May 24 – Happy Birthday Ellie Rodriguez
You’re fourteen years old, you love the Yankees and for the previous three years you’ve watched them degrade from perennial World Series participants to AL cellar dwellers. All your favorite pinstriper’s have grown old instantly together and you’re desperate for some good news. Is Bobby Murcer the next Mickey Mantle? Will Jerry Kenney make us forget about Clete Boyer.? Is Horace Clarke better than Bobby Richardson? You keep watching and listening to game after game and scouring the box scores to get the answer to these questions and even though it quickly became obvious that this next generation of Yankees were simply pale imitations of the previous ones, you didn’t give up hope.
It was this never-give-up-hope attitude that helps me clearly remember when today’s Pinstripe Birthday Celebrant made his debut in the Bronx. It was a Sunday afternoon game at the Stadium in late May of 1968 and I can almost hear Scooter make the first-ever big league introduction of this native Puerto Rican. It probably went something like this; “and batting eighth and doing the catching is, holy cow Messer, this kid’s name is Ellie Rodriguez and he’s doing the catching. If he’s anything like the last Ellie (Elston Howard) who caught for the Yankees, we may have something special here.”
But alas, Ellie Rodriguez was no Ellie Howard. He went 0-3 in his Yankee debut that afternoon and was hitting just .167 by mid-June, when the Yankees sent him back to their Syracuse Chiefs farm team. He’d get called back up a couple of times that year but he did not do much better, finishing his nine-game debut season with a .209 batting average. New York had this other young catcher named Munson playing for Binghamton that same season, who was impressing everyone in the organization, so they left Ellie II unprotected in the AL expansion draft. The Kansas City Royals made him their 13th pick.
It turned out to be a big break for Rodriguez because he became the Royals’ starting catcher in 1969 and made the AL All Star team. Three seasons later he repeated that feat as the Brewers starting catcher. The Brewers traded him to the Angels following the ’73 season and he caught 137 games for California in 1974, a career high. He would end up spending nine years in all as a big league catcher, and then he played four more seasons in Mexico. Lifetime he hit .245 and threw out 41% of the runners attempting to steal against him. He may not have been the next Ellie Howard but he did just fine.
Rodriguez shares his May 24th birthday with this veteran pitcher who played an important role in the Yankees’ 2011 starting rotation.
| Year | Tm | G | PA | AB | R | H | 2B | 3B | HR | RBI | SB | BB | SO | ||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1968 | NYY | 9 | 27 | 24 | 1 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 3 | .208 | .296 | .208 | .505 |
| 9 Yrs | 775 | 2622 | 2173 | 220 | 533 | 76 | 6 | 16 | 203 | 17 | 332 | 291 | .245 | .356 | .308 | .664 | |
| MIL (3 yrs) | 325 | 1152 | 964 | 89 | 246 | 32 | 4 | 3 | 95 | 6 | 134 | 122 | .255 | .357 | .306 | .663 | |
| KCR (2 yrs) | 175 | 575 | 498 | 52 | 115 | 18 | 2 | 3 | 35 | 5 | 58 | 61 | .231 | .323 | .293 | .617 | |
| CAL (2 yrs) | 230 | 778 | 621 | 68 | 153 | 26 | 0 | 10 | 63 | 6 | 118 | 93 | .246 | .376 | .337 | .712 | |
| LAD (1 yr) | 36 | 90 | 66 | 10 | 14 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 9 | 0 | 19 | 12 | .212 | .400 | .212 | .612 | |
| NYY (1 yr) | 9 | 27 | 24 | 1 | 5 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 1 | 0 | 3 | 3 | .208 | .296 | .208 | .505 | |
Pinstripe Birthdays 