Page 125 - 1975 BoSox

118 ’75—THE RED SOX TEAM THAT SAVED BASEBALL
ball program. When that position ended, Rick prayed for a day at his church, hoping for guidance on what he might do next, only to come home and get a call from a man who knew him from church. e man was starting a Little League team and o ered Rick a job instructing the pitchers on the team. e local paper covered the story and from that grew a new sideline. In 1998 Rick founded Kreuger’s Baseball School (see kreugerbaseball.com) based right in Wyoming, Michigan. e school has worked with kids as young as 7 all the way up to working with some pro players. Starting in 2000 he began teaching eighth- grade mathematics at a school in Walker, Michigan, Walker Charter Academy.
Kreuger has done some mission work, traveling to Russia, and talked to children in orphanages and to soldiers. He has also gone on a couple of mission trips with former Cleveland Browns defensive end Bill Glass. ey visited prisons in Pittsburgh and Florida. “I’d throw baseballs and pitch them to the prisoners and then talk to them about faith. It was kind of fun. ey would come out to bat o of me, but they wouldn’t come out to listen to somebody on a soapbox. It was a di erent avenue to reach those prisoners.”
Rick’s daughter Sarah was active in fast-pitch softball. “She has the best arm on her team,” he said in 2005. “She threw ve girls out at home plate from center eld on her freshman team last year. And no girl has ever done that.” As of 2014, Sarah worked a softball hitting instructor at her father’s baseball school and also as a teacher at a Christian school.
Rick Kreuger is content with his life, but there are concerns. He is one of a large number of former major-
league players who are excluded to one degree or another from the major-league pension plan and he is one of 1,053 major-league alumni pursuing a class- action suit.3 Rick still receives regular mailings from the Red Sox as part of their alumni program, and he occasionally comes across former teammates like Bill Lee. Some years ago, he joined Bill at the Senior World Series in Arizona, and almost won a game there one year, losing 1-0 in extra innings.
He enjoys watching the Detroit Tigers play, because he gets the local broadcasts and can better analyze the play, but he still follows the Red Sox most of all. “You become a Red Sox, and it’s kind of like you’re part of such a history there.”He was pleased with the Red Sox’ success in 2004 and subsequently, but there remained a wistfulness of sorts occasioned by the way things worked out in his own time with the Red Sox. “It’s kind of bittersweet in the sense you were part of the team, and yet you were never allowed to be part of that team.” Kreuger was one of the 200-plus Red Sox alumni who attended Fenway Park’s 100th-anni- versary celebration in 2012.
Notes
1 Interviews with Rick Kreuger, August 22 and September 23, 2005. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Kreuger come from this interview. Special thanks to Dan Desrochers for tran- scribing the oral history interview.
2 Kreuger quoted by Don Vanderveen, Advance Newspapers, May 13, 2012. See mlive.com/hudsonville/index.ssf/2012/05/ rick_kreuger_helps_celebrate_1.html. anks to James Forr for additional information included in this biography.
3 See bene tsbryancave.com/ major-league-baseball-pension-and-healthcare-bene ts/.