By Jeff Stuart
Don Zimmer was there to witness so much baseball history and is indelibly linked to it. He was one of the last two players alive to have played with Jackie Robinson. He was on the 1955 Dodgers World Series Championship team. “When Yogi hit the ball down the left-field line,” said Zimmer with an unusual take of a famous moment in game 7, “with Amoros’ speed and being a left-handed thrower — a right-handed thrower probably couldn’t have caught the ball. I always kid around with people. I say, ‘I was very important in that seventh game.’ You don’t win many games by being taken out of the game.”
His best year was 1958 when he hit .262 for the Dodgers. He was the emerging star who was going to replace Pee Wee Reese at shortstop. He was at short with Reese at 3rd when the last out was recorded at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn.
But in 1960 he was traded by Los Angeles to the Chicago Cubs for pitcher Ron Perranoski. Detroit Manager Bob Scheffing, three years removed from managing the Cubs, said at the time. “Not for ten Zimmers should they have given up that wonderful guy.” 2 years later he was an original Met, playing for the venerable Casey Stengel. “I don’t like to rate the managers,” he said. “But don’t underrate Casey. I learned more of the game’s fine points from him than from any other man.” Don went from the Mets to Cincinnati and then back to the Dodgers.
In June of 1963, Don was acquired by the Senators for the waiver price. New manager Gil Hodges, who had contemplated putting himself back on the active list, was happy to have his former Dodger and Mets teammate on board. “He’s an aggressive ball player who goes all out to win,” he said. “I think he will help us. And I’ll forget about pinch hitting for a while.” Zim took over third base and gave the club an immediate lift. His first game for Washington was on June 30th against Minnesota at DC Stadium. The Nats lost, 6-1 and Zim did not have a hit. But in the next game he singled and scored in a 7-1 win over Kansas City. In the opener of a July 4th doubleheader, he walked with the bases loaded in the bottom of the eighth scoring Chuck Hinton with the winning run. He singled and scored in the second game, another one run Washington win, 3-2. On July 5th he singled and scored again as the team swept four from the Athletics and welcomed in the Los Angeles Angels. He had just a walk in the first game against LA. But the club won, 5-1. In the first game of another doubleheader on July 7, he went 2-4 with 3 runs batted in. And in the second he was 2-3 with a grand slam in the first inning. The Nats swept 7-3, and 6-4. The 7 game winning streak was the longest for any Washington club since 1949. On August 30 in Boston, Zim hit yet another grand slam, the 7th in his career. Hodges, who held the National League record for grand slams with 14, told Zimmer, “The next time you’re up with the bases loaded, I’m taking you out for a pinch hitter. You’re breathing down my neck.”
In 1964, Don tried catching. “It was Gil’s idea, ‘you’ve got the square head for it,” he said. I did pretty good. It kept me around for another year.” He handled some of the young and sometimes wild pitchers in the Winter Instructional League. He suffered a chipped finger and later split that finger open. At age 34, Zim said, “In my mind I am going to spring training to be the third baseman. But if Gil wants me to catch, I will, whatever my best bet for a job is. I enjoy it and think I can do a credible job. I want to be a regular player.” After hitting 13 homers in 1963, he hit 12 in 64. He was given his release in 1965. His final MLB game was on Oct. 2, against the tigers at DC Stadium. He spent the 1966 season playing for the Toei Flying Tigers of the Japanese Pacific League.
Everything revolved around baseball for Don. In 1951 playing with minor League Elimira, he married his wife Jean at the ball park. They both marched under a tunnel of player held crossed bats from home plate to the pitcher’s mound.
After playing he managed the Padres in 1972 and 1973 and almost returned to DC at the transfer of the Club was close to a done deal. He managed the Red Sox from 1976 to 1980 winning at least 90 games every year but the last. He was the manager when the Yankees Bucky Dent hit the infamous homer in the 1978 playoff game that sent the Yankees to yet another World Series.
Years later, when Zimmer took a coaching job under Joe Torre of the Yankees, he would cross paths with Dent again. “Dent has been traded by the Yankees to Texas, where I had just been fired as manager; I rent his house in Wyckoff, New Jersey. I go in there and on every wall, there’s a picture of him with that swing for that home run. Every wall. I call him up and I tell him I turned every one of them around, facing the wall.”
As for his experience with the Yankees. “We won ’98, ’99 and 2000. I don’t think you’ll see that again. I really don’t believe you’ll see a team win three World Series in a row. Not that we were so much better than everybody else, but that’s how hard it is to even win one World Series.”
“Joe didn’t need very much help from me,” Zim told Mike Lupica of the New York Daily News. “People who don’t know what a great manager this guy is are the ones who should have their heads examined.”
Don Zimmer suffered two serious beanings in his baseball career. The first came on July 7, 1953, when he was hit in the head on a pitch delivered by Columbus pitcher Jim Kirk. The result was a brain injury that put Zimmer in a coma for two weeks. That led Major League baseball to adopt the use of batting helmets. On June 23, 1956, he suffered a fractured cheekbone after being beaned again, this time by Cincinnati’s Hal Jeffcoat.
Neither beaning affected his powers of reason. He lived a full baseball life, 66 years, from meeting Babe Ruth, to coaching Derek Jeter. He even has a “baseball curse” named after him. “The curse of Don Zimmer has supposedly prevented any San Diego Padres pitcher from ever pitching a no-hitter. Steve Arlin of the Padres had a no-hitter going with one out to go on July 18, 1972. He had walked 3. The potential last batter was Denny Doye. Manager Zimmer was convinced Doyle, who was not particularly fast, would try to bunt his way on. He moved third baseman Dave Roberts in. But Doyle swung away and hit the ball softly right to where Roberts would have been normally. It has been more than 40 years and the Padres are the only club that has never had a pitcher hurl a no hitter.
“He was just wonderful,” legendary Dodger announcer Vin Scully said on his passing, June 4, 2014 “It was an honor and a pleasure, and a huge grace to have known Don Zimmer, believe me.”
