October 1964 (18 page)

Lane’s tantrum hastened the decision in the Sadecki house to expedite the signing process, and not to have Ray fly all over the country doing one-day exhibitions, a procedure that might end up costing him a large part of a season that could be more profitably spent in the minor leagues. Rather, the Sadeckis decided to choose quickly from the teams that had shown the most interest. That most certainly did not include the Yankees, though Tom Greenwade had given Sadecki the traditional Yankee pitch: sign for less now, but play with the best and make more money in the long run with all the World Series checks. Milwaukee was very hot early in the chase, but pulled back to go after another pitcher, Tony Cloninger, and an infielder, Denis Menke. Cincinnati was interested, and made what was possibly the highest offer, and the Cardinals were right in there at $50,000. Kansas City, with a new franchise, was interested, but in the end did not make an offer. The Cardinals then sweetened their offer and said they would give Ray three years’ guaranteed salary at $6,000 a year, a good basic wage in those days, for a total package of $68,000. The pull of the Cardinals was considerable, for Sadecki had been weaned on the exploits of Stan Musial and the voice of Harry Caray, the famed Cardinal broadcaster. He signed with the Cards, and his father, Frank Sadecki, an immigrant’s son who had not been permitted to play baseball by his father, took the $10,000 check for the first part of the bonus and showed it to his own father. The old man looked at it and broke into tears of both pleasure and anguish; the boy, he said, is making that much money just for playing a game, while he had had to work so hard all his life for so much less.

Sadecki went right into the minor leagues, and at first he had felt some resentment from the career minor-league players because he had made so much more money before he had even thrown his first pitch. He sometimes thought it was as if his first two names, as far as the newspapers were concerned, were “Bonus Baby” and his nickname was “The $50,000 Left-hander,” as in “Bonus Baby Ray Sadecki will pitch tonight,” or “The $50,000 left-hander pitched another complete game.” He was well aware that by the time he arrived in professional baseball, it was a two-tiered society, and that by dint of big bonuses, he and a few others, such as Tim McCarver, were part of an aristocracy. The chasm between the bonus babies and the others was particularly great in the minor leagues; Sadecki and McCarver talked of one of McCarver’s teammates in Keokuk, a middle relief pitcher named Warren Rodenberry, who had a wife and two children and a third child on the way. Rodenberry made $250 a month, not an uncommon salary in those days, and he supplemented it by driving the team bus for an additional $50 a month. Sadecki pitched well in the minors, and in 1960 he made the starting rotation with the Cardinals, arriving with the big-league club even sooner than expected. He won 9 and lost 9, with an earned run average of 3.78. He was a young man of exceptional poise and confidence, and he had a maturity beyond his years. “The rest of us who were roughly the same age as Ray,” Tim McCarver said years later, “were very unsure of ourselves, and very immature, and by contrast, Ray was very mature and grown up for his years, and extremely independent in the most natural and unpretentious way.” And, added McCarver, “management most assuredly did not like that degree of independence.” The Cardinal management was very ambivalent in its attitude toward Sadecki, McCarver thought, like a parent with a too-precocious child. This independence particularly irritated Johnny Keane, who was only a coach when Sadecki joined the club, but soon became the manager.

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.