Herb Score

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Herb Score bigraphy, stories - American baseball player

Herb Score : biography

June 7, 1933 – November 11, 2008

Herbert Jude Score (June 7, 1933 – November 11, 2008) was an American Major League Baseball pitcher and announcer. He pitched for the Cleveland Indians and Chicago White Sox from 1955 through 1962. He was television and radio broadcaster for the Cleveland Indians from 1964-1997.

Baseball awards

High School

  • 1952: Florida State Baseball Championship (Lake Worth Community High School)

Professional

  • 1954: International League MVP
  • 1954: Sporting News Minor League Player of the Year
  • 1955: American League Rookie of the Year
  • 1955: American League All-Starhttp://www.baseball-reference.com/players/s/scorehe01.shtml#pitching_standard::none
  • 1956: American League All-Star
  • 2006: Cleveland Indians Hall of Famehttp://cleveland.indians.mlb.com/news/press_releases/press_release.jsp?ymd=20060711&content_id=1552065&vkey=pr_cle&fext=.jsp&c_id=cle

MLB playing career

Cleveland Indians (1955-1959)

In , Score came up to the Major Leagues (with Colavito) as a rookie with the Cleveland Indians at the age of 21. He quickly became one of the top power pitchers in the American League, no small feat on a team that still included Bob Feller, Bob Lemon and other top pitchers, going 16–10 with a 2.85 Earned Run Average (ERA) in his first year.http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/s/scorehe01.shtml He appeared on the cover of Sports Illustrated magazine on May 30, 1955.Score struck out 245 batters in 1955, a Major League rookie record that stood until , when it was topped by Dwight Gooden (Score, Gooden, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Don Sutton, Gary Nolan, Kerry Wood, Mark Langston and Hideo Nomo were the only eight rookie pitchers to top 200 strikeouts in the 20th century). It was the first time in MLB history a regular starting pitcher averaged over one strikeout per inning.

In , Score improved on his rookie campaign, going 20–9 with a 2.53 ERA and 263 strikeouts, while reducing the number of walks from 154 to 129, and allowed only 5.85 hits/9 innings, which would stand as a franchise record until it was broken by Luis Tiant’s 5.30 in .

Batting accident

On May 7, , during the first inning against the New York Yankees at Municipal Stadium in Cleveland, Score, threw a low fastball to his catcher Jim Hegan and was struck in the face by a line drive off the bat of Yankee shortstop Gil McDougald, breaking Score’s facial bones and injuring his eye. McDougald seeing Score hit by the baseball and then lying down and injured, ran immediately to the pitching mound instead of first base to help Score. McDougald reportedly vowed to retire if Score permanently lost his sight in one eye as a result of the accident. Score eventually recovered his 20/20 vision, though he missed the rest of the season.

He returned back late in the season.Though many believe Score feared being hit by another batted ball, and thus changed his pitching motion, Score himself rejected that theory. Score would tell Cleveland sportswriter Terry Pluto (for The Curse of Rocky Colavito) that, in 1958, after pitching and winning a few games and feeling better than he’d felt in a long time, he tore a tendon in his arm while pitching on a damp night against the Washington Senators and sat out the rest of the season.

In 1959, he’d shifted his pitching motion in a bid to avoid another, similar injury. "The reason my motion changed," Score told Pluto, "was because I hurt my elbow, and I overcompensated for it and ended up with some bad habits." As a result of the changes Score made in his pitching delivery, his velocity dropped and he incurred further injuries. Score pitched the full season, going 9–11 with a 4.71 ERA and 147 strikeouts.

In the book "The Greatest Team Of All Time" (Bob Adams, Inc, publisher. 1994), Mickey Mantle picked Herb Score as the toughest American League left-handed pitcher he faced (before the injury). Yogi Berra picked Herb for his "Greatest Team Of All Time".