Impact Player

by Bobby Richardson

  During Game 4, I continued to swing the bat well, going 2 for 3 with an RBI before Casey told me to hold my gun. There were two outs in the ninth with us down a run when Casey made that call. With right-hander Elroy Face pitching for the Pirates, the left-handed batter Dale Long pinch-hit for me and flied out to right to end the game.

  Naturally, I would have liked the opportunity to bat with the game on the line. Before being pulled, I was thinking that all I would need to do was get on base, then Casey could pinch-hit for the pitcher’s spot to tie or win the game. But that was my thinking, not Casey’s.

  With the Series tied 2–2, Art Ditmar came back to start in the final game scheduled at Yankee Stadium. Unfortunately, Art wasn’t able to come through for us the way he had in the regular season. Taking advantage of a defensive error, the Pirates put up three runs in the third, knocking Art out of the game early.

  In the bottom of the second, Kubek scored Howard on a groundout to make the score 3–1. The Pirates answered with another run, driven in by Roberto Clemente. Then Maris homered off Pirates starter Harvey Haddix in the bottom of the third, but Pittsburgh still led 4–2. That score remained until the Pirates added a run in the top of the ninth. I led off the bottom half of the ninth by grounding out to short. That made me 0 for 4 on the day and started an inning in which we all went down in order. That 5–2 loss put us down 3–2 in games, with the Series heading back to Pittsburgh.

  Despite the deficit and the fact that we were returning to Forbes Field, where Pirates fans were supercharged by the prospect of ending their long world-championship drought at home, I believed we were in great shape because Whitey would be pitching Game 6. And sure enough, Whitey dominated from the start. We jumped out to an early lead and kept pulling away. We won that game 12–0, with Whitey tossing another complete-game shutout.

  Whitey pitched shutouts in both of his World Series starts, and I have no doubt that if the rotation had been set up so that he started three games, he would have thrown three shutouts.

  I probably hit the ball better that afternoon than in any other game in the Series, going 2 for 5 with two triples and three more runs batted in. Both triples were hit very, very hard, with one going over Gino Cimoli’s head and off the scoreboard in left field, and the other reaching the ivy-covered wall left of deep center field.

  Our Game 6 victory to even the Series set up what would prove to be one of the most memorable Game 7s in postseason history.

  Once again the Pirates turned to Vern Law as their starter, and we countered with Bob Turley, who had won Game 2. In a curious move, Casey had two relief pitchers warming in the bullpen before Bob had even thrown a pitch. That had to make Bob wonder how much confidence Casey had in him.

  Pittsburgh scored two runs off Bob in the bottom of the first, and after he allowed a single to start the second, Casey pulled him for Bill Stafford. Stafford allowed Bob’s runner to score, plus one of his own, and we were down 4–0 after two innings.

  Law had been mowing us down since early in the game. Casey had moved me into the leadoff spot, and I’d started the game with a line out to shortstop. Then I flied out to left to end the third. Through four innings, Law had held us scoreless and had allowed only two singles.

  Moose finally got us on the board in the fifth inning with a leadoff home run. Then, in the sixth, we were able to get to Law. I led off with a single, and Kubek walked. That ended Law’s day, as he gave way to Elroy Face. After Roger Maris fouled out, Mickey singled to center to score me. Yogi Berra followed with a three-run homer, and we led 5–4.

  Bobby Shantz, who had entered the game in relief in the third inning, was pitching great, holding the Pirates scoreless through the seventh inning. In the eighth, we went ahead 7–4 on RBIs by Johnny Blanchard and Clete Boyer.

  With a three-run lead, we were six outs from winning Games 6 and 7 on the road to claim the World Series. Then things began to unravel.

  Pinch hitter Gino Cimoli started the Pittsburgh eighth with a single into right center. Bill Virdon followed with a routine grounder to Kubek at short. When the ball was hit, even with the Pirates’ leadoff hitter at the plate, I immediately thought, Double play! and raced toward the bag for a flip from Tony. But right before the ball reached Tony, it hit a clump of dirt in the chewed-up infield and bounced directly up and into his throat. The ball caromed toward second as Tony spun and fell in the opposite direction. I raced over and picked up the ball, signaled for a time-out, and knelt next to Tony, who was still lying on his side.

  Our trainers and Casey sprinted out to check on Tony. “Give him room!” Casey ordered. “Maybe he’ll be all right!”

  “I can’t breathe,” Tony said in a husky voice.

  After a few minutes, Tony rose to his feet and struggled to talk. He insisted he wanted to stay in the game, though his windpipe had already begun to swell. Casey and the trainers knew that Tony was not okay and removed him from the game. Joe DeMaestri stepped in at shortstop while Tony, holding an ice bag to his throat, was loaded into the Pittsburgh team doctor’s car for a run to the hospital.

  If the ball hadn’t hit that clump of dirt, we would have turned the double play. Virdon told me some time later that he knew when he hit it that it was a sure double play ball. That was the first of two missed opportunities that inning.

  The second came after the Pirates had scored to pull within 7–5 and Jim Coates had replaced Shantz on the mound. With runners on second and third and Roberto Clemente batting with two outs, we still had a chance to get out of the inning with a two-run lead. Clemente reached for an outside pitch and tapped a weak bouncer toward first. Moose fielded the ball wide of first, expecting Coates to cover the base as usual. But Coates, instead of heading directly to first, had made a move to try to field the ball himself. Moose was too far off first to beat Clemente to the bag. If Coates had covered first, we would have retired Clemente. Instead, Clemente was safe, one run had scored, and the inning kept going.

  With runners on first and third, Hal Smith, the right-handed Pirates’ catcher who had come into the game in the top of that inning, cleared the bases with a long home run to left center that landed in the trees beyond the 406-foot marker on the wall. The Pirates suddenly led 9–7. There was nothing cheap about Smith’s home run. But as he rounded the bases, I couldn’t help but think that, with the bad hop that ruined the double play and the missed out at first, we had given the Pirates three extra outs in an inning in which they had scored five runs.

  Invigorated by the turn of events, Pirates fans were cheering expectantly as relief pitcher Bob Friend came in to start the ninth. I led off and looped a single over the shortstop’s head. Dale Long, pinch-hitting for DeMaestri, singled to right, and I stopped at second instead of trying to take third on Clemente’s strong arm. That knocked Friend out of the game, with Harvey Haddix taking his place.

  Haddix, a starter making a relief appearance because it was Game 7, was staring into the heart of our order: Maris, Mantle, Berra, and Skowron. He retired Roger on a foul pop-up, but Mickey singled to right center to score me and send Long to third. It was 9–8 with one out, and Gil McDougald went in to pinch-run for Long at third.

  Yogi then hit a hard shot down the first base line. I mean, Yogi smashed that ball. But first baseman Rocky Nelson snared it and stepped on first to retire Yogi, then turned to throw to second to try to get Mickey for a double play. But Mickey had stopped still just off first after Yogi hit the ball, not knowing if Nelson would catch the ball before it hit the ground. As Nelson raised his arm to throw to second, Mickey dove back to first. Nelson couldn’t react in time to tag Mickey, and McDougald scored.

  During postgame interviews, reporters told Mickey he had made a great play, because if he had been thrown out at second, he could have been tagged before McDougald scored, and the game would have ended at 9–8.

  “It wasn’t a great play,” Mickey told the reporters. “I froze. I didn’t know what to do.”

  But we had tied the score, 9–9.r />
  Moose then hit a grounder to shortstop, and Mickey was forced out at second to end our half of the ninth.

  Ralph Terry started the bottom of the ninth for us. Ralph had come on with two outs in the bottom of the eighth inning and retired Don Hoak on a fly to left. Ralph was in a difficult spot, though, because he had already warmed up three or four times in the bullpen during the game. Getting up and down repeatedly in the bullpen is tough on a pitcher, and nowadays there are managers who either will bring a reliever in after he’s warmed up once or won’t bring him in at all.

  Bill Mazeroski was first up for the Pirates. Like me, he was a second baseman, and as I had for most of the Series, he was batting eighth. Mazeroski took Ralph’s first pitch high for a ball. Any Pirates fan from that era can tell you exactly what happened with the next pitch—at 3:36 on the afternoon of Thursday, October 13, 1960.

  Ralph wanted to keep the pitch low, but instead he got it up around Mazeroski’s belt. And that pitch landed in the history books, because when Mazeroski hit it, he became the first player to hit a game-winning home run in the final game of a World Series. Only one other player has done so since—Joe Carter of the Toronto Blue Jays in 1993.

  When the ball left Mazeroski’s bat, I looked over to Yogi in left field. As soon as I saw Yogi’s body language as he faced the outfield fence, I knew the game was over. While Mazeroski rounded the bases, Pittsburgh fans started pouring onto the field—so many of them that he could barely get back to home plate.

  I removed my cap so no fan would try to grab it, put it in my hand with my glove, and worked my way through the onrushing crowd into the safety of the dugout, then back into the solemnity of our clubhouse. Mickey came in behind me, sat at his locker, and wept.

  Tony would later talk about how he was resting in the hospital when Mazeroski homered. Tony didn’t have the game on television or radio, but when he heard car horns honking outside and noticed how happy the nurses were, he knew the Pirates had won.

  That, by far, was the toughest loss I ever experienced. Mickey summed it up well for the rest of us afterward when he said, “I just hate to lose when we’re a better team. I feel like we had a better team and deserved to win.”

  Wheeling and Dealing

  None of us Yankees publicly questioned Casey’s decision to hold Whitey until Game 3, but it was widely believed among the players that we would have won the Series with Whitey making three starts. Casey was fired after the World Series—which was his record tenth to manage—because of how we lost.

  That’s not to say the Pirates shouldn’t have won that World Series. Even five decades later, I try to be careful not to sound as if I’m saying that. The Pirates beat us, and they deserved to win. The outcome shows that they had the better team for the Series, though I still firmly believe that we had the better team that season. If there were such a thing as a do-over in baseball, I think the Yankees players from that era would unanimously vote to try that Series again.

  The awful feeling we experienced after Game 7 never goes away. Even while watching the World Series in 2011, those feelings came rushing back at me when the Texas Rangers twice came within one pitch of winning Game 6—and the championship—against the St. Louis Cardinals and then wound up losing the Series. I watched on television as Rangers players sat on the bench after the final game, dejected because they’d had the chance to win and didn’t. That’s the way we felt in Pittsburgh.

  Contributing to our feelings was the fact that we had absolutely dominated the three games we’d won, by scores of 16–3, 10–0, and 12–0. In that seven-game World Series, we had outscored Pittsburgh by a combined total of 55–27. We’d scored more than twice as many runs as the Pirates, yet they had won the close games—and won one more time than we did.

  That goes to show how important it is in tight games to do the little things, like moving a runner from first to third or scoring a runner from third. That’s what Pittsburgh was doing in the close games that Series, and that’s why they won the championship.

  There were reporters in our locker room while we changed out of our uniforms, but it was pretty quiet in there. Ed Fitzgerald, editor-in-chief of Sport magazine, came in and announced that I had been chosen Most Valuable Player of the Series.

  His announcement surprised me because I had never heard of an MVP coming from the losing team. Indeed, it hadn’t happened before in a World Series, and it hasn’t happened since. It’s also only happened once for the Super Bowl (Chuck Howley of the Dallas Cowboys) and the NBA Finals (Jerry West of the Los Angeles Lakers).

  “What are you talking about?” I asked Fitzgerald when he brought me the news. “We lost. How can that be?”

  Fitzgerald said I was the player who had contributed the most to his team over the seven games; thus the MVP had been awarded to me. I’d hit .367 in that series, scored eight runs, doubled twice, tripled twice, hit a grand slam, and driven in twelve runs. And I know records are made to be broken, but two records I set in that World Series have not been broken yet. Since my six RBIs in Game 3, two other players have tied that record: Hideki Matsui (a Yankee!) in 2009 and the Cardinals’ Albert Pujols in 2011. My twelve total RBIs still stands as a single-Series record.

  The MVP award included a new Corvette. Among the many telegrams I received after the Series was one from Tony Kubek: “Congratulations on the MVP. Send car care of my house.” Pittsburgh pitcher Elroy Face mailed a letter joking that he should have been selected MVP and added, “You’re driving my car.”

  I received my Corvette—white with red-leather interior—in downtown New York City two days after the World Series. A longtime friend from Sumter, Dan Lyles, came up to New York, and while I rode home with the family in our station wagon for the off-season, Dan followed us in my new sports car.

  As we neared Sumter, we were stopped at a highway-patrol roadblock and given a police escort into Sumter, where about ten thousand people were waiting to welcome us home. After making a short speech, I was named honorary mayor, honorary chief of police, and goodwill ambassador for the city. Then we were paraded in a convertible down Main Street, where a big banner reading “Welcome Home Bobby (Grand Slam) Richardson” spanned the street.

  My new Corvette was a big hit around town, but we didn’t have it long.

  At the time, Betsy and I had two sons and a third child on the way. A two-seater Corvette didn’t exactly make for a family car. So after I got back home to Sumter, I made a two-for-two trade with a local car dealer—my Corvette and our old station wagon for a new station wagon and a Jeep. But people kept asking me why I’d traded in the Corvette, and not everyone bought my explanation.

  Some time later a friend who owned an Oldsmobile dealership in Sumter called and told me that a high school–aged girl from a nearby town had brought my Corvette in as a trade-in. It had nine thousand miles on the odometer and was in perfect shape, he said. So I bought the car back for $2,800. If I remember correctly, that type of car wasn’t selling for much more than $3,000 brand-new at the time.

  Betsy didn’t particularly care for the Corvette, and I didn’t have much use for it with our growing family. As one friend joked, I couldn’t take my bird dogs in it to go hunting, either. Then there was the time when I was driving home from Columbia in my Corvette. I topped a hill and saw that there were no other cars in sight, so I stomped the gas pedal and got up to about eighty-five or ninety miles per hour in no time. (I hope the statute of limitations for traffic violations has expired by now.)

  Frightened by the power that car possessed, I quickly slowed to a safe speed. Man, I thought, I need to get rid of this thing.

  I had a friend who was traveling around the country, preaching and giving his testimony, so I let him use the car for a while. I also loaned it to Youth for Christ in Columbia, and they offered rides in the MVP car as a promotion. Finally, I decided to get rid of it for good.

  Johnny Sain, our pitching coach, owned a Chevrolet dealership in Walnut Ridge, Arkansas. On a road trip, Johnny a
sked how I liked the car.

  “I’m ready to trade it again,” I said.

  “I’ll trade with you,” he said. “What do you want?”

  “Another station wagon.”

  “I’ll trade you even up,” Johnny offered.

  Right there on the plane, we agreed to the trade, and I don’t know what happened to the Corvette after that.

  Maz and Pirates Fans

  The 1960 Series remains a fascinating one for conversations. In 2010 I had a big thrill when sportscaster Bob Costas called and asked if I would take part in a special night to celebrate the fiftieth anniversary of that Series with a showing of a long-lost recording of Game 7.

  For years it had been believed that all copies of the original television broadcast of that game were lost or destroyed. Then in 2009 a near-perfect black-and-white copy of the broadcast had been found in the wine cellar of the late Bing Crosby.

  Crosby, who was a part owner of the Pirates, had believed his presence at the games would jinx his team. Instead of attending, he and his wife had traveled to Paris, keeping up with the Series by radio. But in the event that his Pirates won, he’d had the television broadcasts recorded on kinescope.

  When the reels were found, it was like discovering a baseball treasure. I was invited to represent the Yankees at the first public showing of that treasure at Pittsburgh’s Byham Theater. Among the Pirates players there were Dick Groat, Bill Virdon, Hal Smith, Vernon Law, and Elroy Face. Roberto Clemente’s widow, Vera, also attended. We all watched together, with Costas moderating discussions at various points in the game, and we shared our memories of key moments.

  I took my youngest son, Rich, with me to the showing. Richie was born in 1968, bringing much joy to the Richardson household. That was two years after I retired. My two older sons have memories of my playing days, but Richie doesn’t. I thought that night would be the closest Richie could come to the experience of watching me play in person.