RIP Milt Pappas

[Going Underground]

Milt Pappas died today.Orioles traded him for Frank Robinson.

[OFFNY]

o

I just read that the 1970 National League champion Cincinnati Reds were only shut out one time that entire season ...... by Milt Pappas.

[Tx Oriole]

Milt Pappas died today.Orioles traded him for Frank Robinson.

That's too bad. May he rest in peace.

[Rene88]

Very sad news. Thoughts & prayers. A moment of silence before the game per Roch. Sad news indeed.

Sent from my iPhone using Tapatalk

[crowmst3k!]

RIP in peace, Mr. Pappas.

[Crabcakes]

9 years w/ the O's. Started as an 18-year old vs. the Yankees, Aug. 10, 1957. Pitched 2 shutout innings.

Don't see many like that anymore. Thanks for the memories. RIP Mr. Pappas.

[mrbig1]

I loved Pappas. One of my favorite O's pitcher. R.I.P.

[25 Nuggets]

209-164, 3.40 ERA, 110 ERA+, 1.225 WHIP, two all star games and 46.8 WAR for pitchers (117th all time). During the Orioles' breakout 1964 season (97 wins) he went 16-7, led the team in IP and led the league in strikeout-to-walk ratio. Pappas is a textbook proverbial "Hall of Very Good" pitcher and would certainly be this Oriole teams' opening day starter if he were in his prime.

The Robinson-Pappas trade is usually considered the greatest in Oriole history... Pappas was before my time (so was Robinson), so I can't speak of seeing him pitch, but by the numbers the trade wasn't all that lopsided. The Reds however did not hold onto him long -- after 2.5 years they traded him along with Ted Davidson and Bob Johnson to the Braves for Clay Carroll, Tony Cloninger and Woody Woodward. So not only did poor Pappas miss out on the great Oriole teams, he also missed out on the height of the Big Red Machine.

[weams]

Milt was a 47 WAR pitcher. It will take Jake Arrieta until age 46 to achieve that.

[George]

The O's gave up a lot to get Frank Robinson.

[24fps]

A cornerstone of the teams that turned me into a lifelong Orioles fan. RIP Milt Pappas (Pappastediodis).

[LA2]

This guy was truly a great pitcher for the Orioles "pre" championship days. From 1957-1965, he and Steve Barber were a couple of the best 1-2 pitching punches in the A.L. He will forever be known as the key player in the trade that brought us Frank Robinson, but he should be remembered as far more than that. He was a 3 time All-Star and pitches a no-hitter for the Cubs. It might've been more than that.On September 2, 1972 he retired the first 26 batters and was one strike away from a perfect game with a 2?2 count on pinch-hitter Larry Stahl, but home-plate umpire Bruce Froemming called the next two pitches ? both of which were close ? balls. Papas believed he had struck out Stahl, and even decades later in 2008, he continued to begrudge Froemming. I didn't know Milt well, but when Brooks had his statue dedicated and I was honored to introduce it at OPCY , Milt walked up to me like we were old friends. He was a very affable and witty guy with a million stories. I know he loved pitching for the Orioles and it broke his heart t be dealt away. Sad day in Oriole history. Truly one of the very best pitchers for the Orioles ever, RIP.

I saw Pappas then in the audience and it was so obvious that he--and other players like Blair and Bumbry--were so wonderfully happy and grateful to be there.

Pappas was a superb and reliable workhorse who pitched for 16 seasons--the 13th through 15th of which were among his career best, including 10 shutouts. By the age of 26 (when he was traded to the Reds) he had already accumulated 110 wins with the O's. Oriole fans usually talk as if the great starting rotations were all from the return of Jim Palmer onwards, but they really began with the Baby Birds, led by Pappas.

[DrungoHazewood]

..but by the numbers the trade wasn't all that lopsided.

Folks talk about the trade like it was Glenn Davis. But Pappas was one of the top ~75 MLB pitchers since WWII in career value. On the fWAR list his immediate peers are guys like Dave Steib, Jake Peavy, Frank Viola, Kenny Rogers, Jimmy Key. Very, very good pitchers.

On the O's all time list he sits between Scott McGregor and Mike Boddicker.

[DrungoHazewood]

From Bill James' question-and-answer part of his site:

Bill: Was there ever a point in his career where Milt Pappas (who died today) was thought to be on track for the Hall of Fame? Thinking about how central wins were to evaluating pitchers then, I notice he had won 40 games by the time he was 21, 150 before the age of 30, and then, after a brief lull, he came back to win 17 twice more in his early 30s. He retired at 34 with 209 wins; feels like he had a decent shot at 300, which almost certainly would have put him in the HOF.

Asked by: Phil Dellio

---

Answered: 4/20/2016

<!--Bill's Reply...

--> Oh, I hadn't heard about his passing; sorry to hear. Pappas self-advocated avidly the position that he should be in the Hall of Fame, and in particular would compare his own record to Don Drysdale's. Pappas was 209-164 (won-lost), and Drysdale was 209-166. I think there was a third pitcher in there, too. . .somebody else in his generation who had a similar record. But no; other than Pappas himself, nobody ever suggested that he was a Hall of Famer. He was always a #2 starter.

Pappas was a real character; hope that I am not speaking disrepectfully of him at the moment of his passing. Whenever his manager was fired, Pappas would apply publicly for the position of the team's new manager, and would call the local reporters on the phone to lay out his credentials for the position. This was done in the same spirit as his later claims that he should be in the Hall of Fame; nobody was ever entirely sure how serious he was about it, although it was always clear that he wasn't going to be hired as the new manager. For years and years, he would periodically claim that his real name was. . . I am probably misspelling this. . . but he would claim that his real name was Miltarego Pappdiego, Greek, and that he had just shortened it to Milt Pappas for his baseball career. Just making it up, but he stuck with it for years. He had other stories like that; he liked to pull the reporters' legs.

As you may know. . .I don't know what is in the obituaries. . . but Pappas was suspected for more than 20 years (as I recall) of murdering his wife. His wife disappeared, just vanished; police suspected that he had murdered her. That REALLY obstructed any possible Hall of Fame campaign for him; you couldn't get a bandwagon rolling for somebody who was under a cloud of suspicion in that way. Finally, many years after she vanished, they drained a lake a few blocks from his house, or a large pond, or a drought dropped the water level. . .something. Anyway, they found her body in the car with the seat belt fastened. She drank a lot, and she had just taken a wrong turn and driven into the lake, apparently (from the position of the vehicle) at a pretty good rate of speed. She may have passed out before she went in the water, since she had never unfastened her selt belt.

Apparently his wife's disappearance/discovery was 1982-87, not 20 years, but otherwise the story seems correct.

Pappas seems like he was an interesting guy. Someone who may not have taken himself too seriously (if his self-promotion was half in jest as it seems like), I think I'd have liked him.

[WEAVERMAN]

RIP Milt Pappas. What a wonderful career