Page 124 - 1975 BoSox

’75—THE RED SOX TEAM THAT SAVED BASEBALL 117
to pitch. So I started calling him ‘Juan’ and he started calling me ‘Four Pitch,’ because I only got four pitches in.” Kreuger was one of the Bu alo Heads, the group of Boston ballplayers that didn’t get along well with manager Zimmer. “I was right in there with them.”
Kreuger may have tweaked Zimmer a bit, too. Acting apparently on his own, he chose to warm up in the bullpen, and did so for 10 days in a row, hoping to get Zimmer’s attention. He was “trying to get him to have him call me into his o ce or something, you know. And he wouldn’t say ‘boo’ to me. And the fans start saying, ‘Hey Rick can we help you?’ ‘Yeah, put a sign out there that says “Kreuger Lives.” So they put a sign out there, and by the 10th day, they say, well, ‘Is there anything else we can do for you?’ ‘Yeah, add a word.’ So they put a second sign that says, ‘Kreuger Still Lives.’” e fan support likely didn’t help Kreuger’s cause, but it was probably a lost cause to begin with. “Zimmer was never Mr. Communication. I was a fun-loving left-hander and not a blood-and-guts football player like he liked. Butch Hobson was perfect for Don Zimmer. Bill Lee and I were the complete opposites.”
In spring training 1978, Rick said, Ted Williams ap- proached him and asked him why he wasn’t pitching in the big leagues. Kreuger told him that Zimmer seemed to have it in for him. “I became friends with Ted that spring. He would hit me fungoes and stu . I think he took a liking to me and wanted to see if he could get me a break.” He credited Ted with helping engineer a trade to the Indians in March 1978. e Red Sox got Frank Du y in the exchange.
Kreuger appeared in six early-season games for the Indians, but his last major-league appearance came on May 7. He retired the only two batters he faced. But that was it. Kreuger hadn’t been pitching poorly, but nonetheless he was assigned to Portland in the Paci c Coast League, where he appeared in 37 games, with a 3.29 ERA.
In 1979 Kreuger signed out of spring training with Tokyo’s Yomiuri Giants to play in Japan. He was 2-1 with a 4.66 ERA with the Giants, but it was a frustrat-
ing year, as he experienced the oft-reported prejudice against gaijin (foreign) players in Japan. He even found that his own catcher was calling pitches that resulted in Kreuger throwing to a batter’s strength instead of to his weakness. He stewed, and began to look like he might become a little controversial. “It felt strange being the center of prejudice,” he recalled, but he had become a born-again Christian in the fall of 1977, during his last year with the Red Sox. “I made that commitment, but I had never been tested before.” e strength he found in Christianity helped see him through a di cult time. Finally the ballclub o ered to pay his full salary if he would leave the team and go home. On one of his last nights there, one of the Giants’ veteran pitchers invited Rick to his home and apologized to him privately. “And I said, Wow! I feel like I’m sane again.”
After Kreuger returned to the States, Felix Millan invited him to Puerto Rico and he played there with the Caguas Criollos. “Jim Bunning became the manager of the team; we nished second, but I had the best earned-run average in the whole league. I got let go from that team because they wanted to bring Dennis Martinez in for the playo s.” Bunning and Kreuger didn’t click. “Him and I didn’t hit o good. Any time I seemed to run into a blood-and-guts type manager who was overly serious, we just didn’t com- municate very well. ey always thought that I was kind of goo ng o , when it was just a style thing. I was more of a free spirit and they didn’t like it. Don Zimmer was the same way. My manager Joe Morgan, [at] Triple-A, at rst he was a little the same way, but then he got to know me and then he loved me.”
e Cleveland Indians sent Rick a contract, inviting him to spring training with their Triple-A a liate, but he wasn’t really ready for a life of Triple-A ball in the summers and working other jobs in the winters, so he walked away from baseball at the time. He became a real-estate broker and did well with that for a number of years, with three years in residential real estate and 13 years in commercial. In 1996 and 1997, he served as head baseball coach at Cornerstone College, a Christian college, until it dropped its base-