Page 179 - 1975 BoSox

172 ’75—THE RED SOX TEAM THAT SAVED BASEBALL
Who am I? Royals or Red Sox? Well, anyway, I got this contract so I called Boston. ey said,‘We bought you back.’ It was a scam deal. ey just protected me.” What really had happened, he pieced together later. e Red Sox had acquired Juan Marichal in December 1973, but had no room for him on the 40-man roster. As it turned out, Kansas City had only 39 players on its roster. So a deal was done, and Hunter played 1974 in the Royals system only to nd himself back with the Red Sox when he was, in the words of baseball- reference.com transaction data, “sent from the Kansas City Royals to the Boston Red Sox in an unknown transaction.” Hunter said he subsequently learned that a couple of years later Mike Easler had sued and won a lawsuit over the same practice. We were unable to verify this. Essentially, the Red Sox had parked Hunter on the Kansas City roster for a year, and then collected him back in time for the 1975 season.
Hunter started the season with Pawtucket and was called up, again at midseason, again due to injury. “ ey always sent me up in the middle of the year. at’s why I don’t have a baseball card,” he said. Baseball card photos were typically taken in spring training. He got in just one game, on June 1 against theMinnesotaTwins.Hegotuponce—hislastmajor league at-bat — and grounded out to end the seventh. He’d been up every other year — 1971, 1973, and 1975. He would never come up again, though he didn’t know that at the time. “Darrell Johnson ... said the guy at second base is not doing good for me, Buddy. I’m going to work you in the tail end of games, get you some experience. You’re going to be my starting second baseman. So I sat on the bench for about a week and never got in a game. I got in one game, and all of a sudden, he calls me in his o ce and he says, ‘We’re going to send you back to Pawtucket. We have three doubleheaders in ve games. I need to call up a pitcher. We’re going to send you down and then we’re going to call you right back up after these doubleheaders. I still want you to be my second baseman.’ I went down to Pawtucket. ey’re playing in Rochester.First game in, broke my wrist. So I don’t know if I would have been called back up again. I wasn’t, because I was injured. at’s when they purchased the contract of
Denny Doyle. He did one hell of a job for the Red Sox and I never returned to the big leagues.”
Hunter did resume play with Pawtucket in ‘75, but watched on television as the Red Sox competed in the World Series. He got a $250 share, less than the batboy, $186.12 after taxes. It paid the rent the month it arrived, though.
Buddy spent 1976 in Pawtucket and had a very good year. In 1977 Pawtucket won the International League pennant and Hunter was named co-MVP of the league, with his teammate, third baseman Ted Cox. Hunter has nothing but good things to say about Pawtucket manager Joe Morgan. He said he still kept in touch with Morgan every two or three weeks. In 1978 and 1979, he played with Pawtucket, but never got a call-up, even late in the season. Denny Doyle was the regular second baseman for the Red Sox through 1977, and Jerry Remy took over in 1978. Hunter was already working with the PawSox as a player- coach, in e ect getting training to become a manager after he was nished playing. He was getting older, and “that last year, I think I collected my check with a gun and a mask. I wasn’t very good.” Starting in 1980, Hunter managed in Winston-Salem for two years. As we have seen, one of the players he managed for the Winston-Salem Red Sox was his younger brother.
At that point, Hunter decided to leave baseball. What happened was that Red Sox farm director Ed Kenney called him up and o ered him a job taking over for a scout who had just retired in California. Buddy and his wife, Lori, had met in high school. ey visited the area to look for a home, but found the cost of living such that even with the small raise the Red Sox o ered, “We would have went broke out there. We would have had to live in the slums.” He went into sales instead, and as of 2014 had worked for more than 32 years, quite successfully, for a company selling mate- rial handling products—from school and employee lockers to warehouse shelving and racking, conveyers, carts, and dollies.
Je Hunter’s daughter Lindsey was second-team all-American in volleyball with the University of