Amos Joseph Otis was born April 26, 1947 in Mobile, Alabama.
The dapper Otis was criticized at times for a casual demeanor, lack of aggressiveness, and one-handed catches, but he won three Gold Gloves and three times was named Royals Player of the Year. He left the Royals in 1983 as their all-time leader in several offensive categories, including runs, hits, and RBI.
Welcome to Baseball History Podcast, featuring baseball biographies. I’m your announcer Bob Wright.
This is game 50 of the 2010 baseball season.
In the first inning let’s take a look at This Week in Baseball History for the 1 week of December.
December 3
1969 The Mets trade outfielder Amos Otis to the Royals for third baseman Joe Foy. Otis will go on to have an outstanding 14-year career with Kansas City and will become a member of the team’s hall of fame.
Amos Joseph Otis was born April 26, 1947 in Mobile, Alabama.
The dapper Otis was criticized at times for a casual demeanor, lack of aggressiveness, and one-handed catches, but he won three Gold Gloves and three times was named Royals Player of the Year. He left the Royals in 1983 as their all-time leader in several offensive categories, including runs, hits, and RBI.
Outside of short stints with the Mets at the beginning of his career and a season in Pittsburgh at the end, Otis became a Royals legend. The five-time All-Star finished in the top 10 in the American League batting race four times, and in the top 10 in steal, runs, hits, and total bases. He twice paced the American League in doubles.
Late in the evening of May 15, 1973, Amos Otis lifted a Nolan Ryan fastball to Royals Stadium’s spacious right-center-field gap that was hauled in by Angels right fielder Ken Berry. Some 35 years later, Otis still remembered the moment, the pitch, and who caught it. “Right there on the warning track,” he told the Kansas City Star, recalling that Berry had come in for defense. “If Bob Oliver had been out there, I’d have had it, I’d have broken it up.”
Instead, with Otis’s help, Ryan took a major step on the path that led him to immortality. The no-hitter was the first of seven fired by the famed Ryan Express. Ryan’s career led him to the Hall of Fame, while Otis played for another decade and was one of the most productive and popular players in Royals history.
While no one could have known it in 1973, Otis and Ryan would remain linked for another reason. They came to symbolize the two worst trades the New York Mets have ever made. While the 1973 Mets were a shocking pennant winner in the National League, they soon endured seven straight seasons finishing fifth or sixth and fading to obscurity in the largest media market.
In 1980, Sports Illustrated’s Henry Hecht referred to Otis as New York’s WT 1 (worst trade No. 1), with Ryan checking in as Hecht’s WT 2. Ryan—and three other prospects—brought former All-Star shortstop Jim Fregosi to the Mets, but Otis brought much less in return to New York. The fledgling Royals received Otis and pitcher Bob Johnson for third baseman Joe Foy, who played only 140 more games in the majors, while Johnson was later shipped from Kansas City in a package of players that brought the Royals Freddie Patek. It was Foy’s failure at third base that set the wheels in motion for the eventual trade of Ryan for Fregosi, whom the Mets unsuccessfully attempted to make into a third baseman.
A.O., as he was called, helped lead the Royals from the futility of their early expansion era to one of baseball’s most successful franchises in less than a decade, and inspired the chants of “Aaaay-Oh! Aaaay-Oh!” which reverberated across the shimmering turf of sparkling Royals Stadium.
And while every Mets fan knows that the organization let Amos Otis slip through its hands, many don’t know that in reality he got away from the Mets twice. In 1964, the year before Major League Baseball instituted the amateur player draft system, Otis was among 35 players flown to Shea Stadium for a workout during a Mets road trip. Sent home to Mobile, he was told the Mets would contact him.
Otis heard from a major league team several months later, but it wasn’t the Mets. The Boston Red Sox drafted him with the 95th selection of Major League Baseball’s first draft.
Two years later the Mets drafted Otis from Boston’s farm system. Taking the move in stride, Otis hit .268 with 36 walks for Triple-A Jacksonville in 1967, with 11 doubles, seven triples, and three home runs. He stole 29 bases, and earned a September call-up to Shea Stadium.
Otis indicated in a 1996 article in Sports Collectors Digest that he arrived in the majors with a clear sense of his defensive role. He told an interviewer, “I was a jack-of-all-trades in high school, I could play all nine positions. I started out my pro career at shortstop, kind of lost interest at shortstop, and moved over to third base for a while. Then I was the fastest guy in the outfield for the Mets and then I wanted to be an outfielder.”
Returning to Jacksonville in 1968, Otis hit .286 with 15 home runs, matching his previous career total as a professional, and stole 21 bases.
His 1968 record landed Otis in an awkward position entering spring training in 1969. The 22-year-old was lauded as “the best piece of property we’ve got” by Mets farm director Whitey Herzog, who later was instrumental in Otis’s career in Kansas City. General manager Johnny Murphy tagged Otis as “untouchable” in trade negotiation with Atlanta for Joe Torre before the 1969 campaign.
If trying to break into a lineup for a New York major league team wasn’t pressure enough, the label of untouchable was. Otis later told sportswriter Arthur Daley “That untouchable label was a terrible burden.” Although seen as a utility infielder during the winter months, he broke camp as a third baseman and saw spot duty, playing primarily as a defensive replacement for the next several weeks. His bat went cold.
On June 15, with only nine hits in 66 at-bats, Otis was sent back to the Minor Leagues to make way for Donn Clendenon, who had been acquired in a trading deadline deal with Montreal. Recalled on September 2, Otis saw some action. In the next-to-last regular-season series, in Philadelphia, Otis went 3 for 9, and General Manager Murphy, in an article in The Sporting News, said manager Gil Hodges thought Otis “looked like the player we always said he was.” That series was Otis’s last appearance as a Met.
Otis also opened the eyes of Kansas City’s Cedric Tallis, the architect of the great Royals teams of the 1970s. Tallis built those teams by acquiring other teams’ talented young players, and the Mets were Tallis’s first victim. On December 3rd they finally made the deal with Joe Foy going to New York and Otis and Bob Johnson coming to Kansas City. Otis was installed in Municipal Stadium’s spacious center field.
Evaluating the opportunity facing him, Otis later told Sports Collectors Digest: “The disappointment came from being traded from a World Series champ to an expansion team; it had only been around one year. The best thing about that was there were no superstars over there; the only name I recognized there was Lou Piniella. He was Rookie of the Year that year. So it was like I went from being on top of the water barrel to being under the water barrel. That was probably my biggest thrill in baseball, getting a chance to play more in Kansas City, and I stayed there for 14 years.”
Otis’s impact in Kansas City was immediate and unquestionable. In his first spring training with the Royals, he told the New York Times in 1971, “I was standing in the outfield not far from the right-field foul line when I saw Charlie Metro walking toward me. I didn’t even know what to say to him and so I headed toward center field. I looked again and he was coming my way. Finally he pinned me against the left-field fence. ‘Amos,’ he said, ‘you’re my center fielder for as long as you can hold the job.’”
On his way to hitting .284 in 1970 with 36 doubles, tied for the league lead, Otis reached base by hit or walk in 136 of his 159 games. He was named to the All-Star Game and was involved in one of the best-known plays in midsummer classic history. Otis made the throw to the plate on which Pete Rose collided with Ray Fosse in the 12th inning to end the game. That throw, Otis recalled in Sports Collectors Digest, spawned the nickname Famous Amos “because I made that great throw from center field. It was a one-hop throw.…That’s the way baseball’s supposed to be played.”
If 1970 announced Otis’s arrival, the next year marked his coming-out party. Playing in 147 games, Otis stole a league-leading 52 bases in 60 attempts to set a stolen base percentage record, and hammered 15 home runs with 26 doubles. He hit .301 and won the first of his three Gold Glove Awards.
In 1971 the Royals continued to improve, adding Fred Patek, Cookie Rojas, and John Mayberry to the infield mix through trades, and adding George Brett and Paul Splittorff through the farm system. They battled through Oakland’s five-year run of division crowns from 1971 through 1975, finishing second to the A’s three times.
Otis played well through this period, earning renown for his speed and glove. On September 7, 1971 he stole five bases in a nine-inning game against Milwaukee, one short of the major league record. Otis and Patek stole 101 bases between them that season, the highest total by two American League players on the same team since 1917.
In 1973, Otis made his only All-Star start; it came at his home stadium and he had two hits while batting fifth in the order.
Otis’s production slipped some in 1974, a season in which some hard feelings emerged on both sides in his relationship with Royals fans. Otis told Joe McGuff early in 1975 about the perception that he occasionally coasted, “I can’t help it if I make things look easy. Even in 1973, when I had my best year, people said I could do better. Last year I didn’t have the year I wanted to have. I got to pressing. It was just something I couldn’t overcome. Everything I do on this team, I’m first or second. I can’t do much more than that. I know I didn’t have the year I wanted, but you can’t always do it. I got so I hated to come to the park. It was embarrassing.…As soon as you came out of the dugout, they were on you. After a while, you just hated to play.”
In 1975 Otis tied an American League record for most steals in two consecutive games with seven, but he struggled with injuries. A midseason tonsillectomy limited him to 132 games—his lowest total in the 1970s—and he finished with a .247 average. His walk total, however, spiked to 66; his on-base percentage held at .342, and his 39 steals were third in the league.
Otis rebounded in 1976, and Kansas City finally outraced Oakland to the American League’s West Division title. The American League Championship Series brought heartache, however. In his first career postseason at-bat, leading off the bottom of the first inning in Game One at Royals Stadium, Otis severely sprained his ankle running out a grounder. He missed the remainder of the series and Kansas City lost to the Yankees in five games.
Otis nearly made another career move following Kansas City’s first divisional crown. After the season, the Royals completed a deal sending him and Cookie Rojas to Pittsburgh for Al Oliver. Rojas voided the transaction by using his 10-and-5 veto rights (10 years in the majors and 5 with one team). Otis remained a fixture in Kansas City’s outfield.
He was credited with popularizing the one-handed catch, a move he said helped him get rid of the ball faster. He won Gold Glove Awards in 1971, 1973, and 1974.
In 1980, the Royals finally beat the Yankees to advance to the World Series. Otis belted three home runs, knocked in seven, and hit .478 in a losing effort against the Phillies in six games. It was his only career World Series action.
Otis’s last season with the Royals was 1983. The club declined to exercise its option after he played the two guaranteed seasons on a $1.27 million contract. The Royals wanted to move Willie Wilson to center field.
A free agent, Otis signed with the Pirates and filled a reserve role for a struggling Pittsburgh club. After batting only .165 in 97 at-bats, Otis, 37 years old, was released in August, ending his career as a player.
Otis remained sporadically active in baseball after his playing days, working in the Rockies organization as a hitting instructor for a time in the late 1990s.
Otis and former teammate Steve Busby were the first players inducted into the Royals Hall of Fame, in 1986.
Bill James, the renowned baseball writer, statistician, Kansas native, and staunch Amos Otis supporter, wrote a testament to the swift center fielder’s legacy the year he left the Royals. In the Bill James Baseball Abstract 1984, James wrote:
Amos Otis was an intensely private man leading an intensely public life. He disdained showmanship—probably he hated showmanship—of any type and to any extent. He could never quite deal with the fact that his business was putting on a show. This is what is called ‘moodiness’ by the media. Yet there was a rare, deep honesty about him that was the defining characteristic of him both as a man and as a ballplayer. He could not stand to do anything for show. He could not charge into walls (and risk his continued existence as a ballplayer) after balls that he could not catch. He could not rouse the fans (and risk his continued existence as a baserunner) with a stirring drive for a base too far. He never in his career stood at home plate and watched a ball clear the fence. McRae and Brett, they did that sort of thing; Otis would sometimes turn away interview requests with a sardonic comment, ‘Talk to Brett and McRae. They’re the team leaders.’
It went further than that. Amos could not quite walk down the line when he hit a popup (that, too, would be dishonest) but he could not bring himself to run, either. Because it was false, you see? He wouldn’t have been running for himself or for the team or for the base; he would have been running for the fans, or for the principle that one always ran.
In a 17-season career, Otis posted a .277 batting average, with 193 home runs and 1,007 Runs Batted In while stealing 341 bases.
A large part of this biography comes from the SABR Baseball Biography Project written by Bill Lamberty. It can be found online at http://bioproj.sabr.org
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Well, that’s it for today’s Baseball History Podcast. I’ll see you later at the ballpark.
