Give it up, y'all, for Willie "Stretch" McCovey, who turns 74 today. This cat with the big smile and even bigger bat won NL Rookie of the Year honors in 1959 after playing less than a third of a season (he hit .354 with 13 homers and 38 RBI in 219 plate appearances), and then went on to play 21 more seasons, finishing his career in 1980 with 521 career home runs, a 1969 NL MVP Award, and a first-ballot ticket to the Hall of Fame. He also homered in four different decades — Ted Williams, Rickey Henderson and Omar Vizquel are the only other players who can claim to have matched that feat.
One of the most feared sluggers of the 1960s — he inspired the "McCovey Shift," wherein teams positioned three infielders between first and second (and sometimes four players in the outfield), and no less a bad-ass than Bob Gibson expressed his distaste for facing him — McCovey posted his last great season in 1970, hitting .289 with 39 doubles, 39 homers, 126 RBI and a league-leading 137 walks for the third-place San Francisco Giants. But though his numbers would slip drastically at times during the 70s, the 6'4" first baseman still cut a tremendously imposing figure. Check out his 1973 Topps card, where he towers over future fellow Hall of Famer Johnny Bench:
"Damn," he seems to be saying. "Did my foul liner just decapitate that beer vendor?" "He'll be feeling THAT tomorrow," nods Bench, sagely...
'73 would be Stretch's last year with the Giants, at least for awhile. Bouncing back after a knee injury-riddled 1972 that saw him hit only .213 with 14 homers while playing in only 81 games, he hit .266 with 29 homers and 75 RBI... and led the league for the fourth time in intentional walks, with 25. (In 1969, his lone MVP year, he led the league with a whopping 45 IBBs.) The Giants, figuring that McCovey's trade value would never be higher, shipped him off to San Diego with teammate Bernie Williams in exchange for lefty hurler Mike Caldwell. But since the Padres were strongly rumored to be moving to Washington DC for '74, Topps gave him one of the more confusing card treatments imaginable — a poorly airbrushed "SD" cap, and a "Washington Nat'l Lea." team designation. Later printings of the card (issued after Ray Kroc bought the team and kept them in San Diego) would correct the team, but not the half-assed artwork...
1976 was probably the nadir of McCovey's career. After hitting only .203 with 7 homers in 71 games with the Padres, he was sold to Oakland on August 30. A's, then eight games in back of the Royals, figured that McCovey's bat would come in handy in the pennant race; but while Chuck Tanner's squad managed to put a scare into Kansas City, finishing just 2.5 games out, the aging slugger didn't have much to do with it. Though a man of his size, age and skills would have seemed tailor-made for the DH role, in reality he wound up knocking only five singles in seven games. The connected moustache-and-sideburns look he sported during his brief Oakland tenure was pretty bad-ass, however.
And then it was back across the Bay to San Francisco as a relatively low-priced free agent. According to varying reports, the Giants paid him somewhere between half and two-thirds of the $110K a year he was making in his SF glory days. They definitely got their money's worth in '77, when he hit .280 with 28 home runs and 86 RBI while playing 136 games at first base, earning him both the NL Comeback Player of the Year award, and 20th place in the NL MVP voting. Not bad at all for a 39 year-old.
It was, of course, a downhill slide from there, though Stretch did make headlines on June 30, 1978, when he hit home run #500 off of Jamie Easterly of the Atlanta Braves. At that point in time, only 11 other players had reached that milestone. (Reggie Jackson would be the next to do it, in 1984.)
What else can you say about the man — other than that he was so bad-ass, they named a cove after him? Happy Birthday, Willie!