Authors: David Halberstam
Stottlemyre’s first victory was a lovely blend of the old and the new. In the fourth inning Mantle came up with the right-handed Ray Herbert pitching for Chicago, and hit a tremendous drive to center field. The wind was blowing out slightly, and at first Mantle did not think he had quite gotten all of it. A look of disgust came over his face; he had, Stottlemyre thought, come very close to throwing his bat down. (Earlier in the year he had hit a ball and thrown his bat down, and then the ball kept carrying and went out for a home run, and Mantle had felt like a fool. Though he normally ran the bases with his head down, on this occasion he had angled his face down even more out of embarrassment.) Gene Stephens, the center fielder, thought at first that he could make a play on the ball, and then as he went back he saw the ball carry over the monuments, over the 461 sign, and over the screen, which was thirty feet high there. It landed fifteen rows back, and since each row was judged to be two feet, the ball was officially judged to be 502 feet. It may have been the longest ball Mantle ever hit to center field in the Stadium. Stottlemyre was in awe. Since he had seen the quick expression of disgust on Mantle’s face, he wondered,
If that’s not far enough, what is?
Mantle was relaxed after the game, almost boyishly happy. “I’m glad I didn’t bang my bat down,” he told the assembled reporters. He loved the tape-measure home runs—they were his secret delight in the game. The reporters who covered him were aware of this, and knew how relaxed and affable he would be in the locker room after he hit one. The measuring of Mantle’s home runs began in 1953 when he hit a tremendous drive against the Washington Senators that had gone out of Griffith Stadium. Red Patterson, the Yankee press officer, decided to measure it, which he did by walking it off, rather than using a tape, and he estimated that it had gone 565 feet. “You could have cut it up into fifteen singles,” said Bob Kuzava, the bullpen pitcher who had watched it go soaring by. Again and again when Mantle was younger, Stengel had tried to get him to cut down on his swing, telling him that he was so strong, the home runs were going to come anyway, and they did not need to be such mammoth shots; if he cut back on his swing, his batting average would go up dramatically. That made no impression on Mantle, for he loved the tape-measure drives; he loved just knowing that every time he came to bat he might hit a record drive; he loved the roar of the crowd when he connected, and was equally aware of the gasp of the crowd when he swung and missed completely, a gasp that reflected a certain amount of awe, as if the crowd was as disappointed as he was.
The home runs separated him from the other great power hitters of that era, as his pure statistics did not. The inner world of baseball was very macho; the clearest measure of macho for a pitcher was the speed of his fastball, and for a hitter, it was the length of his home runs. The players themselves were excited by the power hitters’ extraordinary drives, and they cataloged them—who had hit the longest drive hit in a particular ball park—and spoke of them reverentially. More than thirty years after the event, Dick Groat could remember playing against the Yankees in the 1960 World Series and being out with a broken wrist. He was inside the clubhouse in the whirlpool bath when his roommate, Bill Virdon, rushed in looking stunned. “Roomie, you just missed the granddaddy of all granddaddy home runs!” he hollered. This was a drive Mantle had hit off Joe Gibbon, one of two he had hit in a 16-3 rout, and long after the game had passed into history, Groat still had the moment filed away in his memory, that the ball had gone over the iron gate in old Forbes Field, well over it and well past it.
There was a constant unspoken competition for the reputation of being the man who hit the longest one, and once in the early fifties, while Mantle was waiting in the on-deck circle, Joe Collins hit an enormous home run, one that had traveled way, way back into the upper deck in right field. When Collins finished his home-run trot, he looked over at Mantle and said, “Go chase that.” Mantle did precisely that, driving the ball even farther back into the upper deck. When he returned to the dugout he took a drink of water and went over to Collins. “What did you think of that one, Joe?” he asked. “Go shit in your hat,” Collins answered.
One of Mantle’s great goals was one that mortal men dared not even think about: to be the first player ever to hit a fair ball out of Yankee Stadium. That would set him apart for all time. He never did it, but he came very close on at least two occasions. He hit one off Pedro Ramos of the Senators on Memorial Day in 1956 that was still rising as it hit the roof, just eighteen inches, by subsequent measurement, below the top. Ramos later said that he thought the ball was going to continue on to Connecticut. Then, in 1963, what people believe was the hardest ball he ever hit was a drive off Bill Fischer of the Athletics; the ball was still rising when it hit the top of the façade and bounced back down on the field, a drive that some people estimated might have gone 620 feet if the façade had not stopped it. He had been exhilarated after that game because it showed not only that it could be done but that this late in his career he still had the power to do it. The distance had been right, but he had been slightly off on the angle. If he had only gotten under it slightly, perhaps a millimeter or a centimeter more, he thought, it might have gone out. Now, in 1964, his body badly worn down, he still believed that one day he might drive a ball out of the Stadium.
I
N MID-AUGUST BOB GIBSON
started to find his groove, but whatever run Gibson and the Cardinals made now, it was going to come too late to help Bing Devine. From the start he had been vulnerable to Branch Rickey, and the slow start of a season they had all looked forward to so much spelled the end of Devine’s reign. Rickey had continued to go after Devine relentlessly but subtly, using velvet scissors, as one colleague noted. “Now, Bing Devine is a fine, fine man,” he would say to Busch of his adversary, “a wonderful family man, one of the best family men in our business, doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, doesn’t carouse,” knowing that Busch, who
did
drink,
did
smoke, and
did
carouse, did not trust men who were too fastidious in their personal habits. (“Now, Bing,” Gussie Busch would say when they gathered in the late afternoon for a meeting and a drink, “did you get your Coke?”) Rickey had recently found a new and persuasive line, which he used again and again with Busch: that he, Rickey, could be doing a better job with players who would cost only half as much.
As the season progressed and the Cardinals, failed to make their expected move, Rickey gradually increased the tempo of his drive against Devine. Rickey’s secretary, Kenny Blackburn, stayed at the same hotel as some of the single players, and he was always telling them how close Busch and Rickey were becoming, and how Rickey now had Busch’s ear. The veteran players, who liked Devine, and who did not think the team needed two general managers, were not amused. They knew that the more senior they were, the more likely Rickey was to get rid of them at the end of the season. “The Twig,” they called him.
What finally blew it, ironically, was the Groat affair, which unfolded in August in a bizarre series of events. In those days Eddie Mathews, the Milwaukee third baseman, was going out with Elizabeth Busch, one of Gussie’s daughters. Groat and Mathews were friends, and at one point Groat said something to him about the conflict over the hit-and-run play. Mathews, in turn, said something to Elizabeth Busch about it, and Elizabeth told her father. At the next meeting with his baseball people, Gussie Busch asked Devine and Keane if they had any problems on the team. In their minds the Groat affair was something they had already dealt with back at that meeting in New York right after the All-Star Game, and it was hardly that important in the first place. So they said they did not. For reasons that completely mystified Devine and Keane, Busch thereupon decided they were hiding crucial problems from him. He had learned about
something pertaining to baseball only from his daughter.
He was more than a little paranoid anyway: it seemed to go with the territory with a man who had so much power in, but knew so little about, the high-profile business of baseball. In Busch’s curious scenario Devine and Keane were disloyal, and since he placed loyalty above everything else, this was a serious betrayal. Within days, Bing Devine was summoned for another meeting at The Brewery. That morning Al Fleishman, Busch’s public-relations man, called Devine at home. “You have a meeting this morning with Gussie, don’t you?” he asked. Devine said he did. “Do you know what’s going to happen?” Fleishman asked. Devine said he did not know. “You’re going to be fired,” Fleishman said. “I hate to have to tell you like this, but I don’t want you going in there unprepared and getting hit with a baseball bat.” So, thought Bing Devine, that is how you learn that the world is about to be cut out from underneath you. He had fired people himself, of course, it was part of the game; he remembered having to fire Fred Hutchinson on Busch’s order when he didn’t want to. It had been a painful moment, but Hutch, who was a truly tough man, had handled it very well. Devine had been fumbling for words, and Hutch had said, “Hey, Bing, I know what you’re trying to do, and why you have to do it. It’s okay. I know it’s not you. These things happen.”
Devine went quietly. It was something he had always expected. He had been dealing for the last seven years from a position of limited strength, and the pressure to produce a winner had grown every year. Life under as volatile a man as Gussie Busch was like living on a precipice, he thought. He knew that Busch was surrounded by pals who were always asking him why he could run so great a brewery with such skill and yet could not win a pennant in something as simple as baseball. He believed that another man who had undercut him was Harry Caray, the broadcaster, who gloried in his close relationship with Busch and had never been a fan of Devine’s. The only question in Devine’s mind was whether Johnny Keane would go too, or whether he could last out the season. In the end, Busch decided to let him finish out the season, because firing both the general manager and the manager would be too disruptive.
Devine was replaced by Bob Howsam, Rickey’s partner in a recent attempt to start a new baseball league. When the firing took place, the Cardinals were nine games behind. That they began to make a run at the pennant now was bittersweet for Devine; suddenly all the pieces had come together and all of the players were playing up to their full potential. It was his team, his players, and yet he was out of the picture.
At this point there was an exceptional balance between the younger and older players on the team. The younger players were all coming of age in those years, Tim McCarver later noted, harnessing their abilities, learning to deal with their frustrations, and coming to terms with what they could and could not do as big-leaguers. If you were going to grow up in baseball, then the opportunity to do it with older players such as White, Boyer, and Groat was a great advantage, McCarver came to believe. They typified the best of the older generation. Devine, he thought, had built well.
For the young pitchers looking for a role model there was Curt Simmons. If he had a single goal in life, it was to keep the game simple. When the Cardinals were about to start a three- or four-game series with another team, there was always a meeting of the pitchers to review how they would pitch to the opposing hitters. Simmons did not like his outfielders to shade hitters even to the slightest degree. He wanted them to play the hitters straight away. Someone would go down the list of opposing hitters, many of them pull hitters, and Simmons would respond, Alou? “Straight away.” Crandall? “Straight away.” Torre? “Straight away.” Then he would give his own uncomplicated thesis: “Big guys, play deep,” he would say; “Little guys, play in.” To which he offered only one small addendum: “If you think they’re going to hit it over your head, back up a little.”
At this meeting the manager and coaches would use a projector to show a chart of where the opposing hitters tended to hit and where the outfielders were supposed to play them. The pitchers would go over the opposing hitters and set the positioning for the coming series. “Looney Tunes,” the pitchers called these sessions. When it was Curt Simmons’s turn to tell his fielders how to play the opposing hitters, Gibson would put a sign over the screen that said in huge letters:
STRAIGHT AWAY.
If someone asked Simmons why he wanted his outfielders to play straight away, he would answer, “Because that’s where Abner Doubleday put them, and he knew what he was doing.” Only with Hank Aaron, one of the most murderous pull hitters of his time, would he adjust slightly. “Step to pull,” he would say of the great Aaron, who pulled, it seemed, everything. Once, when Gus Triandos, the huge catcher then with the Phillies, was up with a runner on third, Mike Shannon, in right field, had started creeping in, in order to be able to make a play at the plate on a fly ball. Triandos drilled the ball over Shannon’s head for extra bases, and Shannon knew when he came into the dugout that he was going to get a tongue-lashing. Simmons just shook his head. “Goddamn it, Shannon,” he said. “Simple game. Simple instructions. Little guys, shallow. Big guys, deep. Triandos is a big guy.”
In years to come Tim McCarver realized that the players of his generation were growing up in an unusually strong and highly professional environment. The Cardinals’ system still emphasized serious teaching in its instructional leagues and camps. It stressed fundamentals, and Cardinal players knew how to play the game, how to run the bases, and how to do the little things that added up over a season; they had been trained to play in pressure games without even realizing it, so that when the time came they would instinctively make the right play. They were also being taught not just to be baseball players but how to be honorable men. Codes were learned, rules of conduct were enforced. The lessons were often basic: a young player, after a victory, might be chirping away in the locker room because he had gotten two hits; then a veteran player like Dick Groat would go over to him and ask him deadpan how many hits he had gotten that day, and the player, without thinking, would say two. There would be a long silence. The lesson was in the answer, and it was painfully clear to the younger player: in a season as long as this, with as many ups and downs, don’t be that high when you get two hits, and don’t be that low when you go hitless—be a true professional.