Back in the day, Roger Craig could hum, baby

Roger Craig helped the Dodgers win World Series with both Brooklyn (1955) and Los Angeles (1959).

Roger Craig, with his wife Carolyn, his wife of 62 years, is shown at age 83 in 2013 at his home in Borrego Springs, Calif. After his pitching career he went on to enjoy fame as a pitching coach and manager. 

By Phil Ellenbecker
  When we think of Roger Craig, we probably first think of split-finger fastball, as in the foremost teacher and proponent of the pitch made famous and mastered by Bruce Sutter.
  Or we think of Craig, who made the expression "humm baby" part of the baseball vernacular as San Franscisco Giants manager, as a sad-sack pitcher for the New York Mets — as the openingday pitcher for that woeful team headed toward a 40-win season in 1962 who had consecutive 20-loss seasons.
  Yet a look at the record shows Craig was a pretty darned good pitcher and somebody who played an important part in world championships for the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers (1955 and 1959), and for the St. Louis Cardinals (1964).
  Craig was called up to the Dodgers in midseason 1955 after going 10-2 at Triple-A Montreal. With Brooklyn he was 5-3 with a 2.77 ERA in 21 games, 10 of them starts.
  With the Dodgers just having tied the New York Yankees in the 1955 World Series — the third time the two teams had faced each other in the past four years — Craig was summoned to start Game 5 at Ebbets Field in Brooklyn. He allowed two runs, both earned, on four hits and five walks in six innings while striking out four as he got the victory, and the Dodgers moved ahead with a 5-3 decision.
  Craig surrendered to Clem Labine, with the Dodgers leading 4-2, after giving up a leadoff homer to Bob Cerv and a walk to Elston Howard at the start of the seventh inning. The Yankees also got a leadoff homer from Yogi Berra to start the eighth, but Jackie Robinson singled in Carl Furillo in the bottom of the inning as the Dodgers held on.
  Brooklyn took the seventh game behind Johnny Podres in Yankees Stadium after New York had tied it, giving the Dodgers their first win Series win over the Yankees in six tries.
  Craig didn't fare so well in his next two World Series. He started one game and pitched two, taking the loss in Game 3, and had a 12.00 ERA in six innings as Brooklyn fell in seven games to the Yankees in 1956. That year Craig compiled his most wins with a 12-11 record and 3.71 ERA.
  In the 1959 World Series, Craig started two games, was the Game 1 loser and had an 8.68 ERA in 9.1 innings. The Dodgers won 4-2 over the Chicago White Sox.
  Although he faltered in the Series, Craig did much to get the Dodgers there after encountering arm problems and struggling in 1957 and '58 and getting sent back to the minor leagues. Brought up from Spokane in '59, he went 11-5 with a 2.06 ERA with the big club. He missed the ERA title because he was 1 1/3 innings short of the 154 needed to qualify for the National League title; the Giants’ Sam Jones led with a 2.83 mark. Craig finished in a seven-way tie for the NL lead in shutouts with four.
  The Dodgers won 17 of their final 22 regular-season games, with Craig tallying four victories and a September ERA of 1.01. In the regular-season finale, Craig pitched a complete game and won 7-1 as Los Angeles clinched a first-place tie with Milwaukee. L.A. then swept Milwaukee 2-0 in the tiebreaker playoff, with Craig sitting out.
  Craig got to pitch in one more World Series toward the end of his career, and he made it count. He was the winning pitcher for St. Louis in Game 4 at Yankee Stadium in 1964, tossing 4 2/3 shutout innings and giving up only two hits, as the Cardinals defeated the New York Yankees 4-3. That tied the Series at 2-2 en route to the Cardinals' seven-game ouster of the vaunted Bronx Bombers, who were making their last Series appearance until '76 after 14 trips in the past 16 years.
  Craig was summoned in the first inning after starter Ray Sadecki was roughed up for two doubles and two singles in the first four batters, bringing in two runs. Elston Howard greeted Craig with an RBI single, but he retired the next seven batters, striking out the side in the second, and after back-to-back walks in the third squeezed out of the inning by picking off Mantle.
 He again struck out the side in the fourth, back-to-back to get out of the inning after yielding a walk and a single. The Yankees went 1-2-3 as Craig closed out his stint in the fifth. Mantle whiffed ending the inning, giving Craig a total of eight strikeouts.
  "Game 4 was the key game," Cardinals shortstop Dick Groat told Danny Peary in "We Played the Game." "We had to win it."
  Of Craig's third-inning rubout of Mantle, Groat said, "He had the best pickoff move in the league besides Elroy Face. And we picked off Mantle at second. That may have been the biggest play of the Series because it prevented them from scoring again."
 Ron Taylor shut out the Yankess over the final four innings, and Ken Boyer's fifth-inning grand slam made the difference.
  Rescued from the hapless Mets in a November 1964 trade for George Altman and Bill Wakefield, Craig went 7-9 for the Cards in 1964 in 39 games, 19 of them starts, with a 3.25 ERA. St. Louis, which hadn't won a pennant since 1946, came from seventh place in late July to win the pennant on the final day of the season.
  Craig pitched two more seasons in the major leagues and finished his career with a 74-98 record and 3.83 ERA in 12 seasons.
  Craig then went on to become famous as a split-finger sorcerer, first as a pitching coach for the Detroit Tigers, helping them win the 1984 World Series, and then as manager with the San Francisco Giants for seven seasons. He led them to an NL West title in 1987 and into the earthquake-shaken 1989 World Series, where they lost to Oakland in four games.
Other notes on Craig
  -- Craig holds the distinction of starting the last game ever for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the first game for the New York Mets.
 On Sept. 29, 1957, he allowed two runs, both earned, in seven innings in a 2-1 loss at Philadelphia. Future Hall of Famer but yet unproved Sandy Koufax finished up. Koufax was 5-4 with a 3.88 ERA in '57.
  On April 11, 1962, Craig allowed five runs, all earned, in three innings in the Mets' debut as they fell 11-4 at St. Louis.
  -- How bad was it for Craig with the Mets?
  He went 10-24 in '62 and 5-22 in '63, leading the league in losses both years. That two-season defeat total was the highest recorded by any major league pitcher since the early 1930s. Over a 90-day span from May 4 to Aug. 4 of 1963, Craig lost 18 straight decisions, tying for the most ever in the National League.
  Yet Casey Stengel  trusted him enough, or had nobody better, that Craig compiled 27 complete games in those two years — 13 in '62, 14 in '63, five more than he had in any other year.
  -- Maverick yet visionary owner Bill Veeck proved his prescience when he told Craig: "Roger, I've watched your career, and someday you're going to be a good pitching coach, or manager, after all you've gone through with the Mets."
  Editor's note: Information for this article was gleaned from the following: the biography by Rich Shook from the Society for American Baseball Research's Biography project (http://sabr.org/bioproj); an article by Steve Treder on the Baseball Analysts' website (http://baseballanalysts.com); and an article by Scott Miller at the espn.com website.