October 1964

by David Halberstam

  The whole new thrust of baseball—a more aggressive union, higher salaries, and, soon, greater player freedom—was alien to Gussie Busch, who saw the Cardinals as his success, not the success of his players. He was a businessman and he had made a fatal mistake—he had turned the salary dispute with his players into a personal matter. He had allowed his very considerable ego to get between him and what was good for the ball club. That meant he was sure to be the loser. In February 1972 he gave orders to trade Steve Carlton, then on the threshold of being one of the greatest left-handers in baseball history, because of a ten-thousand-dollar difference in salary negotiations; a few weeks later he got rid of Jerry Reuss, a promising young left-handed pitcher, because Reuss had refused to shave off his mustache and because he too had held out.

  But perhaps the most important trade the Cardinals made or tried to make was one after the 1969 season, when they tried to package McCarver, Curt Flood, and several other players to the Phillies for, among others, Richie Allen. At that moment Flood was thirty-one, the best center fielder in baseball, and a career .293 hitter. He had asked for $100,000. Busch, already angered by the previous set of negotiations, had had enough. As happens in these matters, Curt Flood found out that he was no longer working for the St. Louis Cardinals when a local reporter called to find out what he thought about the trade. Curt Flood was the quiet man. Bob Gibson, his friend and longtime road roommate, remembered a certain delicacy about him, a sensibility and an aesthetic that could easily have been ground down by the system—not just of baseball, but of race in America in those years. Baseball was a tough place: other men like him, talented enough to play baseball, had not been strong enough and had unraveled under the pressure of the life around them. What saved Curt Flood, Gibson believed, was a rare inner toughness. It allowed him to survive and triumph in the racist world of minor-league baseball, in which he had never let local prejudice and cruelty define him. He went on to play for more than a decade in the majors. At first his inner toughness was something that perhaps only his teammates and some of the opposing players saw, although the Philadelphia Phillies, the St. Louis ownership, and indeed the rest of organized baseball would eventually learn how determined and willful he could be.

  “If I had been a foot-shuffling porter, they might at least have given me a pocket watch,” he wrote of finding out he was being traded to the Phillies. At the time Flood, just thirty-two, son of poor people who worked myriad menial jobs to support their six children, did the unthinkable: he refused to report. It was what many an established player, unexpectedly traded, had thought of doing. In retrospect, though, it was not surprising that the first baseball player to draw the line on the reserve clause was black. Blacks felt far more alienated from the norms of society than did whites, and in the case of athletes, they were far more sensitive to being thought of as chattel.

  White athletes, often privileged and pampered since they were teenagers, were rarely skeptical about those who had treated them, on the surface, at least, so lovingly; they tended to accept society and the game at face value. Flood himself wrote of Stan Musial, a man he greatly admired, that Musial often said loving things about the game and the Cardinal organization, “not because he felt it was politic to do so, but because he believed every word he spoke.” The black players emerging in the sports world in this new era were different. In basketball, a professional sport steadily gaining in national acceptance, the leadership for a model professional athlete’s union had already come from a generation of exceptionally thoughtful black athletes. Almost all had been to college and many were graduates of the nation’s best schools, whereas most baseball players tended to be country boys, their political viewpoints fixed when they were teenagers, and thus they were far more malleable to the owners.

  Unlike Gibson, Brock, and White, Curt Flood had never been to college, but like them he was intelligent, and driven. He was a serious painter who had something of an ancillary career doing portrait work. He listened carefully, not just to what people said but to what they did not say. He was articulate about any number of things that grated on black players in those days—the great differences in endorsements, the wariness of some white reporters to interview black athletes and to treat them with respect in newspaper articles. In the past, ballplayers who got into fights on the field and who were scrappy and verbal were considered tough; Curt Flood brought a whole new definition of toughness to the game. There had been certain tipoffs in the past as to what kind of man he was, a willingness to play in exceptional pain, and a willingness to stand in against Don Drysdale—who, along with Gibson, was one of the two most terrifying pitchers in baseball, a man who loved to throw at hitters, and who said of Curt Flood that he was the toughest out for him in baseball.

  Flood was the first to challenge what to him was a demonstrably unfair labor law, one that bestowed all rights on the owners at the expense of the players. “I want to go out like a man instead of a bottle cap,” Flood told Marvin Miller, who became the head of the baseball players’ union.

  When Flood mounted his lonely challenge to baseball’s reserve clause, Miller was cautious at first, and played the devil’s advocate to see if he would have the staying power for so hard a struggle. Miller was aware from his own experiences of the pressure that would be brought to bear on Flood by the owners and by the commissioner. Miller went down the list of things that could happen, and found that Flood remained determined to make his challenge. He was, thought Miller, a flinty young man. It did not surprise Miller that the first challenge had come from a black player on the Cardinals. The Cardinals struck him as being different from other teams in the way they had managed to deal with the issue of race: the black players whom he had first met on the Cardinals struck him as men of exceptional character—good baseball players, but by no means only baseball players.

  Flood’s friends, such as Tim McCarver, with whom he had played and with whom he was being traded, tried to impress on him the serious consequences of what he was doing. “You’ll never get another job in baseball,” McCarver told his friend. “I know that,” Flood answered. Miller asked Flood to come before a meeting of all the players’ representatives, and after a long tough session in which they asked him hard questions—such as what he would do if the owners offered him a lot of money to drop the case—he said he would go forward. “I can’t be bought,” he said. Tom Haller of the Dodgers asked how much of what drove him was race. After all, Haller pointed out, it was a time of black militance. Flood thought it a fair question and answered that yes, what black players went through was often worse and more difficult than what white players did, but what he was doing was for all baseball players. It was time, he said, to draw the line. No other profession in the country left talented men so little control over their own destiny and deprived them of true market value.

  So Curt Flood did not play for Philadelphia. Instead he sat out the season and went ahead with a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court, where he finally lost a close decision (the more conservative Nixon appointees tended to vote against him), but in so doing he began the process that would soon bring baseball players free agency, and thereby change the face and structure of baseball negotiations.

  Tony Kubek and Bobby Richardson were close friends as well as roommates, and they remained friends after their professional careers were over. Kubek went on to become an announcer for NBC on the Game of the Week, and then for the Yankees, where he distinguished himself by his independence and willingness to make calls that angered the Yankee owner, George Steinbrenner. Richardson, a seriously religious Christian fundamentalist, became the baseball coach at the University of South Carolina and later at the Reverend Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University. At one point he decided to run for Congress, as a conservative Republican. He asked several of his former Yankee colleagues to help campaign for him, and Mickey Mantle showed up, enjoying himself immensely, going around repeating over the loudspeaker that this was Mickey Mantle and that he would not vote for Bo
bby Richardson for dog catcher. Joe DiMaggio also showed up. But when Richardson asked his closest friend on the team, Kubek, to help out, Kubek called back and said that he had checked out with the Democratic party, and that the man Richardson was running against was not a bad man, and that it was hard for Kubek to back Richardson since he was a liberal Democrat. Well, that’s Tony, Richardson thought, stubborn as ever.

  Marty Appel, who had lionized Mantle as a boy growing up in suburban New York, eventually went to work for the Yankees, and one of his most important early jobs was going over Mantle’s mail with him. Appel loved doing it because it always gave him some prime time with the player he had so admired, and when Appel decided on a career, he became a baseball executive and in time worked doing the production of Yankee baseball; he went on to write several books about baseball as well. As he grew older he watched Mantle age and he came to feel a growing affection for him. One of the saddest days in Appel’s professional career came when, after the star had lingered on too long in his career, the team statistician had come in to Appel’s office and said that it was his melancholy responsibility to report that either on that day or on the following day Mantle’s lifetime batting average was going to fall beneath .300. That meant, Appel thought, that he was going to fall off the list of the immortals, the lifetime .300 hitters—which he did, ending up with a career .298 average. If it was not a happy day for Appel, it was not a happy day for Mantle either, and he often told friends that he wished he had retired in 1964, the last great season. He hated the fact that when he looked at the baseball encyclopedias, he always saw the figure .298. Mickey Mamie’s final years in baseball were hard ones. His body had worn down and his talents were eroded, and he was playing, in his final four years, for weak teams. Opposing pitchers had a luxury they had never enjoyed in the past—that of pitching around him. He saw few good pitches and he never hit .300 again. Mantle stayed on after the 1964 season in part because management pleaded with him to and he felt a strong personal loyalty to the Yankee organization, and in part because he was extremely well paid for playing and had nothing much else to do. In the years after baseball, particularly as he lived into his sixties, he was extremely hard on himself. Rather than accepting his magnificent career for what it was, he became haunted by the fact that he had not been better, that he had not taken better care of his body and stayed in shape during the offseason, that instead of being the best ever, or one of the very best ever, he had in his own mind slipped below the level of the greatest players of his era, such as Willie Mays and Hank Aaron. In contrast to him, they had taken good care of their bodies and as such had prolonged their careers, as he had not. At night he had terrible recurring anxiety dreams. In one of them he would arrive at the ball park late only to find that the game had started without him, and he would have to find some way of getting through the wire fence so that he could play with his teammates. In another he got to the team bus just in time and got to the game and came up to bat. He would hit the ball hard, but then he would seem immobilized at the plate and he would be thrown out at first by a good throw from the outfield.

  His drinking, which had been heavy when he was a player—it was a world, he later said, where everyone was always pushing a drink at you, a couple of beers in the clubhouse after the game, and then some drinks before dinner, and then some more drinks after dinner—became worse after his retirement. He missed his teammates, and he missed the game, for this was the only world he felt comfortable in, and he felt ill prepared to deal with the more complicated social situations of his life after baseball. He remained shy and reserved, and most of the work he found in his post-baseball life was promotional, and he was thrown again and again into situations where he was with strangers, and where he felt ill at ease.

  In 1985, when his teammate Roger Maris died of cancer at the age of fifty-one, Mantle took it particularly hard, in no small part because Maris, to his mind, had been so much better a family man than Mantle had. It was as if he felt that if one of them had had to die young, it should have been himself, not Maris. At some point he became a full-fledged alcoholic. His behavior, late in the evening, became darker and darker. His friends—and he had many of them, for there was a part of him that remained warm, generous, and genuine—were bothered by his drinking and what seemed to be increasingly self-destructive behavior. He was funny and often exuberant earlier in the day, but as he drank he had the ability to turn ugly. Increasingly he was unable to recall his behavior the next day. That he had a serious drinking problem was hardly a secret and strangers were warned that they ought to try and get to him relatively early in the day. In 1994, at the age of sixty-two, warned by his doctors that his liver was deteriorating at an alarming rate and that he might not live much longer, Mantle checked himself into the Betty Ford clinic in California, and when he came out he had stopped drinking. His friends felt a vast sense of relief. When he went before a national television audience, his face was obviously worn down by those years of hard living, but he was candid and unsparing about how self-destructive he had been, and how embarrassed by his own behavior he was. There was a certain poignancy to the scene, for the interviewer was Bob Costas, the talented young NBC broadcaster, who, growing up in Long Island, had been the prototypical Mantle fan, a walking encyclopedia of Mantle trivia. As an adult he still carried Mantle’s bubble-gum card with him as a talisman. On the occasion of Costas’s wedding day eleven years earlier, Mantle had left a message on his phone service wishing him a happy life. He had been a hero in his youth because of his limitless athletic gifts: now, as a man in his sixties, going before the nation to explain his weaknesses with such remarkable candor, he was performing what his former teammate Steve Hamilton thought was the most courageous act of his life.

  Many of the St. Louis players went on to unusually successful lives after baseball. Both Lou Brock and Bob Gibson went to the Hall of Fame. Gibson, as imposing in his years after baseball as he was during his career, did some coaching for his friend Joe Torre in Atlanta and later with the Mets, though there was a sense that he was too driven and too fierce to deal with many of the modern ballplayers, young men who seemed to arrive in his care with handsome guaranteed contracts, and whose backgrounds and attitudes toward life were so different from his own. For a time he ran a restaurant in his hometown of Omaha. Some of his friends thought he would be an excellent broadcaster, but his demeanor and his reputation for bluntness made many professional baseball people nervous. Brock became an entrepreneurial business figure, and had a sports business and a restaurant in St. Louis. Tim McCarver, with his love of both the language and the game, became one of the game’s best announcers, though he felt a growing distance between himself and many of the younger players, a difference that was highly publicized in a celebrated moment when during a play-off game he made critical comments about Deion Sanders, a talented if immature and egocentric young man who played both professional football and baseball. Sanders responded by dousing McCarver with a bucket of ice water during his team’s victory celebration. Bill White went into an extremely successful career in broadcasting and eventually became president of the National League, where he came to be regarded as a man of exceptional judiciousness and fairness. Curt Flood, whose place in American life transcended baseball because of his historic early challenge to the reserve clause, had a difficult time for a number of years after his career ended, struggling with a drinking problem, but eventually he steadied himself, did some announcing on the West Coast, and emerged as a proud, dignified figure who turned down the Players Association when it talked to him about making some kind of belated compensation for what he had gone through in his legal challenge. Mike Shannon, his career cut short by an unusual illness, became an announcer and restaurateur in St. Louis, his hometown. Julian Javier named his son after his beloved teammate Stan Musial, and in time Stan Javier became a major-league player. Dal Maxvill, a young player catapulted into the starting lineup during the Series because of injuries to Javier, stayed in professional ba
seball and eventually became general manager of the Cardinals. Ken Boyer was traded to the Mets, which was traumatic for his family back in Alba, since his parents believed that he would be with the Cardinals all his life. He played for several more years, and ended up managing the Cardinals for three years, before dying at the age of fifty-one of cancer. Curt Simmons ran a golf course in Philadelphia with his longtime teammate and friend Robin Roberts. Ray Sadecki coached in the minor-league system for the Chicago Cubs. Roger Craig stayed in baseball for much of his life, first as a coach and then as a manager for the San Diego Padres and the San Francisco Giants. Barney Schultz’s lifetime of loving baseball was capped by that one marvelous season in St. Louis. He remained in baseball much of his life as a coach, and then retired to the town just outside Philadelphia where he had grown up. At the time of publication of this book Bing Devine was doing some scouting for the Philadelphia Phillies. Ironically, of all those Cardinals, Bob Uecker, who had been thought of as perhaps the most marginal player on the team, became the best known by dint of a series of beer commercials highlighting the limits of his playing ability and his role in a television sitcom, and at reunions of the team he had to stay at a separate hotel, away from the other members, in order to avoid the crush of fans.

  Whitey Ford retired like his close friend Mickey Mantle and went to the Hall of Fame shortly afterward. They remained close friends and still ran a baseball fantasy camp, designed to allow middle-aged men to think for a moment that they were younger and playing in their own league of dreams. Of the other Yankees, Clete Boyer was soon traded to Atlanta, and he finished up his career playing baseball in Japan, where he managed to distinguish himself in the eyes of the Japanese by making an effort to learn the language and customs. He eventually returned to the Yankees as a coach and still coaches for his old team. Jake Gibbs, who never quite reached the heights that Yankees scouts had hoped for, also became a coach for the Yankees. Gibbs spent the second half of his professional career as the baseball coach at Ole Miss, where he had starred in both baseball and football. Elston Howard was traded late in his career to the Red Sox, but came back as a coach, and had he not died young of a stroke, he might have ended up as one of baseball’s early black managers. Joe Pepitone was traded in time to Houston and then to Chicago, and eventually ended up playing for a good deal of money in Japan. There, his tendency to say he could not play because of injuries but his ability to turn up on the floor of a disco did not amuse the Japanese baseball world, and his career there was abbreviated. Bob Whiting pointed out in his wonderful book on Americans who played baseball in Japan, The Chrysanthemum and the Bat, all American players who were believed to be dogging it came to be known by the Japanese as “Pepitones.” He had some unfortunate run-ins with the law upon his return to America, and eventually became a hitting instructor for the Yankees. Ralph Terry, just as he suspected, was the player to be named later in the Ramos deal, went to the Indians, and made a brief return to New York (with the Mets) in 1965; he went from baseball to a second career playing on the senior golf circuit. Phil Linz ran a restaurant in New York for a time and then moved to suburban New York, where he was in the life-insurance business. Mel Stottlemyre, spent much of his second career as a pitching coach for the crosstown Mets. At the writing of this book, he was the pitching coach for the Houston Astros. Always politically irreverent, Jim Bouton wrote a book, Ball Four, which was a major best-seller and was an early iconoclastic view of life among the Yankees. He was completing a novel about baseball at the writing of this book. Tom Tresh’s career was cut short by injuries and he went back to coach at Central Michigan. Hector Lopez did some major-league scouting and then retired to a small town outside Tampa. Steve Hamilton coached at his own alma mater, Morehead State, and eventually became its athletic director; and Pete Mikkelsen bought some land in the state of Washington and became a grape farmer. Pete Ramos coached junior-college ball in Miami and did some scouting for the California Angels. Being fired by the Yankees did not end Yogi Berra’s career. He managed for the Mets, and took them to the 1973 World Series, where they lost in the seventh game; he came back to manage for a second time with the Yankees in the mid-eighties. When he was abruptly fired by George Steinbrenner, he decided as a point of honor not to return to the Stadium for old-timers’ games. He remained something of phenomenon in baseball and on Madison Avenue, and as this book was written, some forty-eight years after he first broke in with the Yankees, he could be seen regularly in a major commercial pronouncing one of his most famous Yogiisms, saying that it wasn’t over until it was over. Tom Greenwade died a week short of his eighty-second birthday in 1986. He remained the great Yankee scout of his generation. His last great discovery, Bobby Murcer, hailed as Mantle’s successor, proved to be a good but not great ballplayer, as some of the front office had earlier claimed. It was Murcer’s misfortune that he arrived during the team’s prolonged decline. The decision of the major leagues to go to a formal draft not unlike basketball and football profoundly changed Greenwade’s freedom in signing players. Buck O’Neil finally retired after scouting for many years for the Cubs. He remained in Kansas City, where he had made his home when he played and managed for the Monarchs and where he now runs the Negro League Baseball Hall of Fame. Interviewing him was one of the singular pleasures that came with writing this book.