Most of the time, I was happy to see a little guy up at the plate. I wasn’t going to walk him, because there was no reason to. Throw him strikes. The worst he could do was hit a single.
But now and then you find yourself in a spot—with the bases loaded, or with a runner in scoring position late in a tie game—when the little Punch-and-Judy hitter is just the guy you don’t want to deal with. In that situation, I might actually rather pitch to Willie McCovey than Pete Rose, or to A-Rod than Ichiro.
In a spot like that, a home-run hitter might have to make himself a singles hitter.
As much as I respected a big guy like McCovey, and went to great lengths to prevent him from hurting me, that situation calls for a strikeout, and I had a better chance of striking him out than Rose. Maybe, with McCovey or Reggie, I don’t have to be quite as accommodating in the strike zone. Maybe I don’t have to throw a strike. They’re not looking for a strike; they’re looking for a ball they can hit. They’re not quite as particular. A power hitter might swing at a pitch that he really shouldn’t swing at, because there’s always the chance that he’ll hit it, and if he hits it there’s always the chance it’ll leave the park. In some circumstances, those guys can be easier to handle than the irritating hitters who are going to hold out for a nice little pitch right where they want it.
When I’ve got really good stuff, I’d rather take my chances in that situation with a guy who swings at a lot of pitches. I need that strikeout.
I loved to hit with the bases loaded, but there’s some merit to Bob’s argument. I always felt that I was the guy who should drive in the runs. For that reason, if there were men in scoring position I’d sometimes expand the strike zone. That’s what Bob’s hoping for.
At the same time, I didn’t want to do it selfishly. I wasn’t interested in handicapping my team with a dumb, self-defeating at-bat. So I’d try not to go out of the strike zone too far. I didn’t want to look foolish and play into the pitcher’s hands by taking a bad swing. I’d also know who was on the mound, who was on the mound for us, what the game situation was, how important the run was, and who was hitting behind me.
It’s all about circumstances. You might have the prettiest swing on the planet—you might have the quickest hands, the sharpest eye—but you can’t be a great hitter unless you understand circumstances. As strange as it sounds, hitting is a team sport.
It’s not enough just to recognize your circumstances. You also have to understand the pitcher’s. This isn’t the backyard, and we’re not playing for a beer. We’re professionals. If he has a cozy lead and time is running short, he may give up a run in exchange for an out. His priority then is to make sure I don’t keep the inning going: Don’t worry about the guy on third; let’s just get Reggie to hit the ball on the ground. That tells me I might see a breaking pitch in the dirt, or a two-seamer at the knees.
The situation is fluid. It might change in the time it takes me to get from the on-deck circle to home plate. There’s a lot going on for me, and a lot going on for the pitcher, too—what he’s got working that day, what he doesn’t have working that day. Maybe the first two times up I’ve gone boom, boom, two seeds, on a slider and a fastball; so he may have a different plan in mind this time. Every little nuance has the potential to change both his approach and mine.
That right there tells you why Reggie was a great hitter.
When you get into the situation where he needs a strikeout and I need to strike a blow, that’s when it really gets fun. Now he’s going to give you all of it. He’s going to step off the mound, grab the resin bag, and pull his hat down. The guys in the dugout are saying, “Uh-oh, don’t let the man pull his hat down now.”
If my back’s to the wall and I can’t walk him, he’s going to get the fastball, and it’s got to be over the plate. You just try to make sure it’s not over the plate and at the belt at the same time.
With a guy like Reggie …
I’m a tough situation, aren’t I? I can end the game. You can think strikeout against me, but at the same time you don’t want to make a mistake and give up two runs. Or four.
With a guy like Reggie, that might be the only time all night I try to strike him out. But it’s just so hard to generalize. It depends so much on your wiggle room. It depends so much on the score.
There’s some satisfaction in striking out Willie Stargell with the bases loaded, but for the most part you really don’t go out there to strike people out. At least I didn’t, unless there was an important run at third that could score on a fly ball or groundout. Or unless I got two strikes. With two strikes, yes, you do think strikeout. But there were times when I had the bases loaded with nobody out and struck out the side, and it wasn’t because I was trying to but because the situation called for my best fastball and it happened to be good enough to strike people out.
I was considered a strikeout pitcher, and I struck out more than two hundred batters nine times, but you know who I’d strike out? I’d average about eight a game. I’d get the seven, eight and nine hitters twice each. That’s six right there. I lived to get the pitcher and those two guys in front of him. I’d swallow them whole. That’s who you strike out. The bottom of the lineup and whoever comes up with a man on third and less than two outs.
I certainly contributed my fair share to the strikeout totals of a whole lot of pitchers. Most home-run hitters do.
That was hard for me to accept at first. Early in my career, striking out would infuriate me. Then Dick Allen told me not to worry about it, because it was going to happen. Frank Robinson told me the same thing, and Carl Yastrzemski told me the same thing, as well. I wished I had struck out less, but eventually I learned not to obsess over it. It came with the territory.
When all was said and done, I had struck out nearly 2,600 times. I’d covered a lot of territory. Too much, really. I definitely struck out more than I should have.
Everybody loves to watch the big matchups when the strikeout pitcher is throwing as hard as he can and the home-run hitter is swinging as hard as he can. It’s great stuff—power against power, Hall of Famer against Hall of Famer and all of that—but I never had the kind of ego that made me want to get Hank Aaron out when the game was on the line. I was a little more practical than that. I gave those guys a wide berth in those situations. I’d rather end the game against somebody I knew I could get out. Hey, let’s try Joe Adcock.
It’s too bad, but you just don’t have many high-profile, Hall of Fame showdowns anymore. Not with starting pitchers. Back in the day, you could face Gibson in the ninth inning with everything on the line. You could take on Jenkins, Palmer, Seaver, Carlton—any of the great ones—in that scenario. But how many times will Johan Santana still be around at the end of the game? How many times will Josh Beckett, C. C. Sabathia, Brandon Webb, or Jake Peavy come out for the ninth inning?
Even when I was playing, the big confrontation late in the game would usually come against a reliever—for me, usually a lefty reliever. The percentages were with that move, but I liked my odds anyway. The tighter the spot, the better for me.
Think about it. The manager just brought the dude in to face a left-handed hitter, handed him the ball, and slapped him on the butt with a big “go-get-him.” That’s why the guy’s on the team. Okay, kid, there’s Reggie, do your thing. More than likely, he’s going to grit his teeth, throw a fastball, and throw it for a strike, if he can. I’ll get one whack at it, maybe two.
I’d look for a ball to hit early in the count, and I would put that baby in play. I would not foul it off.
A left-hander would come in and throw you a fastball? Damn. I would have thought you’d see a breaking ball ninety percent of the time.
Nope. I looked for a fastball. I didn’t want to take too big of a swing and foul the sucker off, because I was going to get a cookie in the first two pitches. The reliever comes into the game to pitch to you. I tried to take advantage of that. That would be my best shot.
I was going to run right into it. All my timing, everything, was set up for a fastball to hit to left center. If I could get it in the air and square it, I had an opportunity for four “steaks” (rib eyes). I didn’t want to get complicated or fancy. Don’t overswing. Don’t try to hit it over the fence. Don’t pull it over the dugout. Don’t foul it back and have it rolling up the net behind you. Don’t wind up making frustrated gestures that everybody in the ballpark can read. Don’t end up thinking, “Oh man, that was the one! How could I miss that? I shouldn’t even be here!”
None of that. Put it in play. Square the ball.
If Reggie Jackson is going to beat you with a bases-loaded, ninth-inning single, more power to him. It’ll happen, because he’s a good hitter and you have to throw him a strike.
But if he hits a home run to beat you leading off the ninth, or with two outs and nobody on, there’s no excuse for that.
There would be games when not much was going on for either team, we’d get to the late innings, and the great pitchers I played behind—Catfish, Guidry, Palmer, Kenny Holtzman—would tell me, “I don’t want you going for no single now. Give me a whack at it. You got one in you?”
I always believed I did. People say you shouldn’t ever go to the plate trying to hit the ball over the fence, but that’s bull. I’ve done it. Sometimes the situation calls for it.
Bear in mind, I don’t recommend it for a kid, because it could lead to bad habits. It could make you open up your shoulder trying to pull the ball, jerk your head out of the strike zone, get your hips moving too soon—all the things that constitute bad mechanics. But at the major-league level, in a home-run situation, an accomplished power hitter not only can try to hit one, but he should. I won’t say for sure that I hit home runs at a higher percentage when I went up there gunning for one, but there were times when I owed it to my pitcher and to my team to try. There were times when I ended ballgames that way.
For me, that’s the ultimate. With one swing, you get the results that you play for and the gratification that you live for. Hit a home run to win a ballgame and you own the world. At least until tomorrow.
There are games, also, when you can just feel, from the beginning, that a home run will do the trick. When Mike Norris made his first start in the big leagues I told him to take it easy, just pitch like he did in spring training, and I’d get him a tater. I hit a three-run shot in the third inning and he shut out the White Sox.
If you caught one early with Guidry on the mound, you could practically take the rest of the day off. Sometimes he’d walk over in the first or second inning and tell me, “I’ve got it today. Just give me one.”
Catfish would say, “If you can just get me one, we’re going to be all right today. Gimme a shot, Buck.” (That was my nickname when I was with the A’s.)
That’s what I always wanted. We had some great teams with the Cardinals, and we were loaded with winning ballplayers, but it seemed like we never hit a home run. In 1967 we got Roger Maris, who had set the record with sixty-one for the Yankees, and he hit nine for us. The next year, he hit five. Orlando Cepeda led us with sixteen. The next year, Joe Torre led us with eighteen.
Guys on the Cardinals told me I was grumpy all the time. Grumpy? The score’s 1–0, for crying out loud. With our team, it seemed like you had to grunt your way to the ninth inning every single time. That’s as hard on you mentally as it is physically, knowing that if you give up a run, you lose. I’d leave the ballpark and have to go lie down. I always wondered what it would be like to get seven or eight runs now and then.
In 1970, we traded for Dick Allen and he hit thirty-four home runs and we thought we had Babe Ruth. He always seemed to come up with them at just the right time, too. It’s no coincidence that I won twenty-three games that season, my highest total ever.
So yeah, hit me one, big fella. Win me a ballgame.
In 1977, my first year with the Yankees, we were playing the Red Sox in mid-September and trying to hold on to first place. It was a 0–0 game going into the bottom of the ninth inning, Ed Figueroa for us and Reggie Cleveland for Boston.
Thurman Munson led off, and before he went up to hit he told me he was going to single between third and short and it would be up to me to get him home. I told him I would. He did his part, just like he said. But when I got to the plate, Dick Howser, our third-base coach, called me down and told me I might get the bunt sign. I got it on one-and-one, but the pitch was ball two and they took the sign off. Then Cleveland left a slider over the plate a little bit. That was his out pitch, but not in that spot.
It went out, all right.
That should not have happened. If Willie Randolph beats you with a ninth-inning home run, hats off to him. But in that situation, Reggie Cleveland had no business leaving a slider over the plate for Reggie Jackson.
For a hitter, there’s a big difference between a tight spot and a tough spot. In fact, I’m not sure there’s such a thing as a tough spot for a hitter, other than facing a guy with a hot hand and too much stuff. In terms of circumstances, the hairier it gets, the easier it ought to be. Bases loaded—the pressure’s on the pitcher. He’s the one who has to throw a strike.
When I was fortunate enough to find myself in that situation, the game would heighten. It would come to me.
A hitter should be in his element when the game is close. That includes the first inning. In the early going, I was always sharp and bright-eyed, bearing down to see what the pitcher had and trying to set a tone—maybe take advantage of him right off the bat, before he could find his rhythm. And late in the game, when the action had built to a crescendo and the crowd was screaming, I’d be in a zone. In those moments, all the distractions would fade away and the task would become more distinct. It would come into focus.
What’s hard is concentrating in the fourth inning when the score is 7–1.
A six-run lead should be a weapon for a pitcher. The other team is just trying to get baserunners on, trying to work walks, not trying to hit the ball seven hundred feet. The pitcher can, and should, take full advantage of the situation. He does that by challenging every hitter. He does it, basically, by throwing strikes.
But it’s not as simple as it sounds. He can get in trouble if he takes too much advantage. A lot of pitchers confuse throwing strikes with just throwing the ball over the plate. They think it means throwing safe pitches. Well, there’s no such thing. That’s a bad way to go about your business.
I’d pitch just as hard with a six-run lead as I would in an even ballgame. I’d be less likely to pitch around the Aarons and the Reggies, because you don’t want to extend innings and pile up baserunners in that circumstance; but that would be about the only difference in my approach. I’m going to challenge them by throwing strikes, but not with anything less than my best stuff. I know what’ll happen if I let up. One of the surest ways to lose a lead is to change your way of pitching.
I had this discussion with Tony La Russa. Of course, Tony was never a pitcher, but he has a lot of ideas about how to win ball-games, and he’s won a lot of them in ways that I wouldn’t. He was talking about those get-me-over pitches when you have a nice lead and fall behind in the count.
To me, get-me-over implies two things I don’t like. It suggests that you’re unconcerned with your location within the strike zone. And it suggests that you’re holding back on your stuff in the interest of getting the ball over the plate.
Anyway, Tony asked me if I ever threw a get-me-over pitch, and I said no.
He said, “Never?”
I said, “Never.”
He said, “You don’t believe in that?”
“Absolutely not.”
“Why? Why risk walking a batter in that situation?”
“For one thing, I don’t consider it a risk because I’m pretty sure I can get my best fastball over the plate. And for another thing, I know that if I throw Barry Bonds a get-me-over fastball on two-and-oh, he’s going to hit it into McCovey Cove.”
Then I don’t have a six-run lead anymore.
In 1987, my last year with Oakland, we were in a hitters meeting and Tony La Russa was talking about the proper approach with a runner on second or third. Mark McGwire and Jose Canseco were in the room, among others, and Tony wanted them to hear my perspective on the subject. So he asked me, in Tony’s serious style, “Reggie, what are your thoughts when you’re at home plate and there’s a man in scoring position?”
I didn’t miss a beat. “Skip,” I said, “I feel that when I’m hitting and there’s no one on base, there’s still a man in scoring position.” Everyone roared laughing—even Tony. But that was pretty much the way I saw it.
Since I believed so fervently that I could bring home any runner from anywhere, including myself, my preference was not to have a base stealer on first when I was doing my thing. I mean, I appreciated Bert Campaneris and Billy North and all the speedy guys I played with. They won games for us. All the same, I didn’t want them running when I was hitting.
In fact, when they were dancing around off first base, stretching their leads and scheming to steal second, there were times when I stepped out of the batter’s box and gestured to them not to do that. I don’t need you on second to drive you in. And it certainly wasn’t that I wanted that hole to hit through—the hole created by the first baseman holding on the baserunner. I wasn’t thinking about hitting the ball in the hole. I was thinking about squaring the ball on the barrel, and I didn’t want anything to divert my attention from that. I was going to make a hole. So I don’t want you jitterbugging around out there. And when you’re on second base, I don’t want you stealing third, either.
Just stay where you are. If you don’t distract me, I can drive you home.
But a fast runner works to the hitter’s advantage. I’ve seen Lou Brock distract a lot of pitchers, and I’ve had to pitch to Tommy Davis and Frank Howard and Ron Fairly with Maury Wills in the starting block over at first. It can disrupt a guy’s rhythm and throw him off his game. You might forget where you were with the hitter; you might quicken your motion to the plate; you might lose something on the ball.
So keep those guys off the bases. If you’re pitching to Maury Wills, for heaven’s sake don’t walk him. I learned to not be too fancy with the little guys who couldn’t hit home runs. Make them take their cuts. Here’s a high fastball—have at it. If they can hit their way to first base, congratulations. But don’t give it to them.
Honestly, though, when Wills was on base it didn’t bother me as much as you might think, because I was resigned to the fact that Tim McCarver, my good buddy and catcher, wasn’t going to throw him out. I loved pitching to McCarver, but we both know that he wasn’t about to throw out Maury Wills. What I did was hold the ball when Wills was on. I’d bring it to my stretch position and just wait there. He’d be inching away trying to get a good jump, and a lot of times he’d get impatient and start running while I was still standing there holding the ball. I’d just turn around and throw him out at second. I had him all screwed up. I never picked anybody off, but I successfully messed with a few guys.
Looking back on it, though, maybe my attention to Wills explains why a guy like Fairly could knock me around the way he did. Fairly was a professional at the plate, but even so, I could never understand why he should have more base hits off me than anybody else. Maybe I was preoccupied. Maybe I was just pitching from the stretch a lot when he came up. He usually batted behind both Wills and Willie Davis, who was faster than Wills and hit me a lot better. Every time I looked over, Willie Davis was on base.
I don’t advise pitching that way. When you’re throwing out of the stretch, you don’t have all those arms and legs working for you; but that’s not necessarily the biggest problem. Your concentration might be compromised, but that’s not necessarily the biggest problem either. If there’s a fast man on first, the biggest problem is that the hitter is probably going to see more fastballs, and they’re not going to be your best ones.
I’m sure Reggie is in favor of that.
I would rather hit with a man on base, as long as he stays where he is. Let’s take the pitcher out of the windup and split his focus. Maybe he’ll neglect the fact that I can hit the ball out of the ballpark.
Bring that fastball in here.
There is a flip side that works to the pitcher’s advantage. If Brock or Wills or Rickey Henderson is on first, I can pour strike one right down the middle because the hitter is more than likely going to take it and see if the runner can steal.
Most hitters, anyway.
If I’ve got Rickey Henderson on first, or Vince Coleman—guys who stole huge numbers of bases—my thinking’s not going to be any different. I was trying to drive him in from there. I was trying to square the ball and hit it on a line. I wanted the ball in the air for three and a half seconds. Then it’s a souvenir.
Unless it’s an awfully high pop-up.
Of course, with two strikes it all changes. Then I’m playing defense. My order of business is to become a baserunner myself.
There are some hitters who go to the plate playing defense, and I hated it. I’m talking about the guys who take you deep in the count and foul pitches off and hang in there and hang in there and make a general nuisance of themselves. I’d much rather a batter hit the first or second pitch. I don’t want to use up fifteen pitches on one little guy who can’t hit the ball to the warning track.
The worst was Richie Ashburn. What a pain. He’s a Hall of Famer and I salute him for that, but I couldn’t stand to pitch to that guy. He couldn’t put the ball in play off of me—he only had two hits against me his whole career—but he’d stand in there and foul off ten pitches and I’d end up walking him. I walked him ten times. These days the announcers would drool all over themselves telling everybody what a great at-bat that was, and maybe they’re right. But I never thought of it as a great battle. I thought of it as a pain in the butt.
Whether I give him credit for that, I don’t know. I probably should, but I’d rather not. The way the game is played today, that sort of thing has a lot more value because it runs up the pitch count and gets the starting pitcher out of the game quicker. But back then, we weren’t taken out based on a pitch count. Richie Ashburn wasn’t going to get me out of the game. He was just going to tick me off.
It takes some skill to stay alive like that in the batter’s box. I wish I’d been better at it. But when a guy hangs in there with two strikes and fouls off pitch after pitch, he’s not doing it on purpose. I don’t know of anybody who can do that on command—stand at the plate and make up his mind to foul the ball off. Maybe a contact hitter like Luke Appling or Rod Carew or Nellie Fox could handle the bat well enough to do it if he tried, but that’s not the plan. The plan is to put the ball in play. A foul ball means he couldn’t do it.
It’s possible that a great all-around hitter like Aaron could foul the ball deliberately, but it’s not likely that he’d try. He was about hitting the ball hard somewhere. You think Willie McCovey went to the plate to foul the ball off?
The only guy I’ve seen do it deliberately was Jose Cardenal. He did it just to mess with Brock. Brock would be halfway to second base and Jose would just slap the ball in the direction of the dugout. You need talent to do that, and Jose had the talent.
One night I told him that I knew he was doing it on purpose. He just smiled and said, “Did you see that?”
“Yeah, I saw that. Why’d you do it?”
“I don’t know.”
Who knows why people do certain things? Maybe he wanted to steal more bases than Lou. We all dance to different tunes.
The World Series was everything I wanted it to be. Come October, it was all you heard or read about. That put it front and center in my world. It was innate for me to be a hundred percent zoned in and primed for the World Series. I wish I could have done it during the regular season.
The postseason became practically a part of my life cycle. I played in eleven playoffs and six World Series. That is, our team played in six World Series. I played in five.
Oakland went to its first Series in 1972, but to get there we had to make it through a tough playoff against the Tigers. It went to the fifth game, with Blue Moon Odom pitching for us against Woodie Fryman. We were down a run when I came up in the second inning. I walked, stole second, went to third on a fly ball, and then stole home to tie it on the back end of a double steal with Mike Epstein. But in the process I tore my left hamstring, kept running, and ruptured it.
I was so distraught over having to miss the World Series that I cried, and my friends Dave Duncan and Joe Rudi cried with me. When we beat the Reds, it should have been the happiest moment of my career to that point. But I couldn’t even run out onto the field and dive on the pile and jump around with my teammates. It was a sick, horrible feeling, and that feeling stuck with me. I wanted to be out there!
The next spring, I kept telling everybody on the team that we were going back to the World Series. I felt like I had to play in it. I honestly believe that sitting out the ’72 Series was the thing that pushed me to win the MVP Award in 1973. I also believe that it had at least something to do with us repeating as champions of the American League.
The ’73 World Series went seven games. We were forced to win the last two to pull it out. In game six, the Mets had Tom Seaver going, and he’d fanned me three times in game three with the best combination of stuff and location I’d ever faced. This time, though, I caught up with Seaver for three base hits, two of them RBI doubles into the gaps. That’s a badge I wear on my heart to this day. That was Tom Seaver, dude—an all-timer! But Catfish Hunter beat him 3–1. Then, in Game Seven, Bert Campaneris, of all people, gave us the lead with a two-run homer. I hit another one a few batters later, and that was enough for another great pitcher on our team, Ken Holtzman.
I was named the MVP of the Series. Nobody had yet called me Mr. October, but that was the start of it. Let it be known, though, that Campaneris could just as easily have been the MVP.
The next year we beat the Dodgers, which grew into a habit when I went to the Yankees in 1977.
As much success as I had in the World Series, I have to say that it comes down to the hitter more than to the pitcher. I’m going to make my share of mistakes in the World Series, just like I do in the regular season. It’s a matter of whether the hitters are on their game enough to take advantage of those mistakes.
Obviously, Reggie was a guy who could focus all his abilities in that situation and actually feed on it. Lou Brock was the same way. Brock was something else in the postseason.
I watched Bob Gibson beat the Red Sox three times in the 1967 World Series and strike out seventeen Detroit Tigers in the opening game of the 1968 World Series. Yes! It made such an impression on me that he was in my Hall of Fame speech. Gibson was an inspiration. After watching him put everything on the line in two straight Octobers, I was driven to play with the will to win that he exemplified when he pitched.
I’d have loved to face Hoot in the World Series, because that’s when I’d know I was going to be on my game.
That would make two of us.
I might not do anything, but if ever I was going to be able to make my mark against one of the all-time greats, that would be the time. I was going to be on it. And if I did something under those circumstances, nobody could ever say, well, you caught him on a bad day. Uh-uh.
I don’t know that I ever pitched a bad game in the postseason. I got beat; but pitching a bad game—I don’t think that happened.
The atmosphere, no doubt, had something to do with it. I didn’t care for all the distractions that came with the territory, but the excitement surrounding the whole thing served to help me forget how tired and worn out and beat-up I might be.
I didn’t consider them distractions. I saw all that stuff as the stage being set. Set for me.
My first World Series victory came in Yankee Stadium. It was the fifth game of the 1964 Series, and I’d lost in Game Two in St. Louis. That was a wild pennant race that year, and toward the end of it the Cardinals had pushed me up to three days of rest instead of the four we usually got. My last start was on the final Friday, and Al Jackson of the Mets shut us out 1–0. We still needed to win Sunday to take the pennant, and I had to go four innings of relief. That was twenty-nine innings in a stretch of eleven days, and four days later the Yankees beat me in our park.
But nothing energizes a ballplayer like Yankee Stadium in October. I had a cold and sore throat and wasn’t throwing worth a damn in the bullpen, but none of that mattered. In the ninth inning, Joe Pepitone lined a ball off my backside and I sprinted toward the third-base line, grabbed it, and whirled around as I threw him out. He couldn’t believe the call or the play I made, either one; but he was out, and we went to the tenth inning and Tim McCarver hit a three-run homer to win it.
For Game Seven, I only got two days’ rest and went nine innings, which left me closing out the season with fifty-six innings in twenty-two days. There’s no way I could have done that without the adrenaline I got from the pennant race and World Series. Competition brings out the best in a competitor, and also the most. Fortunately, our offense produced seven runs in the seventh game. I gave up a three-run homer to Mickey Mantle in the sixth inning and solo homers in the ninth to Clete Boyer and Phil Linz, which tells you how much stuff I had left. Johnny Keane had every reason to take me out but he didn’t, and he explained it to the press with the comment that he was committed to my heart.
Reggie was saying how his reputation, and really his career, was built on the first World Series he played in. It was the same with me. Before that Series, I’d never won twenty games and I’d only pitched in one All-Star Game. But to win it all under those circumstances, against the New York Yankees, and to hear my manager talk about me in those terms … well, I walked a little taller after that. In 1965, I won twenty for the first time. No coincidence there.
I set a World Series record for strikeouts in that ’64 Series, and they gave me the MVP Award. My prize was a Corvette from Sport magazine. I ended up selling it, because I needed the money and because I was a little ticked off after a policeman pulled me over when I was driving it through a small town in Missouri.
The 1977 Series is the one that I’m most often associated with. Just like my 1977 season, it started out with a little tension. Billy Martin had benched me for the final playoff game against Kansas City, and I would have liked to make a statement about that right away. I singled my first time up in the opening game of the Series against the Dodgers, but in the ninth inning, when we were ahead 3–2, Billy replaced me with Paul Blair for defensive purposes. I didn’t like it, but I can’t blame him for that one. Blair was a great outfielder, and eventually he singled in the winning run in the bottom of the twelfth.
A lot of people have speculated that my spat with Billy was what motivated me in that Series. But to get amped for a World Series, I didn’t need coffee, bennies, amphetamines, or disrespect from Billy Martin. My times in the World Series were in the moment. When I was standing in the batter’s box, there was nothing going on except getting the barrel of the bat in time with the baseball. There was no clutter in my head. I was going to get the barrel in the pay zone, as I call it.
It’s a little different for regulars than it is for a pitcher. A starting pitcher is only out there every fourth or fifth day, so you don’t get into the same kind of grind during the season that everyday players might. I imagine that a guy who plays a hundred and fifty games every year could get a little bored after a few months of going at it seven days a week. But for a pitcher … eighty percent of the time, I’m sitting in the dugout calling people names and having a ball. I didn’t have much problem getting up for a start in the regular season, so the World Series wasn’t much different for me.
But it was different enough.
If a hitter doesn’t do much in a World Series game, he has as many as six more to make up for it.
In 1977, the Series only went six games, but I waited until the latter part to crank it up. In Game Four, which we won 4–2, I homered to left center off Rick Rhoden. My second home run came off Don Sutton my last time at bat in Game Five, but we lost that one. Burt Hooton started Game Six for the Dodgers and walked me my first time up, which was disappointing because I’d been swinging extremely well in batting practice and really felt like I could light up Yankee Stadium. Then I hooked one off Hooton for a home run in the fourth inning to score Munson and give us a 4–3 lead. In the fifth, I homered against Elias Sosa with Willie Randolph on base. I didn’t know anything about Sosa, so I called up to the press box to Gene Michael and he told me what to look for. It was an inside fastball, and I was ready.
In the eighth, when we were looking good, I got hold of one of Charlie Hough’s knuckleballs and hit it way out to center field. By that point, I was just living out my fantasy. When it was over, I had three dingers on three swings. Including the one the game before in Los Angeles, it was four home runs on four swings—five first-swing homers in all, counting the one in Game Four. I also picked up a bunch of Series records and another MVP Award. Munson and Howard Cosell were calling me Mr. October.
What felt best, though, was doing it in New York. Especially after all that we’d been through that season; all I’d been through. It was like I’d unloaded the burdens of the summer on three fat pitches. To top it off, my dad and sister were there, and George Steinbrenner, the man who brought me to New York—The Boss—was saying, “I told you so …”
Now, nobody could talk about all the heroics of all the great Yankees—Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, Yogi, Mickey, Maris, Whitey Ford—without including me in that roll call. I believed that what I’d done couldn’t or shouldn’t have been done anywhere but Yankee Stadium. I had become part of the tradition.
That felt good. God’s sunshine surely hit me that night.
We weren’t much like the Yankees. There was plenty of World Series tradition in the Cardinal organization—Dizzy Dean, Enos Slaughter, Stan Musial, Grover Cleveland Alexander—but that wasn’t what we played for. We played for us.
The Cardinals were an uncommonly close and interesting group of guys. There wasn’t the drama that Reggie dealt with in the Yankee clubhouse. People like McCarver and Curt Flood and Bill White were great friends of mine, and I thought the world of them. Brock, Ken Boyer, Mike Shannon, Joe Torre, Orlando Cepeda, Roger Maris—all those guys. You played for your teammates.
Did I get a kick out of being the best pitcher in the Series? Yeah. Being the MVP? Yeah. But it wasn’t really about me. It was about all of us.
Then, in 1967, we played the Red Sox. As much as we liked the guys in our clubhouse, we didn’t like the ones in theirs.
As a Yankee, that’s music to my ears.
They seemed to think the Series was all about them. Carl Yastrzemski had won the Triple Crown and Jim Lonborg had won the Cy Young, and frankly, they were cocky about it. The whole city of Boston was cocky about it.
But you know, it was an ideal situation for me and the Cardinals. There’s nothing better than being the underdog in the World Series.
I was usually on the other end of that. But I could say there’s nothing better than being a Yankee in the World Series.
I came in pretty motivated anyway, because that was the year Clemente clipped me with the line drive and I missed a couple months. I felt like I hadn’t done my part, and I was determined to make up for that.
And then, with two outs in the bottom of the third inning in Game One, the Red Sox pitcher, Jose Santiago, lifted a little fly to left field and I started to walk toward the dugout and heard all this racket and turned around to see something dropping into the screen that caught balls that cleared the Green Monster. Fortunately, that was the only run they got.
I shut them out in Game Four and was good to go in Game Seven. George Scott, their big first baseman, predicted that “Gibson won’t survive five.” Meanwhile, they had Lonborg ready. He lasted six, and it was too bad he stayed around that long, because we scored three off him that inning to make it 7–1. I ended up with another MVP Corvette (and sold it again). In three games against me, the Red Sox never had more than one hit in an inning.
Afterwards, they weren’t talking nearly as much as they had beforehand.
Does my heart good.
Our rivalry with the Red Sox was never more intense and crazy than it was in 1978, when we came from fourteen games behind to pass them in September, then fell back into a tie on the last day of the regular season. We won the one-game playoff, 5–4, when Bucky Dent hit his famous three-run homer to give us the lead in the seventh inning and Goose Gossage got Yastrzemski to end the game on a pop-up with two men on. I had a home run in the eighth and two more in the playoffs, when we got past Kansas City, and three hits in the first Series game against the Dodgers. Then, in Game Two, at Yankee Stadium, I had driven in all three of our runs when I came up in the ninth inning against a rookie right-hander named Bob Welch.
Welch was only twenty-one years old, and Tommy Lasorda had brought him into a tough spot. The Dodgers led by a run, but we had two on with one out and Munson at the plate, followed by me. Thurman flew out, but I still liked our chances, because I was swinging the bat well. It was the kind of scenario I played for. Even now, I still think of it as one of my great moments in baseball. I loved it—even though I struck out.
Rather, Welch struck me out. The count was two-and-two for a long time, and the kid was just making pitch after pitch, ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball after ninety-five-mile-an-hour fastball. I kept fouling them off, and he finally threw ball three. I was so focused on Welch that I lost track of the count and was surprised when the runners broke off the bases on the three-two pitch. I blinked and the ball got by me for strike three. It wasn’t until I watched the tape that I realized the crowd had been on its feet the entire at-bat. I was so locked in that I didn’t hear a thing. I guess I was too locked in, because it was very unusual for me to lose track of the count. But I don’t want to discredit the job Welch did. He was throwing high fastballs into a space that I’d been taking care of extremely well, and I just couldn’t get there against him. I didn’t lose that at-bat. He just beat me.
As much as I loved hitting home runs, there was also satisfaction in playing the game at a high level, and playing it right. I reveled in the pure baseball aspect of that matchup with Welch, and I was pleased with a little play in Game Four that helped turn the series in our favor. The Dodgers were up two-one in games (they won the first two) and ahead 3–0 in the sixth inning of Game Four when I singled to drive in Roy White and move Munson to second with one out. Then Lou Piniella hit a little liner to Bill Russell, the shortstop, but Russell dropped it and forced me at second. I was stranded halfway between first and second and decided to just stand there in the way of Davey Lopes’s relay to first. I might have ever so slightly let my hip drift out in the direction of the ball. The throw hit me and bounced away, and Munson scored to make it 3–2. They called it the Sacrifice Thigh. I never really got credit for a smart baserunning play on that one, so I’ll go ahead and take the credit right here, right now. Anyway, we tied the game in the eighth and Piniella won it with a single in the ninth.
In the sixth game, we were ahead 5–2 in the seventh inning when I came up against Welch again with a runner on first. As I left the dugout for the on-deck circle, Catfish said, “Get even with him, Buck.” I got my revenge. This time, I dropped a big fly on him into the back of the bullpen at Dodger Stadium. We won, 7–2, and that was that.
My Bob Welch was Mickey Lolich. That might sound a little strange, because it wasn’t like we went after each other, one-on-one, tooth and nail, from sixty feet, six inches. But we had a fantastic battle, and he beat me.
In 1968, after two World Series MVPs and seven straight World Series victories and a single-game World Series strikeout record (in the opener against the Tigers) and two World Series series strikeout records (I broke my own record from 1964 in the seventh game), and after we blew a three-to-one lead in games—in part, possibly, because my teammates felt deep down that we’d win Game Seven anyway since I’d be pitching it—I was beaten by a left-hander with a big gut and lots of guts.
I’m glad, at least, that it wasn’t Denny McLain. He won thirty-one games that year, while I was only winning twenty-two with my 1.12 ERA, and he was on all the TV shows and magazine covers—which was all fine with me until he said before the World Series that he didn’t want to just beat the Cardinals, he wanted to humiliate us. That helps explain my seventeen strikeouts against him while throwing a shutout in Game One.
The other thing that explains those strikeouts is that, even though it was my third World Series, the Tigers’ scouting report still said—apparently—that my game was my fastball. So I kept striking them out with sliders, as I usually did. I guess they thought they were fastballs. In the ninth, I got Al Kaline, Norm Cash, and Willie Horton, and the third strike to Horton was an inside slider that he claimed he never saw.
McLain was also my opponent in Game Four, which we won easily. But we all remembered that, during the season, when McLain was ripping off one victory after another, Roger Maris had told us that the guy we had to worry about in the World Series was not McLain but Lolich. Sure enough, Lolich had beaten us in Games Two and Five, and although it should have been McLain’s turn in Game Seven, the Detroit manager, Mayo Smith, went with the right guy.
I retired twenty of the first twenty-one batters in the seventh game, but we couldn’t break through against Lolich, even though he must have been physically exhausted. It was 0–0 until the seventh, when, with two outs, Cash and Horton singled and Jim Northrup hit a two-run triple to deep center field. That was enough for Lolich, who proved that pitching under pressure is as much about brains and attitude as anything else. Of course, he had pretty good hard stuff, too. The winner of that game would surely be the Series MVP, and he was the best man.
And don’t think that’s easy for me to say, even forty years later.
Here we are, Mr. October and the greatest World Series pitcher of all time, and we both lost our last Series. Mine was 1981, against the Dodgers again. Backing up a bit … In the first round of the playoffs, against Milwaukee, we’d dropped two straight and blown a two-game lead. George Steinbrenner roared into the clubhouse and gave us holy hell. We were very close to falling apart, and I remember telling a writer that we’d find out in the fifth game about this Mr. October business. I ended up with three hits in game five, including a home run off Moose Haas that tied the score in the fourth inning. We survived to play the A’s for the American League championship.
Oakland was Billy Martin’s team now, and a lot was made of our personal relationship. But that didn’t have anything to do with us beating the A’s in three straight. The series, in fact, wasn’t especially sweet for me: I pulled something in my leg early in the second game and couldn’t play the last one. Then, in the victory celebration at an Oakland restaurant, I took out my frustrations with Graig Nettles. There was a misunderstanding and a tussle—no big deal. But I can’t say that we were in the best frame of mind for the World Series. Maybe the drama was finally wearing us down.
My leg kept me out of the first two games of the Series, and we won them both. I could have played in the third, against Fernando Valenzuela, but Bob Lemon didn’t put me in the lineup. It occurred to me that George had probably made that call. It would be my last season in New York, and my guess was that the front office wanted the Yankees to win a World Series without me, just to prove they could.
Maybe it would have been different if I’d played in that game. There were chances to win it, and I had no doubt that I could have gotten the job done. I always had before! As it was, the Dodgers beat us 5–4. Then they took two more one-run games with me back in the lineup. In Game Six, they gave us a pretty good drubbing. It was the first time I’d been on the losing end of a World Series.
I wouldn’t get another shot. And there’s no way to measure what I would have given for one.