October 1964

by David Halberstam

  As the season progressed and the Cardinals, failed to make their expected move, Rickey gradually increased the tempo of his drive against Devine. Rickey’s secretary, Kenny Blackburn, stayed at the same hotel as some of the single players, and he was always telling them how close Busch and Rickey were becoming, and how Rickey now had Busch’s ear. The veteran players, who liked Devine, and who did not think the team needed two general managers, were not amused. They knew that the more senior they were, the more likely Rickey was to get rid of them at the end of the season. “The Twig,” they called him.

  What finally blew it, ironically, was the Groat affair, which unfolded in August in a bizarre series of events. In those days Eddie Mathews, the Milwaukee third baseman, was going out with Elizabeth Busch, one of Gussie’s daughters. Groat and Mathews were friends, and at one point Groat said something to him about the conflict over the hit-and-run play. Mathews, in turn, said something to Elizabeth Busch about it, and Elizabeth told her father. At the next meeting with his baseball people, Gussie Busch asked Devine and Keane if they had any problems on the team. In their minds the Groat affair was something they had already dealt with back at that meeting in New York right after the All-Star Game, and it was hardly that important in the first place. So they said they did not. For reasons that completely mystified Devine and Keane, Busch thereupon decided they were hiding crucial problems from him. He had learned about something pertaining to baseball only from his daughter. He was more than a little paranoid anyway: it seemed to go with the territory with a man who had so much power in, but knew so little about, the high-profile business of baseball. In Busch’s curious scenario Devine and Keane were disloyal, and since he placed loyalty above everything else, this was a serious betrayal. Within days, Bing Devine was summoned for another meeting at The Brewery. That morning Al Fleishman, Busch’s public-relations man, called Devine at home. “You have a meeting this morning with Gussie, don’t you?” he asked. Devine said he did. “Do you know what’s going to happen?” Fleishman asked. Devine said he did not know. “You’re going to be fired,” Fleishman said. “I hate to have to tell you like this, but I don’t want you going in there unprepared and getting hit with a baseball bat.” So, thought Bing Devine, that is how you learn that the world is about to be cut out from underneath you. He had fired people himself, of course, it was part of the game; he remembered having to fire Fred Hutchinson on Busch’s order when he didn’t want to. It had been a painful moment, but Hutch, who was a truly tough man, had handled it very well. Devine had been fumbling for words, and Hutch had said, “Hey, Bing, I know what you’re trying to do, and why you have to do it. It’s okay. I know it’s not you. These things happen.”

  Devine went quietly. It was something he had always expected. He had been dealing for the last seven years from a position of limited strength, and the pressure to produce a winner had grown every year. Life under as volatile a man as Gussie Busch was like living on a precipice, he thought. He knew that Busch was surrounded by pals who were always asking him why he could run so great a brewery with such skill and yet could not win a pennant in something as simple as baseball. He believed that another man who had undercut him was Harry Caray, the broadcaster, who gloried in his close relationship with Busch and had never been a fan of Devine’s. The only question in Devine’s mind was whether Johnny Keane would go too, or whether he could last out the season. In the end, Busch decided to let him finish out the season, because firing both the general manager and the manager would be too disruptive.

  Devine was replaced by Bob Howsam, Rickey’s partner in a recent attempt to start a new baseball league. When the firing took place, the Cardinals were nine games behind. That they began to make a run at the pennant now was bittersweet for Devine; suddenly all the pieces had come together and all of the players were playing up to their full potential. It was his team, his players, and yet he was out of the picture.

  At this point there was an exceptional balance between the younger and older players on the team. The younger players were all coming of age in those years, Tim McCarver later noted, harnessing their abilities, learning to deal with their frustrations, and coming to terms with what they could and could not do as big-leaguers. If you were going to grow up in baseball, then the opportunity to do it with older players such as White, Boyer, and Groat was a great advantage, McCarver came to believe. They typified the best of the older generation. Devine, he thought, had built well.

  For the young pitchers looking for a role model there was Curt Simmons. If he had a single goal in life, it was to keep the game simple. When the Cardinals were about to start a three- or four-game series with another team, there was always a meeting of the pitchers to review how they would pitch to the opposing hitters. Simmons did not like his outfielders to shade hitters even to the slightest degree. He wanted them to play the hitters straight away. Someone would go down the list of opposing hitters, many of them pull hitters, and Simmons would respond, Alou? “Straight away.” Crandall? “Straight away.” Torre? “Straight away.” Then he would give his own uncomplicated thesis: “Big guys, play deep,” he would say; “Little guys, play in.” To which he offered only one small addendum: “If you think they’re going to hit it over your head, back up a little.”

  At this meeting the manager and coaches would use a projector to show a chart of where the opposing hitters tended to hit and where the outfielders were supposed to play them. The pitchers would go over the opposing hitters and set the positioning for the coming series. “Looney Tunes,” the pitchers called these sessions. When it was Curt Simmons’s turn to tell his fielders how to play the opposing hitters, Gibson would put a sign over the screen that said in huge letters: STRAIGHT AWAY.

  If someone asked Simmons why he wanted his outfielders to play straight away, he would answer, “Because that’s where Abner Doubleday put them, and he knew what he was doing.” Only with Hank Aaron, one of the most murderous pull hitters of his time, would he adjust slightly. “Step to pull,” he would say of the great Aaron, who pulled, it seemed, everything. Once, when Gus Triandos, the huge catcher then with the Phillies, was up with a runner on third, Mike Shannon, in right field, had started creeping in, in order to be able to make a play at the plate on a fly ball. Triandos drilled the ball over Shannon’s head for extra bases, and Shannon knew when he came into the dugout that he was going to get a tongue-lashing. Simmons just shook his head. “Goddamn it, Shannon,” he said. “Simple game. Simple instructions. Little guys, shallow. Big guys, deep. Triandos is a big guy.”

  In years to come Tim McCarver realized that the players of his generation were growing up in an unusually strong and highly professional environment. The Cardinals’ system still emphasized serious teaching in its instructional leagues and camps. It stressed fundamentals, and Cardinal players knew how to play the game, how to run the bases, and how to do the little things that added up over a season; they had been trained to play in pressure games without even realizing it, so that when the time came they would instinctively make the right play. They were also being taught not just to be baseball players but how to be honorable men. Codes were learned, rules of conduct were enforced. The lessons were often basic: a young player, after a victory, might be chirping away in the locker room because he had gotten two hits; then a veteran player like Dick Groat would go over to him and ask him deadpan how many hits he had gotten that day, and the player, without thinking, would say two. There would be a long silence. The lesson was in the answer, and it was painfully clear to the younger player: in a season as long as this, with as many ups and downs, don’t be that high when you get two hits, and don’t be that low when you go hitless—be a true professional.

  The lessons were, more than anything else, about how to deal with the adversity of playing in the big leagues and how to deal with so long a season, which might easily wear down even the most talented younger man. McCarver watched Gibson learn this as he worked to become a big-league pitcher, striving to master his pitches.
He could also see it in the growing confidence with which Curt Flood began to play center field, as he came to terms not only with his own immense talent but also with his limitations—that he was to be a contact hitter, not a power hitter; that his job was to get on base and to move runners around and, if need be, to give himself up for the team, which he did constantly.

  Most of all, McCarver came to understand how the growing-up process took place in his own case. The older players worked deftly to teach him how to control his anger and discipline himself and his ego, so that he managed to keep his competitive fire without becoming self-destructive. There was no doubt, the older players thought, that McCarver had a chance to become a great catcher. He was tough; he had a good but not great arm, but he was quick behind the plate; he was highly intelligent and had a fine instinct for the texture of a given game; and he had surprising speed for a catcher, who, as a breed, were notoriously slow. Above all, he had an obvious love for the game, and in many ways, the veteran players thought, was a throwback to the tough, gritty players of the past. What stood in his way was his temper, and perhaps, like many other young players, his ego. So, very quietly they set about trying to teach him to find what was best in himself, refine it, and at the same time discipline that part of him that was self-destructive.

  There was, McCarver decided later, nothing that unusual about him in those years; he was a talented young player with a drive to excel, who had met nothing but success in sports all his life, and who was now, for the first time in his life, as a major-leaguer, dealing with the fact that there were other players as good (and some who were better). McCarver had always been the best, in high school in both baseball and football, and he had been an immediate star in the minor leagues, hitting .360 in Keokuk and .347 with Memphis, and somehow he had always assumed that he would be a comparable star in the major leagues. But it was harder than he had thought, the talent level was better, and he played every day against other people who, like him, had always been the best. When McCarver’s batting average hovered around .270 in his early years, he raged against his fate, and did not readily accept the limitations of his place among more talented and experienced hitters. He was at war with himself. (Later in his career, when he caught Steve Carlton, he was impressed by the fact that Carlton did not want to find his limits; Lefty thought it a mistake to know his limits, and he thought it critical to enter a game as if there were no limits, as if by accepting them even theoretically was to accept the possibility of failure.) At first when McCarver reached his own limits, it seemed like failure. That meant he was often out of synch, and his anger was in the way. It was all right to play with fire, his teammates tried to teach him, but there was a line there between playing with passion and slipping into rage. He had to learn to draw the line, or his passion would become self-destructive. So when he tried to smash a bat against a wall after making an out in a big game, it was not Johnny Keane who talked to him, but the veteran players who took him aside gently and made him understand that the tirade jeopardized not just himself, but by risking injury he was jeopardizing his teammates.

  In one important lesson, Curt Simmons had taught him how to deal with a pitcher. McCarver had called for one pitch from Simmons and Simmons shook him off, and the batter lined the ensuing pitch for an important hit. McCarver had returned to the dugout in a rage. He ripped off his shin guards and slammed them down. Simmons watched him out of the corner of his eye and did not say anything to him at the time, but the next day he took him aside. “Tim, when you behave like that, when you throw your shin guards down like that, don’t you realize what it tells the other players on this team about our relationship?” McCarver was stunned and humiliated at that moment, appalled by his own behavior the previous day, but it had been, he later decided, an important lesson about getting outside his own selfishness, seeing the game as a team game, and understanding the respect teammates had to have for each other.

  Ken Boyer helped him to come to terms with himself as much as anyone on the team. Boyer, as far as the younger players on the Cardinals were concerned, was a great role model, a consummate professional who played hard every day and never lost sight of his essential purpose. It was as if he had a God-given instinct about what was real and what was not real in baseball. Once Boyer made a great play at third base, moving almost all the way to shortstop to reach a hard grounder, and Dusty Boggess, who was umpiring, turned to McCarver and told him, “Take a good look, son, because you’re not going to see anyone like him again.” Later, after the game, McCarver mentioned what Boggess had said to Boyer. “Never get caught up in stuff like that,” Boyer said, and that impressed McCarver even more, the unwillingness to put one’s ego over baseball. It made Boyer very tough as a player: he never seemed to go up or down emotionally because of his performance. He had power, he had speed, and he could play any position in the infield and outfield. Bob Broeg, the St. Louis sportswriter, thought that if he was not the best player in the game, he might be the most versatile, and he liked to argue with his friend Bill Veeck about what he called the Eight Boyer Theory of Baseball. If the pitching was equal and eight Boyers were playing the other positions, could they beat eight Brooks Robinsons, or eight Eddie Mathewses, or eight Hank Aarons?

  Once when McCarver went into a rage, it was Boyer who walked over to Lou Brock, who happened to be standing nearby, and said, “There are some guys who just have to learn that they’re not going to get a hit every single time they get up.” Then he winked at McCarver. It was Boyer who on occasion would take McCarver aside and say, “Have you ever thought about what would happen if you poured all of that energy you have when you’re angry into actions that matter? Sometimes it seems that you put more energy into your actions after you hit than you do into hitting itself.”

  Boyer had come into the league as a kid when the best player on the team had been Stan Musial, and he had learned from Musial how to study the game (when the Cardinals traded for a pitcher from another club, the first thing Musial did was to amble over to the new pitcher and ask what the previous team’s book on him was) and how to carry himself. Musial was a great player and a decent human being, and he treated everyone well. In some ways Boyer was passing on Musial’s lessons to another generation. In 1968 Boyer, near the end of his career, was playing for the Dodgers, and Ted Simmons, a young player for the Cardinals, came up. Simmons singled and stopped at first base. “Is that your first big-league hit?” Boyer asked. Simmons said that it was. “That’s great—I hope it’s the first of twenty-five hundred,” Boyer said, which somehow made the moment even nicer as far as Simmons was concerned. There was a stoic quality to Boyer. He played hurt all the time and he never complained about his injuries. Rather, he reminded the others that no matter how hard it might seem at the time, they were all still lucky in their vocation. Mike Shannon remembered Boyer coming into the clubhouse one day, clearly in such great pain that he was having trouble getting his arm into his uniform. When Shannon looked questioningly at Boyer, as if to ask if he could play, Boyer smiled and asked, “You know any other place where I can go and get a job that pays fifty thousand dollars a year?”

  It was not always easy for Ken Boyer playing in St. Louis. The other Cardinal players believed that Harry Caray, the immensely popular local announcer, rode Boyer unfairly. For much of his career, Boyer was booed at home, and the source of that booing, the other Cardinal players were sure, was Caray. There was an edge there and Boyer’s teammates and his brother Clete believed that it came from a moment when Caray was broadcasting a game on the road at the Los Angeles Coliseum and was doing it from field level. He had wanted to experiment by doing an interview with Boyer during the game. Boyer had said no, not during the game, perhaps when the game was over. They had apparently exchanged harsh words, and the Cardinal players believed that Caray had been hard on Boyer ever since. In fact, one of Bob Uecker’s best early imitations was of Harry Caray sticking it to Ken Boyer: “Well, here’s the Captain, Ken Boyer. Boyer haaaaaaasn’t had an RBI i
n his last fifty-two games. ... I don’t understand why they continue to boo him here at Busch Stadium. ... Striiiiiiiike one, he doesn’t eeeeven take the bat off his shoulder ... here’s striiiiiiike two ... and strike three. ... He nevvvvvver even took the bat offfffff his shoulder. I don’t know why they’re booing him.” None of this ever seemed to bother Boyer. It was as if, as far as he was concerned, the booing and the needling from Caray went with the paycheck.

  It was easy for him to keep his perspective. The Boyers had grown up very poor in rural Missouri. They came from Alba, just outside Joplin in the southwest corner of the state, and a few miles from Mantle’s Commerce, Oklahoma. It was said, Clete Boyer remembered, that you could go from Alba to Commerce entirely underground through the network of lead and zinc mines. It was an incredibly poor region; there was work in the mines, but it meant that you risked dying in your forties or fifties from lung disease. Ken Boyer was one of fourteen children, three of whom played major-league baseball. Vern Boyer, his father, was a carpenter by trade, but there was never enough work for a carpenter in Alba, so he also worked as a marble cutter in the local quarry. He rarely had a functioning car of his own, and often had to carpool with other men to get to the quarry in the morning. The price of the carpool was fifty cents a week.