October 1964 (3 page)

Houk constantly told each player how good he was, how critical he was to the team’s success, no matter how small his role. Every player talked to Ralph Houk and managed to hear what he had wanted to hear. If he did not seem to be entirely on their side in their negotiations with management for larger salaries, then at least he did not seem to be against them in such negotiations either—that is, until Houk was made general manager in time for the 1964 season. Suddenly the nature of his job changed dramatically. In an organization famed for its reluctance to pay top salaries and in which World Series checks were traditionally counted by management as part of a player’s salary instead of as a bonus, Houk went overnight from player’s man to company man. Some of the players suspected that he did it too readily and too completely, and that, like his predecessor George Weiss, he received a bonus based on how much he held down the team payroll. The previous fall, after the Dodgers swept the Yankees in the World Series, Steve Hamilton, a young relief pitcher who had had a good year, asked Houk for a raise. He found a very different Houk than the one who had just managed the team and who had always told Hamilton how important he was to the team’s success. “You know, Hammy, I’d love to give you a better contract, but I can’t. The Series, you know, only went four games and we didn’t make any money,” Houk said. The former manager had gone overnight, Hamilton, who still admired Houk, said later, from blowing smoke to blowing acid rain.

Houk’s replacement as manager was a surprise to the team and to the media: Yogi Berra, the longtime star catcher. Berra was chosen, it was believed by those who knew the front office well, partly to compete with the upstart team in the New York area, the Mets, who were now managed by none other than the indefatigable Charles Dillon Stengel, soon to be seventy-four. Brilliant and verbal, live and in color, a nonstop one-man media show, Stengel could be safely called many things, but no one ever called him boring. The combination of the Mets’ virtually pristine incompetence and Stengel’s singular charm made the Mets a major draw, to the surprise of the Yankee ownership, which valued winning over fun. The more talented of the young New York sportswriters preferred covering the lowly Mets rather than the dynastic Yankees. The Yankees under George Weiss did not think in modern terms about the entertainment dollar, and the general manager had not wanted to broadcast the games on television, thinking that it was giving his product away for free. He had even been reluctant to sell the paraphernalia of modern baseball, including Yankee shirts, Yankee caps, and Yankee jackets. He did not want every kid in New York going around wearing a Yankee cap, he said, for it demeaned the Yankee uniform. The Mets were the reverse of this, and indeed part of their success in the earlier years happened because they successfully blurred the line between player and fan. The Mets were perceived as inept but lovable by a new generation of fans, while the Yankees were coming to be seen as the athletic equivalent of General Motors or U.S. Steel. Something profound was taking place in the larger culture and it was extremely troubling to the Yankee high command. In 1963 Yankee attendance slipped again, the second year in a row in which that had happened; it had surged to more than 1.7 million in 1961, the year Maris and Mantle had chased Ruth’s record, but fell by more than 200,000 a year in the two years after. In 1963 the Yankees drew only about 220,000 more fans than the Mets, and it seemed likely that in 1964, when the Mets moved into their handsome new home at Shea Stadium, they might well outdraw the Yankees (which, in fact, they did, with 1.7 million customers, or nearly half a million more than the first-place Yankees). “My park,” said Stengel, surveying Shea for the first time, “is lovelier than my team.”

In a somewhat misguided effort to become more popular, the Yankees decided to make Yogi Berra their manager. Over the years the New York media had viewed Berra as something of a cartoon figure: funny, awkward, but lovable, much given to inelegant but ultimately wise aphorisms. Some of the famous Yogiisms were genuine, but a good many were manufactured by the writers, and the real Yogi Berra was quite different from the one that had been invented by the press. He was shy and wary with strangers, particularly the media, because of their jokes about his looks (his wife, Carmen, smart and extremely capable,
hated
those jokes) and about his lack of education. In the beginning the jokes were more than a little cruel, but Yogi was shrewd enough to go along with them; had he resisted, the jokes would have taken on a longer life. But it still did not mean he liked them. Nor was he the easiest of interviews. “Why do I have to talk to all these guys who make six thousand dollars a year when I make forty thousand dollars a year?” he once asked in what was to become a rallying cry for thousands of ballplayers yet unborn.

The truth was that the Yankees had made a serious miscalculation if they hired Berra because he was good with the media. Rather, the media was good with him—inventing a cuddly, wise, witty figure who did not, in fact, exist. It was no surprise that as the Yankee players arrived for their first workout that spring, there was a cartoon on the New York
Daily News
sports page entitled, “A Few Words Before the Season,” which showed a grinning Berra in baseball uniform with a tiny cartoonist armed with pen and sketchbook standing on his arm and saying, “A cartoonist’s dream! With that mug of yours I hope y’ stick aroun’ forever.” As a player, Yogi had been surprisingly quick and nimble in a body that did not look particularly athletic, and he was a very dangerous late-inning hitter. “A rather strange fellow of very remarkable abilities,” Stengel once said of him. His new assignment was going to be difficult: he was replacing a popular manager who was still close to the players and who was now his boss. Moreover, he was going to be managing his former teammates, who respected him as a player but who had frequently joked about him, and who thought him, among other things, uncommonly close with a dollar. Yogi was not a man who by his very presence inspired the respect of his teammates, as Mantle, Ford, and even Elston Howard, the catcher, did (though it was too early for anyone in baseball to think of a black man like Howard as a manager). When his friend and teammate Mickey Mantle was asked how the team would do now that Berra had replaced Houk, Mantle answered, “I think we can win in spite of it.”

Berra was aware of the reservations of his teammates, and he was determined to get off to a good start with them. Before his first team meeting he stopped by to see Bobby Richardson, the veteran second baseman, in order to give a dry run of his first speech to the team as its new manager. “Okay,” he was going to say, “this is a new season. We’ll put 1963 behind us. We’re going to have new rules: no swimming, no tennis, no golf, no fishing.” Then he would pause and say, “I’m kidding. We’ll play hard, we’ll play together, we’ll be relaxed, and we’ll win.” Richardson thought it a fine way to start the season, particularly for a manager addressing former teammates. But during the actual speech, when he got to the list of fake new rules, Mantle said very loudly, “I quit!” and the speech had been ruined. It was not a good start.

T
HAT SPRING BING DEVINE
knew his job was on the line. He had been general manager of the Cardinals since 1957, but he had not yet produced a pennant winner, and Cardinals owner Gussie Busch was hardly the most patient of men. Busch was the Budweiser tycoon, accustomed to having his every whim fulfilled. Since he was immensely successful in the beer business, he assumed that he would be equally successful in the world of baseball, about which he knew almost nothing. Busch was an extroverted, zestful man, “a booze-and-broads” kind of guy in the words of Harry Caray, the team’s announcer, who by his own word was also a booze-and-broads guy and a close pal of Busch’s until he got too close. Busch was a generous man, albeit generous on his own terms. He had to win at everything, most notably at card games. He did not like to be alone, and he tended to be followed by an entourage of cronies. Being truly claustrophobic, he did not like to fly on airplanes, so he traveled either in a massive custom-built and custom-outfitted bus or in his own luxuriously outfitted railroad car. On either of these vehicles there were likely to be a lot of drinking, cards, and attractive young women.

It was the rare Busch crony who did not believe in his heart that he was a baseball expert. Therefore, being a baseball manager or a general manager for Gussie Busch was a high-risk occupation. To make matters worse, the tycoon thought himself a man of the people and was prepared to listen to this endless parade of self-styled baseball experts he ran into every day. He was also readily accessible to local reporters, often, it turned out, after he already had a head start drinking either his own product or that of other alcohol manufacturers. If the team went on a losing streak, as it often did, and if a reporter reached Busch at home to ask if he was happy with the way the team was going, he was likely to say no, he goddamn well was not happy. That had happened when Eddie Stanky was managing and the team was on an eight-game losing streak. When the words were in print the next day, it was clear that time was running out for Stanky. Every day of August Busch’s life, Bing Devine thought ruefully years later, there had to be any number of people telling him, “Hey, Gussie, you made a winner out of Bud, how come you can’t make a winner out of the Cards?”

At the tail end of the 1963 season, the Cardinals had launched a furious if belated drive for the pennant, winning nineteen of twenty games, and that had whetted everyone’s appetite for what was going to happen in 1964. Whether the 1964 team was as good as it had been in that miraculous, almost flawless three-week stretch was by no means a certainty. Devine had spent his entire life in the Cardinal organization, apprenticing from the bottom up, and there was no job so insignificant that he had not performed it. Back in the thirties, when Branch Rickey ran the organization, there were some thirty teams in the farm system, and Bing Devine made sixty-five dollars a month for the most menial of tasks. He began every day by collecting the telegrams from all the general managers of the different Cardinal farm clubs reporting what their team had done the previous day. Then Devine went to the various blackboards that listed each league and each Cardinal team, erased the old standings, and wrote in the new ones. He was therefore an expert on how a seemingly unbeatable team could unravel almost overnight based on an injury or two, he knew how two star players could have unexpectedly bad seasons at the same time and cripple a team, and he knew how the combination of these—an injury and an individual bad season—could end a team’s chance as a pennant contender.

Devine was well aware that Busch was not a baseball man, but a
sportsman,
accustomed to winning. His explosive temper was fueled not merely by a fondness for his own product (which was never beer, but always a Bud; there was a fine at Gussie Busch’s ongoing card game for anyone who asked for a beer, not a
Bud),
but even more so for what he called “silver bullets”—very, very dry martinis. In those days, a sportsman meant a rich man with a passion for hunting, fishing, and horse racing, a man who would shoot at the best lodges in the nation and fish distant waters for giant billfish, but who rarely knew about baseball, which was essentially a blue-collar sport. As a Budweiser executive, Busch was an unqualified success. His knowledge of the beer business was exceptional, and he had brought Budweiser to a position of dominance in the industry after World War II. But knowledge and expertise in one field did not travel lightly to another, as he had found after trying to purchase his first black player, Tom Alston, from the minor leagues.

Busch was irate when he found out that instead of being twenty-three years old, as he had been told, Alston was actually twenty-five. Busch was accustomed to buying machinery rather than human beings, and thereafter depreciating his machinery according to the wear on it. Since the average baseball player’s career was ten years, as Busch had been told, and since Alston was two years older than had been claimed, then roughly 20 percent of his career was clearly gone, so Busch demanded twenty thousand dollars back on the price. That he did not get it was a sign of how difficult doing business was going to be with a rather worn-down baseball franchise. On another occasion he pushed for the signing of the son of a well-known former player named Dixie Walker. When his scouts and player-personnel people dissented, saying that they did not consider the younger Walker major-league potential, Busch became annoyed. He did not know baseball, he said, but he knew horses, and in the world of horses, you always went with the bloodlines and the gene pool—why not in baseball as well?

The Cardinals’ previous owner, Sam Breadon, had come to baseball after owning an auto dealership in St. Louis, during the years when Branch Rickey was the general manager. Breadon was, if anything, cheaper than Rickey, a legendary skinflint: in 1942, when the young Musial had come in third in the National League batting race in his first big season, Breadon offered him the magnificent raise of $1,000 for his good work. With Rickey gone to Brooklyn as general manager, the Cardinals still managed to win regularly throughout the forties. But, getting older and fighting cancer, Breadon began in the mid-forties to sell or trade many of the team’s better ballplayers. There was a ceiling on what a Cardinal ballplayer could make in those days, and it was $13,500. Only Marty Marion, as good a salesman as he was a shortstop, it was said, had been able to breach the 13.5 ceiling; he received $15,000 because he was a favorite of management and because, in 1944, he was also the Most Valuable Player in the National League. Generally, when a player reached $13,500, it was as good as buying a train ticket out of St. Louis. At one point, angered by the demands of the Cooper brothers for salaries as large as Marion’s, Breadon essentially sold both of them off, getting $60,000 plus another ballplayer for Mort Cooper in 1945 from the Boston Braves, and, a few months later, selling Walker Cooper to the Giants for $175,000, then a record price. Breadon also allowed Branch Rickey’s great farm system, which in the thirties and forties had fed so many great players into the team, to atrophy. The last hurrah for the old Cardinals came in 1949 when they dueled the Dodgers in a momentous pennant race. Up two games with only five games to play, they blew that lead at the end. On the train back to St. Louis late that season, Bob Broeg of the
Post-Dispatch
asked Eddie Dyer, the Cardinals’ manager, when he thought the Cardinals might challenge for the pennant again. Dyer said, “Funny, Bob, I was just asking my wife the same thing.” Then Dyer pondered the question for a moment. “Not for a long time,” he said, for the farm system was gone and Branch Rickey, who had built it up, was gone, to archenemy Brooklyn, and there were not that many good young players coming up.