October 1964 (39 page)

T
HERE HAD BEEN RUMORS
for more than a year that the Yankees were for sale. Dan Topping, one of the two owners, and the more active of the two because he lived in New York, wanted out, mostly for reasons of health; Del Webb, the Arizona builder, one of the men who opened the door to the Sunbelt for millions of Americans, did not have the time to be a full-time owner. During the period that Topping wanted out, the Yankees had gone about cutting back in order to make their books look better. In the previous two years there had been much talk that the Yankees were no longer the powerful organization they had once been, that their farm system was no longer particularly rich, and that, in fact, only the two sucker trades with weak franchises—first for Bob Turley and Don Larsen, and then for Roger Maris—had kept them going. Men like Bill Veeck were saying that the best young ballplayers coming into baseball were not Yankees and the best organizational skills were no longer those of the Yankee managements. The Yankee cupboard, despite the impressive arrival of Mel Stottlemyre in mid-season, was essentially empty. On August 13, the news leaked out: Topping and Webb had sold the Yankees to CBS. It was a two-part sale: in stage one CBS bought 80 percent for $11.2 million, with an option to buy the remaining 20 percent. That the Yankees were to be merged with CBS at once amused some people (there were jokes that Yogi Berra, the Yankee manager, and Walter Cronkite, the CBS anchorman, might now switch jobs) and terrified others, since CBS was so big and so rich (the price it paid for the Yankees represented only 1.9 percent of its 1963 revenues). With a limitless capacity to invest money made elsewhere, with the ability to broadcast games over a network, some critics feared, the Yankees might be made even richer and more powerful by the sale. A number of owners were upset and tried to bring the Justice Department in to block the sale for antitrust reasons. “The blackest day in baseball since the Black Sox scandal,” said Roy Hofheinz, the owner of the Houston Colts. On the surface the sale seemed to make sense—the people at CBS allegedly knew a lot about sports; baseball and television were already linked in a way that seemed to enhance both; and sports was becoming a bigger part of the entertainment dollar all the time. If anything, the sale seemed like bargain for CBS. In television and radio money alone, the Yankees were already making nearly $2 million a year in broadcast fees, $600,000 for their share of the network game of the week, and $1.2 million for the local television and radio rights.

Nothing better demonstrated the changing economics of sports in general and baseball in particular than the sale of the Yankees, for it reflected both the rising value of a team and the increasing importance of television in sports. It was an important benchmark in the rising commercialism of sports. In the nineteen years since Topping, Webb, and Larry MacPhail had bought the team from the Ruppert estate for $2.8 million, the value of the major league team, the ball park, and its principal farm operations had gone up sevenfold. Nor was this an isolated phenomenon. Throughout sports the impact of television was becoming clearer and clearer. The huge salary soon to be paid to Joe Namath reflected the fact that an experienced network, NBC, which scheduled the fledgling American Football League, needed instant stars in order to be competitive.

Already throughout sports there were signs of the increasing importance and the increasing power of television money. In Houston, Judge Hofheinz was finishing his Astrodome and it would open for the 1965 season; it was a structure that would revolutionize sports in general, making it possible to play any sport in any city in the country, despite the vagaries of local weather. No longer would the rain of Seattle, the cold of Toronto, the sweltering heat and humidity of Houston preclude the acquisition of a sports team. The cost of the new dome was estimated to be some $31 million, including the land. Throughout the country, all kinds of cities now hoped to lure baseball franchises from places where they had not flourished, and in an attempt to hold on to their teams, a number of older baseball cities were already building new ball parks. St Louis, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh had them on the drawing board, at an average of $25 million a ball park. The last thing an owner needed to do anymore was pay for the construction of a new ball park—the cities themselves would willingly take care of that; Atlanta, eager to be seen as a major league city, and well along in negotiations designed to lure the Braves of Milwaukee to the South, had promised the owners a new ball park, with construction to be finished in time for the 1965 season. Local officials in Milwaukee tried desperately to fight back and to hold on to the team that only a few years previously they had stolen from Boston. They offered the Braves ownership all the revenue from concessions, which came to an additional $125,000 a year, and a larger radio-television package, which came to $525,000 a year for three years, an increase of $125,000 a year. The ownership, however, was excited about the prospect of getting out of a market—for that was the new word for a region in the television age—where it was merely one of three teams sharing the same audience in the greater Chicago-Milwaukee area, in order to gain a huge virgin market all to itself. Early estimates were that the Atlanta radio-television money would come to $1.1 million.

By mid-August it was a three-way American League pennant race. Baltimore was on the rise, and would win eleven more games this season than it had in 1963. It had a good young pitching staff with Wally Bunker, Steve Barber, Dave McNally, plus the veteran Robin Roberts, and it had three great players in the daily lineup: Boog Powell, twenty-three that summer and threatening for the American League home-run leadership; Brooks Robinson, just coming into his prime at twenty-seven; and Luis Aparicio, perhaps the best shortstop in the league. The Orioles were about to replace the Yankees as the best and most consistent team in the American League. Chicago was not as well balanced, but it probably had the best pitching in the league, with Gary Peters, Juan Pizarro, and Joel Horlen, and with Hoyt Wilhelm in the bullpen. More and more, the Yankees seemed patched together and carried by memories. On August 17, in third place, and two and a half games behind Baltimore, they went to Chicago for a four-game series. The day before, Mantle had jammed his knee trying to get back to first to beat a pickoff play. He was in terrible pain, with water on his knee, and he thought he would miss most of the Chicago series. In fact, he missed it all. Sportswriters covering the team, who now kept statistics of this sort, noted that it was the seventh time that year that he had been kept out because of injuries. The Chicago series was a disaster. In the first game Ralph Terry pitched well, but New York lost when Hector Lopez misplayed a ball. In the second game they lost, 4-3, when Berra stayed too long with Al Downing. Downing threw a two-hitter through the seventh inning, but then, in the eighth, he tired. Berra was wary of going to his bullpen, and Floyd Robinson hit a three-run homer off Downing to win the game. In the third game Jim Bouton pitched well but fielded poorly, and the Yankees lost, 4–2, with all the Chicago runs unearned. The next day, behind Johnny Buzhardt, Chicago shut them out, 5-0. They were four and a half games back and sinking, it seemed. “Color them black for mourning,” Joe Trimble wrote in the
Daily News.
It was, he added, quite certain that there would be no pennant for New York this year.

One thing happened during that period that seriously affected the pennant race: Boog Powell, the young power hitter of the Orioles, who already had thirty-one home runs that season, hurt his wrist. At first it appeared that he had fractured it and would be out for the season. Instead, it turned out to be a minor injury, but he missed two weeks. The Orioles played fourteen games when he was out and split them. At the very least, the injury slowed down what appeared to be a serious Baltimore stretch drive. Some of the Oriole—and Yankee—players thought that if he had not been injured, Baltimore would have won the pennant.

The Yankees did not know about Powell’s injury as they boarded their bus in Chicago to go to the airport. It was a brutally hot day, and they had just lost four games to a contender during a pennant drive. It was a very un-Yankeelike thing to do, especially to a team they had assumed they could beat easily in the past. The air-conditioning on the bus was not working well, and the bus got caught in Chicago rush-hour traffic. It barely moved for two hours. Tempers were short. Phil Linz, the utility infielder who was playing regularly because Tony Kubek was hurt, was playing a harmonica he had just bought, trying to learn “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Linz was angry and frustrated. He had started the first three games at shortstop and hit well, he thought, going 3 for 10, including two triples; none of the losses were in any way his fault. Then he had been benched in the fourth game, and the implication was that their failure was his failure. His music seemed to have offended the ears of Berra, as well it might have, since Linz played harmonica very badly. Berra told him to stop playing. Linz, who did not hear Berra, asked what he had said. Mantle, ever the provocateur, apparently then said, “He said play it louder.” So Linz played louder. Meanwhile, Frank Crosetti, the longtime coach and, in his own mind, keeper of the Yankee flame (Linz thought Crosetti was clearly fanning the flames in this case), said, in his very distinctive squeaky voice, “That’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen!” With that Berra got angry—his control over the club was at stake. He started coming back toward Linz, and suddenly he was looming over him. “You’d think you’d just won the goddamn pennant instead of losing four straight,” he said. “Why don’t you stick that goddamn harmonica up your ass.” Linz, scared now, for an angry Berra was a rare sight, flipped the harmonica toward Berra, who angrily swiped at it, sending it flying toward Pepitone, whom it hit on the leg. “Corpsman! Oh, my knee, get me a corpsman!” Pepitone shouted.

The next day it was all over the newspapers, driving all other news, Linz remembered, including what was happening in Mississippi and Vietnam, off the front pages. Berra called Linz in, and Linz apologized to him. Yogi was very nice about it. “I’ve got to fine you, Phil, you know,” he said. “That’s okay, Yogi,” Linz said, “I deserve it.” “How about two hundred dollars?” Yogi said. “That’s fine,” Linz said. Two days later he got a call from a harmonica company asking him to endorse their product and offering him five thousand dollars. It was the kind of thing that happened on all ball clubs when they struggled, Linz thought, and he was sure he was being scapegoated in the media. He felt that he had played hard, and that he was playing well. As for Crosetti, it was hardly the worst thing that had ever happened on the Yankees; take, for instance, the famed incident, already recounted, in which Ryne Duren, quite drunk, squashed Ralph Houk’s cigar in Houk’s face during a pennant-clinching celebration. Crosetti, most assuredly, was not pleased that Linz had made money because of the incident. From then on when Linz would go to the outfield to take fly balls before a game, if Crosetti was hitting fungos, he would never hit one to Linz. He would hit to the right of him and to the left of him, but never to him.

What bothered Linz, besides the fact that he had been singled out in the press as the villain and ostensibly as the reason for the Yankee losing streak, was the way Crosetti had come down on him. There was, he thought, a double standard in everything that had happened. Crosetti was afraid to criticize the stars of the team, but he was tough on the backup players. Nor did Linz feel, as he considered the incident, that he was even one of the people who was testing Yogi. That was being done, ironically, by Mantle and Ford, Yogi’s old pals and teammates. They liked Yogi, but, by instinct, they liked to push things to their limits, because there was more fun that way. That was relatively easy with Yogi, for he was not a disciplinarian. He would announce the bus was leaving at five
P.M.
and Ford would be a little late, perhaps deliberately so, and the bus would not leave. When Ford would amble onto the bus at ten minutes after five, Berra would not say a word. Then Whitey would deftly stick it to him, not cruelly but just as part of the constant testing in which players and managers struggled for control of turf. “Hey, Yog,” Ford would ask, “what time is it?” It was not that Mantle and Ford were trying to undermine Yogi Berra that season—far from it. They were professionals and old friends. But at the same time, they went along with the idea that Yogi was a bit of a cartoon figure, and they never used their immense influence with the team to protect him and his authority.

The fact that Tony Kubek had missed most of the Chicago series at shortstop underlined a glaring vulnerability and an important change in the Yankees—a decline in the depth of the team, particularly among the middle infielders. The popular perception was that the Yankees were carried by power hitters. Their opponents thought differently: yes, they had power, and they had good pitching, but the core of their success over the years had been their balance, their depth, and, above all, the strength of their middle-infield play. The most valuable player on the team in the early part of the dynasty was not necessarily DiMaggio—“the Big Dago,” as he was known by his teammates in those days—but, as DiMaggio himself had said, Phil Rizzuto, or “the Little Dago,” as he had been known. According to the team culture, the infielders had to be very good fielders, with good range, and they had to be consistent. They did not have to hit. Hitting on their part was always considered a bonus. When Jerry Coleman went to spring training in 1949, he was dubious about his chances of making the main ball club because he had hit only .251 in Newark, but to the men running the club that hardly mattered; from the moment they saw Coleman play, they loved him. He was acrobatic at second, and a marvelous fielder with considerable range: how much he hit hardly mattered to them. Rizzuto, who was to be paired with him at short, understood immediately Coleman’s value and how it added to the team; because Coleman had exceptional range, it enhanced Rizzuto’s range and allowed him to play even deeper in the hole between short and third. Again and again in his rookie year, Rizzuto would tell the anxious Coleman not to worry about his hitting, that all he had to do was make the plays in the field.