If someone is familiar with 1960s and ’70s pitcher Paul “Sonny” Siebert, the Cardinals are probably not the team that comes to mind. Siebert, who was born in St. Mary, Missouri* on this date in 1937, pitched in the majors from 1964 through 1975, threw 2152 innings and all but 160 came in the American League, mostly with Cleveland and the Red Sox, both for whom he was an All Star.

But late in his career, following his lone season as a Texas Ranger, Siebert was traded to the Cardinals straight up for prospect Tommy Cruz (one of the lesser of the three Cruz brothers), who would accumulate just two plate appearances in the majors. Aged thirty-seven in 1974, Siebert was coming off back-to-back disappointing seasons and was maybe nearing the end of the line when he joined the Cardinal rotation as the fifth starter.

Siebert’s earlier emergence in the mid-’60s as a star pitcher was somewhat unlikely, as he was a basketball standout at the University of Missouri, playing baseball only his junior year—as an outfielder—before he was signed by Cleveland in 1958. He missed the first two months of the 1959 minor-league season with an injury, then, just 61 games after his return, fractured his ankle and missed the rest of the season. During the off-season Florida Instructional League, Siebert, unable to hit or play outfield on the healing ankle, participated by throwing batting practice. His stuff caught the eye of a coach, a former two-time 20-game winner with the Yankees named Spud Chandler, who suggested he had a better path to the majors as a pitcher than a hitter. In 1960 he began his first season as a professional pitcher, for Burlington in the Class B Carolina League, and it took him four years climbing through the minors before he finally made the Cleveland roster, at age 27 in 1964.

For eight seasons, five with Cleveland and then three with the Red Sox, Siebert, while never a superstar or really even a big name, was one of the better pitchers in the American League. In 1965, his first full season in Cleveland’s starting rotation, Siebert went 16-8 and was third in the AL in pitching WAR and second in WHIP and K/9, striking out 191 batters in 188-2/3 innings. (The latter is notable: in the 1960s only four AL starting pitchers had a season averaging at least one strikeout per inning: Siebert; two of his teammates, Sudden Sam McDowell and Luis Tiant; and the Twins’ Dave Boswell.) Siebert followed with double-digit-win seasons through 1972, after which he was dealt to Texas, then to St. Louis.

One memorable highlight of Siebert’s lone season with the Cardinals was on September 11 when he entered the 23rd inning of a scoreless contest in New York that ended up being the longest National League game ever—both by innings and game time. Siebert pitched 2-1/3 innings and was the winning pitcher, striking out John Milner in the bottom of 25th to end the game after Bake McBride had slid home with the only run of the game in the top of the inning.

Despite finishing the 1974 season with very pedestrian numbers—an 8–8 record over 20 starts and 8 relief appearances, with a 3.88 ERA (ERA+ of 94) in 133-2/3 innings—Siebert began dominantly for the Cardinals, throwing a complete-game shutout over the Pirates in his first start and then adding two more while compiling a 1.98 ERA and 6-3 record over his first 11 starts. Arm troubles led to a series of abbreviated shellackings, then to the disabled list. There was a silver lining, though: the Cardinals called up a young righty, Bob Forsch, from AAA Tulsa to take Siebert’s spot while he was on the DL, and Forsch pitched so well he stayed in the rotation, even after Siebert returned, and remained there for 14 years while amassing 163 wins for the Cardinals.

Fun Sonny Siebert fact: In 1971, two years before the adoption of the designated hitter in the AL, Sonny Siebert hit six home runs—only five other pitchers have hit more in a season—and drove in 15 runs while winning 16 games for the Red Sox. He had 1.2 batting WAR that year, along with 5.4 pitching WAR, and finished sixth overall among all AL players in WAR.

Sources: baseball-reference.com and sabr.org

*St. Mary, MO, population 360 (2010 U. S. Census) and located an hour’s drive south of St. Louis, has the distinction of being on the eastern border of Missouri but abutting Illinois—and not the Mississippi River. The river’s flow has changed over the years, and an oxbow that used to divide Missouri and Illinois at St. Mary was filled in, with the river’s new flow further east, in Illinois proper. The former riverbed (technically still known as the Mississippi River), now dry, divides St. Mary from Kaskaskia, IL (population 12), and fills in occasionally during heavy rains.