October 1964

by David Halberstam

  Most of the Yankee hitters went on batting streaks of their own. Elbe Howard went 27 for 86 during the streak, and Bobby Richardson went 39 for 90. But if there was a key player, both offensively and defensively, in that stretch for the Yankees, it was Roger Maris, even though it had not been a good season for him. His nagging injuries had allowed him to play, but not at his top level. And then, in September, when the Yankees seemed on the verge of falling out of contention, with both Mantle and Tom Tresh frequently injured, Roger Maris, who had not been that dangerous a hitter for two years, caught fire and played some of the best baseball of his life. He carried the team as he might have in an earlier time if Mantle had not been a teammate. Maris hit the ball with authority. These were rocketlike line drives, hit so hard that they seemed to have topspin on them and they exploded up when they bounced toward the waiting fielders. He went 16 for 42 during that critical winning streak, and drove in critical runs in game after game—24 runs in his last 41 games. In addition, Berra, finally accepting the inevitability of Mantle’s physical decline, gave Tresh a shot in center field, and then he finally decided on playing Maris there. Maris, fast and strong, a far better center fielder than Tresh, played the best center field that the Yankees had seen since Mantle was young.

  25

  AT FIRST IT SEEMED a small thing. On Sunday, September 29, Tony Kubek had a frustrating day at the plate, one of many in a season of such constant health problems that he was rarely able to play up to the level of his own expectations. His batting average was down some forty points. After this game he apparently slapped his hand against a door that had appeared to him to be made of wood. It was not. It was metal, and he badly hurt his wrist, which began to swell up. Kubek did not play on Tuesday, and then he did not play again on Wednesday. Berra told reporters that he was sure that Kubek would be back in a few days, and that it was a good idea to rest him at this point of the season. But Kubek did not play again for the rest of the season and did not play in the World Series.

  That September, after leading the National League for almost the entire season, often by as many as nine or ten games, the Philadelphia Phillies began to die. As the team started to make mistakes and became mired in a prolonged losing streak, the clubhouse became quieter and quieter; as the defeats mounted, they began to have ever greater psychological impact.

  For Jim Bunning, the ace pitcher of the Phillies, it was the end of a storybook season. Bunning had been a star pitcher in Detroit for nine years, one of the best pitchers in the American League. Then, in 1963, he ran afoul of Chuck Dressen, who had been installed as the Tiger manager for the last part of what was a losing Detroit season. Bunning was underwhelmed by Dressen, almost as much, it seemed, as Dressen was underwhelmed by Bunning, thirty-one years old then, and in the midst of a rare losing season. Dressen seemed to think Bunning’s career was over, and in September he gave several of Bunning’s starts away to other pitchers, most notably to a young right-hander named Denny McLain. That enraged Bunning, who thought of himself as a good September pitcher, and afterward he felt he might have turned his 12-13 record into a winning one had he gotten all his starts. It was not just a matter of ego, but a matter of finances as well; for in those days, when players had so little leverage in contract negotiations, a losing season weakened Bunning’s ability to argue for more money. Bunning regarded Dressen as a self-important man who thought that the manager was more important than the players. His favorite line to his players was that if they could hold the opposition for the first seven innings, he, Chuck Dressen, would think of some way to win the game in the last two. Was there a dumber attitude on the part of a manager in the game of baseball? Bunning wondered. At the end of 1963, Bunning asked for a trade, and the Tiger management granted his wish, sending him to Philadelphia, where he quickly became the ace of the staff. From the start, Bunning loved playing in the National League, where, as a low-ball pitcher, he found that the league’s umpires regularly gave him the call on low strikes as American League umpires had not. He also thought that the Philadelphia team was very good, much better than anyone realized. Even before the season started, he thought it had a good shot at the pennant.

  In the American League there was a certain deadness to the competition because the Yankees cast such a shadow that the other teams spent most of their time fighting to see who would come in second. The National League was so even that just as one injury to a key player could throw a team out of contention, so the pickup of an additional key player could turn a team into a contender. That seemed to have happened in his case with the Phillies, for his arrival not only added one very dependable starting pitcher to the Philly staff—overnight he became their stopper—but it helped the talented young left-hander, Chris Short, a pitcher of considerable skills who seemed to be uneasy with the responsibility of being the ace of the staff. Now Short thrived with the pressure on him reduced. Short had never won more than eleven games before Bunning joined the team, but in the next three years, with Bunning as the lead pitcher of the staff, Short won fifty-five games.

  If the Dodgers had two of the best pitchers in Koufax and Drysdale, the Phillies, Bunning thought, might well have had the deepest starting pitching in either league with himself, Short, Art Mahaffey, Dennis Bennett, and Ray Culp. In addition, it was a team with the best middle infielders Bunning had ever played with. There were four fine infielders: two shortstops, Bobby Wine and Ruben Amaro; and two second baseman, Tony Taylor and Cookie Rojas. That gave Gene Mauch, the manager, a rare degree of flexibility and made the pitching seem even better than it was. In some ways the Phillies reminded Bunning of the New York Yankee teams that he had played against, whose secret strength had always been their superior infield play. The Philly hitting was better than people thought too: by mid-September it was obvious that Johnny Callison was having a career year and might well be the league’s Most Valuable Player if the Phillies won the pennant; Richie Allen, a brilliant rookie, was quite likely to be the Rookie of the Year (which, in fact, he was). Then, in early August, the Phillies made another important pickup, trading with the Mets for Frank Thomas, the big Met first baseman. Thomas was a streaky hitter who had never played with a contending team before, and he had gone on a tear for the Phillies, hitting .294 with 7 home runs and driving in 26 runs in only 39 games. The acquisition of Thomas seemed to give the Phillies a lock.

  For Bunning it seemed, if not a perfect season, something very close. On Father’s Day he pitched a perfect game against the New York Mets. It was a sweltering day and he had had to change his sweatshirt three times. He ignored the superstition that a pitcher was not supposed to mention the possibility of a no-hitter or a perfect game, telling his teammates as they entered the eighth inning that there were only six more outs to go, so they should dive at anything hit. In early September Bunning’s record was 16-4, he had won 9 of his last 10 decisions, and he seemed, if anything, to be getting stronger. The year of the Blue Snow, Jim Bunning called a season like this, which meant that it was a season when everything went right.

  It was the general belief that Gene Mauch, then only thirty-eight years old and in his fifth year as a manager, had done a masterful job with the Phillies. No one had ever doubted Mauch’s intelligence; if anything, some people thought that his problem might be that he thought too much, saw too much, and expected too much of his players. No one certainly had ever shown more skill as a bench manager—he always seemed to be about two moves ahead of everyone else. Whether his temperament was ideal for so long a season was another thing. He seemed to approach the game on a wartime footing, thought the writer Larry Merchant, as if every play in every game were taking place in the seventh game of the World Series. He had learned his trade from the mind and mouth of Leo Durocher and was a bench jockey of almost violent behavior, deliberately trying to provoke players from other teams, always trying to get them to think about him rather than the job they were supposed to be doing. Not all his players thought that his tactic was completely successful. It might break
the concentration of a few players, but it was just as likely to enrage others and provoke them to play harder against the Phillies. Some of his players thought him too passionate, too wired, unable to let go, and there was always the danger that when his team got in trouble he would increase the tension among his players. If things went wrong, he could not let go of the emotion he felt. Once when Tim McCarver had beaten the Phillies with a late-inning hit, Mauch got on the team bus in a rage and sat there, repeating over and over again, perhaps ten times, McCarver was later told, “Tim Fucking McCarver Beat You! Tim Fucking McCarver.” He was not necessarily a manager who could adjust his own temperament to the growing tightness of his team as it suddenly became burdened by a losing streak in a pennant race.

  Then, on September 8, in a game against the Dodgers, Frank Thomas injured his hand. Thirty years later, Bunning, by then a congressman, could still see every detail of the play: Thomas was on second when a ground ball was hit to the left of Maury Wills, the Dodger shortstop. Thomas went out from the bag as if to decoy Wills and block his view, which was not necessarily a smart move for a player not known for his baserunning ability. He held there and then, in a fraction of a second, he realized he had stayed too long, and as Wills began to make his play to second, Thomas was suddenly vulnerable and he had to dive back to the bag. As he landed he reached for the base and broke his right thumb. Though he tried to come back before the end of the season, his effectiveness as a player was ended.

  With that, other things started to go wrong. Ray Culp, who had problems with his elbow, gained his last victory on July 22 and made his last start on August 15. Now, as the team entered the home stretch, Dennis Bennett came up with a sore arm. In the same game against the Dodgers in which Thomas had been hurt, Art Mahaffey lasted only two thirds of an inning, and then four days later in a game on the West Coast against the Giants, Mahaffey again lasted only two innings. Though there did not seem to be anything wrong with his arm, Mauch lost confidence in him and did not start him for another nine days, and even then, only with obvious reluctance. Suddenly, the Philly pitching staff, which had looked so deep, was spread very thin. On September 13, Bunning beat the Giants for his seventeenth victory against only four defeats. Short and Bennett followed with victories against Houston. There was a question of who would pitch the third and final game in Houston against the Colts. Down the stretch Mauch wanted Bunning to pitch in every series the Phillies played, but that meant pitching against Houston on two days’ rest: it would allow him to be ready for the final game of the series against L.A. Bunning agreed to try; he had pitched well against Houston, still an expansion club, which won only sixty-six games that season, and he had already beaten the Colts four times that year. Why not try for five? He and Mauch were trying to steal a start. But Bunning lasted only four and a third innings, Rusty Staub hit a home run off him, the Phillies lost, and Bunning went to 17-5. It was the first of six times that Mauch used both Bunning and Short with only two days of rest during the remainder of the season, and the two star pitchers ended up losing all six games.

  On September 20, Bunning pitched against the Dodgers in Los Angeles and beat them on a five-hitter, 3-2. When the game was over the Phillies were 90-60 with twelve games to play and with a six-and-a-half-game lead over the rest of the league. Cincinnati was in second, and by then a half-game behind them was St. Louis. Even in that game against the Dodgers, Bunning remembered, the Phils had been shaky and had almost blown the game; there had been an easy play at first in the ninth inning when Vic Power, whom they had gotten to replace Frank Thomas, and who was normally a great fielder, seemed unable to pick up a ball and make the proper throw to Bunning. The Dodgers had scored two unearned runs in the ninth, but Bunning had struck out John Roseboro to end the game. With that the Phillies came home for a seven-game home stand, absolutely sure they could clinch the pennant. A reporter from Sports Illustrated was spending time with Bunning, whose record was now 18-5, and soon a photographer arrived to shoot the pitcher in color; it was said that the cover of the magazine for the week the World Series started would feature Jim Bunning on it. The next night, in the first game of the home stand, Art Mahaffey took the ball for the first time in nine days and pitched against John Tsitouris of the Reds. Mahaffey was pitching well in the sixth in what was a scoreless tie. With one out in the sixth, Chico Ruiz singled to right. Vada Pinson lined a ball off Mahaffey’s glove, and the ball went past Tony Taylor toward right center field for a hit, but when Pinson tried to stretch the hit, Johnny Callison in right made a perfect throw and nailed him. Ruiz was on third with two out, and Frank Robinson, one of the most dangerous hitters, was up. On the mound Mahaffey took a big windup and fired. Robinson swung and missed. On third, Ruiz had seen Mahaffey’s windup and noticed that he was not checking the runner. As Mahaffey went into the windup for his next pitch, Ruiz broke for home. It was an unthinkable play, trying to steal home with the team’s big hitter up. Surprised and startled, Mahaffey threw wildly and the ball arrived high and outside; Clay Dalrymple, the catcher, jumped to spear the ball, but it rolled to the screen. Ruiz was safe. The Reds won, 1-0. The Philly lead was now five and a half games. After the game, Gene Mauch was furious—angry that he had lost, and almost as much because he had been beaten by a play that went against all the logic of baseball. “Chico Fucking Ruiz beats us on a bonehead play of the year. Chico Fucking Ruiz steals home with Frank Robinson up! Can you believe it!” he said later, still in disbelief, then adding, when he talked to reporters, that if Ruiz had gotten thrown out, he would have been on his way back to the minor leagues, which is where he belonged anyway.

  The next day, still offended, still angry, Mauch rode Robinson, Ruiz, and the rest of the Reds hard from the bench. Robinson responded with a two-run homer. Chris Short pitched that game, was hit hard, and lasted only four and two thirds innings. When it was over the Philly lead was down to four and a half. That day the Phillies started accepting applications for World Series tickets, and they ended up with some ninety thousand requests. The next day Dennis Bennett, whose arm hurt badly, lasted six innings and the Phillies lost to the Reds, 6-4. Vada Pinson hit a home run and had four runs batted in, and Chico Ruiz, tired of all Mauch’s screaming at him, retaliated by hitting a home run himself. The incredible shrinking Philly lead was now three and a half.

  Jim Bunning came back on three days’ rest against Milwaukee, a tough team for any pitcher, with its great hitters; he went six innings and lost, 5-3. Joe Torre drove in three runs with two triples. (“As slow as he runs, he really had to drive those balls,” Bunning reminisced later.) In fact, both balls were misplayed by Philadelphia outfielders. The first of the two bounced over the head of rookie center fielder Adolfo Phillips, and one run scored; the second, in the eighth, went to the wall when Callison tried for a shoestring catch and missed, and two runs scored. That made it four losses in a row, and when Short pitched on two days’ rest and they lost to the Braves, it was a five-game losing streak and the lead was one and a half. Mahaffey pitched the next night and lost to make it six in a row, and a half-game lead. With no one rested for the Sunday game, Jim Bunning went to Mauch and volunteered. “I’ll take the ball,” he said. He went out and pitched on two days’ rest against Milwaukee and was hammered in a 14–8 defeat, the seventh in a row. Bunning lasted three innings, gave up ten hits and seven earned runs, and when the game was over Lee May had five hits, and Torre and Felipe Alou had three each. The streaking Cincinnati Reds were in first place with a record of 91-66, the Phillies were in second, one game out, with a record of 90-67, and the Cardinals were in third, 89-67, one and a half games out. The Phillies had played their entire seven-game home stand without a victory.

  Rarely was any manager more second-guessed than Gene Mauch in those final two weeks of the 1964 season. In six different games he had gone with either Bunning or Short on two days’ rest and the Phillies had lost all six games. The question was the obvious one: with a lead that big, why not concede a game or two, then come bac
k with a rested pitcher and end the streak. Thirty years later, Jim Bunning could sit in his office in the Rayburn Building and remember each one of the final games of that season—who had pitched, what the situation was in each game, what the Philly lead was at the end of each day, and who had pitched in the other National League games as the pennant race continued to tighten. To understand what had happened, he said, you had to be there at the time, to be caught up in the excitement and emotions of that pennant race. In addition, you had to have the mind-set of a high-level athlete, which meant, in situations like this, a belief that he could prevail by sheer will. Athletes, Bunning said, always think they are invincible. “Hindsight dictates that we should have been rested and then pitched. That’s obvious to everyone now,” he said. “But the emotions of the moment dictated that we try for it, that we go out there and pitch on two days of rest. To say no, to refuse the ball and say that you could not pitch on short rest, was to go against every impulse superior athletes have.” On that critical seventh game of the losing streak, Bunning had believed that he was the stopper of the team, that he could end the losing streak, and, moreover, that it was his personal responsibility to his team to end it. He did not feel tired when he went to the mound in those games. He felt rested, and confident, although based on the way the opposing hitters greeted him, he was obviously pitching with a good deal more fatigue than he realized.