Ken Holtzman, 78, MLB’s winningest Jewish pitcher
Ken Holtzman, a left-hander who pitched two no-hitters for the Chicago Cubs and won three World Series with the Oakland A’s in a 15-season career, died Monday in St. Louis. He was 78.
He had been hospitalized for the past three weeks with heart and respiratory illnesses, his brother, Bob, said in confirming the death.
Mr. Holtzman won 174 games, the most for a Jewish pitcher in Major League Baseball — nine more than the Hall of Famer Sandy Koufax, who is considered one of the best pitchers ever, but had a shorter career.
In addition to his win total, Mr. Holtzman, who at 6 feet 2 inches and 175 pounds cut a lanky figure, had a career ERA of 3.49 and was chosen for the 1972 and 1973 All-Star teams.
Mr. Holtzman, at 23, threw his first no-hitter Aug. 19, 1969, a 3-0 victory over the Atlanta Braves — a performance distinguished by the fact that he didn’t strike out any Braves. It was the first time since 1923 that a nohitter had been pitched without a strikeout.
“I didn’t have my good curve, and I must have thrown 90 percent fastballs,” Holtzman told The Atlanta Constitution afterward. “When I saw my curve wasn’t breaking early in the game, I thought it might be a long day.”
His second no-hitter came June 3, 1971, against the Cincinnati Reds at their ballpark, Riverfront Stadium, where he struck out six and walked four.
“The fans in the first row behind our dugout wouldn’t let me forget I had a no-hitter going tonight,” he told The Chicago Tribune. “I guess from the fourth inning on, they would yell at me that I was going to lose my nohitter.”
But it was a high point in a difficult season, in which his record was 9-15 and his ERA jumped to 4.48 from 3.38 the year before. He also had a fractious relationship with manager Leo Durocher.
In the offseason, the Cubs traded Mr. Holtzman to Oakland for outfielder Rick Monday.
“The air is cleared now,” Holtzman told the Tribune. “I wouldn’t have cared if the Cubs had traded me for two dozen eggs.”
The trade revived his career. Kenneth Dale Holtzman was born Nov. 3, 1945, in St. Louis. His father, Henry, was a machinery dealer. His mother, Jacqueline (Lapp) Holtzman, managed the home.
Mr. Holtzman had a 31-3 record at University City High School, outside St. Louis, and played for the University of Illinois. As a sophomore, he won six games and struck out 72 batters in 57 innings. He was selected by the Cubs in the fourth round of the 1965 amateur draft.
He spent most of the 1965 season in the minor leagues, where he compiled an 8-3 record, before being called up by the Cubs.
Mr. Holtzman left the Cubs in 1971 with a 74-69 record. He fared substantially better with the A’s, a 1970s dynasty whose players included Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando, Catfish Hunter, and Rollie Fingers. In Oakland’s World Series championship years, from 1972-74, Mr. Holtzman had a 59-41 regular-season record. In World Series games, he was 4-1.
In early 1976, Mr. Holtzman was one of nine A’s players whose unsigned contracts were renewed with 20 percent salary cuts by Charles O. Finley, the team’s capricious owner.
“The man doesn’t care if I leave or not,” Mr. Holtzman, a union activist who was the team’s player representative, told The New York Times during spring training that year.
Soon after, he and Jackson were traded to the Baltimore Orioles. But in late June, Mr. Holtzman was sent to the New York Yankees in a 10-player trade. With New York, though, his pitching was not as efficient as it been in Oakland, and manager Billy Martin declined to use him in the postseason rotation in 1976, when the Yankees were swept by the Reds, and again in 1977, when the Yankees defeated the Dodgers in six games.
Mr. Holtzman, who was an insurance broker during his playing days, ran the athletic department for several years at the Jewish Community Center in St. Louis after his retirement.
He returned to baseball in 2007 as the manager of a team in the Israel Baseball League. Dan Kurtzer, the commissioner, recalled in a phone interview that Mr. Holtzman’s experience in the Major League Baseball Players Association made being a manager difficult for him.
In addition to his brother, Bob, a former minor league pitcher, Mr. Holtzman is survived by his daughters, Robyn Schuster, Stacey Steffens, and Lauren Fyle; four grandchildren; and a sister, Janice Koertel. His marriage to Michelle Collins ended in divorce.
Mr. Holtzman, as a Cub, and Koufax, with the Dodgers, faced each other once, at Wrigley Field in Chicago on Sept. 25, 1966.
It was Mr. Holtzman’s first full season and Koufax’s last. In the fifth inning, at which point Mr. Holtzman had not given up a hit, Bob Holtzman told their father that he was going to the men’s room. “He said, ‘You’re not going anywhere, he’s pitching a no-hitter,’” the brother recalled in a phone interview. “He wouldn’t let me leave my seat.”
Mr. Holtzman carried the nohitter into the ninth inning, but it was broken up by the first hitter, Dick Schofield, who singled to center field. Holtzman then surrendered the shutout, but won, 2-1, on a two-hitter, with eight strikeouts. Koufax gave up four hits.