by Bud Selig
We took a 2–0 lead on Ron Guidry but couldn’t hold it. We would lose 7–3 but were down only 5–3 in the eighth inning and nearly gave Fingers a lead to protect.
Two men on, two outs, eighth inning, Don Money up against Goose Gossage. He had just walked Sal Bando and Roy Howell and looked nervous as hell on the mound. I could relate. I’d been pacing back and forth in the back of the press box because I can’t sit still.
Money hit one to left and everyone in the press box thought it was gone, including me. Dave Winfield leaped at the wall and caught it. I won’t say it was a phenomenal catch, but it was a good one. Everyone thought the ball was in the seats from the time Money hit the ball. We would have had a 6–5 lead to turn over to Fingers, but instead the Yankees scored two in the eighth, essentially putting us away.
It was a terrific series and a disappointing end, but it wasn’t long before we were really looking forward to ’82.
We started the season with high hopes. Buck Rodgers was our manager, in his second season. We staggered out of the gate, much to the surprise of me and our GM, Harry Dalton. We had felt so good in spring training, but April was a different story. It was right around Memorial Day when Harry called me at home. He said, “Boss, I think we’ve got to make a change.” I was really surprised. This wasn’t Harry’s style, and it wasn’t my style, but the AL East was loaded and we were getting in a hole.
I wasn’t against changing the manager. Sometimes that can make a difference. Harry told me he thought we had the guy here to replace Buck. He thought Harvey Kuenn was the guy. Everyone here called him Archie. He had been a starting forward on the basketball team in addition to his role as shortstop at the University of Wisconsin. He was Milwaukee through and through, and had been the Brewers’ hitting coach for years.
Players liked Arch, and it was a really smart move, the right stroke at the right time. We were in Seattle when we made the change, having gone 7–14 in this stretch. Right after the change, that’s when Harvey’s Wallbangers, as the team came to be known, took over. Man, did they go on a tear. We played Oakland the first weekend and Roy Eisenhardt, president of the A’s, called me that Sunday and said, “Stop it, please.” We had killed them Friday and Saturday, and we killed them again on Sunday.
We were in first place in July and led most of the year. Wonderful team. Wonderful hitting team. Robin had a phenomenal year. Molitor was a great player. The guy who was underrated, people outside of Milwaukee never understood how good he was, was Cecil Cooper. Boy, could he hit. He never got the credit he deserved. I think he’s a borderline Hall of Famer. You look at the ten, eleven years he was in Milwaukee. I know it’s not enough, but man, he was great. He was huge here. Big favorite here.
Late August we needed a pitcher, and we got Doc Medich from Eddie Chiles and the Rangers. But Doc was no longer Doc Medich, if you know what I mean. He was at the end of his career. Great guy, but not much help.
Harry came to me. He’d been talking to my friend Al Rosen, who was general manager of the Astros, and said, we can get Don Sutton. He said our guys think he can help us. We would have to give up Kevin Bass, a good young outfielder, and some other future pieces to get him. Neither one of us liked the price we were going to pay, but when you have a chance to win, you have to do it. For us, this was like the deal the Cubs made in 2016 when they picked up Aroldis Chapman. There are times you just have to make a deal. Theo Epstein said it well with Chapman—if not now, then when? That was the question for us as it was getting late in ’82.
So we made the deal, and the next thing we were playing a doubleheader with Cleveland in early September. Fingers had gotten hurt in the first game. Little did I know that would be the last time he would pitch that season. He had won the Cy Young and the MVP in ’81. Rollie was a great pitcher and huge for us. Not having him would be a big blow. But that day I wasn’t that worried because I didn’t know that he had torn a muscle in his forearm. I was walking up the ramp at County Stadium for the second game, and I heard this big ovation. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. It was Sutton walking in from the bullpen. That’s how happy fans were to have him on the Brewers.
Sutton said for years that that would happen only in Milwaukee. He loved playing here. He was tremendous about it. He told me that every player should get a chance to play in Milwaukee.
We entered September four and a half games ahead of Boston and five up on Baltimore. Things got tight, of course, because it’s never easy, right? I was really worried because we played the last thirteen games of the season against the Red Sox and the Orioles, with the last seven in Boston and Baltimore. It was a wonder that my bleeding ulcer didn’t return.
We’ve got Earl Weaver’s mighty Orioles in Milwaukee for our last home series. Before the Friday night game, I’m in my office, the phone rings, and it’s Harry. He says, “You better get down here, your kid is acting up.”
The kid is Yount. That’s what we all call him. I go down, Dr. Paul Jacobs is there, Harvey Kuenn, Harry. The door is closed. I’m thinking, What’s the problem? Dr. Jacobs, who was a very close friend of mine and is to this day, says Yount’s got a bad shoulder and a bad knee. They’re both puffed up. I have to take him to Mount Sinai to get cortisone shots in those two joints. Maybe he can play next Monday or Tuesday.
I’m stunned. “Doc, wait a minute . . .”
He reminds me that I’ve always said the health of my players comes first. I say, “Yeah, but Doc . . .”
I know that Dr. Jacobs is right, of course. Yount’s gonna have to do what the doctor tells him to do, and I have to support the doctor. There’s not a moment of question about any of this. It’s what has to happen, even if Rob Picciolo plays shortstop in the biggest games of the year, not Robin Yount.
Archie is sitting behind us. He looks like he’s ready to check out. He’s beyond distraught. I go out in the clubhouse and it’s very quiet. Robin is sitting down. I say, “I’ll see you when you get back from the hospital,” and pat him on the back. He says, “Wait. Wait. Wait a minute. What do you mean? There’s nothing wrong with my knee and my shoulder. Boss . . .”
I say the doctor told me he told you. He says again, “There’s nothing wrong with my shoulder and my knee.” Other players are sitting there, staring.
“Rob, we’re not going to have any debate.”
“What are you talking about?”
“You’re going to the hospital. He’ll bring you back and I’ll see you when you get back. You’ll come up and sit with me.”
“No. No way.”
So now I’m going out the clubhouse door, people are coming into the ballpark. It’s six o’clock. He’s in uniform and now he’s walking after me, in the middle of all these people, vendors, fans. We’re going back and forth.
“You can’t do this to me,” he says. “This is not right. We got to win.”
What an attitude. Now we’re halfway up the ramp and we’re still arguing. We’re discussing things emotionally. Finally, he says to me one of the best lines.
“What do you mean, I can’t play? I’m a ballplayer. That’s what I’m here for.”
I look at him and I can see it would just crush him to go to the hospital. He’s won the argument. I finally say, go ahead and play, I’ll take the responsibility. I get up to my office and call the manager’s office. Arch answers the phone. I say, you’ve got him in the lineup.
He’s like, “Oh, man.” You can hear the relief. And Robin never misses a pitch all the way through the rest of the season, the playoffs, and the World Series.
If you ever want to doubt what an athlete can do in these situations, think about Robin Yount.
That night we beat the Orioles 15–6. Robin homered in the first inning off Mike Flanagan and in the sixth off reliever Don Stanhouse. He drove in six runs. The sellout crowd started chanting “MVP!” Robin was hurting. He wouldn’t admit it. He would never admit it. My only fights with Yount in twenty years were about his health. I so admired his toughness.
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p; We go to Boston to start the last week of the season. We win the first night in shocking fashion. Our backup catcher, Ned Yost (who would manage the Brewers before winning a World Series as the Royals’ manager), hits a homer in the ninth to win the game. We win the next night, lose Thursday, and go into Baltimore three games up with four games to go—starting with a makeup doubleheader. We were swept, and now the lead is one. I’m dying.
We play a game on Saturday afternoon, Tony Kubek and Joe Garagiola announce the game, and we get killed. We go back to the Cross Keys Hotel in Baltimore, where the team stays. We’ve got the kids with us, but they’re smart. They all go out on Saturday night while I just sit around and stew.
The tension, you could cut it with a knife. I’m up all night and Sue’s up all night. I watch The Dirty Dozen twice. I’m nervous. I’m thinking, all these years, what if we blow this? The club may never recover.
About eight thirty in the morning, I’ve finally fallen asleep, and there’s banging on the door. I say to Sue, “Why did you order breakfast? We have a 3:05 game.”
“I didn’t order breakfast,” she says.
This is not a good thing. I go to the door and it’s Howard Cosell. He’s come down to do the game. He walks in and he says, “I knew Sutton in Vero Beach, 1966,” and goes into this long tirade.
“You’re going to win today because this guy won’t let you down,” he said. “Look out the window. I just saw him.”
Sure enough, in this little park across from the Cross Keys, there’s Sutton and Simmons, sitting at a picnic table going over hitters. We order breakfast, Howard leaves. I don’t know why, but I feel better. I wanted to feel better. (I only found out later that he’d told the opposite version of the same story to Edward Bennett Williams, the owner of the Orioles. When Williams and I called Cosell on it, his reply was: “Well, I made you both feel better, didn’t I?” As much as it pained me to admit it, he did.)
It was a huge crowd at Memorial Stadium, a very emotional day, and the only fans the Brewers were going to have were the few people sitting by the dugout. It was terrifying. The place was a madhouse when I walked in. The Orioles were pitching Jim Palmer and we were going with Don Sutton. Two Hall of Famers. And the team that won would capture the AL East after a great race. This is the kind of stuff that I loved when I was a kid, the kind of game that people remember the rest of their lives.
Before the game, I asked Harvey and Harry, do you mind if I talk to the players? I had never done this before in my years with the Brewers. I told them I wouldn’t take much time and Harry liked the idea. Harvey was thrilled.
I said, “I love you guys, I wish you well today, just do the best you can.” That was it.
Yount hit a home run in the first inning and another one in the third inning. Palmer is still mad about those homers. He tells me they were just two fly balls. I tell him they were fly balls, all right, but they were 410-foot fly balls.
Cecil Cooper hit a homer off Palmer in the sixth, giving us a 4–1 lead. Sutton was pitching great, and all of a sudden it was the eighth inning, we were up 5–2, but they got a couple men on. We didn’t have Fingers, so Harvey stuck with Sutton. Joe Nolan came up as a pinch hitter and hit a long fly ball into the left-field corner. Ben Oglivie made a great catch. I mean, a great catch. I wanted to kiss him.
That was the end of the Orioles. We blew it up with five runs in the ninth, including a three-run homer by Simba, Ted Simmons. It was 10–2. Somebody counted the number of Tiparillos I smoked. There were thirty under my seat. I had ’em going all the time. I lit one, lit another. You talk about nervous.
There are great pictures of Coop and me in the clubhouse. We were drinking champagne. No wonder it became my favorite drink. It was such a great moment.
I’ll never forget the fans when we got back to Milwaukee. We went by under the bridge on Wisconsin Avenue and you saw all these people. I said, “I wonder what happened?” never dreaming they were all out there because we won.
We played Gene Mauch’s Angels in the AL Championship Series. They were very good—the lineup had Hall of Famers in Reggie Jackson and Rod Carew and a cast of tough veterans that included Don Baylor, Bobby Grich, Brian Downing, Bob Boone, and Doug DeCinces—but so were we. Our lineup was just tremendous.
Oglivie had a big year. Simmons. Cooper. Molitor. Yount. Gorman Thomas. Even Charlie Moore was a very good player. We were tough. One thing about that team, they could hit. We lost the first two games in Anaheim, putting us in the same situation we had been in a year before, down 2–0 in a playoff series. But this time we were going home to County Stadium, and it’s like my security blanket.
Sutton pitches great on a Friday, and we win. Saturday we have a big debate. It’s raining. Lee MacPhail, the American League president, is there. Bowie’s there. Bowie thinks we should call the game. It’s raining on and off. Lee says, no, we can’t call it off. Bowie’s not happy with Lee. I’m grumbling a little bit, but I always grumble. We play the game and we win. Mark Brouhard, who’s in left field because the Angels started lefty Tommy John, gets three big hits and we win. Now we’re down to another Sunday game to decide the series.
We still don’t have Fingers, of course. I keep thinking about Yogi Berra’s comment that if you don’t have relief pitching, you don’t got nothing. We have Pete Ladd. He’s out of our farm system, a big guy, and he’s been okay. But Rollie was great.
That fifth game is one of the best games I’ve seen. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a crowd more into a game. You can’t hear yourself think.
In the seventh inning, we’re down 3–2. But after Robin walks to load the bases, Coop lines a hit to left-center, scoring Moore and Jim Gantner, and the place is up for grabs. Bedlam. I can still see Coop waving the ball to get down, get on the grass, as he’s running to first base. Then Gantner slides in behind Moore. They’re going crazy.
By the ninth inning, I’m hanging on for dear life. There’s two outs, Brian Downing is on second, Ladd is pitching, and it’s 4–3. The place is wild. You can’t hear. I’m smoking. I’ve got one lit here, I’ve got one in the ashtray, I’ve got another here. I burned myself. I’m just lighting up. I don’t know what I’m doing, and I admit that.
The only thing I can think of after all these years: Why does it have to be the great Rod Carew coming up to hit? Why can’t it be some stiff who can’t hit?
Carew hits the ball hard but right to Yount, who comes up throwing to Coop. The game is over. What a finish. I go downstairs and they dump everything on me. Vukie and Ted Simmons are waiting for me. I’ll always remember this. Now I get home, happy, it’s about ten o’clock at night, the game was over at seven. I’m still sitting in my den, with my little radio.
This voice says, “It’s the seventy-ninth World Series, between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Milwaukee Brewers.” I’m not ashamed to tell you I cried. Oh, my goodness, the Brewers are in the World Series. It was a great feeling.
St. Louis is a great baseball town, but so is Milwaukee. You have two really great baseball cities. We head to St. Louis first to play the mighty Cardinals and we get off to a big start. We win 10–0. Molitor and Yount have nine hits between them at the top of the order. I think we have a better team than the Cardinals, but I’m biased. A lot of people thought we would have been clearly a better team if we had Fingers.
In later years I would kid Whitey Herzog about it, and he didn’t deny it. He had Bruce Sutter and we didn’t have our guy.
The next day we lose 5–4. That’s where we miss Fingers. Ladd is great. Gives us everything he has. But it would have been great to have had Fingers.
With the World Series tied one apiece, we come back to Milwaukee. Bowie’s here. Bob Lurie, the Giants’ owner, and his wife. The Bronfmans came. That meant a lot to me.
The Cardinals win game 3 on Friday, but we win on Saturday to get it even again. After the game I take a big group to our regular pizza place, Zaffiro’s. It’s a good time. We win Sunday, and now we’re ahead 3–2. We’
re going back to St. Louis, and Sutton’s ready to pitch.
That’s it. We lose game 6, get killed 13–1, so we go to the seventh game. Vukie, as it turns out, is pitching with a torn rotator cuff. We don’t know he is, but he is. He’s tough, a real competitor. We’re ahead until we have one tough inning. After that it’s all over. We lose 6–3. I don’t need to tell you how crushed I am.
Dick Hackett, our marketing guy, says to me, “I just talked to the Association of Commerce people; they want a parade tomorrow.”
“What? Are you crazy? We lost. What are we celebrating?”
This goes back and forth. Robin Yount is in the back of the plane, sobbing, and I’m going all around the plane, back and forth, talking to our players, making sure they’re all right. Now here comes Hackett again. He’s smart. He talks to Sue. Naturally she says of course, you can’t tell ’em no.
Hackett comes over, and I’m saying, “I’ll tell ’em no. We lost.” But by the time the plane lands in Milwaukee, I agree. I even apologize to Hackett. But I’m thinking, The heartbreak of losing game 7, nobody’s going to come, you’re going to be sorry you did it.
The next morning we get to the ballpark, and they have little buses taking us downtown. When we get to the park, there are some sheriff’s department guys there. I know ’em well because they used to work the ballpark.
“Oh, hi, Bud, sorry, but we’re so proud of you.”
I say to one of the sheriffs I know very well, “Eddie, this will be quick. I’m sorry you have to work.” He says, what are you talking about?
I say, “We lost, why would anybody come out?”
He says, “I don’t know, but we’ve just closed downtown. There must be a million people here. I don’t know where they’ve all come from.” The streets are jammed, the buildings are jammed. And, of course, Sue is beaming, just as she should be. It takes us four or five hours to get up Wisconsin Avenue. It’s unbelievable.
