Jeff Torborg, an unassuming baseball lifer who caught three no-hitters, including Sandy Koufax’s perfect game in 1965, and as a manager revived the Chicago White Sox but flopped spectacularly with the New York Mets, died on Sunday in Port Orange, Fla. He was 83.
His death, in a hospital, was announced by the White Sox, with whom he won American League Manager of Year honors in 1990. He had struggled in recent years with Parkinson’s disease, his son Greg said.
During his 10 seasons playing in the majors, most of them as a backup catcher with the Los Angeles Dodgers, Torborg had a reputation as a durable, cerebral backstop who couldn’t hit — a deficiency he overcame with the value he added in adroitly managing pitchers.
“I’ve always enjoyed the thinking side, the mechanical side of the game,” he told The Sporting News in 1973. “I’ve always gotten a thrill from doing something that doesn’t show up in the box score, like preventing a wild pitch.”
Torborg was one of just 18 catchers in Major League Baseball history to catch at least three no-hitters. His first — Koufax’s perfect game, during which the lefty struck out 14 Chicago Cubs batters — is among the greatest pitching performances ever.
It was only Torborg’s second season in the big leagues. He called every pitch of the game.
“Sandy didn’t shake off too many pitches in this particular game,” he said in a 2005 interview with Chicago Baseball Museum historian George Castle.
The Dodgers won the World Series that season, the only championship Torborg won as a player or manager.
In 1970, Torborg caught his second no-hitter, this one thrown by the Dodgers righty Bill Singer. Torborg joined the California Angels the following year, and in 1973 — his final season as a player — he caught the first of Nolan Ryan’s seven career no-hitters.
Catchers don’t get credit for no-hitters, but Torborg understood the important role they play.
“I feel that a catcher’s pitch selection, his target location, his knowledge of what the pitcher throws and his familiarity with opposing hitters’ strengths and weaknesses can be important factors in making a no-hitter happen,” he told The New York Times in 1989.
After retiring, Torborg spent the next three decades coaching and managing, including stints with Cleveland, the Yankees, the Chicago White Sox, the Mets, the Montreal Expos and the Florida Marlins.
His best year as a manager was in 1990, during his second season with the White Sox, when the team finished 94-68 after losing 92 games in 1989. Torborg credited much of his success to the laid-back family atmosphere he fostered, including allowing wives to travel with the team.
“I mean, why wouldn’t you want guys to be with their family on the road instead of going out someplace?” he said in a 2010 interview with the Idaho State University sportscaster and White Sox historian Mark Liptak.
The White Sox finished the 1991 season 87-75, but that wasn’t good enough for the team’s new general manager, Ron Schueler. Torborg, encouraged to look for a job, took over in 1992 as skipper of the Mets — a team loaded with big stars like Eddie Murray, Dwight Gooden, Vince Coleman, Bobby Bonilla and Bret Saberhagen.
But the team collapsed amid injuries, clubhouse squabbles and poor play. Torborg’s emphasis on family values wasn’t popular among many of the team’s veterans, who pushed back against the idea of bringing wives on trips.
“The clubhouse, the playing field, the press box were all property of the old boys’ network, and yet here was Torborg breaking all the rules,” Bob Klapisch and John Harper wrote in “The Worst Team Money Could Buy,” their 1993 book about the Mets’ lousy season.
Torborg wouldn’t relent. Late in the season, he designated a series of away games in St. Louis and Chicago as a wives’ trip.
“On the day the Mets left for St. Louis,” Klapisch and Harper wrote, “a telling inscription was anonymously scribbled on the clubhouse blackboard: SIX DAYS OF HELL.”
The Mets finished 72-90. Torborg was fired early in the 1993 season after a 13-25 start.
Baseball writers lamented his dismissal.
“One gets the feeling that what New York grew to dislike so much about Torborg was that it couldn’t turn him into one of its own sort of rabid sports personality,” Claire Smith wrote in The Times. “You know, the sort that confuses diatribe with intelligent discussion, the sort that believes the fist is mightier than reason.”
Jeffrey Allen Torborg was born on Nov. 26, 1941, in Plainfield, N.J., the younger of two sons, and grew up in nearby Westfield. His father, Robert, worked in the insurance industry. His mother was Winifred (Kenney) Torborg.
Torborg was an All-American baseball player at Rutgers. He led the nation in hitting with a .537 batting average in his senior season, and the Dodgers signed him in 1963 with a $100,000 bonus (the equivalent of about $1 million today). He played one season for the team’s Class AA affiliate in Albuquerque, where his reputation as a hitter collapsed against better pitching.
He is survived by his wife of nearly 62 years, Suzie (Barber) Torborg; three sons, Doug, Greg, and Dale; four grandchildren; and two great-grandchildren.
Despite hitting poorly in the minor leagues, Torborg was quickly promoted to the big leagues. He marveled that Dodgers manager Walter Alston, a Hall of Fame skipper, even put him in the lineup.
“He was aware that I couldn’t hit a lick,” Torborg told Baseball Digest in 2002, “but he still played me. I don’t know how he went to the Hall of Fame with that kind of judgment.”