Even before the legendary shadows could descend on the Yankee Stadium grass, Lou Perini, sitting in the box seats with his wife and Joe Cairnes, knew to send the champagne back to the icebox.
The final score was 7–0. Turley had struck out ten, fanning Henry twice. There would be no celebration, only a long flight to Milwaukee and two chances to win one game at County Stadium.
But you wouldn’t have known the Braves had blown a chance to win the World Series by the scene in the Milwaukee clubhouse. Haney was gray, Burdette embittered, but the rest of the Braves were as light as a Fourth of July barbecue.
BRAVES FROLIC IN CLUBHOUSE135 AFTER LOSS
BUT HANEY AND BURDETTE ARE GLOOMY
Aaron imitates Covington lapse
Fred Haney … wasn’t happy after yesterday’s loss to the Yankees….
But there was no evidence of unhappiness among the other Braves….
Wes Covington, smiling as always, said “no comment” when asked whether he had lost McDougald’s long drive in the sun in the sixth inning.
At that moment, his team-mate, Henry Aaron, who had just emerged from his shower, put on a clowning act that he intended as an imitation of Covington staggering aimlessly as the ball dropped. Covington only grinned some more.
Haney decided to start Spahn on two days’ rest, and if need be for a deciding game seven, Burdette on two days’ rest.
Overconfidence comes in many forms. With the Braves, it revealed itself in a total lack of concentration, which undermined Spahn. Bauer hit a two-out homer in the first to make it 1–0 before the Braves chased the great Whitey Ford in just an inning and a third, taking a 2–1 lead. Spahn held the lead until the sixth, when Mantle and Howard singled to lead off the inning. Berra hit a game-tying sacrifice fly that scored Mantle, who had advanced on an error by Bruton in center. It was the second error of the afternoon and it cost Spahn the lead.
Haney, of whose managerial abilities Henry would always be critical, allowed Spahn to pitch into the tenth in a 2–2 game. McDougald led off the inning with a home run. Spahn responded by retiring Bauer and Mantle. One strike away from going into the bottom of the tenth down a run, Howard and Berra singled. Then Haney got the message and brought in Don McMahon, who gave up a run-scoring single to big Moose Skowron.
And so it was 4–2 in the bottom of the tenth, the Braves facing Ryne Duren, who had breezed fastball after fastball by them. Duren had entered the game in the sixth inning, had struck out the side twice, in the sixth and ninth innings. With two out and Logan on second, Henry rifled a run-scoring single to center to make it 4–3. Then Adcock singled to put the tying run on third, and the Series-winning run on first. Stengel replaced Duren with “Bullet Bob” Turley, who threw three pitches to Frank Torre. The third was a soft liner to second that floated over McDougald’s head. Henry raced toward home and the game-tying run, only to see McDougald’s legs churning, his arms outstretched, before he leaped and snared the ball into his glove to end the game.
New York won the World Series in Milwaukee, 6–2. And it was there Henry’s doubts about Fred Haney exposed themselves.
Nearly four months earlier, the Yankees and Braves had met for an exhibition game at Yankee Stadium to support the Jimmy Fund, the Boston charity created by Perini to fund cancer research. Before the game, Stengel and Haney shared a jocular moment, with Haney relishing the license to crow, since he had beaten Stengel in the World Series. Both had spent their lives in baseball. Stengel was seven years older than Haney, and at their ages, in other occupations, both would have been retired instead of standing at the center of the sports world.
But that was where similarities ended. Stengel’s ability to butcher the English language beyond recognition made him colorful to the newsmen. But like most theater, it was an act, and the true face behind the Stengel mask was that of a shark. The kindly old clown who picked up his knowledge not from books but the streets was nothing more than a routine. Stengel did not spare feelings for victory. There was no sentimentality for the moment. Take the Yankee starter for game seven, Don Larsen, who held a 2–1 lead. Billy Bruton led off the inning with a single. Frank Torre popped up, and Henry singled to put two on and one out. And what happened next? The old man tramped up the dugout steps, grim and crotchety. He wasn’t coming out for a pep talk. He took the ball from Larsen, in the third inning.
The game was 2–2 in the eighth. Burdette retired Bauer and struck out Mantle. Judging a pitcher by his pitch count, especially on two days’ rest, was still four decades away, but back in 1958, common sense was still available. Burdette had pitched forty-eight hours earlier, had given up just two runs. The entire Braves bull pen would not pitch again in a game that mattered for another six months. Blame it on the times, when men were men and pitchers were not removed from games, or blame it on Fred Haney, his five-foot-four-inch frame a motionless little package as Berra doubled to right.
Haney didn’t move. Then Howard singled Berra in to break the tie. Andy Carey hit a smash to third, which Mathews kept in the infield but couldn’t make a play on to put out runners at the corners, while Henry fumed in the outfield and the bull pen waited for the skipper to lead them into action and save the season. Haney let Burdette face the next batter, Skowron, who had already driven in the go-ahead run off Burdette way back in the second that put the Yankees ahead, 2–1. Skowron, naturally, homered, a big majestic drive that sent an entire city into grieving. Four runs with two out and the manager reduced to being a spectator: The score was now 6–2.
Just as he had been on the mound in game five, when the Braves were cavalier about losing, Turley was on the mound at the end, when Schoendienst lined to Mantle, thereby giving the Yankees the World Series. “Going into the eighth,136 when Burdette still had his tie game, the scent of victory was still strong among Milwaukee’s burghers,” wrote Shirley Povich in the Washington Post. “Coming out of the eighth, after those four Yankee runs, a sickly quiet reigned in the stands, and wooden men went to bat against Turley in the last two innings.”
Over the final three games, Turley had beaten Burdette twice and saved the game in between. The Braves committed six errors over the final two games and struck out twenty-five times over the final three. Henry was brilliant, with nine hits and a .333 average, while Eddie Mathews set a World Series record with eleven strikeouts and a .160 average for the Series.
There was bitterness to spare, and the Braves knew they had cost themselves greatly. They had become the one thing they detested the most. They had become a chapter in the Yankee legend, and Henry would lament often that instead of being a team that won consecutive championships and dominated an era, they had been reduced to, in his words, “just another team that won the World Series.”
Of course, they’d become more than that. They had also become one of the rare teams that gave away a championship with a 3–1 lead in games. You had to go back thirty-three years, to 1925, when the Pirates beat Washington and Walter Johnson lost game seven, to find another team that had a 3–1 lead in games and came away with nothing but dust. There were no pantomimes in the clubhouse after this one. The 1958 season was over, and nobody was laughing.
PERHAPS MORE THAN any other sport, baseball is a game of self-sufficiency, a team game that lives in the individual’s domain. Nobody can hit for you. By virtue of the strikeout, a pitcher can barely include his fielders in the flow of the game. Even defensively, where a team must work together on cutoffs and relays and backups, only one person can catch the ball. On certain days, an outfielder can play the entire game and not even have an opportunity to touch the ball. Sink or swim. If the shortstop is the best player on the field but a ball is hit to deep center, there is no defensive scheme that can be concocted to shield his team from the center fielder’s defensive weaknesses, no way to showcase the better players and hide the mediocre as in football and basketball. In basketball, the player who can’t shoot can always pass the ball to a more gifted offensive player. In baseball, you can’t give an at bat to a teammate. Yo
u catch the ball and hit it, or you fail.
Conversely, because of baseball’s individualist nature, it is also virtually impossible for a position player to dominate every moment of every game. A few basketball players can account for the majority of their team’s shot totals. In extreme cases, one player can score nearly half of his team’s points. In baseball, both halves of the batting order—the first five and the bottom four—each receive approximately the same number of at bats over a single game, regardless of a player’s abilities.
And that was the reason why the National League season of 1959 was so special. It combined the individual and the collective. It featured a supernova eclipsing the established star. And it spotlighted a three-team pennant chase deep into September—the Dodgers, the Giants, and the Braves vying for the prize—a chase that would have lasting consequences for each franchise, and the players involved.
The supernova was Henry Aaron, and for the first month of the season he began to chart his course toward a place more rarefied, more exclusive. He began the season with fury—extra base hits in each of the first seven games of the season, including three in an opening-day destruction of Bob Friend and Pittsburgh at Forbes Field, then three more for the home opener, including singling and scoring the winning run in beating Philly in front of 42,081 at County Stadium. At the end of April, Henry was hitting .508.
Henry did not necessarily need a reason to tear into the league at a more vigorous pace, but two spring-training incidents clearly would have motivated him. The sting of the World Series loss would never go away, and during the spring, Haney did not intend to let any of the players forget, especially the ones who didn’t produce. One day in Bradenton, Mathews, who had died at the plate during the Series, wanted to stay in the batting cage for a few extra swings. “You didn’t want to swing it last October,”137 Haney bellowed for all to hear. Throughout the length of spring training, Haney’s jabs contained just a bit more acid.
Of course, Haney did not seem to blame himself for nodding off at the wheel in game seven, but he gave the players the works. “We could use some more speed,” Haney told Shirley Povich of the Washington Post. “Pitching and hitting sound pretty good, but you can’t overlook other ways to win ball games. In a close game, the big play can beat you. Willie Mays can beat you four ways. He can beat you with a hit or a throw or a steal or a big catch in the outfield. We don’t have one like that on our club.”
For three years, Henry had listened to Fred Haney take his whacks at various players on the team, and now he had taken a shot at him, too. We don’t have one like that on our club. It was true that Henry did not have big stolen-base totals. It was bad enough that Haney had sat in the dugout while the World Series turned to ashes, and now the players had to wake up to the morning paper, with him cutting them off at the knees. And now there was this, Haney waxing nostalgic for Mays.
So Henry swung with purpose, setting the Phillies, the Pirates, the Cardinals, and the Reds aflame. When the Giants came to Milwaukee for three games to start May, Henry had to swallow Sam Jones walking away with a victory in the opener and Willie going four for five in the second game, a Saturday win for San Francisco.
In the finale, Burdette against Johnny Antonelli, the two stars put on a show in a sideways Milwaukee rain. With one on in the first, Mays took a sidearm fastball from Burdette and sent it four hundred feet to dead center, the ball landing softly in the Perini pines in right-center field. In the bottom of the inning, with two out, Henry pounded a home run of his own to make it 2–1. The next time up, Mays lashed a drive into the left-center gap and raced for second, only to be erased by a laser from Pafko. Leading off the fourth, Henry faced Antonelli and wafted another home run, this one close to where Mays’s ball had landed. An inning later, the Braves finished Antonelli with five runs and took the game, 9–4. When Mays and Aaron were finished sparring, Willie had gone two for four, with a home run and two runs driven in. Henry was three for four, with two home runs, three driven in, and two runs scored.
The Dodgers came to County Stadium the next night and Drysdale posted a classic line—eleven innings, ten hits, nine strikeouts—which meant nothing, because he was long gone by the time the matter was decided, at the end of the sixteenth inning, which happened to be three minutes before the National League curfew of 1:00 a.m.
BRAVES SHADE DODGERS,138 3–2
Aaron’s long double breaks up
thriller just before curfew
By Frank Finch/Times Staff Representative
MILWAUKEE—With first place at stake, the Dodgers and Braves battled for 4 hrs, 47 minutes … before Hank Aaron doubled Eddie Mathews home … to give Milwaukee a 3–2 victory….
… Aaron, the greatest hitter in the game today, drove in the tying tally with an accidental bloop single … and then demonstrated his greatness with the clutch clout that ended hostilities at 12:47 a.m.
Even if Fred Haney didn’t believe he had a game breaker the caliber of Mays, Henry played with a certain type of ferocity. Most players played with purpose, but few could make their bodies do what the mind wanted. On May 10, Henry singled in the ninth inning off Joe Nuxhall to cap a doubleheader sweep of Cincinnati.
The Braves took over first place three days later. In the meantime, Henry maintained a scorching pace. In a particularly painful loss in Philadelphia on April 23, he doubled for his first hit of the game in the seventh inning and then homered in the ninth to give the Braves a 3–1 lead, only to see Pizarro give up two homers in the bottom of the ninth and lose 4–3. He would hit in every game for nearly the next month, a twenty-two-game hit streak. In the final game of the streak, a crisp afternoon at Seals Stadium, with the Giants and Braves slugging it out for first place, Sam Jones held on, trailing 2–1 in the fifth. Mays had already homered, and even though he was down in the game, Jones was pleased by his shackling of Henry, who bounced out weakly in his first at bat and struck out in his second.
Jones quickly retired the first two batters of the inning and, with the pitcher, Spahn, standing at the plate, was about to cruise into the dugout. But Spahn singled. So did Bruton. Then Mathews flipped a single to the opposite field in left to make it 3–1. Jones was breathing fire when Henry stepped to the plate. Henry took a Jones delivery and blasted it into the gap in center, over Mays’s head. Bruton scored from second and Bill Rigney made his quick trot across the infield with the hook. Jones left the mound, turning as he headed to the showers to stare down Henry, who was staring right back at second base.
SAM JONES GUNS FOR HANK AARON139
MILWAUKEE (AP)—Sam Jones of the San Francisco Giants was quoted … as saying, “The next time Henry Aaron sees me on the mound, he is going flat. He’s going to get a face full of dirt.” …
“Don’t let ’em print what you said,” Willie Mays pleaded with … Jones….
“Aw, go ahead and print it. I said it.”
And with a little self-satisfied twinkle in his eye, Henry responded, “Sam must have been a little upset at getting beat,” but he knew Jones was a little upset at getting beaten by him. Sam Jones would die of cancer in 1971, at forty-five years of age, and there would not be a moment of reconciliation. Sam Jones took his fight with Henry to the grave.
On June 16, at the cavernous L.A. Coliseum, the trio of Johnny Podres, Clem Labine, and Art Fowler held Henry to a hit in five at bats, dropping his pregame average from .402 to .398. He would not threaten .400 again, but he assaulted pitchers, especially in late innings. Once, it was easily Mays in the National League, Elston Howard and Berra in the American as holders of the clutch-hitting title, but now Henry had elbowed in on the discussion.
But the Braves could not escape their own drift. They had lost first place at the all-star break and would trade places in the standings with the Dodgers throughout the remainder of the summer. In the second week of September, the Giants still held the lead, but the Dodgers and Braves played two bitter games at the Coliseum. In the first, Bob Buhl beat Drysdale, 4–1. The next n
ight was a game the Braves would not forget. Henry struck hard again, going four for six, singling and scoring in the tenth to break a 6–6 game. Up 7–6, with one out in the bottom of the tenth, Maury Wills singled off McMahon, then raced to third on another single by Chuck Essegian. Junior Gilliam wafted a sacrifice fly to tie the score at 7–7 and rejoiced when McMahon walked in the winning run. The Dodgers and Braves were now tied for second, both 79–65.
ON SEPTEMBER 15, the Giants led by two games. The next five games would likely decide the pennant, home games with Milwaukee and the Dodgers. San Francisco had held on to first place since July 10. Bad things always seem worse when they happen to you, and that was why the San Francisco Giants generally lacked sympathy for the Braves. The Giants proceeded to split the series with the Braves, lose all three to the Dodgers—which put Los Angeles in first place for the first time in consecutive days in May—and then lose two more to the Cubs and the Cardinals. The Giants lost eight of their final ten games, and by the final weekend, they were finished.
The Braves, meanwhile, entered the final two games of the season trailing by a game, thanks to Jack Meyer (now pitching for Philadelphia) beating Burdette 6–3 at County Stadium. Losing was one thing, but there were still two games left. But on that night when Mathews hit his forty-fifth home run, staring the Braves in the face should they find a way to take the pennant was not the perennial New York Yankees, but the Chicago White Sox, who had won the pennant for the first time in forty years, not having done so since the infamous year 1919. These Sox, the “Go-Go Sox,” as they were called, couldn’t break a pane of glass with their bats, but they ran all the way to the pennant, beating out Cleveland. The dreaded Yankees were thirteen back.
It wasn’t the losing that night that galled Perini and Burdette and the rest, but the sparse and uninspired crowd of 24,912 that showed up at County Stadium. Had winning become so old so quickly? Was the circus in town? Then came the chilling extrapolations of thought: If the fans weren’t showing up for a team that played for the pennant, the whole franchise would fall through the floorboards if they’d ever had a losing season.
The Last Hero Page 30