1967 Season
April- Welp. Danny Lazar broke his wrist in spring training and will miss the entire year. Jim Rittwage will take his spot in the rotation. Then Tim McCarver broke his wrist in the first week of the season and will miss a month. Near the end of the month Tommy John sprained his back and will be out a month. Through all that we manage a 14-12 April and are 3.5 games behind the Giants in 4th place.
May- We end May 32-22 despite Manny Mota missing two weeks with a sprained ankle. We're 7 games out, time to turn it on.
June- We have a good June, problem is we lose all six games against the Giants. We're 50-31 and 6.5 games behind the Giants. Johnny Callison missed two weeks with a broken hand.
Vida Blue goes 1st overall in the draft to the A's. Mike Schmidt goes 2nd to the Cardinals.
July- Really strong month as we finish it up 70-38 but still 3.5 games behind the Giants. This is a legit race. Jim Rittwages 3.00 ERA is the highest on our staff, so yeah, our pitching is still righteous. McCovey is having a great year at .318/32/86. Javier leads baseball in hits. Our staff is dominating again.
August- Ughh. Tim McCarver messes his thumb up in early August and misses about half the month. We fade late in the month and drop to 83-53, 8 games behind the Giants. Crap.
September- We can't make up the ground, finishing 99-63 and 8 games out of first.
No real fingers to point. Robinson, Brinkman and McCarver didn't have great years, Brinkman and McCarver especially, but our pitching was pretty much fantastic. Len Church did lose 12 games despite a 2.63 ERA. The Giants just had our number this year.
Javiers 211 hits was good for 3rd, Yaz's 201 put him in the top 10. McCovey had 45 homers, good for 3rd, his 119 runs good for 3rd and his 128 RBI were good for 4th. Yaz scored 112 times to put him in the top 10. Jenkins at 2.17 was 2nd in ERA, Klages at 2.50 and Arlichs 2.63 were both top 10. Rittwage won 21 games, good for 3rd. Jenkins 234 K's put him in the top 10.
The Giants will take on the Orioles who went 98-64 and won the AL in a heated pennant chase by 1 game over the Yankees, 3 games over the White Sox and 4 games over the Red Sox.
The Orioles are led by Kaline, Boyer, Gibson and Camilo Pascual. Our old buddies Ray Culp and Mickey Lolich are their 3rd and 4th starters and they were both decent but nothing I regret losing.
The Giants are aced by Jim Derrington who won 24 games, Ron Keller who won 21 and Jim Kaat won 20 games. Bob Allison, who hit 55 homers, Orlando Cepeda and Tommy Davis are the heart of their very dangerous order. Allison is interesting, he's 33 years old and had never had more than 163 AB's in a season before last, must be a frigging hard lineup to crack out there in SF.