Authors: David Halberstam
In 1955, the summer he turned twenty-nine, Schultz reached the big leagues with the Cardinals, as a reliever. He pitched in 19 games that season, always in relief, for a total of 29.2 innings. His earned run average was a hefty 7.89, and it did not surprise him greatly that the next year he was sent back to the minor leagues for four more years. In 1959, he made another appearance in the majors, this time as a reliever with Detroit (13 games, 18.1 innings pitched, and an earned run average of 4.42). Thereupon he went back to the minors again. That was pretty much the story of his life, but Barney Schultz not only survived, he persevered. It was far better than the alternatives; he had once taken a winter job working in a plant, and the people who ran it asked him to come back as a foreman. It might well have paid him more than he was making as a minor-league pitcher, but the work did not interest him. Baseball was what he loved. When he was told that he would eventually become a pitching coach, it was more or less how he hoped his career would end up.
As Schultz started the season pitching and coaching for Jacksonville, it was, he thought, a nice moment in his life. He was pitching well that spring. He was primarily a knuckleball pitcher and now he had his knuckler down cold. He could almost always throw it for strikes. In the previous season the Cubs had traded him to the Cardinals, and he had done what was probably the best pitching of his career. He had appeared in a total of 39 games, had won 3 and lost none; even more important, his earned run average was down to 3.59. He had become the classic knuckleball pitcher—no power, but rubber-armed—and the fluttering, dancing ball he threw was the bane of good hitters and catchers alike. (By this time Schultz brought his own catcher’s mitt to the park for the catcher—it was more like a first baseman’s glove than a true catcher’s mitt.) Managers loved him, though, because he could pitch every day.
Just how fragile the world of baseball was was brought home to both the Cardinals and the Dodgers on the night of April 22. Sandy Koufax was matched against Curt Simmons, who had taken to calling himself “the poor man’s Koufax.” Three times in 1963 Koufax had beaten Simmons, including the 4-0 shutout he had thrown during the decisive late-season sweep of the Cardinals, one of eleven shutouts he had pitched that season. The night before the game, at the annual dinner of the Knights of the Cauliflower, which was an extended group of Gussie Busch’s partying pals, the Cardinals’ owner publicly challenged Simmons to beat Koufax this year. If he did not, noted Jack Buck, the broadcaster who was emceeing the dinner, the Anheuser-Busch beer truck might have a new left-handed driver.
The Dodgers came into Busch Stadium on a six-game losing streak. Koufax was having trouble with his left arm and was scheduled to have it X-rayed when he returned to Los Angeles. It was not a happy evening for him. He got the first two batters out, but Bill White went after a wild pitch and managed to reach first as the ball got away from the catcher. Ken Boyer walked on four pitches, and then Charlie James, one of the young players vying for a regular job in the outfield, homered. Koufax finished the inning, but then Walter Alston pulled him from the game. Koufax had not wanted to come out—his arm was obviously hurting him, and he kept shaking his head at John Roseboro, the Dodger catcher, whenever Roseboro called for the curve. Later, the Cardinal doctor examined him and said that he had an inflammation of the left elbow and a slight muscle tear in his left forearm. His arm had apparently been bothering him since spring training, but Koufax thought he could pitch through it. He flew back alone to Los Angeles, ahead of the team, and there the Dodger team doctor gave him a cortisone shot. There was talk of his going on the disabled list. His left arm was not merely an arm; for the Dodgers, for better or worse, it was a season. Curt Simmons won the game, 7-6, even though he gave up a mammoth home run to Frank Howard. He had finally gone against Koufax, albeit Koufax with a bad arm, and he had won. “The boys,” he said of the Cardinal hitters, “kept me off the beer truck. It was close though—it was parked just outside.” The Dodgers were now 1-7. With Koufax and Drysdale on the mound in every big series, they sometimes had seemed invincible to the other National League teams. With Koufax possibly injured, they suddenly seemed quite vulnerable.
W
ITH KOUFAX INJURED, IT
was possible that the hardest throwing pitcher in the league at that moment was Bob Gibson of the Cardinals, just reaching his full power that season. In late May, Gibson threw a masterpiece at home against the Cubs. He had won, 1-0, while striking out twelve men. The Cubs had gotten just four hits off him. He had not walked anyone. Gibson had been bothered by a stiff shoulder earlier in the season, and he was having trouble warming up, so he had polished his car before coming to the park in order to loosen up his right shoulder, and it seemed to work. As the game wore on, he only got stronger, and he retired the last seventeen men in a row. In the ninth inning, he faced and struck out Ron Santo and Billy Williams, and it seemed, said his manager, Johnny Keane, as if he were saying, “Hurry up and get out of there—I want to go home.” His teammate Dick Groat said he had seen him display that kind of power only once before, in a game that Gibson pitched against Pittsburgh when Groat was still a Pirate. The Pirates had gotten three hits off him—two on sliders, one on a curve, none on a fastball. “I felt that for one given night Gibson was the fastest pitcher I ever faced,” Groat said. Questioned by reporters after the game, Ron Santo of the Cubs said he thought that Gibson was now as fast as Koufax at certain times, and that Gibson’s ball had far more movement than that of the other great power pitcher of the league—Jim Maloney of the Reds.
Gibson was talented, to be sure, with a high-velocity fastball and a very good slider, but it was his competitive fire, his intensity, and his willingness to fight every batter on every pitch that came to distinguish him. His ability in baseball did not exist apart from the rest of his being; rather, his ability as a player was an extension of his will as a man. When opposing teams prepared to battle Gibson (and that was the right word:
battle),
they were taking on not just Gibson the pitcher, but Gibson the man.
If anyone knew and had mastered the uses of adversity, it was Bob Gibson. He was born during the Depression in Omaha; his father died three months before he was born, and he was one of seven children. His mother worked in a commercial laundry. The family lived in a four-room shack on the north side of the city; as a boy he was bitten on the ear by a rat. He was small and sickly as a child, and nearly died once from pneumonia. Later, the Gibson family moved to a government housing project, and for the first time they had heat and electricity. His mother, a woman of great courage and determination, somehow managed to make enough money so that there were always food and clothes for her children.
Gibson was a man of unusual self-discipline. That came from his family, especially his brother Josh, the eldest. Fifteen years older than Bob, his legal name was LeRoy, but he was nicknamed Josh. He was a serious, ambitious man, with a master’s degree in history. He had wanted to teach history, but given the ceiling on what an educated black man could do in those days, he had to settle for a job in a meat-packing house. He had always wanted to coach at a school or college, and he ended up coaching at the local black YMCA, where he touched many lives, most notably that of his younger brother. If he was hard and demanding on the youths he coached in those days, it was because he knew that the way was harder for them, that it was easier for them to quit, and that they had to be better than whites at all things. He was hardest of all on his younger brother, because Josh Gibson saw Bob’s natural ability early on: he pushed him not merely to be good, but to be excellent.
When Bob was in high school, he was small for his age and the football coach turned him down. Josh was pleased because he did not want his brother’s basketball and baseball careers jeopardized by a football injury. Even though Bob was relatively small, he was quick and a good all-around athlete, with a strong arm. By his senior year in high school he began to grow, and he was six feet tall and 175 pounds by graduation. He became a good high school basketball player, missing the All-State team, he believed, only because he was black. He was fast enough to run the 440 and the 880 in major track meets. He played baseball in summer leagues, under Josh’s auspices, on a Y team that toured throughout the region, and was good enough at the end of his third year in high school to receive an offer from the Kansas City Monarchs. There was even a feeler from Runt Marr, the Cardinal regional scout, and some talk of a minor-league contract, but Josh Gibson insisted that his brother go on to college.
Josh made sure that his brother always played with kids several years older so that he had to reach for more. There were times when it was too much and Bob would on occasion burst into tears. But Josh did not back down. At all times Bob had to push himself to be the best. In addition, he was to handle himself with pride and dignity. It was important to dress well, to carry himself well, and to speak well. Small things, acts of social carelessness, which did not offend when they were done by white people, could easily be seized on and held against a black man. Among other things, there was to be no smoking in the Gibson household. Bob once got hold of a small silver pipe and figured out how to tear open cigarettes and use the tobacco from them in his pipe. He hid in a closet one day and was smoking away when Josh found him. His older brother whacked the pipe right out of his hand. “Don’t you ever do that again!” he said. Bob had a small space between his front teeth, and as a boy he mimicked the way he had seen older boys spit; it was a way of showing that he was grown up. Josh put a stop to that as well. If he saw his brother spitting he would slap him. “Don’t ever do that! That’s not the person you’re going to be!” He was going to be a man who knew how to comport himself and to gain the respect that was rightfully his.
Slowly over the years, certain qualities of toughness and resilience were instilled in Bob Gibson, which would enable him to play sports in a white-run world. Playing with Josh’s all-black YMCA baseball teams against the all-white local teams, Bob saw that the all-white umpires were so prejudiced that Josh on occasion had to threaten to take his team off the field unless they were willing to give the visitors a break on calls. It was a given that Bob would go to college—he was not going to enter an unwelcoming white world without an education. He applied to Indiana University, hoping to win a scholarship to that basketball powerhouse, but was told in a return letter that Indiana already had its quota of Negroes for that year, which, Gibson later found out, turned out to be all of one. Josh thereupon talked his brother up to Duce Belford, who was the athletic director and basketball coach of Creighton, the local Jesuit college. Since Gibson was one of the best high school basketball players in the state, Belford eventually offered him a basketball scholarship, and Gibson went on to be an outstanding athlete at Creighton, where he was the first black to play on the baseball and basketball teams. Still, on occasion, he had to stay in a different hotel and eat at different restaurants because of local customs, even there, in the heartland of America. He was a good enough basketball player to get offers to play with the Harlem Globetrotters upon graduation, but he was attracted more and more to baseball, which in those days was the professional sport that offered the greatest and most immediate financial rewards.
As Josh Gibson had once talked up his brother to Belford, now, as Bob’s college graduation approached, he began talking him up to Bill Bergesch, the general manager of the St. Louis Cardinal Triple A farm club, the Omaha Cardinals. The two were acquaintances, and Bergesch admired Josh Gibson considerably—Josh was always asking Bergesch for used baseballs, old bats, and used uniforms for his Y teams. In the spring of 1957, Bob Gibson’s last year at Creighton, Josh started telling Bergesch, “I’ve got this kid brother who’s going to play in the major leagues.” Bergesch would ask what position and Josh would say he was a pitcher, but, then again, he was a hell of a hitter, and could also play the outfield. And the infield, too, as a matter of fact. And catch, by the way. The general manager of a Triple A farm team tended to hear that kind of thing from almost everyone he dealt with—legendary prospects being hidden away in a tiny town, or pitching for a sandlot team nearby—and those reports tended to be met with considerable skepticism. But Josh Gibson had a reputation for being a careful man, and he had never been boastful before about anyone or anything else. He was
very
persistent, and so Bergesch decided, both as a courtesy to someone whom he liked and because a good baseball man never knows when he’s going to find a diamond in the rough, that he would watch Josh Gibson’s kid brother pitch for Creighton. He went to two Creighton games, but he never saw Bob Gibson pitch. The first time, Gibson played the outfield, and Bergesch got a quick sense of the boy’s speed and power and that he had a very strong arm. The second time, Gibson caught. This time, seeing the way he blocked the plate, Bergesch sensed his competitive fire. Bergesch asked Duce Belford about him. Belford, who, besides being the baseball coach, was a bird-dog scout for the Dodgers, was not impressed. “That kid’s never going to make it,” he told Bergesch. “He’s much too wild. Why, he’s not even our best pitcher.” That, thought Bergesch, was the difference between coaching college baseball, where you wanted a finished product, and working in the minor leagues, where you looked for raw ability. As far as Bergesch was concerned, Bob Gibson was all potential—the only question was which position he would play. So he told Johnny Keane, who was managing the Omaha team, that young Gibson was a genuine prospect and suggested they bring him in for a tryout. At the tryout Gibson was awesome: first he took batting practice and showed exceptional power, driving a few balls over the fence. Then Bergesch had him throw to the Cardinals’ regular catcher. Neither Bergesch nor Keane had ever seen a kid throw like that before, and, though they did not have the resources to clock him, years later Bergesch estimated that he must have thrown at about ninety-five miles an hour. In addition, his fastball already had movement. That meant they were likely to be able to teach him how to put more movement on it. “That’s some arm,” Keane told Bergesch. “Let’s sign him and start him off as a pitcher. I’ll guarantee you if he doesn’t make it as a pitcher, he’ll sure as hell make it as an outfielder.” A few days later the signing took place, ironically at the end of the college World Series, when all sorts of scouts had gathered in Omaha and were eager to sign that year’s hot prospect, Ron Fairly of USC. There was no small irony in that, Bergesch thought: all those scouts clustered around, waiting for the Series to end so they could make their pitch to Fairly. For if Bergesch was right, and he suspected he was, then he was about to sign someone who was a good deal more talented than Ron Fairly.