Doug Drabek would have a very fruitful career pitching in MLB, a career that started with the Yankees.
Back in the day, Doug Drabek was an All-Star. He was a 20-game winner. He was a Cy Young winner and the go-to guy in a must-win Game 7 of a League Championship Series. Before all this, he was also a member of the New York Yankees.
Drabek was drafted by the Chicago White Sox and later traded to the Yankees. He spent the 1986 season as a member of the starting rotation in the Bronx, on a team which finished second in the division.
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Rather than investing in the future with a young Drabek, the Yankees chose to bring in more experienced veteran pitchers. Tommy John and Rick Rhoden were aging hurlers who were brought in to satisfy the win-now mentality of the Yanks.
Between the two of them, they won 29 games, pitching well, despite the team finishing in fourth place in the division.
Drabek was traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates where he would win 11 games his first year as a Bucco. The patience the Yankees weren’t willing to spend on Drabek, the Pirates were, and dividends it paid.
From ’88 to ’92 Drabek would average 16 wins a game and he brought home the Cy Young Award with a league-leading 22 wins in 1990.
The Pirates would appear in three straight League Championship Series’, and though they lost all three, Drabek was the horse who they depended on to get them there.
By 1990 both John and Rhoden, at age 46 and 36 respectively, were out of the game. Drabek was in his prime pitching years. A cadre (including Greg Cadaret) of arms would be run out to the mound the next three years for the Yankees before they would garner a winning record again.
Would Drabek alone have made the difference for the team, probably not. The early 90s Yankees had a few issues which were not going to be solved by one pitcher. Seeing Drabek win a Cy Young in pinstripes would have been nice, however.
Drabek would pitch a few years for his hometown Houston Astros before finishing off his career with the Baltimore Orioles. He won 155 games in his big league career, though just seven with the New York Yankees.
We’ll be left to wonder what could have been, had Doug Drabek not been exiled from The Big Apple at an early age.