The last six games of the regular season may have been a hectic experience for Mickey Stanley. But they were a bit of a lull in the life of Denny McLain.
After the high drama of the thirtieth win and the pennant clincher and the Mantle home run, Denny needed a little some-thing to keep his interest up. So upon being asked his view of the upcoming World Series, he responded: “I’m sick of hearing about what a great team the Cardinals are. I don’t want to just beat them; I want to demolish them.”
Oh, my.
In the trash-talking, in-your-face ’90s, this sort of hype has become commonplace. Even four months later, Joe Namath would cause whole forests of newsprint to be felled to convey the news that he “guaranteed” a Super Bowl for the New York Jets over the heavily favored Baltimore Colts. But McLain beat him to it, and with a far more pronounced sneer on his lips.
The Cardinals were decided favorites going into this series, although certainly not by the overwhelming margin that the Colts would be. The Tigers were seen as fairly formidable opponents by the oddsmakers. But for the Cards, this was their third series in five years, and they were loaded with money players.
The core of this Cardinals team had upended the Yankees in 1964 and then come back to defeat Boston in 1967. There had been a fairly extensive makeover of the infield between the two championships. Only second baseman Julian Javier remained at the same position. But Lou Brock and Curt Flood were back in the outfield, and Mike Shannon had moved from right field to third base. Tim McCarver was the catcher on both teams. Although the pitching staff had been overhauled almost entirely, Bob Gibson was the rock on which it was built.
McLain’s season had been historic. But Gibson’s stats read like something out of the dead-ball era. His 1.12 ERA had not been matched in more than half a century. Thirteen of his twenty-two wins had been shutouts. He finished all but six of his starts. These numbers didn’t have the immediate grab of thirty wins. But to those with a sense of history and a knowledge of how the game had evolved, they were staggering. They had the texture of Walter Johnson in his prime.
Moreover, Gibson had already proven that he could do it on the field as well as in the scorebook. He had won five series games in a row, beating the Yankees twice and then polishing off the Red Sox three times. In those five games, he had struck out forty-eight men and pitched with the efficiency of a scythe, ruthlessly cutting down everything in his path.
Gibson was anger turned to grace. A man filled with the fury of racial discrimination, he had managed to channel it more artfully than any player since Jackie Robinson. A complete athlete, he fought the opposition with his arm, his legs, his bat; and you got the idea that if those didn’t work he’d take on the opposition with his fingernails. The Tigers thought they knew a little something about him from the times they had faced him in Florida exhibitions. As it turned out, they didn’t know a thing. They would now encounter a different Gibson, one prepared for mortal combat.
“I couldn’t ignore what Denny said,” Gibson now recalls. “I’m sure he regretted it as soon as it left his mouth. I had nothing against him personally. In fact, I kind of admired the way he marketed himself. He understood where the bottom line was in this game. I just didn’t think any pitcher could beat me in a World Series. I sure as hell didn’t think Denny McLain could do it.
“I’m pretty sure I knew more about him than he did about me. I thought he was as much a showman as he was a competitor. That thing about giving up the home run to Mantle. Disgraceful. I would have dropped my pants on the mound before deferring to an opposing player that way. You know what I would have done to show my respect for Mantle? I would have reached back for something extra and tried to blow him away.”
Much has been made of the fact that on the days that Gibson pitched the Cardinals fielded a team with a majority of blacks and Hispanics in the lineup. There was Brock, Flood, Javier, and first baseman Orlando Cepeda. Writer David Halberstam contrasted them to their 1964 series opponents, the Yankees, and concluded that the Cards, at the peak of the civil rights era, presented a vision of an integrated America. Claiming that as a unique niche for this team, however, is a bit of a stretch. The championship Dodgers ballclub of 1955 could also field five minority starters—Robinson, Jim Gilliam, Roy Campanella, Sandy Amoros, and Don Newcombe. The 1962 San Francisco Giants, who lost the series to the Yankees, would often present a lineup with six minority members.
If the Cards played a different style of game than the Tigers, that had more to do with the exigencies of their home stadium than with any ethnic or racial background. St. Louis had been one of the first cities to build the all-purpose, circular, cookie-cutter stadium. Although “all-purpose” was the acceptable euphemism, these facilities were usually built to favor a football configuration. Within a generation, they would be regarded as hopelessly obsolete, unsatisfactory for either sport, candidates for the wrecking ball. Baseball, especially, suffered, with seats too far from the field, power alleys too long, artificial surfaces that distorted the speed of the ball. When new ballparks were built in the 1990s they were more likely to borrow features from structures such as Tiger Stadium, ballparks with a sense of place and historic ambience to them. Such places proved wildly popular in many cities, especially Cleveland, Baltimore, Denver, and Arlington, Texas, where attendance records were shattered. But in 1968, the circular park was thought to be the shape of things to come, and the Cards were the team of the era.
They came at opponents with overwhelming speed and pitching. Cepeda and Shannon were the only consistent power threats in the lineup, and they hit just seventeen and sixteen homers, respectively. Except for Shannon, in fact, everyone in their lineup had dropped off significantly in offense from the previous year. Even Brock, a holy terror in the 1967 series, had finished the season at just .279, with a mere six homers. Roger Maris, who had slammed his sixty-one homers only seven years before, was at the end of the road. He was a smarter hitter but one whose extra-base threat was only a memory. Maris hit just five homers all season.
Behind Gibson, there was nineteen-game winner Nellie Briles and Ray Washburn, who had won fourteen. These were manager Red Schoendienst’s choices to start the other series games. Detroit’s scouts had reported that neither one would present much of a problem to the Tigers’ power hitters. Schoendienst decided to bypass future Hall of Famer Steve Carlton in his series rotation, using him in long relief. Carlton had been the least of the team’s four starters, with a 13-11 record. Moreover, Detroit had pounded lefties at a .655 pace during the season. Carlton was just twenty-three and not yet the pitcher who would become the best in the National League through the ’70s. Still, he had started in the 1967 series, and the Tigers respected his arm far more than they did that of Washburn or Briles. They thought Schoendienst was doing them a favor.
So there would be just one-left handed starter for either side in this series. That would be Lolich. He had come on so late and so fast, and was so overshadowed by McLain, that the St. Louis book on him was inconclusive. “Stay close, and you’ll beat him,” was the phrase they used, but the same thing could have been said about any number of pitchers in the majors. Lolich was the X factor in the series. St. Louis, however, didn’t think they would have to get much beyond G in the alphabet. With Gibson starting three times, the Cards were confident that they had the edge in pitching.
This was a very confident team about most things. From the multicolored ball they used in infield practice (a quirk the Tigers had copied) to the nickname “El Birdos” that they had hung on themselves, it was a club that had its own strong identity. The Cards understood precisely what it took to win. Their final pennant margin of nine games was a bit smaller than Detroit’s. But they had removed all doubt from the race even earlier than the Tigers and coasted in from mid-August on. The previous year they had won by 10½ The Cards knew they were very good and played that way.
So they were amused rather than seriously angered by McLain’s little diatribe. But they hung it in their locker room at Busch Stadium. Gibson, who was angry most of the time anyhow, knew he would get the starting assignment against McLain. He did not need the diatribe to motivate him.
The two franchises had met once before in a series, in 1934. Oddly enough, those games involved the last pitcher to have won thirty games, Dizzy Dean. He had combined with his brother, Paul, to win forty-nine for the Cards that year. Before the series, he had flat out proclaimed that “me ’n’ Paul” would win the four games needed to beat the Tigers. As it turned out, he was right on the money. He didn’t say anything about demolition. But as he himself pointed out on another occasion, “If you can do it, it ain’t braggin’.”
It remained to be seen whether McLain could do it or not.