Authors: David Halberstam
The lessons were, more than anything else, about how to deal with the adversity of playing in the big leagues and how to deal with so long a season, which might easily wear down even the most talented younger man. McCarver watched Gibson learn this as he worked to become a big-league pitcher, striving to master his pitches. He could also see it in the growing confidence with which Curt Flood began to play center field, as he came to terms not only with his own immense talent but also with his limitations—that he was to be a contact hitter, not a power hitter; that his job was to get on base and to move runners around and, if need be, to give himself up for the team, which he did constantly.
Most of all, McCarver came to understand how the growing-up process took place in his own case. The older players worked deftly to teach him how to control his anger and discipline himself and his ego, so that he managed to keep his competitive fire without becoming self-destructive. There was no doubt, the older players thought, that McCarver had a chance to become a great catcher. He was tough; he had a good but not great arm, but he was quick behind the plate; he was highly intelligent and had a fine instinct for the texture of a given game; and he had surprising speed for a catcher, who, as a breed, were notoriously slow. Above all, he had an obvious love for the game, and in many ways, the veteran players thought, was a throwback to the tough, gritty players of the past. What stood in his way was his temper, and perhaps, like many other young players, his ego. So, very quietly they set about trying to teach him to find what was best in himself, refine it, and at the same time discipline that part of him that was self-destructive.
There was, McCarver decided later, nothing that unusual about him in those years; he was a talented young player with a drive to excel, who had met nothing but success in sports all his life, and who was now, for the first time in his life, as a major-leaguer, dealing with the fact that there were other players as good (and some who were better). McCarver had always been the best, in high school in both baseball and football, and he had been an immediate star in the minor leagues, hitting .360 in Keokuk and .347 with Memphis, and somehow he had always assumed that he would be a comparable star in the major leagues. But it was harder than he had thought, the talent level was better, and he played every day against other people who, like him, had always been the best. When McCarver’s batting average hovered around .270 in his early years, he raged against his fate, and did not readily accept the limitations of his place among more talented and experienced hitters. He was at war with himself. (Later in his career, when he caught Steve Carlton, he was impressed by the fact that Carlton did not want to find his limits; Lefty thought it a mistake to know his limits, and he thought it critical to enter a game as if there were no limits, as if by accepting them even theoretically was to accept the possibility of failure.) At first when McCarver reached his own limits, it seemed like failure. That meant he was often out of synch, and his anger was in the way. It was all right to play with fire, his teammates tried to teach him, but there was a line there between playing with passion and slipping into rage. He had to learn to draw the line, or his passion would become self-destructive. So when he tried to smash a bat against a wall after making an out in a big game, it was not Johnny Keane who talked to him, but the veteran players who took him aside gently and made him understand that the tirade jeopardized not just himself, but by risking injury he was jeopardizing his teammates.
In one important lesson, Curt Simmons had taught him how to deal with a pitcher. McCarver had called for one pitch from Simmons and Simmons shook him off, and the batter lined the ensuing pitch for an important hit. McCarver had returned to the dugout in a rage. He ripped off his shin guards and slammed them down. Simmons watched him out of the corner of his eye and did not say anything to him at the time, but the next day he took him aside. “Tim, when you behave like that, when you throw your shin guards down like that, don’t you realize what it tells the other players on this team about our relationship?” McCarver was stunned and humiliated at that moment, appalled by his own behavior the previous day, but it had been, he later decided, an important lesson about getting outside his own selfishness, seeing the game as a team game, and understanding the respect teammates had to have for each other.
Ken Boyer helped him to come to terms with himself as much as anyone on the team. Boyer, as far as the younger players on the Cardinals were concerned, was a great role model, a consummate professional who played hard every day and never lost sight of his essential purpose. It was as if he had a God-given instinct about what was real and what was not real in baseball. Once Boyer made a great play at third base, moving almost all the way to shortstop to reach a hard grounder, and Dusty Boggess, who was umpiring, turned to McCarver and told him, “Take a good look, son, because you’re not going to see anyone like him again.” Later, after the game, McCarver mentioned what Boggess had said to Boyer. “Never get caught up in stuff like that,” Boyer said, and that impressed McCarver even more, the unwillingness to put one’s ego over baseball. It made Boyer very tough as a player: he never seemed to go up or down emotionally because of his performance. He had power, he had speed, and he could play any position in the infield and outfield. Bob Broeg, the St. Louis sportswriter, thought that if he was not the best player in the game, he might be the most versatile, and he liked to argue with his friend Bill Veeck about what he called the Eight Boyer Theory of Baseball. If the pitching was equal and eight Boyers were playing the other positions, could they beat eight Brooks Robinsons, or eight Eddie Mathewses, or eight Hank Aarons?
Once when McCarver went into a rage, it was Boyer who walked over to Lou Brock, who happened to be standing nearby, and said, “There are some guys who just have to learn that they’re not going to get a hit every single time they get up.” Then he winked at McCarver. It was Boyer who on occasion would take McCarver aside and say, “Have you ever thought about what would happen if you poured all of that energy you have when you’re angry into actions that matter? Sometimes it seems that you put more energy into your actions after you hit than you do into hitting itself.”
Boyer had come into the league as a kid when the best player on the team had been Stan Musial, and he had learned from Musial how to study the game (when the Cardinals traded for a pitcher from another club, the first thing Musial did was to amble over to the new pitcher and ask what the previous team’s book on him was) and how to carry himself. Musial was a great player and a decent human being, and he treated everyone well. In some ways Boyer was passing on Musial’s lessons to another generation. In 1968 Boyer, near the end of his career, was playing for the Dodgers, and Ted Simmons, a young player for the Cardinals, came up. Simmons singled and stopped at first base. “Is that your first big-league hit?” Boyer asked. Simmons said that it was. “That’s great—I hope it’s the first of twenty-five hundred,” Boyer said, which somehow made the moment even nicer as far as Simmons was concerned. There was a stoic quality to Boyer. He played hurt all the time and he never complained about his injuries. Rather, he reminded the others that no matter how hard it might seem at the time, they were all still lucky in their vocation. Mike Shannon remembered Boyer coming into the clubhouse one day, clearly in such great pain that he was having trouble getting his arm into his uniform. When Shannon looked questioningly at Boyer, as if to ask if he could play, Boyer smiled and asked, “You know any other place where I can go and get a job that pays fifty thousand dollars a year?”
It was not always easy for Ken Boyer playing in St. Louis. The other Cardinal players believed that Harry Caray, the immensely popular local announcer, rode Boyer unfairly. For much of his career, Boyer was booed at home, and the source of that booing, the other Cardinal players were sure, was Caray. There was an edge there and Boyer’s teammates and his brother Clete believed that it came from a moment when Caray was broadcasting a game on the road at the Los Angeles Coliseum and was doing it from field level. He had wanted to experiment by doing an interview with Boyer during the game. Boyer had said no, not during the game, perhaps when the game was over. They had apparently exchanged harsh words, and the Cardinal players believed that Caray had been hard on Boyer ever since. In fact, one of Bob Uecker’s best early imitations was of Harry Caray sticking it to Ken Boyer: “Well, here’s the Captain, Ken Boyer. Boyer haaaaaaasn’t had an RBI in his last fifty-two games. ... I don’t understand why they continue to boo him here at Busch Stadium. ... Striiiiiiiike one, he doesn’t eeeeven take the bat off his shoulder ... here’s striiiiiiike two ... and strike three. ... He
nevvvvvver
even took the bat
offfffff
his shoulder. I don’t know why they’re booing him.” None of this ever seemed to bother Boyer. It was as if, as far as he was concerned, the booing and the needling from Caray went with the paycheck.
It was easy for him to keep his perspective. The Boyers had grown up very poor in rural Missouri. They came from Alba, just outside Joplin in the southwest corner of the state, and a few miles from Mantle’s Commerce, Oklahoma. It was said, Clete Boyer remembered, that you could go from Alba to Commerce entirely underground through the network of lead and zinc mines. It was an incredibly poor region; there was work in the mines, but it meant that you risked dying in your forties or fifties from lung disease. Ken Boyer was one of fourteen children, three of whom played major-league baseball. Vern Boyer, his father, was a carpenter by trade, but there was never enough work for a carpenter in Alba, so he also worked as a marble cutter in the local quarry. He rarely had a functioning car of his own, and often had to carpool with other men to get to the quarry in the morning. The price of the carpool was fifty cents a week.
Ken and his brother Clete, who played third base for the Yankees, were raised in a small house with no electricity and no plumbing. On occasion they would heat bricks in the stove at night to warm themselves in bed. As many as five brothers slept in one room in two beds. His mother decided to have one of her last children delivered in a hospital. Why? one of the older children asked her. “I just wanted to see what it was like,” she answered. It did not seem to her to be a great improvement and so she had her remaining children delivered at home. Most of the older children had never eaten store-bought bread at home. Chicken on Sunday was the fancy dinner. Meals were mostly starches during the week—potatoes, beans, and fried baloney for dinner. It was a very strict home. If you were supposed to be in at 9:00
P.M.
and you came in at 9:05, the strap awaited you. Vern Boyer was home by 5:15 and dinner was served immediately. You were not to be late to dinner. They were supposed to swim only once a day, but sometimes they swam twice a day and their mother tried to protect them. Above all, they were never to complain and never to whine. The Boyers played hard, worked hard, and accepted life as full of hardship and disappointment.
Baseball was at the core of the existence of boys growing up in tiny towns in that part of the country during those years. The connection to the larger world was not the voice of Edward R. Murrow and his fellow CBS correspondents so much as it was the voice of Harry Caray broadcasting the Cardinals. If there was a folk hero in the region, it was Stan Musial. The highest calling was to be a professional baseball player, but even better was to be a Cardinal. Tom Greenwade of the Yankees spent a lot of time in Alba eating supper with the Boyers at their home, but he was never there as much as Runt Marr, the Cardinal scout. Both Ken Boyer and his older brother Cloyd signed with the Cardinals, although within the Boyer family it was believed that the Cardinal organization had made a rare mistake by turning Cloyd into a pitcher instead of an everyday player. Somehow the Boyer boys and their father made their own ball park, rolling the field themselves, and they even managed to string a very simple lighting system around it. Clete Boyer thought that two more of his brothers could have played in the big leagues, his younger brother Len and his older brother Wayne. Wayne was major-league material but wanted to study dentistry. Their father was furious with Wayne for not going forward with a baseball career, and did not talk to him for several years. The Boyers practiced every day of the week, and they played three times a week: on Sunday afternoon, Monday night, and Wednesday night. Over seven years some twenty-one boys from the Alba team signed professional contracts, and at times there were as many as five Boyers on the Alba starting team, playing all the time, it seemed, against the Baxter Springs Whiz Kids, starring, as he was known as a boy, Little Mickey Mantle.
Slowly, over the previous few years, a certain culture had evolved on the Cardinal team, not unlike that which had existed on the great Yankee teams in the past—and men like Boyer, Gibson, Flood, Groat, and White were instrumental in creating it. The Cardinals were a strong team, and they played very smart baseball. Good defense and good baserunning were as important as good hitting. Individual statistics and goals were sacrificed for team objectives. Because it was a team that depended on speed and did not have many power hitters, moving a runner on first up a base when there was no one out or only one out was every bit as important as getting a base hit—particularly when Gibson, who gave up so few runs, was pitching. Players who seemed to be putting their own goals ahead of team goals were soon gone. A light-hitting utility player who was picked up only for his defense and who raged and threw bats in the dugout after he struck out was viewed with contempt. The other players knew the histrionics were false, because everyone knew he was there for defense and not for hitting. Curt Flood was greatly admired by his teammates because he was such a good team player, and because you could never tell from his attitude and the way he cheered his teammates whether he was hitting well or was in a slump. Dick Groat was admired not just because he was a superlative hitter, but because there was no one in the league who was better at moving runners up. Late in the 1963 season, when the Cardinals had lost their three games to the Dodgers and were finally eliminated from the pennant race, Groat was still in a race for the National League batting crown. Curt Flood went to him and told him to go for the batting title. “Think about Groat for the rest of the season,” Flood said. “Go for the hits.” That day there had been a man on first with no one out and Groat decided instead to move the runner ahead. “You just don’t know how to do it, do you?” Flood said. It was a high compliment.