No one was ever entirely sure why Keane was so down on Ray Sadecki. Perhaps, some of the players thought, it began with the team poker games on the back of the plane. Solly Hemus had played in them, as did some of the veteran players, such as Musial (who was considered by his teammates a terrible poker player, always drawing to inside straights, but who nonetheless always seemed to win, favored in this, it seemed, as in all else). Sadecki, the same age as one of Musial’s sons, joined the game almost as soon as he joined the team. Clearly, neither Keane nor Harry Walker, one of the other coaches, liked the idea of someone so young being in the poker game. Walker never said anything directly to Sadecki about it, but he kept saying little things to some of the other players: “He’s too young to be in it”; or, “Suppose he loses—he can’t afford to lose the money it takes. It’s going to get him in trouble.”
There was clearly something about Sadecki that put Keane off. Sadecki might be pitching hard, but he did not seem to give off the usual signs that he was pitching hard. Bob Gibson on the mound grunted so hard on every pitch that his throat was parched at the end of a game, but Sadecki pitched so fluidly and with such ease that he did not reveal the effort behind it. Soon after Johnny Keane took over as manager, Harry Walker began telling Sadecki he had to look more fierce when he was on the mound. He was supposed to put on some kind of grim game-day face, much the way Bob Gibson did. But Sadecki was not Gibson, and he did not want to do anything that felt false. These requests struck Sadecki as childish, and he answered that that was the way he looked, and that that was the way he pitched, and he was not going to go through false histrionics or try to look tougher. Sadecki was still, in his own words, primarily a thrower with a good fastball, but not yet, in the complete sense, a pitcher. He did not yet understand the process of how to set up hitters. Yet when he was on the mound, the ball seemed to zip into home plate with surprising speed.
In 1961, Sadecki pitched very well, and at 14-10 he owned the best win-loss record of any starter on the team. He was still only twenty that year, and his future looked bright. There was no tension, as far as he was concerned, between himself and Keane. What happened next was (and some of his teammates agreed) a textbook example of how the hierarchical system worked in baseball in those days, even with men as decent as Bing Devine and Johnny Keane. With his early bonus money Sadecki bought his parents a small restaurant in St. Petersburg, and he spent the winter there after the 1961 season. He had been paid around $7,000 for his first season, and about $11,000 for his second season, and now, after a successful full year, he was asking for $18,000. It was a big jump in salary, but he was also aware of how well he had done, that he was becoming something of a hot property, and that baseball, when it needed to, had in fact a good deal of money with which to reward talent. He was very optimistic about the coming season, and he had high hopes of winning twenty games at the age of twenty-one and becoming one of baseball’s elite pitchers. The ball club, he recalled later, answered his demand of $18,000 with an offer of $13,000 a year. Throughout the winter he and the ball club haggled, and there was very little movement on either side. As spring training approached, it became clear to Sadecki that he was in danger of becoming a holdout. Since he was already in Florida, he went to talk to Johnny Keane about the salary stalemate, hoping that Keane would take his side, turn to Bing Devine, and say something along the line of, “Hey, this kid pitched well for us. Let’s do something for him.”
That turned out to be a considerable misperception on his part, thinking there was any difference between the front office and the field manager, who dealt daily with the players. Bing Devine and Johnny Keane were very close, so much in synch with each other that each, it often seemed, spoke not only for himself but for the other. The meeting went very badly. Sadecki barely began to talk when Keane quickly disabused him of the notion of getting his help. “I know everything that’s going on,” Johnny Keane said. “Bing Devine is a very fair man—I’ve known him a long time and we’ve worked together and there isn’t a better or more decent man in baseball. I want you to sign the contract that he’s offering you, and I want you to be with the team tomorrow.” It was a stunning moment for Sadecki. It was one thing to have the front office play down what he had done, but it was quite another thing to have the manager, the man for whom he had played for an entire season, stonewall him as well. “I’m sorry,” he answered. “I don’t feel that way, but I hope we can work it out.” Not very long after that, Ray Sadecki signed. In what was the accepted practice of the day, they had split the difference, and he signed for about $15,000, which was probably the figure the ball club had penciled in in the first place. But in the process, two things had happened: Ray Sadecki had transgressed in the eyes of Keane and shown himself to be arrogant and ungrateful, and Keane had proven himself a company man in the eyes of a talented young player.
It was clear to Sadecki that everything that happened from then on was about discipline and that he was being taught a lesson. The ball club still had complete control over a player’s life. It could, if it so chose, send a quality player back to the minors. And that soon happened with Sadecki. In the spring of 1962 he did not pitch particularly well, but he had never been a good spring pitcher. As spring training ended, he was not in the starting rotation. Instead he was in the bullpen, which puzzled him, for it was a clear demotion, and yet he had not been driven there by opposing hitters in real league games. This was a hard time for Sadecki, for he was not accustomed to failing. He was in the bullpen, he did some spot starting, and then he and Keane had a major confrontation. It came after a June relief appearance against the Reds and their ace, Bob Purkey. Sadecki had come in and given quite possibly the worst performance of his career. He faced five batters, gave up a single and two home runs, and put two runners on base with his own errors. He left the ball game trailing, 9-1. Eventually the Cardinals came back to win, 10-9, and so the clubhouse was jubilant after the game, but Sadecki was not one of the players taking part in the celebration. Nonetheless, he was surprised when Johnny Keane called him into his office. “That’s the worst effort I’ve ever seen,” Keane began. That, as far as Sadecki was concerned, was the wrong phrase to use, and soon both men were shouting at each other. It was one thing to question his performance—he freely admitted that he had been terrible—but it was another thing to question his effort. “I pitched lousy and I fielded lousy—but don’t ever question my effort,” he said. “I always play hard.” Both men were in a rage, and Keane said that he had intended to fine Sadecki $500 because he had done so poorly, but because the Cardinals had ended up winning, he was only going to fine him $250. If anything, that made Sadecki even angrier. “Are you going to fine me every time I lose?” he asked. “Are you going to fine the other pitchers when they lose? Do you think Cincinnati is going to fine Purkey because he blew a big lead today?” Then Bing Devine walked into the room and suddenly Sadecki felt that he was taking them both on. It was, he thought, an unfair match, and the culmination of a frustrating period. He told Devine, “Why don’t you do us all a favor and trade me? I’m sure there’s some value out there. You don’t seem to want me, and I don’t like it here anymore.” That angered Devine. He said, “The players don’t run the club. We run the club and we decide who we’ll trade.” Things went downhill from there, and by the end of the meeting Devine talked of suspending Sadecki. In fact, Sadecki believed he had been suspended, and so he did not show up at the ball park the next day, and thereupon the club did suspend him. That produced yet another meeting, this time at The Brewery with everyone but Gussie Busch there. A great deal of talking was done, some by Devine, some by Keane, none by Sadecki, and there was a general consensus that everyone had overreacted, that too much had been said in the heat of battle, but Sadecki was still unhappy, and remained $250 short because of the fine, which in those days was the equivalent of almost a week’s pay.
Things did not get better for Sadecki. He thought he could pitch well if only they would put him in the rotation.
There was a meeting in Bing Devine’s office at which Devine and Keane said they wanted to send him back to the minors and Sadecki said no way, he wanted none of that. Devine answered that he had not pitched well, and besides, there was no argument about it, he was going back to the minors. So he went back and pitched well with the Triple A club in Atlanta, going 12-2 including play-off games. That winter, when Sadecki was doing his six-month army service in Minnesota, Bing Devine flew up to see him and suggested that they try to put the entire thing behind them, that it had been a long and difficult season and things had not worked out the way anyone had hoped. That was fine with Ray Sadecki, who quite liked pitching for the Cardinals, but there was no doubt that a certain coolness had developed between him and his manager.
Sadecki did not think that Johnny Keane ever quite forgave him, and two years later, as the 1964 season was unfolding and he was pitching very well, he and some of the other players were aware that when Johnny Keane talked to reporters, he was significantly less generous in his mentions of Sadecki than he was of other players. Even when Sadecki was doing well, Tim McCarver thought, it seemed to irritate Keane, as if it showed that Sadecki could flaunt management’s vision of how a young player should behave and still win, which was in some ways worse than flaunting it and losing.
What was clearly happening was a kind of generational tension. Johnny Keane, who had been produced by a less affluent America, and who did not get his chance to manage a major-league team until he was fifty years old, believed that professional as well as financial success had come too quickly to Sadecki, and that somehow he had not paid his dues. Keane, without realizing it, probably resented Sadecki, because the pitcher, as a successful young bonus baby, was somehow a little beyond his control, unlike a poorer young pitcher in another era or in the lower minor leagues might have been. In 1964, Sadecki started the season poorly. He was 0-3 in early May, which did not bother him that much because he never pitched well in the cold weather. But then he began to hit his stride. In May he won four games and his record was 4-4. “Hey,” he said to one of his teammates, “all I have to do is win four games in June, July, August, and September and I’ll be a twenty-game winner,” which in fact is what happened.
None of his success, though, changed Johnny Keane’s attitude toward him. In early June he pitched an important game against the San Francisco Giants in Candlestick Park. In the ninth inning, with the Cardinals leading, 1-0, Jim Ray Hart led off for the Giants with a single. Sadecki got the next two batters, only to find the immensely dangerous Willie McCovey coming up as a pinch hitter. With a 2-2 count on McCovey, he went to his curve and struck him out. After the game the players were in the locker room washing up, and Sadecki was shaving. Right next to him, also shaving, was Dick Groat. Bob Gibson and Tim McCarver were standing nearby. Everyone was in a good mood because it was a big win against a tough team and Sadecki had done it by striking out one of the most dangerous hitters in baseball. Just then Johnny Keane came over. “Hey, Sadecki,” Keane said. “What did you get McCovey out with?” “A curveball,” Sadecki answered, not picking up that there was a certain edge to Keane’s voice, and that Keane did not seem to be sharing the pleasure of the big win with the rest of the team. “And if you had missed with that, what would you have thrown him on the three-two count?” asked Keane, who had a running argument with some of his pitchers because he wanted them to come in on a 3-2 count with a breaking ball. “A fastball,” said Sadecki, whose best pitch was his fastball. “Yeah, you do that and you’d have gotten beat,” Keane said, and only then did Sadecki and the others realize how angry the manager was. It was a truly weird moment, Sadecki thought, being told that this pitch that he had not even thrown was going to be hit for a home run. Beside him, Gibson and Groat were breaking up. It was funny, Sadecki thought, and yet it was not funny.
11
IN MID-JUNE THE ST. Louis Cardinals were struggling. The high hopes generated by the strong finish in the previous season seemed to be dissipating. The team was not playing well. It hovered near the .500 mark, sometimes going a little above, and then slipping below it. The confidence and the cohesion that had been there late in the 1963 season had disappeared. In addition, there was a gaping weakness in left field where Stan Musial, for so long the best hitter in the National League, had played. His retirement had been announced in late August of the previous season at an emotional ceremony after which, for the final month of the season, just to show that he was not being forced out, Musial concluded one of baseball’s greatest careers by seeming to hit nothing but line drives. Ernie Broglio, the pitcher with the best record on the team in 1963, 18-8, was convinced that the Cardinals were only one player away from winning the pennant: a talented young outfielder. In spring several young players had been tried in the outfield, and there had been much discussion in the press about who was to be Musial’s successor. Musial himself was interviewed regularly about which of the candidates seemed likely to take his place, (STAN’S MAN, CELEMENS, LOOKS GOOD, read a headline in the Post-Dispatch during spring training, referring to the chances of Doug Clemens, one of the many outfield hopefuls.)
That the team was so flat in early 1964 was an immense disappointment to Bing Devine, whose job was obviously on the line. So, starting in late May, Devine called other National League general managers looking to make the trade that would jump-start his team. By this time, Devine would not hesitate to trade a starting pitcher for an outfielder. He was sure that a good farm system in working order would always keep enough strong-armed young men in the pipeline to deliver first-rate pitchers. In putting this Cardinal team together, he had been guided by that philosophy; several years earlier, he had made an important trade of that kind, giving up Toothpick Sam Jones, quite possibly the best pitcher on his team and a man who always pitched with a toothpick in his mouth, for Bill White, a promising outfielder-first baseman, who had played for only one full season in major-league baseball, and who had been away for two years in the army. It was not a popular trade at the time in St. Louis, or even in Devine’s own household, and he had come home that night only to find his wife and daughter at the dinner table, both of them with toothpicks in their mouths.
Now Devine felt the pressure mounting on him as the June fifteenth trading deadline approached. What he wanted was a quality hitter who could play the outfield every day. He began to push harder to make a deal. Devine and Johnny Keane had long ago agreed that, given the changing nature of major-league baseball, particularly in the National League, which had more and better black players coming in, speed was increasingly important. They talked often about the diminishing chances of finding a great new superstar in the rough, a young DiMaggio, Williams, Mantle, Mays, or Aaron. Again and again they talked late into the night on this one theme: How do you create a winning team if you aren’t fortunate enough to have a superstar in the lineup every day? Coming up with a superstar was always, to some degree, a matter of luck, and it was becoming tougher all the time with more and more teams spending increased amounts of money on scouting. Now, in the sixties, even those teams that had once not deigned to search for black talent were scouring the back roads of the Deep South. In fact, the region was now crawling with scouts. Therefore, they decided, if you had to narrow your expectations on finding super talent, you had to set other priorities. They both decided that speed was the one thing you could spot early on, and it was something that could not be coached. If a young player had speed, there was a chance that the other qualities—the ability to hit consistently, and to field a position well—might come later. The other aspects of what might constitute a great player—the ability to hit for power, the hunger to improve, the ability to play well under pressure—were harder to gauge. But speed was an elemental ingredient for success, particularly as the nature of the game was changing.
If anything, Keane believed even more passionately in the idea of speed than Bing Devine. The player he had wanted for more than a year was a seemingly undistinguished black outfielder for the Ch
icago Cubs named Lou Brock. Brock was twenty-four years old at the time, and he was not a particularly good outfielder, he had not hit very well in his brief time in the major leagues, and he had an erratic arm. Worse, after two full seasons, he was nothing more than a .260 hitter. An outfielder who was a defensive liability and who hit only .250 or .260 was not exactly a gem. Still, there was the matter of Brock’s speed. He was obviously one of the two or three fastest men in the major leagues, perhaps the fastest. In addition, the Cardinal executives were privately convinced that his talents were being poorly showcased in Chicago, and that the Cubs were the wrong team for him. Because of the nature of their small ball park, the Cubs were not a running team. They tended to wait for the wind to blow out in Wrigley Field and go for the big inning. Stealing bases was considered a high-risk art form for a team like that, thus Brock had never been set loose as a base runner. Nor was Wrigley Field an easy place for a young man to play the outfield, because the sun came right in on the right fielder.
October 1964 Page 15