October 1964

by David Halberstam

  Downing’s first pitch was a slider just outside for a ball. Ellie Howard called for a fastball, but Downing shook him off. Howard gave the signal, a little flutter of the hand, and called for a change: the pitch that Downing wanted. Out at shortstop Phil Linz saw the signal for the change and thought it wrong. It was already hazy out there with poor visibility because of the shadows. Downing, he thought, was a power pitcher and he had the advantage, with poor visibility and a right-handed batter facing Death Valley in Yankee Stadium. A change, he thought, subtracted from his edge. Make them hit your best stuff, fastball, or a hard curve, he thought. For a moment he thought of calling time but he did not, and Downing went to the change. Later it was a pitch that was often second-guessed; Downing thought it was the right pitch. He thought Boyer would be waiting on his fastball and he wanted to throw the Cardinal third baseman’s timing off. He also wanted to go down and away, and he had two pitches that went there, his fastball and his change. The change had been a very good pitch for him that year, and he had given up very few hits on it. If he threw the change properly, he was sure, he would break Boyer’s rhythm and get either a pop-up or a double play.

  He threw Boyer a bad pitch. Usually his change sank on the hitter, but this one did not. The ball came in letter-high, not far enough out, and with very little movement on it, and Boyer jumped on it. Years later Downing could see it all very clearly. It was a poor pitch, but, nevertheless, he thought, still a good bit of hitting by a real professional. Because it was a change Boyer was well out in front of the ball, but he still managed to adjust in mid-swing, hold his weight back, and control his bat properly. The only questions from the moment he hit it were whether he was too far out in front and whether the ball would hook foul, but there was a ten-mile-an-hour wind blowing in from left field toward right, and it helped keep the ball fair as it went past the foul pole. That was it. The Cardinals, with one pitch, had gone from being behind, 3-0, to leading, 4-3.

  Craig was through for the day, one of his best in professional baseball. He had given up two hits and struck out eight men in four and two thirds innings. Ron Taylor came in to pitch the last four innings and he gave the Yankees nothing. Taylor threw hard and had a running fastball. He walked one man, and other than that he retired everyone else. The game had started out as a laugher—the first five Yankees who had come to bat had gotten hits; from then on Craig and Taylor combined to throw a two-hitter for the remaining eight and two thirds innings. Instead of being a blowout for a 3-1 Yankee lead in games, they were now tied, 2-2.

  30

  IN THE FIFTH GAME the Yankees saw the real Bob Gibson. On this day McCarver thought, he had everything working for him. The advantage of pitching in the shadows of the Stadium and against a background of the center-field bleachers made it all the more difficult for the hitters to pick up his ball. He was ahead of the hitters almost all day, and by the end of the game he had walked only two men and had struck out thirteen. This was the Gibson whom the National League hitters were already becoming accustomed to, and whom American League hitters would learn to respect in this and two subsequent World Series: a big-game pitcher, his face an angry, cold mask, a great athlete setting a fast tempo and never letting the hitters get set. Koufax had struck out fifteen Yankees in one of his victories in the previous World Series; Gibson on this day was every bit as imposing. Though they were playing in Yankee Stadium, thought Phil Linz, it was as if the Yankees were the interlopers, and this was Gibson’s territory. The Yankees would come to bat, barely have time to dig in, and the pitch would be on its way; then, just as they started to think about the next pitch, he was already in his windup. How could McCarver be flashing signs that quickly? Linz wondered. Before you were ready there were already two strikes on you. It was the most personal confrontation Linz had ever seen in baseball—as if, for the moment, there were just the two of them battling it out together, pitcher and hitter, and all the other players had momentarily vanished from the game.

  Watching the Yankees struggle that day against Gibson, Al Downing thought his team was being betrayed by the arrogance of its own scouting reports. Those reports, he and a few others on the team decided, reflected the Yankee smugness. In no way had they made clear how good this Cardinal team was, how tough it was, how hard it ran the bases. If anything, they had condescended to the Cardinal players. Lou Brock, they had said, was not that good an outfielder (of course he wasn’t, thought Downing; who would be in that cow-pasture outfield in Sportsman’s Park?). There was little mention of Curt Flood’s exceptional ability as a center fielder, but it was clear now, as they watched him, that he was a great defensive player, and might at that moment be the best center fielder in major-league baseball, as Willie Mays was moving into his mid-thirties.

  The most egregious omission was the failure to describe the sheer power, ability, and fury of Bob Gibson. When the Yankee scouts had given their briefing on the Cardinals, the report on Gibson was that he nibbled at the plate. Bob Gibson nibbling at the plate? The Yankee players did not know the National League that well, but they had heard something about Gibson. When the scout had said that, Downing looked at Jim Bouton, and they had both grinned. Bob Gibson was many things, but he was not a nibbler. The scouts never mentioned how important it was to score off Gibson early because he became tougher as the game went on. Al Downing liked playing for the Yankees, he liked his teammates, but as a young black man, he was aware of the prejudice against blacks that had existed in the organization. It was as if there were two Yankee organizations, he sometimes thought—the old one that had resisted change, and the new one, just beginning to recognize a new era, and the scouting report had been done by people who were part of the old era, an arrogant, smug organization that believed the Yankees were always the best. It rarely deigned to give credit to other players and other organizations, and was particularly loath to give credit to black players and to acknowledge that they were changing the nature of the game. The men who delivered that scouting report, he thought, were the same kind of men who had not signed talented young black players starting ten years ago. If there was a problem, he thought, it was that the Yankees were not entirely prepared for a team as tough as St. Louis. Now, facing the Cardinal speed, the Yankees were not responding well. Their fielding was sloppy, and their baserunning was unusually poor.

  Mel Stottlemyre was pitching against Gibson again. He was probably not quite as sharp as he had been in the second game, and he was getting the ball up just a little more. With most pitchers the index of their sharpness on a given day might be strikeouts, but with Stottlemyre it was ground balls. In the second game he struck out only four, but he got sixteen hitters to go out on ground balls; on this day in seven innings he struck out six, but got only seven hitters on ground balls.

  The Cardinals scored first in the fifth inning. Dal Maxvill struck out, but Gibson singled to left, a short looping fly that Tresh got to but couldn’t handle. Gibson would have had a double had he not slipped and fallen as he went around first. Then Curt Flood hit a sharp grounder to Richardson, a perfect double-play ball, but Richardson booted it and both runners were safe. Lou Brock singled to right, scoring Gibson, with Flood going to third. Bill White grounded to Richardson for what looked like another double play. Richardson made the play to Linz for the first out on Brock, but Linz, feeling the pressure of so fast a base runner as Brock, hurried his throw to first and threw into the dirt. Though Pepitone dug it out, the first-base umpire, Al Smith, called White safe, a bad call, most reporters thought, and a play that allowed Flood to score.

  That made it 2-0, and that was the way it stayed into the ninth. Hector Lopez batted for Stottlemyre in the seventh and struck out, and Pete Mikkelsen came in to pitch the eighth and the ninth for the Yankees. The Cardinals did not touch him, and that meant the Yankees came up trailing 2-0 in the bottom of the ninth. Mantle led off and hit a bouncer to Groat at short. Groat, thinking of the Mantle of old, charged the ball instead of waiting for the big hop. He bobbled the ball,
putting Mantle on first. Gibson struck out Ellie Howard for the first out. Then a play that was probably, along with Boyer’s home run, the most important play of the Series, took place.

  Pepitone was up with one out. Tom Tresh was on deck. Gibson threw his only change of the game, and Pepitone, who had a very quick bat, jumped on it and hit a shot toward the mound. Gibson had a very complete follow-through, and the ball hit him on the rear, as he completed his follow-through, right where he would keep a wallet if he were in street clothes. The ball did not just hit Gibson and drop down; instead, it bounced sharply off him toward the third base line. Watching the play, Tresh was thrilled. A sure hit, he thought. The Yankees appeared to have a rally going, and from the way that Pepitone had hit the ball, Gibson might be tiring. But then, while he watched, Gibson made one of the greatest plays Tresh had ever seen in baseball and certainly the greatest fielding play by a pitcher. Gibson was on the ball like a giant cat, turning as he finished his motion, running full speed to the third base line, and then picking it up even as his momentum carried him away from the line and away from first base. He had no time to stop and set himself, and he was forced to throw part sidearm, part underhand, but it was an underhand, sidearm fastball. Hard and on a line, it beat Pepitone, though the Yankees protested the call. McCarver, behind the plate, also thought it the most exceptional play he had ever seen by an infielder, let alone a pitcher. It was amazing, he thought, because it was all instinct; there was no way Gibson could have anticipated the move the way a great third baseman can sometimes anticipate a line shot. It was a great, great moment, Tresh thought, a superb athlete in the center of the arena, making an unbelievable play on pure ability and instinct.

  The importance of the play soon became clear when Tresh hit Gibson’s first pitch, a fastball into the right center-field bleachers to tie the score. It was only the fifth hit for the Yankees off Gibson. “A fastball down the middle,” Gibson said later of the ball that Tresh hit, “and that’s what happens to fastballs down the middle.” At first Tresh thought the ball was going to stay in play, so he ran hard, hoping for a triple; then, as he neared second base, he realized it was out and started his home-run trot, yet he still seemed to be running hard. Without Gibson’s play on Pepitone, the Yankees might have won the game then and there.

  In the tenth Mikkelsen was still pitching for the Yankees. Bill White walked to open the inning. Ken Boyer beat out a bunt to the right side of the mound, and White stopped at second. When Groat missed a bunt attempt, White was trapped between second and third; for a moment it appeared that the Yankees had him hung up, and he headed back to second. Ellie Howard threw to Linz at second, and suddenly White raced for third and was safe when the throw from Linz was late. White ended up being credited with a stolen base. Boyer held first. Then Groat reached base on an infield grounder as Boyer was forced out at second and White held third. With one out, that brought up McCarver, a left-handed hitter. McCarver had a hot bat in the Series. He was 7-for-16 so far, and he was seeing the ball exceptionally well. He was also a notoriously good low-ball hitter, which made him a tough opponent for Mikkelsen. Out in the bullpen Steve Hamilton, the tall, slim left-hander, was warming up. Hamilton had a reputation of being death on lefties, so some of the Yankees thought that Berra would bring Hamilton in, if only to pitch to McCarver. McCarver himself thought he would see a different pitcher, either Hamilton or Hal Reniff, but certainly not a low-ball right-hander like Mikkelsen. But Berra, who loved sinker-ball pitchers, decided to go with Mikkelsen. Mikkelsen quickly got behind in the count. On the 3-1 pitch Mikkelsen came in with what seemed like a fastball, just a little up. It was the pitch McCarver had wanted, and he ripped it, but it was foul by about four feet. McCarver was furious with himself: to be in this situation, to get the pitch you wanted, and then to blow it. He was sure he would not see anything that good again, but then Mikkelsen came in with a sinker that did not sink, and McCarver nailed it. Catchers don’t catch sinkers that don’t sink, he later thought. As he raced toward first, he watched Mantle’s back and saw the number 7, which he tracked as Mantle headed back toward the fence. McCarver was delighted, because he knew the ball was hit deep enough to get White in from third, and not even the Mantle of old was going to spear the ball and make the right throw, not with his body momentum carrying him away from the plate. Then, as he saw Mantle continue to race toward the fence, it struck him that the ball might fall in and they could keep a rally going. As he rounded first, he saw Mantle slow down, and he realized that it was a home run. It was a marvelous moment for him. For two years he had been struggling to meet his own standards, to be a real professional, and it had not been easy, a kid catcher with a veteran pitching staff. He badly wanted that acceptance of his teammates, and it had been a hard learning process. Now, as he crossed the plate, Groat, the old pro, was bantering with him, and Bill White, the judge, had a huge smile on his face, as if to say, “Well, son, you really did it for us today, you’re all right.” Gibson, who rarely said much in victory, was looking at him with a very warm smile, and McCarver remembered thinking that this was an unusually happy Gibson. It was his own coming of age, McCarver later decided.

  The Cardinals had won it in the tenth, 5-2. Later, after the game, when the Yankees were going to the airport to catch the plane back to St. Louis, Ralph Houk asked Steve Hamilton if he had been ready to pitch in the tenth inning, and Hamilton said he had been. “Was there anything wrong with your arm, Steve?” Houk asked. Hamilton said no, there was not, and he could sense that Houk was furious over Yogi’s decision to leave Mikkelsen in, and that Yogi might soon be gone as the Yankee manager.

  31

  THE SIXTH GAME WAS in some ways a repeat of the third, with Jim Bouton again pitching against Curt Simmons. For the first seven innings it was a tight, well-pitched game. For the Yankees it provided a last World Series hurrah for the home-run tandem of Maris and Mantle, when they and Joe Pepitone flashed a demonstration of that vaunted Yankee power. Simmons did not feel he pitched that well; he preferred the cold, in which he had worked earlier at the Stadium, and he had sensed that his breaking ball was not sharp on this day. As for Bouton, he was delighted to be getting his second shot in this Series. Far more than most baseball players, he was an adrenaline player, and he liked pitching under this kind of pressure. He had pitched exceptionally well in the third game of the 1963 World Series, which he had lost to Don Drysdale, 1-0, a game in which both teams got a total of only seven hits; he had given up one run and six hits in the third game of this Series, and his combined World Series earned run average for his three starts after this day was 1.48.

  Bouton was puzzled by the behavior of the Yankee ownership on the morning of the sixth game. The players had been told to pack their suitcases and check out of the St. Louis hotel before they left for the ball park. If they lost, they would leave for New York right after the game; if they won, they would return to the hotel and check back in. Management clearly did not want to be charged for an extra day in St. Louis if they were going to lose the game and the Series. That stunned Bouton: in the past the Yankees had always been both arrogant and parsimonious, but this was the first time he could ever remember their parsimoniousness outweighing their arrogance. It was, he thought, the work of people with a loser’s mentality. But Bouton felt good on this day; he loved being the center of attention and being given the ball in a game this big.

  The Cardinals scored in the first inning. Curt Flood opened the game with a single to left, then went to third on Lou Brock’s single to center. Brock scored when Bill White hit into a double play. The Yankees tied it in the fifth; Tom Tresh, who had hit the Cardinal pitching hard all week, lined a ground-rule double down the left-field line, moved to third when Clete Boyer grounded out, and scored when Bouton himself singled to left-center. In the sixth the Yankees nailed Simmons. Richardson, the team’s leading hitter in the Series, popped up. Up came Maris, who had been a notoriously poor hitter in this and previous World Series games. Simmons hung a curv
e to Maris and Maris jumped on it, hitting it up on the roof in right, the ball landing just fair. Then Mantle came up and Simmons threw him a fastball; Mantle batting righty, hit it on a line to the roof in right field. This gave the Yankees a 3-1 lead. Then, in the eighth, with Simmons out of the game and first Barney Schultz, then Gordon Richardson, on the mound for the Cardinals, the Yankees scored five more times, including four runs on a Joe Pepitone grand-slam home run. The final score was 8-3, and the Yankees had to check back into their St. Louis hotel.

  In the seventh game Bob Gibson took the ball. There was a time, only recently past, when that would have surprised people, a black pitcher getting the call in a decisive seventh game of the World Series, for it had long been part of the myth of white America that blacks were not mentally as tough as whites and therefore could not be counted on in the clutch: it was the performances of such athletes as Gibson that destroyed that particularly scabrous fiction. In a way Gibson’s very presence on the mound in so big a game showed how much baseball had changed in its ethnic makeup in so short a time. Only fifteen years earlier, in the final regular-season American League game that would decide the pennant, neither team had a black player on its roster, and when the Yankees took the field, four of the nine players, DiMaggio, Rizzuto, Berra, and Raschi, were Italian-American. Now four of the nine Cardinal starters were black, and if Julian Javier had not been injured, the total would have been five black or Hispanic players. The only black starter for the Yankees was Ellie Howard. Now Gibson, starting the seventh game of the World Series for the Cardinals, was a long, long way from the moment seven years earlier, when he had been pitching for Columbus in the Sally League, a brief unhappy stint lasting only eight games, and someone had yelled out at him, “Alligator bait! Gibson, you’re nothing but alligator bait!” Alligator bait, he thought, what the hell is that? for he had no idea at all what it meant. Later he was told it was an old Deep South expression, and it recalled the good old days when the good old boys went into the swamps in search of alligators and tied a rope around a black man, or so they claimed, and threw him in the water as bait.