Pete Ramos was not eligible for the World Series—he had come over to the Yankees after the September 1 deadline. There had been some talk with the Phillies of allowing a player from each club to be added to the rosters, because the Phillies were short of pitching too, but when the Phillies collapsed, Ramos’s chances died as well. The Cardinals had no intention of doing anything that would allow him a shot at eligibility. It was a black day, Ramos thought when he found out he could not pitch. The Yankees invited him to come with the team to St. Louis, but he had no taste for it. When they played in New York he went out to the park early to pitch batting practice, and then went to his room at the Concourse Plaza Hotel to watch the games by himself in his room.
26
THERE WAS, OF COURSE, some apprehension among the Cardinals about playing the mighty Yankees. The Yankees had been to the World Series every season since time began, it seemed, and they knew about big games. They knew how to intimidate their opponents, and somehow in a World Series, no matter where the game was played, they always managed to seem like the home team. As they came on the field for the first game, they did not trickle out of the dugout as other teams did, but came out as a team; because they were big men, they came out big. They seemed to boost themselves as they came over the last step of the dugout in order to look even bigger. On the field, watching, Lou Brock could not figure out if it was intentional, but it struck him then that they knew how to play the game of intimidation and how to look imposing. Curt Flood was standing with Brock, and he was thinking the same thing Brock was. “Hey, Lou, when they come down, they still have to play baseball,” Flood said.
In fact, the Cardinals could still hardly believe they were in the World Series. Winning the pennant had come as a quick high for the Cardinals, and an equally quick downer for the Phillies. The only person who appeared to show any stress at the end was Barney Schultz. He had held up well during the last few weeks, pitching brilliantly every day, it seemed, with the game on the line on every pitch. When the Cardinals won the pennant, though, he felt the tension for the first time. Just before the World Series started he had been driving to the ball park with his old pal from the minor leagues Joe Morgan, who later went on to manage the Red Sox. Suddenly Schultz pulled over to the side of the road. “What’s the matter, Barney?” Morgan asked. “I’m having trouble seeing,” Schultz said. He tried to drive one more time and then pulled over again. “You better drive, Joe,” he said. Schultz immediately went to see Dr. Middleman, the team doctor, who told him to wear sunglasses when he got to the field. “What you’re suffering from, Barney, is stress,” Middleman said. “That’s all. For weeks the game has been hanging on every pitch you’ve thrown in every game you’ve pitched, and now you’re showing the reaction. It’s nothing very new. I’ve had it as a doctor—after an operation. You’ll be fine. Get some dark glasses, and a good night’s sleep, and try and relax. You don’t even know the pressure you’ve been under.” Schultz took his advice, began to relax, and gradually his vision came back.
On the day of the first game, Bob Uecker was shagging balls out in left field with some of the other scrubs. In order to mark the festivities, three Dixieland bands were stationed there, and at one point they took a break and put down their instruments. Uecker wandered over and picked up a tuba. For a moment he thought of trying to play it, because that might amuse the other players, but just then someone hit a slow, lazy fly out to left. Instinctively, because he was born to be a comic, Uecker circled under the ball with the waiting tuba. He tried for the catch in the mouth of the tuba, but missed. The next one he caught. Then he missed one. The players began to laugh and the crowd began to cheer. He missed two more flies and then caught one. Some of the balls dented the tuba, and the owner was not amused, sending the Cardinals and Uecker a bill for $250. His teammates, though, were delighted. It was the World Series against the mighty Yankees and the Cardinals were very relaxed.
Because Gibson had pitched so much at the end of the season, there had been no chance to rest him, so they opened width Ray Sadecki, who, true to his own projections, had been a twenty-game winner. He was pitching against Whitey Ford, who, despite injuries and declining physical ability, had nonetheless managed a record of 17-6 with an ERA of 2.13.
In the first inning there was a critical play. With one out, Brock singled. Then Groat singled to right, and Brock kept going, without hesitation, to third. It was something he had thought about before the game—testing Mantle—and he had decided he was going to do it every time. After all, he had challenged the great Roberto Clemente in the National League, and Clemente was a great defensive player at the height of his power, not an aging one playing in the wrong position, watching his skills atrophy and undermined by bad legs. Mantle, playing right, had not even bothered to make a throw. The Cardinal book on the Yankees said that they could run on Mantle, and now they started to do it, almost from the moment the game began. It was an early sign not just of his own physical decline and the fact that he was now a defensive liability, but that the Cardinals were the younger, faster, more aggressive team. Brock had come in to score when Boyer flied to Mantle.
Ray Sadecki was not sharp that day. He had pitched well at the end of the season, but in the next-to-last game against the Mets, the 15-5 defeat, he had been bombed, lasting one inning. The World Series was hard for him, he thought, because you had to go on scouting reports and that was not the way he liked to pitch; rather, he liked to rely on his personal feel for the hitters. Nor were the Yankees an easy team for him. He liked to come in with a high fastball, and the Yankees murdered high fastballs, and in the second inning Elston Howard singled, and then Tresh, a good high-fastball hitter, hit a tremendous drive into the left-center-field bleachers. The Yankees got another run on two more singles and might have gotten yet another one except that Lou Brock threw out Whitey Ford trying to score from second. The Yankees had three runs and they had gotten them on five hits. The Cardinals got one back in the bottom of the second when Mike Shannon singled and moved to second on Dal Maxvill’s tapper back to Ford. Sadecki singled Shannon in. It was 3-2, In the New York fifth, the Yankees grouped three hits for one more run, making it 4–2. That was normally a nice lead to hand to Whitey Ford midway through a World Series game.
For Tim McCarver, all of twenty-two, the excitement was extraordinary. It was not just the myth of the Yankees that the Cardinals were battling that day, it was also the myth of Whitey Ford, the greatest big-game pitcher of baseball for more than a decade. He had been pitching in World Series games since Tim McCarver was nine years old, and he was the player to whom you gave the ball on critical days and who always rose to the occasion. Anyone else might have been excited and nervous on this day, McCarver thought, with the crowd at Busch Stadium and the giant press corps, not to mention the even bigger invisible crowd of 40 million at home watching on television, but Whitey Ford was as cool as could be. There was no fanfare to him, except perhaps a certain barely detectable cockiness in his stride. There he was—the pitcher with the most World Series starts, the most World Series innings pitched, the most World Series wins; he walked out to the mound like a man going out to grab a bus to take him to work in the morning.
As the game developed, though, it was clear to McCarver that Ford did not have much that day, that he was probably pitching in considerable pain. Ford had always triumphed on the basis of intelligence, placement, and a wicked curve, but on this day his curve was flat. On another day in another park with a smaller crowd and less scrutiny, Ellie Howard might have been able to cut the ball for him and then he might have been able to have given the ball some movement. But this was neither the time nor the place for that. There was a good chance they could beat him that day, McCarver decided.
It was Mike Shannon who helped get Ford in the sixth. Bing Devine had brought Shannon up in mid-season to make the Cardinals’ outfield complete, and he had done just that. Shannon was big and strong, a good defensive right fielder with a wicked arm and genuine power. I
n half a season he had hit 9 home runs and knocked in 43 runs. His nickname was “Moon” or “Moon Man” because of his eccentricities. Someone once asked McCarver why Shannon was nicknamed Moon Man, and all McCarver had said was, “Just think about it.” Ted Simmons, who was to be McCarver’s eventual replacement, remembered being with Shannon in the locker room after a game when Shannon turned to him and said, “Teddy, I’ve got something to tell you.” “What is it?” Simmons asked. “Insurance,” Shannon answered. It was, Simmons recalled, like the scene in The Graduate when someone said “Plastics” to Dustin Hoffman, and Simmons then decided that the nickname fit.
In the bottom of the sixth Boyer singled and took second on a passed ball. Then Bill White, trying to do too much and overswinging, struck out. That brought up Shannon. He was new to the majors and new to Whitey Ford, but he thought Ford was off that day. Shannon thought Ford had been trying to throw sliders inside and missing. Indeed, Ford threw Shannon what looked like a slider, and hung it, and Shannon drilled it. It was one of the hardest balls he hit in his career, a ball with a Mantle-like orbit that went over the 358 sign and hit the B in the BUDWEISER sign. The estimates were that the ball went some five hundred feet in the air. “The longest ball I’ve ever seen him hit,” Johnny Keane said afterward. There was a huge photo on the front page of the local paper that night with a dotted line showing the trajectory of Shannon’s home run as it hit the sign, and years later, when he was a restaurateur in St. Louis, Shannon asked Ford to sign the picture. “You son of a bitch, you want to get me twice, first when you hit it,” Ford said, “and now when I’m supposed to sign it.” The home run tied the score, and then McCarver doubled and Al Downing replaced Ford. Ford was through for the day, through for the Series, and in terrible pain. His left arm was dead, and he was to undergo two operations before he got complete feeling back in it again. The Yankees did not announce that; instead, hoping to make the Cardinals think that their bullpen was deeper than it was, they announced that he was bothered by a bad heel and might still pitch again. When a reporter asked Ford himself whether he might pitch later in the Series, he said, “There’s nothing wrong with me that a big ball park can’t cure.” In truth, his arm hurt so much that he could barely cut his food.
Downing was not a natural relief pitcher. Carl Warwick, a pinch hitter, singled, the first of his three successful pinch hits in the series, and that scored McCarver. Curt Flood drove a ball, carried by the wind, to the base of the left-field wall, and Tom Tresh finally lost it in the glare. (“I lost it in the sun. ... When it came down I couldn’t catch it, you can’t catch what you can’t see,” he said afterward. The ball came down three feet from his glove and went for a triple. Julian Javier, running for Warwick, scored, and that essentially was the game. The Cardinals had drawn first blood, 9-5, and had shown that they might be a tougher team in a short series due to their vastly superior speed.
27
THE SECOND GAME, ON October 8, pitted Bob Gibson against Mel Stottlemyre. Each was the ace of the staff, and normally it was the matchup that would have taken place in the first game, but Gibson had not been ready to pitch then. He had pitched eight innings in the 1-0 loss to the Mets on October 2, and then had gone four hard innings in relief as the winning pitcher in the final game of the season on October 4, to clinch the pennant. The great question was whether he was sufficiently rested even now. In the first inning Gibson struck out Bobby Richardson, Maris, and then Mantle. If he was not entirely rested, and Tim McCarver, his catcher, did not think he was, then he was hiding it very well. Not very often did all three batters in the lead part of the Yankee batting order strike out in the first inning. In the second Gibson struck out both Ellie Howard and Tom Tresh. That made five strikeouts in two innings.
Later, in seasons that followed, as he watched Gibson intimidate opposing hitters, Tom Tresh thought the Yankees had been relatively lucky in this Series in the sense that they were new to Gibson. They were battling only his skills, no small thing in itself, instead of having to battle both that and his reputation, as teams would have to in the future. For after this World Series he would not be just Bob Gibson, he would be the great Bob Gibson, and his myth would loom bigger, and because of that, in the minds of the hitters, his fastball would be faster, the slider would break sharper and wider, and the word about how he shaved hitters with a fastball would be more ominous. The myth would work to his advantage in the future, Tresh thought, and lucky for them that the myth was still in the making.
Mel Stottlemyre looked very cool out on the mound. Young players, Tim McCarver thought, consciously or unconsciously, tended to take on the mannerisms of the best players on their teams. At the beginning of the Series the Cardinal players had watched Tom Tresh go out to his position in left field, and they had detected a slight limp. “Does he have a bad knee?” someone asked. “No,” replied Ken Boyer. “He runs like that because that’s the way Mantle runs.” Now, as he watched Stottlemyre, McCarver decided that in some ways Stottlemyre had picked up the mannerisms of Whitey Ford. Nothing seemed to shake him. He did not look like someone who had been pitching in Richmond only a few weeks earlier; if anything, he looked like he had been dealing with pressure as long as Whitey Ford had.
Stottlemyre himself was amazed but not distracted by all the attention caused by the World Series. It seemed as if there were more reporters there than there were people back in Mabton, Washington, where he had grown up. He was surprised that there were so many people in one place whose sole purpose, it seemed, was to ask him questions, the answers to which did not seem to interest him very much, and so he doubted they would interest the strangers either. The other thing he noticed about the World Series was the noise. A low buzz seemed to be everywhere, beginning the moment he left his hotel room and got into an elevator; the closer you got to the ball park, the louder it got.
Stottlemyre had heard that Bob Gibson was a power pitcher with a great fastball, and he watched him in those early innings with true admiration. This was a highly skilled professional at work, a man of rare determination; he had a great fastball, a great slider, but most of all, thought Stottlemyre, a great presence on the mound. But Stottlemyre was careful not to be drawn outside himself. He was not overmatched in pitching against Gibson, he reminded himself. He had to be careful not to change his style and try to become a power pitcher. There was a tendency in a big game when you went against a power pitcher like Gibson to go outside your game and try to match him. That was a mistake, Stottlemyre knew. He was pleased with his stuff on that day, his ball was breaking sharply and his placement was excellent. Still, he thought, if you were inventing a pitcher for one great game like this, you would probably invent Bob Gibson.
Yet, if there were an advantage, Stottlemyre thought, it might well be his, because a power pitcher tended to wear down in the late innings, whereas a sinker-ball pitcher, like himself, might go all day. Ellie Howard had been very good with him that day, telling him not to compete with Gibson but to stay within himself, and above all not to overreach. So he fed the left-handers sliders on the outside of the plate, and the right-handers got the sinker ball.
The Yankees were supposed to be special because they always won, and Bob Gibson, new to pitching against them, at once saw that they were no better than the great players of the National League. Yet at the same time he wondered how much truth still existed to their myth. They still had the aura. They still wore the pinstripes, and their reputation made it sound like they could walk on water. It was part of his job, he believed, to bring them down to size.
The one player he was apprehensive about in their lineup was Mantle, because he had heard so much about him. Mantle was always being compared to Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, and Hank Aaron, so Gibson knew he had to be a very good hitter. He liked the idea of being pitted against the best. Tim McCarver thought that Gibson was good that day, but not prime Gibson. He was still a little tired. His fastball, McCarver thought, was good, but it did not have the explosion of Gibson at h
is best. The Yankees, he thought, might still see that before the Series was over.
Mantle had to bat lefty against him. The great Yankee slugger limped slightly when he came up to the plate, and then, when he swung, Gibson could see him cringe in pain, anguish obvious on his face. Gibson could see as well that Mantle could not shift his weight properly when he swung. The scouting book on him was to come inside and keep the ball away on the outside, but Gibson thought that was wrong. Gibson did not like to come inside to hitters in general, and he saw that Mantle had trouble shirting his weight. The great reputation, Gibson thought, at least when Mantle was batting left-handed, had little to do with the figure standing in front of him, who was clearly coming to the end of his career and was playing despite terrible pain. Gibson struck him out swinging in the first, got him on a called third strike in the fourth, and walked him in the sixth. In the seventh Mantle hit a hard grounder to second, where Maxvill blocked the ball and threw him out.
The Cardinals scored first in the third when Shannon singled and Maxvill hit a ground single past third, sending Shannon to second. Gibson sacrificed, advancing the runners to second and third, and when Flood grounded softly to Linz at short, Shannon scored. The Yankees tied it in the fourth. Howard doubled, and when Brock tried a shoestring catch on Pepitone, the ball got by him. Howard stopped at third. Tresh was given an intentional pass. Clete Boyer flied to Flood in center, and Howard scored. In the sixth Mantle walked, then Pepitone was allegedly hit by a pitch, a call the Cardinals bitterly disputed (and still dispute), and which the Yankees privately thought was a bad one. Mantle scored on a single by Tresh. That made it 2-1.
In the seventh the Yankees started to break it open. Phil Linz singled to left and went to third on a wild pitch. Bobby Richardson singled to center and Linz scored. The Yankees scored another run on two more hits. In the eighth the Cardinals picked up a run. Gibson came out of the game for a pinch hitter in the eighth, with the Cards trailing, 4–2, and in the top of the ninth the Yankees picked up four more runs, most memorably when Mantle hit a wicked double off reliever Gordon Richardson. Mantle came back to the dugout absolutely furious with himself. “I’d like to give them back the double—I should have hit a home run off him,” he said. The Yankees won the second game, 8-3; Gibson had struck out nine men, but Stottlemyre had gotten sixteen men out on ground balls. The teams were going to New York tied, 1-1.
October 1964 Page 36