Hairs vs. Squares

by Gruver , Ed;

  Yankees manager Ralph Houk thought the breezy lefty had the perfect temperament to be a reliever. Houk, a hard, cigar-smoking army man whose nickname was “the Major,” called the durable Lyle a “throwback to the old-timers.” As far as Houk was concerned, Lyle, a product of western Pennsylvania, seemed as much at home amid the rattle of the IRT trains, the emerald expanse of the outfield, the monuments in center, and the famous façade as any of his illustrious predecessors in pinstripes.

  Even so, after Lyle had contributed to eight of nine wins in mid-August, Houk rested his workhorse. New York lost its next four games. Lyle improved to 9-5 when he beat the Tigers 3–2 in twelve innings on September 28, the victory keeping the Yankees’ hopes alive.

  The dramatic victory over Detroit symbolized baseball in the Bronx in ’72. Presaging their epic playoff battles with Kansas City from 1976 to 1980, the Yankees split wild, 7–6 decisions with the Royals in late summer. On August 15 in Municipal Stadium, Thurman Munson lashed three hits, but future Yankees teammate Lou Piniella’s single capped Kansas City’s game-winning three-run rally in the ninth. Twelve days later at the Stadium it was New York’s turn to rally, coming back from a 6–0 deficit. On August 29 Murcer hit for the cycle against Texas, blasting the tying homer in the bottom of the ninth to set the stage for Johnny Callison’s decisive hit in the eleventh in another 7–6 finish.

  It all made for an exciting and memorable summer in the city: the IRT rumbling from the tunnel to reveal iconic Yankee Stadium and the initial view of the expansive green outfield through your window as your train lurched into the 161st Station; public address announcer Bob Sheppard welcoming fans to the Stadium in his precise, distinctive baritone; Wright playing the Stadium organ; Robert Merrill singing the National Anthem, his words echoing throughout the Cathedral-like ballpark. These were some of the reasons American League umpire Jim Honochick, who worked the junior circuit from 1949 to 1973, thought Yankee Stadium the best AL park to call games in.

  New York in the 1970s bears little resemblance to the refined Big Apple of the twenty-first century. New York then was far more Frank Sinatra’s gritty 1979 depiction than the gentrified Gotham that Alicia Keys soulfully sang of thirty years later. The city had a fiscal crisis in the mid-1970s, the likes of which had rarely been seen before in an American metropolis. It led to New York City mayor Abe Beam’s leaving a desperate, one-word note—“Help!”—at the Wailing Wall in Jerusalem.

  From Times Square to Park Slope, prostitutes and drug dealers plied their trade in full view. Heroin and cocaine were commonplace, and with them came increased street violence. Like Detroit, New York suffered from economic decline and ultimately white flight. In the summer of ’77, New York City descended into darkness during a terrifying twenty-five-hour blackout in July. The chaotic event led to widespread looting and rioting in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn; the devastation of neighborhoods from East Harlem to Bushwick; more than 1,000 fires and 1,600 damaged stores; 3,700 arrests; and a total cost to the city that exceeded $300 million. The trauma of those two days in mid-July symbolized the growing malaise gripping America’s major cities.

  The sense of uneasiness shared throughout the five boroughs was felt by Yankee fans as well. Murcer and Munson led a modestly talented team that included Callison, Horace Clarke, Gene Michael, Celerino Sanchez, Roy White, and Ron “the Boomer” Blomberg. These Yankees were far removed from the fearsome Mantle-Maris-Ford clubs of the early ’60s; comedian Joe E. Lewis famously compared rooting for the lordly Yankees to rooting for U.S. Steel. Boxing writer A. J. Liebling of the New Yorker said at the time of the Yankees’ second straight World Series title in 1962 that those Bombers were the least popular of all baseball clubs “because they win, which leaves nothing to ‘if’ about.”

  Clarke, a leadoff man and second baseman, is often recalled as the front man and fall guy for the era that extended from 1965 to 1975, a time referred to, unfairly it seems, as the “Horace Clarke Era.” Clarke was a solid player for a squad that in 1970 won 93 games—second-best in the AL East and the fourth-highest total in baseball that season—and in ’72 was in the playoff chase until the final days.

  Nicknamed “Hoss,” Clarke was a durable player who averaged 151 games over a seven-year stretch from 1967 to 1973 and twice led the AL in at-bats. He had good range at second base, a fact recognized by Mickey Mantle, who, playing first base at the end of his career because of bad legs, told the young Clarke in 1967, “Take anything you can reach!” A deft bunter and contact hitter, Clarke twice led the American League in singles. The switch-hitting Clarke had a signature style at the plate. In a July 23 game at the Stadium against California, Angels announcer Dick Enberg noted that when the 5-foot-9 Clarke batted out of his signature deep crouch, “he doesn’t give that pitcher much of a strike zone between the knees and letters. . . . Little guy spreads [his feet] out as much as any hitter.”

  Fans who couldn’t make it to the Stadium tuned in to WPIX Channel 11 in New York. There they were greeted by a rapid montage and the Yankees anthem.

  Composed by Bob Bundin and Lou Stallman of Columbia Records and recorded by the Sid Bass Orchestra and Chorus, the song had been the Bombers’ theme since 1967. It ushered in each game’s broadcast by the announcing team of Phil “Scooter” Rizzuto, Frank Messer, and Bill White. The trio would work together from 1970 to 1984, endearing themselves to generations of Yankees fans in the New York–northern New Jersey area with their “Welcome to New York Yankee baseball” introduction. Rizzuto, Messer, and White’s broadcasting Yankees baseball on WPIX 11 and WMCA Radio became for many as much a part of the team’s tradition as pinstripes, monuments, and the Stadium’s famous frieze.

  The Scooter’s stream-of-consciousness style of broadcasting and lively play-by-play, with the occasional malapropisms, was adored by his fans but irritating to his critics: “Deep to left-center, nobody’s gonna get that one! Holy cow, somebody got it!”

  Rizzuto’s “Holy cow!” was his catchphrase, punctuating his calls of some of the most famous moments in Yankees history: Roger Maris’s sixty-first home run in 1961 and Chris Chambliss’s bottom of the ninth blast to beat Kansas City in the fifth and deciding game of the 1976 ALCS, among others. His “Holy cow!” would be featured in Meat Loaf’s “Paradise by the Dashboard Light” and in an episode of Seinfeld.

  The Scooter’s frequent digressions on the air led to his reading recipes sent in by listeners and viewers, speaking well of restaurants he frequented or the cannoli he ate between innings, wishing fans happy birthday or happy anniversary, and sending get-well wishes to fans in hospitals. He would joke about leaving the game early, issuing an on-air statement to his wife: “I’ll be home soon, Cora!”

  Rizzuto was also known for calling his broadcast partners by their last names—“White” rather than “Bill”—a habit that stemmed from his Hall of Fame career as the Yankees shortstop from 1941 to 1956.

  White: And here’s Phil Rizzuto. . . .

  Rizzuto: I’m doing play-by-play? White, you’re doing play-by-play!

  By mid-September, Rizzuto, White, Messer, the Yankees, and their fans were concerned not only with the play-by-play at the ballpark, but also with watching the scoreboard for games involving Boston and Detroit. Fritz Peterson’s 3–2 win over Tiant September 12 in the Bronx brought New York to within a half-game of the lead. With seventeen games to play, the Yankees were within reach of making the playoffs for the first time since ’64.

  The elevated IRT trains on the Third Avenue El weren’t the only cause of the rumble coming from the Bronx. Pinstripes were back in style in Gotham, and for a time it seemed as if the Bombers might turn back time to the days when the Yankees were winning pennants in waves. Even Wright got swept up in the excitement, banging out “It Seems Like Old Times” on the Stadium organ.

  It was a dramatic change for a club that seemed to be better known in the early ’70s for off-the-field news—muggings in the Bronx; poor parking at the Stadium; the Mike Kekich�
�Fritz Peterson family trade that had its origins in a July 15, 1972, party but wasn’t announced until March ’73.

  Apart from the Lyle deal the Kekich-Peterson swap was the Big Trade in the Bronx in ’72. It’s ranked by ESPN.com as the sixth most shocking moment in baseball history. The two couples had grown close and came to realize they were married to the wrong people. The introspective Kekich, once regarded in the Dodger organization as the second coming of Sandy Koufax because of his blinding fastball, became Peterson’s roommate when dealt to the Yankees. He gravitated toward the thoughtful Marilyn Peterson, while Fritz, a man who lived in the moment, was drawn to Susanne Kekich, an ex-cheerleader.

  “Don’t make anything sordid out of this,” Peterson, a 20-game winner in 1970, said at the announcement of the Big Trade. Mike Kekich concurred. “Don’t say this was wife swapping because it wasn’t.”

  Kekich said it was a matter of swapping lives more than wives. The Big Trade began in mid-July, and the couples moved in with each other’s spouses that fall. Yet by spring training 1973 Peterson and Kekich were barely speaking. Fritz and Susanne were happy; Mike and Marilyn, not so much. Years later Kekich said his career went into a “black hole” after the Big Trade. He and Marilyn split, and he was dealt to Cleveland in 1973 and then moved on to Japan. Fritz and Susanne, meanwhile, remained married and had children of their own.

  Recently Peterson was said to be living in “semi-hiding.” Kekich, reportedly “panic-stricken” over word of a Matt Damon–Ben Affleck film about the Big Trade, was said by New York writer Mark Jacobson to have assumed a new identity.

  As summer cooled, so too did the Yankees. A 7–2 loss to Boston on September 13 started a spiral that saw New York lose six of its next seven. Two of the more damaging blows were delivered by Indians ace Gaylord Perry, the first coming September 22 in Cleveland and the final shot, it turned out, on October 1 in New York. Despite being in the presumed twilight of his career, the thirty-three-year-old Perry had gone to the American League after ten years in San Francisco and dominated, compiling an AL-leading 24 wins, 29 complete games, and a 1.92 ERA and winning the league’s Cy Young award.

  Perry’s productivity on the mound hadn’t made for an Indian summer in the East, but he had proved to be the best, and most controversial, pitcher in the league that season.

  A lanky right-hander, the 6-foot-4 Perry was both the son of a North Carolina tobacco farmer and the father of the modern-day spitball. By the age of seven, Gaylord and his ten-year-old brother Jim were behind a mule plowing the fields of the twenty-five-acre spread owned by their parents, Evan and Ruby. As a student, Gaylord was more into sports than books. In high school he was all-state offensive and defensive end in football and averaged almost thirty points and twenty rebounds in four years of basketball. But his favorite pastime was chucking baseballs in and around the southern hamlet of Williamston. In time Perry developed an extensive repertoire of pitches; writer Ray Robinson described Perry’s arsenal in the early 1970s as an “express train fastball, a sinuous curve, a rollercoaster sinker, a mystifying forkball and a teaser of a slider.” There was one other pitch in Perry’s weaponry: his celebrated spitball.

  The “greaser,” as Perry called it, has a long and colorful place in the game’s history. Big Ed Walsh of the Chicago White Sox popularized the pitch during the game’s deadball era. After Indians shortstop Ray Chapman was struck in the temple and killed by a spitball thrown by the Yankees’ Carl Mays in August 1920, the spitball was banned. Use of the pitch persisted, and in the mid-1950s and 1960s baseball commissioner Ford Frick advocated its return to the game. It was a great pitch, the commissioner stated, and apparently forgetting Chapman’s death, added that “there was nothing dangerous” about it. Frick was not alone in his thinking. American League president Joe Cronin; Cal Hubbard, the supervisor of umpires; and baseball’s bible, The Sporting News, all believed the rule banning the spitter should be abolished since it was not enforceable.

  The pitch remained outlawed but not out of practice. In 1968 MLB took additional steps to sideline the spitter when it instituted what is known as the “Gaylord Rule,” which forbid a pitcher from putting his hand to his mouth anywhere on the mound. Perry had picked up his myriad of motions on the mound—touching his belt, his cap, his neck—by watching Don Drysdale, who Perry thought made a big thing of tugging at his hat.

  Until 1974, when Perry authored a book, Me and the Spitter: An Autobiographical Confession, he claimed innocence. Despite the allegations against him through the years, the sweet-drawling man who, like Sal Maglie before him, cultivated a mountain man’s beard between starts, would issue a sly smile when asked about the spitter.

  Perry once told ump Ron Luciano during a search on the mound, “Look at my left shoulder but don’t look under my hat!” Gaylord giggled during another search, telling Luciano he was tickling him, and he once asked Luciano if he gave massages.

  In his book Perry claimed he threw his first important illegal pitch on May 31, 1964, in the second game of a doubleheader against the New York Mets at Shea Stadium. The game would last twenty-three innings and a record seven hours and twenty-three minutes. A mop-up reliever at the time, Perry entered the game for the Giants in the bottom of the thirteenth. Up to that point he had thrown spitters in meaningless situations—spring training games and batting practice—but he and catcher Tom Haller decided it was time to try the pitch with the game on the line. With the aid of the spitter and his other new pitch, a slider, Perry pitched ten innings to earn both the win and the confidence of manager Alvin Dark.

  Perry won 12 games that season and 21 in 1966, the first of his five twenty-win seasons. As he raised his win totals, he also raised the ire of opponents. During the ’72 season, Oakland’s Mike Epstein pointed his bat at Perry and threatened to charge the mound. A’s skipper Dick Williams protested so vigorously that Perry was strip-searched and ordered to change jerseys. Billy Martin brought bloodhounds to a game in order to sniff baseballs for illegal substances like Vaseline. Despite the ban, Martin insisted Perry still threw spitters, especially to good hitters.

  One such hitter was Murcer, whose hot bat helped fuel the Yankees’ surge. With his dark hair flowing from the back of his helmet, Murcer would take a slight crouch from the portside of the plate and punch hits to all fields. He caught fire in the heat of the summer, hitting .367 in June, .283 in July, and .331 in August.

  He had always been a streak hitter, but Murcer’s modus operandi was to start fast and then tail off. He reversed form in ’72. On May 15 he was hitting just .183 with two homers and six RBIs in twenty-two games. On June 1 he lit the fuse on his bat by lashing four hits in Milwaukee. On the twelve-game road trip he went 21 for 46 to raise his average to .273.

  Murcer, who was then wearing number 1, matched that numeral by reaching career-highs to that time in all extra-base hit categories. He did so by not being a Bronx Bomber in the traditional sense. It wouldn’t have been surprising at the time to hear Yankees fans paraphrasing Marvin Gaye’s 1971 hit as “Murcer, Murcer Me.”

  In the aftermath of his 1970 season, which had seen his home run total fall to 23 and his batting average dip to .251, the Oklahoma kid, who had been touted as the “next Mantle” while still a teenager, had stopped trying to conform to the Yankees’ power-hitting image, stopped trying to pull every pitch into the inviting right-field porch.

  Like a lot of boys who had grown up in the 1950s fascinated by the Mick, Murcer idolized the Yankee demigod. Unlike Mantle, whose favorite player growing up was not the man who preceded him in center field but St. Louis’s Stan Musial, Murcer thought his predecessor the best player he’d ever seen. Murcer’s connection to Mantle was closer than most. Both were born in Oklahoma; both had been signed by legendary scout Tom Greenwade; both were shortstops at the time of their signing and were later converted into center fielders. When he reached the majors, Murcer was given Mantle’s Yankee Stadium locker.

  Murcer realized in 1971 that while he occupie
d the Mick’s locker, he didn’t own Mantle’s raw strength. Despite hitting four homers in four official at-bats in a 1970 doubleheader—something not even Ruth had done—Murcer realized at season’s end that he was a line-drive hitter, not a home run hitter. Sacrificing power for average, Murcer choked up on the bat and cut down on his swing. If the pitch was outside, he would go with it and hit it to left. He began bunting more, a tactic that eventually brought the infield in and gave him more room to spray hits.

  Murcer’s average in 1971 jumped to .331, his RBIs improved from 78 to 94, his hits from 146 to 175, and his home runs to 25. To paraphrase Shakespeare, the quality of Murcer had been strained, but now it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven upon the place beneath: a Yankee Stadium crowd thirsting for a pennant.

  Like Joe DiMaggio, Mantle, and Earle Combs, Murcer became a fixture at the most glamorous position in baseball—center fielder for the New York Yankees. It was comparable to being a running back for the Cleveland Browns and following in the footsteps of Marion Motley, Jim Brown, and Leroy Kelly or being a Montreal Canadiens goalie and joining the royal lineage of Jacques Plante, Gump Wormsley, Rogie Vachon, Tony Esposito, and Ken Dryden.

  That the Yankees didn’t know they had a future star in their midst was evident in their initially handing him uniform number 17. New York’s star sluggers always wore single digits: Ruth, 3; Gehrig, 4; DiMaggio, 5; Mantle, 7. Roy White broke into the bigs on September 7, 1965, one day before Bobby, and was handed number 6, a clear indication of who the Yankees believed would be the next man up on the monuments. Murcer was happy with his number 17; at least it had the Mick’s number 7 in it. But when second baseman Bobby Richardson retired and asked Murcer to take his number 1, he obliged.