Mike Cuellar, RIP: “I Can Still See the Look on His Face”

Hands up to everyone who thinks Jim Palmer was the first Cy Young Award winner in Baltimore Orioles history. Now, hands down. The winner was Mike Cuellar, a National League expatriate who shared the 1969 Cy Young Award with Denny McLain after going 23-11/2.38 for the Orioles team that was supposed to squash the poor lil' Metsies in the World Series, probably in four straight.

The heat of the moment never bothered Cuellar, who died of stomach cancer at 72 Friday. Come to think of it, the heat of the anything never bothered him. "I belong to hot weather," said the Cuban-born Cuellar, the first Latino to win or share a Cy Young Award. "Cold weather no good for baseball or me."

The left-hander with the twist-and-shout screwball, as the top of the line of a repertoire that could be described fairly as slop, garbage, and byproduct, was the only reason the Orioles didn't get squashed in four straight in that incandescent Series. But that is not the only reason his teammates will miss him.

"When Mike came," outfielder Paul Blair told the Baltimore Sun, referring to the 1968 trade that made the Houston Astros look ridiculous for giving up on him at age 32, "he solidified the whole pitching staff. We had complete confidence in him, Dave McNally, and Jim Palmer when they walked out on the mound. We knew that if we scored two or three runs, four at the most, we'd win the game. That's a great feeling for a team."

Cuellar opened the 1969 Series by squaring off against future Hall of Famer Tom Seaver in Game One and beating the Mets, 4-1. He scattered six hits and worked spotlessly until the Mets loaded the pads on him with one out in the top of the seventh, Ed Charles interrupting the proceedings with a sky to left following a leadoff single (Donn Clendenon) and a walk (Ron Swoboda). Jerry Grote singled to left to load them up for hero-in-waiting Al Weis, who sent home Clendenon with a mere sacrifice fly.

The brainy lefthander ("His fastball couldn't black my eye, but he owns my hitters' minds," Billy Martin would say of him) merely shook it off with his customary cool and lured pinch-hitter Rod Gaspar (for Don Cardwell, who'd pitched a scoreless sixth in relief of Seaver) into a ground out to Brooks (The Hoover) Robinson, before finishing what he started, two modest hits (an eighth-inning single by Bud Harrelson and a single back to the box by Swoboda to open the New York ninth) and a walk (to Weis with two outs) the only interruptions before he secured it by getting pinch-hitter Art Shamsky (for Ron Taylor) to ground out to future Met manager Davey Johnson at second.

Seaver, for his part, had worked a solid enough early game, once he shook off Don Buford's leadoff bomb in the bottom of the first, but he ran into odd trouble in the bottom of the fourth. He'd mostly manhandled the vaunted Baltimore beaters to that point but, with two out and two on, he surrendered back-to-back RBI singles by Mark Belanger and Cuellar and an RBI double by Buford before dispatching Paul Blair on a groundout to end it.

He worked a scoreless fifth and gave way to Cardwell and Taylor, the latter of whom worked the final two Baltimore innings and cured his own lone mistake by picking Blair (a walk) off first for the side. But it was Cuellar's hour with 8 punchouts to 4 passes. He did everything he could to get the Orioles launched right, only to see another excellent performance go for nothing in a Game 4 rematch with Seaver.

This time, in Shea Stadium, The Franchise was very much on his game, with 6 punchouts to 2 walks and only Brooks Robinson spoiling the shutout bid with a game-tying sacrifice fly in the top of the ninth. By that time, the Mets were deep enough in the Oriole bullpen — the game was an early near-inversion of Game 1, Clendenon providing Cuellar's only real blemish with a leadoff bomb in the top of the second. Cuellar pitched in and out of trouble in the third, settled down for a spotless fourth through sixth, and stranded his only runner (Swoboda, a one-out single to left) in the seventh, before giving way to Eddie Watt, Dick Hall, and Pete Richert.

The problem was in the bottom of the 10th. Hall opened by surrendering a pop double to short left to Grote and, after Grote came out for pinch-runner Gaspar, put Weis on to lure pinch-hitter J.C. Martin into a potential double play. Except that Martin, with a little help from Richert, had a date with World Series destiny. The reserve catcher bunted one back to the box, glanced just beyond the baseline on the way up to first base, and escaped execution when Richert's throw over caught him on the wrist, enabling Gaspar's daring run home for the winning run.

Cuellar could only watch when the poor li'l Metsies upended the Orioles for keeps in Game Five. But he and his oddly elegant pitching motion (think of something between Sandy Koufax without the full extension on the leg kick and Warren Spahn without the slight upper body herky-jerky in the windup) returned to the World Series with a flourish in 1970. As would you if you were one of four 20-game winners (Palmer, future free agency co-pioneer Dave McNally, and Pat Dobson were the other three) on your staff, and you just so happened to be the one leading the American League in wins (24), winning percentage (.750), complete games (21), and home runs surrendered. (34 — now do you want to tell me what's the big deal in surrendering the bomb?)

He would finish a close enough fourth in the Cy Young voting, behind Minnesota's Jim Perry (who won the award), teammate McNally, and Cleveland howitzer Sudden Sam McDowell. First, however, there was business coming in. Cuellar got murdered in his only American League Championship Series start (the Twins jumped him for six) and started the World Series on the wrong side of the Big Red Machine, who jumped him for three in the first before chasing him in the third.

But this time it would be Cuellar going the distance to nail the Series in the fifth game, beating the Reds (his first major league organization, in fact) 9-3 after the Machine jumped him again for three in the first. This time, his mates hung up two runs apiece in the first through the third, padded it in the fifth when Merv Rettenmund reached the seats at Tony Cloninger's expense, and put it into the next county in the eighth with an infield out RBI (Boog Powell) and an RBI single.

In Baltimore, they still say prayers in front of the famous photograph of Brooks Robinson waiting with open arms as Cuellar bounds off the mound toward the Hoover, arms raised. "I can still see the look on Mike's face," Robinson told the Sun. "His mouth was wide open and he had a big, big smile."

As would you, if you'd first come to the Orioles as a 32-year-old slopper on whom the Astros gave up before your time. The Astros swapped Cueller for Curt Blefary, whom history remembers perhaps solely as an outfielder with the kind of hands that inspired Jim Bouton, briefly his Houston teammate, to recall (in Ball Four) Frank Robinson ordering the team bus driver to stop as the vehicle approached a junkyard so Blefary could pick out a new glove.

Crotchety manager Earl Weaver loved his new acquisition. Cuellar, as Robinson would remember, wanted the ball as often as Weaver would let him have it, maybe every other day if it came to that. "He was an artist on the mound," Weaver told the Sun. "[Getting him] put us over the top. Several times down the stretch he pitched with two days' rest when we needed it."

Cuellar was loved among his mates even through his quirks, of which there were several having nothing to do with the point that he tended to start slow but tighten down as the game, and the pennant race, went on. Beating the Reds after a three-run spanking to open a World Series game was the least of it.

You could get his autograph anytime you liked except on the days he was scheduled to pitch. You wouldn't see him poke his nose out of his hole to take the mound each inning until his catcher's shinguards were strapped back on. And you wouldn't see him touch a foul line even if he'd volunteered to walk the chalk down before a game. "If his stride [to or from the mound] was off and he got too close," Powell remembers, "he used a little chicken hop to step over it."

Players have been known to have lucky caps (Eric Gagne, notoriously, refused to change his salt sweat-trimmed cap at the height of his consecutive saves streak, or all season long, during his peak seasons with the Dodgers) but how many would compel a team to air mail the cap from home when forgetting it for a road trip?

Not that the Orioles minded. "Mike was, arguably, the best left-hander in the game from 1969 through 1974," Palmer — now the lone survivor of those four 1970 20-game winners — told the Sun, "but he never got his due. Like Frank Robinson, he came here, embraced the Oriole Way, and changed the destiny of our franchise."

Let the record show that Cuellar anchored the only pitching staff in baseball history to boast four 20-game winners scandal free. The only other franchise to boast four 20-game winners? The 1920 Chicago White Sox, with an even divide between Clean Sox (Red Faber at 23-13, Dickie Kerr at 21-9 and leading the team in winning percentage) and Black Sox (Eddie Cicotte at 21-10, Lefty Williams at 22-14).

Cuellar also impressed the most disbelieving opponents. "His fastball couldn't black my eye," Billy Martin once said of him. "But he owns my hitters' minds."

But he also entertained his teammates. "He made hitters look comical," Powell says, "like they could have swung three times before the ball got there. A couple of times, I almost had to call time out because I was laughing my head off ... It was fun [playing behind him], like when you were a kid. You felt like yelling, 'Hey, batta batta batta.'"

Cuellar had spent the last few seasons showing up as a volunteer Oriole spring instructor. He also spent a lot of years building up the kind of good will he'd built in the Oriole clubhouse in his chosen home of Orlando, Florida. Wracked with cancer — visitors were required to wear surgical gowns and gloves before being allowed to see him — after surviving a brain aneurysm and gall bladder surgery, Cuellar made friends with the same ease by which he dispatched hitters. Cuban-Americans weren't the only ones who ponied up to help his family defray his medical expenses and, ultimately, his funeral.

Until Cuellar's own illness took the wrong turn to the dead end, his buddy Jose Vargas suffered a pre-Father's Day heart attack last year. Cuellar cranked up the TLC and leavened it with buckets of autographed balls for his friend's hospital staff.

His Cuban-born friends, of course, remember the fellow who cranked it up on the mound for the Havana Sugar Kings, in the pre-Castro International League, helping lead a team that included future Showmen Tony Gonzalez, Leo Cardenas, and Cookie Rojas. Then, as in later years, hunting nightclubs where he might get a crack at sitting in when a conga player or a bass player (Cuellar could play either) took a break.

Cuellar shared a Cy Young Award with a fellow musician, one who played the organ as a sideline and probably should have kept his sidelines to that. Denny McLain's music hasn't been anywhere even close to Cuellar's sweetness since.