October 1964 (6 page)

There was clearly no room for the two of them. Getting around slowly on a cane or not, Rickey remained a powerful presence. He wore Devine down, making everything he did harder, making every day at the office more contentious, and making him argue harder for trades, which meant that if Devine finally got a trade, the expectations on the part of the owner were higher. Devine was working ever harder just to stay afloat; it was not an enviable situation.

In the fall of 1962 Devine decided that St. Louis badly needed a solid veteran shortstop. The Cardinals had played a rookie named Julio Gotay there in much of 1962, and they became dubious that Gotay would ever show the talent he had on occasion flashed in the minor leagues. Otherwise the infield was strong; Ken Boyer at third and Bill White at first were virtual all-stars, and Julian Javier at second was young but showing certain signs of greatness. Devine wanted a mature shortstop to play alongside Javier and help bring him along. Dick Groat, only two years earlier the Most Valuable Player in the National League, was available, the Pirates having become disenchanted with him. Groat was an unusual player. He was one of the smartest athletes in the game, a man who had to work exceptionally hard to maximize his abilities and overcome his physical limitations.

No one in any major professional sport was ever a better illustration of the difference between being fast and being quick. In terms of leg speed Dick Groat was slow, but in terms of his reflexes, he was exceptionally quick. He had been a college all-American as a basketball player and a professional basketball player as well. He had great hand-to-eye coordination and deft hands. But he also had minimal range. No one studied pitchers, his own as well as opposing ones, more closely than Dick Groat, because he had to know how to play each hitter since he lacked the natural speed to compensate for being even the slightest bit out of position. He loved playing behind veteran pitchers, for he felt that the more experienced a pitcher was, the better he could position himself to make the plays: if the pitcher threw where he was supposed to, then Groat had a very good chance of making the play. He was also an exceptional hitter, almost always around .300. He had great bat control, rarely struck out, and was very good on the hit-and-run. He had been a professional shortstop for eleven years, counting time spent in the service, and had never played in the minor leagues. At the time that Devine wanted to make the trade, Groat was thirty-two. The Cardinal scouts, headed by Eddie Stanky, believed that it was a good trade, that Groat was in great shape, was highly professional, still had several good seasons ahead of him, and was not likely to lose speed, since he had never had it. Rather, he would be a good influence on the younger players and could work alongside Javier, thus anchoring what was potentially a very good infield.

But Rickey hated the deal. It was anathema to everything he believed in, especially his most basic rule: never trade a young player for an older player. Devine tried to make the case for Groat for several weeks, but Rickey kept stonewalling it. Stanky, Harry Walker, a coach, and Johnny Keane, by then the manager, all wanted it. So, one day during the instructional meeting, they all descended on Rickey. “You seem to have this meeting loaded,” Rickey said to Devine, and he was not pleased. Yes, Devine answered, he had loaded it up, but they all wanted Groat that badly. Then they made their pitch: Groat was the right player for a team that was ready to contend. It would have been nice to come up with a superb young shortstop in their farm system, but they did not have anyone ready in the minors. In the meantime, Groat was available, a good hitter, an absolute professional. Rickey listened, and the more he listened, the angrier he became. He knew that Devine had ambushed him brilliantly, and there was no alternative solution he could offer. “All right,” he said, “I will tell Mr. Busch that I won’t stand in the way of this deal, but I won’t recommend it either.” That meant that they could get Groat, but it also meant that Groat had better have a good year, and had better not slip.

Mercifully, they bet right; Groat was angered over his treatment by the hometown Pirates, and he was determined to show that his career was not over. He decided that he would throw from shortstop overhand, much like an outfielder, instead of sidearm like most in-fielders, and he spent the off-season building himself up with special weight drills to that end. He also ice-skated every day in order to strengthen his legs, and to diminish any chance of muscle pulls. He arrived in marvelous shape, and played very well for St. Louis. The Cardinal groundskeepers, so ordered by management, deliberately let the grass in the infield grow high, which slowed down the ball and gave him more range. The long grass pleased Groat the fielder, although Groat the hitter hated the very same grass and frequently complained to his teammates because it meant that he could not drive the ball through the infield so readily. In 1963 he made a solid challenge for the National League batting title at the end of the season, and that summer all four Cardinal infielders started in the All-Star Game. That in itself was a sign that Devine’s master plan was coming along nicely.

But, if anything, Rickey became even more resentful when the Groat deal worked out, and in the spring of 1964, there was one more incident which showed that Devine was dealing from a base of limited power. Tim McCarver was set in spring training as the everyday catcher, but Johnny Keane badly wanted a new backup catcher. A young player named Bob Uecker, of limited experience, playing behind Del Crandall, Ed Bailey, and now Joe Torre at Milwaukee, was available, having told the Milwaukee management that if he was not traded, he would retire from baseball. Keane wanted to make the deal for him, giving up two minor players—Gary Kolb and Jimmie Coker, then the backup catchers. Rickey wanted no part of it; if anything, he seemed to like Kolb as a player. But as both Keane and Devine pushed hard for the trade, Rickey resisted, with a vehemence out of all proportion to the importance of the players at stake. It seemed to be more about territory than about personnel. Uecker was in fact a good defensive catcher with a good arm, and there was an additional advantage to getting him, because Uecker batted right-handed, while McCarver batted left-handed.

But every time Devine pressed for Uecker, Rickey used his leverage with Busch. Finally, just as the team was about to leave Florida, Keane went to Devine one last time to ask for Uecker. “Bing, we have to try one more time—we have to have a better backup catcher. If we don’t, we’re vulnerable there,” Keane said. “I’m sorry, Johnny, but I can’t go back there anymore,” Devine said, “I’ve gone as far as I can go on that one.” Keane could, if he wanted to, Devine suggested, go out that night and talk to Gussie Busch at his home about it himself. It was a sign of how seriously Keane took the matter that he did, in fact, go to Busch’s house near the beach sometime after ten
P.M.
Around midnight a call came for Devine from Keane. He had talked to Busch and it was okay to make the Uecker trade. So Devine went ahead, and a few days later Bob Uecker became, in his own words, the first local Milwaukee boy to play for the Braves, the first to be sent down to the minor leagues by them, and then the first to be traded away by them. On his first day in the Cardinal locker room he was taken to meet the legendary Branch Rickey in the Cardinal clubhouse.

“Mr. Rickey,” he said, extending his hand, “I’m Bob Uecker, and I’ve just joined your club.” “Yes, I know,” said Rickey, “and I didn’t want you. I wouldn’t trade a hundred Bob Ueckers for one Gary Kolb.” And with that warm welcome, Rickey turned and walked away. (It should be noted that while Kolb came to bat 450 times in his big-league career, Uecker came to bat
731
in his.) Bing Devine knew that time was running out on him that year.

J
UST BEFORE THE CARDINALS
broke camp, Johnny Keane sat talking with a group of sportswriters about how evenly balanced the National League was and how important a great player like Sandy Koufax of the Dodgers became in that situation. Koufax, he thought, had stood between the Cardinals and the pennant in 1963, and he was concerned that that one pitcher would once again make the difference. In 1963, Koufax, aided by an expanded strike zone, had a career year, winning 25, losing only 5, with an ERA of 1.88, and beating the Cardinals four times. Most critically, he had shut them out in the last matchup, when the Cards had been the hottest team in baseball, during their run at a pennant. The knowledge that any challenging team would eventually have to go against the Dodgers and beat Koufax head-to-head was an important advantage for the Dodgers, Keane said. Except for that one pitcher, the Cardinals might well have a better team than the Dodgers.

Keane continued to talk about his own team’s prospects for the year. He thought his team was better than last year, but it was hardly without its weaknesses. No team had great hitting
and
great pitching, and no team since the Milwaukee Braves in 1957 and 1958 had won back-to-back pennants. Every year since 1958 a different team had won, and it was rarely the team that looked best on paper. Just a few days earlier 232 baseball writers around the country had been polled on who they thought would win the National League pennant. Eighty-four had picked the Giants with their great hitting, and 79 had picked the Dodgers with their great pitching. The Cardinals, with better balance, and off their late-season challenge last year, were third, chosen by 38 writers. San Francisco’s pitching was suspect, Keane said. The Dodgers had great pitching and speed but little power, and had been looking for more than a year to make a deal for a consistent .300 hitter who could knock in 100 runs. Milwaukee might well have the toughest hitters in the league—Hank Aaron, Eddie Mathews, Joe Torre, Lee May, and Felipe Alou, recently traded from the Giants—but the great pitching staff that had carried the Braves to earlier pennants had aged, and the younger pitchers on whom the team had spent enormous bonus money had yet to come through. Pittsburgh had very good pitchers, with Bob Friend and Bob Veale, and a good batting order, with Bill Virdon, Roberto Clemente, and a rising star in Willie Stargell. Cincinnati had Frank Robinson, Vada Pinson, and a good pitching staff. Only 10 of the 232 writers favored Philadelphia, but Lee Petersen of UPI went out on a limb and picked the Phillies, because he thought they had the best pitching in the league, with Jim Bunning, just picked up in an off-season trade from Detroit; that gave them a formidable front-line pitcher to go with Art Mahaffey, Chris Short, and Dennis Bennett. The Phillies were a dark horse, but they worried other baseball men. Keane said he thought the Phillies would be tough.

The team that made it through was likely to be the one with the fewest injuries to key players, Keane said. In a league so evenly balanced, just one key player who was injured or performed significantly below expectations could cost a team the pennant. The Cardinals, Keane told his reporters, had to learn to beat the Dodgers this year. If you went head-to-head with your most important opponent and lost those big games, you did not deserve to win the pennant. The key to winning, Keane said, was for the Cardinals somehow to match Koufax; perhaps, he said, the Dodgers’ luck might slip a little, Koufax might have an off season. An off year for Koufax was one in which he might win only twenty games instead of twenty-five. The odds favored it. It would be hard even for a pitcher that great to match what he had done the previous year, not to mention that Ron Perranoski, their top reliever, had gone 16-3, appearing in 69 games, with a 1.67 ERA, also a career year. Perhaps, Keane mused, if one or the other slipped just a bit, that might open the door a crack for the other teams.

The signing of Yankee players usually took place relatively painlessly, or at least relatively quickly. Management still held all the cards at contract time and retained all the negotiating leverage. In fact, there was no such thing as real negotiations, since it takes two sides to negotiate. Mantle had signed again for $100,000, and Maris for $65,000. But Jim (Bulldog) Bouton, who had pitched extremely well in 1963, winning 21 and losing only 7, with an earned run average of 2.53, the best on the staff, was asking for virtually a 100 percent raise for his third season; in 1963 he had made $10,500 and now he wanted $20,000. At first Ralph Houk had been optimistic about signing Bouton quickly. But the difference between them did not shrink. Houk was offering $18,000 and that was as high as he was going to go, he told the press. After all, he was offering Bouton 80 percent of what he wanted, which was fairly generous by contemporary standards. Bouton soon began to look like the one serious holdout on the team. Day by day Houk’s irritation with the young pitcher increased, until by March 10, he announced that if Bouton did not sign, he would be fined $100 a day. (“The Yankees shortened the leash and tightened the collar on the ‘Bulldog’ today,” the
Daily News
reported.) Houk said he was doing this for the good of the club. “I have no qualms about this,” Houk told reporters. “If I gave him what he is asking it would not be fair to the others—my dealings with the rest of the club. I raised the figure and will not go any higher. Bouton had a good year and I hope he has many more ... and that he gets more good raises. But he can’t have it all at once. You have to earn your way to a star’s salary.” The next day Bouton conceded and signed for $18,000.
BULLDOG STOPS BARKING, AGREES TO YANKS’ $18,000,
read the
News
headline.

As far as the Yankee management was concerned, Bouton’s near holdout typified the danger of letting a young player, particularly a pitcher, have too good a season too early in his career. A twenty-game winner, management believed, had too much leverage with the club. In the Weiss-Stengel years, Yankee pitchers rarely won twenty games, and there was a reason for it. It was better to let them win fifteen or, at most, eighteen, which meant that the team could still win the pennant, but management would retain maximum leverage in negotiations the following year. That was as much a part of the Yankee tradition as winning the pennant and the World Series, and such great Yankee pitchers as Vic Raschi and Allie Reynolds had considered their contract struggles with Weiss to be virtual battles in which management belittled their achievements and did not like it if their previous seasons had been too good statistically. Those past Yankee teams had been so powerful and so dominating that not only could they win, they could do it while management kept one eye on statistics. Bouton, that spring, did not realize the degree to which he had violated Yankee tradition by winning too much too quickly. Years later he ran into Johnny Sain, who had been the pitching coach in 1963, and Sain filled him in on what had happened. Near the end of the season, with Bouton closing in on his twentieth victory, Houk had not been entirely pleased. “It’s too soon for him to win twenty,” Houk had told Johnny Sain at the time. “Look at how long it took Whitey to win twenty.” This was a reference to the fact that it took Whitey Ford ten seasons to become a twenty-game winner. Besides, there was already some evidence that Bouton, who was later to emerge as a major iconoclast in the world of baseball, might turn into a difficult young man by Yankee terms—too outspoken, too quick to challenge management’s decisions, too friendly with journalists, and in particular with journalists who were considered unfriendly to management. As Bouton neared his twentieth win, Houk had not kept him out of the rotation. But years later, after Bouton spoke with Sain, something clicked in his memory; he remembered the game that was his twentieth win. It had been in Minnesota, and he had been backed by a weird lineup, a goodly number of the Scrubeenies, as the bench players were known, with some of them out of position—Phil Linz, for example, in center field, and Johnny Blanchard in right. But Bouton had won his twentieth, and then, for good measure, he won his twenty-first. After his twenty-first win his teammate Ralph Terry came over after the game, slapped him on the leg, and told him, “I’m glad you got the twenty-first—winning twenty games makes it look like you just barely made it. But twenty-one is really terrific.”