October 1964 (20 page)

Brock’s Cub teammate and close friend Ernie Banks was not the only one who thought that Brock’s problem had been that he was trying so hard, he was tying himself up in knots. Bob Kennedy, the Chicago manager—actually, one of nine managers, for the ownership had created a bizarre system of nine coaches who rotated as coaches and managers—once asked Brock to write his name on a piece of paper. Brock had done it easily, without thinking. Then Kennedy asked him to write it again, slowly this time, thinking carefully about each letter. Brock did and produced an entirely different signature, so pinched and unrecognizable that no bank would have cashed a check with it. That, Kennedy told Brock, was what he was doing at the plate.

Unfortunately, neither Kennedy nor the rest of the endless parade of Chicago coach-managers were able to create an atmosphere in which so ambitious a young man could relax. There were too many people in charge, too many different people telling Brock different things—to choke up, to swing all out, to pull the ball, to hit to the opposite field, to hit the ball down and beat out his infield hits, to relax, to play harder. Brock had become so frustrated and so despairing that when the front office called him in to tell him they were transferring his contract, Brock was sure he was being sent down to Tacoma, a Cub minor-league team. The most interesting thing about all those managers and coaches, Ernie Banks thought afterward, was that somehow they did not see or understand Brock’s passion, and some of them thought the problem with him was that he was not trying hard enough. Banks hated it when he heard about the trade. He thought the Cubs were giving up on a great talent and a great human being much too early.

Ernie Broglio, the pitcher who thought the Cardinals were one player away from a pennant run, was called in and told he had been traded to Chicago. He was not told whom he had been traded for. He was stunned by the news. Though he gave the requisite interviews, saying that he was delighted to be going to the Cubs, he was, in truth, very upset. He loved being a Cardinal, and he liked his teammates and wanted to stay in St. Louis. Lou Brock flew immediately to Houston to join his new team. When he arrived in Houston he was greeted with a certain amount of teasing. Curt Flood welcomed him by saying that he had heard that Bing Devine was going to pull off another brilliant deal: Bill White for two broken bats and a bag of peanuts. Well, Curt, Brock thought, it’s nice to be welcomed to the Cardinals. He played for the first time on June 16. The Cardinals had lost seventeen of their last twenty-three games and seemed headed straight for the cellar. In his first game Brock appeared as a pinch hitter, and struck out on three pitches. Bing Devine was sitting right behind the Cardinal dugout when he struck out. Some Houston fans were behind him, riding the Cardinals. “Brock for Broglio! Who would make a deal like that?” a fan yelled. “Yeah,” Devine said to his assistant Art Routzong, “what kind of general manager would make a deal like that?”

Brock soon discovered that the Cardinals were very different from the Cubs. When the Cubs lost, everyone sat around pondering the game, and the players who had made mistakes were particularly penitent. In no way did that help the team, Brock thought, and if anything it seemed to reflect the power of negative thinking, making each defeat all the heavier. With the Cardinals, by contrast, the sense of defeat did not linger long in the clubhouse. If they lost, there were vows to go out and get them the next day, and someone, usually Bob Gibson or Bob Uecker or Tim McCarver, would play some prank. If Brock had made an error, he was likely to find Gibson imitating him with astonishing fidelity in the locker room after the game, and asking everyone, “Who do you think this is?” Gibson could do a brilliant imitation of Brock, especially Brock misplaying a ball in the outfield. Nor was he being singled out—for Gibson did it to everyone. The Cardinals, he realized, knew how to play hard, and better still, they knew how to get a bad game out of their system as quickly as possible, as the Cubs did not.

He quickly came to like Johnny Keane, the manager, who was protective of him at first, very much aware of the pressure he had been under in Chicago, and of the great pressure he faced in St. Louis because of the trade. A few days after Brock joined the Cardinals, Bob Broeg, the veteran St. Louis sportswriter, came to the clubhouse before the game. He motioned toward Brock and told Keane that he thought he would do a piece on the newest Cardinal. “Bob, why don’t you wait a bit,” Keane suggested, “until he gets a better feeling for this place, and there’s less pressure on him. There’ll be plenty of time to write about him later.” That did not mean Keane was a particularly sentimental man. (With Sandy Koufax pitching for the Dodgers, a left-hander who was unusually hard on left-handed hitters, Brock would look over at the dugout to catch Keane’s eye, as if to say,
Get me out of here and get a right-handed hitter up here,
but Keane would always avert his eyes instead of offering encouragement.) Early on Keane called Brock over and talked to him about his role on the team. “We’ve seen you hit the ball and we know you have power. We don’t care how you hit the ball as long as you hit. Be as natural as you can,” Keane said. The other subject was stealing. “Since you’ve got the speed for it, I guess you’re going to want to try stealing bases,” he said. “Hell yes,” Brock answered. “Well, go for it when it strikes you as right,” Keane said. “You make the call.” That was all. For Brock it was a stunning moment. On the Cubs there had been all kinds of rules about when he could go and under what conditions he could go, all of them in some way inhibiting him, and all of them in some way making him go against his instincts and limiting his natural ability. Not only were there rules, but had he run and been thrown out, there would have been endless recriminations after the game in which his mistake would have been scrutinized and corrected. Now Johnny Keane was telling him what he needed to hear more than anything else—just trust his instincts.

There was also a team meeting in which Keane got up and said that there was a new element in professional baseball, that it was speed, and that the Dodgers had become the leaders in this new game with Maury Wills. “Now,” Keane said, “we’re going to run the bases too. We’re not just going to match the Dodgers, we’re going to go right past them.” So far he had not mentioned any names. But as Keane continued to talk, Brock began to wonder if he was going to be traded again, this time, perhaps, for Maury Wills. At that point Bob Uecker, the backup catcher, a slow runner but the team comedian, raised his hand and said, “Okay, Johnny, it’s a hard job but I’ll do it—I’ll steal those bases for you.” No, said Keane, they did not need to trade for another player and they did not even need Uecker to steal, in the unlikely event that he got on base. They had their thief right here in this meeting. “Brock,” he announced, “you’re going to do it for us.” So his role was clear. “Brock, I want you to keep running. If I don’t tell you to stop running, then no one else on this team does either, and if someone tries to stop you, then you can tell them where to go.”

Brock came alive as a Cardinal. With Johnny Keane giving him the green light to run, he stole 33 bases in what remained of the season and hit .348 as a Cardinal. It was the trade that changed the season for the Cardinals. A team that had been one key player short of making a run for the pennant had not only gotten the right player, it had gotten something more, a veritable ignition system for its offense. Still, the Cardinal players had been right about Brock in one sense: his talent was raw, and unrefined. Here he was, now in his third full season, and for the first time, with the help of Curt Flood, he was learning how to use his sunglasses—how to flip them down, to keep the sun from being an enemy. He had spent precious little time in the minor leagues, and he was still unsure as an outfielder. A few games after he had joined the team, the Cardinals were playing Milwaukee. With a runner on first, Rico Carty was at bat. He hit a ball to left field, and Brock, playing in left, broke the wrong way, toward center. Suddenly he reversed himself, put on the brakes, broke back for the fine, and made a magnificent catch near the line. “Brock,” Bill White told him when they were back in the dugout, “you’re either the best outfielder in the game, or the worst.”

If his new teammates had been unhappy with the trade at first, their attitude quickly changed. It was not just his speed on the bases that brought them around—and, most certainly, most of them had never seen speed like that before—but also the determination with which Brock came to work every day. This young man, his teammates decided, was
driven.
He was quiet, he kept to himself in a world of rather gregarious teammates, but he was one of the most focused players any of them had ever seen. Whoever had been in charge of him in Chicago and thought that he was passive had completely misread him. He was wired to play baseball; he existed as if for no other purpose than to play hard. He not only wanted to justify the trade, he wanted, it seemed, to be the best ever. If Gibson wore anger openly on his face, almost as a weapon against the opposition batters, Brock smiled constantly, but the rage to succeed was always there. The joy boy of the Cardinals, Bob Broeg, the St. Louis writer, once called him in print because of his ready smile. “Bob, I know you don’t mean anything negative when you use that phrase,” Brock told him afterward, “but you have to understand the implication of the word ‘boy’ to a black man.”

If he was just learning how to harness his great ability, he nonetheless had an immediate impact on the Cardinals. As he was aggressive, so his teammates became more aggressive. They already played a hard-edged game that emphasized baserunning, but now, with Brock on the team, they were more aggressive than ever, and within a week, it was clear that Brock’s speed was going to pay off. On June 23, a week after he joined the team, Brock gave the Houston Colts an exhibition of what he might do, not just in stealing but in putting pressure on an opposing team and forcing it to make mistakes. He dragged a bunt in the first inning and beat it out. Then he broke for second. John Bateman, the Houston catcher, tried to throw him out but threw the ball away, and Brock went on to third. He scored when Bill White singled, and White scored when Ken Boyer hit a home run. Two innings later, Brock opened the inning with an opposite-field double to left. With White up and no one out, Brock thought he had timed the pitcher, Dick Farrell, and broke for third. He was sure he was safe, and the other Cardinals thought he was safe, but the umpire, Jocko Conlan, called him out. (Part of the problem, Brock said later, was that he was using his distinctive popup slide, in which even as he slid in, he popped up to be ready to go to another base in case there had been an error. The problem was that the umpires were not used to it, and he was not getting the calls on it; indeed, it appeared as if he were popping up into the tag.) It had not, he said later, been a particularly smart play, stealing third with no outs and the heart of the order coming up. But in the seventh inning, the Cardinals saw the perfect illustration of what his speed could do, and how much pressure it placed on an opposing team. Brock came up with two outs and Tim McCarver on third. He hit a little chopper in front of the plate. It was Bateman’s play, and the catcher rushed the ball and rushed the throw, which went off the glove of Rusty Staub for an error. McCarver came in to score the winning run, to make it 5-4. It was just the kind of win Keane wanted: when the teams had been seemingly even, the winning run had come not off a home run or a double, but rather because of the pressure that Brock’s great speed had put on the Colts.

After the game, Keane was euphoric. Brock had forced the key mistake, he told reporters, and had scared the Colts so much that they had unraveled. “With anyone else it’s an easy play,” he said. “But Brock hurried the defense and thus increased the chances for an error.” Keane was sure now that the trade, only one week old, was a brilliant one, and that it had given the Cardinals the missing piece for the kind of team he wanted. Brock, he decided, was not only going to be a good player, he might well become a
great
player. Brock was only going to get better, he told the assembled sports-writers after the game. For the moment he was stealing through sheer speed, and he lacked technique. Look at Maury Wills of the Dodgers, then the leading base runner in baseball, Keane said. Wills had spent
nine years
in the minor leagues and had been able to work on his technique during that prolonged apprenticeship. By contrast, Brock spent only one year at the Class C level, and he had been given little time to work on how to measure and time both pitchers and catchers, how to maximize both his lead and his start. “Maury Wills is a good runner, but he can’t run with this kid,” Keane told the writers.

In Chicago Buck O’Neil heard about what his young protégé had done in his first week with the Cardinals and he felt at first a certain relief, and then a rush of pride. He was almost embarrassed to be that proud of the young man he had helped bring to the majors. The trade of Brock to the Cardinals, thought O’Neil’s other protégé, Ernie Banks, had at first been a bitter disappointment to O’Neil. If Banks and Brock were not exactly the children of Buck O’Neil, they were, at the very least, athletic and spiritual extensions of him. O’Neil had seen in Brock not just a potentially great ballplayer but something more, an athlete so exceptional that he would bring to the world of white baseball skills and dazzling speed rarely seen there in the past. O’Neil had become very close to Brock, and for a brief time when O’Neil was one of the nine Cub coaches, they had even roomed together. O’Neil had loved teasing Brock, trying to get him to be a little looser. Brock would get ready to go into the batter’s box and he would hear Buck’s voice saying, “Good eyes, Lou ... you got the good eyes ... good eyes ... now open them up so you can see ...”

Buck O’Neil was a traveling man, fifty-two years old in 1964. His territory extended from Florida to Texas, and his job was to find every talented young black player in that vast region. He had watched Lou Brock for three years before he had signed him off the campus of Southern University, in Baton Rouge. He had been far ahead of all the other scouts in picking up on Brock, and he was so much of a celebrity himself within the black athletic world that well into his pursuit of Brock, and absolutely sure of his prospect, O’Neil decided to spend less rather than more time on the Southern campus, for fear that the other scouts, most of them, of course, white, would become aware that Buck was up to something—and therefore the ante on Brock might be raised, and he might even lose him. O’Neil’s life was a fascinating reflection of the black American baseball experience. He had had the misfortune, or at least the poor timing, to be born in 1911, during the era when the major leagues were closed to black players. O’Neil grew up in rural Florida near Sarasota, and in those days, the Yankees, the Giants, and the Athletics all trained there. As a boy he had been allowed to watch them practice. These were the Yankees of Ruth and Gehrig, the greatest baseball players of their time. He had watched them with awe, though their world was unattainable to him. He could watch and admire them, but he could not dream about being like them. But then an uncle, a railroad man, and therefore a truly cosmopolitan figure, came down from the North and told him that he had not seen the greatest players in the world; there were great teams made up exclusively of
Negro
baseball players, and
they
were the best players in the world. O’Neil argued with his uncle, but his uncle took him to Palm Beach, where two great black teams were training—Rube Foster and his Chicago American Giants for the Breakers, and C. I. Taylor and the Indianapolis ABCs for the Poinciana Royal. The games were known as Maids Day Off Baseball, because they were played on Thursdays and Sundays. That was when the maids and other domestics, chauffeurs and cooks, who had been brought down to Florida by their wealthy employers, had half-days off. The spectators were a fascinating blend of the very, very rich and their servants. It was a different kind of baseball than Buck O’Neil had seen before. It was all about speed and aggressiveness. A man would draw a walk, and he would steal second and then third. There was a lot of use of the hit-and-run. There wasn’t a slow man on the field, he thought.