October 1964

by David Halberstam

  For Terry there was irony in the fact that the Yankees were coming up short on pitching. Sometimes in the past they had had so much of it, there had been almost an arrogance in the way management handled its pitchers. Like other Yankee pitchers, Terry was convinced that late in certain seasons, when the pennant seemed a lock, the Yankee management had on occasion tried to suppress the statistics of the team’s starting pitchers, lest the pitchers become too demanding at contract time. It wasn’t necessarily deliberate, and it certainly wasn’t personal. It was just smart business. In 1963, with less than two weeks to go in the season, Terry had led the league in complete games and in innings pitched, and then suddenly he had pitched significantly less—for the good of the team, he was told, so that management could look at other pitchers. He had still managed to lead the league in complete games, but Whitey Ford ended up pitching one more inning than he did, which made it easier for management to maintain the pecking order in salaries.

  Terry was only twenty-eight in the summer of 1964, and he found it hard to believe that his career was in decline already; for him the glory years were only yesterday, and by all rights he should still be enjoying them. It was only two years ago that he had been the star of the 1962 World Series, when the Yankees had taken on the San Francisco Giants and he had started three games. He had pitched brilliantly in the entire Series against what was arguably the hardest-hitting lineup in baseball, and his control had never been better—when the Series was over, he had pitched twenty-five innings, given up only two walks, and struck out sixteen in three games. He lost the second game of the Series, 2-0, to Jack Sanford, although he had pitched extremely well. In the fifth game he came back and beat Sanford, 5-3. Then, in the seventh game, he took on Sanford once again in one of the greatest World Series games ever played. Jim Bouton was supposed to pitch the seventh, but there had been a three-game rain delay when the teams had gotten to San Francisco, and so Terry was able to go once more, fully rested. The seventh game, he thought, was the best game he ever pitched in his life. The weather was still harsh; the field was still so wet that helicopters had been called in to hover over and help dry it off. On the day of the game a formidable wind blew in from left field, and Tom Tresh, the Yankee left fielder, caught six balls, though it was a hard day’s work for him, as he battled the gale on every one.

  That kind of wind, though, helped Terry, who felt razor-sharp anyway. He pitched a perfect game into the sixth, when Sanford got a hit. The Yankees scored their run in the fifth. They had loaded the bases with no one out and Alvin Dark had played the infield back for the double play. Tony Kubek hit into the double play, but Moose Skowron scored from third. That meant Terry had taken a 1-0 lead into the bottom of the ninth inning. Matty Alou was the first man up; he fouled a ball over near the Giant dugout and Ellie Howard got under it, but just as he had been about to gather it in, he was jostled by two people in the dugout—Bob Nieman, a reserve outfielder, and Dark, the manager, he later said. With that reprieve Alou beat out a perfect bunt. That made Alou the runner with no one out. Both Chuck Hiller and Felipe Alou tried to move him along, but Terry managed to strike them both out. That brought up Willie Mays, to be followed by Willie McCovey and Orlando Cepeda—the heart of the order, a new black Murderers’ Row. That gave Terry pause, and a quick flash of sympathy on his part for those pitchers who in recent years had faced a Yankee batting order that contained Maris, Mantle, Skowron, and Howard.

  Of the three, Mays was the toughest hitter, a man without a single weakness. Terry came inside twice trying to jam him, and he just missed the call both times. On the 2-0 pitch Mays hit what Terry thought was a good pitch—a fastball low and away—and laced it to right field toward the corner. Roger Maris then made the crucial play of the World Series. He got a good jump on the ball, and despite the wet, slippery field he got to it quickly, got a good bounce, and whirled to throw a strike to Bobby Richardson. Richardson thought that Maris’s throw was perfect and he took it and fired a strike to Howard. Alou held at third. Without that perfect fielding (and the threat posed by Maris’s great ability as a defensive outfielder with one of the best arms in baseball), the Giants might have had the tying run. As it was, thought Terry, if they had sent Alou from third, he would have been out by ten feet.

  That brought Willie McCovey up, with Cepeda on deck. Out to the mound came Houk. “I don’t know why I’m doing this,” Houk told Terry. “How is your control?” Terry said his control was fine. “Do you want to go after McCovey,” Houk asked, “or walk him and go after Cepeda?” Terry said he preferred to go after McCovey rather than walk him and have to work against Cepeda with the bases loaded. Cepeda was a very good hitter, and he was having something of a career year. There was a margin of error in working on McCovey with a base open. Earlier in the year, in a play-off game, Stan Williams, the Dodgers pitcher, had walked in the winning run, and Terry was aware that the home-plate umpire was from the National League, which meant you could be a little less sure of what the strike zone was. So Terry told Houk, “I’d like to take a couple of shots at McCovey high and tight, and then low and away, and if we lose him, then we lose him, and we go after Cepeda.” So Terry decided to give Willie McCovey pitches just off the strike zone. Behind the mound Tony Kubek walked over to Bobby Richardson, his roommate, and said, “I sure hope McCovey doesn’t hit it to you.” Why, Richardson asked. “Because you’ve already made a couple of errors,” Kubek said. If nothing else, thought Richardson, Kubek got Willie Mays to laugh.

  The Yankees were playing McCovey like a dead pull hitter. Terry checked his infielders just before he threw his first pitch and noticed how far over in the hole toward first base Bobby Richardson was playing. Terry was worried about McCovey going up the middle, and for a moment he thought of calling Richardson over and moving him back more toward second, but then he checked himself—he was playing with Tony Kubek and Bobby Richardson, and they were the best infielders around. National League hitters or no, they knew more about how to play batters than he did. His first pitch was a slow curve, just outside, and McCovey swung and hit a soft drive down the right-field line, which the wind carried foul. The next pitch was an inside fastball, and the moment Terry threw it, he was pleased, because it was a very good pitch, just where he wanted it, and by all rights it should have tied up a big powerful hitter like McCovey. But he watched as McCovey did a brilliant job of hitting. Almost by instinct and in the fraction of a second allotted to him, McCovey bent his immense body slightly backward in order to get more arm extension, and he hit the ball like a rocket, a vicious smash right at Richardson. For a moment Richardson thought it was a base hit, a ball that would go over his head, and then, because McCovey had hit it so hard, with topspin, the ball began to come down. Years later at his induction into the Hall of Fame, McCovey said that he never hit a ball harder. Many fans were later left with the image that Richardson had jumped and speared it, but, in fact, even as Richardson caught it, he was moving his hands down to match the sharp downward trajectory of the ball. Ralph Terry not only won but in the process obliterated the ignominy of being the pitcher who had thrown the home run to Bill Mazeroski in the 1960 World Series. The ball McCovey hit went to the Hall of Fame, as in time did McCovey himself (Terry would eventually go back to Larned, Kansas and play on the senior golf tour). Now not even two years later he was struggling for his career.

  He was one of the most popular players on the team, a country boy who loved the big city. Relaxed, tolerant, highly intelligent, he had come from a small town in Oklahoma to the biggest city in the country. Unlike many of his teammates, he came not with the fear and anxiety about things that were different, but with anticipation and curiosity. In the locker room, more than most players, he was able to cut across the different groups, finding something of value in almost all of his teammates, and always accepting them for what they were. If some of the other veteran players were made uneasy by the new breed of players, Terry was different. He quite admired them, and thought that in some ways
they might even be tougher than the old-time ballplayers because they knew a world outside baseball, and therefore were not so torn apart by a single defeat.

  He was one more of the Tom Greenwade boys on the Yankees. He had even played on the same Baxter Springs team that Mickey Mantle had once played on, and in time Greenwade showed up at Terry’s home—a lean, older man driving a black Cadillac. Tom Greenwade, Terry thought, had a pretty good line when he dealt with country boys. “Ralph,” he said, “how would you like to play baseball in the biggest city in the world?” Terry liked that idea immediately, and he liked it even better when Greenwade told him that Terry’s timing could not be better. “Why, son, the Big Three [Raschi, Reynolds, and Lopat] are getting a little old. You’ll be coming up just in time.” And Terry not only loved the sound of Greenwade’s words, but with the confidence of the young, he believed them as well. He signed with the Yankees for a small bonus and was sent to Binghamton, New York, to play with one of the Yankee Class A teams. Since Cooperstown was not very far away, he got permission from his manager to go over and watch the annual Hall of Fame game there, where the Yankees were playing that day. Jim Turner, the Yankee pitching coach, recognized him and, because it was not a league game, told him it was all right to sit down at the end of the Yankee dugout. Terry walked down to the end of the bench, where he found three very old men sitting together. Very full of himself, and sure that the big leagues were just around the corner, Terry introduced himself to the nearest of the men. “Hi, I’m Ralph Terry, and I’m pitching for the Binghamton Yankees,” he said, and the tone of his voice, he later decided, was more than a little cocky, implying that within a year or two he would be with the big-league club. The older man, one of the most courteous people Ralph Terry had ever met, said, “Well, Ralph, it certainly is a pleasure to meet you. Now, my name is Cy Young. And these fellas over here next to me are Zack Wheat and Ty Cobb.” Just as Terry decided that he was the youngest and biggest fool in professional baseball, Cy Young moved over a little closer, to sit next to him, and he talked pitching with him for the rest of the day.

  Terry knew that the Yankees were not a particularly altruistic organization. In 1961 he had won 16 and lost only 3, even though he had missed six weeks with a sore arm and shoulder. In the spring of 1962 he had been ordered to fly to Florida and prove to management that he was healthy before he was even offered a contract. By August 1964 he had heard rumors of trades, and there was one report that the Yankees were going to trade him to the Mets for Frank Thomas. Then, later on, when the Yankees picked up Pedro Ramos from the Indians for a player to be named later, he heard that he was the player to be named later, that the Yankees had to submit five players, and that the Indians had demanded that his be one of the names. As the summer moved along, his back began to feel better and he began to pitch better. Someone in the Yankee management came to him at that point and asked him to tell reporters that he did not feel well and that his arm still hurt, as a way of decoying Cleveland and getting the Indians not to pick him up.

  15

  THE CARDINALS WERE A troubled team at the All-Star break. The addition of Lou Brock had added a badly needed spark and given them a new dimension of speed, but as a club they still were faltering. They were one game under .500 and ten games behind Philadelphia. At the beginning of the season the Cardinal players had felt that they could beat the Phillies in head-to-head competition, and that they were a better team. Yet here were the Phillies doing everything right, with Johnny Callison making a bid to become the National League’s Most Valuable Player and a young player named Richie Allen looking like he might be the Rookie of the Year. The Phillies were looking harder and harder to catch. For St. Louis it was turning into a season of disappointment: the Cards would go on a small streak of three or four wins, and then they would slip back and match it with a comparable losing streak. The Cardinals decided they had to make their move at the All-Star break. They had started the season needing to fill two positions in the outfield. Curt Flood and Lou Brock were set, but they were still looking for an everyday right fielder. They were still, Bing Devine thought, incomplete as a team; both their power hitters were infielders, and they were falling short in getting sufficient power from the usual source—the outfielders. They were using something of a patchwork combination in right, so Devine decided to call up a young outfielder named Mike Shannon. He was twenty-four, a big, strong local boy who signed with the Cardinals in 1958 after playing quarterback with the University of Missouri freshman football team. Football was his game of preference, and he was probably better suited to it physically than he was to baseball, but baseball not only offered more money, more important, it offered its money up front—in his case, a fifty-thousand dollar signing bonus. Because he was a local boy, the Cardinals had watched him grow up, and they took him into Busch Stadium for a tryout. It was a day on which Shannon, who was built more like a tight end than a quarterback, simply hammered the ball. Devine had asked Hutchinson what he thought, and Hutch had said, “Lock the goddamn door and don’t let him out until we sign him.” The Cardinals, Shannon thought, were very good to him; they moved him up quickly, letting him skip a classification every year. In 1963 he went to spring training with the big-league club, one of several players trying to crack the outfield. He showed up only to find George Altman’s name written in on the board for the right-field job. He immediately went in to see Johnny Keane. “Hey,” he said, “I hit .300 in the minors and I may be the best defensive outfielder you have, and I’m not getting a chance here.” It was more than a little audacious, he later decided, but Keane was not put out. “You’re right,” the manager said, and thereupon gave him a very good shot at the right-field job, but Shannon did not hit well that spring and found that he was not yet ready. He went in to see Keane to thank him for giving him the chance. “That’s okay,” Keane said, “we’ll give you a couple more days, and we don’t want you to lose confidence in yourself. We think you have a place here one day.” It was a very nice way for a manager who had a lot of other things on his mind to treat a kid who was not even a rookie, Shannon decided.

  In fact, Shannon was very much in the Cardinals’ plans, and in 1964 they called him up, Bing Devine said, to make their outfield complete. They were not thinking batting average, for he was hitting only .278 in Jacksonville, but he was a very good defensive player, with one of the best arms in the league, and he would hit for power, they thought. But the Cardinals were still far back and had not shown any signs of making a pennant run. There was no doubt that the tension and frustration on the team was mounting. As far as Johnny Keane was concerned, the source of this was Dick Groat, the shortstop. Groat was a good player, professional, smart, and very heady, but someone to be watched, Keane thought. He had a tendency to be something of a clubhouse lawyer, a man who always seemed to be whispering something to other players, often, Keane was sure, words of discontent. That, in fact, was true—“Whispering Smith,” his teammates called him, after a fictional character of the day—but whether he was the true source of dissidence was another thing. It was true that Groat was down on Keane at this point. Groat liked to use the hit-and-run play and he was very good at it, which was no small achievement, since he was one of the slowest players in the league. That meant Groat had to call for the hit-and-run himself when he was sure the opposing team was completely unprepared, since he could not do it in situations that normally mandated it. Keane had given him permission to do that earlier in the season, but in one game it had backfired, and Keane was so irritated that he had taken away the right to call the play. That, in turn, had angered Groat—it limited his freedom at the plate, and he thought it a too-severe rebuke by an untested manager of a senior player. There was no doubt that he sulked after Keane restricted his freedom, but his teammates did not think he was truly sowing dissension—it was just Groat being Groat. There was always a touch of the shadow manager to him, which was almost inevitable in a player with his exceptional baseball knowledge and whose mind was alway
s in the game.

  Still, Keane was angry. Not only was the team playing below expectations, but with the pressure mounting on him to win and his own job in jeopardy, he saw Groat as a challenge to his control. He became determined to flush out the shortstop as a malcontent at a team meeting in New York, where the Cardinals had gone to start the second half of the season after the All-Star Game. The meeting unfolded as a sort of theatrical play in which Johnny Keane had written all the lead parts: Keane got up and told the team that he knew what was going on, that there was someone out there who was always second-guessing him and he was damn well tired of it. It was a curious scene, this normally mild man in a genuine rage, prancing back and forth with his odd little pigeon-toed walk in front of a room of silent players. Whoever was doing it was damn well undermining the team as well, Keane continued, and he was not going to stand for it. “Maybe I’ll lose my goddamn job, but I’ll promise you this—I’m going to take some of you with me,” he said as he finished up. Then he went around the room asking each player if he had any criticism of the way the team was being managed. “Flood, you got anything to say?” Flood said he did not. “Brock, you got anything to say?” Brock said he did not. Eventually he came to Groat. Groat stood up and said, “Well, John, I think you’re talking about me.” “You’re goddamn right I am,” Keane said. “John,” Groat continued, “I did not mean to undermine you or to hurt the team. So let me apologize to the team if you think I did.”