Hitting for the cycle launched Yastrzemski’s historic stretch

He will forever be defined by the 1967 season, a year when Carl Yastrzemski was the American League’s Most Valuable Player.

But if not for some unfortunate injury luck, Yastrzemski might have won the MVP Award two years earlier.

On May 14, 1965, Yastrzemski hit for the cycle in a 12-8 Red Sox loss to the Detroit Tigers at Fenway Park. Yastrzemski became the 13th player in Red Sox history to record a single, double, triple and home run in one game – going 5-for-5 with a walk while recording two home runs and tying a Red Sox record with 14 total bases.

The game pushed Yastrzemski’s batting average to .304. But two days later, in the second game of a doubleheader against the Tigers, Yastrzemski suffered a cracked rib and bruised kidney trying to break up a double play when Tigers second baseman Jake Wood kneed him in the back. Yastrzemski missed the next seven games and saw his batting average drop below .300 before another hot streak that saw him hit .425 from June 9-28.

“It often happens that a player is hurt when he’s hot,” Boston manager Billy Herman told United Press International. “But they very seldom come back into the lineup hitting nearly as well as they did when they went out.”

But soon after that stretch, a muscle pull in his leg sidelined Yastrzemski for 13 games over two-plus weeks and cost him a chance to play in the All-Star Game. When he returned, Yastrzemski continued to pound the ball – hitting .332 as late as Aug. 27 before finishing with a .312 batting average and league-leading marks in on-base percentage (.395), slugging percentage (.536) and OPS (.932). Yastrzemski paced the league in batting average for much of the season before Minnesota’s Tony Oliva overtook him down the stretch, leaving the Red Sox’s left fielder in second place at the end of the year.

“Yastrzemski could hit .350,” Cleveland manager Birdie Tebbetts told the Hartford Courant prior to the 1965 season.

Yastrzemski did lead all MLB players with 45 doubles while playing in only 133 games. Since the start of the Modern Era in 1901, only five players (Nap Lajoie, Tris Speaker-twice, Bob Meusel, Frankie Frisch and Ben Chapman) had as many doubles in so few games.

Yastrzemski finished 10th in the AL MVP balloting in 1965. His 4.9 Wins Above Replacement mark, however, trailed only Zoilo Versalles (7.2) and Oliva (5.4) of the AL champion Twins among the players finishing ahead of him in the voting. Had injuries allowed him to play a complete season, Yastrzemski would have undoubtedly improved on his 20 home runs and 72 RBI – statistics that at the time were much more important to the award voters.

After the 1966 campaign where his average dropped to .278 (while again leading the league in doubles), Yastrzemski spent the offseason working out and gained muscle and stamina. In 1967, he powered the Impossible Dream Red Sox to the pennant by leading the league in runs, hits, home runs, RBI, batting average, OPS and total bases. He won the AL MVP Award in a landslide.

But if any point in time can be identified as the start of Yastrzemski’s dominance, it might have been the day he hit for the cycle for the only time in his Hall of Fame career.

“Sure, I’d like to get a player like Carl Yastrzemski,” Yankees manager Johnny Keane told The Boston Globe at the end of the 1965 season when New York finished in sixth place in the American League. “But we never will.”

Craig Muder is the director of communications for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum