Dick Hughes had waited a long time. He attended a tryout with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1958 and won them over instantly, signing with the club and forsaking the final two years of his scholarship at the University of Arkansas. He completed his second pro season in a clash with baseball’s greatest cryptid, Steve Dalkowski for the Northern League championship; against Dalkowski’s 16.8 walks per nine, Hughes’ six looked like self-control in comparison. Based on stuff more than results, Hughes continued to climb the ladder, reaching Triple-A by 1961, a still-raw 23 years old.
And there he stayed. Expansion had come too late for Hughes; there simply weren’t enough jobs, especially for pitchers, to go around. In 1962 he pitched to Tim McCarver, who made the bigs a year later and never came back. Even once he got a handle on commanding the fastball—by 1963, his walks per nine fell into the threes—the Cards showed no interest in him as anything more than an emergency starter, and it was an era where the franchise saw very few emergencies. At one point the team loaned him to the Washington Senators for a few weeks to fill out their Double-A rotation. As the sixties continued Hughes started every five days alongside Dick LeMay, another veteran who’d earned a few cups of coffee, and who wound up starting 204 games in Triple-A.
