October 1964

by David Halberstam

  The new-breed players were not deferential to the veteran players. From the start they talked to the senior players—the great stars of the team—as if they were equals. The first time Pepitone was sent in to replace Moose Skowron for defensive purposes, the brash Pepitone told Skowron, “Moose, you must have the bad glove.” Skowron, a veteran ballplayer and firm upholder of tradition, would walk through the locker room, looking at the younger players and shaking his head, saying that it had never been like this when he was a rookie. Pepitone answered by telling Skowron to watch out, because he was going to take his job, which in fact he eventually did. When in November 1962 Skowron was traded to the Dodgers, Pepitone sent him a cable after the trade: DEAR MOOSE: TOLD YOU SO. JOE PEP.

  From the start, Pepitone, in particular, ignored the team hierarchy. If the normally unapproachable DiMaggio walked into the locker room, it was Pepitone who might yell out, “Hey, Clipper, how are you—do you want to have dinner tonight?” To everyone’s amazement this seemed to please DiMaggio. It was Pepitone who, when asked by Mantle to bring him a beer, demanded that Mantle bring him a beer, which seemed to amuse Mantle as well. It quickly became clear that Pepitone loved Mantle, loved being Mantle’s pal and basking in his reflected glory; in fact, Pepitone wanted nothing so much as to be Mantle’s caddy. One or two of the older players thought there was a certain desperate quality to Pepitone’s clowning, and his need for Mantle’s approval. In the locker room, Pepi always had his eye on Mantle, watching to see if the great star approved of what he was doing. Some were reminded of school days when an insecure and not particularly popular kid wanted to win favor with the most popular boy in the class.

  Generally Pepitone was successful in his attempts to charm Mantle. Pepitone, an amused Mantle said at the time, was “the freshest rookie I ever saw,” but he also had a quick bat, a good swing, and could play both first and the outfield. Pepitone loved it when Mantle nicknamed him “Pepinose” (Stengel, in those days before ethnic slurs were taboo, called him “Pepperoni”) and was thrilled when Mantle told a sportswriter that Pepitone was the key to the 1963 season. “I figure we’ll win by a nose,” Mantle said. Yet even the easygoing Mantle, a player always looking to be amused, thought there were times when Pepitone overstepped the bounds. Once, during batting practice, Pepitone jumped into the batting cage and got ready to take his swings when Mantle wanted to take extra swings because he wasn’t hitting well. “Five swings, Slick,” Pepitone said to an astonished and then enraged Mantle. The two exchanged sharp words, and even though Pepitone was embarrassed to have done the unthinkable, to have provoked his idol, he was in too deep and could not back down. Much to his regret, he heard himself telling Mantle to get to the ball park earlier and get himself wrapped earlier if he wanted extra swings, and not to hold up his teammates. It was not, as far as Mantle was concerned, a small matter, and he did not speak to Pepitone for several weeks, leaving Pep increasingly dispirited and desperate.

  There were other sins. During spring training the Yankees had a dress code: the players were to come down to breakfast in the motel in their civilian clothes, which meant a sports jacket, and then go back to their rooms and change. On one occasion Pepitone and Linz came into the restaurant in their Yankee uniforms. Houk was furious, as if this were somehow demeaning the uniform, and he sent them right back to their rooms to change. Pepitone was the first Yankee to bring a hair dryer into the locker room, as much as anything else to fight his onrushing baldness. On occasion he seemed to enjoy going on the field without his cap, as if to unveil himself for the young women in the stands. He not only tended to wear his street clothes tighter than most of his teammates did (on the same day he bought his new convertible, he also bought several flashy suits, styled, in his words, like those of “the younger, sharper racket guys”), he also started to wear his uniform tighter than the prevailing style of the day for ballplayers.

  Because they were young and ebullient and somewhat surprised to be playing for, of all teams, the Yankees, they showed their pleasure openly, especially to the younger sportswriters. Those writers were frustrated with the often unsympathetic older players, whose quotes seemed to come from some central clearinghouse of approved and sanitized athlete-speak, so, in turn, they were drawn to the extroverted new breed. But in the Yankee clubhouse the younger players were believed not only to talk too much, but to have talked before their turn. The ability to be quoted in a newspaper was not, in the Yankee tradition, a God-given right; rather, it was like being given a low rather than a high uniform number, something that was supposed to be earned, preferably over many years. They had not yet earned the right to be quoted.

  This clubhouse code was set not by Mantle or Ford or Berra, who by and large could have cared less (and who were probably delighted to see the local sportswriters bothering someone other than themselves). Instead, it was the older players, more often than not the part-timers of marginal talents, who were bothered most. It was not surprising that the second-tier players were unusually zealous to protect their privileges as Yankees, for it was not individual play that secured their niche in baseball history, but their place on those dynastic teams. They viewed a younger player who talked too much and whose locker became something of a haven for the beat reporters as seeking too much publicity and promoting himself. He was a member, they said, of the Three-I League: I-I-I. In addition, there was a suspicion that a player who talked too much was somehow disloyal to the team, and might be giving away secrets. When Bouton or Linz or Pepitone were too available to reporters, the other players would pass their lockers and make a gesture with their fingers of a mouth moving, the implication being that the player was talking too much, and was too close to the press.

  4

  THE YANKEE ROSTER WAS essentially set when spring training began. There was, the players believed, one additional place left—Yogi Berra was looking for a reliever, and in early spring it came down to a contest between a player named Tom Metcalf and one named Pete Mikkelsen. By all odds Metcalf, then twenty-three, was the favorite, for he had gone further and accomplished significantly more than Mikkelsen, twenty-four, whose career had been rocky. Metcalf had played for three years at Northwestern and pitched at a high level in the minor leagues: he had a wide variety of pitches, with a particularly good curve. Johnny Sain, the perceptive pitching coach, thought him just on the verge of becoming a good big-league pitcher. Metcalf had been brought up to New York from the Triple A farm club in Richmond in mid-1963 when Houk began to worry about his bullpen. Because he had spent time with the parent club, it did not occur to him until rather late in the spring of 1964 that he was competing with a pitcher who had never pitched above Class A. Even Pete Mikkelsen himself thought the fact that he had been invited to the major-league camp something of a fluke. He did not have a very good fastball (“at best it was mediocre”) and he did not have a very good curve. He did have a wicked palm ball, a pitch that allowed him to rear back and throw with a violent arm motion, while the ball itself proceeded slowly toward the plate. In much of his career in the minors he had been on the edge of failure; in 1961 with Binghamton he had been 4-10, and the next year, with Augusta, he had been 3-5 and he felt he had pitched badly. At that point he was sure he was on his way out of the world of professional baseball to one populated primarily by blue-collar workers, like most of his high school classmates from Staten Island. To make bad matters worse, in early 1963 he hurt his arm at the start of the season. Because of the pain, Mikkelsen had been forced to start throwing his fastball with a shoulder-high delivery instead of a straight overhand delivery as he had in the past. When he began to do that, the ball started to sink on the hitters, and they regularly beat the ball into the ground. He had become, quite involuntarily, a very good sinker-ball pitcher.

  Rube Walker, Mikkelsen’s manager in Class A, spotted the sinker and told him to stay with it. “Don’t change a damn thing,” he told Mikkelsen. Mikkelsen pitched well during 1963 with Augusta—his record there had been 11-6 in 49 ga
mes, and his ERA had dropped to 1.47—and much to his surprise he joined the big-league club in the spring of 1964, largely on Walker’s recommendation, he was sure. He did not think he was pitching terribly well that spring, but he kept surviving the successive roster cuts. Finally, during the last two weeks in Florida, he realized that it had come down to himself and Metcalf. Mikkelsen later said, “Metcalf was a prospect, and I was a suspect.” But Berra had liked sinker-ball pitchers in the past, and now that he was about to manage, he liked them even more, because they could come in during tense situations and get the batter to hit the ball on the ground. Walker kept telling Mikkelsen that he was doing well, that all he had to do was to keep throwing the sinker, which he did, even in batting practice, much to the annoyance of the veteran hitters. “All those hitters, they have this belief—thou shalt not pass,” Walker said. “It’s like a sin for them to get a walk. So they’re going to swing and if you throw them the sinker, they’ll beat it into the ground. And then you’ll make the club.”

  Metcalf, in the meantime, thought he was throwing well, and not giving up very much in the way of hits or earned runs. He had not been pleased earlier in his career when the Yankees had turned him into a relief pitcher. He thought they had done it because he was tall (six feet two and a half inches) and slim (about 165 pounds), and they had decided that a player that skinny might lack the stamina necessary for a starter. His best pitch was a big roundhouse curve. Metcalf could throw it for a strike when he was behind in the count. “The Hammer,” Ernie White, his manager in Augusta in the Sally League in 1962, liked to call it. There had been a clash of coaching wills that season when the Yankees sent the old Phillies reliever Jim Konstanty down for a few days as a pitching coach. Konstanty taught what the players called the Jim Konstanty Curve, which was a smaller curve that did not break as wide, but more sharply. Konstanty told Metcalf that his curve was too big, and that he needed to work on one that was smaller and sharper. “Your curve may break out of the strike zone,” Konstanty said, “and maybe you won’t get the call.” So Metcalf had worked on the Konstanty Curve and started throwing it. As soon as he tried it in a game, Ernie White called time and ran out to the mound. “Where the hell is the Hammer, kid?” he asked. Metcalf said he was not throwing it anymore on Jim Konstantys advice. “Listen, you dumb son of a bitch. You’ll be riding the first train back to Whiskey Rapids or wherever the hell you’re from if you don’t go to the Hammer on the next pitch, and as for Konstanty, he’ll be gone in two days, but I’ll still be here managing this goddamn team, even if you’re not on it.” With that Metcalf went back to his big curve, winning 14 games and losing only 6. He reached Richmond in 1963, his third year in organized baseball, gaining a record of 9-5 there with an earned run average of 2.69 before being called up to New York. In New York he had one bad outing and appeared in seven other games. But with Hal Reniff, Marshall Bridges, and Steve Hamilton pitching well, the Yankees used Metcalf less and less. That bothered him, and late in the season he asked Ralph Houk to send him back to Richmond where he would be able to play regularly, but Houk said it was too risky, because the World Series rosters were set and if Metcalf were sent back, Houk might lose an eligible player. He said he was sorry the way things had turned out, but that Metcalf would get a good shot to make the roster and do some serious pitching next season. Gradually that spring it dawned on Metcalf that he and Mikkelsen were competing for the last spot on the roster, that they were pitching on the same day against the same teams, to see how they did against the same hitters. That did not strike him as fair, since Mikkelsen had not yet pitched above Class A. What do I have to prove? Metcalf thought. I’ve been in Triple A and I’ve done well, and he’s never been above Class A. There were stairs to climb, and in his mind he had climbed them and Mikkelsen had not. The other Yankee pitchers watched the competition with interest. They noticed one additional difference between the two players, and that was that Mikkelsen seemed to carry himself with more physical authority than most minor-leaguers. There was a sense that he would be grizzled one day, and there was an obvious physical toughness about him. By contrast, Metcalf had a cherubic face, innocent and unlined; he looked like someone who might be the most popular member of a college fraternity. This did not mean that Metcalf was, in fact, more innocent or gentler than Mikkelsen or that Metcalf cared any less about getting to the majors, but Metcalf looked innocent, and Mikkelsen looked tough. To some of the other players that was an important distinction, for they believed in the macho theory of baseball decision-making: you could put pictures of two equally talented players in front of several coaches and a manager, and they would, being pretty grizzled themselves, invariably choose the tougher-looking player.

  As the competition continued, some players told Pete Mikkelsen that he was doing well, but he did not believe them. When there was a report in one of the New York papers about him and his improving prospects, the story referred to him as Jim Mikkelsen, which did not leave him optimistic. But he knew that Yogi liked sinker-ball pitchers, and the other players pointed out to him that if his name was in the papers, it was probably because Yogi had put it there—the sportswriters never pushed prospects without getting signals from the manager. But then the day came when he pitched against the Minnesota Twins, and he looked up at the plate to see the immense figure of Harmon Killebrew facing him. Here was the man believed by most players to be the only other hitter in the American League as strong as Mantle. Harmon Killebrew at bat, Mikkelsen thought. I must be getting closer to the major leagues than I ever imagined if I’m pitching to him. He gave Killebrew nothing but sinkers, and Killebrew drove four of them into the ground, foul. Although in the next inning Tony Oliva hit a ball off him that seemed to go past the flagpole in deepest center field, the fact that he had been able to handle Killebrew was something that the manager and the coaches had to have noticed.

  Mikkelsen still believed that he was going to be sent back to a minor-league camp, although at a higher level than he had originally believed possible, when Rube Walker called him over. “Where do you think you’re going next year?” Mikkelsen answered that he was hoping to go to Double A or, maybe with luck, Triple A. “You ain’t going to no Double A, you’re going to New York,” Walker said. Mikkelsen said that they did not have a team in New York. “Yes, they do,” Walker said. “You’re going with the big club, the Yankees.” Mikkelsen still did not believe Walker, but ten days later, when they were set to leave camp, Pete Sheehy, the clubhouse attendant, who knew every rumor ahead of everyone else on the team, asked him where he wanted his things shipped. “What do you mean where do I want them shipped?” he asked. “Where in New York?” Sheehy persisted. That was how Mikkelsen learned he had made the big-league roster. He later heard that there had been a split in the executive ranks—that Yogi and Rube Walker, a former catcher for Brooklyn and a close friend of Yogi’s, had favored him, while Houk preferred Metcalf, but that Yogi had won out. What had made the difference, the other pitchers were sure, was the fact that Mikkelsen had one great pitch, the perfect go-to pitch for a reliever, because it produced ground balls. Metcalf, possibly more talented, had no comparable pitch that would serve a reliever so well.

  Bruce Henry, the traveling secretary, asked Mikkelsen how many sports coats he owned. Mikkelsen answered that he owned one, because that was the way young men of limited means dressed in those days: one suit for weddings and funerals and one sports jacket. Henry told him that he had to buy some new clothes, that there was a dress code on the team and that one sports coat was not going to get him through the season.

  Tom Metcalf was called in by Yogi Berra and told that he was being sent back to Richmond. Metcalf was sure he had outpitched Pete Mikkelsen, and he became extremely angry. He thought that their competition had been rigged, and that Mikkelsen had had the job from the start. He and Berra exchanged angry words. He asked to be traded, but it was clear that the Yankees had no interest in doing that, that they still saw him as a top prospect. Houk came over to him l
ater that day and apologized, saying that it was Yogi’s decision and Yogi’s team. For a time Metcalf thought of not reporting to Richmond, but he realized that he would be challenging the entire structure of baseball, so he relented. That spring, having apparently learned a lesson in Florida, he began to work on a sinker ball. During one inning he tried to throw a sinker and felt a small, sharp pain in his elbow. When he left the mound, his arm did not hurt that much, but when he went back out to pitch, he bounced the first pitch halfway to home plate to Jake Gibbs, who was catching. Metcalf tried one more pitch and bounced that one too. The next day he had very little feeling in his fingers or in his arm from the elbow down. He had damaged the nerve in his right, or throwing, elbow, and he was done for that year. Though he made one major attempt to come back in 1965, his career was essentially finished, and he never made it back to the major leagues.