October 1964 (10 page)

There, for the first time in his career, Mel Stottlemyre hit a wall. He did not pitch as well as he expected. The roster seemed to be loaded with pitchers, and Stottlemyre thought for a time that he might be sent down to a lower classification, perhaps Double A. But they kept him on in Richmond. There he struggled and was not able to get into the starting rotation. In the past, he had always been carried by his sinker, which was virtually indistinguishable from his fastball, but he had noticed that at Richmond, in Triple A ball, the balance between hitters and pitchers was already changing. The hitters were better here, and they were smarter, and his ability to dominate them based on pure natural ability had disappeared. In the past his skill was such that he could afford to be almost careless with it. But if he made a mistake in Triple A ball, he quickly paid for it: if the pitcher fell behind in the count, the relationship between hitter and pitcher tilted dramatically in favor of the hitter, as batters started hitting good pitches. It was no longer a matter, as it had always been for him in the past, of merely throwing strikes, but of throwing
quality
strikes, putting the ball exactly where he wanted to whenever he needed to. He could no longer pitch by pure instinct.

He had to think about every pitch now. If he was to have a career in major-league baseball, he had to improve, particularly as far as his control was concerned. It was a frustrating year for him: he was used mostly in relief and his record was 7-7. He gave up a hit for almost every inning pitched and his earned run average ballooned up to 4.05. What made the season worse in his mind was that when it came time to get ready for 1964, he was not invited to spring training with the big-league club, the way the top pitching prospects in the farm system generally were. That was a shock for Stottlemyre, for it marked the first time in his career that he had not moved ahead. Perhaps, he thought, he was no longer one of the Yankee’s top prospects. Perhaps he had fallen in their estimation. In 1964 he was still in Triple A, making $1,200 a month for five months, starting in April and going through August.

Stottlemyre was a young man of unusual confidence and maturity; he never really doubted that he would somehow make the Yankee team, but he decided in the spring of 1964 that it might take longer than he had expected. Back in Richmond for 1964, he started the second game of the season, and was cuffed around a good deal. His command of his pitches was poor, and he fell behind frequently in the count. After that he was sent back to the bullpen. At first his relief appearances were not very successful either, as he continued to have problems with his control. He did not start again until the Memorial Day doubleheader.

Though the Richmond team did not have a full-time pitching coach, it did have the equivalent of one, a thirty-three-year-old pitcher named Billy Muffett. Muffett was one of those men who form the very foundation of professional baseball: he was something of a career minor-league pitcher. He spent eight years in the minor leagues and had one great season with Monroe in the Cotton States League, when he had won 22 games, lost only 9, with an earned run average of 2.25. In both number of games won and ERA he had led the league that year, and he was rewarded for this splendid season with two years in the army. After coming back to pitch, this time for Shreveport in the Texas League with a record of 5-11, he finally reached the majors at the age of twenty-six. He won seven games for the Cardinals over two years, and then went back for three more seasons in the minor leagues before surfacing again with Boston in 1960, where he won six games—his high-water mark in the majors. By 1963 he was back in the minors with Richmond, pitching mostly out of the bullpen. When the Yankees encountered bullpen problems in the middle of the season, Muffett hoped the call would come for him. Instead it came for young Tom Metcalf, and Muffett knew then that he had reached the point in his career when youth began to outweigh experience. So, when Richmond manager Preston Gomez asked him to coach as well as pitch, he was glad to accommodate. He was a shrewd observer of the game and he had the rare capacity to pass on his knowledge to younger, sometimes more gifted men. Thirty years after that season he was still a big-league pitching coach.

What Muffett saw in Mel Stottlemyre was a young man of enormous talent, who had been carried in his early career by raw ability, and who was now facing the first major crisis of his career. Either he would learn to deal with this crisis, Muffett thought, and become a first-rate big-league pitcher, or his career would quickly decline. Part of the problem was simple mechanics. Stottlemyre was planting his feet too close together when he completed his follow-through, and that was diminishing his power and velocity. In addition, he was not getting the ball
down
enough, which was hurting his location. Muffett got him to work on coming up higher with his arms and using his legs more to drive through his motion.

The most important thing was location. Stottlemyre had marvelous movement on the ball, movement that the average pitcher would kill for, but sometimes it took place outside the strike zone, which helped no one but the hitter. Muffett began to tutor Stottlemyre in the bullpen. Pitching in the majors was all about concentration, location, and mastery of his pitches, he explained. Under Muffett’s guidance, Stottlemyre quickly improved his mechanics. He was releasing the ball better, the ball was coming down more, and that helped his control. But what helped even more was a lesson that Muffett taught him on improving concentration. Muffett suggested that when Stottlemyre was about to throw a pitch, he think not of the larger strike zone, but that he refine it and aim for a much smaller part of it, on the inside corner to right-handed hitters. If he could hit the inside corner with right-handers regularly, then he was a sure thing. To allow himself the luxury of thinking of the entire strike zone, Muffett taught him, was the equivalent of being mentally lazy. Shave the strike zone, Muffett told him, fine-tune yourself, go for smaller and smaller targets. That way, even if you don’t put it exactly where you want to, you still may be in the strike zone, and even if you miss the strike zone, you may be close enough to get the call. It was brilliant advice, and though it might not work for everyone, it was ideal for Stottlemyre. Actually, he was a coach’s dream as a pupil, for he not only listened but had the ability to take advice and act on it successfully.

On Memorial Day the Richmond team played a doubleheader and Stottlemyre was summoned out of the bullpen to start one of the games. It was a one-start call, and he was by no means back in the rotation. Able to fine-tune his work now and place the ball almost exactly where he wanted it, he stayed ahead of the hitters. His sinking fastball continued to frustrate them as it broke down six inches below the knees; they ended up not with the vicious line drives they expected, but with yet another grounder. On that day he turned around his career: Mel Stottlemyre pitched a shutout. He was still not back in the rotation yet, but because of his success he was given another start, and he pitched another shutout. With that, he was back in the rotation.

Jake Gibbs, a young bonus baby who had signed with the Yankees after graduating from the University of Mississippi, and who had been converted to a catcher, marveled at the poise and ease with which Stottlemyre was pitching. There was one series of at bats, Gibbs thought, that seemed to epitomize the young pitcher’s newfound skills and confidence. It occurred in a game against Toronto when Ozzie Virgil, a former major-leaguer, and a good hitter, was at bat. Virgil was a right-handed hitter, and the first time he came to bat, Stottlemyre got him out by jamming him. So the next time Virgil came up, he backed off a little. But Stottlemyre ran the sinker in on him again, and Virgil swung and broke his bat, a sure sign that the sinker had triumphed. The third time Virgil came up, he turned to Gibbs, who was behind the plate, and said, “I’m not going to let him jam me again,” and then moved a little farther off in the batter’s box. But Stottlemyre jammed him again and broke his bat again. The fourth time he came up, Virgil was virtually out of the batter’s box. Again Stottlemyre jammed him. That was amazing, Gibbs thought: four times a kid pitcher had tied up one of the better hitters in the league, and twice he had gotten broken bats. Stottlemyre threw what professionals call a heavy ball, which meant that it came into the plate hard and heavy. It was hard to catch and hard on the catcher’s hands as it broke down. Catching Stottlemyre over a few games almost guaranteed that Jake Gibbs’s hands would be swollen and the fingers would be a purplish blue with little circulation in them.

Gibbs watched as Stottlemyre went on a roll. He reeled off ten wins in a row. He was pitching like a major-league starter against minor-league hitters. There was talk in mid-season that he would be called up to New York to help the parent club, which was struggling. But Stottlemyre doubted that that would happen. The Yankees did not like to rush their young pitchers up from the minors in mid-season. They regarded it as a sign of panic in the organization and liked to think of themselves as an organization so professional that it never had to panic. Only in rare situations, such as with Bob Porterfield in 1948 and Whitey Ford in 1950, had the Yankees made exceptions. The sportswriters in Richmond began asking Mel Stottlemyre when he thought he would be going to New York, and whether it was true that the Yankees were getting ready to bring him up, but Stottlemyre was sure he would stay the season in Richmond. Which was just fine with him; he was happy in his work and sure now that he would be a major-leaguer in 1965.

T
HERE WAS A CERTAIN
gallantry to Mickey Mantle as he pressed forward in the twilight of his career. By the start of the 1964 season he had already hit more than 400 home runs, and he appeared to be on his way to a .300 career average. He was the man who carried the team, and yet he played now in constant pain, reaching for physical skills that were no longer there. However, in some remarkable way, the athlete within continued to rebel against the pain and refused to accept the limits set by his body. Again and again he endangered himself. Watching him tape himself every day—for the ritual of taping his legs had been going on for so long that he could do it himself—his teammates were in awe of him. “He is,” his teammate Clete Boyer once said, “the only baseball player I know who is a bigger hero to his teammates than he is to the fans.” His teammates knew from their own lesser encounters with injuries how much pain he was playing with every day. Hobbled by a bad right knee for most of his career, he now had two bad knees. His right knee was his pillar of support when he swung from the left side, and it sometimes buckled on him. That was painfully obvious when, batting left-handed, he started to swing and then decided to hold up on a pitch. His right leg, trying to break the force of the rest of his powerful body, seemed to give, and the pain on his face was clearly visible to his teammates. Watching him that spring, his former teammate Jerry Coleman, by then the team’s broadcaster, could hardly believe the deterioration of that once-great body in so short a time, for when Mantle had first come up, he was the fastest runner Coleman had ever seen. When he had raced down the first baseline, Coleman remembered, you could not see the right leg go down and then the left go down; what you saw instead was the blur of both legs as part of one relentless motion. His legs, Coleman thought, were like the spokes on a moving bicycle wheel. But that speed was destroyed by injuries that occurred in his very first season. Charlie Silvera, the backup catcher, carpooled with Mantle in the very early years and watched him, even as a young player, unable to get into a car properly: instead, he would have to slide his body onto the seat, and then use his arms to lift his legs over the seat. By 1964, Coleman thought, he had become a very great athlete somehow managing to compete at the highest level of professional sports, while being, in medical terms, very close to a cripple.

The question of Mantle’s health cast a shadow over the Yankee camp that spring. The 1963 season had been a disaster for him: he had missed almost one hundred games because of injuries. The cartilage was wearing thinner and thinner on his right knee, and, indeed, he was perilously close to having
no
cartilage there. That meant bone was grinding against bone, guaranteeing that he would limp in some manner for the rest of his life, and that the limp would be accompanied by pain. He had torn up his right knee in his first World Series in 1951, when he caught his leg in a drainage ditch in the Yankee outfield while trying to stop at the last minute to avoid a collision with Joe DiMaggio. A series of injuries followed. In 1963, in a game in Baltimore, he ran into a wire fence in the outfield, broke his left foot, and tore the cartilage in his
left
knee. When the season was over, he immediately underwent surgery to remove cartilage from it.

Mantle’s teammates and the sportswriters now wondered whether center field was the right position for him, with all the running that was demanded of a center fielder. Perhaps, some of his teammates thought, left field or right field might be better. But Ralph Houk thought center was better—that he was less likely to run into a fence as a center fielder, and that there was less stopping and starting. Playing first base was also a possibility, for many other outfielders had moved there once their speed had begun to go, but in Mantle’s case it was not an easy solution. Playing first might involve too much starting and stopping and quick lateral movement, all of which would be hard on his right knee.

In the first days of spring training all eyes were on Mantle, and the reporting on the Yankees seemed more like the work of medical writers than sportswriters. Mantle, ever stoic, said he felt well, and for the first few days he even tried to play without bandaging his legs. But then, in an early spring-training game, his left knee began to hurt, and he was forced to sit the game out. When the Yankees played the Mets in an early-spring game, several of the Met players noticed that Mantle did not seem like the Mantle of the past. His swing, they thought, was more hesitant and not as powerful. Worse, when he was in the outfield, he could not make diagonal cuts going back on a ball. He tended instead to go straight back and then move either to his left or to his right as the path of the ball mandated. The main problem, he was discovering as the team played through its spring-training games, was not the left knee, but once again the right one, which had plagued him on and off for thirteen years now.