The Cardinals had scouted Brock carefully while he was in college at Southern University in Baton Rouge, and been quite interested in signing him, but then had managed to blow their chance. But that meant they knew a lot about him. He might, for instance, look slim, but, in fact, he was so powerfully built that he had the ability to hit a long ball. He once hit a home run to dead center in the Polo Grounds, a ball that carried at least 485 feet. At six feet and weighing 170 pounds, he was almost devoid of body fat. It was a body, said his teammate Tim McCarver, that looked as if it had been chiseled out of marble. A few years later Senator Eugene McCarthy, a former minor-league ballplayer himself, signed on to cover the 1968 World Series for Life magazine. Being in the clubhouse with someone as muscular as Brock, he said, was like being in the clubhouse with a superior species of being. “I was ashamed to be in the same locker room with him,” McCarthy later said.
Keane had been pushing Devine to get Brock for more than a year, and Eddie Stanky, the former Cardinal manager who was now a Cardinal scout and instructor, appraised him carefully in his Chicago incarnation and remained very high on him as well. Brock was a player, both Keane and Stanky felt, who might blossom on the Cardinals, a far more aggressive team on the base paths than the Cubs. The Cardinals did not play for the big inning, they fought and scratched for one run at a time. They not only ran more often than the Cubs, they tended to use the hit-and-run and other plays that used speed on the bases to pressure the opposition.
With the trade deadline approaching, and the Cardinals in the doldrums, the team went on a trip to the West Coast. On June 11, St. Louis played the first of three games with the Dodgers. It went on to lose all three games. Suddenly there was a sense of mounting desperation on the Cardinals. The third loss to the Dodgers, with roughly a third of the season gone, had put them under .500, 28-29, tied for seventh place. Devine now felt an even greater urgency to make a trade and beat the deadline. From Los Angeles he telephoned John Holland, his opposite number in Chicago, to whom he had been talking over a period of months. The Cubs too were slipping. “I’m glad you called,” Holland said. “We’re doing poorly and I see you’re not doing very well. Let’s talk about doing something together quickly.” The Cubs, it turned out, badly wanted a starting pitcher. At the time Ernie Broglio, one of the previous year’s big winners for the Cardinals, was struggling. Broglio had lost one of the three games in Los Angeles, and that made his record 3-5. Johnny Keane had never been a very big fan of Broglio’s. Keane felt Broglio’s attitude was not intense enough, and from time to time Harry Walker would tell Broglio, as he had also told Ray Sadecki, that he did not look fierce enough when he was out on the mound. “You’ve got to look meaner when you’re out there,” Walker would say.
Bing Devine finished his conversation with Holland, and boarded the plane for Houston with Keane and the team. “We can get Brock for Broglio if you want,” he told his manager. “Then what are we waiting for?” Keane asked. “For this plane to land in Houston so I can call John Holland,” Devine answered. And so the deal was done. It was an immensely risky deal. Broglio was twenty-eight, just coming into his prime as a pitcher. He had won 60 games in the last four years and had been 18-8 in 1963 with an earned run average of 2.99. Brock was an unknown. What the veteran Cardinal players knew about Brock did not impress them. The trade inspired considerable resentment and a good deal of grumbling among them. Broglio was a talented and extremely popular player. Bob Gibson, the Cardinal pitcher, who was as powerful a force within the locker room as he was on the field, thought it was the worst trade he had ever heard of. Broglio was a twenty-game winner, he said. Who knew what Brock was or could do? Brock later told Gibson that he had, in fact, batted against him, but Gibson had no memory of him as a batter. Gibson was angry and, as always, quick to express his anger. Bill White, the first baseman, also thought it was a bad trade; Dick Groat, the veteran shortstop, was sure that the team had panicked. There was so much complaining that Johnny Keane called a team meeting. “Who we trade for is our business, and you guys have no right to criticize what we do. This trade is none of your business,” he told them. The Chicago sportswriters, by contrast, were jubilant. “Thank you, thank you, oh, you lovely St. Louis Cardinals,” wrote the same Bob Smith who had placed Brock’s name in contention for the title of worst outfielder in big-league history. “Nice doing business with you. Please call again anytime.”
The irony of the trade, Lou Brock always thought, was that it came just as he had finally begun to feel confident about playing for the Cubs and had begun to hit well. In the weeks just before the trade he had gone on a roll as one of the hottest hitters in the league. There had been a game against Cincinnati early in May when he had felt he belonged in the big leagues for the first time. Vada Pinson had been up and hit a shot toward right-center that looked like it might carry over the fence for a home run, or at the very least hit the fence and come back for a double. Brock, with his exceptional speed, had gone after it, jumped at the last moment, and made a sensational stab at the ball just as he and the ball reached the fence at the same time. Brock had come down hard after the catch, so jarred by the collision with the wall that he had no idea whether he had caught the ball, and he started to look for it on the grass. Finally a fan in the bleachers yelled out, “Look in your glove, Brock—you might just find it.” He was elated by the catch and had returned to the dugout grinning, quite possibly for the first time, he thought, as a Cub. He had started laughing with that, and he had spent the rest of the day grinning, almost uncontrollably. His teammates were puzzled—it was a good catch, to be sure, but his pleasure seemed out of all proportion to what he had done. To Brock it was different, it was as if with that catch, the weight of the world was finally off his shoulders. It was shortly afterward that he was traded to St. Louis.
If the prevailing wisdom was that the Cardinals had been snookered, not everyone agreed. One baseball man who was sure that the Cardinals had made a good trade, and quite possibly a great trade, was an older black man named Buck O’Neil. O’Neil had played in the Negro leagues, had for a time managed the famed Kansas City Monarchs; then, late in his life, with the Negro leagues in collapse after the integration of more and more black players into the big leagues, he had become a scout for the Cubs. Buck O’Neil had scouted Lou Brock for three seasons in Baton Rouge, and had been absolutely sure Brock was going to be a great player. He thought it was a shame that the Cubs had neither the time nor, it seemed, the place for this exceptional young man. He was pleased with the trade for Lou Brock’s sake, for he believed that the Cardinals were the perfect team for him: they liked to run, and they liked to put constant pressure on the other team.
Brock’s Cub teammate and close friend Ernie Banks was not the only one who thought that Brock’s problem had been that he was trying so hard, he was tying himself up in knots. Bob Kennedy, the Chicago manager—actually, one of nine managers, for the ownership had created a bizarre system of nine coaches who rotated as coaches and managers—once asked Brock to write his name on a piece of paper. Brock had done it easily, without thinking. Then Kennedy asked him to write it again, slowly this time, thinking carefully about each letter. Brock did and produced an entirely different signature, so pinched and unrecognizable that no bank would have cashed a check with it. That, Kennedy told Brock, was what he was doing at the plate.
Unfortunately, neither Kennedy nor the rest of the endless parade of Chicago coach-managers were able to create an atmosphere in which so ambitious a young man could relax. There were too many people in charge, too many different people telling Brock different things—to choke up, to swing all out, to pull the ball, to hit to the opposite field, to hit the ball down and beat out his infield hits, to relax, to play harder. Brock had become so frustrated and so despairing that when the front office called him in to tell him they were transferring his contract, Brock was sure he was being sent down to Tacoma, a Cub minor-league team. The most interesting thing about all those managers and coac
hes, Ernie Banks thought afterward, was that somehow they did not see or understand Brock’s passion, and some of them thought the problem with him was that he was not trying hard enough. Banks hated it when he heard about the trade. He thought the Cubs were giving up on a great talent and a great human being much too early.
Ernie Broglio, the pitcher who thought the Cardinals were one player away from a pennant run, was called in and told he had been traded to Chicago. He was not told whom he had been traded for. He was stunned by the news. Though he gave the requisite interviews, saying that he was delighted to be going to the Cubs, he was, in truth, very upset. He loved being a Cardinal, and he liked his teammates and wanted to stay in St. Louis. Lou Brock flew immediately to Houston to join his new team. When he arrived in Houston he was greeted with a certain amount of teasing. Curt Flood welcomed him by saying that he had heard that Bing Devine was going to pull off another brilliant deal: Bill White for two broken bats and a bag of peanuts. Well, Curt, Brock thought, it’s nice to be welcomed to the Cardinals. He played for the first time on June 16. The Cardinals had lost seventeen of their last twenty-three games and seemed headed straight for the cellar. In his first game Brock appeared as a pinch hitter, and struck out on three pitches. Bing Devine was sitting right behind the Cardinal dugout when he struck out. Some Houston fans were behind him, riding the Cardinals. “Brock for Broglio! Who would make a deal like that?” a fan yelled. “Yeah,” Devine said to his assistant Art Routzong, “what kind of general manager would make a deal like that?”
Brock soon discovered that the Cardinals were very different from the Cubs. When the Cubs lost, everyone sat around pondering the game, and the players who had made mistakes were particularly penitent. In no way did that help the team, Brock thought, and if anything it seemed to reflect the power of negative thinking, making each defeat all the heavier. With the Cardinals, by contrast, the sense of defeat did not linger long in the clubhouse. If they lost, there were vows to go out and get them the next day, and someone, usually Bob Gibson or Bob Uecker or Tim McCarver, would play some prank. If Brock had made an error, he was likely to find Gibson imitating him with astonishing fidelity in the locker room after the game, and asking everyone, “Who do you think this is?” Gibson could do a brilliant imitation of Brock, especially Brock misplaying a ball in the outfield. Nor was he being singled out—for Gibson did it to everyone. The Cardinals, he realized, knew how to play hard, and better still, they knew how to get a bad game out of their system as quickly as possible, as the Cubs did not.
He quickly came to like Johnny Keane, the manager, who was protective of him at first, very much aware of the pressure he had been under in Chicago, and of the great pressure he faced in St. Louis because of the trade. A few days after Brock joined the Cardinals, Bob Broeg, the veteran St. Louis sportswriter, came to the clubhouse before the game. He motioned toward Brock and told Keane that he thought he would do a piece on the newest Cardinal. “Bob, why don’t you wait a bit,” Keane suggested, “until he gets a better feeling for this place, and there’s less pressure on him. There’ll be plenty of time to write about him later.” That did not mean Keane was a particularly sentimental man. (With Sandy Koufax pitching for the Dodgers, a left-hander who was unusually hard on left-handed hitters, Brock would look over at the dugout to catch Keane’s eye, as if to say, Get me out of here and get a right-handed hitter up here, but Keane would always avert his eyes instead of offering encouragement.) Early on Keane called Brock over and talked to him about his role on the team. “We’ve seen you hit the ball and we know you have power. We don’t care how you hit the ball as long as you hit. Be as natural as you can,” Keane said. The other subject was stealing. “Since you’ve got the speed for it, I guess you’re going to want to try stealing bases,” he said. “Hell yes,” Brock answered. “Well, go for it when it strikes you as right,” Keane said. “You make the call.” That was all. For Brock it was a stunning moment. On the Cubs there had been all kinds of rules about when he could go and under what conditions he could go, all of them in some way inhibiting him, and all of them in some way making him go against his instincts and limiting his natural ability. Not only were there rules, but had he run and been thrown out, there would have been endless recriminations after the game in which his mistake would have been scrutinized and corrected. Now Johnny Keane was telling him what he needed to hear more than anything else—just trust his instincts.
There was also a team meeting in which Keane got up and said that there was a new element in professional baseball, that it was speed, and that the Dodgers had become the leaders in this new game with Maury Wills. “Now,” Keane said, “we’re going to run the bases too. We’re not just going to match the Dodgers, we’re going to go right past them.” So far he had not mentioned any names. But as Keane continued to talk, Brock began to wonder if he was going to be traded again, this time, perhaps, for Maury Wills. At that point Bob Uecker, the backup catcher, a slow runner but the team comedian, raised his hand and said, “Okay, Johnny, it’s a hard job but I’ll do it—I’ll steal those bases for you.” No, said Keane, they did not need to trade for another player and they did not even need Uecker to steal, in the unlikely event that he got on base. They had their thief right here in this meeting. “Brock,” he announced, “you’re going to do it for us.” So his role was clear. “Brock, I want you to keep running. If I don’t tell you to stop running, then no one else on this team does either, and if someone tries to stop you, then you can tell them where to go.”
Brock came alive as a Cardinal. With Johnny Keane giving him the green light to run, he stole 33 bases in what remained of the season and hit .348 as a Cardinal. It was the trade that changed the season for the Cardinals. A team that had been one key player short of making a run for the pennant had not only gotten the right player, it had gotten something more, a veritable ignition system for its offense. Still, the Cardinal players had been right about Brock in one sense: his talent was raw, and unrefined. Here he was, now in his third full season, and for the first time, with the help of Curt Flood, he was learning how to use his sunglasses—how to flip them down, to keep the sun from being an enemy. He had spent precious little time in the minor leagues, and he was still unsure as an outfielder. A few games after he had joined the team, the Cardinals were playing Milwaukee. With a runner on first, Rico Carty was at bat. He hit a ball to left field, and Brock, playing in left, broke the wrong way, toward center. Suddenly he reversed himself, put on the brakes, broke back for the fine, and made a magnificent catch near the line. “Brock,” Bill White told him when they were back in the dugout, “you’re either the best outfielder in the game, or the worst.”
If his new teammates had been unhappy with the trade at first, their attitude quickly changed. It was not just his speed on the bases that brought them around—and, most certainly, most of them had never seen speed like that before—but also the determination with which Brock came to work every day. This young man, his teammates decided, was driven. He was quiet, he kept to himself in a world of rather gregarious teammates, but he was one of the most focused players any of them had ever seen. Whoever had been in charge of him in Chicago and thought that he was passive had completely misread him. He was wired to play baseball; he existed as if for no other purpose than to play hard. He not only wanted to justify the trade, he wanted, it seemed, to be the best ever. If Gibson wore anger openly on his face, almost as a weapon against the opposition batters, Brock smiled constantly, but the rage to succeed was always there. The joy boy of the Cardinals, Bob Broeg, the St. Louis writer, once called him in print because of his ready smile. “Bob, I know you don’t mean anything negative when you use that phrase,” Brock told him afterward, “but you have to understand the implication of the word ‘boy’ to a black man.”
If he was just learning how to harness his great ability, he nonetheless had an immediate impact on the Cardinals. As he was aggressive, so his teammates became more aggressive. They already played a hard-edged
game that emphasized baserunning, but now, with Brock on the team, they were more aggressive than ever, and within a week, it was clear that Brock’s speed was going to pay off. On June 23, a week after he joined the team, Brock gave the Houston Colts an exhibition of what he might do, not just in stealing but in putting pressure on an opposing team and forcing it to make mistakes. He dragged a bunt in the first inning and beat it out. Then he broke for second. John Bateman, the Houston catcher, tried to throw him out but threw the ball away, and Brock went on to third. He scored when Bill White singled, and White scored when Ken Boyer hit a home run. Two innings later, Brock opened the inning with an opposite-field double to left. With White up and no one out, Brock thought he had timed the pitcher, Dick Farrell, and broke for third. He was sure he was safe, and the other Cardinals thought he was safe, but the umpire, Jocko Conlan, called him out. (Part of the problem, Brock said later, was that he was using his distinctive popup slide, in which even as he slid in, he popped up to be ready to go to another base in case there had been an error. The problem was that the umpires were not used to it, and he was not getting the calls on it; indeed, it appeared as if he were popping up into the tag.) It had not, he said later, been a particularly smart play, stealing third with no outs and the heart of the order coming up. But in the seventh inning, the Cardinals saw the perfect illustration of what his speed could do, and how much pressure it placed on an opposing team. Brock came up with two outs and Tim McCarver on third. He hit a little chopper in front of the plate. It was Bateman’s play, and the catcher rushed the ball and rushed the throw, which went off the glove of Rusty Staub for an error. McCarver came in to score the winning run, to make it 5-4. It was just the kind of win Keane wanted: when the teams had been seemingly even, the winning run had come not off a home run or a double, but rather because of the pressure that Brock’s great speed had put on the Colts.
October 1964 Page 16
