The heart and soul of this team in the late fifties and early sixties, thought Steve Hamilton, the relief pitcher, were Kubek and Richardson. Kubek with his singular toughness, which he passed on as if by osmosis to the other players, might well be the most important player on the team, Hamilton thought, the glue that kept this aging team together. They had come up playing for winners in the farm system, and they had known nothing but winning in their early years in the majors. For the Yankee relief pitchers there was something reassuring about coming into the game, throwing your warm-up pitches, and hearing Kubek and Richardson teasing in the background. “Gee, Bobby,” Kubek would say when Hamilton came in, “how’s he going to get anyone out with that junk? I mean, he doesn’t have anything today.” “Yeah,” Richardson would say, “I wonder how much stuff Mikkelsen has when he comes in. Let’s hope he has more.”
In 1964, Kubek was experiencing constant back problems. He had been badly injured playing touch football while in the army in 1962, had suffered cracked vertebrae, and his recovery had never been complete. He was only twenty-seven that season, but he could not swing properly and ended up playing in only 106 games. He hit some fifty points below his normal average, and it was, for him, a frustrating season. Within a year doctors warned him that he would have to retire or risk permanent damage to his spinal column; his career was cut down just at its height, and years later his memories of that particular season were so unpleasant that he could not bring himself to talk about them. In the past, the Yankees had been so deep that the loss of a player like Kubek would not have seemed that important. They always had an exceptional backup. Perhaps they lost twenty or thirty points in a batting average, but if the play in the field did not drop, then they did not worry about the loss of a few hits. But now it was different. Kubek was not only an exceptionally hard player to replace because of his overall value to the team, but the depth no longer existed. They were not rich in minor-league infielders, and when Richardson and Kubek both retired, they were replaced by a number of players, all of them undistinguished. In 1964, Kubek’s injuries meant that Phil Linz had to play more and more shortstop that season, and that he had almost as many at bats as Kubek. Linz was a good baseball player in the eyes of his teammates, a bit flaky but a tough kid in his own right. But he himself was the first to point out he was not Kubek, and the infield felt less solid to the pitchers with Kubek out for long stretches during this season.
24
AFTERWARD, LOU BROCK THOUGHT it was the best base he ever stole. Certainly the most important. It came just as the Cardinals were beginning to make a run at the Phillies, and after the game was over his teammates thought that if he had not pulled it off, the Phillies might have wrapped up the pennant then and there. It came on September 9, with the Cardinals playing eleven innings against the Phillies in Philadelphia. The Cards had been playing well for the last two and a half weeks; they had won 12 of their last 15, were 31-13 since July 24, and had cut five games off the Philly lead of eleven games. Curt Simmons started the game, pitched poorly, and was driven out in the fourth inning. “They can’t even beat me on a bad night,” he said later. The Cardinals hit Jim Bunning relatively hard and he left in the sixth inning. In the top of the ninth the Cardinals came to bat trailing 5-3. Charlie James opened the ninth with a single and Curt Flood forced him at second. Brock, at bat with one out, singled, and when Flood went to third and Cookie Rojas fumbled the ball in center field, Brock broke for second. Suddenly it appeared that the Phillies had Brock hung up between first and second. But Brock simply turned on his full speed and amazed everyone as he raced back to first past Danny Cater, the Philly first baseman. That, however, did not make him more cautious. With the count 0-2 on Bill White, Brock broke for second. It was one of forty-three bases he stole that year, but it was particularly daring because of the circumstances; if he had been out, then whatever chance the Cardinals had of tying the game up would have slipped away. Brock beat the throw from Clay Dalrymple, then Bill White hit a one-hopper to second, a perfect double-play ball; but instead of it being a double play with Flood scoring and no one left on the bases, Flood scored, Brock went to third, and White was out at first. Ken Boyer’s single tied the score, and the Cardinals broke the game open in the eleventh with 5 runs. Without Brock’s steal, the game would have ended in defeat for the Cards, and since the Phillies won the second game the next day, they might have ended up with an eight-game lead. “They win the game, maybe they break the whole thing open,” Ken Boyer said later. “I think they may be peeking back at us now.”
On September 3, with the Yankees still floundering, Roy Harney, the former general manager, visited the team in Los Angeles, where the Yankees were in the process of losing two out of three to the Angels. “Does it look hopeless?” a reporter asked Hamey. “Well, hope is about all that is left,” he answered. “This team needs a six-game winning streak, but the way they’re hitting, it wouldn’t seem very likely they can do it. And if they get a streak going, those other guys [Baltimore and Chicago] would have to lose a few.” Hamey thought that they were still a good team, but he compared them to Arnold Palmer, the great golfer, who had suddenly gone cold after being the best golfer in the country for years, and who now was coming in second in many tournaments. “I don’t say they’re finished. It could go down to the last week, even the last day. But they’ve got to start winning.”
That August, Pedro Ramos, a pitcher with an exceptional fastball, was beginning to think for the first time that his professional baseball career might be coming to an end. Ramos and Birdie Tebbetts, the Cleveland manager, were most decidedly not getting along, and far more than language difficulties separated them. Ramos believed he had been promised by Tebbetts that he would be a starting pitcher, an assignment he greatly preferred, rather than working out of the bullpen. But by mid-season he was spending most of his time coming out of the bullpen. Ramos asked why, only to become convinced that Tebbetts neither appreciated the question nor was forthcoming in his answer. Tebbetts wore the number 1 on his uniform, and he turned his back, pointed to his uniform number, and said, “I’m number one here and whether you like it or not, you’ll do what I say, and you’ll pitch when I tell you and the way I tell you to.” Ramos, then in his tenth big-league season, thought the Indians were going with younger pitchers who were not as good as he was. “But you told me I was a starting pitcher and that’s what I am,” he said. Tebbetts answered, “Don’t you tell me what you are and what I said—I’m the manager, I know what I said, and I decide what you are.”
Playing for Cleveland under Birdie Tebbetts was not where Ramos wanted to end up while he still was in his prime, for this was a team mired in sixth place. So Ramos asked to be traded. “We’d be glad to get rid of you, but no one wants you,” Tebbetts told him. “What about letting me buy out my own contract and then letting me make my own deal if that’s true?” asked the shrewd Ramos. “We can’t do that,” said Tebbetts. He did not say why they could not do that, but the idea had smacked of independence, and perhaps other players might want to purchase their contracts, too. So Ramos sat there that summer, a player of considerable ability whose misfortune it had been to play with poor second-division clubs most of his career. Worse, it seemed he would do it now as an older relief pitcher for second-division clubs. That would, of course, affect his salary negatively. Instead, he had always wanted to play for the Yankees, a team that had been his favorite when he was a boy growing up in rural Cuba. Whenever the Washington Senators, the team for whom he had labored for most of his career, played the Yankees, Ramos would sidle over to Casey Stengel and suggest that he make a deal for him. “I would pitch very good for you,” he would say. “I would be a very good Yankee.” Stengel always replied that he was interested, that the Yankees wanted him, but that the Washington ownership would not trade him—something others doubted, since Washington was famous for its willingness to trade or sell almost anything not nailed down. Then, in early September, Pete Ramos was called in by Gabe Paul,
the general manager, and Tebbetts. “You’ve been traded,” Tebbetts said. “I hope it’s not to Kansas City,” Ramos said, suddenly sensing that that might be Tebbetts’s revenge, to trade him to a team even further down in the standings (the Kansas City Athletics were in tenth place at the time, some thirty games out). “Yeah, you have to go to Kansas City,” Tebbetts said. There was a pause. “You’re going to join the Yankees there.” “I’ll be on the first plane,” Ramos said. Then, as he was leaving, he turned back to Tebbetts. “I thought you said no one wanted me.”
Even in rural Cuba, for a little boy who helped carry the tobacco leaves on a plantation near Pinar del Río, the legend of the Yankees was powerful. Regular-season baseball games were not broadcast throughout Cuba, but World Series games were, and the Yankees always seemed to be in the World Series. The broadcaster was named Bob Canal, a very famous man in Cuba, and because of the way Canal pronounced “Yogi Berra,” rolling the syllables out, it sounded like a Spanish name. So Ramos chose Berra as his favorite player, hoping that he was Spanish. That was as close to a big-league role model as a Cuban boy was going to get in the late forties. When Ramos finally signed with the Senators, the team with the strongest connection to Hispanic ballplayers in those days, he was very excited about visiting Yankee Stadium, which he had envisioned in his childhood fantasies. When he first got to the Stadium, he put his baseball uniform on and then toured the entire ball park, examining everything there, much as another man might have walked around a museum. This was the place he had always heard about as a boy, he thought, every bit as majestic as he had hoped. He loved playing against the Yankees, because they had so many great players, and his favorite player was now Mickey Mantle, who had hit one of his longest home runs off Ramos. That home run had come perilously close to going out of Yankee Stadium—leaving both Mantle and Ramos disappointed; Mantle because it was his life’s ambition to hit one out, and Ramos because, in addition to being an intense competitor, he was a joyous man and realized he had just lost a moment of derivative immortality: that of having his name linked forever to Mantle’s as co-authors of the longest home run in baseball history.
Liberated from Cleveland, Ramos raced for the airport and joined the Yankees in Kansas City on September 5. They were four games out and playing poorly at the time. But he was thrilled by the idea of being with his favorite team, of being in the midst of a pennant race, and, in addition, of pitching with the best infield in the American League playing behind him. He admired, as did many pitchers on opposing teams, the Yankees’ infield play and their ability to pull off the pitcher’s best friend, the double play. He got an example of that immediately. In his first game as a Yankee he came in to relieve Roland Sheldon in the last game of the Kansas City series. Sheldon pitched well through eight innings, had a 3-0 lead, and then walked the first batter in the ninth, Wayne Causey. Berra signaled for Ramos. The first batter was Rocky Colavito, who hit what looked like a tailor-made double-play ball to third. But the ball took a bad bounce and went off Clete Boyer’s shoulder for a base hit. Then Jim Gentile singled past the mound, and Causey scored. Bill Bryan, a left-handed batter, was sent up to bat against the right-handed Ramos. Suddenly, after all those years of playing in games in which he was carried by personal ambition and pride, Pete Ramos was pitching under pressure, where a pennant could depend on his every pitch. Bryan hit a sharp ball to the right side, and for a moment Ramos thought that he had failed and that it was a base hit, but Pepitone made a nice pickup, went down to Kubek for the lead runner, and then took the relay for the double play. Then Ramos got Ed Charles to pop up for the third out.
It was Ramos’s first save as a Yankee, and the first of many similar plays he would see in the weeks to come. He would throw the ball, and there would be a sharp grounder. For the moment he would feel that he had blown the game, then Kubek or Richardson would race over to make the play, and make it look easy. Afterward he would ask Kubek how he had done it, and Kubek would say that he and Richardson played the hitters in certain ways and it always seemed to work out. Good athletes, Ramos thought, and smart ones too. These were plays that had never been made for him in Washington or Cleveland, and he thought that in order to appreciate the Yankee infield play, every Yankee pitcher should be sentenced to five or six years playing for second-division clubs before he got to New York. If other members of the team thought the Yankees were wearing down and were not as disciplined as in the past, Ramos did not agree. What struck him was the professionalism of the Yankees, the belief that everything should be done right. Once when he was in the bullpen, Whitey Ford came out to talk to him, and Ford said that it was a great shame that Ramos had spent so many years with so many weak teams instead of getting to the Yankees much earlier. “Pete, if you’d been here from the start instead of the Senators,” Ford said, “you could take five defeats a year, and move them over to the win column.” They began to figure out his record that way. For the first nine years of his career, his record, they figured out, would have been 140-87. “Pete, you might have had a better record than me,” Ford laughed.
Ramos had always had a good fastball, and when he broke in with the Senators when he was twenty, he had not even known how good it was. He played in a final preseason exhibition game against the Cincinnati Reds, and, of course, he had no idea who the Reds were, since he neither spoke nor read English. He knew they were in the National League and had red on their uniforms. The Reds crushed the Senators with their hitting that day. Late in the game Ramos was able to tell from Chuck Dressen’s hand signals that Dressen wanted him in the game. So he pitched to two men, struck them out on six pitches, and got a third man to pop up. Two of the batters seemed unusually large to him. When he finished, a huge cheer went up from the crowd. Dressen, using his other players as interpreters, asked Ramos if he knew what the cheer was for. Ramos said he had no idea. “It’s for you,” Dressen said. Why? Ramos asked, puzzled. “Because you struck out Wally Post, Ted Kluszewski and got Gus Bell to pop up.” That did not impress Ramos, so Dressen asked if his young pitcher knew who they were. No, he said. Well, said the manager, they all hit around thirty or forty home runs a year. “So the fans are happy with you,” Dressen said.
His was not a great repertoire of pitches. He had a wicked fastball, a dinky curve (in his own words), and what became his famous Cuban palm ball, though everyone who hit against him said it was a spitter, which he always denied, albeit with a knowing smile. He knew exactly what he had to do every day as a relief pitcher for the Yankees. It was to get the batters to hit the ball on the ground, so he came in low all the time. In addition, he was determined not to walk anyone. The hitters were going to have to earn their hits off him. It was his happiest time in professional baseball: he could still throw hard—Ellie Howard told him he was probably throwing in the low nineties—and he was putting the ball exactly where he wanted it. Whitey Ford, who seemed to know more about pitching than anyone he had ever met, would take Ramos to the bullpen and teach him how to throw the Whitey Ford mud ball. The Yankees needed to play at home to use the mud ball, because the groundskeepers would wet down a spot near the catcher’s position. When Whitey was pitching, Ellie Howard would give the ball a quick hard scratch at the mud. If the dirt was on the top, the ball would break down; if it was on the bottom, the ball would break up.
Ramos was greatly impressed by his teammates. He had never seen such a sense of purpose before. They were very relaxed as the pressure built during the stretch; no one seemed nervous, and no one was playing tight. They all seemed to put the idea of team ahead of individual accomplishment. In one game, his fourth appearance as a Yankee, he came in to relieve Whitey Ford, who had gone the first four innings with a 4–1 lead, but jammed his heel running out a base hit. Ramos gave up two hits and one run over the next five innings, and after the game he went over to Ford and asked why he had not gone one more inning in order to get credit for the win, which would have made his record 15-6 at the time—a lovely accomplishment in a season marked by
injury and pain for Ford. “Pete, one more win for me isn’t very important—it doesn’t really mean anything. But one more win for the Yankees in a pennant race means a hell of a lot right now, and it’s not worth taking a chance.” That win had brought them into second place, only one game out.
The Yankees were on the move now and Ramos was a key part of it. It was the best month of his professional career. He seemed to be pitching every day, with the game on the line on every pitch. Again and again Berra went to him. Finally Berra told him he needed a rest and not to come to the ball park, because if he came Yogi might not be able to resist the temptation to go to him. But Ramos came to the ball park, and Yogi inevitably used him. Roy Hamey had made his statement about the need for a winning streak on September 3, and the next day the Yankees went on a 5-game winning streak. Then they hit another bump in the road and lost 2 out of 3, with a five-hitter by Al Downing against the Tigers, their only victory. On September 12, Stottlemyre, who was absolutely brilliant down the stretch, beat Minnesota, 4–3, on a five-hitter, and it was the first game of another winning streak. Over the combined winning streaks, the young rookie had 5 starts and won all 5, including 3 complete games and another game in which he pitched into the ninth. On September 26 he pitched against the Senators in Washington in what would be the Yankees’ eleventh straight victory if they won. He was awesome, and they won, 7-0. Stottlemyre gave up two hits, got fifteen outs on groundballs, and had five hits himself. When the second streak was over, the Yankees had won 19 out of their last 22, and were in first place by four games. Pete Ramos had appeared in 8 games, won 1, saved 5 (he would save 2 more before the season was over); he had worked 20⅓ innings and given up only eight hits and two runs. He struck out sixteen men and did not walk a single batter. His earned run average was 1.59. As the National League race was becoming tighter and tighter, the Yankees suddenly seemed to be putting a lock on the American League. Their two competitors, the Orioles and the White Sox, were younger teams and they simply flattened out: Baltimore, which actually had a season edge over the Yankees that year, went 11-11 during the Yankee hot streak, and the White Sox went 10-9.
October 1964 Page 33
