October 1964

by David Halberstam

  A losing streak is contagious. Players who have played with confidence begin to lose it. Doubts begin to arise where there have been no doubts. Players run the bases poorly and throw to the wrong bases. Easy plays are missed. In the 14–8 loss to Milwaukee, Bunning watched Ruben Amaro, a shortstop who fielded beautifully, come under an easy pop-up behind short. Amaro had not dropped a pop fly all year, but now, perhaps because he heard the approach of the left fielder, he dropped the ball. Uncharacteristically, Gene Mauch became quieter and quieter as the losing streak went on.

  On Monday, September 28, the Phillies went into St. Louis for a three-game series. Suddenly the schedule, if anything, seemed to favor the Cardinals. The Cards got three shots at home against a stumbling Philadelphia team, and then they closed out the season with three games against the Mets, while the Reds finished up with Philadelphia. Obscured by the run that the Reds made against the Phillies was the fact that the Cards were a hot team too. Their lead-off hitters had been getting on, and both White, who had knocked in sixty-four runs since the All-Star break, and Boyer had been hitting consistently in the clutch. Their three best pitchers were all in a groove. The Cards had started their desperate last-minute pennant run on September 22, when they went to New York to play two games against the Mets, and from there to Pittsburgh to play five against the Pirates. Bob Skinner, the old Pirate outfielder who had been traded that season to the Cards, and Dick Groat decided they needed to sweep the Mets, and then take four out of five against the Pirates: it was a tall order because Pittsburgh was a tough team. They ended up splitting with the Mets, losing to Galen Cisco, 2-1, in a game that Roger Craig pitched beautifully. “Okay, Dick, the only thing we have to do is sweep the Pirates in five,” Skinner then said. They went on to do just that, helped by the fact that Bob Friend, one of the Pirates’ best pitchers, missed a turn because of a sore throat, a decision that enraged the Phillies.

  When the three-game Philly-Cardinal series started in St. Louis, the Cardinal players, as befit a team doing everything right, were confident and exuberant. Don Hoak, the former Pirate third baseman, was a good friend and former teammate of Groat’s and now an advance scout for the Phillies. “That was a disgrace in Pittsburgh,” Hoak told Groat. “They just handed you five games.” “Hoaky, I bet you told them that,” Groat said, “but I bet you forgot to mention the most important thing about those five games—that we didn’t make a single mistake in all five of them.” Hoak admitted a little sheepishly that, in fact, he had not mentioned it. “Don, did you mention Barney?” Groat asked. (In the final game at Pittsburgh, Barney Schultz had come in to relieve Roger Craig, who had pitched a shutout over seven innings. He had faced Roberto Clemente, the league’s leading hitter with two men on and two out, and struck him out.) Hoak just smiled.

  Rarely had baseball been so much fun for the Cards. When you woke up in the morning, thought Barney Schultz, you could not wait to get to the ball park. They should have been exhausted, but the winning streak and the apparent collapse of the Phillies was a booster shot, allowing them to play through their fatigue and despite an assortment of nagging injuries. These were injuries that in other seasons might have kept them out of games, but now they paid little attention to their physical problems. Ken Boyer was so banged up by the end of the season that the Cardinals had to hide the extent of his shoulder injury from the press when the World Series began. Curt Flood’s legs were banged up and extremely sore. Both played all 162 regular-season games. Bill White had been bothered by a bad shoulder for the first half of the season yet he ended up playing in 160 games, and Dick Groat played in 161 games. Tim McCarver’s legs were absolutely black and blue, and there were bumps on them the size of golf balls, Groat thought, and yet he kept playing and caught 143 games with increasingly mangled hands. Brock was with the Cardinals for 103 games and played in 103 of them; his body, befitting that of a base stealer, ached all over, particularly in his shoulder, where he had been hit by a Sandy Koufax fastball. This incident was celebrated by the ever-joyous Don Drysdale, who yelled his approval from the dugout—“All right! All right!” Drysdale later told Brock, “It’s a good thing that Sandy kissed you, because I was going to kiss you the next time.” “Yeah, and I was thinking of going after you when you yelled out,” Brock said. “Why didn’t you?” asked Drysdale. “Because you’re six-five,” Brock answered.

  For the Cardinals the heat of the pennant race had come so quickly that there was no time to play under pressure. They raced right through it. There was a strong sense of camaraderie and a wonderful balance of personalities, the players decided, looking back years later. Bob Uecker, who was one of the last people Devine had picked up, was turning out to be not only a valuable player—a good catcher with a good arm—but also a valuable addition to the team, and he helped keep his teammates loose. Years later, Uecker was to make a considerable living as a baseball comedian, both lecturing and appearing in commercials that mocked his baseball abilities. But in those days, he was performing for his own pleasure and the pleasure of his teammates. He was someone who thought baseball should be fun; Uecker later figured that his clowning around as a minor-league player had delayed his entry into the big leagues for several years, because Chuck Dressen, the manager of the Braves at the time, hated Uecker’s humor. “We don’t need a clown like you in baseball,” Dressen would shout at him. When a photographer had arrived early in the season to take the Cardinal team photograph, Uecker and Gibson had been seated next to each other, and right before the photographer snapped the photo, Uecker whispered to Gibson that they should smile and hold hands. Gibson had been delighted to cooperate. No one noticed what they were doing at the time. When the photo had been produced and processed, there were two men, one white, one black, seated in the front row with goofy smiles on their faces, holding hands. Much to the irritation of Cardinal management, which threatened to fine Uecker, the photo had to be retaken.

  In addition, Uecker invented the game of Ugly and was the team’s best player, which was not hard since he owned and kept possession of all fifty-two cards. Uecker had friends in the Philadelphia police force, and whenever a particularly grim-looking man or woman was wanted for some heinous crime, the cops saved the mug shot for Uecker, who placed it in the Ugly deck. When he finally had fifty-two photos, he invented the game of Ugly, which was not unlike Hearts: there were four players, and whoever put down the ugliest of the four photos gathered up the other three. There was one photo that every player coveted, for it was the key to winning the game. It was of a woman wanted for multiple murders, and it was far and away the grimmest and ugliest picture in the deck. When Uecker played, he tended to keep it out of the pack and up his sleeve so that he could always trump at the last moment. (When Uecker had been with the Braves, he once showed the photo to Dixie Walker, then the Braves’ batting coach, a man who, other than his attempt to protest Jackie Robinson’s entry into the big leagues, was generally known for his courtesy and politeness. “Dixie, that’s my mother. What do you think of her?” Uecker said to Walker. Walker held the photo for a long time and finally said, “She’s rather attractive, isn’t she?”)

  Uecker pitched batting practice every day, and in time he created the Uecker League, of which he was the commissioner, umpire, and scorekeeper. There were two teams of five pitchers each in the Uecker League. There was a draft among the pitchers, and they chose sides, and when the pitchers took batting practice at home (they did not get batting practice on the road), Uecker would stand on the mound and decide whether a player had gotten a hit. All ground balls and pop-ups were outs. If there were runners on base, he decided how far they advanced on a play. The pitchers themselves did the scoring and kept their batting averages. On occasion there were trades from one team to another. Once Ron Taylor, one of the bullpen pitchers, batted out of turn. A protest was immediately lodged. Uecker demanded to see the scorecard, but before he could look at it, Taylor ate it. It was said that Gibson, a very good hitter, hit more than twenty home runs and batt
ed over .500 in the Uecker League.

  As the Phillies prepared for their three games in St. Louis, Gene Mauch tried to fire up his players. “They’re stealing the money right out of your pockets,” he told his players. “If it was me and someone tried to steal my money there’d be a hell of a fight.” Jim Bunning looked over at his friend Gus Triandos in disbelief. Start a fight? he had thought. We don’t need to start a fight. I need to pitch a complete game. When the Philly players arrived on the field, the Cardinal players sensed that they were dispirited. Their pepper games were listless, and their eyes, Dick Groat thought, had a hollow look, like that of men who were in shock. Bill White thought they looked beaten already. Later, Gene Mauch would talk of how when he had called in relief pitchers during that terrible streak, he saw the fear in their eyes when they reached the mound and he gave them the ball.

  In the first of the three games against the Phillies in St. Louis, Chris Short went against Bob Gibson. Short, who had beaten the Cardinals three times earlier in the season, was pitching with three days’ rest. The Cardinal hitters thought he pitched well but lacked the hard, exploding fastball he had shown earlier in the season, and he tired in the middle innings. The Cardinals came up with 5 runs, and Gibson was not about to lose on this day. He gave up only 5 hits, then tired slightly in the ninth inning, giving up a single to the first batter who faced him and then walking Tony Taylor. With no one out and a 5-1 lead, Johnny Keane went to Barney Schultz immediately. It was his fourth straight relief appearance, and his twenty-seventh appearance since he had been brought up on August 1. Schultz liked to amble down to the bullpen during the sixth inning of each game in the stretch run, and once he started down in the fifth inning. Roger Craig stopped him immediately. “Hey, Barney,” he said, “you can’t go down there yet—it’s still an inning early for you.” He had become something of a talisman for them. Schultz threw a knuckleball to Clay Dalrymple and he hit into a double play, and then John Herrnstein popped the ball up. It was the Cardinals’ sixth straight win, and the Phillies’ eighth straight loss. At the end of the day the Reds were in first place, 91-66, the Cards in second, 90-67, one game back, and the Phillies in third, 90-68, one and a half games out.

  The Phillies, if not out of gas, were out of arms. In the second game Dennis Bennett took the mound, and Jim Bunning thought Bennett’s tendinitis was so bad he could barely reach the plate. Curt Simmons, who knew the personnel of the Phillies well and was a friend of some of the players, watched Bennett warming up and agreed with Bunning: Bennett had a dead arm—it was crazy to use him. Mauch, he thought, ought to start Bobby Shantz and try to patch through with his bullpen for one game, but starting Bennett was like giving a game away. Bennett predictably did not have very much, and the Cardinals scored three runs in the first two innings. Bennett left after an inning and a third, the first of six Philly pitchers to appear. Ray Sadecki pitched for the Cardinals, going for his twentieth. Before the game he had looked over and thought the Philly bench resembled a bunch of ghosts. Even their bench jockeying seemed second-rate. “You’re not going to get your twentieth, Sadecki,” someone yelled, and others were yelling at him that he was going to choke. Choke, he thought, that was a strange choice of words from this team. He was given a handsome early lead, and he seemed to coast through the game for his twentieth win. In the seventh inning, with two men on, two out, and Richie Allen up, Keane called for Schultz. Schultz got Allen on a pop-up, and then walked one man and retired the other six men he faced. It was his fifth straight appearance, all of them big games, during this sudden highly pressurized pennant race. With Simmons scheduled to start the next night, Sadecki went over to him and handed him the ball. “Here it is, Curt,” he said. “Just keep Barney around.” In Cincinnati, the Pirates behind Bob Friend ended the Reds’ nine-game winning streak by pitching a shutout. Only 10,800 people showed up to see the game despite the intensity of the pennant race and the Reds’ winning streak. The Cardinals and the Reds were now tied for first place at the end of the day, 91-67 each, with the Phillies still a game and a half out, with four games left.

  For the final game of the series it was Bunning again pitching on two days’ rest against Curt Simmons. The Cardinal players were immensely confident. Not only were they playing well, but Tim McCarver, a good low-ball hitter and a lefty, had hit Bunning with authority in the past. In the second inning, after Groat had singled, McCarver hit his ninth home run of the season for a 2-0 lead, and in the third, eight Cardinals reached base—four on hits, two on errors, and two on walks as the Phillies continued to unravel. The final score was 8-5. The Cardinals thought Bunning did not seem either sharp or fast. By contrast, Curt Simmons had pitched no-hit ball for six and two thirds innings. The Cardinals’ pitching had been spectacular since mid-season: Gibson had been 8-1, Sadecki 6-1, and Simmons 6-0, for a total of 20-2.

  The Phillies seemed finished. It was their tenth loss in a row. “We were the best team in the league for a hundred and fifty games,” Gene Mauch said later. They now faced the Reds for their final two games of the season, while the Cardinals took on the Mets. In New York the editors of Sports Illustrated decided to pull the cover of Jim Bunning and go with one of Dick Butkus, the great college linebacker.

  That night the Cardinal players went out to the pool at the Bel Air East, where many of the unmarried players were staying, and listened to the broadcast of the Reds-Pirates game from Cincinnati. It was a classic game, two power pitchers at their best, scoreless after nine and scoreless in extra innings; Jim Maloney pitched for the Reds, Bob Veale for the Pirates, Maloney striking out thirteen in eleven innings and Veale striking out sixteen over thirteen innings. They were throwing itty-bitty baseballs, McCarver thought, and it was as if the ball itself were getting smaller as the game went on. In the top of the sixteenth Dorm Clendenon doubled and moved to third on Bill Mazeroski’s sacrifice bunt. The batter was Jerry May, a young catcher brought up at the end of the season. Clendenon broke for the plate, May laid down a lovely bunt, and the Pirates had a run. In the bottom of the sixteenth Alvin McBean put down the Reds in order, and at the end of Wednesday’s schedule, for the first time, the Cardinals had first place to themselves. But on Thursday the Reds beat the Pirates to cut the Cardinal lead to half a game.

  It should have been easy for the Cardinals. All they had to do was beat the Mets and the pennant was theirs. They were so hot as a team, McCarver thought, that the only danger was an off day. Friday was a bizarre night. The Cardinals, ready to close in on the pennant, sent Gibson against Al Jackson, the talented Met left-hander, and Gibson pitched beautifully but Jackson was better, and the Mets won, 1-0. The game in Cincinnati was one of the weirdest of the season. The Phillies, still sleepwalking, were behind, 3-0, in the seventh. In the bottom of the seventh, with one out and a man on second, Chris Short hit Leo Cardenas of the Reds with a pitch. Cardenas wanted to fight, and his teammates had to stop him. Somehow, the scuffle seemed to wake up the Phillies. With one out in the eighth, a bloop hit by Frank Thomas landed near second. The Reds thought that Cardenas should have had it, but that his mind was still on the confrontation with Short. Jim O’Toole, the Cincinnati pitcher, seemed furious with Cardenas and lost his cool, walking one man and then giving up another hit. Suddenly the Phillies broke through for four runs and won the game. After the game, in the Reds’ locker room, O’Toole, still furious, went after Cardenas and threw him to the ground. At that point Cardenas grabbed an ice pick and started after O’Toole, but others pulled them apart.

  On Saturday the Reds and the Phillies had the day off and the Cardinals played the Mets in a day game, with Ray Sadecki pitching. Sadecki was flat. The Mets got four runs off him in the first and hammered the Cardinals, 15-5. It seemed a cruel joke to some of the Cardinal players to come this far, to play so well down the stretch, fashioning an eight-game winning streak against the league’s best teams, and then lose the first two games to the Mets. If it was hard on the Cardinal players, it was equally hard on the National League sch
edule makers. If the Reds lost to the Phillies, and the Cards lost to the Mets on the final day, the major leagues for the first time in history would have a three-way tie. A complicated three-way miniseries was created to deal with the prospect. In Cincinnati the Phillies, behind Jim Bunning, pitching with plenty of rest, defeated the Reds, 10-0. In St. Louis, Curt Simmons started. He was not as sharp in this game as he had been against the Phillies, and in the fifth inning, when the Mets took a 3-2 lead, Johnny Keane called for Bob Gibson to come out of the bullpen. The Cards scored three in the bottom of the fifth and three more in the sixth. In the eighth they added three more. Their lead was 11-4, but in the ninth Gibson walked two. There was one out with two on when Keane went to Barney Schultz. A passed ball and a single gave the Mets a run and made the score 11-5. Then Ed Kranepool popped to McCarver. The Cardinals had won the pennant on the last day of the season. On October 3 the Yankees clinched the pennant at home against Cleveland. Al Downing started, and was relieved by Pete Mikkelsen, who became the winning pitcher. Ramos came in for Mikkelsen in the ninth and got the save, his seventh down the stretch as ä Yankee. When the game was over, Ramos stood on the mound and turned to his former manager, Birdie Tebbetts, standing in the Indian dugout, the man who earlier that season had said that no one wanted him. Ramos planted his left hand in the crook of his right arm and then made a gesture as old as the ages to Tebbetts.