THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (64 page)

The third southpaw was Bo Belinsky, a pool
hustler from Trenton, New Jersey. If Dalkowski was the “fastest
pitcher ever,” then Belinsky was the “greatest playboy” in sports
history. If half the stories are half true, Bo Belinsky made Joe
Namath look like a trappist monk.

Barber, Dalkowski and Belinsky liked to
drink and chase girls together. Mainly, Barber and Dalkowski drank
and tried to get Bo’s “leftovers.” As fate would have it, the
reigning Miss Universe of 1961 was a Venezuelan beauty queen who,
as a reward, was sent on an all-expenses paid trip to Miami,
Florida. There she and her mother – a domineering woman worthy of
the KGB or the Gestapo – had a hotel room . . . right next door to
Bo Belinsky’s room.

Barber and Dalkowski got one look at Miss
Universe and almost had heart attacks on the spot. A plot was
hatched: drill holes in Bo’s wall so they could stare at Miss
Universe, “peeping Tom” style, in the next room. Word spread, and
the entire Baltimore Orioles’ minor league organization was in
Belinsky’s room to stare at Miss Universe. When the beauty queen
turned off the lights to go to bed, one of the Orioles got the
bright idea of shining a flashlight on her, which looked like
tracer fire coming through the tiny hole. All hell broke loose when
she and her mother began to scream like bloody murder.

About 50 Orioles farmhands scattered into
the night like rats abandoning a sinking ship, but it was
Belinsky’s room. Paul Richards was summoned and quickly deduced
what happened. Bo was shipped to the Los Angeles Angels, Dalkowski
to the minor leagues. Barber, the only one deemed a real prospect
at the time, was kept and became a sterling, albeit injury-riddled,
pitcher for Baltimore.

Also in the Orioles minor league
organization during this time was a young manager named Earl
Weaver. Weaver managed Belinsky in Aberdeen, South Dakota. One
night after a game, he observed Bo and Yankee farmhand Joe Pepitone
get into a car Bo had. It fishtailed out of the parking lot,
kicking up rocks and dust like something out of a Paul Newman
movie, screeching onto the road.

Weaver just stared, thinking, “There ain’t
nothin’ to do in Aberdeen, South Dakota, but if anybody could find
it, it was these two guys.”

“Oh, man they were pistols,” he
recalled.

Weaver was not a baseball manager; he was a
Damon Runyon character, a caricature. He was a continuation of the
harmonically perfect set of match-ups that marked the 1969 Mets’
season. First, there was Leo Durocher; amoral to the point of being
almost immoral, the perfect bad guy. Then there were the Braves,
which was like getting a second chance at Bull Run . . . Manassas .
. . II? Finally, Earl Weaver.

“Let’s see,” the producer at the script
meeting might have said, “we have the Mets: shiny, bright, youthful
heroes of American youth. Let’s line ‘em up against some nasty,
crusty, cigarette-smoking, whiskey-drinkin’, foul-mouthed baseball
cretin. The guy you love to beat.”

“Oh, you mean Earl Weaver.”

“Get him.”

Earl Sidney Weaver was born on August 14,
1930 in St. Louis. He was 5-7, and weighed anywhere between 180 and
210 pounds depending on how many cigarettes he smoked to keep his
appetite low. Weaver’s skill as a ball player made Billy Martin
look like Rogers Hornsby. He really had no business even playing in
the low minor leagues, but baseball was his life, all he knew how
to do.

He looked like Mickey Rooney. He held his
own at second base when big guys came flying in, spikes high to
break up double-plays. At the plate he was all “punch ‘n’ Judy,”
but he drew walks or got hit by pitches on purpose. He never got
hurt, never complained, and played decent defense. He officially
played minor league baseball between 1948 and 1965 and never hit
more than .294 in 37 games as a player-manager at Dublin of the
Georgia-Florida League in 1958.

Weaver never made it as high as triple-A. He
was a denizen of the low minors at a time when a song of the time
asked, “How low can you go?” He was low and stayed low: West
Frankfort, St. Joseph, Winston-Salem, Houston (his shot at the
big-time for all of 13 games, although it was the double-A Texas
League at the time), Omaha, Denver, New Orleans, Montgomery,
Knoxville, Fitzgerald, Aberdeen, Fox Cities, and Elmira. This was
the Illinois State League, the Western Association, the Carolina
League, the Texas League, the Southern League, the Sally League,
the Georgia-Florida League, the Northern League, the Eastern
League, and something that
The Sporting News 1975 Official
Baseball Register
calls simply the I.I.I. (?).

By 1956, his never-promising career was as
dead as a doornail, so he went into managing. He was a
player-manager at first, still inserting himself into games as late
as 1965, probably because somebody was hurt, called up, or in jail.
That was the way minor league life was. Pat Jordan wrote about the
pre-draft era low minors in
A False Spring
. It was a world
unto its own; a world of racism, drunkenness, sexual depravity,
bugs as big as fists, flannel uniforms stuck to bodies in humid
conditions that cannot be explained unless endured.

Today, a sleek kid is drafted off a baseball
campus where he played in a multi-million-dollar facility worthy of
big league comforts. A hero since his earliest youth, his every
need is taken into consideration, until he is drafted and signs for
a bonus large enough to fund a small country. Then he enters modern
minor league life, which is now beautiful stadiums, family-friendly
atmospheres, and packed crowds enticed by modern marketing
strategies. This youngster is coddled like a Ferrari that just gets
taken for a test drive on Saturdays. Waiting for him after the game
are “blondes with brains,” to quote Crash Davis in
Bull
Durham
.

In Weaver’s day, nobody used ice except to
keep beer cold. A request for a rub down was met by an open can of
Analgesic balm, to be administered by the player himself using
contortions worthy of a circus performer.

Girls in these little towns were often
farmer’s daughters or town trashies who showed the guys a good
time, then blackmailed them with rape allegations. Weaver was
always losing his best slugger or an ace pitcher because he was
gettin’ busy with some chick whose mother was “close” with the
local
PO-leece
chief. Weaver had to pitch eight times in his
minor league career, probably for this reason.

Black and Latino players lived brutal
existences, forced to stay in the shack out back of the shack where
a local family of their ethnicity lived on the wrong side of the
tracks. If he even dared
look
at one of the farmer’s
daughters he could be the Tom Robinson character from
To Kill a
Mockingbird
.

The Sally League and the Georgia-Florida
League were the worst, but big league clubs continued to operate
there, wanting to maintain a Southern “fan base” perhaps, without
any consideration for the health or well being of a Curt Flood, a
Vic Power or a Roberto Clemente. The theory was that if they could
not cut this barefoot walk on hot coals, they did not have the
stuff for the Major Leagues.

Certainly the guys who survived intact had
more than the “right stuff.” Jim Bouton’s
Ball Four
pointed
out that in the late 1960s, black and Latino ball players made up a
fairly low percentage of all big leaguers, but a high percentage of
the top hitters in most offensive categories. This indicated that
only the best minorities were allowed to play in the Majors; if a
guy was marginal, the white player was chosen, and that was only
after they had played in the Georgia-Florida League or some other
version of
The Heat of the Night
.

In 1960 Weaver managed Fox Cities, wherever
that was, to a first place record (82-56). In 1962 he got the job
at Elmira, Baltimore’s double-A club in the Eastern League, a
significant improvement in living conditions on and off the field.
He won the title there in 1964, and in 1966 found himself at
Rochester of the triple-A International League.

It was a big year in the Baltimore
organization. The big club under ex-Marine Hank Bauer won the World
Series. Weaver won the International League with an 83-64 record
(although they lost in the play-offs). Rochester seemed like
gay
Paree
to Weaver after all those years in Smalltown, USA, but
with Bauer’s team going all the way it seemed unlikely he would
ascend to the job at Baltimore. He was an organization man, so he
just kept his nose to the grindstone.

A funny thing happened at Baltimore in 1967
and early 1968: they were bad. Young superstar pitcher Jim Palmer
got hurt and they did not compete in 1967, nor were they competing
when Bauer was fired on July 11 of the next year. Weaver was in the
right place, having been elevated to a spot on Bauer’s staff in
1968. He was named manager.

Weaver made sure it was not an interim
position, steering the Orioles to a 48-35 record down the stretch.
Detroit dominated and nobody came close, but the O’s were a solid
second and Earl Weaver had himself a job in the big leagues.

Weaver drank, chain-smoked, and his language
was coarse. He did not care about the Vietnam War, civil rights or
the economy, and was perplexed by the “new breed.” In October of
1969 he was only 39. Today, a 39-year old man may well be a young,
urban hipster. Weaver was already
The Old Man and the
Sea
.

But his years of harsh minor league life had
taught him not just toughness, but a respect for those who had
survived them, too. Like Durocher, if he harbored any ill will
toward blacks, it was not bigger than the respect he had for
hard-nosed baseball players. He had one of the hard-nosednest in
Frank Robinson.

Frank Robinson and Earl Weaver did not need
to see eye-to-eye, but they were both no-nonsense guys, competitors
of the highest order who would do everything in their power to win
at all costs. F. Robby’s natural skills were so magnificent that he
probably could have been an All-Star if he had been a drunk, a
libertine, and a slacker.

His work ethic, professionalism and desire
was such that he probably could have survived as a big leaguer had
he only been given Weaver’s tools. Weaver and Robinson respected
each other, which was a good thing for Weaver. If F. Robby sensed a
lack of respect he had fists and knew how to use ‘em.

Weaver was a colorful umpire baiter who
turned “the argument” into an art form. His purpose was not to win
the close call in question, but swing the next couple his way by
virtue of making the umpire endure his foul vocabulary while
smelling his cigarette breath. He was often tossed out of games on
purpose.

Weaver’s strategy was simple: hit a
three-run homer in the seventh inning. He resembled Durocher in
that starters finished what they started. His bullpen consisted of
guys who were washed up or not good enough to start. He did not
like to bunt, steal, or hit ‘n’ run. He did not platoon. He was the
anti-Hodges. With Robinson mashing home runs, and his pitchers
stopping the opposition dead cold, Weaver’s strategy paid off time
and time again.

Frank Robinson’s career in Baltimore was a
form of redemption. Robinson grew up in a time and place – Oakland,
California in the 1950s – that may have produced more incredible
athletes in a smaller geographical area over a shorter period of
time than any other location in the world. There was Jackie Jensen,
Cal’s All-American halfback and the 1958 American League Most
Valuable Player with Boston. Len Gabrielson was an All-American at
USC who played in the bigs for Los Angeles and San Francisco. Vada
Pinson was an All-Star teammate of Robinson’s at Cincinnati. Joe
Morgan became a Hall of Fame second baseman. Curt Flood was an
All-Star in St. Louis. Also from the greater East Bay Area over the
years: Dutch Ruether, Maureen Connelly, Lefty Gomez, Billy Martin,
Bill Rigney, Dick Bartell, Bill Russell, Willie Stargell, Bud
Harrelson, Joe Caldwell, Paul Hackett, Norv Turner, Jim Turner,
Charlie Weaver, John Lambert, Rickey Henderson, Dave Stewart, Gino
Torretta, Ken Dorsey, Dennis Eckersley, Jack Del Rio, Jason Kidd,
Bobby Rollins, and Dontrelle Willis.

Oakland was a gritty industrial town, just
across the water from the shining lights of San Francisco. Oakland
and the East Bay had an inferiority complex, and guys like Robinson
were driven to succeed because they felt they needed to be better
than the other guy. It was a mixed neighborhood in those days.
Blacks moved in to Oakland and Richmond to work at the shipyards
during World War II, but before that the area had a rural feel to
it, its citizens possessing a touch of the farmer mentality. It was
a waterfront town, too; Jack London’s Oakland, home to many a sea
captain and merchant marine, its dockside bars filled with ugly
versions of the famed, musical Brandy, “who serves them whiskey and
wine,” and stories like "The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald” by
Gordon Lightfoot.

Like his namesake, Jackie Robinson, Frank
entered pro baseball having played with and against whites. He was
neither fearful of them nor resentful, as he had known plenty that
were good guys. But he was black, the odds were stacked against
him, and he used this chip on his shoulder to make himself the
best. He was smart, highly articulate, loved movies and music;
earning respect (as well as demanding it). Jackie had paved
Robinson’s path, and by the time F. Robby got to the big leagues he
was not afraid to air his opinions, take out a shortstop, or go
after a pitcher who hit him intentionally.

At 6-1, 194 pounds, Robinson was a specimen,
but his strength was less massive power and more, like Hank Aaron,
the result of quick wrists. He had a slightly unorthodox swing,
although not as crazy as Aaron’s hit-off-the-front-foot style.
Robinson stood, pigeon-toed, feet close together, right on top of
home plate, daring pitchers to come inside. He took a lot of
hit-by-pitches that way, and probably missed a few lifetime homers
because of it.