Rollie Sheldon, a pitcher who wore the New York Yankees pinstripes on two World Series championship clubs in the 1960s, died Aug. 31. He was 89.
For Yankees fans who grew up on those early-1960s teams, Sheldon was part of the last great stretch of the franchise’s midcentury run.
He pitched parts of five major league seasons for three clubs — the Yankees, the Kansas City A’s and the Boston Red Sox.
Sheldon finished with a 38-36 record, a 4.09 ERA, four shutouts and two saves in 160 regular-season games.
With the Yankees he made two appearances in the 1964 World Series, which the St. Louis Cardinals won in seven games. He allowed two runs. Neither was earned.
A veteran of the Air Force, Sheldon was honorably discharged and went back to college, playing basketball and baseball at Texas A&M and UConn.
He was a relatively old 23, and still a sophomore, when the Yankees signed him to his first professional contract in 1960. A year later he was in the Yankees’ starting rotation.
As a rookie in 1961 he went 11-5 with a 3.60 ERA and a 103 ERA+ for the American League pennant winners. Those Yankees won the World Series that fall. Sheldon was often in the background while Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris chased, and Maris broke, Babe Ruth’s single-season home run record.
The Yankees traded him to the A’s in May 1965 in the deal that sent Doc Edwards to New York.
“It was hard to leave the Yankees,” he told The Sporting News in 1965, “but it was a break for me getting to go with a club where I could start regularly…There’s just no substitute for pitching regularly. Your control, your rhythm, everything is better when you’re taking a regular turn.”
After a year in the A’s rotation, he was packaged to the Red Sox in a six-player trade in June 1966.
Sheldon made 23 appearances with Boston, 10 of them as a starter. He was traded once more, to the Cincinnati Reds in December 1966, but never got into a game for them.
His two-inning relief appearance against the Yankees in September 1966 was the final game of his five-year major league career.
He is survived by his wife, Shirley, two daughters and two granddaughters among a large extended family.
From the Yankees’ side of the ledger, that is how the story lands. A kid who once rooted for Boston put on the pinstripes, won with the 1961 and 1962 clubs, pitched in October in 1964, and never quite shook the organization after he left. The numbers were modest. The connection was not.
For a franchise that measures itself by October and by the names that stay on the wall, Sheldon belonged to that era, even if the headlines of those summers belonged to someone else.
