From the Archives: Baseball Remembers, J.R. Richard
Since today is the date in 1984 that the Houston Astros formally released J.R. Richard, bringing an official end to his baseball career, I’ve pulled forward and unlocked this edition about him from October, 2023, to round out our vacation editions this week. There will be a normal Friday Stuff tomorrow, and we’re back to regular programming on Monday.
There have been many newspaper columns, sports radio segments, and bar arguments pondering the great “what ifs” of sports. Sometimes these questions come up as a lament about a poor choice by a manager, or play call by a coach, or to ponder bigger philosophical questions about conditions in the sports world. But, most often, this is a wistful exercise when we wonder about some great athlete whose career was sidetracked too soon.
What if Bo Jackson hadn’t hurt his hip?
What if Lou Gehrig hadn’t developed ALS?
What if Len Bias had just said no?
By their nature these are sad exercises. Whether we’re talking about someone we know, or about a great athlete we only feel like we know, reviewing the ways in which someone was unable to fulfill their potential never leaves our spirits uplifted or moods brightened.
Which brings us to the sad career and later life of J.R. Richard.
James Rodney Richard, or just J.R., was a very big man. He stood 6’8”, weighed over 220 pounds, and was a good enough basketball player in high school in Louisiana that he received over 100 scholarship offers to play college hoops. He turned them all down to sign with the Houston Astros, who had drafted him as the number two overall pick in the 1969 June Amateur Draft.
Splitting time between Mesa of the Arizona Rookie League and the Covington (VA) Astros of the Appalachian League, Richard struggled that first year of pro ball. He had a blazing fastball that could top 100 miles per hour, but a very hard time repeating his delivery with that big frame of his. He struck out 87 in just 83 innings, but also walked 69 and threw 13 wild pitches. His ERA was an ugly 5.86, but even then it was hard to hit him. He surrendered only 73 hits and just 3 homers.
As a 20-year old he joined the Cocoa Astros of the Florida State League and improved greatly. He fanned 11.4 batters per nine innings and allowed just 67 hits and one home run in 109 innings pitched. His record was an ugly 4-11 because Cocoa was a terrible team, but his ERA was a sparkling 2.39. The control was still poor, with over five walks per nine innings and a whopping 20 wild pitches, but the results were much better.
It was enough to convince the Astros to jump him to Triple A the following season. At Oklahoma City, the improved competition level didn’t bother him at all, as he repeated his performance from the year before. Playing on a winning team, his record improved to 12-7. His ERA remained a solid 2.45 and the league still couldn’t hit him as he surrendered just 116 hits in 173 innings of work while striking out 202 hitters. The walks and wild pitches were still too high, but Richard earned a September call-up to the big leagues at the end of that season.
Richard’s major league debut on on September 5 couldn’t have gone better. Facing the Giants in the second game of a doubleheader, Richard threw a complete game and struck out 15 hitters. He walked just three and surrendered only two earned runs as he won his first major league game. In four starts for the Astros, he won two, lost one, struck out 29 hitters in just 21 innings, but walked 16 and threw two wild pitches. In other words, his major league performance was an exact match of his minor league work.
The next three seasons were frustrating ones. He repeated his great work in Triple A in 1972, but was terrible in four games with the Astros. The following year, with Houston’s Triple A affiliate now in high-altitude Denver, Richard struggled a lot. He allowed far more hits than usual and saw his ERA balloon to 5.71, but still got into 16 games for the Astros and was pretty good, posting a 6-2 record and 4.00 ERA while striking out more than a hitter per inning again. He split time in 1974 between Denver, Double A Columbus of the Southern League, and with the Astros again, where he was 2-3 with a 4.18 ERA, but saw his strikeout rate drop drastically. He just didn’t seem to be putting things together.
Finally, in 1975, the decision was made to leave Richard on the Astros roster for the entire season. He started 31 games and also pitched twice in relief. Though it was a struggling team, Richard posted a 12-10 record and struck out 176 hitters in 203 innings. The strikeouts were fifth-most in the National League, and his strikeout rate of 7.8 per nine innings was second only to John Montefusco. He had finally arrived.
The most surprising thing about the next four seasons is that Richard didn’t make the National All-Star team a single time, which is baffling because he had four remarkable seasons.
1976: Richard won 20 games and had a 2.75 ERA. He still walked too many, a league-leading 151, but he also allowed only 6.8 hits per nine innings to lead the NL while finishing second to Tom Seaver with 214 strikeouts. He also finished seventh in the voting for the Cy Young Award. At the All-Star break he had 11 wins and a 2.88 ERA but wasn’t selected to the team.
1977: Richard won 18 games and had an ERA of 2.97. He was in the league’s top-10 in wins, ERA, WHIP, hits per 9 innings, strikeouts, strikeouts per 9, starts, complete games, innings pitched, and shutouts. Despite having a 9-6 record and 2.69 ERA at the All-Star break, he again wasn’t selected to the team and also received no votes in the Cy Young race.
1978: Another 18-win season, with an ERA of 3.11. While he led the league in walks again, he also struck out 303 hitters to lead the league for the first time, while allowing the fewest hits per 9 innings. It was good enough for a fourth-place finish in NL Cy Young voting (including a first-place vote) but not good enough for the All-Star team again.
1979: Yet another 18 wins, this time with league-leading marks of 313 strikeouts and a 2.71 ERA. His walk rate dropped to the lowest of his career, just 3.0 per 9 innings, allowing him to also have a league-best strikeout-to-walk ratio. Richard received four first-place Cy Young votes but finished third overall, and again didn’t make the NL All-Star team.
When the 1980 season began, Richard was viewed as being among the best pitchers in baseball. Still just 30-years old, he had finally demonstrated all of the potential that had made him the number two overall pick eleven years earlier, and he promptly set out to have his best season yet.
At the All-Star break he was 7-3 with a remarkable 1.66 ERA. In 87 innings he had struck out 90, walked just 28, and allowed only 49 hits. He hadn’t surrendered a home run yet and the league was batting just .166 against him. He was a fully operational Death Star, and was finally selected to not only be on the NL All-Star team, but to start the game as well. In two scoreless innings, he allowed two walks and gave up a single to Bucky Dent of all people, but struck out three including future Hall-of-Famers Reggie Jackson and Carlton Fisk.
In his fifth start after the All-Star game, Richard complained of blurry vision and trouble with his arm. He said it was difficult to move, and the arm went dead in the fourth inning as he experienced numbness and trouble gripping the baseball. He was placed on the disabled list and scans revealed a blockage in the arteries of his pitching arm. Doctors examined the arteries in his neck and determined no surgery was necessary, but five days later, just hours after a chiropractor adjusted his neck, Richard suffered a stroke at the Astrodome while playing catch.
Emergency surgery saved his life when a blockage of his right carotid artery was removed, but a brain scan revealed that he’d actually suffered three strokes from his various blocked arteries. Further tests showed that he had a severe case of thoracic outlet syndrome.
He missed the remainder of the 1980 season, and all of 1981 as well as he underwent rehabilitation. Hoping to make a comeback, he pitched in the minor leagues in 1982, but struggled with command and fatigue. After nine more challenging minor league games in 1983, Richard decided to retire.
Life was difficult for Richard in the wake of his health issues and loss of his baseball career. Poor investments and two divorces left him penniless. For a time, he live under a highway bypass in Houston before becoming eligible for his major league pension. He also found assistance at his church, and returned their kindness by later serving the church as its minister. In 2019, he was part of the inaugural class of the Houston Astros new Hall of Fame. Two years later, he passed away from the affects of COVID at the age of 71.
The "what ifs” with J.R. Richard are many. What if he’d gone to college on one of those basketball scholarships? What if the Astros hadn’t moved their Triple A team to the thin air of Denver just as Richard was showing promise? What if his thoracic outlet syndrome had been diagnosed sooner? What if doctors had surgically removed all blockages before his strokes? What if he’d never gone to that chiropractor? Of course, we’ll never know the answers.
What we do know was that once he harnessed his full abilities, even just a bit, J.R. Richard was a dominating pitcher. Players as good as Johnny Bench and Dale Murphy called him the toughest pitcher they ever faced. While it would have been far better for all of us to watch his career continue, it was remarkable enough even with its premature ending to spend some time remembering.
The Astros had a wicked rotation in 1980. Ryan and JR throwing heat with Joe Niekro throwing butterflies in between. Talk about slump-inducing. Had JR stayed healthy, my Phillies probably do not escape that LCS and finally win a World Series.
It was so cool watching JR Richard pitch. At times, he was more powerful than his contemporary Nolan Ryan.