Blue Jays Birthdays: John Cerutti
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John Cerutti would have turned 61 today.
John was a good lefty pitcher, for the Blue Jays, back in the late 1980s. He was 46-37 in 6 seasons for us, starting 108 games and relieving in 83, and had a 3.87 ERA. His best season was 1989, when he went 11-11 in 31 starts, with a 3.07 ERA n 205 innings. The next year he was 9-9 with a 4.76 ERA in 30 games, 23 starts. After the season he signed with the
Tigers as a free agent.
He told a great story about his first major league game.
I was called up on 1 September 1985. I didn’t arrive until the fourth inning of the game because of the flight time and the CNE going on. I got to the clubhouse and I got dressed in my uniform and went into the dugout. I said hello to some of the players that I knew and Bobby Cox, the manager, said hello and asked me if I was able to pitch. I said, “Yes”, of course. We were playing the
30 years ago today,
John Cerutti was newly a free agent by virtue of having not been tendered a 1991 contract by the Blue Jays before the midnight December 20/21 deadline to do so. As a result, Cerutti holds the distinction of being the first player in franchise history to be non-tendered, a list which has expanded over the years and earlier this month reached 25 when A.J. Cole and Travis Shaw became the latest.
Interestingly, though non-tenders for economic reasons began to occur as a strategy by the mid-1980s to counter players receiving huge raises through the arbitration process from the 1970s onward, that was not at all the case here. The Blue Jays were actually doing him a favour.