Alright, let’s talk about something I spent some time on recently: digging into Ken Reitz and his baseball days. It started kinda randomly, actually. I was sorting through some old stuff, found a couple of baseball cards from when I was younger, and one of them was Ken Reitz. Didn’t remember a whole lot off the top of my head, just that he played third base for the Cardinals, mostly.
So, I got curious. Decided I’d spend an afternoon just looking him up, see what his deal was. Fired up the computer, you know, just started searching his name.
Getting Down to It
First thing I did was pull up his basic stats. Looked at his batting average, home runs, RBIs. Okay, decent hitter, not spectacular, but solid for a good chunk of his career. But then I remembered hearing something about his glove work back in the day. That’s what I decided to focus on.
I started specifically looking for information about his fielding. Found out pretty quickly he won a Gold Glove in 1975. Okay, that tracks. Then I saw his nickname: “The Zamboni”. That definitely caught my eye. Apparently, he was super smooth fielding ground balls, just vacuumed everything up, like a Zamboni cleaning the ice. Kinda cool.
Then I tried to see if I could find more detailed fielding stats, which is tough for players from the 70s and 80s compared to today. But I looked around for:
- Fielding percentage – His was usually pretty high.
- Range factor – Tried to compare this to other third basemen from his era.
- Errors – Notably, he set a record for fewest errors by a third baseman in a season back then, I think it was 1980.
I spent a good while just clicking through old game logs summaries and reading snippets from articles written back then. It wasn’t like I was doing super deep analysis, more just enjoying piecing together the picture of him as a player. Found myself comparing him in my head to guys like Brooks Robinson or Mike Schmidt – different kinds of players, obviously, but it helped contextualize his defensive reputation.
Tried looking for video clips too. Found a few grainy highlights, mostly team stuff, but you could kinda see that smoothness people talked about. He made it look pretty effortless out there at third.
What I Took Away
So after a few hours of this little project, I felt like I had a much better handle on Ken Reitz. He wasn’t a Hall of Famer, didn’t put up crazy offensive numbers for most of his career. But man, that nickname “The Zamboni” was earned. He was clearly a top-tier defensive player at his position for a long time, especially during his peak years with St. Louis. It was just a fun exercise, reminding myself about a solid player from an era I remember fondly. Just a simple afternoon spent digging into some baseball history, nothing too complicated, but satisfying.
