September 18, 1975: Rusty Staub becomes first Met to reach 100-RBI milestone in walk-off win

Rusty Staub’s 23-season career was dotted with distinctions that established him as a consistently productive hitter, though not quite a Hall of Famer. Staub retired in 1985 as the first man to have collected at least 500 hits with each of four different teams.1 And he trailed only the legendary Ty Cobb as the second player in the American and National Leagues to hit a home run before his 20th birthday and after his 40th.2

In 1975 Staub notched another milestone when he became the first batter in New York Mets history to drive in 100 runs in a season.3 He reached the mark with a flourish, hitting a two-run homer in a dramatic game that also saw him score the winning run in a walk-off finish.

Just two seasons earlier, with Staub a key contributor, the 1973 Mets had mounted an unlikely “Ya Gotta Believe” run to the National League championship. But their 1974 and 1975 successors had mostly shown that the ’73 team caught lightning in a bottle. New York entered the game of September 18, 1975, fourth in the six-team NL East with a 77-75 record, 10½ games behind the eventual division champion Pittsburgh Pirates.

The team’s mediocrity had cost manager Yogi Berra his job in early August.4 Roy McMillan, the Mets’ shortstop in the mid-1960s and a coach under Berra, ran the team for the rest of the season. He inspired a brief rally: The Mets entered September just four games behind first-place Pittsburgh but faded down the stretch. Besides Staub, their biggest offensive weapon was outfielder Dave Kingman, second in the NL with 34 home runs.5 Kingman was shooting for his own spot in Mets history. He had tied Frank Thomas for the most homers by a Met in a single season, a record Thomas set in the team’s inaugural season of 1962.

In Jim Marshall’s first full season as Cubs manager,6 his team was faring even worse at 75-80, 15 games behind Pittsburgh. Like McMillan, Marshall had once played for the team he managed;7 he’d also briefly been a Met during their hapless first season. Just two days earlier, the Cubs had been smacked 22-0 by Pittsburgh, in a game in which Pirates second baseman Rennie Stennett collected seven hits in seven at-bats.

The September 18 game marked the Cubs and Mets’ final matchup at Shea Stadium that season. The Cubs won just three of the nine games they played in Flushing that year—though one of those wins had come the previous day, behind a six-hit complete game by Ray Burris.

The Mets started Long Islander Hank Webb, a righty playing his only full season in the big leagues. He entered with a 7-6 record and a 3.74 ERA, including a win over Chicago in the second game of a July 27 doubleheader. Chicago’s starter was 21-year-old righty Donnie Moore, making his third major-league appearance and first start. He entered with no record and a 3.00 ERA in a scant three innings of work. The Cubs had chosen Moore in the first round of the January 1973 draft, and he’d gone 14-8 at Double-A Midland to earn his first call-up.

The 6,336 fans who showed up on that Thursday night might have wished they’d stayed home and watched The Waltons or Barney Miller instead.8 Webb walked Don Kessinger and Rick Monday to start the game, then gave up a run-scoring double to Jerry Morales that left fielder Mike Vail misjudged.9  José Cardenal singled to right; two runs scored and Cardenal took second on an error by second baseman Félix Millan.10 Four batters into the game, McMillan yanked Webb and summoned 22-year-old righty Randy Tate to replace him.

Tate was nearing the end of a difficult season, his only one in the majors. Working mostly as a starter, he’d compiled a 5-12 record and a 4.42 ERA, and the September 18 game was his second-to-last of 26 major-league appearances.11 He began poorly, throwing away an attempted pickoff that allowed Cardenal to move to third. One out later, Manny Trillo’s grounder brought Cardenal home for a 4-0 Cubs lead.

The Mets wasted a single and a walk in the first but began to chip away at the deficit in the third. With one out, Del Unser doubled to right and took third on Morales’ throwing error.12 Millan’s grounder to second delivered Unser to make the score 4-1. Two-out singles by Mike Vail and Staub brought Kingman to the plate as the tying run, but he struck out, as he did 153 times that season.13

The Cubs squandered two baserunners in the fourth as Moore fouled off a third-strike bunt and Kessinger lined out to left field. Mike Phillips tripled for the Mets in the bottom half, but John Milner, pinch-hitting for Tate, grounded out to strand him at third.

Tate had contributed four innings of hitless, scoreless pitching, settling down a game that had threatened to go out of control. Rookie Rick Baldwin, whose 54 games out of the bullpen led the Mets that season, followed Tate with two shutout, one-hit innings.

As the Mets’ relievers gave the team a chance to win, their bats began to perk up. With one out in the fifth, Millan beat out a grounder to short. One out later, Staub hit his 18th homer of the season, to right field, for his milestone 99th and 100th RBIs, bringing the score to 4-3. Kingman singled, but pinch-hitter Bob Gallagher ended the inning with a strikeout. Gallagher replaced Ed Kranepool after the first baseman was ejected by umpire Ed Vargo over a fair/foul call.14

Clinging to a lead, Moore was pulled with one out in the sixth after yielding a single to Phillips. Darold Knowles replaced him. Formerly a bullpen bulwark for the three-time 1972-74 World Series champion Oakland A’s, Knowles had been dealt to the Cubs shortly after the conclusion of the 1974 World Series in the deal that brought future Hall of Famer Billy Williams to Oakland.15

His first season in Chicago was a struggle for the veteran lefty, who entered with a 6-6 record and a 5.78 ERA.16 He did his job in the sixth and seventh innings, though, maintaining the Cubs’ 4-3 lead with little drama.

With righty Bob Apodaca on the mound for New York, Chicago bolstered the lead with another run in the eighth. Andre Thornton and Trillo singled, and Steve Swisher’s fly to right field scored Thornton.

But the Mets bounced back in the bottom half, beginning with a double to left field by Kingman. With one out, McMillan summoned three righty-swinging veteran pinch-hitters in a row—Jerry Grote,  Jesús Alou, and Joe Torre. Grote grounded out, but Alou singled home Kingman to make it 5-4, and Torre’s triple brought home pinch-runner Bud Harrelson to tie the game, 5-5. Torre’s hit eluded Morales and rolled to the wall, and a faster runner might have had an inside-the-park homer, the New York Times reported.17

New York’s fifth pitcher, well-traveled righty Ken Sanders, retired the Cubs in order on three fly balls in the ninth. Knowles returned for the bottom half and got the first two hitters—Millan on a fly, Vail on a strikeout. Staub kept the inning alive with a single, bringing Kingman to the plate. The powerful “King Kong” touched Knowles for a game-ending homer to left field, deep enough that outfielder Cardenal didn’t chase it.18 Staub scored the winning run and Kingman an extra run for a 7-5 win.

It was one of three walk-off wins for the Mets in a five-day span. They’d beaten Montreal with a bases-loaded walk in the 18th inning on September 16 and defeated the Phillies on an 11th-inning homer by Ron Hodges on September 20. This burst of clutch performance was an anomaly, though. Over the full season, the ’75 Mets collected just six walk-off wins against 12 walk-off losses.

Kingman ended the season with 36 homers, a new team record and two behind Philadelphia’s Mike Schmidt for the NL lead. Staub ended 1975 with 105 RBIs, fourth in the NL.19 “Having people in front of you get on base is the secret of making 100 RBIs,” he said. “With Del Unser, Millan, and Mike Vail batting first, second, and third and having super years, I’m having my best one, too.”20

Both Staub’s and Kingman’s franchise records have long since been surpassed. As of fall 2022, Pete Alonso had freshly set the Mets’ record for RBIs in a season, with 131. Alonso had also collected the most single-season home runs in Mets history, with 53 in his rookie season of 2019. Other Met sluggers of the future will doubtless rack up 100 RBIs or more in a season. But only Rusty Staub will ever be the first.

Acknowledgments

This story was fact-checked by Bruce Slutsky and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources and photo credit

In addition to the specific sources cited in the Notes, the author used the Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org websites for general player, team, and season data and the box scores for this game.

www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/NYN/NYN197509180.shtml

www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1975/B09180NYN1975.htm

Image of 1975 O-Pee-Chee card #90 downloaded from the Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 Norm King, “Rusty Staub,” SABR Biography Project, accessed September 26, 2022. The teams were the Houston Colt .45s/Astros, the Montreal Expos, the New York Mets, and the Detroit Tigers. Staub also played a single season with the Texas Rangers.

2 As of the fall of 2022, Gary Sheffield and Álex Rodríguez had also joined the club.

3 Staub achieved this feat in the team’s 14th season of play. Before 1975, the highest season RBI total for a Mets batter had been Donn Clendenon’s 97 in 1970.

4 Berra was fired on August 6 with the Mets’ record at 56-53. He had also clashed with team management over the reinstatement of troubled outfielder Cleon Jones. Reportedly, Berra spent the day of his firing at the same New Jersey golf course where he’d been when the Yankees fired him as manager in 1964. Associated Press, “Mets Replace Berra with McMillan,” Rochester (New York) Democrat and Chronicle, August 7, 1975: 1D.

5 Mike Schmidt led with 36.

6 Marshall had taken over the Cubs’ managerial job in late July of 1974. He remained in the position through the end of the 1976 season, completing his two full campaigns with identical 75-87 records.

7 Marshall played 134 games with the Cubs in 1958 and 1959 and appeared in 17 games with the 1962 Mets. He also played with the Baltimore Orioles, San Francisco Giants, and Pittsburgh Pirates.

8 The game was an 8:05 P.M. start, and The Waltons and Barney Miller were among the TV programs airing in New York that night in the 8-8:30 P.M. time slot. “Today’s TV Programs,” New York Daily News, September 18, 1975: 125.

9 “Kingman’s 35th Sinks Cubs,” Chicago Daily Herald, September 19, 1975: 2:4.

10 Millan also tied a Mets team record in this game with his 638th at-bat of the season. He had set the previous record in 1973. Parton Keese, “Mets Win on Kingman Clout,” New York Times, September 19, 1975: 43.

11 Two of Tate’s five wins came against the Cubs. He’d worked six innings in the second game of an April 20 doubleheader to earn his first big-league victory, then went seven innings on July 25 to beat them again.

12 Phil Pepe, “Kingman HR (No. 35) Nips Cubs in 9th, 7-5,” New York Daily News, September 19, 1975: 97.

13 As with the home-run race, Kingman finished second in strikeouts to Mike Schmidt. Schmidt struck out 180 times, Kingman 153.

14 Keese’s story in the New York Times and the Associated Press story “Kingman Admits He Has Become Homer Conscious,” both cited elsewhere in these notes, mention Kranepool’s ejection during his at-bat in the fifth inning. As of September 2023, Retrosheet included this ejection in its records, but Baseball-Reference did not.

15 The full terms of the October 23, 1974, trade: Knowles, Trillo, and Bob Locker to Chicago; Williams to Oakland.

16 Despite struggling, Knowles still led the 1975 Cubs in appearances (58) and saves (15).

17 Keese, “Mets Win on Kingman Clout.”

18 Associated Press, “Kingman Admits He Has Become Homer Conscious,” Bloomington (Illinois) Pantagraph, September 19, 1975: B3.

19 Ahead of him were Philadelphia’s Greg Luzinski (120) and Cincinnati’s Johnny Bench (110) and Tony Pérez (109). After he reached 100 RBIs on September 18, Staub added one RBI each on September 20, 23, and 26, then ended the season with two RBIs in the final game on September 28.

20 Keese, “Mets Win on Kingman Clout.” The 1975 season was Staub’s first with more than 100 RBIs. He went on to have an even better season with the 1978 Detroit Tigers, driving in a career-high 121 runs.