October 1964

by David Halberstam

  Ken and his brother Clete, who played third base for the Yankees, were raised in a small house with no electricity and no plumbing. On occasion they would heat bricks in the stove at night to warm themselves in bed. As many as five brothers slept in one room in two beds. His mother decided to have one of her last children delivered in a hospital. Why? one of the older children asked her. “I just wanted to see what it was like,” she answered. It did not seem to her to be a great improvement and so she had her remaining children delivered at home. Most of the older children had never eaten store-bought bread at home. Chicken on Sunday was the fancy dinner. Meals were mostly starches during the week—potatoes, beans, and fried baloney for dinner. It was a very strict home. If you were supposed to be in at 9:00 P.M. and you came in at 9:05, the strap awaited you. Vern Boyer was home by 5:15 and dinner was served immediately. You were not to be late to dinner. They were supposed to swim only once a day, but sometimes they swam twice a day and their mother tried to protect them. Above all, they were never to complain and never to whine. The Boyers played hard, worked hard, and accepted life as full of hardship and disappointment.

  Baseball was at the core of the existence of boys growing up in tiny towns in that part of the country during those years. The connection to the larger world was not the voice of Edward R. Murrow and his fellow CBS correspondents so much as it was the voice of Harry Caray broadcasting the Cardinals. If there was a folk hero in the region, it was Stan Musial. The highest calling was to be a professional baseball player, but even better was to be a Cardinal. Tom Greenwade of the Yankees spent a lot of time in Alba eating supper with the Boyers at their home, but he was never there as much as Runt Marr, the Cardinal scout. Both Ken Boyer and his older brother Cloyd signed with the Cardinals, although within the Boyer family it was believed that the Cardinal organization had made a rare mistake by turning Cloyd into a pitcher instead of an everyday player. Somehow the Boyer boys and their father made their own ball park, rolling the field themselves, and they even managed to string a very simple lighting system around it. Clete Boyer thought that two more of his brothers could have played in the big leagues, his younger brother Len and his older brother Wayne. Wayne was major-league material but wanted to study dentistry. Their father was furious with Wayne for not going forward with a baseball career, and did not talk to him for several years. The Boyers practiced every day of the week, and they played three times a week: on Sunday afternoon, Monday night, and Wednesday night. Over seven years some twenty-one boys from the Alba team signed professional contracts, and at times there were as many as five Boyers on the Alba starting team, playing all the time, it seemed, against the Baxter Springs Whiz Kids, starring, as he was known as a boy, Little Mickey Mantle.

  Slowly, over the previous few years, a certain culture had evolved on the Cardinal team, not unlike that which had existed on the great Yankee teams in the past—and men like Boyer, Gibson, Flood, Groat, and White were instrumental in creating it. The Cardinals were a strong team, and they played very smart baseball. Good defense and good baserunning were as important as good hitting. Individual statistics and goals were sacrificed for team objectives. Because it was a team that depended on speed and did not have many power hitters, moving a runner on first up a base when there was no one out or only one out was every bit as important as getting a base hit—particularly when Gibson, who gave up so few runs, was pitching. Players who seemed to be putting their own goals ahead of team goals were soon gone. A light-hitting utility player who was picked up only for his defense and who raged and threw bats in the dugout after he struck out was viewed with contempt. The other players knew the histrionics were false, because everyone knew he was there for defense and not for hitting. Curt Flood was greatly admired by his teammates because he was such a good team player, and because you could never tell from his attitude and the way he cheered his teammates whether he was hitting well or was in a slump. Dick Groat was admired not just because he was a superlative hitter, but because there was no one in the league who was better at moving runners up. Late in the 1963 season, when the Cardinals had lost their three games to the Dodgers and were finally eliminated from the pennant race, Groat was still in a race for the National League batting crown. Curt Flood went to him and told him to go for the batting title. “Think about Groat for the rest of the season,” Flood said. “Go for the hits.” That day there had been a man on first with no one out and Groat decided instead to move the runner ahead. “You just don’t know how to do it, do you?” Flood said. It was a high compliment.

  Years later, when Steve Carlton was voted into the Hall of Fame, he spoke of how much he had learned when he was young from Bob Gibson about how to concentrate and how to intimidate hitters, and how not to talk to hitters because it was part of the intimidation process. When Ted Simmons was just coming up as a catcher, Dal Maxvill had gone to Tim McCarver and told him to teach Simmons how to block the plate, even though Simmons’s ascent might mean (and soon did) that McCarver would be traded. What was more interesting was the phrase Maxvill used to McCarver: “You owe it,” he said.

  When Simmons replaced McCarver in time, he too began to learn the rules that defined the culture of the team, and he learned it the hard way. Jerry Reuss pitched a strong game early in his career and Simmons had caught it; after the game, proud of Reuss, proud of himself, Simmons spoke to reporters and gave out some unusually enthusiastic quotes about how good Reuss had been, how much he had controlled the game. The next day he was in the locker room and had heard Gibson’s unmistakable voice. “Hmmm,” the voice was saying, “and what have we here?” Gibson began to read from that day’s paper, and did so with a certain irony that made the quotes about how good Reuss had been seem both pompous and excessive. “ ‘One of the best pitched games of the year,’ ” Gibson read aloud. “ ‘A very tough and gutsy performance,’ ” he continued. “Well, I admit I am impressed by this,” Gibson said, putting down the paper. And Simmons realized that he had been caught, that he had not been talking about Reuss, but that he had been staking out his own territory: I am a big-league catcher, and I have caught a very good big-league game. He started to defend himself. “Listen,” he said, “I have a perfect right to say stuff like that ...” And then he realized that he had been set up by a master, and that the entire locker room was laughing, and that this was part of the rite of initiation. “You take it very seriously, Ted,” Gibson said, not unkindly now, and there was a lesson being directed at him, Simmons thought: you are a player, you are young, you would not be here and catching for the Cardinals if they did not think you were good, but you are not yet knocking on the Hall of Fame door. Wait your turn and find your place.

  So, by the last third of the 1964 season, they had come together. That did not mean that everyone liked each other, or that they were all pals. A team did not have to be made up of friends. Everybody was dazzled by Brock, who had turned into a spectacular player, but Brock was somewhat apart, a true loner on the team. He was very comfortable in his own world, and enjoyed his privacy. He thought the Cardinals were a good team because you could at once be outside the inner group and yet still very much a part of the team. “Give me my nine selfish ballplayers anytime,” Curt Simmons liked to say. Bob Gibson, a relentless competitor on the field, was a world-class comic off it, a true star of the clubhouse, with an unerring instinct for a person’s weakness, which he would mime without mercy. He did a brilliant imitation of Bill White, normally a good fielder but not graceful under pop flies, looking very much like a dying robot—arms out, very stiff—when he was waiting for the ball to come down. He noticed that Ken Boyer had a tendency when playing third base to go to his genital area, and then somehow his hand would come up near his mouth. Gibson could do a great Boyer, ready to play, getting set at third, hands to crotch, hands to mouth. He and the others also could imitate Dick Groat, who, because of his baldness, was loath to take his cap off during a game. Gibson did Groat on the field when “The Star-Spangled Banner” was about t
o be played, waiting until the very last millisecond before taking off his cap. (On one road trip to San Francisco, Groat bought a new hairpiece for several hundred dollars, and when he had returned home to St. Louis, he walked by his wife, who did not recognize him in it.) It was, however, generally believed that Gibson’s single best imitation was of McCarver when he got hit on the fingers by a foul tip (he danced a little jig); Gibson would get into the catcher’s crouch, mime getting hit on the hand, dance the jig, and yell, “Trainer! trainer!”

  22

  JOHNNY KEANE KNEW FROM the moment Bing Devine was fired that he was hanging on by his fingernails. Gussie Busch had pointedly refused to offer any words of support for Keane when reporters had asked him about the manager’s future, and in late August the Cardinals remained seven or eight games out. It almost did not seem to matter to Keane, some of his friends thought; he was so angry at the way Busch had treated Devine that he seemed to lose his taste for holding on to the job after the season was over.

  In late August Gussie Busch found his new manager. The Dodgers came into town for a four-game series with the Cards. One of their coaches was Leo Durocher, then fifty-nine, a man who had first managed when he was thirty-three but had not managed a team in nearly ten years. He was the prototype of the ever-contentious, verbally fierce manager. “The Lip,” he had been called, a man with roots in a very different era, where managers fought as regularly with their own players as they did with the opposition. Durocher was a flashy figure, and he liked to make the scene, whether it was the nightclubs in New York or the racetracks in California; there was some debate over whether the people he associated with were glamorous (such as Frank Sinatra, a man who, in Durocher’s words, would give you the shirt off his back and always grabbed first for the check, and George Raft) or shady, or perhaps both. He had spawned such protégés as Eddie Stanky, Solly Hemus, and Gene Mauch, then managing the Phillies; after trying some of them, namely Stanky and Hemus, Gussie Busch decided to go for the real thing.

  The intermediary, voluntary or involuntary, or perhaps a little bit of both, was the ubiquitous Harry Caray, broadcaster, beer salesman, and card-playing pal of Gussie Busch. Some of the players believed he regarded himself as the ex officio general manager. With the Dodgers in town, Durocher went on Caray’s pregame show, and there was a good deal of talk about the fact that a number of Leo’s boys were currently managing in the majors, among them Mauch and Al Dark of the Giants. “What about Leo Durocher?” Caray asked. “You’re not a Number Two man. You’re a Number One man.” Was Durocher interested in managing again? Durocher gave a rather complicated answer in which he implied that, yes, he might be interested in managing again—it would depend on the circumstances, the city, and the club. “I’ll tell you, though, if someone came to me and asked me to manage a team with some talent on it—a team like the Cardinals here—well, I’d jump at it in a minute. Because a team like the Cardinals should be winning.” An answer like that could be viewed by some people as nothing less than a job application, particularly with Keane a lame duck. Among the people listening that day was Gussie Busch.

  Busch immediately called Harry Caray and told him to bring Durocher out to Busch’s residence the next morning for breakfast. Caray later wrote that he sensed what was going on at that point and tried to remove himself from the scenario because he liked Johnny Keane, but Busch would not permit him to. Instead, Busch arranged a clandestine pickup for Durocher by Caray early the next morning two blocks from Durocher’s hotel, and Caray drove him out to Grant’s Farm. Durocher and Busch talked together for an hour, and Busch then offered him the job. “You’re the manager of the ball club,” Durocher later quoted Busch as saying. “Don’t worry about the salary.” So it was done; Durocher would take over the team in 1965. It was not something that remained a secret for very long, and soon word began to slip out that Durocher had met with Busch and had been hired, and that Harry Caray had been the middle man. The Cardinal players were less than enthusiastic. Durocher had a reputation as a man who tended to overmanage, who got more from his players than one might expect early in the season and less than one might expect late in the season; when his team won, he used his considerable connections with the press, which tended to think of him as colorful, to get the lion’s share of the credit, and when he lost, he always seemed able to blame it on his players. He liked to use the old-fashioned ethnic and racial epithets in his bench jockeying (in fact, when he returned to the Cubs in the late sixties, those epithets still spewed forth from his mouth, though the moment when they were considered acceptable in American life was long past, and he was criticized for it by some reporters and some of his players). In a curious apologia for his behavior, he wrote in his book Nice Guys Finish Last, published in 1975, that as long as he had been in baseball every Italian had been known as dago, and every Jew as Hebe, which was probably true in the sense that as long as he had been in baseball every Italian had been known by him as dago and every Jew as Hebe.

  On August 15, the Cardinals played Los Angeles in Los Angeles, and Gibson lost, 4–3. It was a particularly frustrating game. He entered the seventh with a 3-1 lead. For the first six innings he had sailed along on a two-hitter, and the one Dodger run had come in the fourth when, with a runner on third, Ron Fairly hit a short fly to left and Lou Brock stumbled while making the play. He made the catch, but he was off balance when he made the throw, and Maury Wills was able to slide under the high throw. In the seventh with one out, Frank Howard and John Roseboro singled and Nate Oliver walked. Wally Moon came up as a pinch hitter for the pitcher Joe Moeller. Much to Gibson’s irritation, Johnny Keane went to his bullpen and brought in Mike Cuellar. Walter Alston switched pinch hitters, going to Dick Tracewski instead of Moon. Tracewski hit a perfect double-play ball right to Groat at shortstop. The Dodger infield was one of the worst in the league, notoriously hard and uneven, and just as the ball came to the edge of the grass, it kicked high, well over Groat’s head, and two runs came in to tie the score, 3-3. The Dodgers still had some luck in them. Cuellar picked Tracewski off first, and Tracewski in the rundown ran out of the base path. The umpire Tom Gorman was slow to call the runner out of the baseline, and though he eventually did, by the time he made the call, Oliver scored from third.

  Gibson was furious. He had not been pitching well for much of the month, and then, on this evening, he had pitched well, and still lost. He had struck out eight men, given up four hits, and though there were four earned runs charged against him, they were all tainted. It was exactly the kind of game he hated to lose: he detested coming out of a game with a lead, turning over his work to a relief pitcher, and then seeing the game slip away. It evened his record at 10-10. The Cardinals, with 115 games down and 47 still to play, were in fifth place, nine and a half games behind the Phillies.

  A few days later, in a game against Houston, Gibson lasted six innings and was not involved in the decision in a game the Cardinals lost, 8-7. Then, on August 23, the Cards lost, 3-2, to the Giants on the West Coast in the last game of a western swing. That left them eleven games out. The next day, August 24, Gibson pitched against Pittsburgh in the first game of a home stand. In that game he was completely in charge. Some of the Pirate players agreed that they might have seen him with better stuff, but none of them had ever seen him throw harder. He struck out twelve and walked only two. As in the game earlier against Chicago, it was one strikeout short of his personal record. He seemed to be getting stronger as the game went along, and in both the sixth and the seventh he struck out the side. He might have been a little sharper, he said afterward, in the 1-0 game he pitched against the Cubs earlier in the season, but on this evening he had been able to place the ball almost anywhere he wanted. It was, Dick Groat later said, like watching Koufax when he had a one-run lead and went to pure power, with Gibby saying in effect to the hitters: “Boys, now let’s see if you can hit me.” It was his first complete game in six weeks. How did he feel about it? a reporter asked him afterward. “About time,” h
e said. That made his record 11-10. And with that he went on a roll and won his next five games, all of them complete, allowing on the average one earned run a game. That, he thought, was more like it.

  He was glad to be back pitching as he was supposed to, somewhat annoyed that it had taken him so long to find his rhythm, especially because it was too late to help Bing Devine. With Gibson pitching well again, suddenly the Cardinals were a different team; because he was such a force, they became stronger. He brought an additional factor to each game now, and that was intimidation. Gibson was brilliant at intimidating opposing teams. His game face was a cold and angry mask, one that seemed to show no mercy to the batter. There was a mystique to him and he orchestrated it very deliberately. He did not want to be known as a good guy. He refused to socialize with opposing players, fearing that if he showed even the slightest sign of humanity, it might lessen his edge and make him seem less threatening. He hated it when his teammates fraternized with the opposing players before a game, and it was a fact of life around the Cardinals that there was a good deal less fraternization with the enemy when he pitched than when others did. He hated All-Star Games, where his sworn adversaries, the best hitters of the rival National League teams, cavorted as if they were not only his teammates but his friends.

  At one All-Star Game it was the unfortunate fate of Joe Torre to catch him in the ninth. With no one out and Tony Oliva up and two strikes on Oliva, Torre wanted a particular pitch, up and in. He pondered the wisdom of going out to talk to Gibson, having heard of how Gibson devoured even his own catchers, and finally decided he should, since he was, among other things, the Ail-Star catcher. “Bob,” Torre said, “I want it up and in to Oliva, not down and in.” Gibson said nothing, but he looked at Torre as if he had no clothes on. The next pitch was of course down and in, since Gibson had more to prove to Torre than to Oliva—above all that he did not take suggestions, let alone orders. Oliva stroked it for a double. Thereupon Gibson struck out the next three batters. After the game they were among the last two players to shower, and Torre looked over to the next shower and said, “Nice pitching, Bob.” Gibson said nothing in return, just turned away. Torre felt like a complete fool at this, an All-Star Game, which was supposed to be a celebration of excellence. A few years later, when Torre was traded to the Cardinals, the first person to welcome him was, of course, Bob Gibson. “Hey,” Gibson said, “it took me long enough to get you over here.” It was never personal, Torre realized, it was only about gaining the extra edge and being the great pitcher he was determined to be. These were his rules, this was his image, and he was unbending in their implementation. Gibson once got into the players’ elevator at Dodger Stadium with a few teammates, and by chance Willie Crawford, a player from the opposing team, got on. Not knowing Gibson’s personal code, Crawford made the mistake of trying to be friendly, talking to him and the other players about how the Cardinals had just been swept by the lowly San Diego, and now wasn’t it just like them, they were up here and it looked like they were going to sweep the Dodgers. Crawford blathered on, and as he did, Gibson’s face grew colder and colder; there was no doubt as far as the other Cardinals in the elevator were concerned about what was going to happen when the game started—Gibson was going to throw at Crawford with his first pitch, which, of course, he did.