A shoulder injury shortened his major league career, leaving him with a 20-23 record.
Long afterward, he maintained that his chances of coming back from the injury had been spoiled by the baseball wisdom of his time and an odd bit of instruction from Eddie Stanky, who became the Cardinals’ manager in 1952.
“The whole philosophy was to pitch through pain and it would eventually go away,” Cloyd was quoted as saying in Lew Freedman’s “The Boyer Brothers of Baseball” (2015). “And if your arm doesn’t come around, we’ll get somebody else.”
Not only did his shoulder never fully come around, his injury was further aggravated by Stanky’s insistence that he work on his baserunning skills.
He told how Stanky, seeing his potential as a pinch-runner, had put him through drills in which he practiced scrambling back to first base to avoid being picked off. As Boyer told it: “He’d be my coach. He’d yell, ‘Get back!’ And I had to dive back. I think that’s when I hurt my arm the second time.”
After his one season with Kansas City, Boyer pitched in the minors until 1961. He was a pitching coach for the Yankees in 1975 and 1977 and with the Atlanta Braves later in the 1970s and in the early ’80s. He managed in the Yankees’ minor league system and worked for them as a roving pitching instructor and a scout.
Cloyd Victor Boyer was born on Sept. 1, 1927, on the outskirts of Alba, Mo., near the city of Joplin in the southwestern part of the state. His father, Chester, was a grocer and worked on road-building projects run by the Depression-era Works Progress Administration. His mother, Mable (Means) Boyer, tended to the large family.
He graduated from Alba High School in 1945, pitched for a Navy team on occupation duty in Japan after World War II, and was then signed by the Cardinals out of a tryout camp.

Source: New York Times

Powered by NewsAPI.org