October 1964

by David Halberstam

  Lou Brock was uniformly admired by his teammates for what he had done and how hard he had played in 1964. If there was ever a player who set out to be the best ever, his teammates thought, it was Brock. Nor was it so much his great physical ability that made him special. He was one of the most cerebral players of his generation. He studied the game and, in particular, he studied pitchers—not as Ted Williams had studied them, for tip-offs on what they might throw, but instead for the telltale signs that would help him steal bases. Brock had heard that Maury Wills, at the time the standard against whom all base stealers were measured, kept a little black book filled with the idiosyncracies of the league’s pitchers. “Hey, Maury, got that little book?” he once asked the Dodger veteran, but it turned out that Wills was in no hurry to share his secrets with a younger player from a rival team. So, starting late in the 1964 season, Brock got an eight-millimeter camera and began to film the various pitchers in the league as they were on the mound, as they got set, as they threw home, and as they threw to first. “My home movies,” he called them. One day he was filming Don Drysdale, as tough a pitcher as existed in the league. “What the hell you doing with that camera, Brock?” “Just taking home movies,” said Brock. “I don’t want to be in your goddamn movies, Brock,” Drysdale said, and threw at him the next time he was up.

  The films were helpful, and Brock began to pick up on little movements, twitches almost, that might have escaped the naked eye. All pitchers had some kind of twitch, he decided, and so he began to improve as a base stealer, stealing sixty-three in 1965, and then leading the league in eight of the next nine years. Because of his increasing knowledge and improving technique, he realized that he could steal more than one hundred bases in a season, and in 1974 he did just that. If Wills had his black book, Brock thought, I’ve got my camera—I’m a man of modern technology.

  Brock was different from Maury Wills in other ways too. Maury was always talking about how base stealing beat you up. He was always talking about the need to take a big lead off first. If you did not have to dive back, he liked to say, you had not taken a big enough lead. For a time Lou Brock did the same, but after a while he decided to change his style. What convinced him was a game against the Giants in which he had to dive back to first three times, and each time Willie McCovey beat him so hard with the tag that he could barely move. First basemen, he observed, were big, powerful men, while second basemen were slighter, often smaller than Brock himself. He decided that in order to preserve his own body, he was going to take smaller leads and go into second very hard. If anyone was going to do any beating up, he was, not the McCoveys of the world. In time Lou Brock broke Ty Cobb’s record, once considered unreachable, of 892 stolen bases; his own career mark was 938.

  At the meeting of the owners in August, spurred by the rising cost of bonus players, there had been a good deal of talk about going to some sort of draft system for young players, not unlike that used by professional football and basketball. What encouraged the talk more than anything else was the competition for an outfielder named Rick Reichardt, who played for the University of Wisconsin. Reichardt was big and strong, and some said he would be the next Mantle. With ever richer owners and greater pressure than ever for instant success, the bidding for Reichardt soared above the previous ceilings. That summer Reichardt signed with the Angels for what was said to be a record bonus of $250,000. He was not the next Mantle, though no one knew that at the time. Reichardt’s impact on the owners was greater than his impact on the American League’s pitchers: he proved to be a good, not great, player who, in his better years, hit about 15 home runs, knocked in 60 runs, and batted around .260. But his bonus terrified the owners, for it was as close as they had yet come to a free-market situation. A bonus like that, some owners realized (looking at the CBS and Anheuser-Busch millions), might be only the beginning. Later that same year, Charley Finley, the owner of the Kansas City Athletics, revealed that he had paid out $634,000 in bonuses that year to sign some eighty players. The National League teams adopted the idea of a draft enthusiastically, whereas at the American League meeting, only three teams voted in favor of it. Those franchises that had traditionally been successful and had powerful scouting systems were wary of such radical change. But gradually the tide shifted in favor of some sort of draft. At the meeting of all the major league teams held in Houston in early December 1964, the draft was passed with little opposition. Hearing of it, Tom Greenwade, the great Yankee scout, told his son Bunch, “They’ve just taken the bat out of my hand.”

  Given his intelligence and sense of humor, it was not surprising that Bob Gibson soon became the dominating force in the Cardinal locker room. He remained a great mimic and put-on artist, aided now by his success and seniority. At one point there was a young player on the team named Hal Gilson. For a time it appeared that Bob Gibson’s phone calls and messages were being routed to Hal Gilson, which did not please Gibson. “Gilson, I’m warning you,” he said. “You’ve got to stop taking my messages or I’ll have to trade you,” and it was part of Cardinal locker-room lore that shortly thereafter, Hal Gilson was traded to Houston.

  One of Gibson’s favorite stunts was to list the entire roster on the blackboard in the clubhouse at the end of the year, and then go down the list, deciding who was going to be traded during the offseason. He spared no one, save himself and Lou Brock, and later, when he became a great Cardinal hitter, Joe Torre. Everyone else was ticketed out, including Red Schoendienst, who had replaced Johnny Keane as the manager. One year Bing Devine, back from the Mets for his second tour as general manager, walked in when Gibson was going through his routine, and Devine was amused until Gibson looked up and said, “It’s okay to laugh, Bing, but you’re gone too.”

  With the retirement of Sandy Koufax, Gibson became the premier pitcher in baseball. Remarkably, there was, in the 1967 and 1968 seasons, a huge improvement in his control. To the amazement of his teammates and his peers, he reached an ever higher level of excellence, and finally attained that rarefied place inhabited in recent years only by Sandy Koufax. Gibson was the dominating pitcher in the 1967 World Series, after a season in which he had missed a third of his starts with a broken leg. Then he continued to improve and was virtually unbeatable in the 1968 season. In 1968, in what was a dazzling season, he had won 22, lost only 9, he had struck out a league-leading 268 batters in 304⅔ innings, he had walked only 62, he had an ERA of 1.12, he had pitched 13 shutouts, and he had completed 28 of the 34 games he started. It was, for a pitcher who only a few years earlier had contended with serious control problems, a demonstration of the rarest kind of pitching, which combined uncommon power with pinpoint control. Rarely has a single player been so overwhelming in World Series play as Gibson was in the World Series in both 1967 and 1968.

  The first game of the 1968 World Series was his masterpiece. Gibson was going against Denny McLain of the Tigers, the first thirty-game winner in the major leagues in thirty-three years. McLain, who flew his own plane and played the organ in nightclubs around the Midwest when he wasn’t pitching, caught the attention of the media that season in his quest for thirty; to say that he had gotten more publicity and more endorsements than Gibson was an understatement, just as Carl Yastrzemski had gotten more endorsements than Gibson after the 1967 Series. Koufax, one of the network broadcasters that day, mentioned to his audience that he thought the difference in commercials and publicity that the two players had received might just fire up Gibson. He was right. Again and again the television cameras cut to close-ups of Gibson’s face displaying The Look, cold and unsparing, as Gibson struck out one Detroit hitter after another. The Detroit team was considered a good fastball-hitting team, but it barely mattered that day. In the ninth, Gibson, holding a comfortable 4-0 lead, struck out Al Kaline for his fifteenth strikeout of the game, tying the record set by Koufax in 1963. On the scoreboard the statistician flashed the news that Gibson had just tied the record of fifteen for World Series play set five years earlier by Sandy Koufax. Tim McCa
rver walked partway out to the mound to call his attention to it, hoping Gibson would soak in some of the glory of the moment. “Give me the ball,” Gibson yelled at him. McCarver tried to point to the scoreboard. “Give me the ball!” he repeated. Again McCarver tried to tell him what he had done and why the crowd was cheering, and finally Gibson understood. In a softer tone he said, “All right, now give me the ball.” Then he struck out Norm Cash for the third time that day. That broke Koufax’s record. “Who follows Cash?” he asked McCarver. “What difference does it make?” McCarver said. It was Willie Horton, a fearsome hitter in his own right. With two strikes on him, Horton backed away from a slider that looked like it was going to hit him but then broke wickedly back over the plate, for the seventeenth strikeout of the game. McCarver thought the ball must have broken eighteen inches. “To this day I believe Willie Horton thinks the ball hit him,” McCarver later said.

  Gibson was almost as impressive in the fourth game, striking out ten batters to give St. Louis a 3-1 lead in games. If anything, Tim McCarver later reflected, Gibson’s capacity to rise to such heights in World Series games might have made the Cardinals overconfident by the middle of that Series. Confident that they would have Gibby in the seventh game, and that he was unbeatable in big-game situations, the Cardinals might have let up in Games five and six, McCarver thought. In the seventh he was again overwhelming, but Mickey Lolich pitched very well for the Tigers, and when Curt Flood misplayed a ball in center field, the Tigers went on to win the game and the Series.

  Harry Walker remained fond of Bill White, and when Bill White was made president of the National League, Harry Walker was delighted. One day in 1990 Harry Walker, by then living in Leeds, Alabama, called up White and said that he would like to visit him at his home in Pennsylvania. White said that Harry Walker ought to know that he was divorced now and that the woman he was living with was not black. Walker laughed and said, “Bill, that stuff doesn’t bother me anymore—I’m way past that.” So he came up to visit with White, and his visit became something of an annual trip. White was touched by how much one man had changed over the years.

  The Cardinals slipped badly in 1965, going from first place to seventh, winning 80 games while losing 81. Curt Simmons seemed to age overnight, and his record went to 9-15; Ray Sadecki had a dreadful season, winning 6, losing 15, and seeing his ERA balloon up to 5.21. There were signs that Bill White and Ken Boyer might be slipping: their respective run productions were down; Boyer was thirty-four, and Bill White was about to be thirty-two. So the Cardinals began to move for youth. Ken Boyer went to the Mets for Al Jackson, the fine left-hander, and Charley Smith; Bill White, Dick Groat, and Bob Uecker were traded to the Phils for Art Mahaffey, Alex Johnson, and Pat Corrales; and Ray Sadecki was traded to San Francisco for Orlando Cepeda. The 1966 team improved its win-loss record to 83-79 and moved up to sixth place.

  Then, in 1967, the team came together. Viewed by his employers in San Francisco as a morose, somewhat alien malingerer, Orlando Cepeda blossomed on this racially harmonious team, and at critical moments he seemed to carry the whole team with his bat. Roger Maris came over from the Yankees to play for two more years, delighted to be liberated from the declining Yankees and out of the city he had come to hate, to play now, instead, in a city where he felt at ease, and where expectations of what he could do were far less grandiose. Still bothered by a bad wrist, he was no longer a power hitter, but he was an excellent all-around player, and he gave the Cardinals what was probably the best outfield in the league. Mike Shannon, who became his close friend, went to third base, and Dal Maxvill became one of the best shortstops in the league. In addition, Steve Carlton, Nelson Briles, and Ray Washburn were finally surfacing as dependable starting pitchers, with Carlton showing signs of potential greatness. The 1967 team, led on the field and off by Gibson and Cepeda, won the National League pennant by ten games. Gibson, in particular, loved playing with Cepeda, who drove in 111 runs in 1967. When Gibson was pitching and it was time for the bus to leave the hotel for the park, Red Schoendienst would look at his watch and give the word to the driver to go. But Gibson would check out who was there and who was not there, and if Cepeda was not aboard, he would stop the bus. “No way we go until Cepeda is on board,” he would say. No one contradicted Bob Gibson on the day he pitched, and so the bus would wait.

  In 1968, what was essentially the same team won by almost the same margin. The Cardinal players were uncommonly proud to be part of those teams, for they won not by dint of pure talent or pure power—San Francisco was far richer in terms of pure talent. Rather, they won through intelligence, playing hard and aggressively, and because they had a sense of purpose that cut across racial lines in a way that was still extremely unusual in the world of sports.

  That special cohesiveness came to an end after the 1968 World Series. There was a glimmer of what was to come, a Sports Illustrated cover near the end of the season about them as the most expensive team in baseball, and revealing the salaries of each of the starting nine players and their manager. Although the total was only $607,000—less than what a utility player would get some twenty-five years later—it seemed a fortune at the time, and it changed the way the team was perceived by sportswriters, by some fans, and, in the end, by their owner. (The salaries hardly seem that grand now: Maris—$75,000, McCarver—$60,000, Gibson—$85,000, Shannon—$40,000, Brock—$70,000, Cepeda—$80,000, Flood—$72,500, Javier—$45,000, Maxvill—$37,500, and Schoendienst, the manager—$42,000). Bob Burnes, the sports columnist for the St. Louis Globe Democrat, a man not known by the players for working the locker room hard or for his personal knowledge of the players, wrote a column after their bitter final-game World Series defeat in which he theorized that the Cardinals had lost because they had thought more about their clothes than about winning. That column struck many of the players as perhaps the stupidest thing ever written about them, and thirty years later they still seethed about it.

  In the off-season after the 1968 season, Gussie Busch, deeply offended by the rising salary demands of his players, and by the growing pressure for a strong union and by a brief strike, made the first of several mistakes that helped destroy his own team. What may have set him off as much as anything else was the rejection by Curt Flood of an offer for $77,500. Flood told Busch that if he wanted to sign a player who was the best center fielder in baseball and a .300 hitter as well, it would cost him $90,000, “which is not seventy-seven five, and is not eighty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine.” Flood got his contract, but to Busch, who remembered how he had helped Flood out earlier when he had financial troubles, this was one more sign of the player as ingrate. In late March 1969, Busch called a special meeting of the team; he walked into the Cardinal locker room during spring training, and, accompanied by aides from The Brewery and by the press, whose members were there at his specific invitation, he dressed down his players. It was a memorable, humiliating experience for the team, an odd, rambling, somewhat incoherent speech in which the principal theme was that the players were cheating their fans. The owner himself seemed to think that the Cardinals were a nonprofit organization, a kind of athletic charity he sponsored out of civic pride. He outlined all that The Brewery had done for the players and for baseball, how much it had invested in the facilities in St. Louis. The person who was taking the risk each season, he said, was the owner, not the players. “You don’t put two million people into a stadium by wishful thinking,” he said. “It takes hundreds of people, working every day to make it possible for eighteen men to play a game of baseball that lasts for about two hours.” Busch reminded the players of the investment made in the new ball park by civic-minded businessmen. Why, he himself was seventy years old, and the last thing in the world he needed, he said, was a new ball park. So much was being done for the players, he said, and they did not seem to appreciate it.

  The fans, he said, were beginning to turn away from the sport. “If you don’t already know it, I can tell you right now—from the letters, ph
one calls, and conversations we’ve had recently—that fans are no longer as sure as they were before about their high regard for the game and the players.” He then complained to them about their outside business activities. The players, he said, had lost touch. “Too many fans are saying our players are getting fat ... that they now only think of money ... and less of the game itself. ... Fans are telling us now that if we intend to raise prices to pay for the high salaries and so on and on, they will stop coming to the games, they will not watch and will not listen. They say they can do other things with their time and their money.” He ended with a peroration about the fans: “I urge you to watch your attitudes. I plead with you not to kill the enthusiasm of the fans and the kids for whom you have become such idols. They are the ones who make you popular. They are the ones who make your salary and your pension possible.” Then he urged them to go out and show the world that they were still champions. Then, just to make sure that the message got through, the Cardinals traded Cepeda, whom the other players thought the heart of the team, to Atlanta for Joe Torre, who was a good player but who did not arrive in St. Louis under optimum circumstances. The 1969 team was clearly a better team than the Mets, who went on to win the division, but it was an embittered team that played well below its potential.