An all-time White Sox great succumbs after relentless health challenges
A tough day that most of knew was on the horizon finally came, as baseball great and former Chicago White Sox star center fielder Chet Lemon passed away today at his home in Apopka, Fla.
“He was sleeping on his reclining sofa,” Gigi, his wife, told the Detroit Free Press. “He just wasn’t responsive.”
Lemon suffered a seeming endless stretch of health woes, dating back to the end of his playing career. After falling to near death multiple times, he was diagnosed with polycythemia vera, a rare blood disease that causes bone marrow to generate too many red blood cells. Surgeries and other remedies were further complicated by Lemon’s unwillingness to receive blood transfusions, as a Jehovah’s Witness.
Lemon pulled through and his overall health, though always precarious (making at least 300 trips to hospitals), stabilized enough for him to fulfill his post-career baseball mission: youth coaching and teaching. He built Chet Lemon’s Big House, a training complex in Tavares, Fla., and piloted AAU players on Chet Lemon’s Juice. He even coached his son, Marcus, who played in the minor leagues from 2006-17 and spent the mid-teens in the White Sox upper minors.
Lemon was the object of an astute trade by GM Roland Hemond in 1975, pickpocketing him from the Oakland A’s. Back then, Lemon was a third baseman, and the story of his transformation from an overly-aggressive player on the hot corner to record-breaking center fielder was told to me on these pages in 2018.
Chet had always been a dangerous, if free-swinging, hitter, but in center field he set baseball on its ear with his range. By 1977, just his second season in center, he established an American League record of 524 outfield chances and 512 putouts. Both records still stand.
Lemon was a key cog in the South Side Hit Men run at an AL pennant in 1977, slashing .273/.343/.459 with 19 homers and 67 RBIs. Fueled by value on both the hitting and defensive side (never mind baserunning, the fleet Lemon was an awful base-stealer and gave several managers heart attacks with his ill-conceived dives into first base to beat out infield hits), he was by far the WAR leader of the 1977 club, with 5.9.
Chet settled in as a perennial All-Star in the late 1970s into the 1980s, and was in position to become a lifetime White Sox in 1981 when Chicago signed Carlton Fisk to a bigger salary than Lemon had agreed to. Lemon later realized it was petulance on his part, wanting to renegotiate to secure himself as the highest-paid player on the White Sox, but his trade to Detroit in the walk year of his contract unlocked the best moments of his career: two 6.0-plus WAR seasons and a World Series title with the unbeatable 1984 Detroit Tigers.
It was a 40-year reunion last summer in Detroit where Chet, due to a succession of strokes wheelchair-bound and unable to speak, found some new energy that fueled a happier end to his life. “The trip to Detroit, it just sparked him,” Gigi told the Free Press. “He just seemed to be so happy.”
Though comprising just about half of his shortened career and covering a weird if not overlooked period in White Sox history, Lemon made an indelible mark on fans of the era with his free spirit and joy. He remains the 18th-best hitter in White Sox history and second-best center fielder by WAR (24.9), with a full career that by JAWS stands as the 21st-best for a center fielder.
Personally, Chet was my first, and truly only, White Sox hero. (He in fact inspired by original SSS name, Chet Lemonhead, dropped when I ascended to the masthead.) It has been a joy to visit with him and write about him over the years. He was a sweet man, and I was really lucky to know him.
Sometimes, it’s OK to meet your heroes.