Pinstripe Empire (55 page)

That wasn’t the way it should have been. Frick’s decision, whether fair or not, had robbed baseball of the thrill of the final eight games and the grand chase. There was no real sense of marketing in baseball at the time; it was still an industry of “open the gates and they will come.”

What should have been a thrilling finish felt anticlimactic. Maris hit his 60th against Jack Fisher of the Orioles on September 26, with just 19,401 on hand at Yankee Stadium. His teammates appreciated it—they coaxed him out of the dugout to wave his cap in appreciation of the applause, an unprecedented curtain call.

On the season’s final day, only 23,154 turned out, many of them packed into the lower right-field stands, hoping to catch number 61 and receive $5,000 from a West Coast restaurateur. And Maris, with the pressure of
the season having even caused some hair loss, delivered. He belted his 61st homer off Boston’s Tracy Stallard in the fourth inning, as the Yankees won 1–0 for their 109th win. Again he made a curtain call. In right field, a Brooklyn teen named Sal Durante, there with his girlfriend, caught the ball. He was taken to the Yankee clubhouse where he tried to give the ball to Maris.

“Get what you can for it, kid,” said Roger.

Sal collected the reward, married his girlfriend, and became a school-bus driver and the answer to a trivia question. (Baseball trivia has become a bit of a passtime all its own, with avid fans enjoying the challenge of the game’s most obscure details.

Frick’s decision was not only a bad marketing call, but history would prove that the expanded schedule did not play havoc with the record book. It was, of course, not anything that Frick could anticipate. Whereas Ruth’s record of 60 had lasted thirty-four years, Maris’s 61 lasted thirty-seven more, until broken by Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in 1998 and then again by Barry Bonds in 2001. Roger’s widow, Pat, and her children were in St. Louis when McGwire hit his 62nd, a very emotional moment for baseball fans, who had come to respect Maris’s accomplishment at last. (He still held the American League record.)

Not until 1991 did Commissioner Fay Vincent finally declare that the record belonged to Maris, no asterisk required. (Bonds, of course, has a ball in the Hall of Fame literally branded with an asterisk—his 756th career homer. McGwire’s and Sosa’s feats have been linked to performance enhancing drugs as well.)

With his ruling defusing the thrill that the final games might have provided, Frick contributed to what had to be considered a very unimpressive year at the gate for the Yankees. They were still the only team in town. The home run showdown had been an enormous story all summer. There was a good pennant race and a fantastic team. Where were the fans? The Yankees drew only 1,747,725, up just 120,000 from the previous year, an average of about 1,600 more per date. It was not an impressive showing.

In later years, Bob Fishel would blame himself for the problems Maris faced with the press, feeling that he could have made things easier by creating an “interview room” in a more controlled setting so that Maris wouldn’t be cornered at his locker after games with the endless string of “Think you can do it?” questions. But no one had done this yet. It would later become standard practice in the NFL and then in the MLB at big events, and eventually
carried out on the team level. Bob was hard on himself for not creating the idea to help shield Roger.

(Forty years after this great home run race, Billy Crystal produced, with Ross Greenburg, an Emmy-winning HBO film,
61
^*
, with Thomas Jane as Mantle and Barry Pepper as Maris.)

Maris hit another homer in the World Series against the Cincinnati Reds, although the injured Mantle was limited to just six at-bats. The Yanks won the Series in five games, with Bud Daley winning the decisive game with 6
⅔
innings in relief of Terry (16–3 in the regular season). Ford ran his World Series consecutive-scoreless-innings streak to 32, breaking the mark set by Babe Ruth back when Ruth pitched for Boston. It was the Yankees’ nineteenth world championship. Houk won Manager of the Year honors, coming through under the pressure to succeed Stengel.

Maris again edged Mantle in MVP voting, this time by just four points, getting seven first-place votes to Mantle’s six despite a .269 batting average to Mantle’s .317. Roger also led the league in RBI with 141.

But even in losing the home run and the MVP Award, Mantle emerged, at long last, as the rightful heir to DiMaggio and a fan favorite. From 1961 through the remainder of his career, the boos turned to cheers. He would be the most popular player in the game, whether at home or on the road.

AFTER THE SEASON, a script was hastily written for a low-budget movie called
Safe at Home
, in which Mantle and Maris played themselves. The film was shot in the beautiful new Fort Lauderdale Stadium, known locally as Little Yankee Stadium, prior to the Yanks setting up their first spring camp there.

After training in St. Petersburg almost continuously since 1925, the Yanks decided to move east to Florida’s Atlantic coast. Topping said, “Howard, Lopez and [rookie catcher Jesse] Gonder mean as much to our ball club as any other ball players and we would very much like to have the whole team under one roof.” Other black players were coming along, including pitcher Al Downing, who debuted in ’61 as the first African-American pitcher on the team.

Fishel made it clear that they were talking about the Soreno Hotel, whose assistant manager said, “We have always enjoyed having the New York Yankees with us. We hope to have them with us for many years to come on the same basis.”

The “same basis” was the key. It meant separate housing for the team’s negro players. But the clock had run out on that. The times they were a-changin’.

At spring training in 1961, Fishel said, “We hope eventually to break down the segregation which now exists in spring training. But it has been apparent that we would not be able to accomplish that this year, although we feel the Yankees have made more of an effort than any other club.”

Fort Lauderdale was an up-and-coming city celebrated in teenage beach movies. The city fathers were anxious to lure a major league team there.

The Yankees comfortably moved into an integrated hotel on the beach called, appropriately, the Yankee Clipper. The Yankee presence in Fort Lauderdale for thirty-four springs put that city on the tourism map for vacationing New Yorkers.

The Yankees were changing, too. The staid, conservative style was going to be compromised by the addition of four rookies to the 1962 team.

With Kubek off on army duty for the first few months of the season, Tom Tresh and Phil Linz were to compete for the starting shortstop job.

Linz, a free spirit who wound up perfectly content to be a “supersub” utility player, was a likable guy who fit in well with New York nightlife, later opening his own nightclub, Mr. Laff’s. Tresh, the more traditional of the two, came from a baseball family. His father Mike had caught for eleven seasons, mostly with the White Sox, and Tom had been a batboy when his father managed in the minors. A switch-hitter, Tom had that Yankee “look” and pop in his bat. His time at shortstop would be temporary—Kubek returned to the team on August 7—but he then shifted comfortably to left field and played it as though he’d always been there. He would wind up being Rookie of the Year.

Father-and-son combinations in the major leagues became quite common in the coming decades, but in the sixties it was still fairly rare, and Tresh was one of the first sons of a big leaguer to exceed his father’s career achievements.

Jim Bouton, twenty-three, known as “Bulldog” for his gritty determination, was also a rookie in ’62, having won 27 games in 1960–61 in the lower minors. Houk and Sain liked what they saw in spring training and decided to keep him. Born in Newark, he went to high school in Chicago Heights and college at Western Michigan. Bouton was unlike most players in that he was a true fan as a kid. Most players cared little about going to games, reading about them, or learning stats and history. Bouton grew up
with the fan experience. Most of his teammates thought he had a left-hander’s mind trapped in a right-hander’s body, southpaws generally considered more zany in baseball. (Pete Sheehy would flick his left hand to excuse odd behavior.) He was also off to the left politically from his teammates, and an attempt to be elected player representative a few years later went about as well as George McGovern’s presidential bid in ’72.

Bouton’s big break came in his 14th appearance of the season. On June 24, a Sunday, the Yankees played the longest game in their history, a twenty-two-inning affair in Detroit, won after seven hours on the only home run of reserve outfielder Jack Reed’s career. That day, Bouton entered the game in the fifteenth inning and hurled seven shutout innings to get the win. Both his spot on the team and his “Bulldog” nickname were assured on that memorable evening.

The fourth rookie was a Brooklyn kid named Joe Pepitone who could hit “four sewers” in stickball and who was shot in his belly at Manual Training High School by a friend who was “kidding around.” With incredible good luck, no vital organs were pierced, and after twelve days in the hospital, Joe was back. He got a $20,000 bonus from the Yankees and would be the first Italian-American Yankee of significance since the 1946 debuts of Raschi and Berra. Joe had terrific talent both at bat and in the field, but his work ethic was sometimes questionable: His own autobiography, years later, was called
Joe, You Could Have Made Us Proud.
He also hung out with people the Yankee front office thought of as “shady.” On several occasions Joe showed up just minutes before game time, with Houk and the office in full panic mode, having called their police department contacts to search the city. But he always showed up.

Joe also embodied “style” on the Yankees, getting his uniform to fit as tight as the flannel material would allow. The trend toward form-fitting uniforms had begun with Willie Mays and Tito Fuentes of the Giants, who had a personal tailor perform alterations. It quickly spread around the country, and the once-baggy uniforms now looked much more fashionable on players. Even traditionalists like Mantle and Maris joined in. The whole process would change the “look” of the game over the next few years, foreshadowing the incorporation of tight double-knit uniforms, first adopted in 1972, with the Yankees following a year later.

Four rookies in one season, at least three of them a little off-center, would certainly be enough to give McCarthy, Dickey, and DiMaggio pause.

Joe could pause in person, as he was a spring training instructor now. In
’62, he was even accompanied by Marilyn Monroe, which certainly turned heads. (She died five months later.)

(Yogi Berra remembers going to dinner with Joe and Marilyn. When I asked him to tell me every detail, he said, “You know how they usually give you just five shrimp in a shrimp cocktail? That night they gave us eight!” He didn’t remember anything else about the evening.)

IN 1962, THE Mets were born. They drew an “amazin’” 922,530 that season to the Yankees’ 1,493,574. The total was certainly skewed by the return visits of the Dodgers and Giants, who accounted for 51 percent of the Mets’ total draw in just fifteen games: The remaining fifty home dates averaged only 9,009. They were 40–120, the worst record of the century, but they clicked with the fans. Casey talked about how the “youth of America should play for the Mets,” about how their new ballpark in Queens would have “escalators, so no more heart attacks going to your seats,” and how little children would say “Metsie Metsie Metsie” as their first words. The press loved it.

Dick Young in the
Daily News
began to write about the “new breed” of baseball fans in town, a more ragtag bunch of people who were heading out to the Polo Grounds with enthusiasm unseen in the Bronx. Met fans began to bring banners to the games extolling Marvelous Marv Throneberry and Choo Choo Coleman.

By 1963, competition between the two resulted in a true cultural clash. The Mayor’s Trophy game, which the Yankees had long played against the Dodgers and Giants, was revived. The proceeds went to benefit sandlot baseball in New York.
¹⁷
The “historic” first clash would be at Yankee Stadium, but when Met fans arrived with their banners (Casey called them “placards”), Yankee security people attempted to confiscate them. Yankee policy was no banners in the stands, obstructing others’ views.

The press made a huge deal of the Yankees’ confiscations. Eventually, it had the inevitable effect of softening Yankee policy, so that by the end of the decade the Yankees were staging “banner days” just as the Mets did. But the Mets were determined to make an impact, and make it they did.

The Mayor’s Trophy games eventually got a little stale. They were played from 1963 to 1979, then there was a two-year hiatus, and then they resumed in 1982–83 before shutting down. The real problem was that baseball economy pretty much ended doubleheaders, creating fewer mutually available off-days on which to play the game. The teams continued to contribute to sandlot baseball without playing the game. The trophy itself would get passed back and forth to whichever team won. The Yankees won the final one in 1983, so somewhere among Yankee possessions rests the actual trophy.

THE YANKS’ FOLLOW-UP to the great ’61 season was less spectacular. Although they took over first place to stay on July 8, they never had a lead of more than six games, and they seemed ripe for the taking all year. But when they had to win, they won.

Mantle won his third MVP Award in five years, to go with two razor-thin second-place finishes. He claimed that Bobby Richardson (who finished second) was more deserving, hitting .302 and becoming the first Yankee since Rizzuto in 1950 to register 200 hits.

Mick had a .321/30/89 season and at one point hit seven homers in 12 at-bats, but it was clearly well off his ’61 showing, as was Maris’s .256/33/100, with the fans and press beating him up verbally and in print most of the season.

Arroyo, troubled by a sore arm, had one win and seven saves, and the bullpen had only nine saves all season. While Ford went 17–8, it was Terry, 23–12, who would lead the league in wins.