lot more in the ’70s) as he had a higher WAR than the actual winner Joe Torre, and Torre didn’t find his way to the playoffs that year.
In addition to Stargell, Roberto Clemente was still a remarkable hitter in 1971 at the age of 36. He hit .341/.370/.502 that year, with 29 doubles, eight triples, and 13 home runs in 132 games. Sometimes when I look back at old stat lines I see players that simply can’t exist in modern baseball due to the way the game has changed with our increased focus on walks for hitters and strikeouts for pitchers. I understand why the game has evolved the way that it has and I love a lot of modern baseball for what it is, but I still get a little sad for the parts of the game that have faded . Can you imagine a 36-year old hitting .341 with a .370 OBP in 2014? And hitting eight triples? Honestly, the best analogue for this sort of season (high batting average to drive a good OBP, gap power and speed to make up for lack of home run power) I can find on the current Pirates is Josh Harrison. Harrison is 26-years old and certainly in his prime. He played completely out of his mind this year, and I don’t know if even the biggest Josh Harrison fans think he can ever quite match the numbers he just put up in 2014. Clemente surpassed this at 36 with a bad back playing on turf that was laid on top of cement. Like Stargell, so much of Clemente is tied up in myth and legend for those of us that didn’t see him that it’s easy to not fully grasp what a marvel the man was as a baseball player.
That Pirate team had a third really good offensive player: Bob Robertson. Robertson wasn’t an offensive terror the way that Willie Stargell was in 1971 or Andrew McCutchen is in 2014. He wasn’t a unique and persistent offensive threat the way Clemente was in 1971 or Josh Harrison is today. He was just sort of an all-around solid player with some pop, the way that I guess I’d say Neil Walker is on this Pirate team. He hit .271/.356/.484 in 1971, with 26 homers (second on the team behind Stargell). As the recent Pirate history should tell you, it’s not always the guys at the top of the lineup that make the best lineups; it’s the depth after them that separate the bad from the good from the best.
Anyway, the Pirates won the old NL East in 1971 with 97 wins and presumably entered the NLCS as big favorites over the 90-win Giants. In Game 1 of the NLCS, though, the Giants tagged Steve Blass for four runs in the fifth inning to steal a 5-4 at Candlestick Park. As you may recall from last year’s NLDS, a Game 1 loss can be a tough thing to bounce back from in a best-of-five series. Game 2 came the next day and the Giants scored in the first to take a 1-0 lead, then they scored again in the second to take a 2-1 lead. In the fourth inning, though, it was Bob Robertson who hit a two-run homer to put the Pirates ahead 3-2, and in the seventh inning it was Robertson who hit at three-run homer to put the Pirates ahead 8-2, and in the ninth inning it was Robertson who iced the cake with a solo shot. The Pirates cruised to a 9-4 win behind Robertson’s three homers, and three days later the NLCS was over and the Pirates had won the series 3-1.
Robertson’s hit two more home runs in the World Series that year, but his career was derailed by injuries after 1971 and he never really blossomed into the star first baseman that the early 1970s indicated that he might’ve become. Today, his huge performance in the 1971 NLCS is more or less a footnote; I only know about it because of the old Battlin’ Bucs VHS tape I watched to the point of breaking as a kid. The 1971 team is all about that World Series and Blass’s pitching heroics and the final stand of Clemente, as he dragged the team past the Orioles in dramatic fashion. Bob Robertson is a line in the box score and a name in a blog post.
It’s not fair, but that’s how these things happen. Short playoff series or one-game eliminations mean that any player on either can write their name into franchise lore, even if 20 years down the road they’re not well-remembered by anyone besides the people that watched the games or the people that consume the franchise history. Everything is amplified in these games and it’s worth taking it all in. It’s impossible to say what will be important from this game 20 years from now, but tonight, even the smallest things will matter.
