THE SKINNY ON JOE’S BEST YEAR
How a simple diet helped Torre turn in a remarkable 1971 season for Cardinals
Joe Torre had a remarkable 1971 season for the St. Louis Cardinals, lashing liner after liner into the Busch Stadium gaps and beyond. But when he’d sit down to read his fan mail that year, few wanted to ask what it was like to be leading the National League in hitting — they wanted to know what he was (or wasn’t) eating.
Can I have your autograph? Eh. Can I have your diet? Yes.
“I would have my diet printed out and I’d autograph the bottom of it and send it back to the people who asked,” Torre says with a chuckle. “It was a big change for me. I never dreamed I’d lose that kind of weight and feel that good.”
As Mets outfielder Cleon Jones kiddingly puts it: “He was fat Joe and then he became super Joe.”
The previous year, Torre had dropped weight in spring training after going on the Stillman Diet, a high-protein, low-carb plan that excludes most condiments and calls for lots of water, for about two weeks. Nowadays, Torre estimates he lost about 20 pounds, so he weighed about 208 when the season began. He looked different enough that opponents noticed while watching him from their dugouts. And Torre was so skinny that he had to borrow the batboy’s uniform pants by the end of spring training in 1970 because the ones he’d been measured for at the start of camp were ballooning around his waist.
But, Torre says, his hands felt quicker. In that 1970 season, he raised his batting average 36 points, to a career-best .325. A year later, the weight still off, he hit a whopping .363.
And had the best season of his playing life.
Long before the kid from Brooklyn met the Mets or managed a Yankee dynasty or made the Hall of Fame, he was an MVP in St. Louis. This is the 50th anniversary of the year Torre tore up National League pitching, leading the circuit in average, hits (230), RBI (137) and total bases (352), all while playing third base full-time for the first time. He also had 24 homers and a .976 OPS.
Torre got 21-of-24 first-place votes for the NL MVP Award, easily outdistancing Willie Stargell of the Pirates, who led MLB with 48 home runs. The great Hank Aaron was third.
Jones hit .319 that season, tied for sixth-best in the league. But he never felt part of the batting race.
“Not that year, no,” Jones says with a laugh. “Joe was light-years ahead of everyone else. I almost never looked at box scores for myself, but I did for other players and it seemed like he was getting two or three hits every game. He didn’t get tired at the end of the year. He still had tremendous bat speed and the attitude that he was going to drive the ball.”
Then Jones, who once hit .340, adds, “You know how hard it is to hit .360?” In the years since Torre batted .363, it’s only happened 24 other times.
All these years later, Torre still has vivid memories of 1971, including the thrill of winning the batting crown, as he puts it, “in a league that Roberto Clemente was in, Glenn Beckert, Hank Aaron. I felt pretty good about that.” He can recall dewy spring mornings on back fields, preparing to replace the retired Mike Shannon at third by getting schooled on the nuances of the position by venerated Cardinals coach George Kissell. In the All-Star Game, a svelte Torre, sporting bushy sideburns, sprinted across the infield to snag a wind-blown popup near first base.
But Torre can’t help but bring up 1970 when he’s asked about 1971. That’s how much the weight loss helped, Torre says. He decided to try the Stillman Diet when his older brother, Frank, came to visit in spring training having lost weight following it.
“It was 80 ounces of water a day,” Torre recalls. “You could eat steaks and stuff, but no dressing on salads. I did it for 12 or 14 days. It really set the tone for me, personally, realizing all the stuff you put in your mouth without thinking about it. When I got off the diet, I basically stopped drinking soft drinks and things I felt were not good for me. I kept losing weight.
“It really spurred me to become the hitter I became.”
Torre had struggled with his weight as a kid. As Dick Young wrote in a Nov. 11, 1971 column in the Daily News: “Joe Torre, raised on pasta, was a big hunk of provolone as a boy.” Frank Torre urged his talented brother to slim down if he wanted to follow Frank into the Major Leagues. Addressing his weight again after he had long been established as a star helped Torre reach new heights.
Beyond the diet, Torre says he succeeded because he was in his prime. In news reports of the day, Frank Torre credited his brother’s success to maturing, as well as better selectivity at the plate and a growing knowledge of pitchers. Indeed, in Phil Pepe’s column in the Aug. 3, 1971 editions of The News, Pepe quoted Tom Seaver saying Torre is “the smartest hitter in the National League.”
Why wouldn’t Tom Terrific say that? Torre may have been just 3-for-14 (.214) against Seaver in 1971, but batted .280 lifetime against the Mets, 54 points better than the average hitter.
In 1971, Torre’s average was 111 points above the NL mark of .252. He started the season with a 22-game hitting streak and ended it hitting in 25-of-26. He went without a hit in back-to-back games only three times all year, never after May 18-19. He got at least one hit in 133 of his 161 games.
He batted at least .355 in every month of the season, except July, when he hit “only” .324. He batted .359 in the first half, .368 in the second half. With runners in scoring position, Torre batted .382 with a 1.062 OPS. Against NL Cy Young Award winner Fergie Jenkins of the Cubs, Torre hit .389 with two homers and a 1.199 OPS.
“I couldn’t have been more consistent,” Torre says.
“It always amazed us that pitchers didn’t walk him that year,” says infielder Ted Sizemore, Torre’s teammate in St. Louis. “He was our Mr. Clutch. He was a pretty good bad-ball hitter at the time, too. He’d go after balls low or high and always made contact and didn’t strike out very much (Torre fanned only 70
times all year).
“He used to talk about being consistent when we were all talking about hitting. All of us right-handed hitters would, of course, listen to the guy leading the league in hitting, doing everything possible right.”
A side note on Torre’s season: He was never the fastest player in baseball, to put it generously. He’s always been good-natured about it, once joking that ankle surgery “reduced my speed by a step. It meant I was going backwards.” Could he win a batting title if he wasn’t beating out balls that got speedier players extra hits?
“But if he wasn’t getting bunt hits or beating out balls in the hole, that means all his hits were legit and that says a lot,” Jones says. “Especially doing it where the shortstop and other infielders could play deeper and cut balls off” because of Busch Stadium’s AstroTurf.
Of course, Jones adds, Torre did have an advantage being in St. Louis: “When you don’t have to hit against Bob Gibson, you can add 30 points to your average.”
Led by Torre, Ted Simmons, Lou Brock’s speed and a rotation fronted by future Hall-of-Famers Gibson and Steve Carlton, the Cardinals won 90 games, the most of any team Torre ever played on. But they finished second, seven games behind the Pirates in the NL East. They had a winning record in every month except June, when they stumbled to 8-21.
“When I got traded there in ‘69, I thought it was automatic that we’d go to the postseason every year,” recalls Torre, who came up as a catcher with the Braves. “They had been to the World Series in both ‘67 and ‘68.”
Torre never did get to the postseason as a player or at any of his first three managerial stops — the Mets, the Braves and the Cardinals. But he gorged on October thrills as the Yankees manager, reaching the playoffs every season he was in pinstripes, from 1996-2007.
So it’s no surprise what his answer is when asked how piloting a dynasty compares to winning an MVP Award. He relished the award, but...
“It’s not close,” Torre says. “I remember when I was named MVP, I said, probably to my brother, that I’d trade it all to be in the postseason. That was my goal and it really got accentuated because Frank had played in the big leagues and went to two World Series, in ‘57 and ‘58 and had that ring [with the ‘57 Braves].
“I always aspired to it. I was always needing to have it happen. After you get fired [as manager] once, twice, three times, you sort of lose your confidence that it’ll ever happen.
“But it was amazing the way it turned out.”
1971 NL BATTING LEADERS
Joe Torre, Cardinals, .363; Ralph Garr, Braves, .343; Glenn Beckert, Cubs, .342; Roberto Clements, Pirates, .341; Hank Aaron, Braves, .327; Manny Sanguillen, Pirates, .319; Cleon Jones, Mets, .319
JOE TORRE’S AMAZING 1971 SEASON
Since 1971, Torre is one of three just players to bat at least .363 with at least 137 RBI. The others are Todd Helton (2000 Rockies, .372, 147 RBI) and Magglio Ordonez (2007 Tigers, .363, .139 RBI). Since RBI became an official statistic in 1920, it’s only happened 18 times, including the above three players.