October 23 – Happy Birthday Al Leiter
After coming up through the Yankee farm system, Al Leiter made his Major League debut in pinstripes, starting four games for New York during the 1987 season. The following year he finished 4-4 for the Yankees but was hampered by a chronic blistering problem on the fingers of his pitching hand. At the end of the first month of the 1989 season, New York traded the promising left hander to the Blue Jays for Toronto’s slugging outfielder, Jesse Barfield. Leiter bounced up and down between Toronto and the Blue Jays top farm team for the next three seasons before becoming a semi-regular member of the parent club’s starting staff in 1993. He won a World Series game and a ring that year and by 1995, he’d pitched well enough to sign a nice free agent deal with the Marlins. Al won 27 games and another World Series ring during his two years in Florida but the Marlins dealt him to the Mets in 1998 in the deal for A.J. Burnett. During the next seven seasons he pitched some very good baseball for the Amazin’s, winning 95 games, losing just 67 and pitching seven shutouts. When the Mets let him become a free agent in 2004, he went back to the Marlins, where he had compiled a 3-7 record when he was traded to the Yankees.
I remember watching him pitch his first start as a returning Yankee, a six-plus-inning, three hit victory over Boston’s Tim Wakefield. Unfortunately, Leiter’s career-long struggle with control prevented him from becoming an even more effective member of that 2005 Yankee pitching staff. He retired from baseball after that season and is now a very talented and hard-working television analyst for both the YES and MLB Networks. Al was born on October 23, 1965, in Toms River, NJ. This long-ago Yankee outfielder was also born on today’s date.
Pinstripe Birthdays 