THE 1969 MIRACLE METS: THE IMPROBABLE STORY OF THE WORLD’S GREATEST UNDERDOG TEAM (66 page)

He had one of the most unorthodox of
pitching styles, not unlike the high-kickin’ Juan Marichal. The
best way to describe it is to say that no pitcher should ever try
it at home. Nobody could get away with pitching like Palmer unless
you had . . . Jim Palmer’s stuff. He would bend his back, kick out
like a Rockette, then let loose with a full-throttle,
straight-overhand fast ball, delivering pitches constantly around
the letters or even higher. His location screamed “hit me . . .
tomahawk me . . . what’s the matter, I’m right in your face.”

Hitters would see it headed right into their
wheelhouse, dig in, and take a mighty cut. The baseball, however,
would defy gravity, seemingly rising and, if possible, getting
faster
the closer it got to the strike zone, finally
whooshing
past swinging bats. Palmer made hitters look bad.
Then he would throw a
yak
curve, or pinpoint a fast one low
and away. He was insane, one of the toughest pitchers who ever
graced the diamond. If that was not enough, he outsmarted all those
dumb hitters. In his prime, they had little chance when he was on,
and he was rarely off.

Palmer got scooped up by the Orioles for
$60,000 and made his Major League debut in 1965 at the age of 19.
He tried to go to school in the off-seasons, taking classes at
Arizona State, USC and Towson State College, but unlike Seaver he
did not have those three years of basic course work as a head
start. Trying to get a degree over a decade or more of part-time
classwork was too daunting, despite his pedigree and collegial
upbringing.

In 1966 he was not yet 20 when he beat Sandy
Koufax and Los Angeles 6-0, to become the youngest shutout artist
in World Series history. A brighter future had never been known by
any pitcher ever. In keeping with the Orioles’ sore arm history, it
all came crashing down overnight. He was injury prone, hurt his
shoulder, and was virtually out of baseball, forgotten, in 1967 and
1968. Palmer pitched a few minor league rehab innings, but most
people just figured it was a good thing he came from money, because
baseball was not in his future.

Palmer may have been a pretty boy who grew
up with a silver spoon in his mouth, but he was a stubborn one who
refused to give up. In 1969 he showed up healthy and dominant. He
scared the Orioles when he went on the disabled list again
(mysterious back problems that Weaver never quite understood) from
June 29 to August 9. When he came back on August 13 he no-hit the
talented Oakland A’s, 8-0. In 1969, Palmer was 16-4 with 123
strikeouts and just 64 walks in 181 innings. His .800 winning
percentage led the league and his ERA was a sterling 2.34. He was
on his way to Cooperstown.

Oh, and by the way; Palmer and Weaver could
not stand each other. Weaver was the ultimate “dead end kid,” the
hard luck grinder who came from nothin’, had nothin’, and had
scrapped for everything he ever had. Palmer was a guy who waltzed
through life with every gift handed to him like Manna from
Heaven.

Even Palmer’s work ethic, which was not in
question, was questioned by Earl. Jim simply had a different way of
doing things. To Weaver, a pitcher ran his wind sprints, did his
sit-ups, took his rollers, pitched 15 minutes in between starts,
and that was that. Palmer had all kinds of funky, new-fangled
training methods.

Palmer was a genuine hypochondriac. He would
tell Earl he could not pitch; take me out, my arm is sore; my back
hurts; it’s my big toe; a hangnail; a headache. Weaver was
exasperated but what made it even more frustrating was that when
all was said and done, Palmer
would
pitch – he rarely missed
a start – and throw with his usual dominance. Then he would
complain to Earl some more. They were like oil and water.

Weaver would come out to the mound and they
almost needed the catcher to interpret, or mediate, or break them
apart. Palmer literally looked down on Earl, physically and
intellectually. He had no respect for people who were dumb, lacked
the ability to speak decent English, and were simpletons. He lacked
much respect for little people, period.

“The only thing you know about pitching is
you couldn’t hit it,” Palmer told Weaver.

Teammates did not know what to make of
Palmer. It was like the Dan Akroyd character from
Trading
Places
(Louis Winthorpe III) asking to play, then displaying a
95-mile an hour fastball with attitude to back it up. But Palmer
had no fear or the slightest awe. Seaver was a fan living a dream.
Palmer had been the greatest pitcher anybody who ever saw him pitch
had ever seen. He had been this way since age five. Big league ball
was like his inheritance, an expected thing, but he also wanted to
learn.

At 19 he would sit in the bullpen or the
dugout asking endless, jabbering questions of veterans, trying to
learn every possible edge, every advantage on hitters, whatever he
could gain. He was a nice guy, not stuck up despite his rearing. He
simply disarmed with charm, intelligence and a pure desire to
learn.

While Palmer would go on to a Hall of Fame
career that paralleled Tom Seaver’s on and off the field, in 1969
it could be argued that he was the
third pitcher
on Earl
Weaver’s staff. Palmer was prevented from winning 20 games because
of his June-to-July stint on the disabled list.

The
de facto
ace of the staff was a
journeyman screwball pitcher from Cuba named Miguel Angel Cuellar.
Prior to Fidel Castro’s takeover in the winter of 1958-59, Cuba was
an island paradise, albeit one controlled by the likes of Meyer
Lansky and the Mafia. It was a land of women legendary in their
beauty. Stories of sexual decadence available to those with a
little money in their pockets in Cuba reached mythological
proportions. The other mythology in Cuba was
beisbol
.

Baseball was made popular in Cuba and the
Dominican Republic in the 1930s. Various dictators and strongmen in
control of those nations invited Negro League stars to play there
in the winter. Totalitarian Dominican leader Rafael Trujillo once
instructed the black American stars playing for his “national” team
that they had better win all their games or . . . face a firing
squad? At least that was the message that legendary Negro League
outfielder James “Cool Papa” Bell got, as related in a long
Sports Illustrated
essay.

Cubans took to baseball with the same
enthusiasm as the Dominicans, and apparently with less “lobbying”
from the government. Pirates third baseman Don Hoak played winter
ball in Cuba and recalled a game in which Castro, then a young
revolutionary lawyer, came down from the stands, interrupted the
game, and took the mound to throw a few pitches to him. According
to Hoak, he almost skulled him. Castro was said to be a fair
left-handed pitcher who was scouted and even offered contracts by
the New York Giants and possibly the Washington Senators.

Castro, a Washington
Senator?
Talk
about “what ifs?”

Fabulous baseball players came out of Cuba.
Tony Oliva and Camillo Pasqual of the Minnesota Twins were
All-Stars, among many others. While the Dominican is known for
producing tremendous players, Cuba was on a path towards producing
just as many if not more. The pipeline ended with Castro’s
Communist takeover. In the succeeding years, the Cuban national
team has dominated Olympic and amateur competition. Occasionally
one of their stars makes it over to the States via a life boat and
plays with some success, but the waste of talent in Cuba has been
monumental.

Mike Cuellar was born on May 8, 1937 in
Santa Clara, later the scene of a major battle between Castro’s and
President Fulgencio Batista’s forces. He started with the Havana
club in the International League, but struggled for 10 years. At
5-11, 178 pounds he did not throw very hard. Cuellar reached the
big leagues when expansion created jobs for otherwise-minor league
hurlers. In 1966 he won 12 games with the Houston Astros, and
followed that up with 16 in 1967. But in 1968 Cuellar was only
8-11. Lost in that record was the fact that his earned run average
was a sparkling 2.74 in 171 innings of work. The 1968 Astros were a
woeful offensive unit during the “Year of the Pitcher.”

Earl Weaver had been everywhere and seen
everybody. He knew Cuellar could be a winner. The Cuban southpaw
had perfected his “out” pitch, a screwball that broke away from
right-handed hitters. A trade was consummated in which Cuellar came
to Baltimore for Curt Blefary.

Over the next five years, Cuellar was one of
the most effective pitchers in baseball, but his greatest season
was 1969 when won 23 games with a 2.38 ERA, and shared the Cy Young
award with Detroit’s Denny McLain.

Weaver’s pitching staff was a myriad
combination of the elitist Palmer; the Cuban immigrant, now a “man
without a country” (Cuellar); and the Montana country boy, Dave
McNally.

McNally’s high school in Billings did not
have a baseball team, since the snow was still on the field by the
time school let out. But in those days before the Internet, video
games, cable TV and other pre-occupations, the number one source of
entertainment in his town was American Legion ball, and they took
it
seriously
. It was not unlike Appleton, Minnesota, where
Jerry Koosman’s high school did not field a team.

Like Cuellar, McNally hardly broke a pane of
glass with his fast ball. He and the Cuban had none of Palmer’s
immense natural gifts, but statistically they were Jim’s equal in
the 1960s and early 1970s. McNally was one of those young Orioles,
often of the left-handed variety, favored by Paul Richards. He
moved up the ladder and in 1966 won 13 games for the American
League champions.

In the first game of the World Series,
McNally started against Don Drysdale of Los Angeles at Dodger
Stadium. Games one and two were a couple of the strangest ever
played. McNally was so wild he had to be removed with one out in
the third inning of the opener. Drysdale was battered about and
removed, too. Journeyman reliever Moe Drabowsky took over.
Drabowsky was described as looking like “a cab driving down the
street with the car doors open.” A fun-loving sort, he would call a
restaurant in Tokyo from the bullpen phone and order take-out, or
have pizza delivered during the game. That day, a better
description of him would have been “a modern imitation of Cy
Young,” when he struck out a Series relief pitcher-record 11 futile
Dodgers to win it, 5-2.

In game two, Sandy Koufax was betrayed by
center fielder Willie Davis, one of the best defensive players in
the game. Davis lost all semblance of the ball in the hot, smoggy
Indian summer L.A. haze. His defense was described by Roger Angell
in
The Summer Game
thusly: a short fly fall subjected “Davis
to further corona observation, and he dropped it. Still shuddering
under the weight of so many footcandles, Davis now pounced on the
ball and made his first really unforgivable play – an angry Little
League heave into the Dodger dugout that scored the second run.”
Later, caustic Dodger Stadium pavilionites cheered Davis for
catching throws during between-inning warm-ups.

The beneficiary of Davis’s “Little League
heave” was Palmer, who shut out L.A. to beat “Dandy Sandy” Koufax
in game two, 6-0. In Baltimore, there were no defensive relapses or
stretches of wildness, just pitching so airtight it could have
sailed to Europe underwater. In game four, McNally shut out
Drysdale and Los Angeles with the dispatch of a commuter waiting
for the 5:15 to Greenwich, 1-0. Baltimore had a World title.

McNally won 22 games in 1968 and 20 in 1969.
In the process, he won 17 straight decisions between September 22,
1968 and July 30, 1969, a league record. His 15-0 start in 1969 was
also a record. He was a mirror image of Whitey Ford, with a compact
motion, a delivery between sidearm and three-quarter, consisting of
sinkers, curves, scuffed and illegal pitches, all delivered via
pinpoint control. On another team, McNally might have been a .500
pitcher. With F. Robby and Blair pulling down outfield drives;
Belanger and Johnson stopping all manner of ground balls up the
middle; and Brooks Robinson totally denying any hope on the far
left side of the infield, he was an ace.

The Orioles were a “team without a
weakness,” wrote Baltimore sportswriter Doug Brown. They were so
powerful that Merv Rettunmund,
The Sporting News’
1968 Minor
League Player of the Year, could not crack their line-up.

They were 109-53. Only the 1927 Yankees
(110) and 1954 Indians (111) had more wins in American League
history. The 1906 Cubs had won 116 and the 1909 Pirates 110. In a
portent of the future, they had both lost in the World Series. The
1961 Bronx Bombers had the same 109-53 mark. The 1969 Orioles were
unbeatable
in Spring Training
(19-5), started 16-8, and left
defending World Champion Detroit in the dust by June. They won the
East by 19 games, holding onto first place from April 16 on.

But as great as it was, 1969 was a strange
year for Baltimore. In a season in which baseball came alive again
like “a leaping corpse,” in the words of Roger Angell – with huge
attendance increases and fever pitch excitement over division races
– Baltimore drew a mere 1,058,168 fans to Memorial Stadium. There
seems no plausible explanation. The team had won the Series three
years earlier and finished a solid second in 1968, so they did not
come without warning. They were so astonishingly good, winning the
East so easily, that fans found may have no drama in the Oriole
way.

Enthusiasm over the Colts might explain it,
although that makes little sense since. It would mean fans sitting
on their hands from April to August at least; to do what? Daydream
about Johnny Unitas? Perhaps social unrest is the best explanation,
since Baltimore burned after the 1968 King assassination, but that
was still a year earlier.