Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126)

by Jackson, Reggie; Baker, Kevin

  Nettles saved that game for us. But it wasn’t only him. Munson threw somebody out stealing. Guidry didn’t have his good stuff, but he pitched a complete game. Rivers had three hits. We scored five runs, and five separate guys drove them in, including myself. We were really clicking as a team now. We had a dozen ways to beat you.

  Figgy had a much better start for us in Game 4, but Reggie Smith touched him for a three-run homer in the fifth inning. Didn’t matter. Tommy John was going very strong for them; he was just a groundout machine, the way he always was when he was on. Didn’t matter. We found a way, just like we always seemed to.

  It was our old pros again. In the sixth, with one out, Roy White managed to get a single through the infield, then Thurman got a walk. I hit a single into right field to cut their lead to 3–1, send Munson over to second.

  That was when Lou Piniella came up and hit a liner to their shortstop, Bill Russell. He dropped the ball at his feet. I thought that he let it drop out of his glove deliberately. If he did, it was a smart play, because Thurman and I were frozen. We had no choice. If we’d run and he caught the ball, he could’ve just thrown to either first or second for an easy double play.

  We had to wait, and when the ball hit the ground, it was too late. Russell picked the ball up right away and stepped on second. Munson was still running to third, but that retired me. I was still only a few yards off first. All Russell had to do was throw down to first and get Piniella, and the side would’ve been out.

  Only trouble was his throw never got there. Instead, it hit me in the hip and bounced off into right field. Piniella was safe. Munson scored. Lasorda and the rest of the Dodgers went crazy. They wanted an interference call on me, which would’ve retired the side and kept the run from counting. But the umps put their heads together and ruled against them. Thurman’s run stood, and we’d cut the lead to just one, 3–2.

  It was the controversy of the Series. Afterward in the clubhouse, everybody wanted to know about the play. I just told them, “It was in my road, and it hit me.”

  You don’t want to ever show the umpires up. But nobody was buying it. They could see on TV what the umpires couldn’t see on the field. That was that my hip moved—just a little—and nudged that ball into the outfield.

  Did I mean to do it? Let’s just say it was what Roger Angell called it, “an almost unconscious reaction.” I had started to second, but I had no chance to get there before Russell did. I saw the ball coming toward me, and I thought, “I’m going to get hit in … a highly sensitive area.” So I just moved a little.

  Now of course, if I didn’t want to get nicked, I could’ve just hit the dirt. I could’ve jumped all the way to one side or another. But I thought, “I’m in my right-of-way. I’m in the baseline. I’m going to be out anyway, so why not just stand there and play stupid?” I thought, “I’m out anyway, so it’s not so bad if I stay here and let it hit me.”

  It makes you think about the rule. I’ve made perfect throws before from right field and hit a runner while he was in the baseline running to third. A runner going from second to third is in the line of a throw from right field. If you hit the runner as he slides into third base on a perfect throw … it’s called an error on the right fielder. The runner is safe.

  The worst that could’ve happened was that they would’ve called Lou out for my interference. It would’ve been a double play, and the inning would’ve been over. In other words—no worse than what would’ve happened if I’d let Russell throw that ball on down to first.

  Roger Angell called it something like “finding a prize in the weeds.” He said the play had “street smarts,” that it was just like the sort of thing we used to do on the A’s when we were champions. Most others were making out that I wasn’t that smart: “He couldn’t think that quick.” Well, they didn’t know me. Roger knew what some of these Yankees were capable of.

  The Dodgers were still ahead, 3–2. But in the eighth, Tommy John finally wore down a little, gave up a hit to Paul Blair, and then White bunted him over. They had brought in their closer, Terry Forster, but Thurman was such a great clutch hitter he doubled off him to left and tied the game. I was up next, fifty-six thousand people chanting, “Reg-gie! Reg-gie!” Forster hit me—which I guess was my payback for that little hip check.

  They brought in Bob Welch again, who got them out of the inning. He got Lou to pop up and struck out Nettles, to keep the game tied. After that we brought in Gossage, and for the rest of the game it was two men throwing seeds. Just enjoyable baseball. Elemental baseball. Pure power.

  It was a Saturday, so the game had started in the afternoon, but there was a long rain delay, and by now it was night and cold. Each of them went on through the ninth. Nobody going home, the crowd getting tenser. Welch struck out Chambliss and Spencer, who was hitting for Stanley. Goose fanned Reggie Smith and Garvey in the top of the tenth.

  Bottom of the tenth, Welch got Mickey to foul out, but then Roy White—who had a great Series, was almost the MVP—worked a walk on a full count. Welch popped up Thurman, and then I was up. I stayed a little calmer this time, kept within myself a little more. Worked the count to 2–1. Welch threw me another fastball, and this time I pounded a single into right field. It wasn’t a soft line drive, it was a bullet, and I said to myself, “Dang, if I had gotten that ball up, it would still be going.”

  The nice thing about facing Bob Welch was that he had enough pride in his stuff—fastball, curveball—that he was gonna give you something to hit. He had enough stuff to bury you, in the true sense of a power pitcher—a Gibson, a Koufax, a Seaver, a Palmer, a Jack Morris, a Guidry. Those guys had “I-dare-you stuff.” Bringing it right up to today, a Kershaw, a Sabathia. Rivera.

  You’d love to face a guy who had pride in his fastball. Nolan Ryan, the standard in the game for a long time, he would tell you at times, “I want to see if you can hit this.” He did it to me: “I want to see if you can hit this.”

  Welch was in that category.

  Piniella came up next, and the entire, sold-out Yankee Stadium was going crazy yelling his name this time: “Lou! Lou!” He swung at the first pitch and missed. His helmet came off; he hopped around a little and looked funny like only Lou could. Then Welch threw another fastball, and he hit it into right-center. Ball game.

  You know, Lou said it best after the game. He said Welch reminded him of Jim Palmer. Which was a pretty apt comparison, as it turned out. Welch went on to have a great career; he won more than two hundred games. Won the Cy Young with Oakland in 1990, when he was 27–6, with a 2.95 ERA.

  But Lou said, too, “We’re all professional hitters here. You get nothing but fastballs, sooner or later you’re going to hit one.” That’s true for even the fastest major-league pitcher. Even if you can keep it up over a hundred miles an hour. Sooner or later, major-league hitters will time it.

  Bob would learn that. He would become an outstanding pitcher for many years. But now we were even on the Series. And the Dodgers just couldn’t get it together to stop us.

  The next day, they got up early, 2–0, but we came back on them again. Those two years, 1977 and 1978, we beat them eight times in twelve games, and in four of those eight wins they had the lead on us. Didn’t matter. We just found a way to beat them.

  That Sunday, we just pecked them to death. We had eighteen hits—two doubles, sixteen singles. Every starter in the lineup had at least one hit. Thurman, Mickey Rivers, Brian Doyle, and Bucky Dent all had three hits apiece. Thurman drove in five runs—he could just flat hit. We thought we had such a handicap losing Willie Randolph the last week of the season, but Doyle hit .438 on the Series and played a terrific second base. Bucky hit .417 with seven ribbies and was the Series MVP. Doyle could just as well have been the MVP in the Series.

  Meanwhile, the Dodgers played a miserable game, especially once they got behind. They had three errors and too many wild pitches and passed balls. Jim Beattie did a great job, pitched his first complete game in the majors for us. Beat them 1
2–2 in the end, with eight strikeouts.

  The Dodgers let themselves be distracted by the fans. By their frustration. Sometimes you just get your butts beat. You have to acknowledge that and move on. Instead, they started talking about how they hated the fans. How they hated New York. They bad-mouthed the whole area. Bill Russell, who had a bad Series in the field, was saying how New York was the worst. Rick Monday was criticizing the fans and New Yorkers’ whole way of life.

  They had the wrong attitude. They were a great team, with great pitching. But we were a great team, too. We were ornery. We had a meanness and a toughness to us. We were what they had to look out for—not the fans or the lifestyle. We were connected to our fans. Fans and players, we were one.

  Those Dodgers were a well-bred, private-school group. And we were a group from Harlem. We were a group from Harlem, the Bronx, and Queens, all put together. With a Manhattan owner. You know what I mean? We had a top-hat owner. And we had guys who had come out of reform school, metaphorically.

  With us you got your last chance to be on the Dirty Dozen. And this was your way out. We banded together as a group. Maybe this guy didn’t like that guy, and that guy didn’t like this guy, and that guy was jealous of that guy. You can have all those dislikes inside the family, but if anyone tried to come into our house, it was like, “No, no, no, we’re not getting along that bad.”

  We could live together, and we could deal with it. We may not like each other, but you’re not coming in here and kicking us around. We’ll kick each other around, but you’re not doing it to us. Be careful, because we’re family, and together we will kick your butt.

  One time, I might have sounded like the Dodgers did. But by then, I think I had learned to adjust to the city. I had come to understand it. I knew I fit here as an ethnically mixed guy. I had come to like the fast pace, the quickness, and the intelligence. There were ugly parts. It was a city not as free from anti-Semitism as it thought it was. It was not a city as free from racism as it thought it was. It could be a tough place to play. But that toughness made you tough.

  We’d all gone through that. It made us the toughest team at the time. Probably because we were playing in and representing New York City. We couldn’t wait to show you we were different. We were the toughest team from the toughest town.

  We still had another game to win, we had to go back there to Dodger Stadium, and that was all right by me. I’d always enjoyed playing there. They got out to an early lead again; Davey Lopes hit a home run. But the “Killer Ds,” Dent and Doyle, got all over Don Sutton. They drove in our first five runs.

  Top of the seventh, I came up with Roy White on first and us leading, 5–2. They had Bob Welch in again, trying to stop the bleeding, give them a chance to come back and stay alive.

  That was the third time I faced him. He threw hard every time he came in, but the first time I saw him he was fresh as a daisy. The last time, you know the coffee had been on the stove a little bit. And I had smelled the aroma enough to be able to understand the taste.

  I was waiting for my turn at bat, and Catfish, who was pitching for us, said to me, “Go get him, Buck.”

  I went up to home plate looking to hit the ball out of the ballpark—and did. Finally got my man back.

  We won the game, 7–2. Won the Series, four games to two. Our second World Series championship in a row. Catfish Hunter was the winning pitcher in the last game, which was a fitting end to the tremendous comeback year he had.

  I didn’t have as dramatic a postseason in 1978 as I did in 1977. But overall, I had a better one. I was told I broke nine World Series slugging records in 1977 and tied five more. You put the Series games I played that year together with the championship series games against the Royals, I hit .306 with five homers and nine ribbies, in eleven postseason games.

  In 1978, you throw in the one-game playoff in Boston, and I played in eleven games, too. And that year, I hit .400 in October, with five homers and fifteen RBIs. In twenty-two playoff games in the two seasons combined, I had ten home runs and twenty-four ribbies, with a .355 batting average. I also had eleven walks and was hit by a pitch three times, meaning my on-base percentage was .451.

  That was a streak.

  But I was only able to get there, only able to do that, because of the team I was on. When you include the postseason in 1978, we went 37–12 in our last forty-nine games. We were 17–5 against the Red Sox, the Dodgers, the Royals, the Brewers, and the Orioles—in other words, five of the best next six teams in the major leagues. After us, that is.

  You don’t do that alone. Nobody does that alone in baseball, and I was truly blessed to be with guys who could do it.

  You just want to consider yourself lucky, you want to consider yourself fortunate being involved in it all, to be one of the players on one of the great teams of all time. Or in my case, counting those Oakland teams, two of the great teams. To be in that run from fourteen games out in 1978, to have played in the playoff game in Boston—to be part of all that is just immense good fortune.

  Of course, it also took a great organization and an owner who understood the brand, the city, and how to build a champion at whatever the cost.

  After we ended the season in Los Angeles, we flew back to New York for the parade. I didn’t get to make my cross-country drive again, but I enjoyed the ticker-tape parade. How can you not enjoy it? New York City, in the Canyon of Heroes! It was a once-in-a-lifetime experience … and I got to do it twice!

  It was a great time. I had adjusted to the city, and I think it adjusted to me.

  New York has become a place I can call home on the East Coast because of my time with the Yankees in the Bronx. The people of Manhattan and all the boroughs have forever since treated me like one of their own. It’s easy to see I’m one of them. It’s a blessing I’m truly grateful for … I love being part of that city. If you can make it there you can make it anywhere … Oh, yes! I love New York.

  EPILOGUE

  “NOTHING GOLD CAN STAY”

  WHEN I THINK back on it now, it was such an amazing time to have lived through. It was such an incredible thing to have experienced: both the great journey that the country made and the much smaller trip that I made, growing, learning, and changing.

  It bears repeating. In the America that I was born into in 1946—the Jim Crow America that persisted through my high school years, 1960 to 1964, and beyond. We could not use the same drinking fountains, the same bathrooms, or eat in the same restaurants or sleep in the same hotels as whites. In some areas, the laws did not permit us to live in the same neighborhoods, or go to the same schools, or sit next to white people on trains or buses or streetcars—or even to remain sitting at all if a white person needed the seat. The laws did not allow us to marry a white person if we so desired. We were not even allowed to play ball with white people until Jackie Robinson, Branch Rickey, and Walter O’Malley had the courage to make a stand.

  The laws were changed by the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965, but prejudice and de facto segregation persisted in many of the places I passed through—Georgia and Alabama and Kentucky and the Carolinas and Idaho and even Tempe, Arizona.

  Even in the supposedly enlightened North, if you were a person of color, you could not eat in some of the best restaurants or stay in the top hotels. You were banned by written covenant—by “CC&Rs,” covenants, conditions, and restrictions—from living in many of the nicest towns and neighborhoods. (Even today, in some places!) And as I found, even growing up in a nice Pennsylvania suburb, full of what were truly some of the nicest people I’ve ever met, you were still liable to be subjected to all sorts of humiliations by white people who did not want you dating their daughter, or riding their kid’s bike, or swimming in the same pool.

  The laws changed. Black people, along with many courageous whites, made them change, often at tremendous cost to themselves. Those efforts opened all sorts of new opportunities.

  Yet as it is written in Scripture, men must chan
ge before kingdoms change. The laws and the court decisions that secured our rights to vote, or to go to the same schools as whites, or to live anywhere we wanted were great achievements. But they did not change the hearts, or the attitudes, or the social prejudices of all too many people.

  I have been a fortunate son. Starting with my dad, everywhere I’ve gone, I’ve encountered wonderful mentors, men who have helped guide me along the way. My time at Arizona State, with Frank Kush and Bobby Winkles. The minor-league managers who looked out for me, Bill Posedel, and Gus Niarhos, and especially John McNamara. The major-league managers I had the privilege to play for, people like Dick Williams and Earl Weaver, Al Dark and Bob Lemon, Gene Michael and Dick Howser, Gene Mauch and Tony LaRussa. The owners I had the good fortune to play for, Charlie Finley, George Steinbrenner, Gene Autry, and the Haas family, and so many others.

  Even when I was down in Waycross, Georgia, having to live in an army barracks with the other black players on the A’s because it was too dangerous to be out at night, I was grateful. Even when I was the only black player on my team in Birmingham for a while, trying to find someplace that would serve me a meal in the Southern League, I was glad for the opportunity.

  Coming to New York turned out to be a great opportunity also. It happened at a time when the city and the country were still having to make vast social adjustments. Martin Luther King was just nine years gone when I first came to the Yankees. Jackie Robinson had been retired a little over twenty years.

  Some still thought blacks being able to play major-league ball was a privilege we had been given. They thought of it as a favor we had to “live up to”—usually by staying quiet and subservient. It wasn’t as though we’d earned it.

  I would not go along with that. When I saw certain attitudes and certain prejudices emerging, I spoke up about it. When I saw double standards being applied—to myself or others—I spoke up about it. You don’t have to agree with all of it. I might have been wrong about some things. But you have to respect my right to say it—and the fact that I always put my name to what I said.