Authors: David Halberstam
Tim McCarver said that you could see the fire and the drive by looking into Gibson’s eyes, that the ferocity and determination showed there more than anywhere else. The pitcher’s mound was his territory. Lou Brock remembered once when Dal Maxvill, who was one of Gibson’s favorite players, dared to come over and actually place a foot on the mound, at which point Gibson glowered at him and said, “If you aren’t a pitcher and you aren’t prepared to pitch, then stay the hell off the mound.” He had his own rules of what a batter could and could not do and the ability to deny and/or punish a wayward hitter. He liked to work quickly, setting the pace and the tempo himself; he did not like hitters who tried to disrupt his tempo. If they stepped out of the batter’s box, he would scream at them from the mound to get the hell back in there, and if a hitter ducked out too often, or if he got back in the batter’s box too slowly, there was a very good chance that Gibson would throw at him. It was important for them to understand that they were on his turf. He did not permit bunts—bunts, that is, by players who wanted a base hit and were afraid to swing away at him. A bunt to advance a runner was permissible; a bunt for a hit was not. He reciprocated by throwing at the player the next time he came up. There were certain parts of the plate that belonged to him. If a pitch came in over the inside of the plate and the batter got a hit, he could accept that. But if a hitter got a hit on a pitch on the outside corner, an area that he believed belonged to him, the hitter was likely to have to duck the next time up. Bill White was a good friend, but when White was eventually traded to the Phillies and came up to bat against Gibson for the first time in a Philly uniform, he seemed to be trying, in Gibson’s eyes, to gain the outside portion of the plate. Gibson hit him in the elbow. It was White’s fault, he said, for not getting out of the way. “You’re crazier than hell,” White shouted.
He hated being beaten by a lesser hitter. Once in spring training he went out with a few teammates for dinner. After a few drinks he mentioned the name of a marginal hitter who had done well against him. The more he talked, the more agitated he became. “That son of a bitch has no right to hit me,” Gibson said. They all had a few more drinks and, as they did, Gibson became even angrier. “I’m tired of it. He ain’t shit and there he is hitting me like he’s a real hitter.” A few more drinks disappeared and Gibson was angrier still. “I’m going to knock him on his ass the next time we play.” A few days later the Cardinals played against this hitter; Gibson knocked the hitter down with his first pitch and then came charging off the mound. “You son of a bitch—I’m tired of you hitting me the way you do. It’s all over for you now,” he said.
He respected strength in others: he knew another samurai when he saw one. Once in spring training when Gibson was getting a little older and Tom Seaver was in his prime, John Milner of the Mets hit two doubles off Gibson. The next time he came up Gibson nailed him in the ribs. A few weeks later, when the two teams played in St. Louis during the regular season, Seaver was on the mound for the Mets. It was time for Seaver to make a statement for himself and for his team. He chose his moment very carefully: Gibson was up with two outs, and Seaver would be the first Met up in the next inning, so there would be a chance for Gibson to retaliate if he so chose. Seaver threw three pitches inside at Gibson, driving him farther and farther away from the plate; the last pitch came in so close that Gibson had to spin around to get out of the way, using the bat more like a cane than a bat. Then it was Seaver’s turn to bat against Gibson. The first pitch came in fast, and just over Seaver’s head. The umpire had come out from behind the plate at that point to try and stop it, but Seaver pushed him aside. “Shut up,” he said, “this is none of your business.” At that point Seaver stepped away from the plate and yelled out to Gibson, “As far as I’m concerned this is over. But if you want to continue, we can keep going at it, and you better know that I throw a lot harder than you do now, you old fart.” And that indeed ended it.
Gibson used the brushback pitch as a weapon: first to protect his teammates from other pitchers, and second to protect the plate as he saw it. He was rarely indiscriminate with this pitch, which was, in his hands, a frightening weapon. A confrontation with Dave Rader and Chris Speier of the Giants was memorable to Gibson’s teammates. Rader was at bat. He was a talker, and started trying to talk to Gibson; worse, he started asking about Gibson’s family at just the moment that Gibson was going through a divorce. Gibson hit Rader even though it endangered his own small lead at the time. Suddenly, from the dugout, Chris Speier, the Giant shortstop, started yelling at Gibson. In fact, he did more than yell—he started calling Gibson a gutless son of a bitch. His voice was clear and, as far as Gibson was concerned, insulting. Because Gibson had poor eyesight, he asked McCarver and Torre who was yelling at him. “It’s Speier,” they both said. At that moment Speier, realizing what Gibson had asked, turned his back to Gibson and pointed at his uniform number so that Gibson would know who he was. The game ended with Speier on base. As Gibson stalked after him, Speier raced to the dugout. It might have ended there, but a few weeks later Speier was at the All-Star Game, and he saw both Torre and Brock and told them that sometimes he talked a little too much, and to let Gibby know that he was a fan and held no animosity. Except for Speier’s semi-apology, McCarver thought, Gibson might have let it go—Speier was an in-fielder, not that important a hitter, and enough time had passed since the incident to be forgotten. But in backing down from what he had said, Speier had made a mistake. The next time Speier came to bat, McCarver was sure, Gibby was going to throw at him, and in fact he did.
It was a job to him, and teammates were not to violate his professional code. You were not to wish Gibson luck on the day of a big game. He did not like that, he did not like to talk to anyone before he pitched anyway, and besides, what was happening, as far as he was concerned, was not about luck. This was his work. Once a young reporter interviewed him in the dugout and asked him if he were a money pitcher. “That’s the stupidest goddamn question I’ve ever been asked,” he said. “Why the hell else would I do this? To get my name in the paper? Of course, I’m a money pitcher.” Another time a radio reporter suggested to him after he had won a game on a hot muggy afternoon that he had seemed to get stronger as the game went along. “That’s about as goddamn dumb as you can get,” he said. “How can you get stronger after you’ve thrown a hundred pitches in this heat? You might be getting better, but you’re not getting stronger. I’m dead in the eighth inning. I’m going then on what I’ve got inside of me.”
He took very good care of his body. He did not smoke, and he hated those who did; he did not want any smokers around him. The night before a game he was always in his motel room early. He might have half a bottle of wine with dinner, but he got plenty of rest. He was tense and wired on game days, and he rarely ate a full meal before a game, although before night games he would eat a little bit. More than most men he needed to control his environment, in part, friends suspected, because he wanted nothing that would strip away his hard-won place in the world. Because of that need for control, he hated coming out of a game for a relief pitcher. It was not just a matter of pride to finish what he himself had started, it was a matter of control: he did not trust others to do for him what he felt he could do better for himself. Over one stunning
ten-
year period, starting in 1963, he completed at least twenty starts every season—except one in which he broke his leg—a figure virtually unheard of in contemporary baseball.
Later, after he had achieved his position as a preeminent power pitcher, and as the reputation of his fastball preceded him, he did not have to throw the fastball so much. He could get by often on the slider and the threat of a fastball. He did not like his own curve, and went to it reluctantly. Sometimes, after a game he had won, Jack Buck, the announcer, would ask if he had gotten a particular batter with a curveball, and Gibson would say, “I don’t throw any curves.” “But the ball seemed to break down,” Buck would insist. “That was a slider,” Gibson would say. Sometimes he would go through an entire game without throwing a curve, and sometimes, when he finally did throw one, he would get hammered. He would come into the locker room afterward shaking his head and muttering, “I’ll never throw another goddamn curveball in my life.”
His performances had an artistic quality to them. It was his game, he was in charge, and he wanted no delays; he would set the pace and others would make their adjustments. Jack Buck once put a stopwatch on him—he threw every eight seconds. Once during a Saturday
Game of the Week
when he was pitching, he worked so briskly, coming from the dugout to the mound quickly and from there going immediately into his windup, that NBC could not get in its requisite number of commercials. In the press box an NBC producer went over to a Cardinal press officer named James Toomey and asked if Toomey could please slow Gibson down so that they could get in their commercials. “Here’s the phone,” Toomey said. “You make the call.” No call was made. Gibson wanted no interruptions. He wanted no waste. He hated to throw over to first if there was a runner on. That was a waste. Rather, he intended to concentrate on the batter. If he had a hitter down 0-2 he did not want to waste a pitch, as baseball tradition dictated. Instead, he wanted to go for the kill right then and there and finish him off, and he and Johnny Keane argued back and forth for years over the principle of the wasted pitch.
He wanted the ball back from McCarver as quickly as the catcher could deliver it, and he was in his motion rocking back and forth even as McCarver flashed the sign. His veteran teammate Roger Craig, a man who had seen it all, from the World Series to last-place finishes, thought there was a certain genius to Gibson’s authority when he was on the mound, and the speed with which he pitched was a critical part of it. It intimidated the hitter, who could never get set and never had time to guess what was coming; it pleased the umpire, who wanted to get out of there as quickly as possible and therefore probably gave him the benefit of the doubt on certain pitches; it pleased the infielders, who liked quick workers; and it kept Gibson’s own arm warm between pitches.
Rarely did he turn that competitive fire on his teammates. He took defeat hard, but he assumed that they had done their best. Occasionally there were flashes of temper. In the 1965 season, which was to be a tough one for the entire team, he had been pitching with runners on first and second against Pittsburgh, and McCarver called for the fastball. Thereupon Roberto Clemente hit a twenty-bouncer to the right side to score the winning run. Gibson later turned to McCarver and said, “You’ve got more than one finger out there.” McCarver, just as angry, retorted, “Well, goddamn it, you’ve got a head on your shoulders, you can shake me off—you can call for more than the fastball.” They were both furious, each frustrated at the season, but the anger finally passed. On another occasion, Gibson won a 1-0 game and in the locker room McCarver told him what a hell of a game he had pitched. Gibson absolutely exploded. “Hell of a game my ass—why don’t you guys score some fucking runs!” Gibson was not a man who lightly apologized, so a couple of very cool days passed between them, but then, a few days later, they were talking and there was a sort of apology or as close to an apology as Bob Gibson ever came: “You know, the other day ... when we were talking ... that was a hard game ...” That was a sore point with him always—how few runs the Cardinals scored. With a runner on third and fewer than two out, McCarver, as he was ordered by the manager, would go out to the mound to talk to Gibson about what they were going to do if a ball was hit to him. “There’s a man on third,” McCarver would say. “Yeah, I know, I put him there,” Gibson would say. “Now, Bob, you’re supposed to go to first,” McCarver would begin, and Gibson would answer, “The hell you say—I’m coming home with it—you guys don’t score enough runs to give up a run.”
If McCarver came out to the mound to talk to him, it was only because Johnny Keane had ordered him to go out. “He’s pitching too quickly,” Keane would say, ordering McCarver to slow Gibson down. “He doesn’t want me to go out there,” McCarver would protest. “I’m running this goddamn club, not Gibson,” Keane would say, and McCarver would trudge out. He would still be five or six yards away from the mound when Gibson would wave him off: “What the hell are you doing out here? Get the hell back behind the plate where you belong. The only thing you know about pitching is that you can’t hit it.” Even on that memorable day four years later, when he was on the verge of setting a World Series strikeout record in the first game against the Tigers and McCarver came out to the mound, Gibson waved him away. “Give me the ball,” Gibson had kept shouting at McCarver.
Sometimes Gibson seemed to forget how imposing he was. He knew he was threatening on the mound—that was deliberate—but he had little sense that for many people he was unapproachable and distant off the mound. He hated small talk. He did not like to go through a pretense of social interplay each spring: How’s your family, Bob? Did you drive down? Did you have a good winter? Where are you staying? He did not like to waste time. He did not want people to seem to know him when they did not. Once rather late in his career, Bob Broeg, the sports editor of the
Post-Dispatch,
who greatly admired Gibson, said to him, “You know, Gibby, in all the years we’ve been together and I’ve been writing about you, you’ve never said a kind word to me.” Gibson was stunned: he was quite fond of Broeg and had no idea that he placed a man he liked and trusted at such a distance.
He was a man who lifted an entire team. His own standards were so high that the other players did not like to let him down, and they played harder when he pitched. In time this became true on the other days as well. Years later, Steve Carlton, a pitcher who apprenticed on the Cardinals when Gibson was in his prime, would talk about how much he had learned from Gibson, which became critical to his making the Hall of Fame: the ability to focus on a game, the ability to be tough, and, perhaps even more important, the ability to create a mystique of toughness.