by Bob Gibson
Obviously, Reggie was a guy who could focus all his abilities in that situation and actually feed on it. Lou Brock was the same way. Brock was something else in the postseason.
Reggie Jackson
I watched Bob Gibson beat the Red Sox three times in the 1967 World Series and strike out seventeen Detroit Tigers in the opening game of the 1968 World Series. Yes! It made such an impression on me that he was in my Hall of Fame speech. Gibson was an inspiration. After watching him put everything on the line in two straight Octobers, I was driven to play with the will to win that he exemplified when he pitched.
I’d have loved to face Hoot in the World Series, because that’s when I’d know I was going to be on my game.
Bob Gibson
That would make two of us.
Reggie Jackson
I might not do anything, but if ever I was going to be able to make my mark against one of the all-time greats, that would be the time. I was going to be on it. And if I did something under those circumstances, nobody could ever say, well, you caught him on a bad day. Uh-uh.
Bob Gibson
I don’t know that I ever pitched a bad game in the postseason. I got beat; but pitching a bad game—I don’t think that happened.
The atmosphere, no doubt, had something to do with it. I didn’t care for all the distractions that came with the territory, but the excitement surrounding the whole thing served to help me forget how tired and worn out and beat-up I might be.
Reggie Jackson
I didn’t consider them distractions. I saw all that stuff as the stage being set. Set for me.
Bob Gibson
My first World Series victory came in Yankee Stadium. It was the fifth game of the 1964 Series, and I’d lost in Game Two in St. Louis. That was a wild pennant race that year, and toward the end of it the Cardinals had pushed me up to three days of rest instead of the four we usually got. My last start was on the final Friday, and Al Jackson of the Mets shut us out 1–0. We still needed to win Sunday to take the pennant, and I had to go four innings of relief. That was twenty-nine innings in a stretch of eleven days, and four days later the Yankees beat me in our park.
But nothing energizes a ballplayer like Yankee Stadium in October. I had a cold and sore throat and wasn’t throwing worth a damn in the bullpen, but none of that mattered. In the ninth inning, Joe Pepitone lined a ball off my backside and I sprinted toward the third-base line, grabbed it, and whirled around as I threw him out. He couldn’t believe the call or the play I made, either one; but he was out, and we went to the tenth inning and Tim McCarver hit a three-run homer to win it.
For Game Seven, I only got two days’ rest and went nine innings, which left me closing out the season with fifty-six innings in twenty-two days. There’s no way I could have done that without the adrenaline I got from the pennant race and World Series. Competition brings out the best in a competitor, and also the most. Fortunately, our offense produced seven runs in the seventh game. I gave up a three-run homer to Mickey Mantle in the sixth inning and solo homers in the ninth to Clete Boyer and Phil Linz, which tells you how much stuff I had left. Johnny Keane had every reason to take me out but he didn’t, and he explained it to the press with the comment that he was committed to my heart.
Reggie was saying how his reputation, and really his career, was built on the first World Series he played in. It was the same with me. Before that Series, I’d never won twenty games and I’d only pitched in one All-Star Game. But to win it all under those circumstances, against the New York Yankees, and to hear my manager talk about me in those terms … well, I walked a little taller after that. In 1965, I won twenty for the first time. No coincidence there.
I set a World Series record for strikeouts in that ’64 Series, and they gave me the MVP Award. My prize was a Corvette from Sport magazine. I ended up selling it, because I needed the money and because I was a little ticked off after a policeman pulled me over when I was driving it through a small town in Missouri.
Reggie Jackson
The 1977 Series is the one that I’m most often associated with. Just like my 1977 season, it started out with a little tension. Billy Martin had benched me for the final playoff game against Kansas City, and I would have liked to make a statement about that right away. I singled my first time up in the opening game of the Series against the Dodgers, but in the ninth inning, when we were ahead 3–2, Billy replaced me with Paul Blair for defensive purposes. I didn’t like it, but I can’t blame him for that one. Blair was a great outfielder, and eventually he singled in the winning run in the bottom of the twelfth.
A lot of people have speculated that my spat with Billy was what motivated me in that Series. But to get amped for a World Series, I didn’t need coffee, bennies, amphetamines, or disrespect from Billy Martin. My times in the World Series were in the moment. When I was standing in the batter’s box, there was nothing going on except getting the barrel of the bat in time with the baseball. There was no clutter in my head. I was going to get the barrel in the pay zone, as I call it.
Bob Gibson
It’s a little different for regulars than it is for a pitcher. A starting pitcher is only out there every fourth or fifth day, so you don’t get into the same kind of grind during the season that everyday players might. I imagine that a guy who plays a hundred and fifty games every year could get a little bored after a few months of going at it seven days a week. But for a pitcher … eighty percent of the time, I’m sitting in the dugout calling people names and having a ball. I didn’t have much problem getting up for a start in the regular season, so the World Series wasn’t much different for me.
But it was different enough.
Reggie Jackson
If a hitter doesn’t do much in a World Series game, he has as many as six more to make up for it.
In 1977, the Series only went six games, but I waited until the latter part to crank it up. In Game Four, which we won 4–2, I homered to left center off Rick Rhoden. My second home run came off Don Sutton my last time at bat in Game Five, but we lost that one. Burt Hooton started Game Six for the Dodgers and walked me my first time up, which was disappointing because I’d been swinging extremely well in batting practice and really felt like I could light up Yankee Stadium. Then I hooked one off Hooton for a home run in the fourth inning to score Munson and give us a 4–3 lead. In the fifth, I homered against Elias Sosa with Willie Randolph on base. I didn’t know anything about Sosa, so I called up to the press box to Gene Michael and he told me what to look for. It was an inside fastball, and I was ready.
In the eighth, when we were looking good, I got hold of one of Charlie Hough’s knuckleballs and hit it way out to center field. By that point, I was just living out my fantasy. When it was over, I had three dingers on three swings. Including the one the game before in Los Angeles, it was four home runs on four swings—five first-swing homers in all, counting the one in Game Four. I also picked up a bunch of Series records and another MVP Award. Munson and Howard Cosell were calling me Mr. October.
What felt best, though, was doing it in New York. Especially after all that we’d been through that season; all I’d been through. It was like I’d unloaded the burdens of the summer on three fat pitches. To top it off, my dad and sister were there, and George Steinbrenner, the man who brought me to New York—The Boss—was saying, “I told you so …”
Now, nobody could talk about all the heroics of all the great Yankees—Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Yogi, Mickey, Maris, Whitey Ford—without including me in that roll call. I believed that what I’d done couldn’t or shouldn’t have been done anywhere but Yankee Stadium. I had become part of the tradition.
That felt good. God’s sunshine surely hit me that night.
Bob Gibson
We weren’t much like the Yankees. There was plenty of World Series tradition in the Cardinal organization—Dizzy Dean, Enos Slaughter, Stan Musial, Grover Cleveland Alexander—but that wasn’t what we played for. We played for us.
The Ca
rdinals were an uncommonly close and interesting group of guys. There wasn’t the drama that Reggie dealt with in the Yankee clubhouse. People like McCarver and Curt Flood and Bill White were great friends of mine, and I thought the world of them. Brock, Ken Boyer, Mike Shannon, Joe Torre, Orlando Cepeda, Roger Maris—all those guys. You played for your teammates.
Did I get a kick out of being the best pitcher in the Series? Yeah. Being the MVP? Yeah. But it wasn’t really about me. It was about all of us.
Then, in 1967, we played the Red Sox. As much as we liked the guys in our clubhouse, we didn’t like the ones in theirs.
Reggie Jackson
As a Yankee, that’s music to my ears.
Bob Gibson
They seemed to think the Series was all about them. Carl Yastrzemski had won the Triple Crown and Jim Lonborg had won the Cy Young, and frankly, they were cocky about it. The whole city of Boston was cocky about it.
But you know, it was an ideal situation for me and the Cardinals. There’s nothing better than being the underdog in the World Series.
Reggie Jackson
I was usually on the other end of that. But I could say there’s nothing better than being a Yankee in the World Series.
Bob Gibson
I came in pretty motivated anyway, because that was the year Clemente clipped me with the line drive and I missed a couple months. I felt like I hadn’t done my part, and I was determined to make up for that.
And then, with two outs in the bottom of the third inning in Game One, the Red Sox pitcher, Jose Santiago, lifted a little fly to left field and I started to walk toward the dugout and heard all this racket and turned around to see something dropping into the screen that caught balls that cleared the Green Monster. Fortunately, that was the only run they got.
I shut them out in Game Four and was good to go in Game Seven. George Scott, their big first baseman, predicted that “Gibson won’t survive five.” Meanwhile, they had Lonborg ready. He lasted six, and it was too bad he stayed around that long, because we scored three off him that inning to make it 7–1. I ended up with another MVP Corvette (and sold it again). In three games against me, the Red Sox never had more than one hit in an inning.
Afterwards, they weren’t talking nearly as much as they had beforehand.
Reggie Jackson
Does my heart good.
Our rivalry with the Red Sox was never more intense and crazy than it was in 1978, when we came from fourteen games behind to pass them in September, then fell back into a tie on the last day of the regular season. We won the one-game playoff, 5–4, when Bucky Dent hit his famous three-run homer to give us the lead in the seventh inning and Goose Gossage got Yastrzemski to end the game on a pop-up with two men on. I had a home run in the eighth and two more in the playoffs, when we got past Kansas City, and three hits in the first Series game against the Dodgers. Then, in Game Two, at Yankee Stadium, I had driven in all three of our runs when I came up in the ninth inning against a rookie right-hander named Bob Welch.
Welch was only twenty-one years old, and Tommy Lasorda had brought him into a tough spot. The Dodgers led by a run, but we had two on with one out and Munson at the plate, followed by me. Thurman flew out, but I still liked our chances, because I was swinging the bat well. It was the kind of scenario I played for. Even now, I still think of it as one of my great moments in baseball. I loved it—even though I struck out.
Rather, Welch struck me out. The count was two-and-two for a long time, and the kid was just making pitch after pitch, ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball after ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball. I kept fouling them off, and he finally threw ball three. I was so focused on Welch that I lost track of the count and was surprised when the runners broke off the bases on the three-two pitch. I blinked and the ball got by me for strike three. It wasn’t until I watched the tape that I realized the crowd had been on its feet the entire at-bat. I was so locked in that I didn’t hear a thing. I guess I was too locked in, because it was very unusual for me to lose track of the count. But I don’t want to discredit the job Welch did. He was throwing high fastballs into a space that I’d been taking care of extremely well, and I just couldn’t get there against him. I didn’t lose that at-bat. He just beat me.
As much as I loved hitting home runs, there was also satisfaction in playing the game at a high level, and playing it right. I reveled in the pure baseball aspect of that matchup with Welch, and I was pleased with a little play in Game Four that helped turn the series in our favor. The Dodgers were up two-one in games (they won the first two) and ahead 3–0 in the sixth inning of Game Four when I singled to drive in Roy White and move Munson to second with one out. Then Lou Piniella hit a little liner to Bill Russell, the shortstop, but Russell dropped it and forced me at second. I was stranded halfway between first and second and decided to just stand there in the way of Davey Lopes’s relay to first. I might have ever so slightly let my hip drift out in the direction of the ball. The throw hit me and bounced away, and Munson scored to make it 3–2. They called it the Sacrifice Thigh. I never really got credit for a smart baserunning play on that one, so I’ll go ahead and take the credit right here, right now. Anyway, we tied the game in the eighth and Piniella won it with a single in the ninth.
In the sixth game, we were ahead 5–2 in the seventh inning when I came up against Welch again with a runner on first. As I left the dugout for the on-deck circle, Catfish said, “Get even with him, Buck.” I got my revenge. This time, I dropped a big fly on him into the back of the bullpen at Dodger Stadium. We won, 7–2, and that was that.
Bob Gibson
My Bob Welch was Mickey Lolich. That might sound a little strange, because it wasn’t like we went after each other, one-on-one, tooth and nail, from sixty feet, six inches. But we had a fantastic battle, and he beat me.
In 1968, after two World Series MVPs and seven straight World Series victories and a single-game World Series strikeout record (in the opener against the Tigers) and two World Series series strikeout records (I broke my own record from 1964 in the seventh game), and after we blew a three-to-one lead in games—in part, possibly, because my teammates felt deep down that we’d win Game Seven anyway since I’d be pitching it—I was beaten by a left-hander with a big gut and lots of guts.
I’m glad, at least, that it wasn’t Denny McLain. He won thirty-one games that year, while I was only winning twenty-two with my 1.12 ERA, and he was on all the TV shows and magazine covers—which was all fine with me until he said before the World Series that he didn’t want to just beat the Cardinals, he wanted to humiliate us. That helps explain my seventeen strikeouts against him while throwing a shutout in Game One.
The other thing that explains those strikeouts is that, even though it was my third World Series, the Tigers’ scouting report still said—apparently—that my game was my fastball. So I kept striking them out with sliders, as I usually did. I guess they thought they were fastballs. In the ninth, I got Al Kaline, Norm Cash, and Willie Horton, and the third strike to Horton was an inside slider that he claimed he never saw.
McLain was also my opponent in Game Four, which we won easily. But we all remembered that, during the season, when McLain was ripping off one victory after another, Roger Maris had told us that the guy we had to worry about in the World Series was not McLain but Lolich. Sure enough, Lolich had beaten us in Games Two and Five, and although it should have been McLain’s turn in Game Seven, the Detroit manager, Mayo Smith, went with the right guy.
I retired twenty of the first twenty-one batters in the seventh game, but we couldn’t break through against Lolich, even though he must have been physically exhausted. It was 0–0 until the seventh, when, with two outs, Cash and Horton singled and Jim Northrup hit a two-run triple to deep center field. That was enough for Lolich, who proved that pitching under pressure is as much about brains and attitude as anything else. Of course, he had pretty good hard stuff, too. The winner of that game would surely be the Series MVP, and he was the best man.
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And don’t think that’s easy for me to say, even forty years later.
Reggie Jackson
Here we are, Mr. October and the greatest World Series pitcher of all time, and we both lost our last Series. Mine was 1981, against the Dodgers again. Backing up a bit … In the first round of the playoffs, against Milwaukee, we’d dropped two straight and blown a two-game lead. George Steinbrenner roared into the clubhouse and gave us holy hell. We were very close to falling apart, and I remember telling a writer that we’d find out in the fifth game about this Mr. October business. I ended up with three hits in game five, including a home run off Moose Haas that tied the score in the fourth inning. We survived to play the A’s for the American League championship.
Oakland was Billy Martin’s team now, and a lot was made of our personal relationship. But that didn’t have anything to do with us beating the A’s in three straight. The series, in fact, wasn’t especially sweet for me: I pulled something in my leg early in the second game and couldn’t play the last one. Then, in the victory celebration at an Oakland restaurant, I took out my frustrations with Graig Nettles. There was a misunderstanding and a tussle—no big deal. But I can’t say that we were in the best frame of mind for the World Series. Maybe the drama was finally wearing us down.
