October 1964 (46 page)

After the game Whitey Ford told Mantle he had the ball, the one that had broken Ruth’s record. Did Mantle want to buy it from him? Mantle said he did. How much? Ford asked. Mantle started flashing numbers with his fingers. “Will you give me one thousand bucks?” Ford asked. “Sure,” said Mantle. So Ford sold him the ball, which he claimed he picked up after it bounced back on the field. All the newspaper photographers took pictures of Mantle with the ball. A few minutes later a man named John Mazzarella, his clothing torn and his leg cut, showed up with the
real
ball, wanting to
give
it to Mantle. Ford had to admit his hoax. That broke up the clubhouse. Everyone was in a great mood. The Yankees had won, 2-1, and were up in games, 2-1.

T
HE FOURTH GAME WAS
the crucial game of the 1964 World Series. With Whitey Ford finished for the season, the Yankees decided to go with Al Downing, who threw harder than anyone on the team, while the Cardinals came back with Ray Sadecki, who had been hit hard in the first game. Johnny Keane was not very confident about Sadecki, however, and just before the game Keane went over to Roger Craig, the veteran starter-reliever. “As soon as Sadecki gets out there I want you to start warming up,” he said. “If you’re that unsure of him,” Craig said to Keane, “why don’t you start me instead?”

Sadecki did not last the first inning. Phil Linz led off and doubled into the right-field corner. Then, on an attempted steal, McCarver made a great throw to third, and Linz backed off and headed back to second. The Cardinals had him hung up between second and third, but Ken Boyer slipped and threw wildly into center field and Linz ended up safely on third. With the infield partially in, Richardson doubled into the left-field corner, scoring Linz. It was a ball, Sadecki thought later, that Boyer could have gotten if he had been playing at normal depth. Instead of there being two out and no one on, one run was in and Richardson was on second. Roger Maris hit a bloop single to right and Richardson stopped at third. Mantle singled to right and Richardson scored, but when Mantle foolishly tried to stretch the single, Shannon, who had a great arm, threw him out. Maris went to third on the throw. Sadecki was finished for the day. A ten-pitch inning, a ten-pitch game, he thought to himself with disgust. The Yankees had not hit bullets off him, but he had not done the job, and the walk from the mound to the dugout was a very long one. Roger Craig, already warm in the bullpen, was called in. Ellie Howard greeted him with a single to center and the Yankees had their third run.

Three runs behind in the first inning or not, there was something magical about playing in the World Series as far as Roger Craig was concerned. As Bing Devine was putting this team together over the previous winter, one of the keys, he decided, was his acquisition of Craig from the Mets. Devine thought that a pitcher like Craig, who could work either as a spot starter or a middle relief pitcher, was what he needed; if going to a contending team from a last-place team gave Craig the proper emotional boost, and if his arm was right, he might be a determining factor—if not the winning pitcher—in some ten or fifteen games. Getting him might not seem as important in statistical terms as trading for a twenty-game winner, but in the hot days of August, important games could be either won or lost in the middle innings, when everyone was dulled by the torpor. Games slipped away then because pitchers were tired, the bullpen was overused, and the level of concentration of the team dropped. With the addition of the right pitcher, leads could be preserved, games saved, Devine thought. For Craig, going to the Cardinals had the quality of going to baseball nirvana after baseball purgatory. He had had the dubious distinction of leading the National League in games lost for the last two years, twenty-two and twenty-four respectively, and there had been one stretch in that second Met season when he had lost eighteen games in a row, in part because on seven occasions that season when he pitched, the Mets had been shut out.

Craig, in those two dreadful seasons, had tried to hold on to his sense of humor. At one dinner after the 1962 season he went to a baseball banquet along with Don Drysdale. Drysdale had won twenty-five games that year, and had gotten a huge ovation from the audience. When it was Craig’s turn to be introduced, he asked Drysdale how many games he had won. “Twenty-five,” said the Dodger star. “And how many did your team win?” Craig continued. “One hundred and three,” Drysdale answered. “Well, Don, I guess I’m more valuable to the Mets than you are to the Dodgers because I won ten games this year and the Mets only won forty and that’s a larger percentage of the team’s victories than you had,” he said.

Craig had always regarded his professional life as a kind of continuation of boyhood, as if he were the rare grown-up who had been allowed to go off every day and play instead of taking a real job with real hours. But in 1962 and 1963, when he pitched for the Mets, baseball had been like a job. The hours were not particularly long, two to five
P.M.
or eight to eleven
P.M.,
but it was work nonetheless, and the pleasure was marginal. Still, he had pitched twenty-seven complete games in the two seasons, and seven teams had made strong offers for him at the end of the 1963 season. When he heard that it was the Cardinals who had traded for him, he was elated: “I’m going from a tenth-place team to a pennant contender overnight,” he told friends. In the New York newspapers Ralph Kiner, the broadcaster, was quoted as saying that Craig could mean the pennant for the Cards. “He’s a great competitor and he gives the Cards a great middle relief pitcher or a starter. He pitches hard every time he’s out there.”

With the Cards, Craig had loved the excitement of the pennant race, had pitched a critical shutout during those important days in September, and now was about to pitch in a World Series game. When the call came from Johnny Keane, he did not open the bullpen gate or step over the bullpen fence, his friend Bob Skinner later told him—he hurdled over the fence in his excitement. His curve-ball was very good that day and his control seemed almost perfect. Ellie Howard hit a good pitch, but somehow Craig felt confident. Craig got the next two men out. He was behind, 3-0, in the first inning, but somehow three runs did not seem like too much. In the second inning, the bottom of the Yankee order came up. Craig struck all three men out: Boyer, Downing, and Linz. At that point Tim McCarver thought the Yankees were going to have a hard time the rest of the way. Craig had a lot of movement and he threw at a great many different speeds. In Yankee Stadium in early October the shadows would soon fall, and that would make it even harder to hit Craig. The one moment when Craig’s control weakened was in the bottom of the third, when with two out he walked both Mantle and Howard. That brought up Tresh. At second base Groat began to lull Mantle into complacency. “Mickey,” he said, “that was a hell of a home run yesterday off Barney. I mean, you really hit that one.” Mantle modestly thanked him. “Did you see what that spacey goddamn Shannon did?” Groat continued. No, Mantle said, he had not. “He tried to decoy you—as if there was going to be a play on it.” Groat did a small imitation of Shannon pretending to make a play at the wall. “Crazy son of a bitch,” Groat said. “We call him Moon Man.” Roger Craig glanced over and saw the two of them and noticed that Mantle was not paying much attention. Roger Craig, Groat knew, had a great move to second. They had a play, Groat and Craig did—the daylight play, they called it. If Groat got inside the runner at second and there was daylight between them, they would try the pickoff. There was no signal for it. They just did it. When Craig whirled, he did not have to throw and it was not a balk. To Mantle, still leading off, Groat did a great imitation for Mantle of spacey Mike Shannon trying to decoy him at the right-field fence. He also slipped inside Mantle. Mantle began to laugh. Craig turned and threw and they picked Mantle off. Mantle headed back to the dugout, past Craig. “You son of a bitch,” he said. “You show me up in front of forty million people.”

If the Yankees had squandered two chances at more runs with bad baserunning, then they still had a 3-0 lead, and the Cardinals could do nothing with Al Downing. Through five innings, they had only one hit, a bloop single to center by Curt Flood in the third. Sometimes Downing had good stuff but little mastery of it; on this day he had good stuff and good control. Through the first five innings he had walked only one batter. The Cardinal sixth changed things. Carl Warwick led off as a pinch hitter for Craig and grounded a hard single to left, his third pinch hit in the Series. Then Flood singled to right. Warwick held at second. That brought up Brock, who was retired on a fly ball. With one out, Groat came up and hit the ball on the ground to Richardson at second. It was a perfect double-play ball, particularly because Groat was slow. Linz moved toward second to take the throw, but the ball stuck for a moment in Richardson’s glove and he couldn’t dig it out quickly. By the time he got it to Linz, the shortstop was almost past the bag, partially turned toward first and vulnerable to Flood, who went into him hard. Linz couldn’t hold on to the ball, and instead of the inning being over, the bases were loaded with one out. The fault on the play, Richardson thought, was his, but in addition it was a reflection of his inexperience in working with Linz. He and Kubek knew each other better, and if Kubek had been there he might have made the adjustment and they would have at least gotten the man at second. Now Ken Boyer, the Cardinal cleanup hitter, was up. He was 1-for-13 so far in the Series.

Downing’s first pitch was a slider just outside for a ball. Ellie Howard called for a fastball, but Downing shook him off. Howard gave the signal, a little flutter of the hand, and called for a change: the pitch that Downing wanted. Out at shortstop Phil Linz saw the signal for the change and thought it wrong. It was already hazy out there with poor visibility because of the shadows. Downing, he thought, was a power pitcher and he had the advantage, with poor visibility and a right-handed batter facing Death Valley in Yankee Stadium. A change, he thought, subtracted from his edge.
Make them hit your best stuff, fastball, or a hard curve,
he thought. For a moment he thought of calling time but he did not, and Downing went to the change. Later it was a pitch that was often second-guessed; Downing thought it was the right pitch. He thought Boyer would be waiting on his fastball and he wanted to throw the Cardinal third baseman’s timing off. He also wanted to go down and away, and he had two pitches that went there, his fastball and his change. The change had been a very good pitch for him that year, and he had given up very few hits on it. If he threw the change properly, he was sure, he would break Boyer’s rhythm and get either a pop-up or a double play.

He threw Boyer a bad pitch. Usually his change sank on the hitter, but this one did not. The ball came in letter-high, not far enough out, and with very little movement on it, and Boyer jumped on it. Years later Downing could see it all very clearly. It was a poor pitch, but, nevertheless, he thought, still a good bit of hitting by a real professional. Because it was a change Boyer was well out in front of the ball, but he still managed to adjust in mid-swing, hold his weight back, and control his bat properly. The only questions from the moment he hit it were whether he was too far out in front and whether the ball would hook foul, but there was a ten-mile-an-hour wind blowing in from left field toward right, and it helped keep the ball fair as it went past the foul pole. That was it. The Cardinals, with one pitch, had gone from being behind, 3-0, to leading, 4-3.

Craig was through for the day, one of his best in professional baseball. He had given up two hits and struck out eight men in four and two thirds innings. Ron Taylor came in to pitch the last four innings and he gave the Yankees nothing. Taylor threw hard and had a running fastball. He walked one man, and other than that he retired everyone else. The game had started out as a laugher—the first five Yankees who had come to bat had gotten hits; from then on Craig and Taylor combined to throw a two-hitter for the remaining eight and two thirds innings. Instead of being a blowout for a 3-1 Yankee lead in games, they were now tied, 2-2.

I
N THE FIFTH GAME
the Yankees saw the real Bob Gibson. On this day McCarver thought, he had everything working for him. The advantage of pitching in the shadows of the Stadium and against a background of the center-field bleachers made it all the more difficult for the hitters to pick up his ball. He was ahead of the hitters almost all day, and by the end of the game he had walked only two men and had struck out thirteen. This was the Gibson whom the National League hitters were already becoming accustomed to, and whom American League hitters would learn to respect in this and two subsequent World Series: a big-game pitcher, his face an angry, cold mask, a great athlete setting a fast tempo and never letting the hitters get set. Koufax had struck out fifteen Yankees in one of his victories in the previous World Series; Gibson on this day was every bit as imposing. Though they were playing in Yankee Stadium, thought Phil Linz, it was as if the Yankees were the interlopers, and this was Gibson’s territory. The Yankees would come to bat, barely have time to dig in, and the pitch would be on its way; then, just as they started to think about the next pitch, he was already in his windup. How could McCarver be flashing signs that quickly? Linz wondered. Before you were ready there were already two strikes on you. It was the most personal confrontation Linz had ever seen in baseball—as if, for the moment, there were just the two of them battling it out together, pitcher and hitter, and all the other players had momentarily vanished from the game.

Watching the Yankees struggle that day against Gibson, Al Downing thought his team was being betrayed by the arrogance of its own scouting reports. Those reports, he and a few others on the team decided, reflected the Yankee smugness. In no way had they made clear how good this Cardinal team was, how tough it was, how hard it ran the bases. If anything, they had condescended to the Cardinal players. Lou Brock, they had said, was not that good an outfielder (of course he wasn’t, thought Downing; who would be in that cow-pasture outfield in Sportsman’s Park?). There was little mention of Curt Flood’s exceptional ability as a center fielder, but it was clear now, as they watched him, that he was a great defensive player, and might at that moment be the best center fielder in major-league baseball, as Willie Mays was moving into his mid-thirties.