October 1964 (49 page)

Ernie Banks and Lou Brock were already good friends when Brock had been traded to St. Louis, so Banks had told the younger player, “Don’t worry, Lou, you’ll still be able to get into the Series—I’ll send a ticket down to you in St. Louis.” When the Cardinals won the Series, Brock sent his pal the box that his World Series ring came in, without, of course, the ring. Banks called him up immediately. “You son of a bitch,” he said over the phone.

Bob Howsam, who replaced Bing Devine, later went on to become a very good baseball man in Cincinnati, but he had arrived in St. Louis as an alien on a team that was not his own; he did not do it modestly, in the eyes of the players, since he had never played or managed in the big leagues. The players, who were fond of Bing Devine, and who regarded this as rightfully Devine’s team, were prepared to resent him, and they quickly found reason to justify their resentments. It was not merely that when the team began to win, Howsam took, they thought, an undue amount of credit, but there were also the memos. Howsam liked memos, and there were a good many of them, which seemed like nit-picking to veteran players: about the length of hair, for Howsam seemed to believe that short hair led to victory; about the need to wear a cap during batting practice; about how low the stirrups on the socks were supposed to be. There was also a memo at the end of the season to Curt Simmons suggesting that Simmons work on his pickoff move to first during the off-season. Since at the time Curt Simmons was thirty-five and had been in the major leagues with two teams for seventeen years, winning more than 160 games in that time, there were a number of jokes about sending
Howsam
a memo regarding how long his hair should be and how high his socks were to be worn. He was soon replaced by Stan Musial.

Bing Devine was voted baseball executive of the year, which pleased him and almost everyone who had worked for him. In a rare moment of candor a few years later, Gussie Busch admitted that firing him had been a mistake. Devine left St. Louis to go to work in the front office for the Mets. There, much as he had once had to share power with Rickey, he had to work alongside George Weiss, exiled there after having been squeezed out by the Yankees. To Devine, Weiss was very much like Rickey, a once-great figure unable to adjust to new circumstances. Shorn of the great Yankee machinery, and shorn of Kansas City as a virtual farm club, Weiss seemed largely paralyzed by his new job. He still disliked paying a great deal of money for players, and he was very much against the Mets going into a one-shot pool for a young pitcher named Tom Seaver because he thought it too costly. Others in the front office, impressed with Seaver’s talent, pressured him and he finally relented—largely, Devine believed, because Weiss thought the odds of the Mets actually winning the rights to Seaver were so slim. In one case, though, his thriftiness actually helped the Mets. They were just about to cut loose a young minor-league player named Jerry Koosman, who had so far disappointed them. The decision had been made to release him, but then someone noticed that Koosman owed the club five hundred dollars. “If there’s one thing George can’t stand it’s to release a player who owes the club money,” one of his subordinates said, so they kept Koosman on until the accounts could be settled; in the meantime Koosman began to turn his career around.

Lou Brock was uniformly admired by his teammates for what he had done and how hard he had played in 1964. If there was ever a player who set out to be the best ever, his teammates thought, it was Brock. Nor was it so much his great physical ability that made him special. He was one of the most cerebral players of his generation. He studied the game and, in particular, he studied pitchers—not as Ted Williams had studied them, for tip-offs on what they might throw, but instead for the telltale signs that would help him steal bases. Brock had heard that Maury Wills, at the time the standard against whom all base stealers were measured, kept a little black book filled with the idiosyncracies of the league’s pitchers. “Hey, Maury, got that little book?” he once asked the Dodger veteran, but it turned out that Wills was in no hurry to share his secrets with a younger player from a rival team. So, starting late in the 1964 season, Brock got an eight-millimeter camera and began to film the various pitchers in the league as they were on the mound, as they got set, as they threw home, and as they threw to first. “My home movies,” he called them. One day he was filming Don Drysdale, as tough a pitcher as existed in the league. “What the hell you doing with that camera, Brock?” “Just taking home movies,” said Brock. “I don’t want to be in your goddamn movies, Brock,” Drysdale said, and threw at him the next time he was up.

The films were helpful, and Brock began to pick up on little movements, twitches almost, that might have escaped the naked eye. All pitchers had some kind of twitch, he decided, and so he began to improve as a base stealer, stealing sixty-three in 1965, and then leading the league in eight of the next nine years. Because of his increasing knowledge and improving technique, he realized that he could steal more than one hundred bases in a season, and in 1974 he did just that.
If Wills had his black book,
Brock thought,
I’ve got my camera
—
I’m a man of modern technology.

Brock was different from Maury Wills in other ways too. Maury was always talking about how base stealing beat you up. He was always talking about the need to take a big lead off first. If you did not have to dive back, he liked to say, you had not taken a big enough lead. For a time Lou Brock did the same, but after a while he decided to change his style. What convinced him was a game against the Giants in which he had to dive back to first three times, and each time Willie McCovey beat him so hard with the tag that he could barely move. First basemen, he observed, were big, powerful men, while second basemen were slighter, often smaller than Brock himself. He decided that in order to preserve his own body, he was going to take smaller leads and go into second very hard. If anyone was going to do any beating up, he was, not the McCoveys of the world. In time Lou Brock broke Ty Cobb’s record, once considered unreachable, of 892 stolen bases; his own career mark was 938.

At the meeting of the owners in August, spurred by the rising cost of bonus players, there had been a good deal of talk about going to some sort of draft system for young players, not unlike that used by professional football and basketball. What encouraged the talk more than anything else was the competition for an outfielder named Rick Reichardt, who played for the University of Wisconsin. Reichardt was big and strong, and some said he would be the next Mantle. With ever richer owners and greater pressure than ever for instant success, the bidding for Reichardt soared above the previous ceilings. That summer Reichardt signed with the Angels for what was said to be a record bonus of $250,000. He was not the next Mantle, though no one knew that at the time. Reichardt’s impact on the owners was greater than his impact on the American League’s pitchers: he proved to be a good, not great, player who, in his better years, hit about 15 home runs, knocked in 60 runs, and batted around .260. But his bonus terrified the owners, for it was as close as they had yet come to a free-market situation. A bonus like that, some owners realized (looking at the CBS and Anheuser-Busch millions), might be only the beginning. Later that same year, Charley Finley, the owner of the Kansas City Athletics, revealed that he had paid out $634,000 in bonuses that year to sign some eighty players. The National League teams adopted the idea of a draft enthusiastically, whereas at the American League meeting, only three teams voted in favor of it. Those franchises that had traditionally been successful and had powerful scouting systems were wary of such radical change. But gradually the tide shifted in favor of some sort of draft. At the meeting of all the major league teams held in Houston in early December 1964, the draft was passed with little opposition. Hearing of it, Tom Greenwade, the great Yankee scout, told his son Bunch, “They’ve just taken the bat out of my hand.”

Given his intelligence and sense of humor, it was not surprising that Bob Gibson soon became the dominating force in the Cardinal locker room. He remained a great mimic and put-on artist, aided now by his success and seniority. At one point there was a young player on the team named Hal Gilson. For a time it appeared that Bob Gibson’s phone calls and messages were being routed to Hal Gilson, which did not please Gibson. “Gilson, I’m warning you,” he said. “You’ve got to stop taking my messages or I’ll have to trade you,” and it was part of Cardinal locker-room lore that shortly thereafter, Hal Gilson was traded to Houston.

One of Gibson’s favorite stunts was to list the entire roster on the blackboard in the clubhouse at the end of the year, and then go down the list, deciding who was going to be traded during the offseason. He spared no one, save himself and Lou Brock, and later, when he became a great Cardinal hitter, Joe Torre. Everyone else was ticketed out, including Red Schoendienst, who had replaced Johnny Keane as the manager. One year Bing Devine, back from the Mets for his second tour as general manager, walked in when Gibson was going through his routine, and Devine was amused until Gibson looked up and said, “It’s okay to laugh, Bing, but you’re gone too.”

With the retirement of Sandy Koufax, Gibson became the premier pitcher in baseball. Remarkably, there was, in the 1967 and 1968 seasons, a huge improvement in his control. To the amazement of his teammates and his peers, he reached an ever higher level of excellence, and finally attained that rarefied place inhabited in recent years only by Sandy Koufax. Gibson was the dominating pitcher in the 1967 World Series, after a season in which he had missed a third of his starts with a broken leg. Then he continued to improve and was virtually unbeatable in the 1968 season. In 1968, in what was a dazzling season, he had won 22, lost only 9, he had struck out a league-leading 268 batters in 304⅔ innings, he had walked only 62, he had an ERA of 1.12, he had pitched 13 shutouts, and he had completed 28 of the 34 games he started. It was, for a pitcher who only a few years earlier had contended with serious control problems, a demonstration of the rarest kind of pitching, which combined uncommon power with pinpoint control. Rarely has a single player been so overwhelming in World Series play as Gibson was in the World Series in both 1967 and 1968.

The first game of the 1968 World Series was his masterpiece. Gibson was going against Denny McLain of the Tigers, the first thirty-game winner in the major leagues in thirty-three years. McLain, who flew his own plane and played the organ in nightclubs around the Midwest when he wasn’t pitching, caught the attention of the media that season in his quest for thirty; to say that he had gotten more publicity and more endorsements than Gibson was an understatement, just as Carl Yastrzemski had gotten more endorsements than Gibson after the 1967 Series. Koufax, one of the network broadcasters that day, mentioned to his audience that he thought the difference in commercials and publicity that the two players had received might just fire up Gibson. He was right. Again and again the television cameras cut to close-ups of Gibson’s face displaying The Look, cold and unsparing, as Gibson struck out one Detroit hitter after another. The Detroit team was considered a good fastball-hitting team, but it barely mattered that day. In the ninth, Gibson, holding a comfortable 4-0 lead, struck out Al Kaline for his fifteenth strikeout of the game, tying the record set by Koufax in 1963. On the scoreboard the statistician flashed the news that Gibson had just tied the record of fifteen for World Series play set five years earlier by Sandy Koufax. Tim McCarver walked partway out to the mound to call his attention to it, hoping Gibson would soak in some of the glory of the moment. “Give me the ball,” Gibson yelled at him. McCarver tried to point to the scoreboard. “Give me the ball!” he repeated. Again McCarver tried to tell him what he had done and why the crowd was cheering, and finally Gibson understood. In a softer tone he said, “All right, now give me the ball.” Then he struck out Norm Cash for the third time that day. That broke Koufax’s record. “Who follows Cash?” he asked McCarver. “What difference does it make?” McCarver said. It was Willie Horton, a fearsome hitter in his own right. With two strikes on him, Horton backed away from a slider that looked like it was going to hit him but then broke wickedly back over the plate, for the seventeenth strikeout of the game. McCarver thought the ball must have broken eighteen inches. “To this day I believe Willie Horton thinks the ball hit him,” McCarver later said.

Gibson was almost as impressive in the fourth game, striking out ten batters to give St. Louis a 3-1 lead in games. If anything, Tim McCarver later reflected, Gibson’s capacity to rise to such heights in World Series games might have made the Cardinals overconfident by the middle of that Series. Confident that they would have Gibby in the seventh game, and that he was unbeatable in big-game situations, the Cardinals might have let up in Games five and six, McCarver thought. In the seventh he was again overwhelming, but Mickey Lolich pitched very well for the Tigers, and when Curt Flood misplayed a ball in center field, the Tigers went on to win the game and the Series.

Harry Walker remained fond of Bill White, and when Bill White was made president of the National League, Harry Walker was delighted. One day in 1990 Harry Walker, by then living in Leeds, Alabama, called up White and said that he would like to visit him at his home in Pennsylvania. White said that Harry Walker ought to know that he was divorced now and that the woman he was living with was not black. Walker laughed and said, “Bill, that stuff doesn’t bother me anymore—I’m way past that.” So he came up to visit with White, and his visit became something of an annual trip. White was touched by how much one man had changed over the years.

The Cardinals slipped badly in 1965, going from first place to seventh, winning 80 games while losing 81. Curt Simmons seemed to age overnight, and his record went to 9-15; Ray Sadecki had a dreadful season, winning 6, losing 15, and seeing his ERA balloon up to 5.21. There were signs that Bill White and Ken Boyer might be slipping: their respective run productions were down; Boyer was thirty-four, and Bill White was about to be thirty-two. So the Cardinals began to move for youth. Ken Boyer went to the Mets for Al Jackson, the fine left-hander, and Charley Smith; Bill White, Dick Groat, and Bob Uecker were traded to the Phils for Art Mahaffey, Alex Johnson, and Pat Corrales; and Ray Sadecki was traded to San Francisco for Orlando Cepeda. The 1966 team improved its win-loss record to 83-79 and moved up to sixth place.