Vida Blue

Sport: Baseball

Induction Year: 1990

Induction Year: 1990

In 1971, Vida Blue became the first American League baseball player ever to win both the Most Valuable Player award and the Cy Young award. He had a 24-8 record and led the league with a 1.82 earned run average and eight shutouts. He struck out 301 batters in 312 innings.

It was his first full season in the big leagues. Blue turned 22 on July 28 that summer. His Oakland A’s won 101 games winning the West Division of the American League for the first of five consecutive division titles. Three of those teams won the World Series.

Four years after he left Mansfield’s DeSoto High, Blue should’ve been on top of the world in 1971. But he was miserable. His salary was $16,000, making him the most underpaid player in baseball.

Drained by a long, bitter dispute with A’s owner Charlie O. Finley, Blue never equaled those numbers again. But he won 209 games and had 1,875 strikeouts in his major league career.

In the spring of 1967, Vida Blue Jr. had to decide between college football and professional baseball. In football, he passed for 3,484 yards and had 1,600 yards rushing in his senior season for 5,084 yards total offense—an average of slightly more than 423 yards per game. DeSoto High outscored its opponents 314-76 in a 10-2 season. “When he was pressed, he threw a few passes with his right hand. He threw 35 touchdown passes that season. He was my offense,” recalled Desoto coach Clarence Baldwin.

The University of Houston wanted Blue to run its Veer Option offense. Alcorn State, playing in the all-black Southwestern Athletic Conference, also made a serious pitch ffor the lefthanded quarterback, enrolling him in a summer school in Vicksburg, Miss., to make up a credit he needed for high school graduation.

In baseball, Blue pitched four no-hitters in his junior season and three more as a senior. Playing for Coach Tony Rhodes, who later was head football coach at Shreveport’s Huntington High for the first 18 years of the school’s existence, Blue struck out 21 hitters in one seven-inning game and 19 in another.

If Yankee Stadium is the “House that Ruth Built,” there is no doubt that the baseball field at DeSoto High eras the “Field that Blue Built.” Before he came along, DeSoto didn’t even have a baseball team.

There were two other excellent pitchers on the DeSoto team—Jesse Hudson and Jerry Ray. Some pro scouts rated Hudson, who had an excellent curve ball, ahead of Blue until their senior season. The problem for both was that catcher Elijah Williams and the chicken-wire backstop had as much trouble with their pitches as opposing hitters. In their final game, Elbert Glass pitched Bethune to a 3-2 victory over DeSoto although Blue struck out 13 batters—four of them in the first inning.

One factor in Blue’s decision was the death of the father during his senior football season. That left Vida as the man of the house. For whatever reasons, he accepted the A’s $25,000 bonus (spread over two years) and was assigned to Burlington, Iowa, in the Class A Midwest League.

“It was a culture shock,” he said later. But he adapted quickly enough to throw a no-hitter at the Appleton Foxes on June 19.

The first time Joe DiMaggio (who was then with the A’s) saw Blue, he was impressed. “Blue throws smoke,” he said, “and throws it for strikes. What more does he need?”

In 1970, Blue was called up by the A’s at the end of the season. He allowed one hit in a 3-0 victory over the Royals in Kansas City. Then, matched against Cy Young winner Jim Perry of Minnesota with the Twins needing one victory to clinch a division title, Blue delayed the celebration by throwing a no-hitter at the champs—setting the stage for his supper season in 1971.

Blue hit rock bottom in 1983, after he was traded to the San Francisco Giants and then to Kansas City. He entered a guilty plea to a federal misdemeanor charge of possessing cocaine, and spent 90 days in a correctional facility in Fort Worth.

During those 90 days, Blue decided that his baseball career wasn’t over. “Getting involved in drugs was bad judgment, the worst mistake I ever made,” he said. “But I told myself, hell, I can still pitch. I’m Vida Blue.”

He won 18 more games in two seasons with the Giants, and then called it quits at the age of 36. During those two seasons, he gave frequent interviews on network television on the subject of chemical abuse—using himself as an example, in hopes of helping a young person put his life back together and get back into the mainstream of the real world.

“They gave me a chance to express myself,” he said, “and I took full advantage of it.”

Blue thinks the same thing applies to his climb to major league stardom. “Others had just as much talent, maybe more,” he said. “But I was the one that got t he breaks, and I took advantage of my opportunities.”