Impact Player

by Bobby Richardson

  I came out of the All-Star break confident, feeling solidly in place at second base and having been added to the All-Star team by my own manager. To me, being chosen as an All-Star meant Casey must have been pleased with how I was playing. But the thing with Casey Stengel was, just when you thought you had things figured out, he would throw you a changeup.

  In late July I gave way to Gil McDougald, who moved over to second from shortstop when my roommate, Tony Kubek, started getting more playing time at short. (Tony was named American League Rookie of the Year after that season.)

  A week later, I was back to starting at second.

  Another week later, I was out again.

  Needless to say, the changes frustrated me—to the point that I did something way out of character for me. In an August game at Yankee Stadium against the Washington Senators, I started at second and batted eighth. When it came time for my first at bat, in the third inning, Casey called me back to the dugout and sent in Tommy Byrne to pinch-hit. When I walked by Casey in his spot at the edge of the dugout, I said, “If you’re going to pinch-hit for me the first time I’m up, why did you start me?”

  I kept walking through the back of the dugout and into the clubhouse, where I began to take off my uniform. Casey followed me into the locker room. “Get your little glove,” he ordered, “and go down to the bullpen and warm up Ryne Duren.”

  That was my punishment for my attitude. It might not sound like much, but it could have been a pretty harsh punishment.

  Duren had been part of the Billy Martin trade. He wore Coke-bottle glasses and threw about a hundred miles per hour. He threw a lot of his pitches in the dirt, too, because he had yet to gain control of his fastball. I could have gotten beat up catching for Duren in the bullpen, but he took it easy on me, throwing just a few pitches and never really getting up to full speed.

  My playing time remained inconsistent through the remainder of the regular season, and a late-season pulled hamstring that I reinjured hampered me too.

  We won the pennant by six and a half games over the White Sox to advance to the World Series against the Milwaukee Braves, who had won the National League for the first time since moving from Boston in 1953.

  We split the first two games in Yankee Stadium before the Series moved to Milwaukee, where the fans were almost salivating at the thought of winning their first World Series by beating the Yankees. We won Game 3 in Milwaukee, but the Braves came back to win the next two games for a 3–2 lead, with the final two games scheduled for New York. We won Game 6 to force a seventh and deciding game, but Lew Burdette shut us out. The Braves won the game 5–0 and the Series 4–3. Burdette pitched three complete games in that series, shutting us out twice and allowing only two runs over his twenty-seven innings. My playing time in the Series had been limited to pinch-running in Game 2 and serving as a late-inning defensive replacement in Game 5.

  The end of the season was doubly disappointing for me. As a team, we had failed to successfully defend our world championship of 1956. As a player who had hoped to establish myself in the major leagues in 1957, I hadn’t really succeeded. Back in June, I’d thought I was in the process of securing my role as a starter. But then my playing time had grown frustratingly inconsistent late in the season. So even though I had been part of the All-Star Game and the World Series, I couldn’t say I was satisfied with the way the season had played out. But I was happy to be going home to spend time with my wife and my new little son. And next season, I told myself, would have to be better.

  Chapter 7

  Stay or Go Home?

  My favorite story from the 1958 season comes from off the field, if that offers any indication of what kind of season it was for me.

  We started 23–5 and had already built up an eight-and-a-half-game lead by late May. Our lead was in double digits throughout most of the summer, and that allowed us to clinch the pennant by mid-September.

  After we had wrapped up the American League championship in Kansas City, Yankees management commissioned private detectives to follow players around and make sure we weren’t doing anything or going anywhere that could distract us from the upcoming World Series.

  Unfortunately for management, we found out about the detectives, and Mickey, Whitey, and some of the other guys turned the situation into a game of chase. They would hail a cab and climb into the backseat. While the detectives were getting into their own cab behind the players, Mickey, Whitey, and company would slide out the other door and get into another cab headed in the opposite direction. The detectives couldn’t keep up with them.

  Tony Kubek and I were a different story. The detectives had no trouble keeping up with us. Since the detectives knew they had to turn in something to Yankees management to justify their expense, they submitted this report on the two of us: “They went to the movie theater and didn’t go in. They bought popcorn and then went to the YMCA and played Ping-Pong. Then they left to get milkshakes.” After that, the media began calling Tony and me the “Milkshake Twins.”

  There wasn’t much else to laugh about that season for me individually. In 1957, my first full season in the big leagues, I had played ninety-seven games. That had felt like too few to me. Yet in 1958, I played only seventy-three games all season. My at bats also dropped to 195, down from 320 the year before.

  After going 1 for 6 in a doubleheader on May 11, my batting average sat at .203. My playing time really began to diminish from there. I did have a string of starts in June during which I had a five-game hitting streak, but other than that I didn’t feel I received enough consistent time in the lineup.

  Casey would say of me, “Look at him. He doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, and he still can’t hit .250.”

  My reply to Casey: “To hit, you have to play.”

  (A couple of years later, as my batting average improved, Casey amended his quote to say “.260.”)

  There were a few days when I would be sitting in the dugout, out of the lineup again, and feel tears forming. We had a great team, but I didn’t feel like I was contributing anything.

  I was out of the lineup for both games of a July 13 doubleheader against the White Sox. By now we were renting a house in Ridgewood, New Jersey, each season, and Betsy was pregnant with our second child, due any day. She had awakened me at five o’clock that morning and said she needed to go to the hospital because she thought our baby was on the way. I took her to the hospital, but then I had to leave for the ballpark.

  I was sitting on the bench when Dr. John Glasser called the Yankees to say that Betsy had delivered our baby. I received the news that I had a second son via the Stadium scoreboard. Right after that, the scoreboard announced that teammate Enos Slaughter’s wife also had given birth that day, to a daughter.

  After I learned I had another son, our doubleheader seemed to drag on and on and on. It didn’t end in time for me to make it to the hospital before visiting hours ended, but the doctor arranged for me to get into the hospital that night and see Betsy and my new son, Ron. I learned then that before Ron was born, Dr. Glasser had prayed for a safe delivery, and after Betsy gave birth, he had prayed to dedicate Ron to the Lord. Dr. Glasser, who delivered a good number of other Yankees’ babies, was one of the many blessings God afforded us while we lived in New Jersey. We were also blessed with the kindness and support of many others, including Betsy’s cousin Lula Mae, who looked out for her while I was on the road; the Kilgos, our next-door neighbors who were like parents to us; Dave Marshall, our pastor in Ridgewood, and his wife, Lorraine; and the many friends in our church there.

  If Ron had come one day earlier, he might have been born at Yankee Stadium. The previous day had been Family Day, and our trainer had told a very pregnant Betsy that he had the trainer’s room set up just in case our baby decided to make an appearance. Ron still wishes he had arrived a day earlier so he could claim to have been born at Yankee Stadium.

  My batting average was still in the low .200s when the calendar turned to September. With the Yankees lead
ing the American League by a large margin, I began to play more in September and responded by hitting well enough to raise my batting average to .247 by the end of the regular season. That still wasn’t the average I wanted, but at least it looked more respectable.

  The Milwaukee Braves won the National League that year, setting up a World Series rematch. The Series began in Milwaukee, where we lost the first two games. We won Game 3, then lost Game 4 in Yankee Stadium to fall into a 3–1 deficit. Only one team, the 1925 Pittsburgh Pirates, had overcome such a deficit in a best-of-seven format to win the World Series.

  Lew Burdette, the pitcher who had shut us down three times in the ’57 Series and defeated us again in Game 2, started Game 5 opposite our “Bullet Bob” Turley. This time it was Bob who threw the shutout, and we got to Burdette for six runs in the sixth inning to win 7–0. Spared watching the Braves celebrate on our field, we returned to Milwaukee needing to win Games 6 and 7 in order to take back the world championship.

  We did it.

  We won a tense Game 6 in ten innings, 4–3. In Game 7, Moose Skowron hit a three-run home run in the eighth inning off Burdette, and we won 6–2 to secure the Yankees’ eighteenth World Series title.

  I saw more action in that World Series than in the previous one, although still not much. I entered both Games 2 and 3 in the eighth inning to play third base.

  I started Game 4 at third base. That was the only time, other than a preseason exhibition game in Georgia, that my dad was able to see me play a major league game in person. Dad’s emphysema made it extremely difficult for him to make the long trip to New York, but he and Mom came up with my sisters because he wanted to watch me play at least one time.

  Lefty Warren Spahn started pitching for the Braves that day. I flied out to left field in my first at bat against the future Hall of Famer. Leading off the fifth, I popped out to first base. When it was my turn to bat next, in the bottom of the seventh with the Braves leading 2–0, Elston Howard was sent in to pinch-hit for me. To that point, I hadn’t even had a ball hit to me in the field. So the only time my dad watched me play, I went 0 for 2 and didn’t make a play on defense. I would have liked to have done better for him.

  Game 5 was my final appearance of the Series, again as a late defensive replacement at third base.

  I felt better at the end of the 1958 season than I had the previous year when I hadn’t played much and we’d lost. But I was still extremely disappointed I hadn’t played more—and someone back in South Carolina felt the same way.

  Not many people in the little village of Alcolu, where Betsy lived as a child, had televisions at the time. But Betsy’s grandmother had one and opened her home to those wanting to watch the World Series (and their local boy). In the games when Casey didn’t start me, however, Betsy’s grandmother would get mad, turn off the TV, and not allow anyone to watch the game. When that happened, Betsy’s aunt Jennie would have to leave and find another TV set to watch.

  It’s nice to have that kind of support from an in-law. I just wished I hadn’t needed it.

  Playing under Casey’s platoon system for two full seasons had disheartened me to the point that I once again considered quitting baseball. Since the discouraging start to my first season in the minors, when that letter from Coach Alexander helped me reprioritize my life, I had been mindful that my serving the Lord was more important than playing baseball. Now I was thinking that I might be of better service to God if I returned home to Sumter to stay. I had attended some college classes during previous off-seasons, and I began to wonder whether the time had come to put baseball behind me and go earn a college degree.

  I sought the counsel of Ralph Houk, my manager with the Denver Bears, who had moved up to the Yankees as a coach. “Don’t be discouraged,” Ralph told me. He advised me to stick with baseball, reminding me of the number of youth groups I had enjoyed speaking to, and shared his belief that staying in baseball would open up more opportunities to talk about my faith than I might expect. If I gave up baseball, he said, I would be giving up the platform that God was building for me in New York.

  I gave weight to Ralph’s advice because he had become a trusted advisor. I returned home for the off-season and prayed about whether I should remain in baseball or quit. The more I prayed, the more it became clear that I should keep playing.

  Chapter 8

  .300

  The year 1959 turned out to be a complete reversal of the ’58 season. While I had the finest season of my career to that point, it was the worst season for the team that I had experienced. With the talent we had and the depth within our farm system, I thought at the beginning of every season that we would win the world championship. In 1959, that was not to be, much to the chagrin—and delight—of baseball fans across the country.

  Our Yankees were a polarizing club. We were a national team, not merely a New York franchise. I never played for any other team, so I don’t know what it was like to be on their road trips, but with the Yankees, passionate fans greeted us everywhere we played. But we also seemed to attract a large number of people who, with equal passion, desired to see us fail. The more miserably we failed, the happier they would be. Baseball fans were either very much for us or very much against us, and there just didn’t seem to be any middle ground.

  When I say I thought we would win the world championship every season, I don’t mean that in an arrogant way. We all knew that winning the championship would require hard work from each of us and a commitment to playing the fundamentals throughout the long grind of the 154-game schedule. But we could enter each season with a high level of confidence because we knew that we would have the pieces in place to compete in the World Series. We never had to wonder during the off-season whether management would be able to assemble a championship-worthy roster. And with our depth, we never had to go into a season thinking we would be in serious trouble if one particular player got injured.

  But even with all that, there were no guarantees—and 1959 proved that.

  Our title in ’58 had marked the Yankees’ fourth consecutive World Series appearance and the ninth in ten seasons. The only season during that time when the Yankees had missed the playoffs was in 1954, when New York had won 103 games. That represented a winning percentage of .669, a number that in most seasons would win the American League pennant and put us in the World Series. In fact, that was the Yankees’ best record for any season of the 1950s. In ’54, though, the Cleveland Indians had fashioned a remarkable 111–43 record to defeat the Yankees by eight games. So even that one time during that ten-year stretch when the Yankees had not advanced to the postseason, it took an incredible season by another team to keep them out.

  However, that was not the case for our 1959 team.

  We barely produced a .500 record, finishing 79–75 for the Yankees’ worst showing since all the way back to 1925. That was the year of Babe Ruth’s “bellyache heard ’round the world,” when he missed the first two months of the season because of surgery for an abdominal abscess caused by his diet of too many hot dogs and—depending on which sources you prefer—too many sodas or beers.

  We finished in third place in the eight-team American League, fifteen games behind the pennant-winning White Sox.

  Mickey Mantle, Moose Skowron, Gil McDougald, and Andy Carey were among the position players who either missed stretches of games because of injuries or were hampered by them. With those players in and out of the lineup, our offense never seemed to get clicking, and we struggled to score runs. That put a strain on our pitchers, who also had to battle injuries, and they just couldn’t shut down the opposition like they had in recent seasons.

  By late May of 1959, we were in last place in the league, nine and a half games out of first. Before then, the Yankees hadn’t spent one day in last place since 1940. A hot streak helped us climb to within one and a half games of the first-place Cleveland Indians heading into the first day of summer, June 21, but that was as close to the top as we would get. By the end of July we had plummet
ed to a double-digit deficit behind the leader, and for the first time in a long time, the Yankees spent the parts of the calendar usually reserved for a pennant race merely playing out the string.

  One of baseball’s unique aspects, and one of the many reasons I love the sport so much, is that it is a series of individual matchups within a team competition. When I was at the plate, it was me against the pitcher. There was no one setting a pick or throwing a block for me. It was up to me to beat the pitcher. There were nine of us hitters each night in the same situation, but in the big picture we were all contributing to our team. Our motivation to succeed as individuals was for the greater cause of our team, and that could be very satisfying.

  Occasionally, though, it could lead to awkward feelings.

  In 1958, for example, we were world champions, and I celebrated our team’s great accomplishment along with my teammates. Yet solely on an individual basis, that season would have to be classified as discouraging for me. We were the best team in baseball, but I left that season wondering whether I should even continue to play.

  The 1959 season, on the other hand, was a major disappointment from a team standpoint. When we heard things such as “This is the first Yankees team to be in last place since 1940,” that stung. Yet ’59 was the best season I’d had individually.

  The first week of the season I was starting at shortstop. The second week I was at second. The third week I was back at shortstop. The fourth week I was on the bench.

  On May 5 my batting average was at .232. After that, other than an occasional spot start, I was back to playing as a late-game defensive substitution until the middle of June, when Casey decided to insert me back into the starting spot at second. I started there every game through the rest of the season.

  Provided with what I felt was my first real opportunity to show what I could do as a regular starter, my average soared to above .300 at the start of July, and I picked up my second berth in the All-Star Game, although again I did not get to actually play.