Cloyd Boyer obit

Cloyd Boyer, Last of a Three-Brother Baseball Rarity, Dies at 94

His pitching career was cut short, but at one time he and his brothers Ken and Clete were all on the major league stage together. He ended up outliving them. 

He was not on the list.Cloyd Boyer pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals and the Kansas Metropolis Athletics and, in a baseball profession of almost a half century, later labored as a pitching coach for the Yankees and the Atlanta Braves and as a minor league supervisor, a roving pitching teacher and a scout.

However in none of these roles was he particularly well-known. What introduced him his biggest distinction was one thing extra familial: He joined with the third basemen Ken and Clete Boyer in a three-brother main league rarity.

Having outlived each Ken and Clete, Cloyd Boyer died on Sept. 20 at 94 in a nursing residence in Carthage, Missouri. His dying was confirmed by his son Ken.

The Boyers weren’t the one brotherly trio to play within the main leagues on the similar time. Joe, Dom and Vince DiMaggio famously got here earlier than them. Extra not too long ago there have been Felipe, Matty and Jesus Alou, and Bengie, José and Yadier Molina. However throughout baseball historical past, notable three-brother combos are a small fraternity.

Cloyd was the eldest of seven brothers; he additionally had seven sisters. The 4 Boyer boys who didn’t make it to the foremost leagues performed within the minors. Cloyd’s promising pitching profession was victimized by damage, however Ken and Clete, the youngest of the three, flourished within the main leagues.

Ken Boyer performed for 15 seasons, 11 with the Cardinals, and later managed them. A fixture on All-Star groups, he was the Nationwide League’s Most Beneficial Participant in 1964, when the Playing cards confronted brother Clete’s Yankees within the World Collection. Ken hit two residence runs and a double and drove in six runs within the Cardinals’ seven-game Collection victory. He later performed for the Mets, the Chicago White Sox and the Los Angeles Dodgers. He completed his profession with 282 residence runs and a couple of,143 hits.

Clete Boyer, identified for his sharp fielding at third base, spent 16 seasons within the majors. After taking part in for the Athletics, he was a Yankee from 1959 to 1966, showing with stars like Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford on 5 pennant-winning groups, two of them World Collection champions. He later spent 5 seasons with the Braves.

Ken Boyer died in 1982 at 51, and Clete Boyer died in 2007 at 70. Each had most cancers.

Cloyd, a right-hander with an excellent fastball, pitched for the Cardinals from 1949 to 1952 and was a teammate of the long run Corridor of Famers Stan Musial, Red Schoendienst and Enos Slaughter. After being despatched to the minors, he pitched for Kansas Metropolis in 1955.

A shoulder damage shortened his main league profession, leaving him with a 20-23 report.

Lengthy afterward, he maintained that his possibilities of getting back from the damage had been spoiled by the baseball knowledge of his time and an odd little bit of instruction from Eddie Stanky, who turned the Cardinals’ supervisor in 1952.

“The entire philosophy was to pitch via ache and it will ultimately go away,” Cloyd was quoted as saying in Lew Freedman’s “The Boyer Brothers of Baseball” (2015). “And in case your arm doesn’t come round, we’ll get anyone else.”

Not solely did his shoulder by no means totally come round, his damage was additional aggravated by Stanky’s insistence that he work on his baserunning expertise.

He informed how Stanky, seeing his potential as a pinch-runner, had put him via drills by which he practiced scrambling again to first base to keep away from being picked off. As Boyer informed it: “He’d be my coach. He’d yell, ‘Get again!’ And I needed to dive again. I feel that’s after I harm my arm the second time.”

After his one season with Kansas Metropolis, Boyer pitched within the minors till 1961. He was a pitching coach for the Yankees in 1975 and 1977 and with the Atlanta Braves later within the Seventies and within the early ’80s. He managed within the Yankees’ minor league system and labored for them as a roving pitching teacher and a scout.

Cloyd Victor Boyer was born on Sept. 1, 1927, on the outskirts of Alba, Mo., close to town of Joplin within the southwestern a part of the state. His father, Chester, was a grocer and labored on road-building initiatives run by the Melancholy-era Works Progress Administration. His mom, Mable (Means) Boyer, tended to the big household.

He graduated from Alba Excessive College in 1945, pitched for a Navy workforce on occupation responsibility in Japan after World Struggle II, and was then signed by the Cardinals out of a tryout camp.

He retired from baseball after managing a minor league workforce within the Braves’ group within the 1992 season.

Cloyd’s brothers Wayne, Lynn, Len and Ron all performed within the minor leagues.

Along with his son Ken, Boyer is survived by his spouse, Nadine (Witherspoon) Boyer; one other son, Jim; a daughter, Cheryl Boyer; 10 grandchildren; 19 great-grandchildren; three great-great-grandchildren; his brother Ronnie; and his sisters Deloris Webb, Pansy Schell, Shirley Lockhart, Bobbi McNary and Marcy Layton.

Though he loved a protracted baseball profession and was thought of an excellent scholar of the sport, Cloyd Boyer let his deeds converse for themselves.

“I don’t go round bragging about something,” he stated in “The Boyer Brothers of Baseball.”

“The way in which I figured it, the Lord’s been good to me. I used to be fortunate.”

n his major-league career, encompassing all or part of five seasons, Boyer posted a 20–23 won–lost record with 198 strikeouts and a 4.73 earned run average in 3952⁄3 innings pitched, including 13 complete games, three shutouts, and two saves. Boyer also played for the Duluth Dukes, a Cardinals minor league team, in 1947. That year, Boyer compiled a record of 16 wins against 9 losses. He struck out 239 and took the strikeout lead in the Northern League. After that season, he was promoted to the Cardinals' Double-A club, the Houston Buffaloes, for whom he played in 1948.

After his playing career finished, Boyer became a scout, minor league pitching instructor and major league pitching coach—spending much of his time in the New York Yankees' organization. He spent two brief terms as pitching coach of the Bombers in 1975 and 1977, and held the same post on the staff of Bobby Cox during Cox's first term (1978–1981) as manager of the Atlanta Braves, then served under Dick Howser as mound tutor of the 1982–1983 Kansas City Royals.

Boyer died in Carthage, Missouri, on September 20, 2021. At the time, he was the 18th oldest former Major League Baseball player at 94 years, 19 days old.