Mike Torrez

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Michael Augustine Torrez (born August 28, 1946 in Topeka, Kansas) is a former pitcher in Major League Baseball who had an eighteen-year career from 1967 to 1984. He played for the St. Louis Cardinals, Montreal Expos and New York Mets, all of the National League, and Baltimore Orioles, Oakland A's, New York Yankees, and Boston Red Sox, all of the American League.

Torrez won two games in the 1977 World Series for the World Champion Yankees and won fifteen or more games in six consecutive seasons but he is known by many chiefly for two ugly incidents. After the 1977 championship season, he signed as a free agent with Boston. His decent sixteen-win 1978 season was forgotten with one pitch when he gave up a three-run home run to light-hitting Yankee shortstop, Bucky Dent, in the late innings of the division-deciding 163rd game. Then, in 1984, Torrez's last season, he threw a fastball that hit Houston Astros All-Star shortstop, Dickie Thon, in the face, breaking his orbital bone. Thon, considered one of the top prospects in the league at the time, suffered from blurred vision thereafter and never duplicated his prior success.