It was one summer in Buffalo 45 years ago. Rick Lancellotti, a Rhode Islander who grew up in New Hampshire and played high school ball in New Jersey, never could have imagined how life-changing it would be.
In the Bisons’ first-year of Double-A baseball, with the franchise reinstated in 1979 after a nine-year hiatus, the short porch in right field at War Memorial Stadium became Lancellotti’s personal playpen during an historic season.
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Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame 2024 inductee Rick Lancellotti belted 41 home runs for the Buffalo Bisons in 1979 and was named Eastern League MVP that year.
Just 22 at the time, Lancellotti struggled early, but got hot in May and never stopped hitting home runs for the Pirates’ affiliate. The left-handed hitting outfielder finished with 41, earning a tie for the Eastern League record that he still shares and winning the league’s MVP award.
The total remains third all-time on the Bisons’ franchise list dating to 1877, surpassed only by Ollie Carnegie (45 in 1938) and Bill Kelly (44 in 1926).
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Lancellotti moved on from Buffalo the next year and made 12 more stops in the major and minor leagues before he retired in 1992 after playing in Italy. But he made Western New York his home and has coached baseball here for more than 30 years. The combination of his playing career and his community service has led him to earn induction into the Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame come November.
After leaving Buffalo, Lancellotti’s career reads like a baseball road map: Amarillo, Texas; Honolulu; San Diego; Las Vegas; Wichita, Kansas; Oklahoma City; Norfolk, Virginia; Phoenix; San Francisco; Hiroshima, Japan; Pawtucket, Rhode Island; Boston and Parma, Italy.
The Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame is no longer just virtual. You can once again see inductees' names and faces and relive the memories they have created.
So, how do you end up living for decades in Clarence?
“Marry a girl from here and you’re staying,” a smiling Lancellotti said last month of his wife, Debbie. “That’s the golden rule. She was great during my career. She’d say, ‘OK, Rick. We’ll go here. We’ll go there,’ and the whole time we were getting the master plan of Buffalo.
“It was a case of get a little place we can just have so by the time you’re done with your career, we can go anywhere you want. And that little place ends up with shrubs, a lawn, a driveway, patio. Cute little place.”
Debbie Lancellotti is the daughter of the late Jim Ludtka, a former minor league baseball player who became one of Buffalo’s most prominent sporting goods retailers. The Lancellottis’ daughter, Katie, played college softball at Canisius, is in Clarence’s Athletic Hall of Fame and works in sales. A son, Joe, played baseball for Clarence and is a municipal engineer in the town.
Rick Lancellotti has operated his Buffalo School of Baseball, now located in Williamsville, since 1993.
“The people here are just amazing, and when I played here, they were so into their sports,” Lancellotti said. “I found that I think I was a better teacher than a player. And I don’t have to fire myself anymore. I don’t have to train myself. I don’t have to be sent down anymore, right?
“I started going and I just I was hooked on it. I get to work with kids every day and teach them and have fun with them. Baseball can be a long, tedious journey, and you just have to keep working at it.”
Finding groove with Bisons
Lancellotti’s Buffalo journey started poorly in April 1979. Veteran manager Steve Demeter dropped him out of the cleanup slot in the batting order all the way down to No. 8 before Lancellotti summoned his courage to challenge him.
“About a month had gone by, I’ve got one home run and I’m thinking I’m on my way out,” he said. “I go into his office and said, ‘Steve, you have to put me back to fourth. I need pressure. I don’t know why, but all I know is if I don’t feel useful in a position in the lineup, I stink.’ He says to let him think about it and I said, ‘You have to do this.’ I’m telling him what to do. Kind of crazy.”
Lancellotti preceded to tell Demeter he had already talked to teammate Alfredo Torres, who didn’t want to bat cleanup, about swapping lineup spots. Demeter talked to Torres and showed Lancellotti that day’s lineup card.
“He sticks it in my face and goes, ‘There, you happy?’ “ Lancellotti said. “I look at it and I’m at No. 4. That day, I hit two home runs.”
Bisons radio analyst Duke McGuire on Hall of Famer Jim Leyland, his manager with the 1973 Clinton Pilots: "He did it the hard way, up each level. You have to respect that. Nothing was handed to him."
Lancellotti said he wasn’t trying to go deep and just focused on hitting the ball hard, and “all of a sudden, it just started to go.”
Sure did. By the last day of the season, he had tied the league record set in 1930 by Ken Strong of Hazelton -- who would go on to a long career in the NFL with the New York Giants and was inducted into the Pro Football Hall of Fame in 1967.
Lancellotti’s biggest career regret? Not giving the Rockpile fans No. 42 that final day.
“We had a good crowd, and they’re all chanting for me,” he recalled. “I got caught up in the whole thing and I can still see it to this day. Fastball down the middle. And I fly out to right field. I jogged to first and my head is down and I turned around to go back to the dugout and they all stood up. My heart still bleeds for that moment. I wanted to give it to them because of what they had given to me.”
Meeting the ‘Ryan Express’
Lancellotti racked up 276 home runs in his minor league career, but just two in a major-league career of only 36 games with the Padres, Giants and Red Sox. Both longballs were as a pinch-hitter with the Giants in 1986, and they came in consecutive games on Sept. 21 in Atlanta and Sept. 23 in Cincinnati. On Sept. 24 in Houston, he had a chance to tie the major-league record of three straight games with a pinch shot — but had to face Houston’s Nolan Ryan to do it.
The Bisons hit the break at 42-50 overall and will likely continue their playoff drought that stretches to 2005, but you can't complain too much about their offense. They're sixth in the 20-team league in runs scored at 503 and averaging 5.5 runs per game.
Houston led 6-0, and Ryan was tossing a one-hitter when manager Roger Craig sent Lancellotti up with one out in the eighth.
“This is like the most the coolest thing in my life. I had Nolan Ryan’s baseball cards on my bike spokes when I was a kid,” Lancellotti said. “I’m in the Astrodome, they’re looking to win that game for the playoff race and I’m in the on-deck circle with every (bat) donut I can find. And there’s Ryan on the mound acting like a cowboy looking like, ‘Let’s go.’
“I need to see his release point so I take it. His windup is in slow motion and it’s like a bullet that went my way. (Catcher Alan) Ashby is laughing. You see guys throwing 90-95, but this is another level. Next one I swing through. I’m like a foot under it.
“He just climbed the ladder on me. Thigh high, waist, stomach, sit down. Struck out, but still a classic moment for me. I’ve been very fortunate in this game to do so many things and play in so many places.”
This is part of a series profiling the members of the Greater Buffalo Sports Hall of Fame’s Class of 2024. The induction dinner is Nov. 12 at the Buffalo Niagara Convention Center. For tickets, visit buffalosportshallfame.com.