by Gruver , Ed;
Stahl’s walk ended Pappas’s bid for MLB’s first perfect game since Catfish Hunter’s in 1968. Pappas retired the next batter, former Cub Garry Jestadt, on a pop-up to second, and the Cubs won 8–0. It remains the only perfect game bid to be broken up by a walk to the twenty-seventh hitter.
Froemming’s call incensed Pappas, who shouted at Froemming from the mound. Froemming, in his second season as an MLB umpire, told Cubs catcher Randy Hundley that if Pappas walked toward home plate, “Tell him to keep walking,” because Froemming was going to run him out, no-hitter or not.
Pappas later referenced Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series in which umpire Babe Pinelli called a game-ending third strike on a pitch that appeared to be high and outside.
It’s a home game in Wrigley Field, Pappas said later. He’s pitching for the Cubs, and the score is 8–0 in his favor. What does Froemming have to lose by not calling the last pitch a strike to finish a perfect game?
Froemming’s response was he was not aware a perfect game was on the line. Besides, he said, he was an umpire, not a fan. Froemming would call ten more no-hitters in his career.
The date—September 2—has been a historic one in Cubs’ history. Pappas’s no-hitter was preceded in 1970 by Williams’s setting an NL record by playing in his 1,117th straight game. Williams ended the streak the next day, when he asked Durocher to sit him down. In 1955 Banks set a record for shortstops on September 2 when he slammed his fortieth home run, eclipsing the mark set by Vern Stephens of the Red Sox.
Banks was “Mr. Cub,” “Mr. Sunshine,” and his “Let’s play two!” attitude was infectious. Upon Banks’s passing in January 2015 Dick Allen wrote movingly of his first meeting with Banks in 1958. Allen was a high school sophomore, and scout John Ogden took Allen and other prospects to Pittsburgh for a game against the Cubs. Banks allowed Allen to hold his bat—a thirty-ounce Louisville Slugger S2 model. Allen thought the bat very light. But as Allen recalled, Banks “could do some damage with that toothpick.”
Six days after Pappas’s gem Jenkins threw another notable game in Cubs history, beating the Phillies 4–3 to win his twentieth game for the sixth straight season. Jenkins credited his Gold Glove catcher, Randy Hundley, for much of the success enjoyed by Cubs pitchers, including rookie Rick Reuschel, who went 10-8 and at 6-foot-3, 215 pounds inspired comparisons to former American League pitcher Mike “Big Bear” Garcia.
While Pappas and Jenkins made headlines, Williams continued to go overlooked—difficult to do for a guy whose durability allowed him to take the field every day. Playing in the sometimes stifling heat and humidity in an era before night games were inaugurated in Wrigley, Williams in 1970 became the only man in major league history to that point to play seven consecutive seasons of 161 games or more. But he learned to pace himself. Tempted to try for the Triple Crown in 1972—he led the league in batting and trailed slightly in homers and RBIs—he decided to rest rather than let fatigue warp his play.
The acknowledgment of the wear and tear baseball inflicts on the mind and body lent insight into this man-within-a-machine. A Chicago writer in the summer of ’72 suggested Williams wasn’t “easy to get close to. . . . Definitely a case of ‘still waters running deep,’ he must do things on his own time, in his own way, for he’s quite independent.”
The same could be said for Philadelphia Phillies ace Steve Carlton. “Lefty” was as much a man of mystery to the media in the City of Brotherly Love as Williams was to writers in the Windy City. Carlton baffled not only those who carried a ballpoint pen, but those who hoisted a bat as well. Working behind a hard slider, sharp curve, and fastball, Carlton owned the league after being obtained from St. Louis for right-hander Rick Wise.
Dominating on the mound in a manner not seen in Philadelphia since another Lefty—Robert Moses Grove—had dominated the American League as the ace of the Philadelphia Athletics, Carlton had the most wins (27), strikeouts (310), complete games (30), starts (41), innings pitched (346), and lowest earned run average (1.97).
These were video game numbers before video games were invented, and they were more remarkable considering Carlton accomplished what he did in a strike-shortened season. When he beat the Cubs on a cold, gray day in October to claim his twenty-seventh victory, it was the most wins since Sandy Koufax had won the same amount in 1966. The difference was that Koufax’s victories had come for the pennant-winning Dodgers and that Sandy’s total represented 28 percent of Los Angeles’ 95 wins. Carlton’s wins represented 46 percent of the Phillies’ paltry 59 wins, Philadelphia finishing last in the East.
Carlton went on to become the greatest clutch pitcher in Phillies history, leading the Fightin’s to five division titles, two World Series, and in 1980 their first world championship. But he would never have become the best “money” pitcher in the Phils’ long history had he not asked for more money prior to the ’72 season. At the same time Carlton was seeking a substantial raise from the Redbirds, Wise went to the Phillies’ front offices and asked for a hike in pay.
Carlton had been a member of the Cardinals’ World Series staffs in 1967 and ’68 and in ’71 won 20 games for the first time. Cardinals owner Gussie Busch reminded Carlton that he had lost 19 games in 1970. Deciding a change of scenery was necessary for Carlton and Wise, the Cards and Phils swapped pitchers. Wise went 16-16; Carlton had a season that is arguably the most dominant by a pitcher in MLB history.
From June 7 to August 17 Carlton won fifteen straight; the Phils, meanwhile, were futile in games Lefty didn’t pitch, going 2-22 in that same span. Carlton’s win streak was finally snapped on August 21, when he lost 2–1 to Atlanta before an overflow crowd of 52,600 in Veterans Stadium. In one sixty-three-inning stretch Carlton surrendered one earned run while pitching five shutouts and five one-run games. En route to winning the NL Cy Young award in ’72, Carlton was the focal point of the Philadelphia Story.
It was a story colorfully told by Bill Lyon, who in 1972 was in his first year as a sports columnist for the Philadelphia Inquirer:
I came here [to Philadelphia] from Illinois in the summer of ’72; a friend of mine had gone to work for the Inquirer. I heard Philadelphia is a great sports town, nothing but winners, winners, winners. Steve Carlton was on his way to winning 27 games and the rest of the team won about three. He was overpowering. Before the slider became the pitch of choice his was just devastating. It was like a Frisbee in a high wind.”
Longtime Phillies public relations director Larry Shenk believes Carlton in 1972 was the best pitcher he’d ever seen in a career that spanned some six decades. “He was unhittable,” Shenk said. “I never saw a pitcher focus on the mound like Lefty. He was in his own world. [Roy] Halladay came close in [2010–11]. Lefty was not focused on records, he was focused on winning.”
One thing Carlton wasn’t focused on was media relations. “Carlton was a thoroughly disagreeable person, kind of surly,” Lyon remembered. “It was a shame because I don’t know if he ever got the recognition he deserved.”
Shenk said the tipping point was provided by the city’s sports scribes. “They started to turn on him, they started to get personal with him,” he remembered. “One day he came to me and said, ‘My quotes were taken out of context. I don’t want to talk with them anymore.’”
Whatever his wars with the writers, Philly’s faithful still believed Lefty was all right. “The two great attractions in Philadelphia in the summer of ’72 were the Great Wallendas and Steve Carlton,” Lyon said. “They sold a lot of tickets those days [Carlton pitched]. The rest of the times [the Vet] was like a ghost town.”
Shenk remembers the vivid difference on days Carlton climbed the mound at Veterans Stadium. “The excitement, the enthusiasm from the fans was unbelievable,” he said.
Before he had a falling out with the media and became “Silent Steve,” Carlton explained that his entire attitude about pitching had been changed by a series of letters from a man he had never met or even responded to, a Tucson, Arizona, nig
ht watchman who stressed the value of positive thinking. The watchman’s first letter to Carlton ran ten pages and stated that he was tired of seeing a man with so much talent lose so much.
“Those letters were beautiful stuff,” Carlton said at the time. “He talked in depth about applying positive thinking. It changed my whole outlook on things.”
The Phillies were changing too. Just as the Dodgers cast the die in ’72 for a team that would win four Western division titles, four pennants, and one World Series from 1974 to 1981, the Phils were putting in place the pieces for a club that would dominate the East from 1976 to 1983. While the Dodgers had their Baby Blue infield of Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes, Bill Russell, and Ron Cey, the Phils had the “Sesame Street Gang,” so dubbed by the Philadelphia Inquirer to characterize the young corps that would be fixtures in Philly for years to come.
Schmidt believes the ’72 foursome of young guns (Schmidt, Greg Luzinski, Larry Bowa, and Bob Boone) compares favorably to the Core Four of Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins, and Carlos Ruiz, who helped highlight the Golden Era in 2007–11.
“Ours was sort of the first championship run,” Schmidt recalled. “We had two runs and [the modern Core Four] had one. Theirs was pretty strong, there’s no question. I thought both eras were great. I guess it depends on how old you are whether you say one was stronger than the other, but there are some similarities.”
The season got off to a strange start for the Phillies’ kiddie corps. In the April 17 opener at the still new Veterans Stadium—the “Crown Jewel of Philadelphia,” as its architectural firm, KlingStubbins, called it—Kiteman attempted to throw out the first ball but instead crashed into the center-field seats. Almost a month to the day later Luzinski, the Bull of Broad Street, gave a glimpse of the future when he bull-rushed a pitch five hundred feet into the Liberty Bell monument atop the Vet.
Schmidt and Boone debuted in September, and the exploits of the Sesame Street Gang became the sounds of summer as described by play-by-play men Byrum Saam and Harry Kalas and color analyst Richie Ashburn.
Saam is recognized as the first full-time voice of baseball in Philadelphia, broadcasting games for the Philadelphia Athletics and Phillies. He was also behind the mic for the Philadelphia Eagles and Philadelphia Warriors of the NBA and was one of the broadcasters for Wilt Chamberlain’s historic hundred-point game in 1962. Saam suffered the occasional slipup behind the mic—“Hello Byrum Saam, this is everybody speaking!”—but Kalas and Ashburn thought so highly of him, they invited the retired Saam into the broadcast booth to call the final half-inning of the Phils’ Eastern Division–clinching game in 1976. The Phils also added him to the club’s broadcast team for the NLCS.
“By was a basic play-by-play announcer, a facts-and-figures kind of guy,” Shenk recalled. “That’s the way it was then. No humor, no color, no personality. Harry and Richie were entertainers.”
Over the next two decades Kalas and Ashburn became as much of a beloved treasure in Philadelphia as the Liberty Bell or Billy Penn’s statue. Kalas often referred to Whitey as “His Whiteness,” and Ashburn, in between plugs for Celebre’s Pizza, would punctuate some strange happenstance on the field below with “Hard to believe, Harry!” Kalas’s signature call—“Swing and a long drive. . . . Watch that baby, outta heeeere!”—was inspired by Bowa’s commenting at the batting cage one day that a Luzinski drive was “way outta here!” “It had a unique ring to it,” Kalas remembered. As did Kalas’s leathery tone, a product of the Parliament cigarettes he favored. Just as Vin Scully’s voice is revered in Chavez Ravine, Harry the K was what baseball sounded like in Philadelphia.
What baseball sounded like for the Phils on the penultimate day of the regular season was Harry the K calling Carlton’s twenty-seventh win, an 11–1 victory over the Cubs in Wrigley.
Winning was all Carlton’s ex-mound mate in St. Louis, Bob Gibson, was doing from May 25 to July 21. After starting the season 0-5, Gibson won eleven straight. Catcher Tim McCarver joked that his battery mate was the luckiest man in baseball, that Gibson always pitched on days when the other team didn’t score any runs.
Gibson’s summer gave Cardinals voice Jack Buck ample opportunities to punctuate St. Louis victories with his trademark phrase: “That’s a winner!” When he broke in with the Cardinals in 1954, Buck teamed with Harry Caray in the broadcast booth. Because of their contrasting but complimentary styles, Buck later called his pairing with Caray the greatest broadcasting team ever. Along with his “That’s a winner!” Buck issued famous calls on injured Kirk Gibson’s 1988 World Series Game One homer that beat Dennis Eckersley and the A’s in the bottom of the ninth (“I don’t believe what I just saw!”) and another bottom-of-the-ninth postseason walk-off homer involving the Dodgers: Ozzie Smith’s stunning drive that beat Los Angeles in Game Five of the 1985 NLCS (“Go crazy, folks! Go crazy!”).
Aside from baseball, Buck called two of the more iconic games in NFL history: the celebrated “Ice Bowl” on New Year’s Eve 1967 (“Third-and-goal. . . . Quarterback sneak! Touchdown Green Bay!”) and in 1981 “The Catch” (“Montana lines up at the five. . . . He rolls right, looking to throw. . . . And he throws into the end zone. . . . Touchdown!”)
The ’72 baseball season was Buck’s first with his new broadcast partner, Mike Shannon, a third baseman for the great Cardinal squads of the 1960s. Buck and Shannon would broadcast St. Louis baseball for the next twenty-eight summers.
Gibson won 19 games for a squad that finished fourth, far below expectations for a team returning the league MVP in mutton-chopped Joe Torre; speedster Lou Brock, who was on the fast track to baseball’s Hall of Fame; and fellow .300 hitters Matty Alou and Ted Simmons. St. Louis’s “MO-mentum” from a second-place finish the season before failed to sustain the Cards.
With their team finishing fifth Montreal Expos fans didn’t have an overabundance of success to cheer about. Playing in the charming but rinky-dink Jarry Park, the major league’s lone team north of the border had All-Star pitcher Bill Stoneman, who on October 2 no-hit the Mets for his second career no-hitter and the first outside the United States, along with fan favorites Boots Day, John Boccabella and Coco Laboy.
If the Expos’ play on the field was forgettable, their distinctive uniforms remain memorable. Their red, white, and blue pinwheel caps were designed to reflect and carry on the carnival atmosphere of Expo ’67. Debuting in 1969, MLB’s first international franchise was named “Expos” following the hugely successful festival of 1967. Montreal’s caps and jerseys were adorned with an equally distinctive and often misinterpreted logo—a lower case “e” in red on the left; a capital “M” half in white, half in blue; and lower case “b” in blue on the right. It was a combination of the team initials when spoken in French, the eMb representing “[les] Expos [de] Montreal baseball.”
Montreal’s most recognizable player, Staub, had been dealt to the Mets, but the Expos did boast talent in outfielders Ron Fairly and ex-Met Ken Singleton; infielders Bob Bailey, Ron Hunt, and Tim Foli; and starting pitcher Mike Torrez and closer Mike Marshall. Yet the biggest attraction for Montreal fans may have been Jarry Park. Known as Parc Jarry to Quebec’s French-speaking population, the tiny wooden stadium seated just 28,456, and that was only after renovations added 3,000 seats. One of the last major league parks to have a single deck, the closeness of spectator seats to the playing field provided intimacy larger stadiums lacked.
Contributing to the ambiance at Jarry Park was public address announcer Claude Mouton and his unique delivery. Al Oliver was Hal Holiver, and Montreal columnist Ted Blackman wrote that Mouton could really roll the “r” in Angel Hermoso’s last name and dramatically pause between syllables when announcing Boccabella—“Bocca-bellaaaaa.” Mouton, Blackman wrote, was “part of the color of the joint.”
The joint also had attractive usherettes, who, upon being issued their blue uniforms, shortened the skirts. Organist Ferdinand “Fern” Lapierre was so entertaining even visiting players praised him. A’s owne
r Charlie Finley said LaPierre was the most valuable member of the Expos, and the organist inspired another Jarry Park fan favorite, the Dancer. Claude Desjardins, a hospital cook, was the Dancer, who entertained patrons between innings. Like Jackie Gleason, he was a big man with nimble feet.
The Fiddler on the Dugout Roof; bleacher fans in Jonesville, named after the Expos’ first hero, left-fielder Mack Jones; and the fan who brought a duck (some said goose) to a game added to an atmosphere akin to a country fair. Spectators created a racket by drumming their feet on the metal bleachers. Former Dodgers great Maury Willis, who played part of the 1969 season in Montreal, compared Jarry Park patrons to passionate Latin American fans. It was said by natives that Parc Jarry was one of the few places left in Montreal where the French, English, Italians, and Jews could get together and have fun. Among the faithful was Steve Shutt, a defenseman on the dynastic Montreal Canadiens teams of the late 1970s. Shutt and other fans of Nos Amours—“Our Beloveds”—would pack Parc Jarry and give their players standing ovations.
The Expos were a season away from serious contention, but it was a September to remember for the city’s sports populace, riveted as it was by the historic first Summit Series between Team Canada and the Soviet Union. Almost every Canadian old enough to recall can remember where he or she was on September 28, when legendary hockey announcer Foster Hewitt exclaimed, “[Paul] Henderson has scored for Canada!” Henderson’s shot late in the third period of the eighth and final game slipped past goalie Vladislav Tretiak and won the series for Team Canada. It was the goal heard round the world, and Canadians celebrated in a style likened by some to that at the end of World War II.
Late summer found Steel City fans in a celebratory mood as well; it was clear the Battlin’ Bucs were still the beast of the East. Powered by a near endless array of hot hitters (Cash hit in nineteen straight games, Oliver and Richie Hebner in sixteen, and Sanguillen in fifteen), the Pirates posted a torrid .739 winning percentage (34-12) from May into July.