When I think about baseball in the 1970s—when I began my love affair with the game which lasted until just a few years ago—I’m struck by how much different everything was back then.
The players, upon whom everything else depends, weren’t yet free to sell their services to the highest bidder, at least not when this 1975 Topps card appeared.
The ballparks, with only a couple of notable exceptions, were cookie-cutter multi-use structures that used an artificial playing surface.
The ball itself was made in USA by American workers, before Rawlings took over and outsourced its production.
And guys with names like Bill Plummer could make a respectable career out of playing a child’s game.
If you can find a “Bill” on any MLB roster today, please let me know who he is. As near as I can tell, 2012 was the last year that someone named “Bill” played in the majors (actually there were two Bills that season). And keep in mind that I’m not talking about “Billy,” which has always been a more common big league name. Nor am I considering any Williams, Willies, or Wills for the purposes of this piece. I’m only interested in Bills for right now.
It wasn’t too long ago that I wrote about Bill Madlock here, and he wasn’t even the only Cubs player named Bill to win a batting title, since Bill Buckner also accomplished the feat and we’ll read more about him coming up in May.
Also on deck for this later this year, provided that I get around to writing about them all, are Bill Melton and Bill North, Bill Travers and Bill Russell, Bill Robinson and Bill Bonham, and even a couple more than that. Bill once was a common name for big league ballplayers, and has fallen out of favor for the time being. Perhaps there will be another one someday, but whether it will ever be as prevalent as it once was seems doubtful right now.
Bill Plummer was, as the back of the 1975 Topps card indicates, primarily known for being Johnny Bench’s backup for the Cincinnati Reds in their “Big Red Machine” days. There were other catchers who played more frequently than Bill Plummer did, but very few of them also had two World Series rings in their possession.
It’s perhaps a testament to how good Bill Plummer was in his backup role that while his Reds team appeared in three World Series (in 1972, 1975, and 1976), he didn’t play once in any of them. Would he have liked to play at least once, maybe in the late innings of a game that had already been decided? I’m sure that he would have. But by catching in 50-60 regular season games each season, he helped to keep Bench fresh for when the games mattered most in October.
To put a modern phrase on it, Bill Plummer was Johnny Bench’s “load management” before anyone knew what that term meant. And let’s never forget that, for all the big star players who get all the attention, baseball will always be a team game. It’s not too much to say that Bill Plummer was an integral part of one of the best teams that baseball has ever seen.
Godspeed, Bill Plummer and thanks for your contributions, as unheralded as they might appear at first glance. The Reds might not have been what they were without you.