Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever

by Tim Wendel

  While clowning comes naturally to Warden, making it back to the majors proves to be much more difficult. After the Royals release him, Warden signs on with Evansville and the St. Louis Cardinals’ team in the Texas League. After that he tries out with the Cleveland Indians before retiring. His will be a single line in The Baseball Encyclopedia: four victories, one loss and an ERA of 3.62.

  After making a name for himself on ESPN’s Cold Pizza as a wisecracking baseball analyst, Warden travels the country for the Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association, making appearances at golf outings and old-timers games across the country. In addition, he begins auditioning for stage shows on both coasts.

  “What’s the old saying? ‘You’ve got to laugh instead of cry sometimes?’” he says. “I guess I’m an ambassador for baseball. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that year with the Tigers. I’ve gotten more mileage out of that one year in the big leagues. I’m very thankful for it. I would never trade that one year.”

  THE ST. LOUIS CARDINALS

  Roster changes begin soon after the final out in Game Seven in St. Louis, as the Cardinals trade outfielder Bobby Tolan and pitcher Wayne Granger, two players they probably would have lost in the upcoming expansion draft anyway, to the Cincinnati Reds for outfielder Vada Pinson. Pinson replaces the retiring Roger Maris in right field. While the ballclub appears ready to make a run at another championship, management then sends first baseman Orlando Cepeda to Atlanta for catcher-first baseman Joe Torre. (Three years later, Cepeda will be traded from the Braves for Denny McLain.)

  “Trading Cepeda signaled to us, loud and clear, that things would no longer be the same around the Cardinal clubhouse,” Gibson writes in his autobiography. “The front office apparently had very little regard for what the players considered to be the special character of the ballclub.”

  The New York Mets, led by pitchers Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, and Gary Gentry, out-duel the Chicago Cubs down the stretch to take the new National League East Division. The Cardinals fall to fourth place and the front office decides more changes are needed. Tim McCarver, Curt Flood, Joe Hoerner, and Byron Browne are sent to Philadelphia in a seven-player trade. Flood refuses to report and St. Louis eventually sends Willie Montanez and Bob Browning to the City of Brotherly Love to complete the blockbuster deal. But what the remaining Cardinals realize is that Gibson has called it: the era when the ballclub won two, almost three championships in five seasons has come to an end.

  St. Louis doesn’t return to the World Series until 1982, when it defeats the Milwaukee Brewers in seven games.

  Bob Gibson

  While much of the ballclub is dismantled around him, Bob Gibson remains—once again pushing back against the heartache the world offers. A critic of lowering the mound, because he contends it will give hitters too much of an advantage, the intimidating right-hander nonetheless carries on, winning twenty games in 1969, with a league-high twenty-eight complete games, and the following season he notches a league-leading twenty-three victories.

  By the mid-1970s, Gibson’s best performances are behind him and he retires after the 1975 season. With 251 victories and 3,117 strikeouts, the second-highest total ever in baseball history at the time, Gibson enters the Hall of Fame in 1981.

  “I’m glad I had the opportunity of playing against a person of Bob’s caliber,” Hank Aaron says. “I feel that he was one of the best pitchers I faced in baseball.”

  Rusty Staub adds, “In my thirteen years in the big leagues, for consistency of performance, competitiveness, desire and plain old guts, Bob Gibson was my idea of what it takes to be a true champion. I wish I could have played on the same team with him.”

  Of all the lofty statistics of his seventeen-year career, none stand out more than his three World Series campaigns: a cumulative record of seven and two, eight complete games and ninety-two strikeouts. Unfortunately for the pitcher, and perhaps the game itself, he doesn’t appear in the Fall Classic again after the ’68 season.

  Lou Brock

  If the Cardinals had captured the 1968 World Series, Lou Brock certainly would have given Bob Gibson a run for MVP honors. His .464 batting average raises his career mark in postseason play to .391, breaking the record of .363 set by J. Franklin (Home Run) Baker.

  After ’68, Brock leads the league in stolen bases five more times, establishing the career thefts mark of 938, which stands until Rickey Henderson surpasses him in 1991. His goal of being remembered as something more than a base stealer, somebody mentioned in the same breath with the all-time greats, becomes reality as Brock is elected to the Hall of Fame in 1985.

  “He sometimes doesn’t get the general credit that Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig or Reggie Jackson get, but you talk about Mr. October,” says Bob Broeg, the longtime sportswriter with the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “His last two Series were fabulous. In those games, he would combine power and speed.”

  Orlando Cepeda

  Throughout much of his career, behind the smile and ability to rally his teammates, Orlando Cepeda worried about his balky knee. He initially hurt it after the 1962 season—a secret he kept hidden from nearly everybody. By 1968, however, it becomes apparent that he’s playing on borrowed time.

  The Cardinals trade him for Joe Torre after the 1968 season and he’ll play in Atlanta until 1972 when he moves on to Oakland in the deal involving Denny McLain. From there, Cepeda does brief stints in Boston and Kansas City before retiring in 1974. His seventeen-year career includes nine .300 seasons and eight seasons of twenty-five or more homers. Along with Roberto Clemente and Orestes (Minnie) Minoso, he’s recognized as one of the Latino pioneers in the game.

  Soon after his playing days end, Cepeda is arrested trying to pick up 160 pounds of marijuana. Sentenced to five years in prison, he serves only ten months. But the incident certainly delays his entrance into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. In 1993, Cepeda is inducted into the Puerto Rico Sports Hall of Fame and misses being voted into Cooperstown by just seven votes—the fifth-narrowest margin a player has ever missed being inducted by in baseball history.

  He is finally elected into the Hall in 1999, with a class that includes Nolan Ryan, Robin Yount, and George Brett.

  Mike Shannon

  With close ties to the Busch family, Mike Shannon is one of the few regulars from the 1967–1968 teams to remain in St. Louis. But he begins to suffer from a serious kidney infection. He plays only fifty-five games in 1970, batting .213 with no home runs. Shannon continues to try to play until the ballclub takes away his uniform, permanently sidelining him.

  “Mike reminds me of Eddie Mathews,” Joe Torre says. “He couldn’t be hurt bad enough to keep him out of the lineup. The only way they could take Mike out of the lineup is to do what they did. Take him out of uniform.”

  Shannon retires at the end of the season, taking a position in the Cardinals’ front office. Soon he finds his second calling, behind a microphone. Even though he doesn’t know how to keep score at the time, he joins the legendary Jack Buck in the KMOX broadcast booth. The guy with the no-bones-about-it baritone soon gains a following among Cardinals’ fans. He isn’t especially smooth behind the mike—one of his best malaprops comes after St. Louis catcher Ted Simmons homers against the Dodgers. “That’s the kinda pitch that’s bread on Simmons’ butter,” Shannon tells listeners.

  Shannon’s misadventures aren’t limited to calling games, either. He loses and finds his 1964 World Series ring an amazing four different times. The precious bauble falls out a car window along Interstate 70, drops from a coat pocket while at the barbershop, and survives being eaten and passed by the family’s pet goat. “That ring has got nine lives,” Shannon says.

  Roger Maris

  Memories of the stoic, strong-armed outfielder invariably go back to his 1961 season with the New York Yankees when he hit sixty-one home runs, breaking Babe Ruth’s single-season record. But Maris never liked the bright lights, big city, and was much more at home in St. Louis.

  “I was bor
n surly,” he tells the New York Times, “and I’m going to stay that way. Everything in life is tough.”

  After retiring in 1968, his career line reads: 275 home runs, 850 runs batted in, and an average of .260. Perhaps most impressively, he hit six home runs in seven World Series.

  Once Maris hangs up his uniform, he avoids old-timers games and only begins to attend team reunions late in life. He moves to Gainesville, Florida, where he owns a beer distributorship. After a two-year battle with cancer, he dies in 1985. He is only fifty-one years old.

  In 1998, slugger Mark McGwire, playing for the St. Louis Cardinals, breaks Maris’s single-season mark. Mike Shannon, who once roomed with Maris, calls the game on the radio. “And somewhere up there Roger is looking down at all this and cheering for McGwire, too,” Shannon tells the Cardinal nation.

  Nellie Briles

  In July 1967, Bob Gibson suffered a broken leg when struck by a line drive off the bat of the Pirates’ Roberto Clemente. Nellie Briles took his place in the St. Louis rotation and closed the season with nine consecutive victories. A year later, in 1968, Briles posted a 19–11 record, helping the Cardinals repeat as National League champions.

  After 1968, Briles survives the first round of house cleaning in St. Louis. Still, he struggles, in large part due to the lower mound, and in 1970 his ERA soars to 6.24. Before the 1971 season, he’s sent along with infielder /pinch-hitter Vic Davalillo to the Pittsburgh Pirates for outfielder Matty Alou and journeyman pitcher George Brunet. Briles plays a key role in the Pirates’ title run that season, pitching a two-hit shutout in Game Five of the World Series against Earl Weaver’s Baltimore Orioles. Thanks in large part to Briles’s pitching gem, the Pirates become only the sixth team in baseball history to win the World Series after losing the first two games. A year later, Briles falls one hit shy of hurling a perfect game against the San Francisco Giants.

  Off the field, Briles proves to be a better entertainer than Denny McLain or any of the other ballplayers to take a star turn after the 1968 season. An accomplished singer, Briles also does a great impersonation of President Richard Nixon. In 1974, with Hank Aaron on the verge of breaking Babe Ruth’s all-time home-run record, Briles releases a single for Capitol Records called “Hey Hank.” At three-plus minutes, the song’s chorus is a lament by big-league pitchers everywhere: “Hey Hank, I’ve got a reputation. And I’ve got a family.... So please don’t hit it off me.”

  After fourteen years in the majors with five different teams, Briles returns to Pittsburgh. He’s in the broadcast booth in 1979 when the Pirates again defeat Baltimore in seven games to take the World Series. Soon he moves into the front office as the ballclub’s corporate vice president and head of their alumni association. Briles dies of a heart attack while playing golf in 2005. Pallbearers at his funeral include Manny Sanguillen, Jim Leyland, and Roberto Clemente’s son, Luis.

  Steve Carlton

  After the 1968 World Series, the Cardinals travel to Japan for a series of exhibition games. There left-hander Steve Carlton begins to experiment with a slider—a pitch that will soon become his signature offering. Thrown nearly as hard as his fastball, the slider breaks down and in, with great late action, against right-handed batters. In 1969, his first year with the pitch, Carlton’s ERA drops to 2.17. In addition, he strikes out nineteen batters in a close loss to the New York Mets.

  The left-hander wins twenty games for the first time in 1971 and holds out for a $5,000 raise. In response, the Cardinals’ front office trades him to Philadelphia for right-hander Rick Wise. With the Phillies, Carlton becomes only the sixth pitcher to win twenty games for a last-place ballclub, going a league-leading 27–10. That season includes a fifteen-game winning streak, eight shutouts, and thirty complete games. In addition, he wins pitching’s equivalent of the Triple Crown, leading the National League in victories, ERA, and strikeouts.

  In 1980, Carlton leads the Phillies to their first-ever world championship. Two years later, Carlton wins his fourth and final Cy Young Award. Recognized as the best pitcher in Phillies’ history, he is elected into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, in 1994, his first year of eligibility.

  The night before the induction ceremony, at a banquet in the Otesaga Hotel in Cooperstown, New York, Tim McCarver tells the crowd, “If Carl Hubbell will be known as having the best screwball in the history of the game and Sandy Koufax the best curveball, Steve Carlton will go down as having the best slider in the history of the game.”

  Afterward Bob Gibson corners McCarver and says his long-time catcher made a mistake. He should have said that Carlton had the best left-handed slider in the game. Of course, Gibson, a right-hander, believes his slider was the best.

  Tim McCarver

  Every great team needs a Boswell, somebody to sing its praises to the heavens, and nobody has done a better job over the years than Tim McCarver. In addition, he is remembered as a confidant, even a soul mate to many of the pitchers he caught. After being the starting catcher on the Cardinals’ three World Series teams, he is part of the stunning blockbuster trade with Philadelphia. There he catches Rick Wise’s no-hitter in 1971. After that season, Wise is traded to St. Louis for Steve Carlton and there McCarver helps the left-hander to his best season in the majors (27–10). But in the 1972 season, McCarver is dealt to Montreal, where he catches the second of Bill Stoneman’s two career no-hitters. The next season McCarver returns to St. Louis for almost two seasons before being traded to Boston and he returns to Philadelphia, where he plays four more seasons and again is reunited with Carlton. In fact, Carlton is so comfortable pitching to McCarver, rather than Bob Boone, the Phillies’ regular catcher, the joke becomes that the Carlton and McCarver will be buried sixty feet, six inches apart. McCarver retires in 1980, one of the few players who can claim that he played in four different decades.

  After hanging up the tools of ignorance, McCarver gains a following on television, where he will be a central player in the baseball telecasts for all four major U.S. television networks. His partners in the broadcast booth include Don Drysdale, Al Michaels, Jim Palmer, Jack Buck, and Buck’s son, Joe. In the offseason, McCarver turns his attention to the Olympics and cohosts the primetime coverage with Paula Zahn in 1992. In addition, he releases an album of jazz standards (Tim McCarver Sings Songs from the Great American Songbook) in 2009.

  Through it all, nobody can doubt McCarver’s allegiance and love of those great Cardinals teams of the 1960s. When appearing with good friend and former batterymate Bob Gibson on a Major League Baseball Network special about the 1968 World Series, McCarver still plays the role of the good catcher, the trusted sidekick. When Gibson appears reluctant to field queries from host Bob Costas about Curt Flood misplaying Jim Northup’s line drive in Game Seven, and the heartbreak of losing a contest that would have ranked the Cardinals among the best teams of all time, McCarver steps in, effortlessly answering for his good friend.

  Studio 42 host Bob Costas adds that McCarver once said, “Bob Gibson was the kind of player that teammates didn’t just respect, they revered.”

  “I still feel that way,” McCarver replies, “I’m happy to say.”

  Curt Flood

  Some trades and transactions shake up teams. A rare few remake the game itself. At first the seven-player deal between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Philadelphia Phillies including outfielder Curt Flood appears a far cry from Babe Ruth coming to the Yankees or Jackie Robinson signing with the Dodgers. But Flood has no interest in playing in Philadelphia, a city experiencing strong racial tensions at the time. Flood calls Philadelphia “the nation’s northernmost southern city.” In addition, he objects to being treated like a piece of property. Flood asks new commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who has taken over for William Eckert, to make him a free agent. When that request is denied, Flood decides to take the matter to court.

  In January 1970, he files a lawsuit stating that Major League Baseball has violated the nation’s antitrust laws. With the backing of the Players Association, F
lood’s case rises from the district and circuit levels, reaching the Supreme Court in the summer of 1972. Although the highest court in the land eventually rules against Flood, the case sets the stage for the 1975 Andy Messersmith-Dave McNally rulings and ultimately opens the door to free agency in the national pastime.

  While professional ballplayers coming after those court decisions reap the rewards, the battle comes at a huge cost to Flood. He returns to the field in 1971, signing for $110,000 with the Washington Senators, but the game has passed him by. Flood plays only thirteen games and then retires. He spends a year in the Oakland Athletics’ broadcast booth and then moves to Europe, where he spends much of his time painting and writing.

  Marvin Miller, the Players Association’s former executive director, points out that when Flood decided to fight baseball’s reserve clause, “he was perhaps the sport’s premier center fielder. And yet he chose to fight an injustice, knowing that even if by some miracle he won, his career as a professional player would be over. At no time did he waver in his commitment and determination. He had experienced something that was inherently unfair and was determined to right the wrong, not so much for himself, but for those who would come after him. Few praised him for this, then or now. There is no Hall of Fame for people like Curt.”

  Bob Gibson, Flood’s best friend in the game, adds, “The modern player has gotten fat from the efforts of Curt Flood and has returned him no gratitude or any other form of appreciation. I’ve often thought of what an appropriate and decent thing it would be if every player in the major leagues turned over one percent of his paycheck just one time to Curt Flood.”