Red Sox: Boston’s all time washed up player All-Star team

The Red Sox have a history of acquiring great players past their prime. Here’s a look at some of the best players who spent their twilight years in Boston.

When I was a kid, my dad always used to point out how the Boston Celtics (our favorite basketball team) seemed to trade for or sign star players from other teams when they were way past their prime. Something the Red Sox have done plenty of times in their history.

I remember being so excited, for example, when the Celtics got players like Artis Gilmore, Dominique Wilkins, and Xavier McDaniel only to be disappointed that they were old and broken down and not nearly as good as they had been when they were younger and played for other teams.

My dad also used to say that the Red Sox did the same thing and looking back even at just my childhood years, it’s hard to argue with him. I remember being so excited, for instance, when the team signed Andre Dawson in 1993 only to realize once the season started that he was a shell of himself.

As a kid, it took me a while to realize that judging a player’s acquisition based on what they did years before in their prime wasn’t always wise.

Obviously, with age and hindsight, it’s easy to see what the Red Sox were getting when they signed these over the hill stars and that got me thinking: is it just me or have the Red Sox signed a disproportionately large number of formerly great players who were well past their sell-by dates by the time they put on a Red Sox uniform?

I don’t know if they have or if it just seems that way, but I thought it would be fun to take a look at some of the best players in baseball who were no longer great once they got to Boston. Let’s call them the All-Time Washed Up All-Stars. This list isn’t meant to belittle or poke fun at these players, but rather look at what the Red Sox got (or rather, didn’t get) from these formerly great players.

As always, in no particular order, let’s begin!

Ferguson Jenkins

A Hall of Fame pitcher (most notably for the Chicago Cubs) who spent nineteen years in the major leagues, Ferguson Jenkins wasn’t bad during his short stint with the Red Sox, but he wasn’t anything close to what he’d been in the years before. From 1967 to 1975 he won twenty or more games seven times (and in the other two seasons, he won fourteen and seventeen games).

Upon joining the Red Sox for the 1976 and 1977 seasons, his win totals plummeted. He went 12-11 in 1976 and 10-10 in 1977, his two worst seasons since becoming a full-time starter in 1967.

That wasn’t an aberration, either, as apart from a bounce-back season in 1978 with the Texas Rangers when he went 18-8 and his 16-9 record in 1979, he was never over .500 again in a season for the remainder of his career.

Jenkins wasn’t terrible during his two seasons in Boston, but if the Red Sox and their fans were expecting him to be the perennial twenty game-winner he had been for the Cubs and Rangers prior to his stint in Boston, they were absolutely let down.

Jack Clark

The next player on this list is one of the over the hill free agents I remember as a kid. Jack Clark had been a really good player for the Giants and Cardinals when I was growing up in the 1980s so when he signed with the Red Sox as a free agent in 1991, I was really excited. The four-time All-Star was going to be their DH and I was looking forward to seeing lots of home runs hit out of Fenway Park.

Clark signed with the Red Sox for three years and was pretty good in 1991, hitting 28 home runs to go along with a .249 average and 87 RBI in 140 games. For a guy who was thirty-six years old at the time, those weren’t bad numbers. Unfortunately, his 1992 season was a disaster. He only hit five home runs and drove in 33 runs while hitting a dreadful .210 in 81 games.

Before spring training in 1993, the Red Sox waived Clark and ended his time with the team. He ended up signing with the Montreal Expos but never played a game for them and retired, thus ending his eighteen-year career with those final two seasons in Boston.

For years afterward, Clark’s time in Boston was routinely pointed to as an example of the Red Sox bringing in yet another old, broken down player.

Andre Dawson

I already wrote about Andre Dawson in my article on the worst free-agent signings in Red Sox history, but since his inclusion on that list planted the seed for what eventually became this current article, he definitely warrants being discussed here as well.

After playing seventeen seasons for the Montreal Expos and Chicago Cubs, Dawson signed with the Red Sox in the winter of 1992. I was really excited and couldn’t believe the Red Sox got a player like The Hawk, but the reality turned out to be something quite a bit different. Hobbled by chronic knee injuries, by the time Dawson got to Boston he was no longer the same player he’d been during his glory days.

Struggling to cover ground in Fenway Park’s massive right field, Dawson struggled at the plate, too. He did hit his 400th career home run early in the 1993 season, his first with the Red Sox, but he re-injured one of his knees and spent most of the remainder of the season as a DH. He ended up playing in 121 games in that first year, hitting .273 with 13 HR and 67 RBI.

After having surgery on his knee at the end of the season, Dawson missed most of 1994 and only played in 75 games for the Red Sox that year, hitting .240 with 16 home runs and 48 RBI. The Red Sox let him go after the season and he finished his eventual Hall of Fame career with two forgettable seasons as a member of the Florida (now Miami) Marlins.

Frank Viola

If it seems like a lot of the players on this list were acquired by the Red Sox during my childhood in the 1980s and 1990s, that’s because for whatever reason they continually made these same mistakes over and over again during those years. While some long in the tooth players, like Jeff Reardon (1990-1992) worked out, most ended up panning out the way Frank Viola did.

Viola had been a very successful pitcher in the 1980s, most notably for the Minnesota Twins with whom he won a World Series in 1987. He was the MVP of that series and also won the AL Cy Young award with them in 1988. After a couple of seasons spent with the New York Mets, the Red Sox signed Viola in 1992.

Similar to Fergie Jenkins, Viola wasn’t terrible with the Red Sox, but he was far from great and not what I’m sure they expected they were getting based on what he’d done in the past. He’d won 163 career games before joining the Red Sox but only won 25 with them in the three seasons he spent in Boston between 1992 and 1994.

Viola went 13-12 in 1992 and 11-8 in 1993. In 1994 he went 1-1 in six starts before missing the rest of the season after requiring Tommy John surgery. He left the Sox after 1994 and finished his career with two more injury-plagued, forgettable seasons.

Tony Perez

Like Fergie Jenkins, Tony Perez is another example of a Hall of Famer who the Red Sox brought in way after the years that made them Cooperstown-bound. Perez had his best seasons between 1964 and 1976 when he was a member of the Big Red Machine, the Cincinnati Reds teams of the 1970s that won four pennants and two World Series in that decade.

Perez left the Reds after 1976 and played three seasons with the Montreal Expos before the Red Sox signed him in 1980. He was actually pretty good in his first season in Boston, hitting 25 home runs and driving in 105 runs while batting .275. He also played in 151 games. However, there was a sharp drop off after that and his numbers in 1981 and 1982 were not nearly as good.

In 1981, Perez hit .252 with 9 home runs and 39 RBI in 84 games. He followed that up in 1982 with a .260 average, 6 home runs, and 31 RBI in only 69 games. At that point, he was forty-one years old and near the end of the road. He left after 1982 and played one season in Philadelphia before returning to Cincinnati for three abbreviated seasons.

Joe Rudi

The case of Joe Rudi is an interesting one as he was acquired by the Red Sox twice but only played for them once. A core member of the Kansas City, and then Oakland Athletics from 1967 to 1976, Rudi was a big part of the A’s teams that won five straight division titles and three straight World Series in the first half of the 1970s.

During the 1976 season, A’s owner Charles Finley sold Rudi and future Hall of Fame relief pitcher Rollie Fingers to the Red Sox for $1 million each in order to avoid losing them for nothing in free agency. Rudi and Fingers reported to the Red Sox and even posed for photographs in their new uniforms, but then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn voided the deals and they never played a game for Boston.

Rudi ended up signing with the California Angels in 1977 and played for them until 1981 when he was traded to the Red Sox for Fred Lynn. In his one and only season in Boston, Rudi only played in 49 games and batted .180 with 6 home runs and 24 RBI, a far cry from his 1970s prime when he was good for 15-20 home runs and 50-100 RBI every year. He went back to the A’s in 1982 to play a final season before retiring.

Tom Seaver

One of the greatest and most famous pitchers in baseball history, Tom Seaver will forever be identified with the New York Mets and his role as the star of the Miracle Mets of 1969. After breaking into the majors in 1967 and leading the Amazin’s, as they were called, to one of the most improbable World Series victories of all time in 1969, Seaver spent until 1977 as the ace of the Mets staff.

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Traded at the 1977 deadline in what became known as “The Midnight Massacre,” Seaver spent the next six seasons in Cincinnati in the dying days of the Big Red Machine. In 1983 he went back to the Mets for a season before spending the next two seasons with the Chicago White Sox. Midway through 1986, his third in Chicago, the Red Sox traded Steve Lyons to the Pale Hose in order to acquire Seaver.

Seaver brought 306 career wins to Boston but only went 5-7 with the Red Sox in 1986, along with a 3.80 ERA and 72 strikeouts in 16 starts. He won his 311th and final career game in August of that year and injured his knee toward the end of the season, missing the entire postseason and the chance to face off against his former team (the Mets) one last time in the World Series.

Seaver retired after the season although there are many Sox fans who wonder if the team would’ve won the World Series if he had been able to pitch. The Red Sox rotation in October 1986 was very thin after their top three and certainly having Seaver as the fourth starter in the same rotation as Roger Clemens, Bruce Hurst, and Oil Can Boyd would have shored things up.

Roger Clemens has credited the time he spent with Seaver in the 1986 season as helping him develop into less of a thrower and more of a true pitcher, but unfortunately, it was another example of the Red Sox getting a great player at the very end of their career and not getting as much out of them as they expected to based on their previous accomplishments.