October 1964 (41 page)

Even in rural Cuba, for a little boy who helped carry the tobacco leaves on a plantation near Pinar del Río, the legend of the Yankees was powerful. Regular-season baseball games were not broadcast throughout Cuba, but World Series games were, and the Yankees always seemed to be in the World Series. The broadcaster was named Bob Canal, a very famous man in Cuba, and because of the way Canal pronounced “Yogi Berra,” rolling the syllables out, it sounded like a Spanish name. So Ramos chose Berra as his favorite player, hoping that he was Spanish. That was as close to a big-league role model as a Cuban boy was going to get in the late forties. When Ramos finally signed with the Senators, the team with the strongest connection to Hispanic ballplayers in those days, he was very excited about visiting Yankee Stadium, which he had envisioned in his childhood fantasies. When he first got to the Stadium, he put his baseball uniform on and then toured the entire ball park, examining everything there, much as another man might have walked around a museum. This was the place he had always heard about as a boy, he thought, every bit as majestic as he had hoped. He loved playing against the Yankees, because they had so many great players, and his favorite player was now Mickey Mantle, who had hit one of his longest home runs off Ramos. That home run had come perilously close to going out of Yankee Stadium—leaving both Mantle and Ramos disappointed; Mantle because it was his life’s ambition to hit one out, and Ramos because, in addition to being an intense competitor, he was a joyous man and realized he had just lost a moment of derivative immortality: that of having his name linked forever to Mantle’s as co-authors of the longest home run in baseball history.

Liberated from Cleveland, Ramos raced for the airport and joined the Yankees in Kansas City on September 5. They were four games out and playing poorly at the time. But he was thrilled by the idea of being with his favorite team, of being in the midst of a pennant race, and, in addition, of pitching with the best infield in the American League playing behind him. He admired, as did many pitchers on opposing teams, the Yankees’ infield play and their ability to pull off the pitcher’s best friend, the double play. He got an example of that immediately. In his first game as a Yankee he came in to relieve Roland Sheldon in the last game of the Kansas City series. Sheldon pitched well through eight innings, had a 3-0 lead, and then walked the first batter in the ninth, Wayne Causey. Berra signaled for Ramos. The first batter was Rocky Colavito, who hit what looked like a tailor-made double-play ball to third. But the ball took a bad bounce and went off Clete Boyer’s shoulder for a base hit. Then Jim Gentile singled past the mound, and Causey scored. Bill Bryan, a left-handed batter, was sent up to bat against the right-handed Ramos. Suddenly, after all those years of playing in games in which he was carried by personal ambition and pride, Pete Ramos was pitching under pressure, where a pennant could depend on his every pitch. Bryan hit a sharp ball to the right side, and for a moment Ramos thought that he had failed and that it was a base hit, but Pepitone made a nice pickup, went down to Kubek for the lead runner, and then took the relay for the double play. Then Ramos got Ed Charles to pop up for the third out.

It was Ramos’s first save as a Yankee, and the first of many similar plays he would see in the weeks to come. He would throw the ball, and there would be a sharp grounder. For the moment he would feel that he had blown the game, then Kubek or Richardson would race over to make the play, and make it look easy. Afterward he would ask Kubek how he had done it, and Kubek would say that he and Richardson played the hitters in certain ways and it always seemed to work out. Good athletes, Ramos thought, and smart ones too. These were plays that had never been made for him in Washington or Cleveland, and he thought that in order to appreciate the Yankee infield play, every Yankee pitcher should be sentenced to five or six years playing for second-division clubs before he got to New York. If other members of the team thought the Yankees were wearing down and were not as disciplined as in the past, Ramos did not agree. What struck him was the professionalism of the Yankees, the belief that everything should be done right. Once when he was in the bullpen, Whitey Ford came out to talk to him, and Ford said that it was a great shame that Ramos had spent so many years with so many weak teams instead of getting to the Yankees much earlier. “Pete, if you’d been here from the start instead of the Senators,” Ford said, “you could take five defeats a year, and move them over to the win column.” They began to figure out his record that way. For the first nine years of his career, his record, they figured out, would have been 140-87. “Pete, you might have had a better record than me,” Ford laughed.

Ramos had always had a good fastball, and when he broke in with the Senators when he was twenty, he had not even known how good it was. He played in a final preseason exhibition game against the Cincinnati Reds, and, of course, he had no idea who the Reds were, since he neither spoke nor read English. He knew they were in the National League and had red on their uniforms. The Reds crushed the Senators with their hitting that day. Late in the game Ramos was able to tell from Chuck Dressen’s hand signals that Dressen wanted him in the game. So he pitched to two men, struck them out on six pitches, and got a third man to pop up. Two of the batters seemed unusually large to him. When he finished, a huge cheer went up from the crowd. Dressen, using his other players as interpreters, asked Ramos if he knew what the cheer was for. Ramos said he had no idea. “It’s for you,” Dressen said. Why? Ramos asked, puzzled. “Because you struck out Wally Post, Ted Kluszewski and got Gus Bell to pop up.” That did not impress Ramos, so Dressen asked if his young pitcher knew who they were. No, he said. Well, said the manager, they all hit around thirty or forty home runs a year. “So the fans are happy with you,” Dressen said.

His was not a great repertoire of pitches. He had a wicked fastball, a dinky curve (in his own words), and what became his famous Cuban palm ball, though everyone who hit against him said it was a spitter, which he always denied, albeit with a knowing smile. He knew exactly what he had to do every day as a relief pitcher for the Yankees. It was to get the batters to hit the ball on the ground, so he came in low all the time. In addition, he was determined not to walk anyone. The hitters were going to have to earn their hits off him. It was his happiest time in professional baseball: he could still throw hard—Ellie Howard told him he was probably throwing in the low nineties—and he was putting the ball exactly where he wanted it. Whitey Ford, who seemed to know more about pitching than anyone he had ever met, would take Ramos to the bullpen and teach him how to throw the Whitey Ford mud ball. The Yankees needed to play at home to use the mud ball, because the groundskeepers would wet down a spot near the catcher’s position. When Whitey was pitching, Ellie Howard would give the ball a quick hard scratch at the mud. If the dirt was on the top, the ball would break down; if it was on the bottom, the ball would break up.

Ramos was greatly impressed by his teammates. He had never seen such a sense of purpose before. They were very relaxed as the pressure built during the stretch; no one seemed nervous, and no one was playing tight. They all seemed to put the idea of team ahead of individual accomplishment. In one game, his fourth appearance as a Yankee, he came in to relieve Whitey Ford, who had gone the first four innings with a 4–1 lead, but jammed his heel running out a base hit. Ramos gave up two hits and one run over the next five innings, and after the game he went over to Ford and asked why he had not gone one more inning in order to get credit for the win, which would have made his record 15-6 at the time—a lovely accomplishment in a season marked by injury and pain for Ford. “Pete, one more win for me isn’t very important—it doesn’t really mean anything. But one more win for the Yankees in a pennant race means a hell of a lot right now, and it’s not worth taking a chance.” That win had brought them into second place, only one game out.

The Yankees were on the move now and Ramos was a key part of it. It was the best month of his professional career. He seemed to be pitching every day, with the game on the line on every pitch. Again and again Berra went to him. Finally Berra told him he needed a rest and not to come to the ball park, because if he came Yogi might not be able to resist the temptation to go to him. But Ramos came to the ball park, and Yogi inevitably used him. Roy Hamey had made his statement about the need for a winning streak on September 3, and the next day the Yankees went on a 5-game winning streak. Then they hit another bump in the road and lost 2 out of 3, with a five-hitter by Al Downing against the Tigers, their only victory. On September 12, Stottlemyre, who was absolutely brilliant down the stretch, beat Minnesota, 4–3, on a five-hitter, and it was the first game of another winning streak. Over the combined winning streaks, the young rookie had 5 starts and won all 5, including 3 complete games and another game in which he pitched into the ninth. On September 26 he pitched against the Senators in Washington in what would be the Yankees’ eleventh straight victory if they won. He was awesome, and they won, 7-0. Stottlemyre gave up two hits, got fifteen outs on groundballs, and had five hits himself. When the second streak was over, the Yankees had won 19 out of their last 22, and were in first place by four games. Pete Ramos had appeared in 8 games, won 1, saved 5 (he would save 2 more before the season was over); he had worked 20⅓ innings and given up only eight hits and two runs. He struck out sixteen men and did not walk a single batter. His earned run average was 1.59. As the National League race was becoming tighter and tighter, the Yankees suddenly seemed to be putting a lock on the American League. Their two competitors, the Orioles and the White Sox, were younger teams and they simply flattened out: Baltimore, which actually had a season edge over the Yankees that year, went 11-11 during the Yankee hot streak, and the White Sox went 10-9.

Most of the Yankee hitters went on batting streaks of their own. Elbe Howard went 27 for 86 during the streak, and Bobby Richardson went 39 for 90. But if there was a key player, both offensively and defensively, in that stretch for the Yankees, it was Roger Maris, even though it had not been a good season for him. His nagging injuries had allowed him to play, but not at his top level. And then, in September, when the Yankees seemed on the verge of falling out of contention, with both Mantle and Tom Tresh frequently injured, Roger Maris, who had not been that dangerous a hitter for two years, caught fire and played some of the best baseball of his life. He carried the team as he might have in an earlier time if Mantle had not been a teammate. Maris hit the ball with authority. These were rocketlike line drives, hit so hard that they seemed to have topspin on them and they exploded up when they bounced toward the waiting fielders. He went 16 for 42 during that critical winning streak, and drove in critical runs in game after game—24 runs in his last 41 games. In addition, Berra, finally accepting the inevitability of Mantle’s physical decline, gave Tresh a shot in center field, and then he finally decided on playing Maris there. Maris, fast and strong, a far better center fielder than Tresh, played the best center field that the Yankees had seen since Mantle was young.

A
T FIRST IT SEEMED
a small thing. On Sunday, September 29, Tony Kubek had a frustrating day at the plate, one of many in a season of such constant health problems that he was rarely able to play up to the level of his own expectations. His batting average was down some forty points. After this game he apparently slapped his hand against a door that had appeared to him to be made of wood. It was not. It was metal, and he badly hurt his wrist, which began to swell up. Kubek did not play on Tuesday, and then he did not play again on Wednesday. Berra told reporters that he was sure that Kubek would be back in a few days, and that it was a good idea to rest him at this point of the season. But Kubek did not play again for the rest of the season and did not play in the World Series.

That September, after leading the National League for almost the entire season, often by as many as nine or ten games, the Philadelphia Phillies began to die. As the team started to make mistakes and became mired in a prolonged losing streak, the clubhouse became quieter and quieter; as the defeats mounted, they began to have ever greater psychological impact.

For Jim Bunning, the ace pitcher of the Phillies, it was the end of a storybook season. Bunning had been a star pitcher in Detroit for nine years, one of the best pitchers in the American League. Then, in 1963, he ran afoul of Chuck Dressen, who had been installed as the Tiger manager for the last part of what was a losing Detroit season. Bunning was underwhelmed by Dressen, almost as much, it seemed, as Dressen was underwhelmed by Bunning, thirty-one years old then, and in the midst of a rare losing season. Dressen seemed to think Bunning’s career was over, and in September he gave several of Bunning’s starts away to other pitchers, most notably to a young right-hander named Denny McLain. That enraged Bunning, who thought of himself as a good September pitcher, and afterward he felt he might have turned his 12-13 record into a winning one had he gotten all his starts. It was not just a matter of ego, but a matter of finances as well; for in those days, when players had so little leverage in contract negotiations, a losing season weakened Bunning’s ability to argue for more money. Bunning regarded Dressen as a self-important man who thought that the manager was more important than the players. His favorite line to his players was that if they could hold the opposition for the first seven innings, he, Chuck Dressen, would think of some way to win the game in the last two. Was there a dumber attitude on the part of a manager in the game of baseball? Bunning wondered. At the end of 1963, Bunning asked for a trade, and the Tiger management granted his wish, sending him to Philadelphia, where he quickly became the ace of the staff. From the start, Bunning loved playing in the National League, where, as a low-ball pitcher, he found that the league’s umpires regularly gave him the call on low strikes as American League umpires had not. He also thought that the Philadelphia team was very good, much better than anyone realized. Even before the season started, he thought it had a good shot at the pennant.