The Great Eight: The 1975 Cincinnati Reds

11. Bill Plummer

54 Chapter 11. Bill Plummer Michael Fallon Role players have long existed in baseball. At least since 1910, when roster numbers were set at twenty-five active players and forty reserved players , teams have kept bench players who filled certain key situational roles. And this tendency has only increased as the game has evolved over time and player specializations have proliferated. During the 1970s, no one typified the career role player more than Bill Plummer. Born on March 21, 1947, in Oakland, California , William Francis Plummer moved with his family at the age of eight to horse country in Anderson, California, in the northern part of the state. His father , William Lawrence Plummer, was a former Minor League pitcher who, after a twenty-five-year career with the Oakland police, retired to ranch and teach his son the game. “He was a gruff man,” said Plummer in later years, “but big-hearted. A good man.” The elder Plummer kept Bill from becoming a Little League pitcher, worried that it would ruin his son’s arm as it had his. “I used to throw a little relief, but he wouldn’t let me throw a curveball. He taught me a forkball.”1 Plummer played basketball as well as baseball, and while at Shasta College in Redding, California, he was named to the allconference hoops team before deciding to make a career of baseball. Signed out of college in 1965 by the St. Louis Cardinals as an eighteen-year-old, 6-foot-1, 190-pound catcher, Plummer first played for the Cardinals’ Rookie League team in Sarasota that summer . In forty-two games he played well enough— batting .265, providing solid defense behind the plate, and playing in the Florida Rookie League All-Star Game—to be moved up to the Cardinals’ Class A team in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, right before the end of the season. In 1966 Plummer played in Low-A for the Eugene (Oregon) Emeralds (Northwest League), struggling at the plate (.144 batting average and just one home run in forty-six games) and, uncharacteristically, behind it (seven passed balls). In 1967 Plummer’s season went slightly more smoothly. With Modesto (California), another Single -A team, he raised his batting average to .234 and played better defense—but even so, the Cardinals did not protect him from the Rule 5 draft by placing him on their forty-man roster. In late Novemage g ab r h 2b 3b hr tb rbi bb so bav obp slg sb gdp hbp 28 65 159 17 29 7 0 1 39 19 24 28 .182 .291 .245 1 0 2 Bill Plummer spent eight years backing up the greatest catcher of all time, which got him two World Series rings. bill plummer 55 ber 1967, Plummer was taken in the Rule 5 draft by the Chicago Cubs. Plummer may have been simultaneously well served and paid a grave disservice by the rules of the draft. Being chosen by the Cubs gave him a higher profile than he might otherwise have earned over the next several seasons. At the same time, it might also have significantly hindered Plummer’s development as a player. Because the Cubs had to keep him on the Major League roster for the entire season , lest they lose rights to him, Plummer stayed on the bench in 1968, appearing in just two games and recording no hits in two at bats. (Starting catcher Randy Hundley appeared in a record 160 games that year.) Plummer figured enough in the Cubs’ future plans that he was sent after the season to the Arizona Instructional League, where he played well against many of the league’s future star players. Plummer was listed on the Cubs’ forty-man roster , but on January 9, 1969, the team traded him to the Cincinnati Reds. The Reds assigned Plummer to Triple-A Indianapolis, and it was there that he began to blossom as a player. In 1969 he batted .248 with seven home runs in 104 games. More importantly , his defensive skills improved. Early in his Minor League career, Plummer had been rated as a “good receiver who can hit with power but with a lot to learn.”2 After three seasons at Indianapolis , he was upgraded somewhat: “Ready for majors now if somebody gives him chance. Solid receiver with good arm, shows increasing power at plate.”3 In 1971 Plummer completed his best year as a ballplayer —.266 batting average, seventeen home...