October 1964 (17 page)

It was against that background that Johnny Keane was so special. As far as the black players were concerned, there was not an ounce of prejudice in him. They sensed that he cared for them not just as ballplayers, for what they could do for him on the field, but he cared for them as men as well. He had a rare empathy with young players. His own reasonably promising professional career had been cut short when Sig Jakucki had beaned him in a Texas League game in 1935 when he was twenty-three. There was a fracture in his skull that was seven inches long, and he had come very close to dying. He remained unconscious for almost a week, and his temperature had stayed steady at 105 ½. When he made his comeback the next season with the same team, the Houston Buffaloes, his manager had made him stay in the batting cage for a very long thirty minutes against a wild young pitcher on the Houston roster. Only then had he proven that he was still man enough to play baseball.

His friends thought his sense of what life was like for a young player had stayed with him from those days. He thought that the macho managers of his own era, those men who verbally brutalized their own players and used fear as their primary weapon, were not particularly effective back then, and he knew that in the new, more affluent America of the sixties, their tactics were even less effective. The new breed of players, reflecting the changes in society at large, were better educated and better informed and had more options from which they could choose in life. Johnny Keane was a complicated man—religious, sensitive, occasionally authoritarian. In his early days as a manager, the expletives needed to engage in proper dialogue with the umpires had come hard to him. It was said that when Keane was a young man managing in the Texas League, he had been thrown out of a game by an umpire named Frenchy Arceneaux. He had been furious, but was virtually at a loss as to how to express his fury. Finally he yelled from the dugout, “Arceneaux! You know what you are, Arceneaux? You’re just a mean man is what you are!” Gradually, he expanded his vocabulary to meet the requirements of his profession, however, and by the time he surfaced as a major-league manager, he could, if need be, swear like a longshoreman.

There were certain things Keane would not tolerate as a major-league manager. For instance, he hated the Cardinal poker games, because there was never any silver on the table, just bills, and he thought the young players needed to save their money. Some players were losing two hundred dollars a game, which was nearly a week’s salary. As such, the poker game was inevitably bound to create resentments among the players. One of the first things he did when he became manager was to end the poker game. “I felt like an old mother hen, but I knew what I was doing was right, so I told ’em no more poker. There was a little grumbling, mostly by a few players who were getting rich off the game, but they came around,” he said later.

He did not intend to fail as the Cardinal manager. He was forty-nine when he got the job and he had waited a long time for it. The pressure on him to win was enormous. He did not drink unless he had to, for he had seen alcohol as the most destructive vice in baseball when he was young, the crutch all too many players and baseball men seized on when their careers began to fade. But if he had to, he would nurse a drink through an evening as a courtesy to others. He smoked four packs of cigarettes a day, and even though smoking in a major-league dugout was technically forbidden, he smoked right through the games. He was not a man who smiled very much, and he seldom laughed. There was also a certain rigidity to him. Some of the young white players thought he loved the rules too much. By contrast, the young black players thought that if there were too many rules, at least they were employed fairly.

If Gibson and Flood had encountered problems early on in their careers, he believed, it was because they were too wired, and because they put too much pressure on themselves. His job, Keane felt, was to reduce, not increase, the pressure on them, to reduce extraneous distractions. That did not mean Keane and Gibson always had an easy time together. They had their own private war over the use of Gibson’s breaking pitches. When Gibson had a batter down 0-2, he wanted to go for the kill, because he hated to waste a pitch, but Keane would argue that the hitter was on the defensive and that this was a moment when Gibson should go to a location just outside the plate, making the hitter reach for a bad pitch. Then there was the question of the curve: Gibson loathed his own curveball, but Keane wanted him to go to the curve more, particularly when he was behind in the count. They squabbled long and hard over that, and there had been one close game when, in a tight situation, Keane demanded that he throw the curve. “All you do is throw that goddamn fastball. Now I want you to throw a curve and if someone hits it out on you, I’ll eat my fucking hat.” Gibson threw the curve, the batter hit a home run, and both Gibson and Tim McCarver looked over at the bench to see if Keane was taking off his cap. He never touched his hat. If Keane liked Gibson’s curve more than Gibson did, then Gibson liked his own slider more than Keane did, and he went to it more often than the manager thought he should. In one game against Cincinnati, the Reds hit his slider hard, and when Gibson returned to the dugout after one tortuous inning, Keane told him, “Gibson, you ought to take that damn slider and shove it right up your ass.” They were epic battles, the other players thought, and great fun to watch. There was Gibson, a physically intimidating man, and there was Keane, only five feet eight inches tall, going head to head, shouting at each other, Keane wanting nothing but to make Gibson an even greater pitcher, and Gibson, despite the heat of their arguments, somehow always aware of that.

Almost from the moment he went into the rotation Gibson began to pitch as everyone had hoped. In 1960, Hemus’s last full season, Gibson started 12 games and his record was 3-6. Then, in 1961, his record was 2-6 at the moment when Hemus was fired, a little more than a third of the way through the season. From that point Gibson began to show the strength and willpower—if not yet the mastery of his pitches—that would mark his career, and he was a winning pitcher from then on, ending up with a record of 13-12 overall for the season. His control was still a problem, and he had led the league in walks, but even with his control problems, and perhaps because of them, he was an intimidating figure on the mound, and his earned run average was only 3.24 by the end of the season. The following season he started 30 games, won 15, and, even more important, finished 15, a vital statistic as far as he was concerned. His strikeout-to-walk ratio improved dramatically. He struck out 208 and walked 95. Beyond the statistics, he jumped to a high place on the list of pitchers that National League hitters least liked to face. From the moment that Keane put him in the rotation, it was clear to the Cardinal management that a big-league fastball pitcher had finally arrived on the team.

Gibson and a number of other fastball pitchers got a significant break in 1963 when the National League changed the strike zone, expanding it to incorporate the high fastball. Until then anything above the belt buckle had been a ball. That season they brought the strike zone up to the letters. For those pitchers who threw a high or a rising fastball, such as Gibson, Koufax, and Jim Maloney, it was a huge advantage. Koufax, already in the process of mastering his control, jumped from a record of 14-7 to 25-5 and a walk-to-strikeout ratio of 58 to 306; Maloney went from 9-7 to 23-7 with 88 walks and 265 strikeouts. With Gibson the results were not quite so dramatic—he went from 15-13 to 18-9; but there was a general belief around the league that the change had empowered these pitchers, that at the very least they had gotten a major boost in their confidence, because they were now pitching to a much bigger strike zone, and therefore they had far more flex in tight situations.

For Gibson the timing could not have been better; he was on the threshold of greatness. In 1964 he was not yet the great pitcher he soon would be, so dominating that, among other things, the pitcher’s mound had to be lowered to make things a bit easier for the hitters, but he was already a force, with a great fastball and a good slider, and he was beginning to improve his control. He was learning how to hold the ball on the seams or against the seams in order to make his fastball run in or run out on a hitter. If he was not yet a great pitcher, he was capable of pitching great games. He did not have a change, as Solly Hemus, now departed the big leagues, had noted, and he did not have a good curve or the full assortment of pitches that other great pitchers, such as Juan Marichal, had—for Marichal seemed to be able to throw every pitch in the book from every arm position and with vastly different speeds. But Gibson’s determination usually made him harder and harder to beat as a game progressed. Already it was being said of him, as it was said of very few other pitchers, that if the opposition wanted to beat him it had better get to him early, because he got tougher as a game went on.

He was a physically talented man, but what set him apart was his determination. There were wrongs to avenge, the prejudice that had kept down millions of black men. All those dumb things that white people still said about black athletes—that they were gutless, that they folded in the clutch—had to be disproved. It was the most personal of struggles. To Tim McCarver, Gibson was someone who carried an immense amount of anger with him, and with good reason: he was a young black man in a society that was just beginning to deal with centuries of prejudice. But, unlike so many other angry people who were defeated by their rage, Gibson mastered his anger and turned it into a positive force.

A
MERICANS RAISED DURING THE
Depression had known real poverty, while those raised after the war knew far more comfort and affluence; by the mid-sixties sociologists were beginning to talk about a generation gap in American society. If Johnny Keane was more tolerant, and more sensitive to the problems of young players, than most managers of his generation, that did not mean that the Cardinals were different from most other baseball organizations of the day in their attitude toward their young ballplayers. Though he was gentle, Johnny Keane was a fairly strict disciplinarian and a quite conservative man. He had strong ideas about how his younger players should behave. He was still very much the seminarian, and some of his young players thought him almost prudish in some respects. The Cardinals under Keane seemed to know a great deal about what their young players were doing, and there were many warnings about proper behavior. The organization did not like it when Ernie Broglio took an apartment in Gaslight Square, the Bohemian section of St. Louis (Don Blasingame and Joe Cunningham had lived in the same apartment before, and the ball club had not liked that either). If a ballplayer bought too much liquor at a local store, somehow the ball club always knew, and the young player was warned. If a young single player, such as Tim McCarver, not only stayed out ten minutes past curfew but was seen with a girl, he might be called in to Keane’s office and reprimanded, not so much for missing curfew by a few minutes but for being with a
girl.
“But, Johnny, I’m single, and I’m twenty-one,” McCarver protested, but to no avail. The organization was, in some ways, virtually omniscient. (A reporter covering the Cardinals for one of the local papers was believed by the players to be reporting to management on their off-field behavior. That irritated the players no end. Indeed, it was said that the reporter’s wife sometimes hung out with the switchboard operators at the motel where the team stayed during spring training, and that she tried to pick up such information from them as to which players were calling numbers other than those of their wives.)

The issue was, thought such younger players as Ray Sadecki, Ernie Broglio, and Tim McCarver, about control. This was hardly unique to the Cardinals—it reflected the attitudes of most front-office executives. The Cardinals, like other ball clubs, stressed self-confidence as a key quality for their players, but they did not really want truly self-confident young men, McCarver thought. What they wanted instead was a very limited version of confidence, molded to their particular needs and uses: they wanted their players to be fearless and aggressive from two to five
P.M.
during day games and from eight to eleven
P.M.
during night games. But at other times, McCarver thought, management wanted players utterly dependent upon and responsive to management, to trust utterly in the goodwill and abiding wisdom of the club, and to believe that what was good for the Cardinals (and The Brewery) was also good for the players.

The young players chafed at the paternalism, none so much as Ray Sadecki, a confident, talented young left-hander who had been a success almost from the start. At the age of twenty, he had already won fourteen games and seemed well on his way to becoming the ace of the staff. Sadecki was a rare young man in baseball in that era, a bonus baby who was actually worth the money he had been paid. As early as his sophomore year in a Kansas City high school, the scouts had started coming to his games, and by his junior year there were four or five bird-dog scouts at each game he pitched. By his senior year, there were often two full-time scouts from each major-league team present, and his team went 18-0 and won the state championship. A professional career seemed to be a sure thing. The most amazing thing about Sadecki’s performance, his high school coach, Doug Minnis, thought, was that it had never gone to the young man’s head, that he had remained remarkably balanced throughout, committed to his teammates, never drawing attention to himself at their expense. That made him most unusual, Minnis thought, because by his junior year in high school he was already being promised a good deal of money and a bright future. Most young men would have been caught up in all the attention, but Sadecki seemed to reject it as if it were somehow an unwanted byproduct of what he really wanted to do, which was to play baseball.

As his high school graduation approached, the pressure on Sadecki to sign began to mount. On the day of his graduation, the Sadecki house was like a landing field at an overcrowded airport, with scouts assigned time slots to make their appeals. The Milwaukee Braves, then drawing 2 million fans a year and able to throw a good deal of money around, were said to be readying an offer of $100,000. The Cleveland Indians, where Frank Lane had landed after his unhappy tour in St. Louis, were also interested. Ray Sadecki had flown to Cleveland for what turned out to be a memorable tryout. He usually dealt with the scouts accompanied by his father, who ran a small grocery store, but on this occasion he had gone up there by himself. He worked out virtually alone in that giant empty stadium, pitching in front of thousands and thousands of empty seats, with just a handful of older men standing around watching him. Sadecki handled the pressure of that eerie tryout quite well, and afterward Frank Lane called him into his office and offered a contract for $50,000. Lane knew there were other comparable offers on the table for this accomplished young man, and he tried to bully him into signing. The idea of paying $50,000 for an untried player who had not even pitched one inning in the minor leagues enraged Lane. He began shouting at Sadecki. “I’m going to offer you fifty thousand dollars,” Lane shouted, “and you’ve got one shot at it! You can have it by agreeing right now! But if you walk out that door, it’s gone and you’ll never get it again! I’ll pull it off the table and if you tell anybody I offered it I’ll deny it!” For a seventeen-year-old boy it was an amazing scene; he had ventured there without his father (and therefore could not sign the contract anyway), and as he tried to explain this to Lane, the Indian general manager only became angrier. “Who the hell do you think you are! Nothing but a goddamn kid!” Ray Sadecki had never seen a grown man so completely out of control.