Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever (25 page)

“How many Cardinals fans?”

One person yelled out.

“Get him out of here,” McLain joked.

With that Northrup broke into a tune nobody really recognized, closing with the impromptu line, “We didn’t come to St. Looey to sing the blues.”

Northrup went by several nicknames on the ballclub. He was called “The Gray Fox” for his premature silver hair and “Sweet Lips” for his gift of gab. “Lay some sweet words on me, Sweet Lips,” his teammates would often say.

After his attempt to sing along with McLain, Northrup introduced many of his fellow Tigers in the audience—Gates Brown, Willie Horton, Ray Oyler, Joe Sparma, Norm Cash, Mickey Lolich, and Bill Freehan. When the all-star catcher and his wife were singled out, receiving a warm round of applause, Freehan decided to call it a night. Yet most of the Tigers, along with their family and friends, stuck around as McLain serenaded them with such tunes as “One of These Days,” “Restless Wind,” and “Money Is the Game.” A newspaper photographer took McLain’s picture and the hubbub the next morning was how many of the Tigers had broken Mayo Smith’s much-maligned curfew. Not that any curfew was held in high esteem within the Tigers’ ranks. If the Cardinals were the defending champions the fall of ’68, the game’s proud professionals, the Tigers, were still eager to be perceived as equal parts frat brothers and misfits.

October 2, 1968

Game One, Busch Stadium, St. Louis, Missouri

NBC held the television and radio rights to the 1968 World Series, and the network rolled out an impressive team of announcers for their coverage of the Fall Classic. Curt Gowdy held things down as the TV voice, with Harry Caray as his partner for games in St. Louis and George Kell joining him in the booth for games back in Detroit. Jim Simpson and Sandy Koufax headed the pregame show. (On the way to Busch Stadium, Koufax told a St. Louis cabbie that whoever won Game One would take the Series.) On the radio, Joe Garagiola led things off with Pee Wee Reese up in the booth, with help from Jack Buck and later Ernie Harwell. Tony Kubek would be on the field for all games.

Before Game One, Smith watched McLain warm up in the Tigers’ bullpen and didn’t like what he saw. Almost everything his ace threw was high in the zone. Unbeknownst to either of them, the Cardinals planned to take pitches against McLain. After throwing a league-high 336 innings, word had it that he was running on empty. In the ’68 season, McLain started forty-one games and went the distance an impressive twenty-eight times. His relentless drive for celebrity, to constantly be in the spotlight, had helped fuel that fire, along with Pepsi, cortisone, Xylocaine, Contac, and amphetamines. But now it was all visibly taking a toll. In addition, thanks to the fact that any such fatigue had yet to impact the running of his mouth, McLain now also had a lineup of angry Cardinals batters to contend with. Even though he tried to distance himself from his comments about humiliating them nobody in St. Louis had forgotten.

“Our guys were charged up,” Gibson later wrote in a column he penned during the ’68 Series for the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
. “The reason might have been McLain’s statement about wanting to humiliate us, if he really made that statement.

“McLain is a good pitcher,” he conceded, before adding, “Whether he’d win thirty-one games in our league, I really couldn’t say.”

If the Cardinals were charged up, so was the sellout crowd at Busch Memorial Stadium. In the afternoon sunshine, Dixieland bands played and
Sports Illustrated
decided half the crowd was wearing straw hats with either cotton tigers or cardinals stapled to them.

As Game One unfolded, Mickey Stanley was the only Tiger batter to have any early success against Gibson. Although he singled in the first inning, nothing came of it. In the field, Stanley quickly settled into his new post at shortstop, throwing out the Cardinals’ Lou Brock for the first out in the bottom of the first inning. Not bad for a guy who was starting his ninth game at shortstop in the big leagues.

“I hope I can just be adequate,” Stanley said the day before the Series began. “That’s all Mayo wants from me. I know I’ll be tight, but then I’d feel that way in center field for my first Series game.”

With Stanley in the infield, Detroit’s outfield consisted of Kaline in right, former catcher Willie Horton in left, and Jim Northrup in center field. None of them was Stanley’s equal, defensively.

Game One remained scoreless through the first three innings, with Gibson clearly the more impressive pitcher. As Gibson dispatched one Tiger hitter after another (often taking ten seconds or less between pitches), McLain struggled both on and off the mound. In the top of the third inning, he bunted a third strike foul, failing to move Don Wert over. In the bottom of the fourth inning, the Tigers’ starter walked a pair of Cardinals, and Mike Shannon and Julian Javier then singled to bring them around, staking St. Louis to a 3–0 lead.

“We’d never seen McLain,” St. Louis manager Red Schoendienst later said, “but we knew if we’d lay off his high stuff—pitches above the shoulder, up around the neck and eye level—and make him throw strikes, we’d have him.”

Meanwhile, the Tigers’ scouting report on Gibson didn’t do much good. Detroit hitters had been told to be ready for the right-hander’s high heat, but advised that Gibson didn’t have much in his arsenal after his epic fastball. But the St. Louis starter and his batterymate, Tim McCarver, soon realized that the Tigers were too eager to swing at anything that appeared to be a strike. As a result, they began going with breaking stuff. “They were swinging at my curve like it was a fastball,” Gibson said.

In the top of the sixth inning, down 3–0, Detroit pinch-hit for McLain and with that, for this day at least, the “Great Confrontation” was over. The way Gibson was pitching, a three-run lead may as well have been a thirty-run advantage.

McLain later grumbled about his early exit. “Surprised? I was very surprised,” he said. “You don’t pitch 336 innings and get yanked out of a ballgame.... I think this could be the worst I pitched this year—no, I can’t say that. I was making good pitches, but they weren’t going where they were supposed to go.”

When asked about Gibson’s dominating performance, McLain replied, “I know he’s got that 1.12 ERA and he doesn’t give up three runs often, but I don’t give up many runs, either. This is the World Series and it’s different. I won thirty-some games and he won twenty-some, but that’s all wiped out. It doesn’t matter. Not in the World Series.”

McLain bristled when asked about the previous night’s concert at the Gas House Lounge. “It wouldn’t have mattered if we’d been in bed by eight the night before because Gibson was unhittable. Al Kaline and Norm Cash struck out three times and all of us looked like we were in shock.”

Bythe final frames of Game One, the lone constant remained Gibson. He had fanned every Tiger at least once. The only time Detroit really threatened came in the sixth inning, with two outs, when Dick McAuliffe singled and went to third base on Kaline’s two-out double. Then, after a quick meeting on the mound, the Cardinals’ starter proceeded to strike out Cash with a sizzling fastball, ending the threat and closing the inning.

Unfortunately for Cash, he would be on the losing end of another memorable out in the top of the ninth inning, as well. Stanley singled to open the inning, giving Detroit one last measure of hope. Then Gibson struck out Kaline to tie Sandy Koufax’s single-game World Series record of fifteen, which had been set in 1963. With that McCarver hurried to the mound with the ball in his mitt, trying to tell the right-hander what he had done. An exasperated Gibson waved him away, ordering his catcher to get back behind the plate.

“Give me the ball,” Gibson yelled as McCarver pointed at the scoreboard.

McCarver stood his ground, trying to get a word in edgewise.

“Give me the damn ball,” Gibson shouted, getting really agitated now.

Finally, McCarver got a chance to explain why the hometown crowd, which included Frank Sinatra and Julie Nixon, daughter of presidential candidate Richard Nixon, was on its feet and raising such a ruckus. Gibson had tied Koufax’s World Series record, and now he had a chance to surpass it. At last, the Cardinals’ ace understood.

“All right, now give me the ball,” Gibson told McCarver.

With that he promptly established a new mark by once again fanning Cash.

Cash didn’t need such reminding that he was the record strikeout. “I read it on the board,” he said, “but I’ve made a lot of history in my life.”

“Who follows Cash?” Gibson then asked.

“What difference does it make?” McCarver shouted back.

Of course, it was poor Willie Horton, who admired Gibson perhaps more than anybody else on the Tigers’ ballclub. Proving that sports has little time for sentimentality, the Detroit left fielder became the seventeenth strikeout victim on a wicked slider. The pitch broke so sharply and Horton swung at it so hard that McCarver later claimed he heard the Tigers’ slugger grunt in resignation.

Bob Gibson’s Game One performance would become one of the most iconic of that period in sports. Images of him in action that afternoon can be placed alongside the famous photographs of Muhammad Ali yelling for Sonny Liston to get off the canvas in 1965, or the moment when sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved fists into the air (which would take place in Mexico City just days after the ’68 World Series concluded). For there is something in the way that Gibson pitched that perhaps wasn’t simply directed at the hitters he faced, but rather at the world in general. It is something that, decades later, still manages to reach out to us through still photographs of him frozen in action—a countenance of determination and perhaps even scorn that crackles with energy and purpose. Gibson unleashed his pitches as if he were a man on fire. He delivered his offerings with such power and conviction that he fell violently off to the first-base side in his followthrough, as if he had difficulty controlling what he conjured up. Seeing images of him captured in this act can be striking, even startling. His frame held motionless at an impossible angle, everything about the action that flung it there screaming in defiance against convention, expectation, what was accepted. Looking at such photos of Gibson, it is at once easy to imagine him springing to life before your eyes and yet nearly impossible to anticipate exactly what will happen next. Which is likely similar to what the Tigers’ lineup must have been feeling that October afternoon in St. Louis.

“That day Bob Gibson was the toughest pitcher I ever faced in any particular game,” Horton said years later. “That last pitch, the one he struck me out with to end the game, tied me up but good.

“But in looking back on that day, what I still cannot believe is Tim McCarver trying to tell him that he’d tied that all-time strikeout record, running out to tell him and Gibson wanting no part of any kind of interruption. He just kept yelling to McCarver, ‘Give me the damn ball.’ I never saw a guy so focused. That day nobody in the world could beat him.”

Almost to a man, the Tigers agreed that Gibson’s performance was among the best they had ever witnessed. “I’ve never seen anybody pitch like that before,” Kaline said. “If he continues to pitch like that, we can’t beat him.”

“It was impossible to detect what he was throwing,” Detroit pitching coach Johnny Sain added. “He is a wonderful pitcher—a machine.”

“I would say that with the possible exception of Luis Tiant at his best, this man throws harder than anyone we have in our league,” Jim Northrup said, “and he is certainly the best we have seen in some time.”

Yet Detroit hitters also wondered if they had unwittingly played into Gibson’s hands. Busch Stadium’s larger confines, at least compared with those of cozy Tiger Stadium, had them swinging from the heels, looking too much for Gibson’s famous fastball, and believing they had to hit the ball that much harder to do any damage.

“I’d rather pitch to guys who swing for home runs,” said Gibson, who threw 144 pitches in the victory.

After his dominating performance, the Cardinals pitcher received a phone call in the St. Louis clubhouse. Vice president and Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey was on the line. “I’m with you all the way,” he told Gibson.

In the losing clubhouse, some wondered whether manager Mayo Smith would avoid another “Great Confrontation” by moving McLain up to start Game Three back in Detroit. Instead, he confirmed that the rematch would take place. “I’ll put them head to head again,” he said. “I know [Gibson] can’t be any better.”

That evening McLain was back playing at the Gas House Lounge, entertaining the crowd. “Mr. Gibson was super today,” he told his audience. “I don’t even feel bad about getting beat. He pitched one helluva ballgame.”

FINAL SCORE: CARDINALS 4, TIGERS
St. Louis leads Series, 1–0

October 3, 1968

Game Two, Busch Stadium, St. Louis, Missouri

After Bob Gibson’s record-setting performance, Tigers manager Mayo Smith made it official: Mickey Lolich would start Game Two instead of Earl Wilson. His stated rationale? Wilson swung a better bat and Tiger Stadium—where Games Three, Four, and Five were scheduled—was considered a better hitting ballpark. Of course, this was long before the designated hitter rule and its alternating use, depending on whether the game was in an American League or National League venue. Back in ’68, pitchers had to hit, or at least give it a try. “[Wilson] gives us another bat,” said Smith, “and we need it.”