It may be Adam Kennedy's last chance to make a major league stand, signing with Washington for $1.25 million in 2010 with a $2 million option for 2011. He's come a long, hard way from a 2002 American League Championship Series MVP to a fair-to-middling overall resume even if he has been mostly a solid defender.
Kennedy earned his prize thanks to a pennant-securing performance in Game 5 of that ALCS, when he abused Minnesota pitching — including a then-unknown Johan Santana — for 3 bombs in three straight at-bats, the last a no-out, 3-run shot that launched the then-Anaheim Angels to a 7-run bottom of the seventh and a 13-5 lead they never relinquished for game, set, and trip to the World Series they won in seven thrilling games.
It also launched Kennedy from a mere $375,000 in 2002 to seven figures over the next few years. By 2006, however, injuries and middling performance led to season-long trade speculation and, at last, departing via free agency. He returned to the St. Louis Cardinals (they'd sent him to the Angels in the Jim Edmonds deal), spent a few mediocre, injury-addled seasons there, found no way to become a regular, and signed a minor-league deal with Tampa Bay last spring, only to be traded to Oakland and put up a modestly useful season there.
Kennedy isn't even close to the only man who acquired a postseason halo that didn't stay illuminated in his coming career. They don't all go to the Hall of Fame after shining under the big sky. Some make fine careers; some return to the journeymen they already were when they caught the proverbial bite of the proverbial apple. For every Curt Schilling — a 1993 National League Championship Series MVP who goes on to share a World Series MVP (in 2001), helps lead the once star-crossed Boston Red Sox to a pair of World Series triumphs, and retires as a likely Hall of Famer in waiting — there are dozens of Bucky Dents (believe it or not, he was also the 1978 World Series MVP), Don Larsens, and Jeffrey Leonards.
Granted that they don't all become among the exclusive fraternity of three-bomb men in single postseason games. Kennedy at least can tell his grandchildren he did what only Babe Ruth, Bob Robertson, Reggie Jackson, and George Brett had done before him.
But here are how some other postseason MVPs have fared since they came up biggest when their teams needed them the most:
Johnny Podres — Let's start with the first man to win a World Series MVP. Podres pitched his way into Brooklyn lore forever when he beat the Yankees twice in 1955 to nail the only World Series championship the Brooklyn Dodgers ever won.
THE AFTERMATH — The military draft and a few arm problems took some of the steam out of Podres' career right after his Series triumph, but he ended up making an excellent career anyway — including winning all four of his 1950s World Series decisions and being part of the staggering Dodger sweep of the Yankees in 1963. He enjoyed a long career as a pitching coach; his proteges included future postseason heroes Frank Viola and Curt Schilling.
Larry Sherry — The 1959 World Series MVP for becoming the worst bullpen nightmare for the Go-Go White Sox. He saved Games 2 and 3; picked up a win in relief of Roger Craig in Game 4; took over for Johnny Podres in the fourth inning of Game 6 and went the rest of the route for the win.
THE AFTERMATH — A fine 1960 season (14-10, 3.79 ERA, seven saves, 142 innings pitched), a fading star by 1963, as Ron Perranoski became the Dodgers' prime reliever; three respectable seasons in Detroit before finishing up in Houston and Anaheim. Sherry became a respected pitching coach after his playing days were done.
Bobby Richardson — The 1960 World Series MVP, and the first to pick up the award despite playing for the Series loser — something often forgotten when that Series is spelled M-a-z-e-r-o-s-k-i. Played way above his own head, really, with a Series on-base percentage (.387) almost a hundred points above his career total and twelve runs batted in.
THE AFTERMATH — Finished second in the American League's 1962 MVP voting; remained a fine defender while earning an unwarranted reputation as a leadoff bellwether — most likely, his impossibility as a strikeout (lifetime: 28 strikeouts per 162 games) gave him that reputation. (Lifetime OBP: .299.) By far a better man than ballplayer, Richardson retired after 10 major league seasons, became a college baseball coach, and among other things led the South Carolina Gamecocks to their first College World Series berth and to a second-place finish. He continued his leadership in the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and, according to one Yankee history (Pride of October) reached out to Mickey Mantle during the latter's battle with alcohol rehabilitation and liver cancer, leading Mantle to become a born-again Christian shortly before the Hall of Famer's death.
Ralph Terry — The 1962 World Series MVP (2-1/1.87 ERA), after posting his career year (23 wins/3.19 ERA) on the regular season. Richardson was big for Terry's effort — the former Series MVP snapped Willie McCovey's bullet-train liner in the ninth (stranding Willie Mays and Matty Alou, who would have scored on a base hit to win it for the Giants) to seal the Yankee deal.
THE AFTERMATH — Terry put up a fine 17-15/3.22 in 1963, but fell to 7-11/4.54 in 1964, compelling the Yankees to send him to Cleveland to finish the deal that made a Yankee stretch drive hero out of veteran Pedro Ramos. Terry pitched respectably if unspectacularly for the 1965 Indians, finished his career with the Kansas City Athletics (for whom he'd pitched between Yankee stints in the late 1950s, in one of those notorious Yankee-Athletics swaps) and the New York Mets, then became a professional golfer.
Mickey Lolich — The 1968 World Series MVP was a great if not quite Hall of Fame pitcher in his prime and won his prize doing what everyone expected Denny McLain (he of the 31 wins) to do — he beat the St. Louis Cardinals three times, including the clinching seventh game.
THE AFTERMATH — Lolich retired after putting up an 8-13 record for the 1976 New York Mets, openeding up a donut shop, and tried a two-season comeback with the San Diego Padres in the late 1970s. He retired to his donut shop permanently, eventually retiring from that business and becoming a part of Tigers fantasy camps.
Donn Clendenon — The Miracle Mets' Series MVP — who followed the famous Cleon Jones shoe-polish plunk with a shot off the left field scoreboard in Game 5 and posted a 1.509 Series OPS.
THE AFTERMATH — After a few fading seasons, Clendenon eventually retired to earn a J.D. and become an attorney. In due course, following his own battle with drug addiction, Clendenon became a drug rehabilitation counselor as well, before his death following a long battle with leukemia.
Marty Barrett — The 1986 American League Championship Series MVP probably would have shared the World Series MVP with pitcher Bruce Hurst but for the Mets following that extraterrestrial Game Six with a nearly-as-unlikely Game 7 overthrow of Hurst. Barrett was actually better in the World Series than he'd been in the ALCS.
THE AFTERMATH — A solid second baseman who hit decently enough and had a reputation as a tough bunter, Barrett also had a reputation as a standup man — then-Boston Globe writer Dan Shaughnessy, in The Curse of the Bambino, has written that Barrett and Hurst gave the Red Sox clubhouse crew money out of their own World Series shares, after the rest of the team voted to stiff them. Barrett's career was ruined by a 1989 knee injury, but there was a sort-of happy ending: Barrett eventually won a $1.7 million judgment against the doctor (who happened also to be a Red Sox part-owner at the time) whom he accused of botching several procedures on his knee. Became a minor league manager until deciding he preferred watching his children grow up, and retired to fatherhood and golf in Las Vegas's Summerlin suburb.
Ray Knight — The 1986 World Series MVP (and, concurrently, the National League's Comeback Player of the Year) went from glory to gone almost in an instant; the Mets let the veteran third baseman escape to Baltimore as a free agent, when they chose to go toward youth despite Knight's offer to take a pay cut in order to stay with the Mets.
THE AFTERMATH — The Mets may have been right about Knight as a player but wrong about the man; several members of the 1986 team have said his departure was one of the keys to the team's lack of spirit following that championship. He played two so-so seasons in Baltimore and Detroit and retired, becoming a coach and eventually the Cincinnati Reds' manager (succeeding his former Mets' skipper, Davey Johnson), where he became most famous for calling a bunt play with two out and fining himself $250. It wasn't enough to save his job. He coached for the Reds under Bob Boone, but is now in the broadcast booth for the Washington Nationals. His almost three-decade marriage to Hall of Fame golfer Nancy Lopez is rumored to be over.
Rob Dibble and Randy Myers — The co-National League Championship Series MVPs in 1990 and two-thirds of the vaunted Cincinnati "Nasty Boys" bullpen. Dibble appeared in five games, saving 1, striking out 10, and allowed only 1 baserunner — on a walk. Myers was almost as good: 7 punchouts, 3 passes, 2 hits for his 3 saves. Neither man surrendered a run.
THE AFTERMATH — After the Reds' unlikely sweep of Oakland in the World Series, they got the brilliant idea that Myers should be a starter. The result: 6-13 in 1991, before they let him escape to San Diego. He put up a solid relief career in San Diego, Chicago, Baltimore, and Toronto. Then, he earned a weird place in the wavier wire history book; The Blue Jays put him on the wire in 1998; the Padres — who didn't really want him back, but who didn't want the Atlanta Braves to take him off the waiver wire, either — put in a waiver claim the Jays were only too happy to let them have: Myers had shoulder miseries that kept him from pitching, and the Padres were stuck paying the rest of his $12 million salary after he injured his rotator cuff and the team's insurance denied their claim against his salary. Retired back to the Pacific Northwest.
Dibble, meanwhile, who was known for his temper as well as his fastballs and strikeouts (he was the fastest ever to reach 500 career punchouts), ran into the injury bug and retired by 1998 without looking much like the late-inning terror he once was. (He also didn't leave behind half the mess Myers inadvertently had.) But the Nastiest Boy (who swears that the third member of the triumvirate, Norm Charlton, was really the nastiest of the boys) had a slightly happier aftermath: he became a popular baseball analyst for ESPN and Fox Sports and is also on the Washington Nationals' broadcast team.
Steve Avery — The National League Championship Series MVP in 1991. Started two, won two, surrendered no runs, struck out 17. And that was after an 18-8/3.38 regular-season ERA. Everyone thought the Braves' rotation was going to be Tom Glavine, Steve Avery, and John Smoltz, right?
THE AFTERMATH — Maybe the saddest of all. He didn't look half as good in the World Series as he had in the NLCS, and he pitched likewise in 1992 — he was a .500 pitcher and didn't look half as good that postseason as he was in '91. He hung up a career year in 1993, but late in the season came the event that sealed his fate: an armpit muscle injury. Never again the pitcher he once promised to be, Avery struggled for two seasons in Boston, made an unlikely relief comeback with the 2003 Tigers (as in, the 119-loss Tigers), and retired permanently. He settled with his wife and family in Dearborn.
John Wetteland — The World Series MVP, 1996. Wetteland's prize masked a kind of transition: he was about to yield the Yankee closing job to a fellow named Rivera. He'd been a solid relief pitcher to that point overall, and in the 1996 Series, he was as solid as you could ask: he saved all four Yankee wins with 6 punchouts in four and a third and a 2.06 ERA.
THE AFTERMATH — Wetteland moved to the Texas Rangers, becoming the first Ranger to earn a save in an All-Star Game, and retiring with the most saves of any 1990s pitcher. He was once canned as the Washington Nationals' pitching coach when, reputedly, manager Frank Robinson thought he wasn't cracking down hard enough on bullpen pranks. Today, he's the pitching coach of the Seattle Mariners, though he made the news last November when his hospitalization over high blood pressure and his heart rate was misreported as a suicide attempt.
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