October 1964

by David Halberstam

  28

  IN THE THIRD GAME Jim Bouton pitched against Curt Simmons in Yankee Stadium, and it was probably the best played and best pitched game of the Series. Bouton thought it would be a low-scoring game. He knew that Whitey Ford had not been ready to pitch the first game, that he had been having too much trouble with his arm. Bouton, who had been pitching well in the second part of the season, felt that he or Stottlemyre should probably have started the first game. But he had also understood why Yogi went with Ford. You go with the past and with tradition, he thought, particularly when your tradition was as rich as the Yankees’. Late in the regular season, when there was a pennant race, with huge crowds in the stands, Bouton had begun to prepare himself for this occasion. He would fantasize that those were World Series games. He would tell himself that he had to deliver under pressure. Bouton had pitched in a World Series for the first time in the third game of the 1963 World Series with the Dodgers. His team was down, 2-0, in games, and he was going against the great Don Drysdale. “Hey, Jim, you nervous?” Ralph Terry, his friend, had asked. Bouton was in fact so nervous that he could barely breathe. “Well, Jim,” Terry had said, “just remember that whether you win or lose, there are six hundred million Chinese out there who don’t give a shit what happens one way or another.”

  The Cardinals were a good team for him to pitch against. He was a righty and the only three left-handed bats were White, Brock, and McCarver. White, the one true power-hitting lefty, was the hitter he feared the most. The scouting reports said that he could get Bill White out on a change, and somehow Bouton knew that White knew about the scouting report and was standing at the bat just waiting for the change. It was as if there were a voice of a friendly baseball angel coming into Bouton’s ear and telling him, “Don’t throw him a change, don’t throw him a change. Come into him with fastballs.” So Bouton threw White nothing but fastballs. He guessed right. Late in the game, sure that White had been looking for the change and gotten nothing but fastballs, Bouton went to the change, and he guessed right again. White had readied himself for a fastball and missed the change by a foot. Later, after the game, White told reporters that he had spent the entire game looking for a change, “and then as soon as I stopped looking he threw me one.” Two of White’s outs were balls hit to Tom Tresh in left, there was a groundout to Richardson at second, and then White got on base when he hit a slow bouncer to Boyer at third.

  Curt Simmons had waited a long time to pitch in a World Series. He had been one of the Whiz Kids pitching for the Phillies in 1950 when he was only twenty-one, his third full season in the majors. The Phillies had won the pennant, but he had been called into the service because of the Korean War. At the time it had seemed like a missed opportunity, but he was sure there would be other chances, sooner rather than later; it had not occurred to him that he would have to wait fourteen years for his next chance, and that instead of being a kid of twenty-one he would be a senior player of thirty-five—no longer a power pitcher, but a skilled pitcher with a provocative motion who knew how to use hitters’ strengths against them. He felt very good that day. He had great stuff, good location, and a very good breaking ball. Watching him, Bouton was impressed. Simmons kept coming inside to the left-handed hitters, going against all the rules in the book, but he was just smart enough to keep them off balance, and the Yankee hitters could not do that much with him. Simmons, for his part, could not tell that much about the young New York pitcher, Bouton. He seemed to throw surprisingly hard and his hat came off on almost every pitch, but the Cardinal hitters said that they were not that impressed. They kept coming back to the bench saying that they could get him, that he did not have that much, and yet they did not get him; later they would agree that Bouton had thrown hard and well, harder than they realized, even though he was not striking out that many batters.

  The Yankees scored first, when in the second inning Elston Howard singled to center and then, with two outs and the count 0-2 on Clete Boyer, Simmons tried to waste a pitch, but got it too close to the strike zone and Boyer doubled down the left-field line. In the fifth the Cardinals tied the score. McCarver opened the inning with a single to right, and went to second when the ball went through Mantle for an error. Shannon lined to Mantle and McCarver did not advance. Then Dal Maxvill grounded out to Richardson and McCarver moved to third. When Curt Simmons fined a ball off Clete Boyer’s glove, McCarver scored. That made it 1-1. It stayed that way through eight innings. The Yankees had four hits off Simmons, and the Cardinals had six off Bouton. It was a beautiful, tight baseball game. In the top of the ninth the Cardinals threatened to get to Bouton. McCarver reached first when Linz fumbled his ground ball. Shannon sacrificed him to second. Carl Warwick came up for Maxvill, and Bouton walked him. There were two on and one out. Then Bob Skinner came to bat for Simmons. Skinner liked the idea of batting against Bouton, because he was so aggressive a pitcher; he got a fastball, just as he expected, and he hammered it deep to right center field, where Maris finally hauled it in. Simmons, from the bench, watched it and thought to himself that in St. Louis it was a three-run homer on top of the roof, but in Yankee Stadium it was just a long out. It was a cold day and Simmons, his day’s work done, decided to head back to the locker room to take a shower.

  Barney Schultz was to pitch the ninth, and the Cardinal players were pleased because Schultz had become their invincible man that season. Somehow, when Barney came in, the game was a lock. The Yankee leadoff hitter was Mickey Mantle, and because Barney was a right-hander, Mantle would have to bat from his left, or weaker, side. Watching Mantle at the plate, Bouton had a sudden sense that the Cardinals were making a mistake, that they should not bring in a right-handed knuckleball pitcher against him. Mantle golfed the ball when he swung from the left side, swinging up, compared to his swing from the right side, which was more of a tomahawk. That golf swing could be lethal against a knuckleball pitcher because of the way the ball dropped down.

  Mantle, it turned out, was thinking much the same thing. The Yankee scouts had told the hitters two things about Barney Schultz. The first was that he needed to get the first pitch over the plate because it was important for a knuckleball pitcher not to fall behind in the count. If he got the first pitch in, he could then afford to throw two more knucklers. The second thing was that for the same reason, Schultz threw the first pitch a little harder, and it did not move quite as much. It was, the scouts said, the best pitch to swing on against him. On the mound Barney Schultz was pleased with himself. The warm-up pitches he threw were very good, the ball seemed to flutter and dodge, and he was sure he had his best stuff on that day. Mantle was waiting by the plate while Schultz was warming up and Ellie Howard was in the on-deck circle. Mantle walked over to Howard. “Elston,” Mantle said, “you might as well go on back to the clubhouse because I’m going to hit the first pitch out of here for a home run.” It was, he later noted, the kind of boast that he had made many times, though he did not always make good on it. Schultz wound up and threw. He knew immediately it was not a good pitch: it did not dance or flutter, and it did not move away from Mantle as it should have. Instead, it glided in with precious little speed and precious little movement. Behind the plate, Tim McCarver watched the ball float toward him, ever so slowly, ever so ominously. A number of things flashed through McCarver’s mind in that instant, none of them good: he could see Barney Schultz very clearly, he could see the Cardinal infielders, and he could almost feel the awesome physical surge in Mantle. For a split second McCarver wanted to stop the scenario, to reach out and interfere with Mantle’s bat, but then the ball floated in, and Mantle absolutely crushed it, a tape-measure job well into the third tier in right field—his sixteenth World Series home run, which put him ahead of Babe Ruth and gave him one of his greatest thrills in baseball. Out in right field Mike Shannon went to the fence, pretending he might have a play, as if he were decoying Mantle and making him think the ball was catchable. Curt Simmons was on his way from the dugout to the locker room when he heard a t
remendous roar. Simmons was an old pro, skilled at measuring crowd noise. For a moment he stopped and thought that Mantle must have hit a double, then the roar kept growing and growing, and he thought to himself, Oh, shit, he hit a home run. After the game, reporters crowded around Simmons’s locker, and he handled them with considerable grace. “Tough day at the mill,” he told them. Then he paused. “That’s baseball.”

  After the game Whitey Ford told Mantle he had the ball, the one that had broken Ruth’s record. Did Mantle want to buy it from him? Mantle said he did. How much? Ford asked. Mantle started flashing numbers with his fingers. “Will you give me one thousand bucks?” Ford asked. “Sure,” said Mantle. So Ford sold him the ball, which he claimed he picked up after it bounced back on the field. All the newspaper photographers took pictures of Mantle with the ball. A few minutes later a man named John Mazzarella, his clothing torn and his leg cut, showed up with the real ball, wanting to give it to Mantle. Ford had to admit his hoax. That broke up the clubhouse. Everyone was in a great mood. The Yankees had won, 2-1, and were up in games, 2-1.

  29

  THE FOURTH GAME WAS the crucial game of the 1964 World Series. With Whitey Ford finished for the season, the Yankees decided to go with Al Downing, who threw harder than anyone on the team, while the Cardinals came back with Ray Sadecki, who had been hit hard in the first game. Johnny Keane was not very confident about Sadecki, however, and just before the game Keane went over to Roger Craig, the veteran starter-reliever. “As soon as Sadecki gets out there I want you to start warming up,” he said. “If you’re that unsure of him,” Craig said to Keane, “why don’t you start me instead?”

  Sadecki did not last the first inning. Phil Linz led off and doubled into the right-field corner. Then, on an attempted steal, McCarver made a great throw to third, and Linz backed off and headed back to second. The Cardinals had him hung up between second and third, but Ken Boyer slipped and threw wildly into center field and Linz ended up safely on third. With the infield partially in, Richardson doubled into the left-field corner, scoring Linz. It was a ball, Sadecki thought later, that Boyer could have gotten if he had been playing at normal depth. Instead of there being two out and no one on, one run was in and Richardson was on second. Roger Maris hit a bloop single to right and Richardson stopped at third. Mantle singled to right and Richardson scored, but when Mantle foolishly tried to stretch the single, Shannon, who had a great arm, threw him out. Maris went to third on the throw. Sadecki was finished for the day. A ten-pitch inning, a ten-pitch game, he thought to himself with disgust. The Yankees had not hit bullets off him, but he had not done the job, and the walk from the mound to the dugout was a very long one. Roger Craig, already warm in the bullpen, was called in. Ellie Howard greeted him with a single to center and the Yankees had their third run.

  Three runs behind in the first inning or not, there was something magical about playing in the World Series as far as Roger Craig was concerned. As Bing Devine was putting this team together over the previous winter, one of the keys, he decided, was his acquisition of Craig from the Mets. Devine thought that a pitcher like Craig, who could work either as a spot starter or a middle relief pitcher, was what he needed; if going to a contending team from a last-place team gave Craig the proper emotional boost, and if his arm was right, he might be a determining factor—if not the winning pitcher—in some ten or fifteen games. Getting him might not seem as important in statistical terms as trading for a twenty-game winner, but in the hot days of August, important games could be either won or lost in the middle innings, when everyone was dulled by the torpor. Games slipped away then because pitchers were tired, the bullpen was overused, and the level of concentration of the team dropped. With the addition of the right pitcher, leads could be preserved, games saved, Devine thought. For Craig, going to the Cardinals had the quality of going to baseball nirvana after baseball purgatory. He had had the dubious distinction of leading the National League in games lost for the last two years, twenty-two and twenty-four respectively, and there had been one stretch in that second Met season when he had lost eighteen games in a row, in part because on seven occasions that season when he pitched, the Mets had been shut out.

  Craig, in those two dreadful seasons, had tried to hold on to his sense of humor. At one dinner after the 1962 season he went to a baseball banquet along with Don Drysdale. Drysdale had won twenty-five games that year, and had gotten a huge ovation from the audience. When it was Craig’s turn to be introduced, he asked Drysdale how many games he had won. “Twenty-five,” said the Dodger star. “And how many did your team win?” Craig continued. “One hundred and three,” Drysdale answered. “Well, Don, I guess I’m more valuable to the Mets than you are to the Dodgers because I won ten games this year and the Mets only won forty and that’s a larger percentage of the team’s victories than you had,” he said.

  Craig had always regarded his professional life as a kind of continuation of boyhood, as if he were the rare grown-up who had been allowed to go off every day and play instead of taking a real job with real hours. But in 1962 and 1963, when he pitched for the Mets, baseball had been like a job. The hours were not particularly long, two to five P.M. or eight to eleven P.M., but it was work nonetheless, and the pleasure was marginal. Still, he had pitched twenty-seven complete games in the two seasons, and seven teams had made strong offers for him at the end of the 1963 season. When he heard that it was the Cardinals who had traded for him, he was elated: “I’m going from a tenth-place team to a pennant contender overnight,” he told friends. In the New York newspapers Ralph Kiner, the broadcaster, was quoted as saying that Craig could mean the pennant for the Cards. “He’s a great competitor and he gives the Cards a great middle relief pitcher or a starter. He pitches hard every time he’s out there.”

  With the Cards, Craig had loved the excitement of the pennant race, had pitched a critical shutout during those important days in September, and now was about to pitch in a World Series game. When the call came from Johnny Keane, he did not open the bullpen gate or step over the bullpen fence, his friend Bob Skinner later told him—he hurdled over the fence in his excitement. His curve-ball was very good that day and his control seemed almost perfect. Ellie Howard hit a good pitch, but somehow Craig felt confident. Craig got the next two men out. He was behind, 3-0, in the first inning, but somehow three runs did not seem like too much. In the second inning, the bottom of the Yankee order came up. Craig struck all three men out: Boyer, Downing, and Linz. At that point Tim McCarver thought the Yankees were going to have a hard time the rest of the way. Craig had a lot of movement and he threw at a great many different speeds. In Yankee Stadium in early October the shadows would soon fall, and that would make it even harder to hit Craig. The one moment when Craig’s control weakened was in the bottom of the third, when with two out he walked both Mantle and Howard. That brought up Tresh. At second base Groat began to lull Mantle into complacency. “Mickey,” he said, “that was a hell of a home run yesterday off Barney. I mean, you really hit that one.” Mantle modestly thanked him. “Did you see what that spacey goddamn Shannon did?” Groat continued. No, Mantle said, he had not. “He tried to decoy you—as if there was going to be a play on it.” Groat did a small imitation of Shannon pretending to make a play at the wall. “Crazy son of a bitch,” Groat said. “We call him Moon Man.” Roger Craig glanced over and saw the two of them and noticed that Mantle was not paying much attention. Roger Craig, Groat knew, had a great move to second. They had a play, Groat and Craig did—the daylight play, they called it. If Groat got inside the runner at second and there was daylight between them, they would try the pickoff. There was no signal for it. They just did it. When Craig whirled, he did not have to throw and it was not a balk. To Mantle, still leading off, Groat did a great imitation for Mantle of spacey Mike Shannon trying to decoy him at the right-field fence. He also slipped inside Mantle. Mantle began to laugh. Craig turned and threw and they picked Mantle off. Mantle headed back to the dugout, past Craig. “
You son of a bitch,” he said. “You show me up in front of forty million people.”

  If the Yankees had squandered two chances at more runs with bad baserunning, then they still had a 3-0 lead, and the Cardinals could do nothing with Al Downing. Through five innings, they had only one hit, a bloop single to center by Curt Flood in the third. Sometimes Downing had good stuff but little mastery of it; on this day he had good stuff and good control. Through the first five innings he had walked only one batter. The Cardinal sixth changed things. Carl Warwick led off as a pinch hitter for Craig and grounded a hard single to left, his third pinch hit in the Series. Then Flood singled to right. Warwick held at second. That brought up Brock, who was retired on a fly ball. With one out, Groat came up and hit the ball on the ground to Richardson at second. It was a perfect double-play ball, particularly because Groat was slow. Linz moved toward second to take the throw, but the ball stuck for a moment in Richardson’s glove and he couldn’t dig it out quickly. By the time he got it to Linz, the shortstop was almost past the bag, partially turned toward first and vulnerable to Flood, who went into him hard. Linz couldn’t hold on to the ball, and instead of the inning being over, the bases were loaded with one out. The fault on the play, Richardson thought, was his, but in addition it was a reflection of his inexperience in working with Linz. He and Kubek knew each other better, and if Kubek had been there he might have made the adjustment and they would have at least gotten the man at second. Now Ken Boyer, the Cardinal cleanup hitter, was up. He was 1-for-13 so far in the Series.