October 1964 (19 page)

None of his success, though, changed Johnny Keane’s attitude toward him. In early June he pitched an important game against the San Francisco Giants in Candlestick Park. In the ninth inning, with the Cardinals leading, 1-0, Jim Ray Hart led off for the Giants with a single. Sadecki got the next two batters, only to find the immensely dangerous Willie McCovey coming up as a pinch hitter. With a 2-2 count on McCovey, he went to his curve and struck him out. After the game the players were in the locker room washing up, and Sadecki was shaving. Right next to him, also shaving, was Dick Groat. Bob Gibson and Tim McCarver were standing nearby. Everyone was in a good mood because it was a big win against a tough team and Sadecki had done it by striking out one of the most dangerous hitters in baseball. Just then Johnny Keane came over. “Hey, Sadecki,” Keane said. “What did you get McCovey out with?” “A curveball,” Sadecki answered, not picking up that there was a certain edge to Keane’s voice, and that Keane did not seem to be sharing the pleasure of the big win with the rest of the team. “And if you had missed with that, what would you have thrown him on the three-two count?” asked Keane, who had a running argument with some of his pitchers because he wanted them to come in on a 3-2 count with a breaking ball. “A fastball,” said Sadecki, whose best pitch was his fastball. “Yeah, you do that and you’d have gotten beat,” Keane said, and only then did Sadecki and the others realize how angry the manager was. It was a truly weird moment, Sadecki thought, being told that this pitch that he had not even thrown was going to be hit for a home run. Beside him, Gibson and Groat were breaking up. It was funny, Sadecki thought, and yet it was not funny.

I
N MID-JUNE THE ST.
Louis Cardinals were struggling. The high hopes generated by the strong finish in the previous season seemed to be dissipating. The team was not playing well. It hovered near the .500 mark, sometimes going a little above, and then slipping below it. The confidence and the cohesion that had been there late in the 1963 season had disappeared. In addition, there was a gaping weakness in left field where Stan Musial, for so long the best hitter in the National League, had played. His retirement had been announced in late August of the previous season at an emotional ceremony after which, for the final month of the season, just to show that he was not being forced out, Musial concluded one of baseball’s greatest careers by seeming to hit nothing but line drives. Ernie Broglio, the pitcher with the best record on the team in 1963, 18-8, was convinced that the Cardinals were only one player away from winning the pennant: a talented young outfielder. In spring several young players had been tried in the outfield, and there had been much discussion in the press about who was to be Musial’s successor. Musial himself was interviewed regularly about which of the candidates seemed likely to take his place, (
STAN’S MAN, CELEMENS, LOOKS GOOD
, read a headline in the
Post-Dispatch
during spring training, referring to the chances of Doug Clemens, one of the many outfield hopefuls.)

That the team was so flat in early 1964 was an immense disappointment to Bing Devine, whose job was obviously on the line. So, starting in late May, Devine called other National League general managers looking to make the trade that would jump-start his team. By this time, Devine would not hesitate to trade a starting pitcher for an outfielder. He was sure that a good farm system in working order would always keep enough strong-armed young men in the pipeline to deliver first-rate pitchers. In putting this Cardinal team together, he had been guided by that philosophy; several years earlier, he had made an important trade of that kind, giving up Toothpick Sam Jones, quite possibly the best pitcher on his team and a man who always pitched with a toothpick in his mouth, for Bill White, a promising outfielder-first baseman, who had played for only one full season in major-league baseball, and who had been away for two years in the army. It was not a popular trade at the time in St. Louis, or even in Devine’s own household, and he had come home that night only to find his wife and daughter at the dinner table, both of them with toothpicks in their mouths.

Now Devine felt the pressure mounting on him as the June fifteenth trading deadline approached. What he wanted was a quality hitter who could play the outfield every day. He began to push harder to make a deal. Devine and Johnny Keane had long ago agreed that, given the changing nature of major-league baseball, particularly in the National League, which had more and better black players coming in, speed was increasingly important. They talked often about the diminishing chances of finding a great new superstar in the rough, a young DiMaggio, Williams, Mantle, Mays, or Aaron. Again and again they talked late into the night on this one theme: How do you create a winning team if you aren’t fortunate enough to have a superstar in the lineup every day? Coming up with a superstar was always, to some degree, a matter of luck, and it was becoming tougher all the time with more and more teams spending increased amounts of money on scouting. Now, in the sixties, even those teams that had once not deigned to search for black talent were scouring the back roads of the Deep South. In fact, the region was now crawling with scouts. Therefore, they decided, if you had to narrow your expectations on finding super talent, you had to set other priorities. They both decided that speed was the one thing you could spot early on, and it was something that could not be coached. If a young player had speed, there was a chance that the other qualities—the ability to hit consistently, and to field a position well—might come later. The other aspects of what might constitute a great player—the ability to hit for power, the hunger to improve, the ability to play well under pressure—were harder to gauge. But speed was an elemental ingredient for success, particularly as the nature of the game was changing.

If anything, Keane believed even more passionately in the idea of speed than Bing Devine. The player he had wanted for more than a year was a seemingly undistinguished black outfielder for the Chicago Cubs named Lou Brock. Brock was twenty-four years old at the time, and he was not a particularly good outfielder, he had not hit very well in his brief time in the major leagues, and he had an erratic arm. Worse, after two full seasons, he was nothing more than a .260 hitter. An outfielder who was a defensive liability and who hit only .250 or .260 was not exactly a gem. Still, there was the matter of Brock’s speed. He was obviously one of the two or three fastest men in the major leagues, perhaps the fastest. In addition, the Cardinal executives were privately convinced that his talents were being poorly showcased in Chicago, and that the Cubs were the wrong team for him. Because of the nature of their small ball park, the Cubs were not a running team. They tended to wait for the wind to blow out in Wrigley Field and go for the big inning. Stealing bases was considered a high-risk art form for a team like that, thus Brock had never been set loose as a base runner. Nor was Wrigley Field an easy place for a young man to play the outfield, because the sun came right in on the right fielder.

The Cardinals had scouted Brock carefully while he was in college at Southern University in Baton Rouge, and been quite interested in signing him, but then had managed to blow their chance. But that meant they knew a lot about him. He might, for instance, look slim, but, in fact, he was so powerfully built that he had the ability to hit a long ball. He once hit a home run to dead center in the Polo Grounds, a ball that carried at least 485 feet. At six feet and weighing 170 pounds, he was almost devoid of body fat. It was a body, said his teammate Tim McCarver, that looked as if it had been chiseled out of marble. A few years later Senator Eugene McCarthy, a former minor-league ballplayer himself, signed on to cover the 1968 World Series for
Life
magazine. Being in the clubhouse with someone as muscular as Brock, he said, was like being in the clubhouse with a superior species of being. “I was ashamed to be in the same locker room with him,” McCarthy later said.

Keane had been pushing Devine to get Brock for more than a year, and Eddie Stanky, the former Cardinal manager who was now a Cardinal scout and instructor, appraised him carefully in his Chicago incarnation and remained very high on him as well. Brock was a player, both Keane and Stanky felt, who might blossom on the Cardinals, a far more aggressive team on the base paths than the Cubs. The Cardinals did not play for the big inning, they fought and scratched for one run at a time. They not only ran more often than the Cubs, they tended to use the hit-and-run and other plays that used speed on the bases to pressure the opposition.

With the trade deadline approaching, and the Cardinals in the doldrums, the team went on a trip to the West Coast. On June 11, St. Louis played the first of three games with the Dodgers. It went on to lose all three games. Suddenly there was a sense of mounting desperation on the Cardinals. The third loss to the Dodgers, with roughly a third of the season gone, had put them under .500, 28-29, tied for seventh place. Devine now felt an even greater urgency to make a trade and beat the deadline. From Los Angeles he telephoned John Holland, his opposite number in Chicago, to whom he had been talking over a period of months. The Cubs too were slipping. “I’m glad you called,” Holland said. “We’re doing poorly and I see you’re not doing very well. Let’s talk about doing something together quickly.” The Cubs, it turned out, badly wanted a starting pitcher. At the time Ernie Broglio, one of the previous year’s big winners for the Cardinals, was struggling. Broglio had lost one of the three games in Los Angeles, and that made his record 3-5. Johnny Keane had never been a very big fan of Broglio’s. Keane felt Broglio’s attitude was not intense enough, and from time to time Harry Walker would tell Broglio, as he had also told Ray Sadecki, that he did not look fierce enough when he was out on the mound. “You’ve got to look meaner when you’re out there,” Walker would say.

Bing Devine finished his conversation with Holland, and boarded the plane for Houston with Keane and the team. “We can get Brock for Broglio if you want,” he told his manager. “Then what are we waiting for?” Keane asked. “For this plane to land in Houston so I can call John Holland,” Devine answered. And so the deal was done. It was an immensely risky deal. Broglio was twenty-eight, just coming into his prime as a pitcher. He had won 60 games in the last four years and had been 18-8 in 1963 with an earned run average of 2.99. Brock was an unknown. What the veteran Cardinal players knew about Brock did not impress them. The trade inspired considerable resentment and a good deal of grumbling among them. Broglio was a talented and extremely popular player. Bob Gibson, the Cardinal pitcher, who was as powerful a force within the locker room as he was on the field, thought it was the worst trade he had ever heard of. Broglio was a twenty-game winner, he said. Who knew what Brock was or could do? Brock later told Gibson that he had, in fact, batted against him, but Gibson had no memory of him as a batter. Gibson was angry and, as always, quick to express his anger. Bill White, the first baseman, also thought it was a bad trade; Dick Groat, the veteran shortstop, was sure that the team had panicked. There was so much complaining that Johnny Keane called a team meeting. “Who we trade for is our business, and you guys have no right to criticize what we do. This trade is none of your business,” he told them. The Chicago sportswriters, by contrast, were jubilant. “Thank you, thank you, oh, you lovely St. Louis Cardinals,” wrote the same Bob Smith who had placed Brock’s name in contention for the title of worst outfielder in big-league history. “Nice doing business with you. Please call again anytime.”

The irony of the trade, Lou Brock always thought, was that it came just as he had finally begun to feel confident about playing for the Cubs and had begun to hit well. In the weeks just before the trade he had gone on a roll as one of the hottest hitters in the league. There had been a game against Cincinnati early in May when he had felt he belonged in the big leagues for the first time. Vada Pinson had been up and hit a shot toward right-center that looked like it might carry over the fence for a home run, or at the very least hit the fence and come back for a double. Brock, with his exceptional speed, had gone after it, jumped at the last moment, and made a sensational stab at the ball just as he and the ball reached the fence at the same time. Brock had come down hard after the catch, so jarred by the collision with the wall that he had no idea whether he had caught the ball, and he started to look for it on the grass. Finally a fan in the bleachers yelled out, “Look in your glove, Brock—you might just find it.” He was elated by the catch and had returned to the dugout grinning, quite possibly for the first time, he thought, as a Cub. He had started laughing with that, and he had spent the rest of the day grinning, almost uncontrollably. His teammates were puzzled—it was a good catch, to be sure, but his pleasure seemed out of all proportion to what he had done. To Brock it was different, it was as if with that catch, the weight of the world was finally off his shoulders. It was shortly afterward that he was traded to St. Louis.

If the prevailing wisdom was that the Cardinals had been snookered, not everyone agreed. One baseball man who was sure that the Cardinals had made a good trade, and quite possibly a great trade, was an older black man named Buck O’Neil. O’Neil had played in the Negro leagues, had for a time managed the famed Kansas City Monarchs; then, late in his life, with the Negro leagues in collapse after the integration of more and more black players into the big leagues, he had become a scout for the Cubs. Buck O’Neil had scouted Lou Brock for three seasons in Baton Rouge, and had been absolutely sure Brock was going to be a great player. He thought it was a shame that the Cubs had neither the time nor, it seemed, the place for this exceptional young man. He was pleased with the trade for Lou Brock’s sake, for he believed that the Cardinals were the perfect team for him: they liked to run, and they liked to put constant pressure on the other team.