Gary Gaetti: Unlikeliest Hero?
Who would have been less likely than Gary Gaetti, a man whose career could have ended twice before, to punch his team's ticket to the postseason at 40?
There may not have been a man more unlikely to make Barry Bonds disappear into the ivy than Gary Gaetti.
Gaetti had been unceremoniously dumped by the Cardinals on August 8, 1998 after only seeing action in garbage time for the week leading up to his designation for assignment, granted his release five days prior to his 40th birthday and four days earlier than the standard ten days a team has to try to sway another team to take on a player (and the remainder of his contract) they’ve DFA’d for practically nothing. Reading between the lines, that he was released four days prior to the expiration of the ten-day period the Cards had to work out a trade meant that 29 other teams agreed that Gaetti was not worth the $250K he was due in the final quarter of a season in which a mere eight months earlier the St. Louis front office had deemed him worthy of a one-year, $1MM contract.
For context, $1MM was still below the league average in 1998 dollars. League-minimum salary was $170K, and league-average salary was $1,398,831. By the general public’s standards, Gaetti was getting paid well. By MLB standards, his full-season salary didn’t even crack the top 200 salaries in 1998.
As one might suspect given the timing of Gaetti’s release, he’d been rendered superfluous by a deadline deal bringing 23-year-old Fernando Tatís (no need for a Senior designation yet, as Junior was still six months from being born) to St. Louis in a deal that brought Darren Oliver to Busch Stadium along with the AAA outfielder Mark Little from Texas in exchange for Todd Stottlemyer and Royce Clayton as St. Louis sat 6 games under .500 at the deadline. Sure, Mark McGwire’s late summer andro-assisted assault on the record books would fuel a 31-22 August and September, but the fact that McGwire’s 8.1 fWAR/7.5 rWAR, 70 dong season only got these Cardinals to 83 wins should be plenty of evidence that this team wasn’t playing for much.
While wins in 1998 may have been as meaningless to the Cardinals as Gary Gaetti was come August as the 23-year-old third baseman of the future had been acquired, Gaetti’s 1998 season in St. Louis had essentially seen him putting up league average production (108 wRC+, which for the uninitiated is a measure of a player’s offensive performance scaled to 100, with 100 being league average and each point above or below representing a percentile above or below league average). This probably should have been enough to have warranted a team in the throes of a pennant race and with a need for corner infield depth to see if he couldn’t help prior to him being granted his release with four days’ grace, but it doesn’t take much imagination to figure out why teams weren’t tripping over themselves to take on the prorated salary of a guy nearing his 40th birthday.
To truly understand how improbable Gary Gaetti playing a meaningful role in the 1998 playoff picture is, though, it’s not this instance in which a team gave up on him upon which we should be focusing.
Gaetti put up three solid seasons from 1986-1988, two All-Star worthy seasons sandwiching his simply average campaign for the Twins’ 1987 World Series run where his ratios were dragged down by a .256 BABIP but where his postseason exploits saw him honored with the ALCS MVP Award after hitting .300/.348/.650 against Detroit. He earned down-ballot MVP vote recognition in these three years, making the All-Star team in 1988 and winning three of four straight Gold Gloves, with 1989 seeing him repeat his Gold Glove and All-Star Game selections (the latter of which was probably based as much on his 1988 campaign as it was on his ‘89 season where he went into the break with a .268/.296/.449 propped up by him tallying 16 of his 19 home runs that year prior to the break). Gaetti’s 1990 was more or less a lower-resolution facsimile of his 1989 season, with his wRC+ dipping from 86 in ‘89 to 74 in ‘90.
With Gaetti having turned 32 in August of 1990, Andy MacPhail and the Twins front office granted Gaetti free agency and watched him sign a four-year, $11.4M contract with Gene Autry’s California Angels, netting him more in year one of that deal than all but two Angels (Mark Langston and Dave Winfield) and ranking 43rd in all of MLB with $2.7M earned that year, tied with Roger Clemens, who *checks notes* was about to win his 3rd of seven Cy Youngs.
While Roger Clemens was about to have another insane season (followed by an even better one in which he finished behind far inferior seasons from Dennis Eckersley and Jack McDowell), Gary Gaetti and the Angels watched as his career went careening off a cliff into a ravine.
1991 saw Gaetti put up a meager .246/.293/.379 season with 18 dongs, an 84 wRC+, and 0.9 fWAR. If the Angels weren’t paying a player the 43rd-most money of any player in baseball to be 16 percent below average with the lumber in 1991, then they couldn’t have been happy to see that production drop another 18 percent the next year, notching an abysmal .226/.267/.342 slash line with a 66 wRC+, good for -1.1 fWAR in his age-33 season.
If you want a frame of reference for how bad a 66 wRC+ is, Alcides Escobar had a 72 wRC+ for his career, and he was routinely lumped in with the worst performing full-time position players in baseball. Gaetti’s 1992 was sub-Alcidesian while getting paid the same amount of money as Ron Gant, Wade Boggs, and Mark McGwire.
So in Year Three (of four that the Angels were committed to paying for) of the Gary Gaetti Experience kicked off, he managed to play in just 20 of the Angels’ first 51 games, totaling just 9 hits and 5 walks in 56 PA, good for a .180/.250/.220 slash line with a 29 wRC+ and -0.4 fWAR. With offseason acquisition Kelly Gruber coming back from shoulder surgery, the Angels waived Gaetti with more than a year-and-a-half of guaranteed money left on the contract he’d signed less than three years earlier.
This was cutting bait with a sunk cost.
Two months shy of his 35th birthday and more than four years removed from his last above average season with the bat, Gary Gaetti’s career should have been over. Once his calling card—as evidenced by his four consecutive Gold Gloves—even his defense had fallen off in Anaheim as much as his bat. Better players had seen their careers end with less cause.
So after being released on June 3rd of 1993, Gary Gaetti sat and waited. Ten days passed and obviously no other team was going to take on this dead weight on the payroll, but when a team signing him would just be on the hook for paying him at the league minimum, no one came calling.
Make no mistake. His career should probably be over right here, right now.
Another six days passed before the Royals came along and kicked the tires. They scooped him up, and on June 21st he first suited up for the Royals. On June 22, he hung his first of 14 dongs in 82 games for Kansas City, putting up a .256/.309/.477 slash line to go with a 105 wRC+ and 2.4 fWAR. He was solid in the strike-shortened 1994 season, worth 2.1 fWAR in 90 games with roughly league average offensive production and a second straight superb defensive season after looking like a dead man walking the season before in California.
And in 1995? He was preposterous. He crushed 35 dongs in 137 games, his most home runs in a season and a total that had been beaten by a Royals player just once before—Steve Balboni hit 36 in 1985—and which wouldn’t be surpassed again by a Royals hitter for another 22 years, when Mike Moustakas hit 38 in 2017. He slashed .261/.329/.518 putting up marks of 3.3 fWAR and 111 wRC+.
To see point out just how aberrant this all was, 1995 was the first time he’d posted a SLG over .500 since 1988.
As one might expect, his production fall off a bit from these highs in each of his next two seasons in St. Louis, so when they cut a productive if unnecessary Gaetti after the trade deadline in 1998, it could have spelled the end for Gaetti for might have been a second time, but the Cubs—who unlike the Cardinals weren’t idly standing by, their season having been reduced solely to watching their own slugger chasing down Roger Maris and the single-season home run record—took a flyer on Gaetti, signing him on August 19, 1998—his 40th birthday.
And 40 looked great on Gaetti.
In 37 games with 147 plate appearances, Gaetti went berserk.
He slashed .320/.397/.594 down the stretch, hanging dong eight times, or more than once every five games, good for a 157 wRC+ and 1.5 fWAR. His wRC+ with the Cubs would have placed him 10th amongst qualified hitters between Moises Alou and Bernie Williams at 158 and Andres Galarraga and Edgar Martinez at 156. Sammy Sosa was just two points higher.
For 37 games, Gary Gaetti—whose career should have ended five years earlier and could have ended this season—was Sammy Sosa.
So, when the Cubs and Giants ended the 162-game 1998 season tied for the Wild Card berth and had to face off in a one-game, do-or-die play-in game to gain entry to the playoffs, it wasn’t Sammy Sosa who was the hero.
And Barry Bonds?
Well…
Barry does his best Homer Simpson impression, backing into the ivy, watching as a guy who shouldn’t still be in Major League Baseball rounds the bases having put the difference-making first two runs on the board in a 5 - 3 win over the Giants.
He was bad in 1999 and bad again in 5 games for Boston in 2000, but for the first two months of Gary Gaetti’s 40th year on this planet, after cheating baseball death not once, but twice, he was Prime Sammy Sosa.