Authors: David Halberstam
T
HE SECOND GAME, ON
October 8, pitted Bob Gibson against Mel Stottlemyre. Each was the ace of the staff, and normally it was the matchup that would have taken place in the first game, but Gibson had not been ready to pitch then. He had pitched eight innings in the 1-0 loss to the Mets on October 2, and then had gone four hard innings in relief as the winning pitcher in the final game of the season on October 4, to clinch the pennant. The great question was whether he was sufficiently rested even now. In the first inning Gibson struck out Bobby Richardson, Maris, and then Mantle. If he was not entirely rested, and Tim McCarver, his catcher, did not think he was, then he was hiding it very well. Not very often did all three batters in the lead part of the Yankee batting order strike out in the first inning. In the second Gibson struck out both Ellie Howard and Tom Tresh. That made five strikeouts in two innings.
Later, in seasons that followed, as he watched Gibson intimidate opposing hitters, Tom Tresh thought the Yankees had been relatively lucky in this Series in the sense that they were new to Gibson. They were battling only his skills, no small thing in itself, instead of having to battle both that and his reputation, as teams would have to in the future. For after this World Series he would not be just Bob Gibson, he would be the great Bob Gibson, and his myth would loom bigger, and because of that, in the minds of the hitters, his fastball would be faster, the slider would break sharper and wider, and the word about how he shaved hitters with a fastball would be more ominous. The myth would work to his advantage in the future, Tresh thought, and lucky for them that the myth was still in the making.
Mel Stottlemyre looked very cool out on the mound. Young players, Tim McCarver thought, consciously or unconsciously, tended to take on the mannerisms of the best players on their teams. At the beginning of the Series the Cardinal players had watched Tom Tresh go out to his position in left field, and they had detected a slight limp. “Does he have a bad knee?” someone asked. “No,” replied Ken Boyer. “He runs like that because that’s the way Mantle runs.” Now, as he watched Stottlemyre, McCarver decided that in some ways Stottlemyre had picked up the mannerisms of Whitey Ford. Nothing seemed to shake him. He did not look like someone who had been pitching in Richmond only a few weeks earlier; if anything, he looked like he had been dealing with pressure as long as Whitey Ford had.
Stottlemyre himself was amazed but not distracted by all the attention caused by the World Series. It seemed as if there were more reporters there than there were people back in Mabton, Washington, where he had grown up. He was surprised that there were so many people in one place whose sole purpose, it seemed, was to ask him questions, the answers to which did not seem to interest him very much, and so he doubted they would interest the strangers either. The other thing he noticed about the World Series was the noise. A low buzz seemed to be everywhere, beginning the moment he left his hotel room and got into an elevator; the closer you got to the ball park, the louder it got.
Stottlemyre had heard that Bob Gibson was a power pitcher with a great fastball, and he watched him in those early innings with true admiration. This was a highly skilled professional at work, a man of rare determination; he had a great fastball, a great slider, but most of all, thought Stottlemyre, a great presence on the mound. But Stottlemyre was careful not to be drawn outside himself. He was not overmatched in pitching against Gibson, he reminded himself. He had to be careful not to change his style and try to become a power pitcher. There was a tendency in a big game when you went against a power pitcher like Gibson to go outside your game and try to match him. That was a mistake, Stottlemyre knew. He was pleased with his stuff on that day, his ball was breaking sharply and his placement was excellent. Still, he thought, if you were inventing a pitcher for one great game like this, you would probably invent Bob Gibson.
Yet, if there were an advantage, Stottlemyre thought, it might well be his, because a power pitcher tended to wear down in the late innings, whereas a sinker-ball pitcher, like himself, might go all day. Ellie Howard had been very good with him that day, telling him not to compete with Gibson but to stay within himself, and above all not to overreach. So he fed the left-handers sliders on the outside of the plate, and the right-handers got the sinker ball.
The Yankees were supposed to be special because they always won, and Bob Gibson, new to pitching against them, at once saw that they were no better than the great players of the National League. Yet at the same time he wondered how much truth still existed to their myth. They still had the aura. They still wore the pinstripes, and their reputation made it sound like they could walk on water. It was part of his job, he believed, to bring them down to size.
The one player he was apprehensive about in their lineup was Mantle, because he had heard so much about him. Mantle was always being compared to Willie Mays, Frank Robinson, and Hank Aaron, so Gibson knew he had to be a very good hitter. He liked the idea of being pitted against the best. Tim McCarver thought that Gibson was good that day, but not prime Gibson. He was still a little tired. His fastball, McCarver thought, was good, but it did not have the explosion of Gibson at his best. The Yankees, he thought, might still see that before the Series was over.
Mantle had to bat lefty against him. The great Yankee slugger limped slightly when he came up to the plate, and then, when he swung, Gibson could see him cringe in pain, anguish obvious on his face. Gibson could see as well that Mantle could not shift his weight properly when he swung. The scouting book on him was to come inside and keep the ball away on the outside, but Gibson thought that was wrong. Gibson did not like to come inside to hitters in general, and he saw that Mantle had trouble shirting his weight. The great reputation, Gibson thought, at least when Mantle was batting left-handed, had little to do with the figure standing in front of him, who was clearly coming to the end of his career and was playing despite terrible pain. Gibson struck him out swinging in the first, got him on a called third strike in the fourth, and walked him in the sixth. In the seventh Mantle hit a hard grounder to second, where Maxvill blocked the ball and threw him out.
The Cardinals scored first in the third when Shannon singled and Maxvill hit a ground single past third, sending Shannon to second. Gibson sacrificed, advancing the runners to second and third, and when Flood grounded softly to Linz at short, Shannon scored. The Yankees tied it in the fourth. Howard doubled, and when Brock tried a shoestring catch on Pepitone, the ball got by him. Howard stopped at third. Tresh was given an intentional pass. Clete Boyer flied to Flood in center, and Howard scored. In the sixth Mantle walked, then Pepitone was allegedly hit by a pitch, a call the Cardinals bitterly disputed (and still dispute), and which the Yankees privately thought was a bad one. Mantle scored on a single by Tresh. That made it 2-1.
In the seventh the Yankees started to break it open. Phil Linz singled to left and went to third on a wild pitch. Bobby Richardson singled to center and Linz scored. The Yankees scored another run on two more hits. In the eighth the Cardinals picked up a run. Gibson came out of the game for a pinch hitter in the eighth, with the Cards trailing, 4–2, and in the top of the ninth the Yankees picked up four more runs, most memorably when Mantle hit a wicked double off reliever Gordon Richardson. Mantle came back to the dugout absolutely furious with himself. “I’d like to give them back the double—I should have hit a home run off him,” he said. The Yankees won the second game, 8-3; Gibson had struck out nine men, but Stottlemyre had gotten sixteen men out on ground balls. The teams were going to New York tied, 1-1.
I
N THE THIRD GAME
Jim Bouton pitched against Curt Simmons in Yankee Stadium, and it was probably the best played and best pitched game of the Series. Bouton thought it would be a low-scoring game. He knew that Whitey Ford had not been ready to pitch the first game, that he had been having too much trouble with his arm. Bouton, who had been pitching well in the second part of the season, felt that he or Stottlemyre should probably have started the first game. But he had also understood why Yogi went with Ford. You go with the past and with tradition, he thought, particularly when your tradition was as rich as the Yankees’. Late in the regular season, when there was a pennant race, with huge crowds in the stands, Bouton had begun to prepare himself for this occasion. He would fantasize that those were World Series games. He would tell himself that he had to deliver under pressure. Bouton had pitched in a World Series for the first time in the third game of the 1963 World Series with the Dodgers. His team was down, 2-0, in games, and he was going against the great Don Drysdale. “Hey, Jim, you nervous?” Ralph Terry, his friend, had asked. Bouton was in fact so nervous that he could barely breathe. “Well, Jim,” Terry had said, “just remember that whether you win or lose, there are six hundred million Chinese out there who don’t give a shit what happens one way or another.”
The Cardinals were a good team for him to pitch against. He was a righty and the only three left-handed bats were White, Brock, and McCarver. White, the one true power-hitting lefty, was the hitter he feared the most. The scouting reports said that he could get Bill White out on a change, and somehow Bouton knew that White knew about the scouting report and was standing at the bat just waiting for the change. It was as if there were a voice of a friendly baseball angel coming into Bouton’s ear and telling him, “Don’t throw him a change, don’t throw him a change. Come into him with fastballs.” So Bouton threw White nothing but fastballs. He guessed right. Late in the game, sure that White had been looking for the change and gotten nothing but fastballs, Bouton went to the change, and he guessed right again. White had readied himself for a fastball and missed the change by a foot. Later, after the game, White told reporters that he had spent the entire game looking for a change, “and then as soon as I stopped looking he threw me one.” Two of White’s outs were balls hit to Tom Tresh in left, there was a groundout to Richardson at second, and then White got on base when he hit a slow bouncer to Boyer at third.
Curt Simmons had waited a long time to pitch in a World Series. He had been one of the Whiz Kids pitching for the Phillies in 1950 when he was only twenty-one, his third full season in the majors. The Phillies had won the pennant, but he had been called into the service because of the Korean War. At the time it had seemed like a missed opportunity, but he was sure there would be other chances, sooner rather than later; it had not occurred to him that he would have to wait fourteen years for his next chance, and that instead of being a kid of twenty-one he would be a senior player of thirty-five—no longer a power pitcher, but a skilled pitcher with a provocative motion who knew how to use hitters’ strengths against them. He felt very good that day. He had great stuff, good location, and a very good breaking ball. Watching him, Bouton was impressed. Simmons kept coming inside to the left-handed hitters, going against all the rules in the book, but he was just smart enough to keep them off balance, and the Yankee hitters could not do that much with him. Simmons, for his part, could not tell that much about the young New York pitcher, Bouton. He seemed to throw surprisingly hard and his hat came off on almost every pitch, but the Cardinal hitters said that they were not that impressed. They kept coming back to the bench saying that they could get him, that he did not have that much, and yet they did not get him; later they would agree that Bouton had thrown hard and well, harder than they realized, even though he was not striking out that many batters.
The Yankees scored first, when in the second inning Elston Howard singled to center and then, with two outs and the count 0-2 on Clete Boyer, Simmons tried to waste a pitch, but got it too close to the strike zone and Boyer doubled down the left-field line. In the fifth the Cardinals tied the score. McCarver opened the inning with a single to right, and went to second when the ball went through Mantle for an error. Shannon lined to Mantle and McCarver did not advance. Then Dal Maxvill grounded out to Richardson and McCarver moved to third. When Curt Simmons fined a ball off Clete Boyer’s glove, McCarver scored. That made it 1-1. It stayed that way through eight innings. The Yankees had four hits off Simmons, and the Cardinals had six off Bouton. It was a beautiful, tight baseball game. In the top of the ninth the Cardinals threatened to get to Bouton. McCarver reached first when Linz fumbled his ground ball. Shannon sacrificed him to second. Carl Warwick came up for Maxvill, and Bouton walked him. There were two on and one out. Then Bob Skinner came to bat for Simmons. Skinner liked the idea of batting against Bouton, because he was so aggressive a pitcher; he got a fastball, just as he expected, and he hammered it deep to right center field, where Maris finally hauled it in. Simmons, from the bench, watched it and thought to himself that in St. Louis it was a three-run homer on top of the roof, but in Yankee Stadium it was just a long out. It was a cold day and Simmons, his day’s work done, decided to head back to the locker room to take a shower.
Barney Schultz was to pitch the ninth, and the Cardinal players were pleased because Schultz had become their invincible man that season. Somehow, when Barney came in, the game was a lock. The Yankee leadoff hitter was Mickey Mantle, and because Barney was a right-hander, Mantle would have to bat from his left, or weaker, side. Watching Mantle at the plate, Bouton had a sudden sense that the Cardinals were making a mistake, that they should not bring in a right-handed knuckleball pitcher against him. Mantle golfed the ball when he swung from the left side, swinging up, compared to his swing from the right side, which was more of a tomahawk. That golf swing could be lethal against a knuckleball pitcher because of the way the ball dropped down.
Mantle, it turned out, was thinking much the same thing. The Yankee scouts had told the hitters two things about Barney Schultz. The first was that he needed to get the first pitch over the plate because it was important for a knuckleball pitcher not to fall behind in the count. If he got the first pitch in, he could then afford to throw two more knucklers. The second thing was that for the same reason, Schultz threw the first pitch a little harder, and it did not move quite as much. It was, the scouts said, the best pitch to swing on against him. On the mound Barney Schultz was pleased with himself. The warm-up pitches he threw were very good, the ball seemed to flutter and dodge, and he was sure he had his best stuff on that day. Mantle was waiting by the plate while Schultz was warming up and Ellie Howard was in the on-deck circle. Mantle walked over to Howard. “Elston,” Mantle said, “you might as well go on back to the clubhouse because I’m going to hit the first pitch out of here for a home run.” It was, he later noted, the kind of boast that he had made many times, though he did not always make good on it. Schultz wound up and threw. He knew immediately it was not a good pitch: it did not dance or flutter, and it did not move away from Mantle as it should have. Instead, it glided in with precious little speed and precious little movement. Behind the plate, Tim McCarver watched the ball float toward him, ever so slowly, ever so ominously. A number of things flashed through McCarver’s mind in that instant, none of them good: he could see Barney Schultz very clearly, he could see the Cardinal infielders, and he could almost feel the awesome physical surge in Mantle. For a split second McCarver wanted to stop the scenario, to reach out and interfere with Mantle’s bat, but then the ball floated in, and Mantle absolutely crushed it, a tape-measure job well into the third tier in right field—his sixteenth World Series home run, which put him ahead of Babe Ruth and gave him one of his greatest thrills in baseball. Out in right field Mike Shannon went to the fence, pretending he might have a play, as if he were decoying Mantle and making him think the ball was catchable. Curt Simmons was on his way from the dugout to the locker room when he heard a tremendous roar. Simmons was an old pro, skilled at measuring crowd noise. For a moment he stopped and thought that Mantle must have hit a double, then the roar kept growing and growing, and he thought to himself,
Oh, shit, he hit a home run.
After the game, reporters crowded around Simmons’s locker, and he handled them with considerable grace. “Tough day at the mill,” he told them. Then he paused. “That’s baseball.”