Authors: David Halberstam
That was the Yankee trademark: two exceptional middle infielders, and usually a backup player or two who could play any infield position and play it well. The veteran middle infielders helped train the younger ones, even if the younger players they trained were likely to be their successors. Therefore, when Bobby Richardson was about to come to the major leagues, and it was Coleman’s job he would most likely take, Coleman spent long hours with him in spring training, teaching him how to make the pivot on the double play without being crunched. No one had ever been a more dedicated teacher than Coleman, Richardson later reflected: he dissected Richardson’s flaws and got him to make the basic movements of a second baseman by instinct. “Come on, Bobby,” Coleman was always saying, “let’s do a little more today.” Even Billy Martin—who shared second base for a time with Coleman, and who, with less natural talent, had been determined to maximize his ability and stay with the Yankees—worked with Richardson. Martin teased Richardson when he first showed up in camp, a pretender to Martin’s job at second: “Hey, kid—I was sure you’d be in the Army by now—I already wrote your draft board telling them to take you.” But Martin was helpful too, and in 1957, when he was traded, one of the most bitter days of his life, he behaved very well with Richardson. “Okay, Bobby, it’s all yours now,” he said.
Richardson and Kubek had played together for Ralph Houk in the minors at Denver, and had come up to the majors at roughly the same time. As he was reaching the higher echelons of the minors, Richardson was bothered by the number of middle infielders ahead of him—Martin, Gil McDougald, Andy Carey, Coleman, and Jerry Lumpe—all of whom seemed older and more experienced. In 1959, after the Yankees sent Jerry Lumpe to Kansas City, where he clearly would be able to play regularly, Richardson, by then twenty-four and feeling old and extremely frustrated with his lack of playing time and with Casey Stengel’s tendency to play him and then pinch-hit for him in the early innings, went to George Weiss and asked to be traded as well. “No,” said Weiss, “we’re not going to trade you—we’re not going to trade any more of our younger players. You’re going to play regularly now.” That had been the trademark of those old Yankee teams, so much depth that they could afford the luxury of breaking in their players slowly, not putting too much pressure on them at first, and confident always that there was another graceful-fielding shortstop and second baseman coming up through the minors. In 1961, when Ralph Houk became manager, Richardson and Kubek became the core of the infield. Kubek had been a favorite of Stengel’s from the start. Stengel had known his father in the minor leagues, and Kubek’s versatility appealed to Stengel. “I can play that kid anywhere,” Stengel said, and he in fact did just that. Stengel came more slowly to his appreciation of Richardson, of whom he said at first, “He doesn’t drink, he doesn’t smoke, he doesn’t chew and he doesn’t cuss, and he still can’t hit .250.” Richardson was a quiet player, and Stengel would say of his play at second base (in contrast with that of Martin, who was nothing if not volatile and verbal), “He doesn’t talk much out there—I don’t know if he’s asleep or not.”
When Houk took over as manager in 1961, he wanted to stabilize the team and believed he could do it by putting Kubek at shortstop every day and Richardson at second, and not shifting them around. He went to Richardson as soon as Stengel was forced out and told him, “The second-base job is yours. You’ll play every day. I don’t care if you hit .250 or .270. You’re going to stay there.” With that Kubek and Richardson became ever more confident, and one of the great strengths of the Yankee team in those years was its infield play. They were a very good double-play combination, quite possibly the best in the league. They always seemed to make the plays, and they were surprisingly good hitters. Mantle just edged Richardson out for American League MVP in 1962, and Mantle himself often said that if the game were on the line and the Yankees needed a hit, the player he would want up was Richardson. In fact, both Kubek and Richardson played better than their statistics showed. The recognition of their excellence came slowly, in part because Kubek never looked like a great shortstop. He was not graceful, like Belanger or Aparicio, and he did not seem to have very good range. But he repeatedly made the kind of plays that players with greater range did not. He played shortstop, it seemed, not as if it were his natural position, but through sheer willpower and determination. The key to his play, his teammates thought, was that he played with an inner toughness that he transmitted to other players on the team and seemed to carry him to a higher level in big games. He wanted to win, he expected to win, and he would not let anyone else loaf or slip beneath a standard of excellence; he was the one player on the team who would stand up to Mantle if he thought Mantle was losing focus or letting his hitting failures affect his play in the field.
Kubek liked and responded to challenges. Early on, he had heard people say that he would never be a big-league shortstop, and with that he set out to be the best shortstop in the league. He was persistent in all things, a strong union man in the Players Association when it was not a popular role and certainly did not help a player’s career with management. He had his own strong sense of right and wrong and did not covet popularity. He did not like to be categorized, and if reporters wrote that he was one of the milk shake kids, hanging out with Richardson rather than with the carousers on the team, then he would hang out with Mantle and Ford for a few days, just to show them. That grittiness had always been there. Richardson remembered when they were both in the minor leagues, still at Denver, and Kubek was barely twenty. There was an argument at second base and Eddie Stanky, then the opposing team’s manager, came out and seemed to bully not only the umpire but the Denver players. Kubek simply drew a line in the dirt and told Stanky, “Cross that line, I’ll knock you on your ass.” Those were not words that minor-league kids said to tough guys like Stanky, but it was a warning both heard and heeded. In Denver a pitcher named Frank Barnes threw at him and Kubek immediately laid down a bunt so that he could nail Barnes at first. He responded to every challenge and his intensity was palpable. Once in Detroit, after the Yankees had taken a big lead on a couple of home runs, Joe Sparma of the Tigers threw at Kubek and hit him. Kubek was furious; as soon as he could, he broke for second and took out the second baseman with a hard, rolling block. No one in the league, unless it was Roger Maris, a former football player, came in to second with as hard a block as Kubek. Then, on the next pitch, he broke for third and took out the third baseman with another hard body block. And then, on a grounder, he came home and rammed the catcher on another hard play. Then he went to the Detroit dugout, stopped right on the top step, pointed at Chuck Dressen, the Detroit manager, whom he knew had ordered the knockdown, and uttered some well-chosen words. He had been out, but the run had not mattered; what had mattered was sending a message to Dressen and Sparma.
The heart and soul of this team in the late fifties and early sixties, thought Steve Hamilton, the relief pitcher, were Kubek and Richardson. Kubek with his singular toughness, which he passed on as if by osmosis to the other players, might well be the most important player on the team, Hamilton thought, the glue that kept this aging team together. They had come up playing for winners in the farm system, and they had known nothing but winning in their early years in the majors. For the Yankee relief pitchers there was something reassuring about coming into the game, throwing your warm-up pitches, and hearing Kubek and Richardson teasing in the background. “Gee, Bobby,” Kubek would say when Hamilton came in, “how’s he going to get anyone out with that junk? I mean, he doesn’t have
anything
today.” “Yeah,” Richardson would say, “I wonder how much stuff Mikkelsen has when he comes in. Let’s hope he has more.”
In 1964, Kubek was experiencing constant back problems. He had been badly injured playing touch football while in the army in 1962, had suffered cracked vertebrae, and his recovery had never been complete. He was only twenty-seven that season, but he could not swing properly and ended up playing in only 106 games. He hit some fifty points below his normal average, and it was, for him, a frustrating season. Within a year doctors warned him that he would have to retire or risk permanent damage to his spinal column; his career was cut down just at its height, and years later his memories of that particular season were so unpleasant that he could not bring himself to talk about them. In the past, the Yankees had been so deep that the loss of a player like Kubek would not have seemed that important. They always had an exceptional backup. Perhaps they lost twenty or thirty points in a batting average, but if the play in the field did not drop, then they did not worry about the loss of a few hits. But now it was different. Kubek was not only an exceptionally hard player to replace because of his overall value to the team, but the depth no longer existed. They were not rich in minor-league infielders, and when Richardson and Kubek both retired, they were replaced by a number of players, all of them undistinguished. In 1964, Kubek’s injuries meant that Phil Linz had to play more and more shortstop that season, and that he had almost as many at bats as Kubek. Linz was a good baseball player in the eyes of his teammates, a bit flaky but a tough kid in his own right. But he himself was the first to point out he was not Kubek, and the infield felt less solid to the pitchers with Kubek out for long stretches during this season.
A
FTERWARD, LOU BROCK THOUGHT
it was the best base he ever stole. Certainly the most important. It came just as the Cardinals were beginning to make a run at the Phillies, and after the game was over his teammates thought that if he had not pulled it off, the Phillies might have wrapped up the pennant then and there. It came on September 9, with the Cardinals playing eleven innings against the Phillies in Philadelphia. The Cards had been playing well for the last two and a half weeks; they had won 12 of their last 15, were 31-13 since July 24, and had cut five games off the Philly lead of eleven games. Curt Simmons started the game, pitched poorly, and was driven out in the fourth inning. “They can’t even beat me on a bad night,” he said later. The Cardinals hit Jim Bunning relatively hard and he left in the sixth inning. In the top of the ninth the Cardinals came to bat trailing 5-3. Charlie James opened the ninth with a single and Curt Flood forced him at second. Brock, at bat with one out, singled, and when Flood went to third and Cookie Rojas fumbled the ball in center field, Brock broke for second. Suddenly it appeared that the Phillies had Brock hung up between first and second. But Brock simply turned on his full speed and amazed everyone as he raced back to first past Danny Cater, the Philly first baseman. That, however, did not make him more cautious. With the count 0-2 on Bill White, Brock broke for second. It was one of forty-three bases he stole that year, but it was particularly daring because of the circumstances; if he had been out, then whatever chance the Cardinals had of tying the game up would have slipped away. Brock beat the throw from Clay Dalrymple, then Bill White hit a one-hopper to second, a perfect double-play ball; but instead of it being a double play with Flood scoring and no one left on the bases, Flood scored, Brock went to third, and White was out at first. Ken Boyer’s single tied the score, and the Cardinals broke the game open in the eleventh with 5 runs. Without Brock’s steal, the game would have ended in defeat for the Cards, and since the Phillies won the second game the next day, they might have ended up with an eight-game lead. “They win the game, maybe they break the whole thing open,” Ken Boyer said later. “I think they may be peeking back at us now.”
On September 3, with the Yankees still floundering, Roy Harney, the former general manager, visited the team in Los Angeles, where the Yankees were in the process of losing two out of three to the Angels. “Does it look hopeless?” a reporter asked Hamey. “Well, hope is about all that is left,” he answered. “This team needs a six-game winning streak, but the way they’re hitting, it wouldn’t seem very likely they can do it. And if they get a streak going, those other guys [Baltimore and Chicago] would have to lose a few.” Hamey thought that they were still a good team, but he compared them to Arnold Palmer, the great golfer, who had suddenly gone cold after being the best golfer in the country for years, and who now was coming in second in many tournaments. “I don’t say they’re finished. It could go down to the last week, even the last day. But they’ve got to start winning.”
That August, Pedro Ramos, a pitcher with an exceptional fastball, was beginning to think for the first time that his professional baseball career might be coming to an end. Ramos and Birdie Tebbetts, the Cleveland manager, were most decidedly not getting along, and far more than language difficulties separated them. Ramos believed he had been promised by Tebbetts that he would be a starting pitcher, an assignment he greatly preferred, rather than working out of the bullpen. But by mid-season he was spending most of his time coming out of the bullpen. Ramos asked why, only to become convinced that Tebbetts neither appreciated the question nor was forthcoming in his answer. Tebbetts wore the number 1 on his uniform, and he turned his back, pointed to his uniform number, and said, “I’m number one here and whether you like it or not, you’ll do what I say, and you’ll pitch when I tell you and the way I tell you to.” Ramos, then in his tenth big-league season, thought the Indians were going with younger pitchers who were not as good as he was. “But you told me I was a starting pitcher and that’s what I am,” he said. Tebbetts answered, “Don’t you tell me what you are and what I said—I’m the manager, I know what I said, and I decide what you are.”
Playing for Cleveland under Birdie Tebbetts was not where Ramos wanted to end up while he still was in his prime, for this was a team mired in sixth place. So Ramos asked to be traded. “We’d be glad to get rid of you, but no one wants you,” Tebbetts told him. “What about letting me buy out my own contract and then letting me make my own deal if that’s true?” asked the shrewd Ramos. “We can’t do that,” said Tebbetts. He did not say why they could not do that, but the idea had smacked of independence, and perhaps other players might want to purchase their contracts, too. So Ramos sat there that summer, a player of considerable ability whose misfortune it had been to play with poor second-division clubs most of his career. Worse, it seemed he would do it now as an older relief pitcher for second-division clubs. That would, of course, affect his salary negatively. Instead, he had always wanted to play for the Yankees, a team that had been his favorite when he was a boy growing up in rural Cuba. Whenever the Washington Senators, the team for whom he had labored for most of his career, played the Yankees, Ramos would sidle over to Casey Stengel and suggest that he make a deal for him. “I would pitch very good for you,” he would say. “I would be a very good Yankee.” Stengel always replied that he was interested, that the Yankees wanted him, but that the Washington ownership would not trade him—something others doubted, since Washington was famous for its willingness to trade or sell almost anything not nailed down. Then, in early September, Pete Ramos was called in by Gabe Paul, the general manager, and Tebbetts. “You’ve been traded,” Tebbetts said. “I hope it’s not to Kansas City,” Ramos said, suddenly sensing that that might be Tebbetts’s revenge, to trade him to a team even further down in the standings (the Kansas City Athletics were in tenth place at the time, some thirty games out). “Yeah, you have to go to Kansas City,” Tebbetts said. There was a pause. “You’re going to join the Yankees there.” “I’ll be on the first plane,” Ramos said. Then, as he was leaving, he turned back to Tebbetts. “I thought you said no one wanted me.”