October 1964

by David Halberstam

  The last thing Simmons thought he was going to see in this season was a pennant race. He had been one of the top pitchers in the game for almost two decades, and it struck him that his best chance for a World Series had come and gone in 1950, when he was a star on the Phillies’ Whiz Kid team of that era. As a twenty-one-year-old that season, pitching in what was for him an abbreviated season, he had won 17 and lost 8 with an earned run average of 3.40, but it was during the Korean War and he had been in a National Guard unit that was called up late in the season. He was not shipped overseas and there had been talk that he would be allowed to come in and pitch during the Series, but the army authorities had been reluctant to let him do it, fearing they might be criticized for favoring a young athlete.

  The Cardinals had picked him up for nothing. During spring training in 1959 something had popped in his elbow, and he observed Opening Day of that season by having his arm operated on. That season was, to all intents and purposes, a washout. He came back late in the season trying to work himself into shape with the team’s farm club in Williamsport. He felt good about his arm in 1960, but Eddie Sawyer, a manager he liked and trusted, quit almost as soon as the season opened, apparently because Bob Quinn, the general manager, was telling him whom to play and whom not to. He was replaced by Gene Mauch, who was young and smart—quite possibly the most intelligent man ever to manage a baseball team, some people said—but for a variety of reasons he seemed to have no interest in using Curt Simmons. Weeks passed and Simmons did not pitch and finally he was given his release one night around midnight in San Francisco. That was the low point of his career. Whether the Phillies had ever tried to trade him he was not sure, but ostensibly his career was over; he had won 115 big-league games, but it appeared that he now had no value in his chosen profession. Yet he remained confident about his future. His arm had felt good during spring training and he was sure he could still pitch.

  Ken Silvestri, a former catcher and now a coach with the Phillies, told him that he had been screwed, that he could still pitch, and that he ought to send a telegram to every major-league team asking for a tryout. But Simmons was disgusted, and for the moment all he wanted to do was to go home. “No, damn it, do it,” said Silvestri, “send out a bunch of telegrams.” Simmons went home for a few days, pulled himself out of his funk, and then began to make a few calls. By chance the Cubs were in Philadelphia the week Simmons called Lou Boudreau, their manager, and asked for a tryout. Boudreau said yes, and he pitched to Del Rice, the Chicago bullpen catcher. Rarely had he felt so in command of his pitches, and he was throwing better than he had in years. “How the hell did they ever release you?” Rice asked. The Cubs were interested, Boudreau told Simmons, and they wanted to make some kind of a deal, but first they had to make some roster moves, so it was going to take some time.

  The Cardinals were also interested in him; Solly Hemus and Bing Devine decided that he was well worth flying in for a tryout. Even as he was working out with the Cubs, Hemus called Simmons to ask him to fly to St. Louis. “He’s down at the park trying out with the Cubs,” Mrs. Simmons told Hemus. At that point, Devine and Hemus decided to skip the tryout and sign him blind. He turned out to be a great pickup; he was still a gifted pitcher—in 1963 he won 15 and lost 9, and a number of his defeats had come when the Cards had either failed to score a run or scored only one run. Now, in mid-season, he was pitching as well as he ever did, and he specialized in tormenting his old team, going 16-2 against the Phillies as a Cardinal (he would beat them four times without a loss in this season). A few days later he shut out Houston on five hits for his twelfth victory. Curt Simmons did not agree with others that Gene Mauch was the smartest man in baseball. He thought Mauch was too much like a drill sergeant who wanted to run everything, and who thought he was smarter than everyone else. He thought men like that could get other people in trouble.

  On July 30, Johnny Keane gave the call to bring Barney Schultz back to the parent club. Barney Schultz was doing the best pitching of his life in Jacksonville, with an earned run average under 1.00. Frustrated by his bullpen, Keane had started asking for him in late July. “I want Barney,” he told Bing Devine. “He’s my man. He can pitch every day.” It was Keane, after all, who had converted Schultz to a bullpen specialist when he had managed him at Columbus ten years earlier. So Schultz came up in August when it was not yet a pennant race. On August 1 he pitched for the first time in relief of Bob Gibson. Of the remaining fifty-nine games left on the Cardinal schedule, he pitched in thirty of them. He was an odd figure, a young old man, more like a rookie than a veteran, extremely experienced on the field and equally tentative off it. All those years of meager salaries in the minor leagues had made him somewhat uneasy in the big leagues. He wanted to behave like a big-leaguer, to eat and tip like a big-leaguer. Big-leaguers tipped 10 percent, but Barney Schultz, from all those years when his salary was around three thousand dollars, calculated it exactly instead of rounding it out as some of the others did.

  Curt Simmons had known him on the Phillies, had hung out with him in St. Louis, and seemed to be in charge of him. It was as if he were the much older player and Barney was the young rookie, though in fact Schultz was three years older than Simmons. He was constantly asking Simmons questions—Curt, how long to the ball park from the hotel? What time do we leave for it? Where do we eat tonight? Simmons loved it. “Barney,” he would say, “this is Twenty Questions, and that’s eighteen of them down, and you’ve only got two left.” There was a constant byplay about where to eat: Simmons and a few others ate together regularly, and Schultz, new in town, joined them now. Where should we eat? he would ask each night, and Simmons would tell him it was his turn to pick the restaurant, which would bring on more questions about what kind of place they wanted to go to. “Barney, it’s your turn to pick the place,” Simmons would say. The next day there would be more questions about what to do, and then Simmons would say, “Barney, this is the big leagues.” The Mother Hen, they called him. There was something very poignant, they thought, about a man getting a shot like this so late in his career, and from the start he was helping the club with his knuckler, which seemed unhittable this season.

  The call from New York for Mel Stottlemyre came on August 10. By this time Whitey Ford had gone to the bullpen. Jim Bouton was fighting pain in his throwing arm, and Al Downing was still somewhat erratic, brilliant when he had his control, self-defeating when he didn’t. When Yogi Berra had started pressing Ralph Houk to bring Stottlemyre up from Richmond, Houk had held back. Stottlemyre was supposed to be the jewel in the crown for the extension of the Yankee dynasty, and, all things being equal, it was better for the Yankee organization if he finished the season at Richmond. But Berra was insistent. Since Houk was the man who had asked Berra to be the manager, now he owed Yogi a chance to call up the best young pitcher the organization had in the minor leagues, and who sounded from all reports as if he was ready to pitch in the majors. Stottlemyre was hardly surprised when the call came. The problems of the pitching staff were hardly a secret, and he was aware that there had been representatives of the big-league team watching him work in recent games. “Hey, Mel,” a teammate would say, “all those big men from New York—they’re here to watch you.” At first he did not believe them, but then he realized they were probably right. Even so, the extra attention did not bother him, and it did not add to the pressure when he went out to pitch. He had an unusual ability to shut out the crowd and keep his mind in the game. That was one of his trademarks—the ability to shut out everything else and concentrate. It was the bane, he later noted, of his wife’s existence. One day with the New York brass watching, he won, 2-1, his tenth victory in a row. It made his record 13-3. His earned run average at Richmond, which had been 4.05 the year before with virtually the same team in the same league, had dropped to 1.42. He was told to get to New York as quickly as he could. He got a room at the Concourse Plaza near the Stadium, and almost immediately he was called by a New York writer who wanted to do a stor
y about him. Stottlemyre, the writer, and a photographer ventured down to Times Square, where the rookie was dazzled by the sight—so many people, so many tall buildings. He had come from a town of about one thousand people and did not believe that there could be so many people in the world; the article about the country boy dazzled by the sights in the big city was duly published. When Stottlemyre went to work for the first time as a New York Yankee, the Yankees were in third place, three and a half games out of first. No one reached out to him more readily in those first days than the catcher, Elston Howard. “Pitch the way you did in Richmond. Don’t change anything. Don’t try and do more because you’re here and you’re pitching against major leaguers. Don’t try and throw faster. Do what you did there and you’ll be fine,” Howard said. Then he did something for Stottlemyre that he did for other pitchers: before a game Howard took the few last pitches squatting right over the plate instead of squatting just behind it; this allowed the pitcher to see exactly what was happening as the ball broke over the plate.

  The Yankees had lost a doubleheader to the White Sox the day before, with both Bouton and Terry losing. They were three and a half games behind Baltimore and two and a half games behind Chicago when Berra decided to pitch Stottlemyre for the first time in an afternoon game at the Stadium. That day in his first major-league appearance he was everything management and his teammates had hoped for. He was the coolest rookie the others had ever seen. The other players, particularly the other young players, were in awe of him from the start. Here he was, a kid just out of the minor leagues, walking into the starting rotation of a defending championship team in the middle of a pennant race, and he was as relaxed as could be. Stottlemyre’s was, thought Jim Bouton, the most economical motion he had ever seen in a pitcher. He would stand on the mound, go into a miniature windup, and take a small stride toward the plate. The ball would come in, nice and fast, but not that fast, and then it would explode downward, dead flat down. He had great control and he never seemed to throw a ball that was above the knees. Watching him that day, Jim Bouton thought, was like a scene out of a great western movie. It was as if the Yankees were the good guys but in desperate trouble, and the other teams were the bad guys, and then into town walks this tall, slim U.S. Marshal, who doesn’t talk too much, but who is absolutely fearless and who doesn’t know he is supposed to be scared. Quietly he starts cleaning up the bad guys, or at least, Bouton decided, getting them to hit into ground balls. In that first game against the White Sox, twenty-one batters hit ground balls, and he walked only one batter. The Yankees won, 7-3. He was going to be around a long time, Steve Hamilton, the relief pitcher, thought, and so Hamilton, unofficial monitor of the daily baseball-signing speed records, tried to talk Stottlemyre into changing his name to Stott.

  Stottlemyre’s first victory was a lovely blend of the old and the new. In the fourth inning Mantle came up with the right-handed Ray Herbert pitching for Chicago, and hit a tremendous drive to center field. The wind was blowing out slightly, and at first Mantle did not think he had quite gotten all of it. A look of disgust came over his face; he had, Stottlemyre thought, come very close to throwing his bat down. (Earlier in the year he had hit a ball and thrown his bat down, and then the ball kept carrying and went out for a home run, and Mantle had felt like a fool. Though he normally ran the bases with his head down, on this occasion he had angled his face down even more out of embarrassment.) Gene Stephens, the center fielder, thought at first that he could make a play on the ball, and then as he went back he saw the ball carry over the monuments, over the 461 sign, and over the screen, which was thirty feet high there. It landed fifteen rows back, and since each row was judged to be two feet, the ball was officially judged to be 502 feet. It may have been the longest ball Mantle ever hit to center field in the Stadium. Stottlemyre was in awe. Since he had seen the quick expression of disgust on Mantle’s face, he wondered, If that’s not far enough, what is?

  Mantle was relaxed after the game, almost boyishly happy. “I’m glad I didn’t bang my bat down,” he told the assembled reporters. He loved the tape-measure home runs—they were his secret delight in the game. The reporters who covered him were aware of this, and knew how relaxed and affable he would be in the locker room after he hit one. The measuring of Mantle’s home runs began in 1953 when he hit a tremendous drive against the Washington Senators that had gone out of Griffith Stadium. Red Patterson, the Yankee press officer, decided to measure it, which he did by walking it off, rather than using a tape, and he estimated that it had gone 565 feet. “You could have cut it up into fifteen singles,” said Bob Kuzava, the bullpen pitcher who had watched it go soaring by. Again and again when Mantle was younger, Stengel had tried to get him to cut down on his swing, telling him that he was so strong, the home runs were going to come anyway, and they did not need to be such mammoth shots; if he cut back on his swing, his batting average would go up dramatically. That made no impression on Mantle, for he loved the tape-measure drives; he loved just knowing that every time he came to bat he might hit a record drive; he loved the roar of the crowd when he connected, and was equally aware of the gasp of the crowd when he swung and missed completely, a gasp that reflected a certain amount of awe, as if the crowd was as disappointed as he was.

  The home runs separated him from the other great power hitters of that era, as his pure statistics did not. The inner world of baseball was very macho; the clearest measure of macho for a pitcher was the speed of his fastball, and for a hitter, it was the length of his home runs. The players themselves were excited by the power hitters’ extraordinary drives, and they cataloged them—who had hit the longest drive hit in a particular ball park—and spoke of them reverentially. More than thirty years after the event, Dick Groat could remember playing against the Yankees in the 1960 World Series and being out with a broken wrist. He was inside the clubhouse in the whirlpool bath when his roommate, Bill Virdon, rushed in looking stunned. “Roomie, you just missed the granddaddy of all granddaddy home runs!” he hollered. This was a drive Mantle had hit off Joe Gibbon, one of two he had hit in a 16-3 rout, and long after the game had passed into history, Groat still had the moment filed away in his memory, that the ball had gone over the iron gate in old Forbes Field, well over it and well past it.

  There was a constant unspoken competition for the reputation of being the man who hit the longest one, and once in the early fifties, while Mantle was waiting in the on-deck circle, Joe Collins hit an enormous home run, one that had traveled way, way back into the upper deck in right field. When Collins finished his home-run trot, he looked over at Mantle and said, “Go chase that.” Mantle did precisely that, driving the ball even farther back into the upper deck. When he returned to the dugout he took a drink of water and went over to Collins. “What did you think of that one, Joe?” he asked. “Go shit in your hat,” Collins answered.

  One of Mantle’s great goals was one that mortal men dared not even think about: to be the first player ever to hit a fair ball out of Yankee Stadium. That would set him apart for all time. He never did it, but he came very close on at least two occasions. He hit one off Pedro Ramos of the Senators on Memorial Day in 1956 that was still rising as it hit the roof, just eighteen inches, by subsequent measurement, below the top. Ramos later said that he thought the ball was going to continue on to Connecticut. Then, in 1963, what people believe was the hardest ball he ever hit was a drive off Bill Fischer of the Athletics; the ball was still rising when it hit the top of the façade and bounced back down on the field, a drive that some people estimated might have gone 620 feet if the façade had not stopped it. He had been exhilarated after that game because it showed not only that it could be done but that this late in his career he still had the power to do it. The distance had been right, but he had been slightly off on the angle. If he had only gotten under it slightly, perhaps a millimeter or a centimeter more, he thought, it might have gone out. Now, in 1964, his body badly worn down, he still believed that one day he might drive a ball out
of the Stadium.

  21

  IN MID-AUGUST BOB GIBSON started to find his groove, but whatever run Gibson and the Cardinals made now, it was going to come too late to help Bing Devine. From the start he had been vulnerable to Branch Rickey, and the slow start of a season they had all looked forward to so much spelled the end of Devine’s reign. Rickey had continued to go after Devine relentlessly but subtly, using velvet scissors, as one colleague noted. “Now, Bing Devine is a fine, fine man,” he would say to Busch of his adversary, “a wonderful family man, one of the best family men in our business, doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t carouse,” knowing that Busch, who did drink, did smoke, and did carouse, did not trust men who were too fastidious in their personal habits. (“Now, Bing,” Gussie Busch would say when they gathered in the late afternoon for a meeting and a drink, “did you get your Coke?”) Rickey had recently found a new and persuasive line, which he used again and again with Busch: that he, Rickey, could be doing a better job with players who would cost only half as much.