“Younger Than Yesterday”
Statis-Pro Baseball ⚾️ Cards for the 1967 National League:
(A Merely Good Pennant Race Effort)
It’s probably useful to think of these teams as clones, to use a term from RPG rules. They are a new effort, but intended to augment Jim Barnes’ 1967 American League teams from Great Pennant races. They use his carding methodologies as determined through AI observation and calculation, rather than merely what was stated in the rules. They are what the 1967 National League might have looked like if he had included it with Great Pennant Races.
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“Younger than Yesterday”
The 1967 National League season saw a changing of the guard, as more and more stars of the Fifties retired or moved to part time roles, and new players thrived. Sandy Koufax, the foremost pitcher of his era and a player who could count himself as a player in the 1955 World Series retired at 29 in 1965; Dick Groat, Bob Uecker, Don Larsen, Vern Law and Charley Lau all joined Frank Bolling and Don Blasingame, who had retired in 1966. In their place came players like Tommy Helms, Sonny Jackson, Tito Fuentes, Randy Hundley, Jerry Koosman, Tom Seaver, and Cleon Jones. 1967 wasn’t just The Summer of Love, it was the Summer of Change, and as Youth was served it would soon bloom across many Senior Circuit rosters, perhaps flowering nowhere more than the Mets. Their time would come, and but soon.
But even now there are many Cardinal fans who believe the 1967 Redbird squad might be their best Championship team. On offense, the batting order was led by left fielder Lou Brock, who slammed 21 home runs and stole 56 bases in one of his best years, and first baseman Orlando Cepeda, who had come over from the Giants in May, 1966 in a trade for Ray Sadecki. Cepeda won the 1967 NL MVP by batting .325, slamming 25 home runs, and driving in a league-best 111 runs. Curt Flood also chipped in a .335 batting season and a Gold Glove in centerfield. The pitching was in the capable hands of Hall of Famer Bob Gibson, reliever Joe Hoerner and newcomer Dick Hughes (16-6, 2.67 ERA), who finished second in the NL Rookie of the year voting to the Mets’ Seaver.
The team was led by Red Schoendienst, who had been a player as recently as 1963. Schoendienst had played for Eddie Stankey in the Fifties, and he had inherited the same firebrand spirit and confrontational style as his mentor. On the field his teams attacked on the base paths and they were always in motion; his pitchers, led by Gibson, were not afraid to knock down the power hitters on opponent rosters. The Cardinals felt they had been short changed after their seven game 1964 win dethroned the M&M Yankees, and two years of looking up in the National League standings at the Dodgers did nothing to improve their collective temperament. The team was deep and talented, and they won 101 contests and the pennant by 10.5 games.
The team they defeated, the San Francisco Giants, won 91 games, and it had much the same core of players that it had throughout the mid-1960. Pitchers Juan Marichal, had an off year with only 14 wins and Gaylord Perry, finished only 15-17. Willie McCovey slammed 31 homers and drove in 91 runs; Jim Ray Hart hit 29 homers and drove in 99 runs, and Willie Mays hit 22 home runs and won another Gold Glove in centerfield. The team had added a fine pitcher in former Cardinal Ray Sadecki, and another fine left handed starter in Mike McCormick, who won 22 games and the NL Cy Young Award. But the off years by Mays and Marichal really cost the Giants their shot at the pennant, and they really missed Cepeda’s leadership and right-handed bat. The team would finish close to the money in the years 1968-1970, and most of this core was still present when they won the NL West under divisional play in 1971.
Two teams rose to competitive prominence in 1967, the Chicago Cubs and the Cincinnati Reds. Each gained newfound success in the same way; they found pitching staffs. In 1967 the Cubs set the foundation of a very good group of moundsmen, anchored by 20 game winner Ferguson Jenkins, Rich Nye and left-handed newcomer Ken Holtzman, while later starter Bill Hands would work as a swing man in Chicago in 1967 with a 2.46 ERA. On the field the team was led by three Hall of Famers, Ron Santo (.300, 31 HR, 98 RBI), Billy Williams (28 HR) and Ernie Banks (95 RBI) with middle infielders Glenn Beckert and Don Kessinger getting on base and fielding opposing blue darters. This team would remain competitive until 1972, when the old guard would start to fade; Banks retired after the 1971 season, and Williams was traded to Oakland in the American League to serve as a DH in 1973.
Cincinnati also had an excellent staff, finishing tied for second in the National League. It was their pitching veterans who let them down, as Jim Maloney, Sammy Ellis and Bob Lee missed time due to injuries or inconsistency. On the field the team had Pete Rose (.301) and young Tony Perez (.290, 26 HR, 102 RBI) and holdover Vada Pinson, one of the best players of that time not in the Hall of Fame. Help was on the way; Johnny Bench wowed everyone in a late call up, and by 1969, the team would be known as The Big Red Machine.
Elsewhere the Phillies wasted a good year from their pitchers in spite of good years from Tony Gonzalez (.339 BA) and Dick Allen (.307, 23 HR), as Jim Bumming finished a tough 17-15 with a .229 ERA. The Pirates had excellent production from their first two hitters, 34 year old shortstop Maury Wills (.302, 29 SB) and shortstop Gene Alley (.287 batting average, pretty good for a middle infielder) along with the incomparable Roberto Clemente, who clipped a league- leading .357 with 23 HR and 110 RBI and played a Gold Glove level right field at the age of 32. But the Pirates had exactly half of a great team, as their pitchers faltered and Pittsburgh allowed as many runs as they scored; fittingly they halved their schedule at 81-81.
The Dodgers sorely missed the incomparable Sandy Koufax. As a squad, starters Claude Osteen, Don Sutton and Don Drysdale finished a collective 41-48, but the real culprit was a lineup that collapsed and scored only 21 runs more (at 521) than the league’s worst hitting team, the Mets.
Elsewhere the league’s oldest team, the Braves, got older and so did Hank Aaron, but you wouldn’t have known it. At 33 he swatted 39 HR and drove in 109 RBI while batting .307. Yankee expat Clete Boyer settled in at The Launchpad, clipping 26 HR while batting in 96 runs; he would play a key part in the Brave’s resurgence in 1969. Houston obtained great performances from their troika of Joe Morgan (.275, 29 SB), Rusty Staub (.333 and a league-leading 44 doubles) and The Toy Cannon, Jimmy Wynn, who spanked 37 HR and drive in 107 RBI). But while Houston set team marks that would take twenty years to erase, the team actually had to rally to pass the Mets, allowing the most runs in the National League in spite of playing half their games in the Astrodome.
Jerry Grote, Bud Harrelson, Ed Charles, Cleon Jones and Ron Swoboda, stalwarts of the 1969 champs, dotted this Mets roster but under a tandem of so-so managers they bore little resemblance to that opportunistic squad. Tom Seaver won 16 games and Rookie of the Year, but the real help was coming with the off-season hire of ex- Brooklyn Dodger Gil Hodges to lead the club.
The Cardinals emerged to play the Red Sox, who showed surprising pluck and power to take them to seven games before Sox ace Jim Lonborg succumbed, at last, to the Redbirds’ relentless lineup and Bob Gibson, who won three complete games in the Series - only the fifth man, at that point, in baseball history to do so. True to form the team was hardly magnanimous in victory, as Schoendienst opined after the Series that the Red Sox had been lucky to make it as far as they had.
We know this to not be true; the truth is the “Impossible Dream” Red Sox made it to the Series led by the American League’s two best players at their positions, AL Cy Young Award winner Lonborg and left fielder and MVP Carl Yastrzemski, and the Cardinals saw enough of both men to know they were both very challenging to overcome. It wasn’t Schoendienst’s Eddie Stanky style of gamesmanship that beat the Sox, in the end their individual excellence was only overcome through a concerted team effort by the St. Louis club. El Birdos would win another pennant in 1968, and would very nearly win another Series.
Fred Bobberts
Initial Date of Publication September 18, 2026
