A TALE OF THREE CITIES: NEW YORK, L.A. AND SAN FRANCISCO IN OCTOBER OF ‘62 (27 page)

Those men were usually Maury Wills, Junior
Gilliam and Willie Davis.

"He'd go up there and look bad on some
pitches, but he'd do it on purpose," said catcher Norm Sherry. "So
the pitcher would throw the same thing to him again and he'd knock
the cover off the ball."

"Down in his heart he wants to play, win and
bear down as much as anyone," said Alston. "But he likes to relax.
It's our job to keep him wound up."

Davis hung out with Wills, Willie Davis and
John Roseboro for musical jam sessions. Wills handled the banjo.
Davis was a baritone. Roseboro fooled around with bongo drums,
harmonics and a ukulele. Tommy was a "utility man," more often
playing producer/critic. Davis did some promotional work for
Capitol Records in the off-season. The great singer, songwriter and
piano impresario Ray Charles was a business partner of Davis's, in
a travel agency called Gulliver's.

Davis also enjoyed playing golf with Wills,
Willie Davis and Roseboro. Eventually he shot in the low 70s. While
Davis had shown great ability in the minors and terrific potential
in his first two years in the big leagues, nobody could have
predicted what he had in store in 1962.

In the early days of baseball, bunting,
stealing and moving runners over from base to base was the formula
by which winning teams thrived. Great singles hitters and base
stealers such as Ty Cobb were the idols of the game. Then Babe Ruth
came along. His power hitting prompted the establishment to "liven
up" the baseball, outlaw spitters, and usher in a new era of home
run hitting. The stolen base became a secondary weapon until after
World War II, when Jackie Robinson broke in and a new wave of black
players started a style that came to be called "National League
baseball."

Maurice Morning Wills was the epitome of this
aggressive style; stealing bases, taking the extra base, forcing
errors on pick-off throws and outfielders trying to nab runners
stretching out hits. He was, as Cobb had once described himself, a
"scientific" player, a "thinking man's" ballplayer. At 5-11 and
only 170, the wiry little shortstop needed to develop the skills he
had - namely, speed and smarts - instead of focusing on what he did
not have; power, a strong throwing arm . . .

Wills made friends of the groundskeepers, who
tailored the dirt areas to his liking. Philadelphia manager Gene
Mauch said it was "an education just to watch him" before games;
testing his footing, practicing turns, "like a guy tuning a violin
for a concert."

"I think I can steal against anybody," he
said. "Stealing is about 40 percent lead, 40 percent jump, and 20
percent speed." Indeed Wills was fast, but others - Lou Brock,
Rickey Henderson, to name two - were considerably faster. "The
score doesn't have much to with stealing bases as far as I'm
concerned. Even if we're four or five runs behind, I like to play
it as if the game was even. I'll try to steal sometimes just to get
us one run closer. If we can edge up on 'em one at a time we might
win it."

Writers quickly noted that Wills had that
special talent known as "killer instinct." He said he would like to
"win every game 100-0 if we could." Wills was also skilled in the
art of the "disrupted throw." Not only did he steal bases, but he
had the ability to cause infielders to miss throws by jamming his
legs and body into their gloves and bodies as he was sliding safely
into the bag, popping up, and taking an extra base on the forced
error.

Wills had seemingly come out of no where.
Four years earlier he was unknown. The son of a Baptist preacher,
born in Washington, D.C. in 1932, Wills was one of 13 children who
grew up in a rat-infested government housing project. His father
also worked as a Naval yard machinist. His mother was an elevator
operator and domestic. Maury had to care for himself. Constantly
worried, Maury became a bedwetter, a big problem in a house in
which children were forced to sleep in the same beds.

Wills was all-city in baseball, basketball
and football his senior year of high school. At the age of 17 he
eloped. His new bride, Gertrude was 16. Their first child was born
shortly thereafter.

Nine colleges offered him athletic
scholarships, including Syracuse and Ohio State, but with a young
family Wills went for pro baseball. He entered as part of the wave
of black and Latino players who came after the likes of Jackie
Robinson, Willie Mays and Roberto Clemente opened so many doors.
Many were called, but few were chosen. He did not impress the
people who mattered, spending years toiling in the minor leagues.
Even his strengths were seen as weaknesses under the code of 1950s
society. A light-skinned black, Wills was extremely smart; too
smart for some of his white managers and counterparts, who called
him a "clubhouse lawyer."

Wills played minor league ball from 1951 to
1959. It seemed he would never make it. He made no money, lived in
squalid conditions, endured the vagaries of the South, and was
separated from his family. In 1955, Wills broke the Texas League
"color barrier." He ended up in Spokane, the Dodgers' triple-A farm
club, and was there so long it became his residence.

In 1959 the Tigers purchased an option on
Wills, who spent Spring Training with them, but was dumped back
into the Dodgers' laps when Detroit decided he was not worth the
$35,000 they needed to spend in order to keep him. Wills returned
to Spokane, beaten. He had been all-but given-up on by two teams.
But Spokane manager Bobby Bragan, a seasoned big leaguer, believed
in him. He also taught him the art of switch-hitting. Wills batted
.313 in the Pacific Coast League.

Finally, in 1959 Wills replaced Pee Wee Reese
as the Dodgers' shortstop. In 1960 he slumped, but hitting coach
Pete Reiser started working with him. The two arrived before
anybody else and practiced in the batting cage.

"He gave up three hours every day that he
could have spent with his family," Maury remembered. "Pete taught
me to believe in myself. He gave me the inner conceit that every
athlete needs if he hopes to be great."

Wills became a creditable Major League
hitter, but what separated him from the competition was his
penchant for the stolen base. He led the National League in that
category in 1960 (50) and 1961 (35). From the lead-off position,
Wills drew many walks, forced pitches to throw a lot of pitches and
pick-offs, while setting the table for the likes of Tommy Davis
hitting behind him .

Wills's banjo playing gained him some
notoriety, but he got caught up in playing "Bye, Bye Blues" so much
that Sandy Koufax finally told him he would "personally cut the
strings off your banjo," if he played it again.

The little orchestra of Wills, the two
Davis's and Roseboro included a clavietta, described by Wills as "a
wind instrument that's a combination harmonica and accordion."
Wills even played some Las Vegas dates. When the threesome
performed they preferred standards such as "My Funny Valentine,"
"Stella by Starlight," and "Moon River" which, according to Wills,
was particularly nice on the clavietta.

Wills's years of anxiety - his childhood and
then minor league life - caused him to become a man of routine.
Part of that routine revolved around neatness and planning. This
carried over to the way he conducted himself and dressed.

"Look, I spent eight and a half years in the
minors, came from a family of 13 kids and six of my own," said
Wills. "I never had much to spend on clothes until I got to the big
leagues. So it was important for me to look nice.

"Other players drove flashy cars. I was happy
with my Ford station wagon. But I wanted to look sharp. We did a
lot of shopping at Cy Devore's in Hollywood. That was the ultimate,
because that's where the movie stars went."

Wills and Tommy Davis were friendly rivals,
but sometimes it got out of hand.

"Tommy Davis lived four houses away from me,"
said Wills. "He came over for coffee. Our kids played together. But
when we got to the ball park, we fought like cats and dogs" over
card games.

"One time on the team bus in Milwaukee, he
started riding me unmercifully about a new sweater I just bought. I
had really picked it out with care, but he says, 'Where'd you get
it - at a fire sale?' Soon everybody on the bus was laughing at me.
Jim Gilliam, who was an excellent dresser, too, also used to
criticize my wardrobe, but not in front of everybody like Davis was
doing. At the park I challenged Tommy to step outside the
clubhouse. When he got there, I was already in tears.

" 'C'mon, let's fight,' I said. 'I'm tired of
this crap.' Tommy just laughed. 'I'm not gonna fight you. You're
too little.' But I kept shoving him in the chest. My pride and my
ego were hurt, but he refused to fight me and he wouldn't
apologize."

Wills once gave a signal to re-position Davis
in the outfield, but Tommy refused to move, giving Maury the finger
instead. In the dugout, a fight did ensue, broken up by 260-pound
Frank Howard.

On another occasion Wills drew half a dozen
pick-offs with Gilliam at the plate. Gilliam finally took a third
strike while Wills stole second, but shot an angry glance at Wills.
Howard again had to be the peacemaker when Gilliam and Wills took
their argument into the runway. He held both players in mid-air and
told them "you can't fight" in the dugout, as aghast at the concept
as the Peter Sellers' character who declared, "There's no fighting
in the War Room" in
Dr. Strangelove
.

Both San Francisco and Los Angeles got off to
good starts in 1962, but it was the Dodgers who established the
pace of the season. Wills led that pace. If Jackie Robinson and
Willie Mays had created "National League baseball" - stolen bases,
aggressiveness - that had always marked the old Negro Leagues, then
Wills was the embodiment of what that meant now.

No longer in the Coliseum, the club adjusted
perfectly to Dodger Stadium. The infield was a hard, red brick and
clay surface that sometimes resulted in bad bounces, but was
perfect to propel flying feet. The distance fences meant there was
no single "home run alley." The thick Los Angeles smog and
night-game heavy schedule tended to keep baseballs in the park,
too.

"Dodger Stadium today is still a good-sized park, but
the playing field was even bigger back then," recalled homegrown
Norm Sherry, the brother of pitcher Larry Sherry. "Home plate was
much closer to the stands in '62, making it at least 15 feet
farther to the fences. And in Dodger Stadium, those coastal breezes
made the nighttime air a little heavier, so the ball didn't travel
as well."

"This park separates the men from the boys," related
one of the Cubs' "revolving managers," Elvin Tappe. "There will be
very few .300 hitters around here."

Andy Carey of the Dodgers said he would rather have
four singles than one home run, and that for him at least, the only
chance to hit one was out was to pull it right along the line. All
of this steered the team towards a certain strategy based on speed,
with Wills the driving force.

Wills was a danger to steal at any time but speed
manifested itself beyond the statistics. The club would swipe 198
bases, the most of any National League team since the end of the
"dead ball era," and "that doesn’t show how many doubles were
stretched into triples, how many singles into doubles," wrote Jim
Murray in the
L.A. Times
. " 'The Los Angeles Larcenists,'
they should call them . . . they should play in masks and
blackjacks. You know the Dodgers are in town by the cloud of dust
around second base."

The Dodgers of later years were known for being
speed-friendly and "Hitless Wonders," but for all their swiftness
in 1962 this was still a team with power in the form of Wally Moon,
Frank Howard, Duke Snider, Tommy Davis and Ron Fairly. Unlike the
Yankees and Giants, power teams that never stole bases, Alston
preferred to use all the tools at his disposal. He was not averse
to giving his speedster the "green light" or ordering something
even in a hitter-friendly situation. The power guys learned to live
with it, quickly realizing it created advantages; pitchers'
concentration was affected, thus creating mistakes pitches. But as
the season played out, an interesting dynamic presented itself. Los
Angeles scored most of their runs on the road, where many teams
still played in old, cozy parks like Forbes Field, the Polo
Grounds, Colts Stadium and Crosley Field. At home they relied more
on pitching.

"Being a line drive hitter, the larger playing area
gave me a better chance to run," said Wills. "The infield was fast
so I was now able to hit ground balls through the hole and also
beat out a lot of high choppers."

Alston allowed Wills to run whenever he wanted to.
The manager had confidence not only in his star's ability to steal
the base, but in his sense of diamond intelligence. Wills was a
field captain who new the game inside and out. His strategic mind
was always working.

"I've never seen a better base runner," said Alston.
"He knows when to take a chance, how to get a good lead, how to get
the jump on the pitcher and how to slide."

Scouting director Al Campanis always gave the
lectures on base running at Vero Beach, but the job was given to
Wills while still an active player.

"I watch every move the pitcher makes and jot down
every item in the book I keep in my head," Wills told
Life
magazine. "You always steal on the pitcher, not the catcher.

"Just about every pitcher in the business shows a
telltale sign with a man on base - a dip of the head or a turn of
the shoulders. These signs tell me this pitch is heading for home
plate and that I'm heading for second."

Dodger Stadium crowds exhorted him with chants of,
"Go, Maury, go!" Vin Scully called him
The Roadrunner
, from
the popular cartoon. Broadcasts made the "beep-beep" sound from the
show whenever he stole a base. Wills "stole" the show in the
All-Star Game, thrilling President Kennedy and Vice President
Lyndon Johnson with daring-do on the base paths that fueled the
Nationals' 3-1 victory.