[Terry D]

I first started watching baseball on TV in the summer of 1979 on Cape Cod, so naturally the Red Sox were the team I saw most of. That was a tough year for the Sox, the year when they were still hungover from the '78 crash. A barrage of injuries didn't help either, but this was still the great late 70's lineup with Evans, Lynn, Rice, Yaz, Burleson, and Fisk and so it was an interesting summer. As so often in Sox history the pitching was mediocre. Eck was still at his early peak as a starter, but nobody else in the rotation was even comparable and the bullpen was unstable. The Sox paraded a bunch of kids to the mound. Chuck Rainey had a decent rookie season and John Tudor was eventually destined for some glory, but fortune did not smile on Allen Ripley, Jim Wright, Win Remmerswaal, or Joel Finch. Joel, drafted out of South Bend, Indiana, had some credentials in the minors. He was good in '78 at Pawtucket (11-8, 3.18 ERA) and excellent in 16 AAA starts in '79 (9-1, 2.63). In both Pawsox seasons he allowed fewer than a hit an inning. As is often the case, though, Joel tended to struggle with his control and that was his undoing at the major league level. He went 0-3, 4.87 for the Red Sox in '79, allowing more than a hit an inning and posting a dead even k/w. Joel was 23 but looked younger somehow, almost like one of the pitchers I'd seen in high school. I knew he was trying hard and I hated to see him get roughed up. (I felt the same about Ripley too.) Joel kept trying for two more years in the minors before he quit. Here is an action shot of him from the second edition of the 1979 Red Sox yearbook. The image is baseline optimized; I can resample it some other way or provide larger versions if needed. This version is about the same size as the image which appears on the printed page in the yearbook.