Greatest Cardinals No. 15: OF Ray Lankford
NOTE: The BND has endeavored to identify an objective list of the top 100 St. Louis Cardinals players of all time, based on statistical formulas developed through sabermetrics. We’ll count down the list daily, player by player, until April 4, the day of the Cardinals’ 2019 home opener. The running list and player bios can be found at bnd.com.
NO. 15: OF Ray Lankford
After a successful run in the 1980s that produced three pennants, a World Series championship and the third most regular-season wins in the majors, the Cardinals kicked off the last decade of the 20th century with a resounding thud.
With the death of Gussie Busch in September 1989, manager Whitey Herzog had lost the ear of ownership. Tired of dealing with Anheuser-Busch beer executives on matters of baseball, and his Cardinals already 14 games below .500 after 80 games, Herzog abruptly announced his resignation. The Redbirds fluttered into last place for the first time in 72 years.
By spring of 1991, an offseason purge of veteran players left infielders Ozzie Smith and Jose Oquendo as the lone connections to the team’s championship years. The Cardinals looked like the Cleveland Indians from the movie “Major League,” where even members of their grounds crew were asking themselves: “Who are these (bleep) guys?”
But fans who hadn’t already heard of Ray Lankford made the rookie outfielder’s acquaintance during the Cardinals’ first home series, a four-game set with Philadelphia.
St. Louis had trailed the Phillies by five runs before a four-run seventh and an RBI triple by Gerald Perry in the ninth tied the score, 6-6, to force extra innings. With one out in the home half of the 10th, Lankford drew a walk from the “Wild Thing,” Phillies’ closer Mitch Williams, then proceeded to steal second base. The next batter, Felix Jose, another newcomer to the Cardinals’ outfield, was walked intentionally to set up the double play.
Perry set the heroics into motion with a sharp ground ball to Philly first baseman John Kruk, who threw to second for the force out. Shortstop Dickie Thon noticed that the speedy Perry got a quick first step from the left side of the batter’s box and held his throw back to first. He didn’t noticed, however, that Lankford had already rounded third and was chugging toward home.
The throw still beat the Redbird rookie by two steps, but Lankford lowered a shoulder into to Phillies catcher Darren Daulton to send him into la-la land and separate the ball from his mitt. The 24-year-old Lankford, who went 3-for-5 that afternoon, pumped his fists and howled with emotional fury at the walk-off victory.
Lankford thought he had left football in the past when the Cardinals drafted him in the third round of the 1987 MLB Draft. Suddenly, though, he found a handy use for those gridiron skills.
“To be honest, it was bad base running on my part — I thought the ball went into right field so I just kept rounding third base,” he said in a 2018 interview. “Football was my first love and I was a running back, so I knew to lower my shoulder.”
Back at Busch Stadium against the New York Mets in September of that season, Lankford had a first-inning double, a third-inning single, a triple in the fifth and home run in the seventh to become the first Cardinals rookie to hit for the cycle.
By season’s end, he had posted a National League-leading 15 triples to go with 44 stolen bases and 83 runs scored. The young Cardinals, meanwhile, escaped their one-season stay in the Eastern Division cellar, to win 84 games and place second. Over the next 10 seasons, the man who displaced the ever-popular Willie McGee in centerfield, quickly but quietly developed into one of the best all-around outfielders in the game.
In 1992, Lankford improved his batting line to .293/.371/.480 and included 20 home runs, 86 RBIs and 42 stolen bases. In 1996, under a new manager, Tony La Russa, the Cardinals returned to the postseason as Lankford belted 21 home runs while driving in 86 and scoring 100.
Despite lingering knee trouble, Lankford mounted a three-season run from 1997-99 that ranked with the National League’s elite. He batted .295/.411/.585 with 98 RBIs and 94 runs scored during his All-Star season. As batting order protection for Mark McGwire during his record run of 70 home runs in 1998, Lankford hit a career-best 31 homers of his own to go with 105 RBIs. The next season, he batted .306/.380/.493 with 32 doubles in just 122 games.
In center field, he posted an NL-best 2.90 range factor as a center fielder in 1992, committed just one error in 1996 and led the NL in fielding percentage in 1997. And from 1991 to 2001, only Ken Griffey Jr. and Kenny Lofton had higher Wins Above Replacement (WAR) among major league center fielders.
Apparently, though, the rest of baseball wasn’t as bowled over by Lankford’s five-tool skill set as Daulton had been a few years earlier. Lankford got enough votes for Rookie of the Year to place third, but otherwise made it to just one All-Star Game (1997) and was shut out for a Gold Glove.
The Cardinals traded Lankford to San Diego in 2001 for starting pitcher Woody Williams, who would play a major role for the Cardinals through three division championships. Lankford was back as a free agent in 2004, when he helped the Cardinals off the bench through 105 victories and their first National League championship in 17 years.
When he retired at the end of that season, Lankford was the all-time home run leader at Busch Stadium II and fifth overall in franchise history. Lankford also ranks among the Cardinals’ top 10 in walks, extra-base hits, stolen bases, RBIs, doubles, and runs scored. His 37.7 career WAR in St. Louis is in the franchise’s top 20, ahead of Hall of Famers Jim Bottomley, Red Schoendienst and Frankie Frisch.
In the 126 years since joining the National League, the Cardinals have had nine seasons in which a player hit 20 or more home runs and stole 20 or more bases — Lankford accounts for five of those.
Given his conspicuous absence from the annual lists of postseason award winners, it would be fair for Lankford to wonder how his 14-year career had become so widely overlooked and underappreciated. But he expressed nothing but humility and appreciation when St. Louis fans voted him into the Cardinals Hall of Fame in 2018. He cut his induction speech short, he said, when his emotions started to get the best of him.
“I was trying to figure out what I want to say and how I want to say it and it just kind of hit me in the morning that ‘I’m a Cardinal for life. This is my new uniform,’” he said, tugging at the lapel of his red Hall of Fame blazer. “I’ll always be a St. Louis Cardinal.”
SEASONS IN ST. LOUIS: 1990-2001, 2004
KEY STATS
.273/.365/.481 in St. Louis | All-Star | Busch II home run king | 37.7 WAR | Cardinals HoF’18
TOP 100 SCORE: 4.42
This story was originally published March 19, 2019 at 5:00 AM with the headline "Greatest Cardinals No. 15: OF Ray Lankford."