Authors: David Halberstam
More and more, the afternoon papers, barely hanging on, pushed for the angle on a story. Even such morning papers as the
Daily News
started looking for a human-interest angle each day, and were behaving as afternoon papers once had. Shecter had written thirty Roger Maris stories during that momentous summer, which was regarded by his peers as a herculean achievement, just short of Maris’s own, and after the season ended he wrote a quickie paperback called
Home Run Hero,
for which he was paid the grand sum of one thousand dollars. For the start of 1962 Shecter had been with the Mets, a preferred Chipmunk assignment, and by the time he joined the Yankees at the All-Star break, the relationship between Maris, the fans, and the press had deteriorated terribly. Shecter picked up the Yankees in time to watch Maris collide with the fans during a double-header on July 30 at the Stadium. Some fans had thrown golf balls out on the field at him, and Maris responded by throwing them back into the stands. That made it worse and more debris was thrown at him. (After the game Maris reacted predictably and said that he was through trying to win friends and influence people.) Before the day was over, the umpires had to escort him to the outfield. Shecter was appalled by what was happening; he talked to one of the umpires, who did not seem very sympathetic to Maris, and who seemed to think he was doing a poor job of handling his fame. They thought that with the money he made, it was imperative to learn how to deal with the fans, even if the fans were difficult and provocative. Shecter wrote of the incident, of the cycle of growing mutual hostility between Maris and the fans, and quoted Maris in the end as saying that as far as the fans were concerned, he no longer gave a damn. To Shecter’s surprise, Maris absolutely hated the story. “You fucking ripping cocksucker,” Shecter quoted Maris as saying. “Look, Rog, isn’t that the way it happened?” Shecter had asked Maris, trying to appease him. “That’s got nothing the fuck to do with it,” Maris said. We settled our problem, Shecter later wrote, by never talking again.
J
ULY 3 WAS A TERRIBLE
night for Ralph Terry. He had been one of the mainstays of the Yankee pitching staff for the last three years, winning a total of fifty-six games during that time. But in 1964 he was not only struggling, he was failing. As July arrived his record was an egregious 2-7, and his earned run average resembled Mickey Mantle’s slugging average more than anything else. That summer he was discovering a state of anxiety peculiar to pitchers. As they grew older, regular ballplayers worried that their abilities would gradually wear down, and their reflexes would slip just a fraction. It was the rare regular player whose career ended overnight. Pitchers were different: they lived constantly in fear that one physical mishap might cause the arm injury that would finish them. Ralph Terry had plenty of time that summer to ponder the fragility of a pitcher’s life. His arm bothered him most of the season, and he was well aware that if it did not get better quickly, his major-league baseball career was over. Terry thought he knew exactly what had gone wrong. It had happened almost as soon as he had arrived at St. Petersburg for spring training. The Yankees had built some new mounds for their pitchers, and they were far too steep; when Terry went out to pitch for the first time, he came down on his follow-through, and the mound threw him off. Where he expected his foot to hit the ground, there was no ground, and he overextended his shoulder and his back. Then, he later decided, he made a rookie mistake and tried to come back too quickly. His back had bothered him through May and June, and now it was July and he was still having problems. The injury had cost him location as well as power.
He simply could not find his rhythm, and he continued to falter. In one brief stretch he pitched sixteen innings and gave up eleven home runs. His record reached 2-8. It was a terrible time for him, and there were days when he wondered whether Yogi Berra had lost confidence in him completely, and, worse, why Berra should not have. He was immensely frustrated with his own performance. His team was in a pennant race and the pitching was not up to expectations, principally because of him. He had seen this happen some five years earlier to teammates of his, Don Larsen and Bob Turley. Turley had lost something on his fastball and for a time he managed to hold on, throwing a sinker instead of a fastball in tough situations; but the hitters caught on, realizing that they did not have to face Turley’s feared fastball, and his effectiveness declined quickly.
Making it even harder for Terry was the absence of Johnny Sain. Sain had been the Yankee pitching coach for the last few years and was adored by most Yankee pitchers, including Jim Bouton, Al Downing, Steve Hamilton, and Terry. Sain, a former star pitcher for the old Boston Braves, had come over to the Yankees near the end of his career, as a reliever and spot starter. As much a psychiatrist as a coach, he was immensely skilled, his many protégés thought, at getting the pitchers to figure out what it was he wanted them to do. Sain’s commitment to the nonpitching members of a baseball team always seemed minimal; he was interested only in pitchers. A manager who signed him on as a pitching coach did so at his risk, for it was almost as if Sain ran a completely independent organization, a separate team of pitchers whose loyalty was only to him. He seemed to feel that his pitchers were on loan to the
other
manager—that is, the manager of the team—for two or three hours a day. If a manager, as they were wont to do, tried to tell
his
pitchers what to do and what to throw, Sain would quickly intercede. He was likely to ask the manager how many pitches he had thrown as a big-leaguer. His success with pitchers who had not been successful before was truly phenomenal. Friends would tease him about this, and he would reply, with a paraphrase of Will Rogers, that he had never met a pitcher he didn’t like.
Other pitching coaches were concerned with the physical condition of their pitchers; Sain was more concerned with their minds. He wanted his pitchers to think positively and to be at peace with themselves at all times. Pitching was all about confidence and concentration, Sain thought. More than most other pitching coaches, he worked on having his pitchers come up with moves to first and second, not so much to pick off base runners but to minimize the distractions that base runners posed. Unless a pitcher was prepared to deal with him, a runner was likely to be a larger psychological distraction than most professional baseball people realized. The better prepared you were for runners on base, Sain believed, the less distracted you were in game situations. Part of his strength, the pitchers thought, was that he did not play to the manager’s whims or favor the players who were doing well at the moment; rather, he spent more time with the players who were in trouble than the ones who were the stars. Once during the 1963 season, Jim Bouton stopped him and asked him, “John, how come you’re not talking to me anymore?” “How are you doing these days, Jim?” Sain answered. In fact, Bouton had been on a considerable roll for several weeks, keeping the ball down and winning low-scoring games. “Fine, John,” he answered. “Then you don’t need me, do you?” Sain answered.
Sain’s lessons were not just psychological in nature, for he was a very good practitioner of the art as well, always trying to give his pitchers an additional pitch as one more weapon against their true enemies, the hitters. He would sit with the pitchers in the bullpen and together they would experiment on different pitches and how to hold the ball for them, along the seams or across the seams. He could explain how a particular ball, held in a certain way and thrown in a certain way, was likely to break. He gave almost every pitcher on the staff an additional pitch. He was not, thought Downing, a velocity man, he was a location man.
If he saw a pitcher make a mistake during a game, he would not say anything during the heat of the game or immediately afterward, when the pitcher was down on himself. Instead, he would wait a couple of days. Then he and the pitcher would grab gloves, and they would begin by playing catch, at first throwing at thirty feet, and then at forty-five feet, and soon at sixty feet. Suddenly, without anything being said, in order not to make the pitcher tense, and without a single word of criticism having been uttered, he would be well into a lesson on mechanics and on trying to correct the error. There was never anyone, thought Al Downing, better at getting inside the head of a pitcher than Johnny Sain, and of seeing the game as the pitcher saw it.
Just before Downing came up to the Yankees for the second time, Bill Yancey, his scout and sponsor, a man who had played in the old Negro leagues, took him aside and said that when he got to the majors he was to make no judgments about people and their racial attitudes unless they showed prejudice. Downing was going to be surprised by the people he met, Yancey said; for example, a big old country boy from Arkansas named Johnny Sain. His accent might be heavy and off-putting, but he would prove to be, Yancey predicted, one of the greatest people Downing ever met in his life. If Downing worked hard, Sain would work equally hard for him, and he would make him a much better pitcher. Sain would not see Al Downing as an upstart young black man in what had once been a white man’s game, but as a young man with a good fastball, good curve, and good change, who needed to work on his control, his confidence, and, finally, his reason for throwing each pitch. It all turned out to be true, Downing later thought.
No one, including Sain himself, was ever sure about the chain of circumstances that caused Johnny Sain’s departure from the Yankees after the 1963 season. Part of it was that he thought the organization didn’t appreciate him. Certainly it took a very strong manager with a very strong ego to put up with his independence, which sometimes seemed to border on out-and-out disobedience. Some of the Yankee pitchers thought it was because Ralph Houk and Sain no longer got along. Certainly Sain was surprised that he had not been notified in advance of the switch by which Houk would become general manager and Berra manager. He heard about it first from an outsider, a close friend of Mickey Mantle’s. That was jarring to him because it meant that he was somehow outside the inner circle of the organization. It was true that after the 1963 season Sain had asked Houk for a two-year contract at $25,000 a year, which was a raise of $2,500, and had been turned down. “Mr. Topping won’t go for it, John,” Houk had said, which also meant that Houk was not going for it. After four years of helping to create a championship pitching staff, Sain thought it was a shame; the organization had not been very direct with him. He also thought the appointment of Whitey Ford, an immensely popular player, as his successor was a skilled move politically. Now no one would criticize the management publicly for letting him go. But most of the pitchers thought his loss was a major one. The problem with Ford as a pitcher-coach was that he was in the process of fighting his own overwhelming physical ailments, his body and arm were both wearing out, and he had little time to work with his teammates.
Almost every pitcher on that staff felt indebted in some way or another to Johnny Sain, but none more so than Ralph Terry. Terry had had a good but not great fastball, and a fair curve. Even for a right-handed pitcher who had good location, that was not quite enough to win in a home ball park that so heavily favored left-handed hitters. Knowing that Terry needed one more pitch, Sain taught him how to throw the slurve, a small breaking ball, half curve, half slider. He did it in time for the 1961 season and it proved so successful that Terry had gotten off to a 5-0 start at the beginning of the season. But a few weeks into the season he experienced arm trouble for the first time, and he suspected it had come from throwing the slurve. But the slurve had taught him the value of having an additional pitch, and he started experimenting with what was in effect a slider off his fastball. Later known as a cut fastball, it did not break in as large an arc as his curve, but instead had a small but very sharp break to it. He had badly needed that pitch because when he had to go to the breaking ball, the good hitters in the league would not just sit around and wait on what might otherwise have been nothing but a big old curve. With its acquisition Terry suddenly jumped from being a mediocre pitcher to a top-line pitcher who came close to winning twenty games a season.
During the 1962 World Series, Sain handled Terry with exceptional care. He pitched in the second game and lost, 2-0, although he threw a six-hitter. There was an undercurrent of feeling among some of the Yankee people, going back to a home-run ball Terry had thrown in the 1960 World Series to Bill Mazeroski, that he might not be able to win the big games. Terry was scheduled to pitch the fifth game too, and as the players got ready to go on the field, one after another they came by Terry’s locker and patted him on the back. “Go get ’em, Ralph,” they said. Sain stood aside watching this, thinking this was not exactly what a control pitcher like Terry needed just before a big game. He did not need to reach for something extra, he needed to be exactly who he was, to pitch to spots. So when all the others were out on the field, Sain sidled over to him. “Don’t try and be sensational, Ralph,” he said. “Just be yourself. That’s good enough. You’ll win.” Sain was not even sure that Terry had heard him, but Terry beat the Giants that day, and the next day in the clubhouse he came over and told Sain, “See, John, I didn’t try to be sensational.” Then he came back and beat them again in the seventh game, 1-0.
Now, in 1964, Terry needed a mentor like Sain who might have been able to understand how much of his problem was physical, how much was mental, and who just might have told him to take his time recovering.
On that night of July 3, Terry was called into a game at the Stadium against the Minnesota Twins, at the time the hardest-hitting team in the American League. The score was 0-0 after nine innings. Stan Williams, a pitcher recently acquired from the Dodgers, had pitched the first nine innings and given up only two hits. Even as Terry made his way out of the bullpen and started walking in from right field, the booing began, and then, when the public-address system announced his name, more boos thundered down. It got worse a moment later when Don Mincher drove his first pitch over the head of Mantle in center field for a triple. Jerry Kindall came in to run for Mincher. The booing increased. It was so harsh that it reminded one sportswriter of the booing reserved in the past for Roger Maris. With Kindall on third, Earl Battey, the catcher, bunted and was thrown out without advancing Mincher. But the next batter, Jim Snyder, flied out and Kindall scored the winning run. Terry reminded himself that night that these same fans had booed Maris in recent years, and had only switched to Maris after devoting so many seasons to booing Mantle. He knew that fans were fickle—he had pitched in Fenway Park one night when Ted Williams had let a pop-up drop in left field, and the boos had been as loud as any he had ever heard. Then, only a few moments later, Williams made a great running catch and the same people gave him an ovation. Williams had responded to this by placing his left hand on the muscle of his right arm, which he extended toward the crowd. Still, it was painful to be booed, and to know that as the Yankees continued to flounder, he was part of the problem.