I can remember my best friend, who was a rabid Yankee fan, telling me about this new guy on the team who was going to be the next Mickey Mantle. A lot of people thought that when he came up, and it's sort of a shame Murcer got saddled with that. He was never Mantle, but he was pretty good.
Murcer's career was wrecked by the Yankees' move to Shea Stadium. He was the prototypical Yankee Stadium short-porch home run hitter. In 1973, he hit three homers on the road and 19 at home. When the Yanks moved to Shea the next year, his homers at home dropped from 19 to two. So the Yankees decided to get rid of him.
3 Interesting, though his home/away splits were not so extreme during his two monster seasons ('71-'72). All in all, though, a pretty nice career with some very fine seasons.
3 - I'd always wondered about why the Yanks sent Murcer away, although never enough to actually look at the numbers until today. It's not like the Yanks seemed to particularly value the guy they got in exchange for Murcer, Bobby Bonds. It's ironic that the guy who was supposed to be the next Mickey Mantle was traded for the guy who was supposed to be the next Willie Mays.
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I'm going to see some very familiar names over the next ten years. My sympathies to the Murcer family.
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