Fred Lynn

Fred Lynn

Some players seem like pure joy in motion. Roberto Clemente, Ken Griffey Jr, and Willie Mays all fit that bill.

Does Fred Lynn belong in that company? Statistically, he does not. He finished his career with 1960 hits, and 300 home runs: impressive numbers, but not numbers befitting one of the greats.

At his best, though, Freddie Lynn did belong in that company. He had that same ineffable grace and beauty in the way he played the game. He was selected to nine straight All-Star games to start his career, starting in 1975 when he also won Rookie of the Year and the MVP. He also won four Gold Gloves which, of all his awards, were the ones he was most proud.

The Sox made the World Series in 1975 after sweeping the three-time defending champion Oakland A’s in the American League Championship Series. They then had the misfortune of coming up against a truly great Cincinnati Reds team that won 108 games in the regular season.

The World Series was a back-and-forth affair, with the Red Sox winning Game 6 in truly spectacular fashion on a 12th-inning walk-off homerun by Carlton Fisk. The image of him waving his arms emphatically, trying to coax the ball to stay fair, is forever burned into our cultural memory. The Red Sox took an early 3-0 lead in Game 7 before the Reds slowly, inevitably, fought their way back to even the score. In the 9th, Joe Morgan singled home the winning run.

The 1975 World Series has been called one of the greatest ever played and, although Lynn played on some of the most talented Red Sox teams of his generation, this was the closest he would ever come to reaching the Promised Land.

It’s something of a trope to say a player cared about winning more than personal glory, but it was something Lynn repeated over and over, in his words and his play on the field. ‘One man doesn’t make a team,’ he said in 1976. ‘All the awards are great, but they are secondary to winning. If we didn’t win, none of these awards mean anything.’

If the next few years were not quite up to the magical standard he set in 1975, Lynn continued to rack up All-Star appearances and Gold Gloves. 1979 would bring a return to form, as Lynn posted the best all-around numbers of his career. He hit .333 and knocked in 39 HRs and 122 RBIs. He led the league in not only batting average, but also on-base-percentage, slugging percentage, OPS, and OPS+.

In a word, he crushed it. He finished only 4th in MVP voting that year, despite leading baseball in WAR, according to www.baseball-reference.com. It’s possible that he was hurt by the, probably incorrect, impression that Jim Rice was equally important to the Red Sox’s success.

As would be the case for most of his career, he could not quite follow one brilliant season with another. He struggled with injuries in 1980, but in 110 games, Lynn won his 4th Gold Glove and managed 4.7 WAR, good for 14th-most in all of MLB. Unfortunately, a contract dispute meant that Lynn would never play another game at Fenway Park in a Red Sox uniform.

As his career continued, first in Los Angeles and later in Baltimore, he continued to play well, but he clearly missed Fenway’s friendly confines where he’d put up a line of .347 / .420 / .601. After leaving Boston, he would never again post a complete season with a .300 batting average.

He did make three more All-Star games as a member of the California Angels, and hit more than 20 home runs in four straight years with Baltimore and Toronto. The magic was fading, though. Only once in a 16-year career would he play 150 or more games, and only four times would he play even 140. Mostly, his injuries were minor things. They would cost him a handful of games here and there, sporadically, but they added up. Add in a couple of more major ones, and he ended up averaging only 432 at-bats per season.

As he entered what should’ve been his prime power years, those injuries slowly robbed him of his physical gifts. You can draw an easily parallel between the career of Fred Lynn and that of another surpassingly talented left-handed slugger who broke down too soon: Don Mattingly. Like Mattingly, Lynn was prevented from reaching his full potential by factors outside his control.

What, then, is the legacy of Freddie Lynn?

As a thought experiment, let’s imagine his injuries never happened. Let’s imagine he managed 600 ABs a season. All else remaining the same, he would’ve ended up with around 2700 hits and 420 homeruns. If he’d spent his entire career in Boston, where he was practically born to hit, those numbers might’ve been even better.

Freddie Lynn may never end up in the Hall-of-Fame, but he certainly belongs (with honors) in the Hall-of-What-If.