My First Cards

It seems to be the cool thing suddenly to feature a Steve Renko card on your blog. No, seriously. Earlier this month 1980 Topps featured him. Then last week the 1976 Steve Renko card was profiled. Then yesterday the ’75 Topps Renko showed up. He’s the “in thing” right now, and I’m not about to be left out!

Since everybody else has said so much about him already, I’m just going to skip to the highlights of his 1982 season & tell you why his career ended.

His best performance was on May 18, 1982, in Milwaukee. He posted a game score of 82, tossing a complete game victory against the eventual American League champions! He only allowed 1 run, and 3 hits. Molitor smacked 2 of those, while the other was a solo shot by Marshall Edwards.

Although you could make a good argument that his best game was Sunday July 11, 1982, when the Yankees came to visit the Angels. He struck out 8 Yankees in 7 1/3 innings. Sure he allowed 8 baserunners, but he only let 1 score (Nettles). He got a no decision, being he was taken out during a 1-1 tie and a runner on 1st.

Then again, May 23, 1982 in Tiger Stadium was quite a good one too. Steve Renko threw a complete game victory, allowing only 1 run.

He started off the season great, as you probably guessed already. The first half of the year, he went 7-2, 3.09 ERA, 4 CG, and only allowed 4 HR’s in 102 IP. Then the bottom fell out. The rest of the season was horrid….going 5-4 on a 7.00 ERA, giving up 13 HR’s in just 54 IP. It wasn’t out of nowhere though, as his ERA began to balloon in June. He only kept on winning for a while, because the California Angels offense was good enough to score plenty of runs.

Looking at his day/night splits for 1982, it seems his biggest problem was that he had a decent 3.28 ERA in the day but a 4.79 ERA in night games. That’s a full 1.51 run difference. The previous year, 1981, he developed this problem in his splits (2.97 daytime & 3.67 at night). Of course, that wouldn’t be such a problem if he spent the time in Wrigley Field, but he didn’t. He was stuck on a team where most of their games were at night. If you want to stay in the major leagues, you’ve got to be better in night games than day.

It didn’t stop there though. The next year, playing for the Royals, he posted a decent daytime ERA of 3.42 but a terrible 4.92 at night. That’s a full 1.5 run difference. Which explains exactly why Steve’s career came to an end on Sunday August 28, 1983 in Kansas City. Interestingly, it was a day game, and he pitched 5 great innings but got the loss, 1-0.