Kansas City baseball: Highlights, lowlights of A's, Royals and other basebal topics: Magic Royals moments, 1977: Joe Zdeb, and his biggest fan

Joe Zdeb gave the Kansas City Royals a spark during his rookie year of 1977, hitting .297 to help them to a team-record and major league-best 102 victories.

By Phil Ellenbecker

I'm going to get a little bit more personal with the Royal reminisces here by talking about a player who gave the team a boost for a spell during the 1970s named Joe Zdeb.

That's Joe Zdeb, as in the only player in the history of the major leagues whose last name started with a Z that was followed by a D (with the D silent).

Zdeb played just three years in the major leagues, all for the Royals, and the last two weren't much to speak of.

But he made solid contributions as a rookie in 1977, when the Royals compiled their best record ever of 102-60 (major league best), when many think they had their best team, when Hal McRae hit 54 doubles when nobody else was hitting nearly that many. And the year the Royals blew a 2-1 lead on the Yankees in the American League Championship Series with two games to go at home. Bittersweet memories.

Zdeb batted .297 that year, fifth-best among Royals with 150 at-bats, but the main thing I'll remember is how much my father loved him and how much he stuck up for him.

Now, my dad wasn't the biggest sports fan in the world but he'd follow along, and being as my brothers and I and my buddies were avid Royals fans at the time, he formed some opinions about them. They were selective opinions; he'd pick and choose, and then he'd harp on the ones he picked.

Joe Zdeb was a case in point. Zdeb played in 105 games for the 1977 Royals, but as far as my dad was concerned it should have been 162. He thought Zdeb got the shaft when it came to whom manager Whitey Herzog decided to play in left field alongside Amos Otis in center and Al Cowens in right. (This was two years before Willie Wilson took over full time in left to give the Royals one of the most wide-ranging outfields in major league history.)

Zdeb played 87 games in left in '77, starting 40. He played eight more in right, starting one, and had four games as a designated hitter, one each at center and third base. Besides his .297 average, Zdeb had a .374 slugging average, two homers, 23 RBIs and 26 runs scored.

Tom Poquette was the Royals' other main left fielder that year. He played 73 games in left, starting 60, and also 28 in right and one in center. He had a .292 average, .337 slugging, with two homers, 33 RBIs and 43 runs scored in his 106 games.

So not much to choose from between the two. Poquette has the edge in run production, Zdeb in the averages.

Taking it beyond the standard offensive stats, Zdeb had six steals (five caught stealing), 16 walks, five doubles, two triples and a .345 on-base percentage. Poquette: one steal (four caught), 23 doubles, six triples and .337 OBP. Zdeb had a higher slugging percentage despite far less extra-base hits, but that can be explained by the fact although they played about the same number of games, Poquette compiled 342 at-bats to 195 for Zdeb.

And the main reason for that discrepancy, and the main reason they split time in left, was because Poqutte was a left-handed hitter, Zdeb right, and Herzog loved to platoon and use his roster as much as possible. And there were more right-handers for Poquette to face than lefties for Zdeb.

How about defense? Looks like Poquette had a decided edge here -- 1.000 fielding percentage with a 2.20 range factor to .970 percentage and 1.94 range for Zdeb. And Poquette had a Rtot (fielding runs above average, whatever that means) of 7 to 1 for Zdeb.

Taken overall, I think you have to give the edge to Poquette, and that's borne out in his 1.6-0.4 advantage that year in WAR (wins above replacement), the modern metric that attempts to sum up a player's overall value in one number, with all variables figured in.

But my dad couldn't have cared about all this. He just liked Zdeb better -- maybe because my dad thought he was more of a hustler or had a more rugged-sounding name or was more rugged-looking, or maybe he had a game or two sunk in his mind, I don't know. He just thought Zdeb should have been in there more. And I heard all about it.

Can't recall whether I heard about it the next two years, but I doubt it. Because Zdeb hit only .252 in 60 games in 1978 and .174 in 15 games the next year, and then he was gone from the big leagues.

I can't find too much to trace Zdeb's decline, other than his player registers at baseballreference.com and retrosheet.org and his Wikipedia entry.

But for that summer of '77, I remember Zdeb having his moments. And not just because of my dad. So here's a closer look at the summer of Zdeb (and I had to look these up, my memory's not that great):

-- Most notable was a game July 1 when he went 5-for-5 with four RBIs, two doubles and a homer in a game won 12-2 by the Royals over the Indians at Cleveland Stadium.

Hitting in the No. 6 slot that Friday night, Zdeb singled his first two times up and then unloaded his second and last homer of the year, a three-run shot to deep left field in the fifth inning that capped a five-run inning, putting the Royals ahead for good at 7-2.

Zdeb came through again with a two-run double in a four-run sixth that gave K.C. an 11-2 lead. He doubled his last time up, in the ninth, but was thrown out trying to stretch the hit into a triple.

Zdeb displayed his spray-hitting ability, typical of the Royals' attack, with two hits to right, two to left and one to center.

With the win the Royals lagged 2 1/2 games behind Chicago and Minnesota, tied atop the American League West.

-- Another big game for Zdeb came Aug. 6 when he went 3-for-4 with a double and triple, a homer short of a cycle in the Royals' 6-3 win over Chicago. Again batting No. 6, again he moved the ball around with a triple and single to right and double to left. He didn't drive in any runs, but he scored the Royals' last in the eighth on a sacrifice by Bob Heise after reaching on a fielder's choice as the second batter in the inning.

The Royals were still 2 1/2 games behind the White Sox and in third place after this win.

-- He went 2-for-5 with two RBIs in a 9-6 win over Milwaukee on Aug. 25. Batting No. 7 this time, his two-run single in the second put the Royals ahead for good at 2-1. He also scored the last run in a six-run third after reaching on a fielder's choice and stealing second.

That was the ninth win in a 10-game streak that lifted the Royals into a three-game lead in the West. A later team-record 16-game streak left the rest in the dust as K.C. went on to win the division by eight games over next-best Texas.

-- Perhaps Zdeb's biggest clutch contribution came June 25 when he hit a two-run homer in the seventh to give the Royals a 4-2 lead in a game they won over Oakland 6-4.

All told, in addition to his big 5-for-5 blowout July 1, he had four games with three hits, nine with two hits and two with two RBIs.

So although not a crucial contributor to the Royals' best-ever regular season, a vital one nonetheless.

Not so in the 1977 ALCS, in which he went 0-for-9. He started the first two games and went 0-for-7, stealing a base after reaching on a fielder's choice in Game 1. He was a defensive replacement in Game 3, then was 0-for-2 coming off the bench in Game 4 to face lefty Sparky Lyle, who slammed the door on the Royals in that game with 5 1/3 innings of shutout relief. Zdeb didn't leave the bench in Game 5, when the Yankees broke the Royals' hearts with a 5-3 ninth-inning comeback win.

Joe Zdeb showing looking quite a bit different from as he did in a baseball uniform, as as an investment adviser with Prime Capital Investment Advisors in Overland, Park, Kansas.

(I did find a nice picture online of him crashing into a wall to make a catch at Yankee Stadium, so that's one highlight. But the photo doesn't provide enough details to figure out any accompanying information. Flied out to left in the Retrosheet play-by-play doesn't help much. And I couldn't figure out a way to reproduce a .jpg image here without shelling out a lot of bucks.)

The bottom fell out after '77. So what happened the next two years? Not much can be found other than in his Wikipedia entry, which indicates the arrival of Wilson had something to do with his lessened playing time. But beyond that he just appears to have lost his batting stroke, and even trips back down to the minor leagues in '78 and '79 didn't help. He batted .224 at Omaha in '79 after being demoted.

He was traded in January 1980 to the Chicago White Sox. He hit .194 that year playing in the minors for the Iowa Oaks and Tidewater Tides, and then the tide washed out on his playing career.

If info on his baseball career is lacking, an online search does reveal Zdeb found a baseball afterlife as an investment adviser with Prime Capital Investment Advisors in Overland, Park, Kansas.

“My life as a professional athlete taught me some important lessons, such as how to budget my time and how paying attention to details is critically important to success," he says on his PCIA website.

So it sounds like whether it was the quasi-glory of '77 or the washout that followed, it was all worthwhile. And he gained at least one big fan.

Pre-Royals

Items of note on Zdeb's athletic life before joining the Royals, and of personal note:

-- Zdeb, who had a distinctive look with flowing hair and mustache while with the Royals, was perhaps a bit too hirsute to suit the Royals organization before joining the big club. From Wikipedia:

"At some point, during minor league spring training, he showed up to camp with long hair, which was against team policy. Manager Joe Gordon refused to give him a uniform, so he approached general manager Lou Gorman, asking "Mr. Gorman, if I cut my hair, will I become a better ballplayer?" Gorman said he needed to cut it to properly represent the organization, and after initially refusing, he did so a couple days later."

No year is given for this, and although Joe Gordon was the Royals' first manager in their expansion year of 1969, his Society for American Baseball Research biography says Gorden didn't manage thereafter, although he was a Royals scout. But this is Wikepedia.

-- Zdeb was drafted in the fourth round of the 1971 MLB June Amateur Draft from Maine South High School in Park Ridge, Illinois, a suburb of Chicago. That was the same year the Royals drafted Hall of Famer George Brett and Steve Busby, who might have had a Hall of Fame career cut short by injury, each in the second round. Other future Royals mainstays drafted that year were John Wathan, in January back when baseball had a January draft, and Mark Littell.

The Royals first draft pick that June? The immortal Roy Branch, who made it the majors one year, with Seattle in 1979.

-- If Zdeb hadn't opted for baseball, he might have become known elsewhere in Missouri, halfway across the state playing football for the Missouri Tigers.

According to Wikipedia: "A fullback, he signed a letter of intent to play football at the University of Missouri, with a promise that he would also be allowed to play baseball."

-- Zdeb's progress was slower than Brett's and Busby's and he had an uneven six years in the minors, but he earned his shot by batting .298 with Triple-A Omaha in 1976.

-- As for where that last name came from, Zdeb told Chuck Woodling of the Lawrence (Kansas) Journal-World: "Aw, it's a little bit Irish and some Polish. Who knows?"