I read this excellent piece by George Diaz at the Baltimore Sun the other day about Mike Cuellar, a four-time 20-game winner for the Orioles, who had been in the last days of terminal stomach cancer. Cuellar died Friday at 72, the cancer finally taking him after a series of other health issues over the past year.
After a 15-year Major League career, Cuellar pitched his last game in May 1977, just as I was becoming a fan, so I never got to see him play. But I recall, even early on in discovering the game, a certain connection I felt towards Cuellar. I remember reading a lot about the four 20-game winners on the Orioles staff, and seeing the highlights of those early 70’s World Series that the Orioles were in, and seeing Jim Palmer and Dave McNally and, to a degree, Pat Dobson, getting more attention. Then I’d look at Cuellar’s numbers in the Baseball Encyclopedia and wonder why he didn’t get more acclaim.
I think it’s exactly because he wasn’t like Palmer that Cuellar fascinated me. He didn’t have the dominating fastball or the underwear ads or the TV persona that Palmer had. Plus, Palmer was still going strong in the late 70s, and Cuellar was already retired, which made him a little more of a mythic figure to me. Cuellar wasn’t famous outside of Baltimore — certainly not in New York — and he wasn’t even a Yankee (!). Yet I remember connecting with him.
Diaz’s piece drove another point home to me, one that I think is lost on today’s young fans. Cuellar, though clearly one of the best pitchers in the game for a solid six years right in the middle of Baltimore’s championship run, never made enough money in the game (max salary: $45,000) to take care of his family. Cuellar just missed out on free agency, and had he put that 67-win, three-year stretch together today — as a lefty, to boot — he’d be a $10-million-plus player. Cuellar gave his whole life to the game; it was all he knew. He’d been pitching so long that he had played for Havana when it was still in the International League, pre-Castro. And he ended up working part time as a starter and ranger at a country club after he retired.
The point of Diaz’s column is that Cuellar didn’t let that define him, just as his recent illnesses couldn’t break his bond with family an ex-ballplayer friends like Felix Millan. It was a life well lived, and to be celebrated, even by a Yankees fan who never saw him play. R.I.P. Mike.
