October 1964 (34 page)

Now Ford would go to the bullpen on days when he did not pitch and work on doctoring the ball—seeing how it would move when he cut it in certain ways and held it either with the seams or against the seams. For a time Ford kept a tiny sharp-edged blade in his ring, but eventually the umpires caught on and made him stop. So the job of cutting the ball had fallen to Ellie Howard, who sharpened one of the clasps in his shin guard. By early August, not only was Ford’s arm giving him trouble but so was his right hip. He was pitching in terrible pain and was not sure he could continue. Some sportswriters suggested that his career might be over. Against Kansas City on August 4, he told Berra that he would try to pitch, but he was not sure he could make it. Berra let him try, but had Stan Williams warming up simultaneously. Ford went seven innings and lost, 5-1. The next day, frustrated and in pain, he put himself in the bullpen. He tried again four days later, and could go only four innings. The doctors examined him and told him that what had been considered a minor ligament pull was in fact a calcium deposit on his hip. Yogi Berra, wrote one of the sportswriters, had better learn how to spell Stottlemyre, the name of the young pitcher playing so well in Richmond.

F
OR THE FIRST FIVE
innings on July 29, Curt Simmons was pitching a no-hitter. Then, in the sixth, with one out, Lew Burdette, the Cubs pitcher, bunted. Ken Boyer at third charged the ball. Tim McCarver, behind the plate, yelled for Boyer to let it go, that it was going to go foul, but almost by instinct Boyer tried to make the play, and Burdette beat it out. That broke up the no-hitter, but Simmons coasted to victory. It had brought his record to 11-8. He was going to lose only one more game during the rest of the year.

Simmons was a vital part of the team, the veteran pitcher who had seen it all on a staff where both Sadecki and Gibson were still defining themselves. Baseball was life and life was baseball for him: Curt Simmons saw life through the prism of baseball. If someone was coming on hard times, maritally or had a lot of debt, the count in life was 0-2. If things were going well for him and he was on a roll, if he had a good-looking wife and a generous new contract, then he was going through life with the count on him 3-0. If Curt Simmons walked into the hotel coffee shop to have lunch, he ordered what he called a Baseball Special and seemed surprised if they did not know what it was, for a Baseball Special was the most basic of meals to be eaten on the road, a cheeseburger.

There was nothing mysterious about what he was going to do when he pitched. He was going to keep the ball low and away, or up and in, and try to keep the hitters from seeing anything good. Why? someone asked him. Because God had attached the arms to the shoulders instead of the hips. Otherwise it would have been low and inside, and high and away. The correct ratio of pitches, he added, was four low and away to one up and inside, because if you missed high, the hitter was likely to do more damage than if you missed low. Simmons no longer had his blazing fastball, but he had a good fast curve, a good slow curve, a good change, and just enough of a fastball to keep hitters off balance. In addition, he had the kind of lovely control that delighted managers, catchers, and his own infielders. To beat Curt Simmons in 1964, when he was thirty-five and in his seventeenth season, a hitter had to be very smart and very patient. He had a great herky-jerky motion that threw hitters off, and because he did not throw that hard anymore, there was a perception that he was beatable. He was, but it was harder than it seemed. He was a manager’s dream—six or seven quality innings on every start, a pitcher who performed well even when he did not have his best stuff. Good hitters had a hard time with him because he seemed particularly good at throwing their timing off. He irritated the great Henry Aaron no end. Once when the Braves were playing the Cards, Curt Simmons’s young son wandered out on the field and was introduced to Aaron. Aaron looked at the young boy and told him, “Why don’t you tell your dad to pitch the way everyone else does?” In one season Aaron got so irritated by Simmons’s slow stuff, his off-setting motion, that he lunged at a pitch and drove it for a long home run. The only problem was that he had jumped out of the batter’s box to do it, and he was called out. (Aaron had, in fact, jumped out of the batter’s box on the previous at bat, popping the ball up, and the umpire, Chris Pelekoudas, had told one of the Cardinal infielders that if he did it again, he was going to have to call him out for leaving the batter’s box.) A man who could torment a hitter as good as Henry Aaron was valuable to have on any team.

The last thing Simmons thought he was going to see in this season was a pennant race. He had been one of the top pitchers in the game for almost two decades, and it struck him that his best chance for a World Series had come and gone in 1950, when he was a star on the Phillies’ Whiz Kid team of that era. As a twenty-one-year-old that season, pitching in what was for him an abbreviated season, he had won 17 and lost 8 with an earned run average of 3.40, but it was during the Korean War and he had been in a National Guard unit that was called up late in the season. He was not shipped overseas and there had been talk that he would be allowed to come in and pitch during the Series, but the army authorities had been reluctant to let him do it, fearing they might be criticized for favoring a young athlete.

The Cardinals had picked him up for nothing. During spring training in 1959 something had popped in his elbow, and he observed Opening Day of that season by having his arm operated on. That season was, to all intents and purposes, a washout. He came back late in the season trying to work himself into shape with the team’s farm club in Williamsport. He felt good about his arm in 1960, but Eddie Sawyer, a manager he liked and trusted, quit almost as soon as the season opened, apparently because Bob Quinn, the general manager, was telling him whom to play and whom not to. He was replaced by Gene Mauch, who was young and smart—quite possibly the most intelligent man ever to manage a baseball team, some people said—but for a variety of reasons he seemed to have no interest in using Curt Simmons. Weeks passed and Simmons did not pitch and finally he was given his release one night around midnight in San Francisco. That was the low point of his career. Whether the Phillies had ever tried to trade him he was not sure, but ostensibly his career was over; he had won 115 big-league games, but it appeared that he now had no value in his chosen profession. Yet he remained confident about his future. His arm had felt good during spring training and he was sure he could still pitch.

Ken Silvestri, a former catcher and now a coach with the Phillies, told him that he had been screwed, that he could still pitch, and that he ought to send a telegram to every major-league team asking for a tryout. But Simmons was disgusted, and for the moment all he wanted to do was to go home. “No, damn it, do it,” said Silvestri, “send out a bunch of telegrams.” Simmons went home for a few days, pulled himself out of his funk, and then began to make a few calls. By chance the Cubs were in Philadelphia the week Simmons called Lou Boudreau, their manager, and asked for a tryout. Boudreau said yes, and he pitched to Del Rice, the Chicago bullpen catcher. Rarely had he felt so in command of his pitches, and he was throwing better than he had in years. “How the hell did they ever release you?” Rice asked. The Cubs were interested, Boudreau told Simmons, and they wanted to make some kind of a deal, but first they had to make some roster moves, so it was going to take some time.

The Cardinals were also interested in him; Solly Hemus and Bing Devine decided that he was well worth flying in for a tryout. Even as he was working out with the Cubs, Hemus called Simmons to ask him to fly to St. Louis. “He’s down at the park trying out with the Cubs,” Mrs. Simmons told Hemus. At that point, Devine and Hemus decided to skip the tryout and sign him blind. He turned out to be a great pickup; he was still a gifted pitcher—in 1963 he won 15 and lost 9, and a number of his defeats had come when the Cards had either failed to score a run or scored only one run. Now, in mid-season, he was pitching as well as he ever did, and he specialized in tormenting his old team, going 16-2 against the Phillies as a Cardinal (he would beat them four times without a loss in this season). A few days later he shut out Houston on five hits for his twelfth victory. Curt Simmons did not agree with others that Gene Mauch was the smartest man in baseball. He thought Mauch was too much like a drill sergeant who wanted to run everything, and who thought he was smarter than everyone else. He thought men like that could get other people in trouble.

On July 30, Johnny Keane gave the call to bring Barney Schultz back to the parent club. Barney Schultz was doing the best pitching of his life in Jacksonville, with an earned run average under 1.00. Frustrated by his bullpen, Keane had started asking for him in late July. “I want Barney,” he told Bing Devine. “He’s my man. He can pitch every day.” It was Keane, after all, who had converted Schultz to a bullpen specialist when he had managed him at Columbus ten years earlier. So Schultz came up in August when it was not yet a pennant race. On August 1 he pitched for the first time in relief of Bob Gibson. Of the remaining fifty-nine games left on the Cardinal schedule, he pitched in thirty of them. He was an odd figure, a young old man, more like a rookie than a veteran, extremely experienced on the field and equally tentative off it. All those years of meager salaries in the minor leagues had made him somewhat uneasy in the big leagues. He wanted to behave like a big-leaguer, to eat and tip like a big-leaguer. Big-leaguers tipped 10 percent, but Barney Schultz, from all those years when his salary was around three thousand dollars, calculated it exactly instead of rounding it out as some of the others did.

Curt Simmons had known him on the Phillies, had hung out with him in St. Louis, and seemed to be in charge of him. It was as if he were the much older player and Barney was the young rookie, though in fact Schultz was three years older than Simmons. He was constantly asking Simmons questions—Curt, how long to the ball park from the hotel? What time do we leave for it? Where do we eat tonight? Simmons loved it. “Barney,” he would say, “this is Twenty Questions, and that’s eighteen of them down, and you’ve only got two left.” There was a constant byplay about where to eat: Simmons and a few others ate together regularly, and Schultz, new in town, joined them now. Where should we eat? he would ask each night, and Simmons would tell him it was his turn to pick the restaurant, which would bring on more questions about what kind of place they wanted to go to. “Barney, it’s
your
turn to pick the place,” Simmons would say. The next day there would be more questions about what to do, and then Simmons would say, “Barney, this is the big leagues.” The Mother Hen, they called him. There was something very poignant, they thought, about a man getting a shot like this so late in his career, and from the start he was helping the club with his knuckler, which seemed unhittable this season.

The call from New York for Mel Stottlemyre came on August 10. By this time Whitey Ford had gone to the bullpen. Jim Bouton was fighting pain in his throwing arm, and Al Downing was still somewhat erratic, brilliant when he had his control, self-defeating when he didn’t. When Yogi Berra had started pressing Ralph Houk to bring Stottlemyre up from Richmond, Houk had held back. Stottlemyre was supposed to be the jewel in the crown for the extension of the Yankee dynasty, and, all things being equal, it was better for the Yankee organization if he finished the season at Richmond. But Berra was insistent. Since Houk was the man who had asked Berra to be the manager, now he owed Yogi a chance to call up the best young pitcher the organization had in the minor leagues, and who sounded from all reports as if he was ready to pitch in the majors. Stottlemyre was hardly surprised when the call came. The problems of the pitching staff were hardly a secret, and he was aware that there had been representatives of the big-league team watching him work in recent games. “Hey, Mel,” a teammate would say, “all those big men from New York—they’re here to watch
you.
” At first he did not believe them, but then he realized they were probably right. Even so, the extra attention did not bother him, and it did not add to the pressure when he went out to pitch. He had an unusual ability to shut out the crowd and keep his mind in the game. That was one of his trademarks—the ability to shut out everything else and concentrate. It was the bane, he later noted, of his wife’s existence. One day with the New York brass watching, he won, 2-1, his tenth victory in a row. It made his record 13-3. His earned run average at Richmond, which had been 4.05 the year before with virtually the same team in the same league, had dropped to 1.42. He was told to get to New York as quickly as he could. He got a room at the Concourse Plaza near the Stadium, and almost immediately he was called by a New York writer who wanted to do a story about him. Stottlemyre, the writer, and a photographer ventured down to Times Square, where the rookie was dazzled by the sight—so many people, so many tall buildings. He had come from a town of about one thousand people and did not believe that there could be so many people in the world; the article about the country boy dazzled by the sights in the big city was duly published. When Stottlemyre went to work for the first time as a New York Yankee, the Yankees were in third place, three and a half games out of first. No one reached out to him more readily in those first days than the catcher, Elston Howard. “Pitch the way you did in Richmond. Don’t change anything. Don’t try and do more because you’re here and you’re pitching against major leaguers. Don’t try and throw faster. Do what you did there and you’ll be fine,” Howard said. Then he did something for Stottlemyre that he did for other pitchers: before a game Howard took the few last pitches squatting right over the plate instead of squatting just behind it; this allowed the pitcher to see exactly what was happening as the ball broke over the plate.

The Yankees had lost a doubleheader to the White Sox the day before, with both Bouton and Terry losing. They were three and a half games behind Baltimore and two and a half games behind Chicago when Berra decided to pitch Stottlemyre for the first time in an afternoon game at the Stadium. That day in his first major-league appearance he was everything management and his teammates had hoped for. He was the coolest rookie the others had ever seen. The other players, particularly the other young players, were in awe of him from the start. Here he was, a kid just out of the minor leagues, walking into the starting rotation of a defending championship team in the middle of a pennant race, and he was as relaxed as could be. Stottlemyre’s was, thought Jim Bouton, the most economical motion he had ever seen in a pitcher. He would stand on the mound, go into a miniature windup, and take a small stride toward the plate. The ball would come in, nice and fast, but not
that
fast, and then it would explode downward, dead flat down. He had great control and he never seemed to throw a ball that was above the knees. Watching him that day, Jim Bouton thought, was like a scene out of a great western movie. It was as if the Yankees were the good guys but in desperate trouble, and the other teams were the bad guys, and then into town walks this tall, slim U.S. Marshal, who doesn’t talk too much, but who is absolutely fearless and who doesn’t know he is supposed to be scared. Quietly he starts cleaning up the bad guys, or at least, Bouton decided, getting them to hit into ground balls. In that first game against the White Sox, twenty-one batters hit ground balls, and he walked only one batter. The Yankees won, 7-3. He was going to be around a long time, Steve Hamilton, the relief pitcher, thought, and so Hamilton, unofficial monitor of the daily baseball-signing speed records, tried to talk Stottlemyre into changing his name to Stott.