October 1964 (44 page)

It should have been easy for the Cardinals. All they had to do was beat the Mets and the pennant was theirs. They were so hot as a team, McCarver thought, that the only danger was an off day. Friday was a bizarre night. The Cardinals, ready to close in on the pennant, sent Gibson against Al Jackson, the talented Met left-hander, and Gibson pitched beautifully but Jackson was better, and the Mets won, 1-0. The game in Cincinnati was one of the weirdest of the season. The Phillies, still sleepwalking, were behind, 3-0, in the seventh. In the bottom of the seventh, with one out and a man on second, Chris Short hit Leo Cardenas of the Reds with a pitch. Cardenas wanted to fight, and his teammates had to stop him. Somehow, the scuffle seemed to wake up the Phillies. With one out in the eighth, a bloop hit by Frank Thomas landed near second. The Reds thought that Cardenas should have had it, but that his mind was still on the confrontation with Short. Jim O’Toole, the Cincinnati pitcher, seemed furious with Cardenas and lost his cool, walking one man and then giving up another hit. Suddenly the Phillies broke through for four runs and won the game. After the game, in the Reds’ locker room, O’Toole, still furious, went after Cardenas and threw him to the ground. At that point Cardenas grabbed an ice pick and started after O’Toole, but others pulled them apart.

On Saturday the Reds and the Phillies had the day off and the Cardinals played the Mets in a day game, with Ray Sadecki pitching. Sadecki was flat. The Mets got four runs off him in the first and hammered the Cardinals, 15-5. It seemed a cruel joke to some of the Cardinal players to come this far, to play so well down the stretch, fashioning an eight-game winning streak against the league’s best teams, and then lose the first two games to the Mets. If it was hard on the Cardinal players, it was equally hard on the National League schedule makers. If the Reds lost to the Phillies, and the Cards lost to the Mets on the final day, the major leagues for the first time in history would have a three-way tie. A complicated three-way miniseries was created to deal with the prospect. In Cincinnati the Phillies, behind Jim Bunning, pitching with plenty of rest, defeated the Reds, 10-0. In St. Louis, Curt Simmons started. He was not as sharp in this game as he had been against the Phillies, and in the fifth inning, when the Mets took a 3-2 lead, Johnny Keane called for Bob Gibson to come out of the bullpen. The Cards scored three in the bottom of the fifth and three more in the sixth. In the eighth they added three more. Their lead was 11-4, but in the ninth Gibson walked two. There was one out with two on when Keane went to Barney Schultz. A passed ball and a single gave the Mets a run and made the score 11-5. Then Ed Kranepool popped to McCarver. The Cardinals had won the pennant on the last day of the season. On October 3 the Yankees clinched the pennant at home against Cleveland. Al Downing started, and was relieved by Pete Mikkelsen, who became the winning pitcher. Ramos came in for Mikkelsen in the ninth and got the save, his seventh down the stretch as ä Yankee. When the game was over, Ramos stood on the mound and turned to his former manager, Birdie Tebbetts, standing in the Indian dugout, the man who earlier that season had said that no one wanted him. Ramos planted his left hand in the crook of his right arm and then made a gesture as old as the ages to Tebbetts.

Pete Ramos was not eligible for the World Series—he had come over to the Yankees after the September 1 deadline. There had been some talk with the Phillies of allowing a player from each club to be added to the rosters, because the Phillies were short of pitching too, but when the Phillies collapsed, Ramos’s chances died as well. The Cardinals had no intention of doing anything that would allow him a shot at eligibility. It was a black day, Ramos thought when he found out he could not pitch. The Yankees invited him to come with the team to St. Louis, but he had no taste for it. When they played in New York he went out to the park early to pitch batting practice, and then went to his room at the Concourse Plaza Hotel to watch the games by himself in his room.

T
HERE WAS, OF COURSE
, some apprehension among the Cardinals about playing the mighty Yankees. The Yankees had been to the World Series every season since time began, it seemed, and they knew about big games. They knew how to intimidate their opponents, and somehow in a World Series, no matter where the game was played, they always managed to seem like the home team. As they came on the field for the first game, they did not trickle out of the dugout as other teams did, but came out as a team; because they were big men, they came out big. They seemed to boost themselves as they came over the last step of the dugout in order to look even bigger. On the field, watching, Lou Brock could not figure out if it was intentional, but it struck him then that they knew how to play the game of intimidation and how to look imposing. Curt Flood was standing with Brock, and he was thinking the same thing Brock was. “Hey, Lou, when they come down, they still have to play baseball,” Flood said.

In fact, the Cardinals could still hardly believe they were in the World Series. Winning the pennant had come as a quick high for the Cardinals, and an equally quick downer for the Phillies. The only person who appeared to show any stress at the end was Barney Schultz. He had held up well during the last few weeks, pitching brilliantly every day, it seemed, with the game on the line on every pitch. When the Cardinals won the pennant, though, he felt the tension for the first time. Just before the World Series started he had been driving to the ball park with his old pal from the minor leagues Joe Morgan, who later went on to manage the Red Sox. Suddenly Schultz pulled over to the side of the road. “What’s the matter, Barney?” Morgan asked. “I’m having trouble seeing,” Schultz said. He tried to drive one more time and then pulled over again. “You better drive, Joe,” he said. Schultz immediately went to see Dr. Middleman, the team doctor, who told him to wear sunglasses when he got to the field. “What you’re suffering from, Barney, is stress,” Middleman said. “That’s all. For weeks the game has been hanging on every pitch you’ve thrown in every game you’ve pitched, and now you’re showing the reaction. It’s nothing very new. I’ve had it as a doctor—after an operation. You’ll be fine. Get some dark glasses, and a good night’s sleep, and try and relax. You don’t even know the pressure you’ve been under.” Schultz took his advice, began to relax, and gradually his vision came back.

On the day of the first game, Bob Uecker was shagging balls out in left field with some of the other scrubs. In order to mark the festivities, three Dixieland bands were stationed there, and at one point they took a break and put down their instruments. Uecker wandered over and picked up a tuba. For a moment he thought of trying to play it, because that might amuse the other players, but just then someone hit a slow, lazy fly out to left. Instinctively, because he was born to be a comic, Uecker circled under the ball with the waiting tuba. He tried for the catch in the mouth of the tuba, but missed. The next one he caught. Then he missed one. The players began to laugh and the crowd began to cheer. He missed two more flies and then caught one. Some of the balls dented the tuba, and the owner was not amused, sending the Cardinals and Uecker a bill for $250. His teammates, though, were delighted. It was the World Series against the mighty Yankees and the Cardinals were very relaxed.

Because Gibson had pitched so much at the end of the season, there had been no chance to rest him, so they opened width Ray Sadecki, who, true to his own projections, had been a twenty-game winner. He was pitching against Whitey Ford, who, despite injuries and declining physical ability, had nonetheless managed a record of 17-6 with an ERA of 2.13.

In the first inning there was a critical play. With one out, Brock singled. Then Groat singled to right, and Brock kept going, without hesitation, to third. It was something he had thought about before the game—testing Mantle—and he had decided he was going to do it every time. After all, he had challenged the great Roberto Clemente in the National League, and Clemente was a great defensive player at the height of his power, not an aging one playing in the wrong position, watching his skills atrophy and undermined by bad legs. Mantle, playing right, had not even bothered to make a throw. The Cardinal book on the Yankees said that they could run on Mantle, and now they started to do it, almost from the moment the game began. It was an early sign not just of his own physical decline and the fact that he was now a defensive liability, but that the Cardinals were the younger, faster, more aggressive team. Brock had come in to score when Boyer flied to Mantle.

Ray Sadecki was not sharp that day. He had pitched well at the end of the season, but in the next-to-last game against the Mets, the 15-5 defeat, he had been bombed, lasting one inning. The World Series was hard for him, he thought, because you had to go on scouting reports and that was not the way he liked to pitch; rather, he liked to rely on his personal feel for the hitters. Nor were the Yankees an easy team for him. He liked to come in with a high fastball, and the Yankees murdered high fastballs, and in the second inning Elston Howard singled, and then Tresh, a good high-fastball hitter, hit a tremendous drive into the left-center-field bleachers. The Yankees got another run on two more singles and might have gotten yet another one except that Lou Brock threw out Whitey Ford trying to score from second. The Yankees had three runs and they had gotten them on five hits. The Cardinals got one back in the bottom of the second when Mike Shannon singled and moved to second on Dal Maxvill’s tapper back to Ford. Sadecki singled Shannon in. It was 3-2, In the New York fifth, the Yankees grouped three hits for one more run, making it 4–2. That was normally a nice lead to hand to Whitey Ford midway through a World Series game.

For Tim McCarver, all of twenty-two, the excitement was extraordinary. It was not just the myth of the Yankees that the Cardinals were battling that day, it was also the myth of Whitey Ford, the greatest big-game pitcher of baseball for more than a decade. He had been pitching in World Series games since Tim McCarver was nine years old, and he was the player to whom you gave the ball on critical days and who always rose to the occasion. Anyone else might have been excited and nervous on this day, McCarver thought, with the crowd at Busch Stadium and the giant press corps, not to mention the even bigger invisible crowd of 40 million at home watching on television, but Whitey Ford was as cool as could be. There was no fanfare to him, except perhaps a certain barely detectable cockiness in his stride. There he was—the pitcher with the most World Series starts, the most World Series innings pitched, the most World Series wins; he walked out to the mound like a man going out to grab a bus to take him to work in the morning.

As the game developed, though, it was clear to McCarver that Ford did not have much that day, that he was probably pitching in considerable pain. Ford had always triumphed on the basis of intelligence, placement, and a wicked curve, but on this day his curve was flat. On another day in another park with a smaller crowd and less scrutiny, Ellie Howard might have been able to cut the ball for him and then he might have been able to have given the ball some movement. But this was neither the time nor the place for that. There was a good chance they could beat him that day, McCarver decided.

It was Mike Shannon who helped get Ford in the sixth. Bing Devine had brought Shannon up in mid-season to make the Cardinals’ outfield complete, and he had done just that. Shannon was big and strong, a good defensive right fielder with a wicked arm and genuine power. In half a season he had hit 9 home runs and knocked in 43 runs. His nickname was “Moon” or “Moon Man” because of his eccentricities. Someone once asked McCarver why Shannon was nicknamed Moon Man, and all McCarver had said was, “Just think about it.” Ted Simmons, who was to be McCarver’s eventual replacement, remembered being with Shannon in the locker room after a game when Shannon turned to him and said, “Teddy, I’ve got something to tell you.” “What is it?” Simmons asked. “Insurance,” Shannon answered. It was, Simmons recalled, like the scene in
The Graduate
when someone said “Plastics” to Dustin Hoffman, and Simmons then decided that the nickname fit.

In the bottom of the sixth Boyer singled and took second on a passed ball. Then Bill White, trying to do too much and overswinging, struck out. That brought up Shannon. He was new to the majors and new to Whitey Ford, but he thought Ford was off that day. Shannon thought Ford had been trying to throw sliders inside and missing. Indeed, Ford threw Shannon what looked like a slider, and hung it, and Shannon drilled it. It was one of the hardest balls he hit in his career, a ball with a Mantle-like orbit that went over the 358 sign and hit the
B
in the
BUDWEISER
sign. The estimates were that the ball went some five hundred feet in the air. “The longest ball I’ve ever seen him hit,” Johnny Keane said afterward. There was a huge photo on the front page of the local paper that night with a dotted line showing the trajectory of Shannon’s home run as it hit the sign, and years later, when he was a restaurateur in St. Louis, Shannon asked Ford to sign the picture. “You son of a bitch, you want to get me twice, first when you hit it,” Ford said, “and now when I’m supposed to sign it.” The home run tied the score, and then McCarver doubled and Al Downing replaced Ford. Ford was through for the day, through for the Series, and in terrible pain. His left arm was dead, and he was to undergo two operations before he got complete feeling back in it again. The Yankees did not announce that; instead, hoping to make the Cardinals think that their bullpen was deeper than it was, they announced that he was bothered by a bad heel and might still pitch again. When a reporter asked Ford himself whether he might pitch later in the Series, he said, “There’s nothing wrong with me that a big ball park can’t cure.” In truth, his arm hurt so much that he could barely cut his food.

Downing was not a natural relief pitcher. Carl Warwick, a pinch hitter, singled, the first of his three successful pinch hits in the series, and that scored McCarver. Curt Flood drove a ball, carried by the wind, to the base of the left-field wall, and Tom Tresh finally lost it in the glare. (“I lost it in the sun. ... When it came down I couldn’t catch it, you can’t catch what you can’t see,” he said afterward. The ball came down three feet from his glove and went for a triple. Julian Javier, running for Warwick, scored, and that essentially was the game. The Cardinals had drawn first blood, 9-5, and had shown that they might be a tougher team in a short series due to their vastly superior speed.