Best 50 — 1967 St. Louis Cardinals (#40)
Orlando Cepeda infuses the Cards with the winning spirit
The subject of today’s newsletter is the 1967 St. Louis Cardinals, who are No. 40 in the Best 50, my list of the greatest ballclubs in history. The rankings come from my new book, Baseball’s Best (and Worst) Teams.
Here’s a quick boilerplate explanation that I’m appending to every story in this series:
I compiled the Best 50 by analyzing 2,544 major-league teams from 1903 to 2024. Those clubs have been ranked by their team scores (TS), which are plotted on a 100-point scale. (A given club’s all-time percentile is the percentage of the other 2,543 teams that it outperformed.)
See my book for an explanation of my TS calculations. The book also offers separate breakdowns of the best and worst clubs for every decade and franchise, comprehensive profiles of the Best 50 (including position-by-position lineups and much more information than you’ll find in this newsletter), and similar summaries of the 10 worst teams of all time.
Now on to today’s profile.
Facts and figures
Team: 1967 St. Louis Cardinals
Team score: 85.667 points
All-time rank: 40 of 2,544
All-time percentile: 98.47%
Season record: 101-60 (.627)
Season position: First place in National League
Final status: World champion
Season summary
The Cardinals used the Orioles’ success story as a template for their own championship tale. Baltimore acquired an acclaimed slugger, Frank Robinson, in late 1965. Robinson won the next season’s Most Valuable Player Award, leading the Orioles to a world title. St. Louis swung its own trade for a renowned power hitter in May 1966. Orlando Cepeda earned 1967’s MVP trophy, spurring the Cardinals to their own crown.
The Cards had finished seventh in the National League in 1965 and sixth in 1966. The arrival of Cepeda and former Yankees star Roger Maris sparked an upswing. Maris was no longer a home-run threat — he cleared the fences only nine times all season — but he clearly enjoyed 1967 more than any of his seven tumultuous years in New York. “I almost forgot how much fun it was to be in baseball,” he said.
St. Louis trailed league-leading Cincinnati by 4.5 games as late as June 7. But the Cardinals blazed to a 74-40 record the rest of the way, winning the pennant by 10.5 games.
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Postseason summary
Nobody — literally nobody — expected Boston to reach the World Series. The Sporting News surveyed 255 sportswriters at the start of the 1967 season, and no one picked the Red Sox to finish higher than fourth place in the American League.
Yet the Sox prevailed in a four-team dogfight to win their first AL pennant in 21 years, a triumph hailed as the “Impossible Dream.” It was widely assumed that the Cardinals would easily subdue the upstarts from Boston, and St. Louis did win three of the first four games.
But the Sox battled back to extend the World Series to its limit. Bob Gibson pitched a three-hitter to win Game Seven (and the championship) for the Cardinals. It was Gibson’s third complete-game victory of the series. He surrendered a total of three runs in 27 innings.
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Lineup summary
Racial tensions remained stubbornly commonplace in 1967, two decades after Jackie Robinson integrated the major leagues. Several teams — notably the San Francisco Giants — were fractured into white, black, and Hispanic cliques. The Cardinals were a rare exception. Center fielder Curt Flood, himself a black man, said the club was “as close to being free of racist poison as a diverse group of 20th century Americans could possibly be.”
First baseman Orlando Cepeda, whom the splintered Giants had dealt to the Cardinals, was instrumental in developing a cohesive unit in St. Louis. Cepeda was nicknamed Cha Cha because he blasted jazz and Latin music in the clubhouse after games. Teammates enjoyed his lively and inclusive spirit. “We’re El Birdos because Cha Cha named us that, and that is what we want to be called,” said right fielder Roger Maris. Flood called Cepeda “our cheerleader, our glue.”
It certainly helped that he was a dominant player. Cepeda topped the National League with 111 RBIs, and he ranked sixth with a .325 batting average. Flood, a Gold Glove center fielder, led the club with a .335 BA. Fleet-footed left fielder Lou Brock stole 52 bases; nobody else in the league pilfered more than 29.
The brightest star on the St. Louis roster — outshining even Cepeda — was Bob Gibson. The fireballing pitcher had notched 60 victories over the previous three seasons, but a Roberto Clemente line drive broke his leg in July 1967. Gibson was tough-minded — catcher Tim McCarver called him “a man of mulish competitive instinct” — and he tried to keep pitching. He eventually missed two months, finishing with a disappointing (for him) record of 13-7.