Mobile, Alabama, has churned out some remarkable baseball players. Henry Aaron. Willie McCovey. Billy Williams. It was Ozzie Smith’s birthplace, too, before he moved to Los Angeles.
With that kind of talent coming from Mobile, it’s easy for Amos Otis to fall through the cracks when considering the best players from that area. That’s unfortunate, because Otis was a great player, and didn’t deserve to be as overshadowed as he was.
He wasn’t even the first player from Alabama to be drafted in 1965. Two fellow ‘Bama kids went in the first round. Rick James (no, not that one) was the sixth overall pick, taken by the Cubs. He eventually pitched three games in the big leagues and had a career ERA of 13.50. The tenth pick was Wayne Dickerson from Birmingham. He never made it past A-ball.
Otis slipped to round five. Drafted by the Red Sox, he batted .329 in rookie ball, and .289 with 19 steals in his second season in Boston’s system. That wasn’t enough to get onto the big club’s radar, though, and he was left unprotected in the minor league free agent draft after the 1966 season.
The Mets decided to take a flyer on him, drafting him from Boston and assigning him to Triple-A Jacksonville. The leap from A-ball as a twenty-year old didn’t prove to be much of a challenge, as Otis hit .268 with 29 steals, earning a brief September call-up to New York. He went back to Jacksonville the next year, finding some power for the first time with 15 homers while hitting .286.
Otis began the Met’s miracle 1969 season on the major league roster, but he struggled to hit well or get playing time. By the middle of June he was batting just .136 and hadn’t started a game in a month, so he was sent to New York’s new Triple-A affiliate in Tidewater. That got Otis back on track. He batted .327 there with 10 homers in just 77 games, earning a return to New York for their pennant drive in September. He still struggled at the big league level though, and was left off the playoff roster as the Mets won the World Series.
That offseason, New York included Otis in a trade to the Royals for third baseman Joy Foy, perhaps the most important of a series of deals Kansas City made in the early days of that franchise.
It’s forgotten a bit now, but the Royals proved to be the model for how to quickly turn an expansion team into a contender. They made savvy selections in the 1969 expansion draft (Foy, Bob Oliver, Paul Schaal, Pat Kelly, Al Fitzmorris, Tom Burgmeier) some of whom (Hoyt Wilhelm) they flipped in deals for even more talent. The took Paul Splittorff in their first amateur draft in 1968 and he’s still the franchise leader in wins. In 1970 they brought in even more talent, drafting Jim Wohlford and Tom Poquette, signing Frank White as an amateur free agent, and trading for Cookie Rojas and Freddie Patek in separate deals.
In just their third season they won 85 games and finished second in the division to the World Champion A’s. By their eighth season they were division champs for the first time. It was a masterful building job, and much of it took place around the acquisition of Amos Otis.
Installed as the team’s regular center fielder the moment he arrived in Kansas City, Otis was immediately great. He led the American League with 36 doubles, batted .284/.353/.424, made the All-Star team, and stole 33 bases while only being caught twice. He was even better the next year, leading the league with 52 steals in 60 attempts, batting .300 for the first time, making another All-Star team, winning his first Gold Glove, and finishing 8th in MVP voting.
That pretty much became the standard for Otis for his entire time with the Royals. In his first ten years there, his 162-game averages were:
172 hits
96 runs
32 doubles
6 triples
18 homers
84 RBI
33 steals (in 41 attempts)
67 walks
123 OPS+
.284/.354/.443 batting line
4.3 WAR
He made five All-Star teams in that decade, won three Gold Gloves, and finished in the top-10 in MVP voting four times.
By 1980 he had slowed down a bit, and was dealing with injuries. The blazing fast Willie Wilson was pushing him for playing time in center field. But in the Royals’ first World Series in franchise history, Otis wasn’t sitting on the sidelines like he had in New York over a decade earlier. In six games against the Phillies he hit a remarkable .478/.538/.957, including three home runs. Had that series been won by Kansas City instead of Philadelphia, Otis may have been the series MVP.
He was good in limited time for a couple more seasons after that, but by 1983 he was no longer a threat to run and had lost his power and much of his range in the outfield. After a disappointing season in 1983 he wasn’t re-signed, and went to Pittsburgh for a final year before retiring. He remains in the top-three in Kansas City’s franchise history in most offensive categories, including WAR, games, plate appearances, runs, hits, total bases, triples, RBI, walks, steals, runs created, batting runs, and times on base.
His career numbers pale in comparison to franchise icon and Hall of Famer George Brett, and are also dwarfed by the numbers piled up by his fellow outfielders from Mobile, like Aaron and Williams, but Otis had a great career. He’s rated by Jay Jaffe as a top-50 center fielder all-time. His career was every bit as good as more recent center fielders like Lenny Dysktra, Andy Van Slyke, or Steve Finley.
He even had a comparable career to some Hall of Famers, like Earl Combs, Hack Wilson, Hugh Duffy, or Edd Roush. That doesn’t mean he belongs in Cooperstown, but it does mean that he was much, much better than he’s remembered now, or than the zero votes he received in his only year on the Hall of Fame ballot would indicate. (Heck, even Dykstra got one vote. Finely got four.)
Otis wasn’t close to being the best player ever from Mobile, or the best player in the history of the Royals. But he was Kansas City’s first star, the foundation upon which they built a dominating team for about a decade. He had a better career in Kansas City than Luis Gonzalez had in Arizona, yet the Diamondbacks have retired Gonzalez’s number. Kansas City hasn’t done the same for Otis’ iconic #26 that was the focus of so many chants of “A-O, A-O, A-O” at Royals Stadium during the 1970s.
Maybe it’s time the Royals took a page from the Diamondback’s playbook.
I remember AO as a good player but he was even better than my memory of him, several really good seasons he put up after KC got him. Thanks for the reminder of his career and also how quickly the Royals acquired a bunch of solid ballplayers early in their history. I don’t remember who was in charge when they started up but I do remember them trying to be a little more progressive than the old franchises.
AO was involved in arguably the most memorable moment in All Star Game history. He fielded the base hit off the bat of Cub Jim Hickman, threw it home to catcher Ray Fosse, and watched as Pete Rose collided into Fosse to score the winning run in the bottom of the 12th inning.