But as more young talent arrived, including catcher Randy Hundley, second baseman Glenn Beckert, and shortstop Don Kessinger, Durocher’s Cubs improved. They won 87 games in 1967, with Durocher parceling out occasional rest to the regulars, especially Banks, now a first baseman with creaky knees.
Williams was the exception. By the end of the 1967 season, he had played in every game since September 22, 1963—656 straight.
“Players on other teams would come up and say, ‘Man, why don’t you get some rest?’ They thought I was showing them up. They figured if I did it, they had to, too,” Williams recalled. “There were plenty of days when I could have taken off, when I was tired or sore. But I wanted to be out there. Not many guys are wired that way. Most guys like a day off now and then. But a guy who never sits out, his mind is geared up for it, his body is geared up for it. If he’s not out there, he’s a miserable soul. That was me.”
Durocher was impressed. “Billy Williams never gets excited. Never gets mad. Never throws a bat. You write his name down in the same spot every day and forget it. He will play left. He will bat third. Billy Williams is a machine,” Durocher said.
The manager thought Williams’s streak was important and vowed to keep it going after he broke Ashburn’s record for outfielders in 1968. “Billy’s got a good chance of topping Musial’s [National League] record. I’ll rest him occasionally, but when I do, I’ll always have him go up and pinch-hit so he can keep his record going,” Durocher said.
The Cubs’ developing talent coalesced in 1969, producing the franchise’s best team in years. They won 24 of their first 35 games to move into first place in the National League East—it was the first year of divisional play—and built a nine-game lead by June. A decade after the White Sox’s pennant-winning season, the Cubs owned Chicago.
When the season began, Williams had played in 819 straight games, 76 short of Musial’s record. His pursuit burbled in the background of the Cubs’ triumphant season.
On June 13, the Cubs played the Reds on a Friday night in Cincinnati. Williams was 18 games shy of Musial. Batting in the top of the sixth, he swung at a high slider, chopping his bat down. The ball caromed awkwardly off his bat and hit his right instep. “One of the hardest balls I hit all season; it felt real bad,” Williams said later.
Able to continue playing, he hobbled to the plate in the top of the ninth, took two pitches, and swung hard at a fastball, making contact. The ball soared over the infield and disappeared beyond the right-field fence. The Cubs erupted in their dugout, but Williams limped around the bases, returned to the dugout, and told Durocher, “Get me out of there.” The next morning, he could barely walk.
Fortunately, a night game was scheduled, giving Williams all day to try to heal. A trainer applied a heat treatment and massage. Willie Smith, a reserve, took his place in the lineup, but Durocher wanted to keep Williams’s streak going. So did Williams. He pinch-hit in the top of the sixth, drawing a walk. A pinch runner replaced him.
Williams’s foot was still sore when the Cubs and Reds played a doubleheader on June 15. Another reserve replaced him in the lineup for the first game. Durocher planned on using the same strategy, letting Williams pinch-hit to keep the streak going. It almost backfired when rain began falling in the fourth inning with the Reds up, 3–0. Williams had not batted and remained on the bench as the Cubs went down in the top of the fifth. The game was official now. If it suddenly was called for rain, it would go into the books without Williams having played. But the rain stopped, and Williams hit with the bases loaded in the top of the sixth. He drew a walk, driving in a run, and was replaced by a pinch runner.
In the second game of the doubleheader, Williams again was out of the lineup, but he pinch-hit in the top of the sixth and drew a walk—his third walk in two days. The Cubs won, improving their best-in-baseball record to 41-19, and Williams was back in the lineup the next day for the start of a four-game series in Pittsburgh. He banged out seven hits in the four games. “Those days off seemed to help me,” he said. “I might do it again if I start feeling tired.”
First, he had to pass Musial. He was on schedule to do it on June 29, 1969, by playing in a doubleheader against the Cardinals. The Cubs organized a “Billy Williams Day” celebration. It was a sunny Sunday, and more than 41,000 fans, the largest crowd of the season, were in attendance to cheer on the first-place team and their durable left fielder. Another 10,000 fans reportedly were turned away. Williams had long subsisted in the shadow of Banks. Even Santo, a garrulous fan favorite, had a higher profile. But the quiet, dependable Williams finally was receiving his due.
The first game of the doubleheader was a scoreless duel for seven innings between a pair of future Hall of Fame pitchers, the Cubs’ Ferguson Jenkins and the Cardinals’ Bob Gibson. Williams started a rally in the bottom of the eighth, whacking a double down the right-field line. Banks singled him in, and Willie Smith followed with a two-run homer. The Cubs won.
When the game ended, a bank of microphones was set up by home plate. Williams had played in 895 straight games, tying Musial. Members of the Cubs’ front office spoke. Williams was given a car, a boat, a puppy, and more. His high-school-sweetheart wife stood to his left, his mother to his right. When he stepped to the microphone, his soft voice was barely audible. “I want to thank the almighty God for giving me the ability to play major league baseball, and for protecting me over all these games I’ve played in,” he said. The fans responded with a roar.
The second game was a rout. The Cubs scored four runs in the bottom of the first, as Williams singled and Banks hit a three-run homer. Williams went on to collect three more hits, giving him five for the day, and the Cubs completed the sweep. It was a great day to root for the Cubs, to play for the Cubs, to make history with the Cubs. They had an eight-game lead over the New York Mets, and their first trip to the postseason since World War II seemed certain. Meanwhile, Williams now owned the National League Ironman record. “What a beautiful day; it couldn’t have been any better,” he told reporters.
On August 16, the Cubs held a nine-game lead. But they started to slip, losing three in a row, then four in a row, while the Mets got hot. Their lead was down to five games in early September and disappeared entirely when they lost eight in a row. A glorious summer gave way to the grimmest of autumns. Durocher pulled every string imaginable. Nothing worked. The Mets pulled ahead, won the division, and went on to capture the World Series. The Cubs’ 92-win total was their highest since 1945, but the season would be remembered only as a debacle, the year they completely collapsed.
Williams slumped down the stretch. He had spoken about possibly resting occasionally so he would feel fresher in September, but he was not going to sit out a game as the Cubs tried to save their season.
Early in 1970, he became the first National Leaguer to play in a thousand games in a row. It appeared his streak would not end soon. “By then, I wanted to keep it going,” Williams recalled for this book. “I had never thought that much about it until I passed Ashburn. Then people started talking about Musial, and it got in the paper, and it got in my head, and you get where you want to do it. Once I had Stan’s record, it was a matter of, ‘Let’s see how many games I can accumulate.’”
Seeking to bounce back from their 1969 disaster, the Cubs led their division for most of the first half of the season, until a 12-game losing streak sent them tumbling before the All-Star break. The Pirates passed them. So did the Mets. Williams kept them in the race almost by himself; he would end the season with 205 hits, 42 home runs, and 129 runs batted in, all career highs.
Durocher did not want to rest him. But in early August, with the Cubs on the road, the outfielder approached his manager. Always a man of few words, he said, “Leo, take me out.”
Williams had gone as far as he could. “I was tired. It had become a struggle to do a lot of stuff,” he recalled. “After you play in so many games, you might not go from first to third on a hit to right, or you might not catch up to a
ball in the outfield, might be slow getting there. I wasn’t playing at 100 percent. I figured with rest you could regenerate your body.”
He asked out on August 6, after struggling during a series in Montreal. The Cubs traveled to Philadelphia, and Williams was out of the lineup on August 7. “Sometimes when I’m up at bat, I’m so bushed I feel like I’ve got nothing left,” he told reporters when the lineup was posted before the game. “It’s time for the streak to end. It’s become too much of a big deal.”
Reporters raced to the press box and filed stories about the streak ending at 1,092 straight games. Williams watched from the dugout as the Phillies built a lead and carried it into the late innings. But when the Cubs, trailing, 4–1, loaded the bases in the top of the ninth, Durocher sent Williams up to bat against a right-handed reliever. Williams lashed a pitch down the left-field line, foul by inches. He ended up striking out, and the Cubs lost, but his streak was alive.
That was enough rest, Durocher decided. The Cubs were in a pennant race. They needed him. Williams was back in the lineup the next day and stayed there. A little over a week later, he passed Joe Sewell’s mark of 1,103 straight games, leaving only Gehrig and Scott ahead of him.
Inevitably, reporters asked about Gehrig. Could he go that far? He was 32 years old. To reach Gehrig, he would need to play almost seven more seasons without a break. The thought exhausted him. “When people started talking about Gehrig, I was like, ‘No, I don’t think I can do that,’” Williams recalled. “I had nowhere to go as far as another record.”
In early September, the Cubs opened a three-game series against Philadelphia at home. They were closing in on first place, the stakes rising. But Williams went 0-for-6 in the first game, then 0-for-4 in the second. He was still hitting .317, but he “wasn’t getting the bat around, wasn’t performing at the plate,” he said later. After the second game, he reiterated to Durocher that he would not mind missing a game.
The next day was September 4, a muggy late-summer afternoon in Chicago. When Williams arrived at the park, he was met at the clubhouse door by one of the Cubs’ coaches, Joey Amalfitano. “Billy, Leo doesn’t have you in the lineup,” Amalfitano said gravely. “You can go home if you want. You don’t have to be here for this.”
Williams smiled. “No, I’m going to stay,” he said.
He had been out of the lineup before, so it wasn’t unusual for him to be in the dugout when Ferguson Jenkins tossed the first pitch at 1:30 p.m. But as the game unfolded, it became clear this day was different. The Cubs took the lead in the first. Jim Hickman hit a three-run homer. By the fifth, they had a 7–2 lead. “If we had been behind, I might have brought him in. But we weren’t,” Durocher said.
Williams moved around nervously, spent an inning in the bullpen, another in the clubhouse, and settled on the dugout bench. He had played in 1,117 straight games. “It is one of the most amazing individual feats in baseball history,” one sportswriter had written. The fans at Wrigley Field were clued in to the situation. They started a chant in the seventh inning: “We want Billy!” Williams left the dugout for the clubhouse, vowing not to return. He flipped on a radio and listened to the final innings there.
“If I had stayed on the bench, I would have started thinking about maybe getting in there,” he said.
Jenkins was due to bat in the bottom of the eighth, an ideal situation for Williams to hit. Durocher did not flinch. Jenkins struck out and then retired the Phillies in order in the top of the ninth. The last out was a ground ball to Kessinger, the shortstop. When his throw nestled in Banks’s glove at first, the game was over, and so was Williams’s streak.
“I have mixed emotions right now, part relief and part sadness,” Williams told reporters. “But all I know is that if I start a new streak tomorrow, I want it to include some World Series games.”
The Mets were coming to Chicago for a crucial series, part of Williams’s rationale for ending the streak when he did. He wanted to focus on helping the Cubs get to the postseason and thought he might play better if he no longer had to think about the streak. “It just seemed like the right time,” he said.
His strategy worked. He had two hits the next day and two more the day after that. Ending the streak seemed to energize him as the Cubs battled the Mets and Pirates for the division title.
But the Cubs faltered, losing three in a row, then four of five, and ended up in third place, out of the postseason for the 26th straight year. Williams finished second in the National League MVP voting.
Williams would play four more years for the Cubs, appearing in over 90 percent of the team’s games, and then finish his career by switching leagues and playing for the Oakland A’s for two seasons. In 1973, when his batting average dropped below .300 for the first time in four years, Williams was asked by Chicago Sun-Times sportswriter Edgar Munzel if he possibly had worn himself out by playing in every game for almost seven years.
“I don’t really know,” Williams replied. “But I’m certain of one thing. If I had it to do over again, I’d never get involved in it. When you get into an endurance streak like that, you go out there and play many days when you’re hurt or not feeling well. And that does take something extra out of you.”
Few players grasp the complex nature of a consecutive-game streak better than Dale Murphy, who fashioned a long streak while playing for the Atlanta Braves in the 1980s.
A slender, long-necked outfielder with a boyish grin, long dark locks, and a devastating right-handed batting stroke, he won the National League Most Valuable Player award in 1982 and 1983, then went on to hit 36 home runs in 1984 and 37 in 1985. By July 1986, he had the longest active consecutive-game streak in the majors, having played in more than 700 games in a row. Murphy was proud of the streak, but now he was in a horrid slump at the plate, feeling frustrated and frazzled. Murphy thought it might help to take a day off, just sit and watch, hopefully clear his head. But that would end his streak.
Murphy was a team leader, but Ted Simmons, the Braves’ 37-year-old catcher, was higher up the chain of clubhouse elders. Though now a backup, Simmons had played in the major leagues since the 1960s and could offer counsel on just about any subject. Aware that Murphy was feeling conflicted, he approached the younger star in the clubhouse before a game.
“Let’s have a heart-to-heart,” Simmons said.
They found a quiet place to talk. “So, you’ve got a streak going. What’s it mean to you?” Simmons asked. “If it means something to you, keep going. But if not, well, what are you feeling about it?”
Murphy paused. “I think I need a day off,” he finally said.
He had not missed a game in almost five years, since September 25, 1981. For most of that time, he had abhorred the idea of taking a day off.
“I was young and healthy and wanted to be out there,” Murphy recalled for this book. “This was baseball, a sport that, let’s face it, isn’t that physically taxing. A guy in his mid-20s, even his mid-30s, you should be able to go out there and play every day. Yeah, the travel is a bit of a challenge, but come on, you’re flying on chartered planes, sleeping in the best hotels. Maybe the time-zone changes get you a little out of whack at times, but you can handle it.”
He cared about his streak, making sure—with cooperation from his managers—to get into games on the rare occasions when he did not start. On August 19, 1982, he pinch-hit in the eighth inning. On July 20, 1983, he went in as a defensive replacement in the ninth. On May 22, 1985, he pinch-hit again late in the game.
Earlier in 1986, he had cut his right hand while trying to make a catch against the outfield wall. It took nine stitches to close the wound, and Murphy feared his streak was over. But taking batting practice the next day, he found the stitches did not keep him from swinging the bat normally. The Braves’ manager, Chuck Tanner, kept him out of the lineup but used him to pinch-hit in the fifth. Murphy whacked a home run off the New York Mets’ ace, Dwight Gooden.
But as his streak grew, Murphy began to notice he wa
s struggling to stay fresh mentally. “Playing a full season is hard that way,” he recalled. “It’s a game of confidence, being mentally sharp at the plate and just as sharp in the field, and in a season so long, with so much failure bred into it, it’s inevitable that there are times your confidence flags and you aren’t as sharp; times when you say, ‘Hey, I’m a little lost.’ That’s the honest truth. Sometimes it’s hard to say, ‘Hey, let’s go get ’em.’”
He had observed St. Louis’s manager, Whitey Herzog, resting certain Cardinals on Sundays before an off day on Monday and night game on Tuesday, effectively giving the players three straight days off. “It was almost like a mini–All-Star break for them,” Murphy recalled. He was envious.
By the time Murphy and Simmons had their heart-to-heart talk in 1986, Murphy’s streak was the 11th longest in major league history. Simmons advised him to tell Tanner that he wanted to sit one out.
“Your streak is long enough that whoever is managing you is not going to say, ‘Hey, you’re taking a day off.’ You’ve got to be the guy to make the decision,” Simmons said.
Murphy went to Tanner and said he was ready to sit out a game.
“Let’s do it,” Tanner said.
On July 9, 1986, Murphy watched from the dugout as the Braves scored a 7–3 win over the Phillies in Philadelphia. Tanner gave no thought to inserting him as a pinch hitter or defensive replacement. Murphy’s streak ended at 740 games.
“It was a nice thing but not something I wanted to maintain,” Murphy told reporters. “Now it’s over with. It’s better not to have it hanging over my head. It’s better for the team. The streak was always on my mind.”
Initially, he resumed his everyday habit, playing in 174 straight games after his night off. But for the rest of his career after that (he played until 1993 with the Braves, Phillies, and Rockies), he sat out a handful of games every year, becoming a proponent of the benefits of rest. He no longer believed in playing every day. It was not practical, he felt. A player needs a break now and then.
The Streak Page 26
