Larry Herndon

Larry Darnell Herndon

• Bats Right, Throws Right
• Height 6' 3", Weight 195 lb.
• High School Douglass High School (Memphis)
• Debut September 4, 1974
• Final Game October 2, 1988
• Born November 3, 1953 in Sunflower, MS USA

BR page

Biographical Information

Larry Herndon graduated from Douglass High School in Memphis, Tennessee in 1971, earning 4 letters in football.

While he first came up with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1974, he is most famous for his time with the San Francisco Giants, when he made the 1976 Topps All-Star Rookie Team as an outfielder as a rookie in 1976 and later with the Detroit Tigers, when he was a starter with the World Series-winning team of 1984. He retired following the 1988 season with Detroit. He was mainly a center fielder until 1979, then moved to left field for the remainder of his career.

He did not hit double figures in home runs until his first season with Detroit, in 1982, when he hit 23, and followed that with 20 homers in 1983. In the championship-winning season of 1984, he hit a more typical 7. However, he normally posted good batting averages, with .288 in his rookie season, and being between .280 and .302 every season from 1981 to 1984. His OPS+ was also above 100 those four years, but for the rest of his career, lesser power numbers combined with a lower batting average meant that he was a below-average hitter, even though he was normally playing a corner outfield position. He retired after the 1988 season, when he fell to .224 with an OPS+ of 82 in 76 games. Most of the members of the Tigers championship team of 1984 were from the same generation, all having started to play regularly between 1976 and 1978, and as a result, they all got old at the same time, like Herndon did, making for a precipitous fall that left them a below-.500 team for years after their division title in 1987.

He was traded from St. Louis to San Francisco for P Ron Bryant after the 1975 season. Bryant was done as an effective major league pitcher by then. He was then traded from San Francisco to Detroit for Ps Mike Chris and Dan Schatzeder, neither of whom did anything of value for the Giants (Schatzeder dod bounce back to become an effective pitcher again, but only after leaving San Francisco). Thus, in both cases, the teams who acquired Herndon came out way ahead in the deal.

After his playing days, he was a Detroit Tigers coach from 1992 to 1998 and a member of the Lakeland Tigers/Lakeland Flying Tigers staff from 2005 through 2014.

Notable Achievements

• 1976 Topps All-Star Rookie Team
• 20-Home Run Seasons: 2 (1982 & 1983)
• Won a World Series with the Detroit Tigers in 1984

Further Reading

• Glen Vasey: "Larry Herndon", in Mark Pattison and David Raglin, ed.: Detroit Tigers 1984: What A Start! What A Finish!, SABR Publications, Phoenix, AZ, 2012, pp. 90-94. ISBN 1933599448

Related Sites

• Larry Herndon at the SABR Bio Project