— October 1967
THE LAURELS ALL ARE cut, the year draws in the day, and we’ll to the Fens no more. A great baseball season—the most intense and absorbing of our times—is over, the St. Louis Cardinals stand as champions of the world, and hundreds of thousands of New Englanders must winter sadly on a feast of memory. The autumn quiet that now afflicts so many of us has almost nothing to do with the Red Sox defeat in the last game of the World Series, for every Boston fan has grown up with that dour Indian-pudding taste in his mouth. New England’s loss is not of a game or a Series but of the baseball summer just past—a season that will not come again, not ever quite the same. What will be remembered this winter, I think, is not so much a particular victory (Elston Howard blocking off the last White Sox base-runner at the plate one night in Chicago, Carl Yastrzemski’s eleventh-inning homer at Yankee Stadium) or a nearly insupportable loss (all those Baltimore games in September) as the shared joy and ridiculous hope of this summer’s long adventure. I resisted at first, but it caught me up, and then I was sorry for anyone who was too old or too careful to care. Almost everyone on the sea board was caught up in the end, it seemed. Forty-four New England radio stations poured out the news from the Fenway, and home-game telecasts by Ken Coleman, Mel Parnell, and Ned Martin made for late bedtimes from eastern Long Island to the Gaspé. Maine lobstermen pulling their traps off Saddleback Ledge called the news of the previous night’s game from boat to boat through the foggy dawn air. The moderator of an August town meeting in Andover, Massachusetts, interrupted a hot budget debate to cry, “The Sox are leading, 2–1, in the sixth!” Three hikers descending the Brook Trail on Mount Chocorua, in New Hampshire, caught the afternoon score from a transistorized ascending climber. Sunday sailors off Manchester Harbor, on Boston’s North Shore, hailed a winning rally with foghorns and salvos of cherry bombs, and then cheered when a power yacht broke out a large flag emblazoned “THINK PENNANT!” Late in August, a patient recovering from surgery stood at the window of his room in the New England Baptist Hospital night after night, watching the lights of Fenway Park across the city and hearing the sudden double roar of the crowd—first over his radio and then, in a deep echo, through the warm night air. The sense of belonging was best in the crowded streets near the ballpark before game time. Up out of the subway on Commonwealth Avenue, up Brookline Avenue and over the expressway bridge, past the Pennant Grille, past the button-hawkers (“GO, Sox!”) and the icecream wagons and the police horses; carried along in a mass of children and parents, old ladies in straw porkpies, pretty girls with pennants, South Boston and Dorchester youths in high-school windbreakers, a party of nuns; then pushed and jammed, laughing at the crush, through the turnstiles and into the damp gloom under the stands; and out at last to that first electric glimpse of green outfield and white bases—this is the way baseball is remembered, and the way it truly was, for once, in the summer of the Red Sox.
Even a restrained backward look at this season and this Series must appear hyperbolic; already there is the odd temptation simply not to believe one’s recollection or the record. The Cardinals, sixth-place finishers last year, lost their best pitcher for half the season and still won their pennant easily, entirely dominating the other powerful contenders that had given the National League its recent reputation for late-season violence. The Red Sox, who finished the 1966 season one-half game out of the cellar, captured the American League pennant on the last afternoon of the year by winning the second of two consecutive essential victories over the Twins and then waiting for the Tigers to lose their last game. The Baltimore Orioles, who won the 1966 World Series in four straight games, fell to sixth place this year, while the Red Sox, Twins, Tigers, and White Sox clawed and clung to each other like rival mountain climbers at the topmost escarpment of the American League for more than two months, in the closest pennant race in baseball history. The White Sox fell only two days before the end, at a moment when it appeared that they had the best chance to take the flag and the Red Sox the worst. Finally, the World Series, which promised only to be a numb, one-sided anticlimax, went the full seven games, producing some of the best baseball of the year, and was won at last by the better team.
An appreciation of the Cardinals must be postponed in this account until their appearance, in due course, in the World Series. An appreciation of the Red Sox must begin with a look at their prospects last April, which seemed inadequate even to sustain the wild vernal hopes that leap every year, jonquil-like, in the hearts of their followers. The Sox were a young team, probably a better one than their ninth-place finish indicated, but a review of the troops suggested only that hostilities should somehow be postponed. The up-the-middle strength, the traditional spine of a ball team, consisted of an earnest but light-hitting young catcher named Mike Ryan and two rookies—second baseman Mike Andrews and center fielder Reggie Smith. Third baseman Joe Foy and shortstop Rico Petrocelli could hit an occasional fly ball into the Fenway’s short left-field screen, but both were subject to fatal spells of introspection when approaching ground balls. The large, slick-fielding George Scott was set at first, but last year, after making the All Star team with his early slugging, he had apparently determined to hit every subsequent pitch out of the park, and wound up leading the league only in strikeouts. The two other outfielders—Tony Conigliaro in right and Yastrzemski in left—enjoyed star billing, but neither came close to .300 last year. Yaz, who had won the batting title in 1963, finished at .278, with sixteen home runs; he had never hit more than twenty homers in one season. There was, to be sure, a new manager—Dick Williams, up from two successful years with the Toronto farm—but a new manager in Boston has the same approximate hopes for tenure as a titled Balkan bridegroom in a Hollywood marriage. Any manager, however deep-browed, hates to do much thinking in the first two or three innings, and thus must own a pitching staff. The Red Sox had none, having failed in the winter to improve the corps that was the worst in the league last year. Their best starter, the youthful Jim Lonborg, could strike out batters but had proved too gentlemanly in the clutch ever to enjoy a winning season in the majors. There was one strong late reliever, John Wyatt, and some passable middle-innings men, but absolutely no other starters in sight.
Reasonable hope cannot be constructed out of such a sad pile of feathers, but the lifelong Red Sox fan is not a reasonable man. In him is the perpetual memory of a dozen seasons when the best of hopes went for nothing, so why is he not to believe that the worst of prospects may suddenly reward his fealty? If he is middle-aged, he remembers when, in the early nineteen-thirties, the team’s owner, Tom Yawkey, acquired the Sox and almost bought a pennant within a few years, at an immense price, with a team built around such stalwarts as Jimmy Foxx, Joe Cronin, Lefty Grove, and a lanky young outfielder named Ted Williams. He remembers the homegrown squad of the mid-nineteen-forties, which included William, Dominic DiMaggio, Johnny Pesky, and Bobby Doerr. Those teams were wonderfully talented and exciting, but unfortunately they coexisted with two Yankee teams that were among the best in league history. There is one Boston pennant to treasure, in 1946, but that memory is accompanied by the awful vision of Enos Slaughter, of the Cardinals, racing all the way home from first on a double by Harry Walker and scoring the winning run of the Series while Johnny Pesky hesitated with the relay at short. There was a tie for first with the Indians in 1948, but the starting Red Sox pitcher for the one-game playoff was an aging journey man named Denny Galehouse, who instantly unjustified the hunch. Since then, the Sox have been more at home in the second division than in the first. There are other interior daguerreotypes to sustain the New Englander—Ted Williams towering over the plate and grinding the bat between his fists before pulling an outside pitch into the bullpen, Dick Radatz fanning the side in relief—but these are matched by darker plates: Williams hitting .200 in that 1946 Series, Williams never hitting much against the Yankees, Walt Dropo and several other immobile croquet wickets letting grounders bounce between their legs at first, a dozen assorted infielders messing up a thousand double plays. I have studied the diehard Boston fan for many summers. I have seen the tiny, mineral-hard gleam of hope in his eye as he pumps gas under the blighted elms of a New Hampshire village or sells a pair of moccasins to a tourist in the balsam-smelling dimness of his Down East store, listening the while to the unceasing ribbon of bad news by radio from Fenway Park. Inside his head, I am sure, there is a perpetual accompanying broadcast of painful and maddening import—a lifetime’s amalgam of ill-digested sports headlines, between-innings commercials, and Fenway Park bleacher cries:
“Hi, neigh-bor, have a Gansett! … DOUBLE-X 9 GAMES AHEAD OF BABE’S SWAT PACE … Oh, God, look—Slaughter’s going for home! C’mon, Pesky, throw the ball, throw the ball! … YAWKEY VOWS PENNANT … but the lowly A’s, rising for three runs in the eighth, nipped the Hose in the nightcap.… Hi, neigh-bor.… SPLINTER DEFIES SHIFT … and now trail the Yankees by two in the all-important lost column.… He’s better than his brother Joe—Domi-nic DiMaggio! … RADATZ IN NINETEENTH RELIEF STINT … and if Pesky takes the ball over his right shoulder, Enos is dead, I’m telling you … GOODMAN NEARS BAT CROWN … Fenway scribes stated that Ted’s refusal to doff his cap is nothing less than … HIGGINS SEES PENNANT WITHIN TWO YEARS … and Doc Cramer’s shotgun arm just fails to cut down Averill at third … DID NOT SPIT, KID SWEARS … the aging shortstop-manager, lately known in the press box as The Ancient Mariner (‘who stoppeth one in three’) … ZARILLA TRADE STRENGTHENS O.F. … better than his brother Joe—Domi-nic DiMaggio! … HIGGINS, REHIRED, VOWS … A bright spot in the Bosox seventh-place finish was Pete Runnels’ consistent … TED FIRST A.L. SLUGGER TO TOP .400 SINCE … but Schilling dropped the ball … delicious Narragansett Ale. So, hi, neigh-bor … and Keller matched Gordon’s awesome poke over the inviting left-field screen with … MALZONE TRADE RUMORS DENIED … and Slaughter, running all the way, beat the startled Pesky’s hurried … CRONIN, NEW MGR, VOWS … the hotly fought junior-circuit gonfalon … FOXX NEARS SWAT MARK … as Slaughter crosses the plate.…”
By Memorial Day, the Red Sox were only a game above the .500 level, but Manager Williams and the front office had seen enough signs of life on the field to decide that their young enlistees would benefit from the assistance of some experienced noncoms. Successive deals in June brought Gary Bell, a strong right-handed starter, from the Indians and infielder Jerry Adair from the White Sox. Later in the summer, Elston Howard was bought from the Yankees to help behind the plate, and then Ken Harrelson, a brash, hog-dog outfielder with the Kansas City Athletics, signed aboard for a large bonus, after having so enraged the owner of the A’s, Charles O. Finley, during a squabble that Finley threw him over the side.
Just before the All Star Game, in mid-July, Lonborg ended a five-game losing streak with a 3–0 shutout over the Tigers. Dick Williams said that this game marked Lonborg’s arrival as a great pitcher, but it is likely that Lonborg’s immense subsequent season was more the result of his decision in spring training to throw an occasional fast ball in the direction of the hitters’ chins. “Keep count of how many batters I hit this year,” Lonborg whispered to a sportswriter in April. Lonborg also kept count himself, recording the plunkees in ink on the back of his glove, like a fighter pilot pasting confirmed-kill decals on his plane’s fusilage. The final bag came to nineteen, with several dozen near-misses, and the message got around the league that Lonborg was no longer a fine, friendly fellow to swing against. He finished the year with twenty-two wins, nine losses, and two hundred and forty-five strikeouts. Meanwhile, pitchers like Bell, Lee Stange, and José Santiago began showing signs of equal obduracy. Petrocelli, Conigliaro, and Yastrzemski were all off to fine seasons, the rookies Andrews and Smith proved to be quick and unflappable, and Dick Williams established his directorship once and for all by benching George Scott during three essential games because he was overweight. Late in July, the Sox won ten straight games, came home from a road trip in second place, and were met at Logan Airport by ten thousand true believers.
I refused to believe what was happening. Unpleasantly cool, I told Boston friends to keep their eyes on the other teams—the White Sox, who were clinging to first place on the strength of nothing but a fine pitching staff and some hilarious needling of the opposition by their manager, Eddie Stanky; the Twins, obviously the class of the league, who were just beginning their move; and the Tigers, who showed signs at last of wanting the pennant they had seemed capable of winning for the past two years. Then, too, I was waiting for the Red Sox bad break—the moment of ill fortune, the undeserved loss, that so often cracks the heart of a young team playing over its head. The break came on August 18 and was infinitely worse than I had imagined. A fast ball thrown by the Angels’ Jack Hamilton struck Tony Conigliaro on the cheekbone, finishing him for the season. In that instant, the Sox lost their right fielder, a bat that had already delivered twenty home runs and sixty-seven runs batted in, and the only man on the team who could fill the key fourth spot in the batting order. In a few days, I could see, the Red Sox would … In the next few days, the Red Sox overcame an 0–8 deficit in one game and won it, 9–8, jumped off on what proved to be a seven-game winning streak, and climbed from fourth place to within one game of the Twins and White Sox, at the top. I gave up; from that week on, I belonged.
Even to neutralists, the last weeks of the American League race must have seemed excessive. On any given evening late in August, knowing the leader often depended on which edition of the papers one happened to buy. In the first week of September, the four teams reshuffled themselves nervously, the Red Sox lost three games without giving up much ground, and on Labor Day at Yankee Stadium Eddie Stanky had to tackle one of his infielders, Pete Ward, to keep him from punching an umpire and thus being ruled off the turf for the rest of the way. On September 7, there was a four-way tie for first. My baseball nerves had grown too raw to permit me to keep out of it, and a few days later I flew west to see the four top teams in action. When I arrived in Chicago on September 16, the Twins, Red Sox, and Tigers were still even-up, and the White Sox, who had slipped a trifle, were making up lost ground brilliantly. Two days before, they had beaten the Indians with a tenth-inning grand-slam home run, and the previous night they had won the first of a three-game series with the Twins, which they had to sweep in order to stay alive. That night, even the half-empty bleachers in White Sox Park (racial troubles on Chicago’s South Side cut heavily into the White Sox attendance this year) failed to diminish the wonderful baseball tension in the boxy old stadium. With two weeks to go, the season had narrowed down to the point where each pitched ball seemed heavy with omens, and spectators greeted the most routine enemy pop fly with nervous laughter and applause. The Twins’ ace, Dean Chance, was seeking his nineteenth win, and after watching him jam the White Sox batters with his jumping fast balls and low curves I concluded that I was in on a mismatch. Looking confident and workmanlike, the Twins loaded the bases in the fifth on a hit batsman, a single, a sacrifice, and an intentional walk. The White Sox pitcher, Tommy John, then leaped anxiously after a hopper by Ted Uhlaender, managing only to deflect it, and threw the ball past first, as two runs scored. A third came in a moment later on a single, and a fourth in the next inning on a home run by Bob Allison, which the Chicago outfielders studied in flight like junior astronomers. In the bottom of the ninth, it was 4–1, Twins, and the crowd managed only a few imploring cheers for their dying banjo hitters. The first Chicago batter, McCraw, singled, and took third on Ron Hansen’s single and Oliva’s subsequent error in right. Colavito then hit a perfect double-play ball, which manager Stanky or some other deity caused to bound suddenly over the third baseman’s head, scoring a run. Josephson, the catcher, now dropped an unsurprising sacrifice bunt along the third-base line. Chance pounced on it eagerly, dropped it, cuffed it, scuffled with it, patted it, and finally merely glared at it as it lay between his feet like a kitten. The score was now 4–2, with none out and the bases full, and wild bird cries rose into the night. Manager Stanky dispatched his third pinch-runner of the inning to first, and Wayne Causey, batting in the pitcher’s spot, came to the plate. Manager Cal Ermer of the Twins called in Jim Kaat, who threw a wild pitch, scoring a run and moving up the runners. Causey tied the game with a fly to right. More strategy ensued. Worthington came in to pitch. Smoky Burgess pinch-hit and was intentionally passed, giving way to another pinch-runner. Buford was also walked, to set up the force at all bases, and Pete Ward, the twelfth Chicago player to appear in this one-third of an inning, came to the plate. He had been hitless in his previous twenty-one times at bat, but he lined the 2–2 pitch smartly off Killebrew’s glove and trotted to first, clapping his hands over his head all the way, as the scoreboard rocket display went off. Afterward, in the noisy Chicago clubhouse, I saw two Chicago coaches, Kerby Farrell and Marv Grissom, sitting silently side by side in front of their lockers. They had their pants and spikes off, their feet were propped up, and they were comfortably balancing paper cups of beer on their stomachs. Their seamed, down-home country faces were still alight with the game. As I passed, Farrell nodded his head once and said, “Hum-dinger.”
The next day, a summery Sunday afternoon, Stanky got his sweep as Gary Peters shut out the Twins with four hits and won, 4–0. The cheerful family crowd got as much pleasure from the scoreboard as from the game; it showed the Tigers losing to Washington, and the Red Sox in the process of dropping their third straight to Baltimore. The Tigers now led Chicago by half a game and the Twins and Red Sox by one, and I passed the time during my flight to Detroit that night trying to fathom the recently announced schedule for postseason playoffs that might be needed to determine a winner; it listed eleven different possibilities for the teams and sites involved in two-way, three-way, or four-way playoffs. The World Series might never happen.
There was an enormous, noisy crowd the next night for the first of the Tigers’ two-game series with Boston, and Tiger Stadium instantly justified its reputation as a hitters’ park when the Red Sox jumped off to a three-run lead in the first. But no lead and no pitcher was safe for long on this particular evening; the hits flew through the night air like enraged deerflies, and the infielders seemed to be using their gloves mostly in self-defense. The Tigers tied it in the second with a cluster of hits, including a homer by Norm Cash, but the Red Sox instantly went one up, 4–3, after Yastrzemski’s bulletlike single up the middle nearly nailed the second baseman on the ear. Cash’s second homer retied it in the sixth, and then the rackety, exhausting contest seemed settled by Kaline’s single and Northrup’s double in the eighth, which put the home side in front for the first time. Just before that, though, in the Boston half of the eighth, there had been an extraordinary moment of baseball. With none out and Petrocelli at first and Dalton Jones on third, the Boston catcher, Russ Gibson, hit a sharp grounder to Dick McAuliffe at second, McAuliffe glanced over at third, freezing Jones there. Petrocelli, hoping for a rundown that would permit the run to score, stopped dead on the base path, and McAuliffe, ball in hand, ran him back toward first, tagged him, and stepped on the bag in time to retire Gibson for an unassisted double play at first base. No one in the park—at least, none of the ballplayers and none of the sportswriters—had ever seen a play like it.
Yastrzemski came up in the ninth with one out and none on. He already had two hits for the night, and was in the home stretch of an extraordinary season at the plate and in the field, which had made him the favorite to win the Most Valuable Player award in his league. Boston sportswriters, however, are famously unimpressionable, especially when the Red Sox are behind. “Go on!” one of them shouted bitterly from the press box at this moment. “Prove you’re the MVP! Prove it to me! Hit a homer!” Yastrzemski hit a homer. In the tenth, Dalton Jones, a part-time infielder inserted in the Red Sox lineup that night only because he hits mysteriously well in Tiger Stadium, won it, 6–5, with another homer. There were some seven hundred members of the Polish National Alliance staying at my hotel, and the delegates’ celebrations in the lobby that night made it clear that Yaz’s homer, his fortieth of the year, had been voted the finest Polish-American achievement since Cornel Wilde wrote the “Polonaise Militaire.”
The next evening’s game, mercifully, was a more languid affair, in which the Tigers kept putting men on base and allowing them to die there. In the third, they hit three successive singles without issue. The Sox had managed on scratchy run in the early going, but the Tigers’ fine left-hander, Mickey Lolich, was striking out Boston batters in clusters, and he seemed sure of his seventh straight win after Jim Northrup hit a prodigious two-run homer onto the roof, ninety feet above the right-field wall. Detroit loaded the bases in the eighth with none out but again failed to score, and its lead was somehow only 2–1 when Jerry Adair led off the Boston ninth with a single. Lolich, working like a man opening a basket of cobras, walked Yastrzemski, and then George Scott, after botching up two tries at a sacrifice, singled up the middle to tie it. Earl Wilson, the ace of the Detroit staff, came on in relief for the first time in the year, and gave up a sacrifice to Reggie Smith and an intentional pass to Jones. He then threw a wild pitch, and Yastrzemski sailed in from third. Gibson’s fly scored Scott, who slid under Kaline’s peg in a cloud of dust and unbelieving silence. Boston won the game, 4–2, and I came home with my first solid conviction about the pennant race: The Tigers could not win it.
No one, it appeared, wanted that pennant in the end. The four teams fell toward the wire in a flurry of failures, in one stretch losing ten out of twelve games against weaker clubs. With three days to go, the White Sox needed only wins against the Athletics and Senators to make up their one-game deficit. Chicago, pitching its two aces, Gary Peters and Joel Horlen, lost both ends of a doubleheader to Kansas City on Wednesday, and then fell out of the race when it lost to the Senators two nights later. That coup de grâce administered by the A’s, a last-place club that had lost both its franchise and its manager in recent weeks, was an act of defiant pride that everyone in baseball, with the possible exception of Eddie Stanky, could admire. Three teams, then, for the final weekend. Minnesota, a game up on Boston, could eliminate the Red Sox by winning either of its two games at Fenway Park. The Tigers, facing two doubleheaders at home against the Angels, would gain at least a tie and a playoff by sweeping the four games.
There was perhaps less expectancy than gratitude in the enormous crowd that threw itself into Fenway Park that sunny Saturday. The possibility of winning two games from the Twins while the Tigers lost two looked to be beyond even New England hopes, but there was the plain joy of being there and seeing the old, low-roofed, country-style grandstand and the humpbacked bleachers choked with that enormous sitting and standing assemblage of zealots, all there to shout for the team that had given them such a summer. There was a flurry of governors and dignitaries behind the home dugout, and a much more interesting swarm of kids balanced precariously on top of an immense Old Grand Dad billboard across the street behind the left-field fence. That pale-green, too close fence looked dangerous today—a target for the Twins’ Harmon Killebrew, who was tied with Yastrzemski for the home-run lead, at forty-three each.
Then the game began, and all the Twins looked dangerous. They scored an instant run off Santiago in the top of the first, and only a line drive out to the third baseman saved further damage. Jim Kaat, the Twins’ enormous left-hander, struck out four of the first nine Boston batters, looking as formidable as he did two years ago, when he beat Sandy Koufax in a World Series game. Kaat’s last strikeout, however, was an immense misfortune for the Twins, because he pulled a tendon in his pitching arm and was forced to leave the game. The import of this blow, however, was not immediately visible. Kaat’s replacement, Jim Perry, went on fanning the home side, while Santiago continued his anxious-making practice of pitching into and barely out of fearsome difficulties.
It was still 1–0, Twins, when Reggie Smith led off the Boston fifth with a double to the left-field wall, and then Dalton Jones, pinch-hitting, was miraculously safe when his grounder to Carew suddenly leaped up and struck the second baseman in the face. Adair tied the game with a soft Texas leaguer. Yastrzemski then sent a low shot that went past the diving Killebrew but was fielded by Carew in short right. Perry, perhaps still brooding about Boston luck, failed to cover first, leaving no one for Carew to throw to, and the Sox led, 2–1. The Twins tied it in the sixth, but Perry vanished, necessarily, for a pinch-hitter, and George Scott bombed reliever Ron Kline’s first pitch into the center-field stands. Baseball luck creates intolerable pressure in a close game, and in the seventh the pressure of the luck and the tie destroyed the Twins. Mike Andrews was safe on a topped roller that trickled about twenty feet toward third, and a moment later shortstop Zoilo Versalles dropped Kline’s peg in the middle of an easy double play, making all hands safe. All hands then came home on Yastrzemski’s homer off Jim Merritt, which landed beyond the bullpen, and the Red Sox players, leading by 6–2, attempted to pound their hero into biscuit dough as he returned to the dugout. The ensuing Fenway din was diminished only faintly when Killebrew hit a two-run homer over the screen in the ninth off Gary Bell, tying Yaz for the title and bringing the game back to 6–4. It ended that way, but I had to wait until almost nine o’clock that night before my hunch about the Tigers was rejustified, via TV, as they lost their second game. Now there was one day left.
There was no reticence in Boston the next day. A woman calling the Ritz-Carlton that morning suddenly found herself in conversation with the hotel telephone operator, who exclaimed, “What if the bases had been loaded when Killebrew hit that ball? My heart can’t stand it!” Bad nerves took me to Fenway Park early, and on the way I spotted an empty hearse with a fresh “GO, SOX!” sticker on the rear bumper. At the ballpark, several hundred reporters could watch Ricky Williams, the manager’s ten-year-old son, working out in uniform at first base during batting practice. I took this to be a last, brilliant managerial hunch by his father: Ricky had accompanied the squad during its all-winning road trip in July. “Look at him,” Ken Harrelson said admiringly as the boy made a nifty, Gil Hodges pickup. “The kid has all the moves.”
The big boys played the game, though—Chance against Lonborg—and the weight of it kept the crowd silent. The weight of it also seemed too much for the Red Sox. In the top of the first, Killebrew walked and Oliva doubled, and George Scott, relaying, threw the ball over the catcher’s head for the first Minnesota run. In the third, there was another walk, and Yastrzemski let Killebrew’s single into left field hop between his legs for another error and another run. The Red Sox managed a hit in each of the first four innings but could not advance the runners. Lonborg pitched on grimly, keeping the ball low. The immense crowd was so quiet that one could hear the snarling and baying of the Minnesota bench wolves between every pitch. The scoreboard reported Detroit ahead in its first game.
It was still 2–0 for the outlanders when Lonborg, leading off the sixth, laid down a sudden bunt on the first pitch and hoofed it out. Adair hit the next pitch through second. Dalton Jones fouled off his first attempt at a sacrifice bunt and then, seeing Killebrew and Tovar, the third baseman, charging in like cavalrymen, socked the next pitch past Tovar and into left, to load the bases for Yaz with none out. The screeching in the park was almost insupportable: “Go! Go! GO!” Yastrzemski tied the game with a single up the middle. When the count went to three and two on Harrelson, Yaz took off with the pitch, arriving at second just before Harrelson’s high chopper got to Versalles behind the bag; utterly unstrung, Versalles threw home, far too late to get anybody. Dean Chance, unstrung, departed. Worthington, unstrung, came in and threw two wild pitches, letting in another run. The fifth scored when Reggie Smith’s hot grounder bounced off the unstrung (or perhaps only unhappy) Killebrew’s knee.
It was growing dark, but the dangerous season had one or two moments left. Jerry Adair collided with the oncoming Versalles on the base path in the eighth, but held on to the ball and flipped out of the dust to first for a double play. The Twins, still fighting, followed with two singles. Allison then lined a hit to left; Yastrzemski charged the ball, hesitated only an instant at the sight of the runner racing for home, and then threw brilliantly to second to cut down the flying Allison. You could see it all happening in the same twilight instant—the ball coming in a deadly line, and Allison’s desperate, skidding slide, and the tag, and the umpire’s arm shooting up, and the game and the season saved. One more inning, and then there was nothing more to be saved except Lonborg, who had to be extricated—sans sweatshirt, buttons, and cap—from the hands of the local citizenry, who evidently wanted to mount him in the State House beside the sacred cod.
The Boston locker room presented a classic autumn scene—shouts, embraces, beer showers, shaving cream in the hair, television lights, statements to the press. (“Never,” said Lonborg, “do I remember a more … ecstatic and … vigorous moment.”) But then it all sagged and stopped, for this was still only a half-triumph. Detroit had won its first game, and now we had to wait for the radio news of the second game to know whether this was the pennant or whether there would be a playoff with the Tigers the next afternoon.
During that long, painful interval in the clubhouse, there was time to look back on Yastrzemski’s season. He had won the triple crown—a batting average of .326, a hundred and twenty-one runs batted in, forty-four homers—but this was not all. Other fine hitters, including Frank Robinson last season, had finished with comparable statistics. But no other player in memory had so clearly pushed a team to such a height in the final days of a difficult season. The Allison peg was typical of Yastrzemski’s ardent outfield play. In the final two weeks at the plate, Yaz had hammered twenty-three hits in forty-four times at bat, including four doubles and five home runs, and had driven in sixteen runs. In those two games against the Twins, he went seven for eight and hit a game-winning homer. This sort of performance would be hard to countenance in a Ralph Henry Barbour novel, and I found it difficult to make the connection between the epic and the person of the pleasant, twenty-eight-year-old young man of unheroic dimensions who was now explaining to reporters, with articulate dispassion, that his great leap forward this year might have been the result of a small change in batting style—a blocking of the right hip and a slightly more open stance—which was urged on him in spring training by Ted Williams. There was something sad here—perhaps the thought that for Yastrzemski, more than for anyone else, this summer could not come again. He had become a famous star, with all the prizes and ugly burdens we force on the victims of celebrity, and from now on he would be set apart from us and his teammates and the easy time of his youth.
Detroit led for a while in its last game, and then the Angels caught up and went ahead, but the clubhouse maternity ward was an unhappy place. Players in bits and pieces of uniform pretended to play cards, pretended to sleep. Then, at last, it was the ninth inning, with the Angels leading, 8–5, and the Red Sox formed a silent circle, all staring up at the radio on the wall. The Tigers put men on base, and I could see the strain of every pitch on the faces around me. Suddenly there was a double-play ball that might end it, and when the announcer said, “… over to first, in time for the out,” every one of the Boston players came off the floor and straight up into the air together, like a ballet troupe. Players and coaches and reporters and relatives and owner Yawkey and manager Williams hugged and shook hands and hugged again, and I saw Ricky Williams trying to push through the mob to get at his father. He was crying. He reached him at last and jumped into his arms and kissed him again and again; he could not stop kissing him. The champagne arrived in a giant barrel of ice, and for an instant I was disappointed with Mr. Yawkey when I saw that it was Great Western. But I had forgotten what pennant champagne is for. In two minutes, the clubhouse looked like a YMCA water-polo meet, and it was everybody into the pool.
Cardinal fans who have managed to keep their seats through this interminable first feature will probably not be placated by my delayed compliments to their heroes. The Cardinals not only were the best ball club I saw this season but struck me as being in many ways the most admirable team I can remember in recent years. The new champions have considerable long-ball power, but they know the subtleties of opposite-field hitting, base-running, and defense that are the delight of the game. Their quickness is stimulating, their batting strength is distributed menacingly throughout the lineup (they won the Series with almost no help from their No. 4 and No. 5 hitters, Cepeda and McCarver, while their seventh-place batter, Javier, batted .360), they are nearly impregnable in up-the-middle defense, and their pitching was strong enough to win them a pennant even though their ace, Bob Gibson, was lost for the second half of the season after his right leg was broken by a line drive. In retrospect, the wonder of the Series is that the Cards did not make it a runaway, as they so often seemed on the point of doing.
Fenway Park was a different kind of place on the first day of the Series. Ceremonies and bunting and boxfuls of professional Series-goers had displaced the anxious watchers of the weekend. Yastrzemski, staring behind the dugout before the game, said, “Where is everybody? These aren’t the people who were here all summer.” The game quickly produced its own anxieties, however, when Lou Brock, the Cardinals’ lead-off man, singled in the first and stole second on the next pitch. Though we did not recognize it, this was only a first dose of what was to follow throughout the Series, for Brock was a tiny little time pill that kept going off at intervals during the entire week. He failed to score that time, but he led off the third with another single, zipped along to third on Flood’s double, and scored on Maris’s infield out. The Cardinals kept threatening to extinguish Santiago, the Red Sox starter, but bad St. Louis luck and good Boston fielding kept it close. Gibson, hardly taking a deep breath between pitches, was simply overpowering, throwing fast balls past the hitters with his sweeping right-handed delivery, which he finishes with a sudden lunge toward first base. He struck out six of the first ten batters to face him and seemed unaffronted when Santiago somehow got his bat in the path of one of his pitches and lofted the ball into the screen in left center. It was a one-sided but still tied ball game when Brock led off the seventh (he was perpetually leading off, it seemed) with another single, stole second again, went to third on an infield out, and scored on Roger Maris’s deep bouncer to second. That 2–1 lead was enough for Gibson, who blew the Boston batters down; he struck out Petrocelli three times, on ten pitches. The crowd walking out in the soft autumn sunshine seemed utterly undisappointed. They had seen their Sox in a Series game at last, and that was enough.
Five members of the Red Sox had signed up to write byline stories about the Series for the newspapers, and Jim Lonborg, not yet ready to pitch after his Sunday stint, kept notes for his column as he sat on the bench during the opener. He must have remembered to look at those earlier memoranda on his glove, however, for his first pitch of the second game flew rapidly in the suddenly vacated environs of Lou Brock’s neck. It was Lonborg’s only high pitch of the afternoon, and was fully as effective in it’s own way as the knee-high curves and sinking fast balls he threw the rest of the way. None of the Cardinals reached first until Flood walked in the seventh, and by that time Yastrzemski had stroked a curving drive into the seats just past the right-field foul pole for one run, and two walks and an error had brought in another for the Beantowners. There were marvelous fielding plays by both teams—Brock and Javier for the Cards, Petrocelli and Adair for the Sox—to keep the game taut, and then Yaz, who had taken extra batting practice right after the first game, hit another in the seventh: a three-run job, way, way up in the bleachers. After that, there was nothing to stay for except the excruciating business of Lonborg’s possible no-hitter. He was within four outs of it when Javier doubled, solidly and irretrievably, in the eighth, to the accompaniment of a 35,188-man groan. (Lonborg said later that it felt exactly like being in an automobile wreck.) When Lonborg came in after that inning, the crowd stood and clapped for a long, respectful two minutes, like the audience at a Horowitz recital.
Everyone in St. Louis was ready for the third game except the scoreboard-keeper, who initially had the Cardinals playing Detroit. More than fifty-four thousand partisans, the biggest sporting crowd in local history, arrived early at Busch Memorial Stadium, most of them bearing heraldic devices honoring “El Birdos”—a relentlessly publicized neologism supposedly coined by Orlando Cepeda. Home-town pride was also centered on El Ballparko, a steep, elegant gray concrete pile that forms part of the new downtown complex being built around the celebrated Saarinen archway. I admired everything about this open-face mine except its shape, which is circular and thus keeps all upper-deck patrons at a dismaying distance from the infielders within the right angles of the diamond. The game, like its predecessors, went off like a pistol, with Lou Brock tripling on the first pitch of the home half. After two innings, Gary Bell, the Boston starter, was allowed to sit down, having given up five hits and three runs to the first nine Cardinal batters. That was the ball game, it turned out (the Cards won, 5–2), but there were some memorable diversions along the way. Nelson Briles, the Cards’ starter, decked Yastrzemski in the first with a pitch that nailed him on the calf. Lou Brock, having led off the sixth with a single, got himself plunked in the back with a justifiably nervous pick-off throw by pitcher Lee Stange, and chugged along to third, from where he scored on a single by Maris. L’affaire Yaz was the subject of extended seminars with the press after the game. St. Louis Manager Red Schoendienst stated that inside pitches were part of the game but that his little band of clean-living Americans did not know how to hit batters on purpose. Pitcher Briles stated that the sight of Yastrzemski caused him to squeeze the ball too hard and thus lose control of its direction. (He had improved afterward, not walking a man all day.) Manager Williams pointed out that a pitcher wishing to hit a batter, as against merely startling him, will throw not at his head but behind his knees, which was the address on Briles’ special-delivery package. This seemed to close the debate locally, but that night the publisher of the Manchester, New Hampshire, Union Leader wrote an editorial demanding that the Cardinals be forced to forfeit the game, “as an indication that the great American sport of baseball will not allow itself to be besmirched by anyone who wants to play dirty ball.”
The great American sport survived it all, but it almost expired during the next game, a 6–0 laugher played on a windy, gray winter afternoon. The Cardinals had all their runs after the first three innings, and the only man in the park who found a way to keep warm was Brock, who did it by running bases. He beat out a third-base tap in the first and went on to score, and subsequently doubled off the wall and stole another base. Gibson, the winner, was not as fast as he had been in the opener, but his shutout won even more admiration from the Red Sox batters, who had discovered that he was not merely a thrower but a pitcher.
The Red Sox, now one game away from extinction, looked doomed after that one, but Yastrzemski pointed out to me that most of his teammates, being in their early twenties, had the advantage of not recognizing the current odds against them. “Lonborg goes tomorrow,” he said, “and then it’s back to Boston, back to the lion’s den.” Lonborg went indeed, in a marvelously close and absorbing game, that I watched mostly through Kleenex, having caught a pip of a cold in the winter exercises of the previous day. The Red Sox won, 3–1; two former Yankees settled it. In the Boston ninth, Elston Howard, who can no longer get his bat around on fast balls, looped a dying single to right to score two runs—a heartwarming and, it turned out, essential piece of luck, because Roger Maris hit a homer in the bottom half, to end Lonborg’s string of seventeen scoreless innings. Maris, freed from his recent years of Yankee Stadium opprobrium, was having a brilliant Series.
Laid low by too much baseball and a National League virus, I was unable to make it back to the lion’s den, and thus missed the noisiest and most exciting game of the Series. I saw it on television, between sneezes and commercials. This was the game, it will be recalled, in which the Red Sox led by 1–0, trailed by 2–1, rallied to 4–2, were tied at 4–4, and won finally, 8–4, burying the Cardinal relief pitchers with six hits and four runs in the seventh. Brock had a single, a stolen base, and a home run. Yastrzemski had two singles and a left-field homer. Reggie Smith hit a homer; Rico Petrocelli hit two homers. This was the first Series game since the Cardinal-Yankee encounters in 1964 in which any team rallied to recapture a lost lead, which may account for the rather stately nature of most of the recent fall classics. My admiration went out not only to the Red Sox, for evening the Series after being two games down, but to Dick Williams, for having the extraordinary foresight to start a young pitcher named Gary Waslewski, who had spent most of the season in the minors, had not started a Boston game since July 29, and had never completed a game in the major leagues. Waslewski didn’t finish this one, either, but he held the Cards off until the sixth, which was enough. Williams’ choice, which would have exposed him to venomous second-guessing if it had backfired, is the kind of courageous, intelligent patchworking that held his young, lightly manned team together over such an immense distance. In the opinion of a good many baseball people, his managerial performance this year is the best since Leo Durocher’s miracles with the Giants in the early nineteen-fifties.
Nothing could keep me away from the final game of the year, the obligatory scene in which Lonborg, on only two days’ rest, would face Gibson at last. Fenway Park, packed to the rafters, seemed so quiet in the early innings that I at first attributed the silence to my stuffed-up ears. It was real, though—the silence of foreboding that descended on all of us when Lou Brock hit a long drive off Lonborg in the first, which Yastrzemski just managed to chase down. Lonborg, when he is strong and his fast ball is dipping, does not give up high-hit balls to enemy batters in the early going. After that, everyone sat there glumly and watched it happen. Maxvill, the unferocious Cardinal shortstop, banged a triple off the wall in the third and then scored, and another run ensued when Lonborg uncorked a wild pitch. In time, it grew merely sad, and almost the only sounds in the park were the cries and horns from Cardinal owner Gussie Busch’s box, next to the St. Louis dugout. Lonborg, pushing the ball and trying so hard that at times his cap flew off, gave up a homer to Gibson in the fifth, and then Brock singled, stole second, stole third, and came in on a fly by Maris. A fire broke out in a boxcar parked on a railway siding beyond left field, and several dozen sportswriters, looking for their leads, scribbled the note, “… as Boston championship hopes went up in smoke.” Manager Williams, out of pitchers and ideas, stayed too long with his exhausted hero, and Javier hit a three-run homer in the sixth to finish Lonborg and end the long summer’s adventure. The final score was 7–2. Gibson, nearly worn out at the end, held on and finished, winning his fifth successive Series victory (counting two against the Yankees in 1964), and the Cardinals had the championship they deserved. I visited both clubhouses, but I had seen enough champagne and emotion for one year, and I left quickly. Just before I went out to hunt for a cab, though, I ducked up one of the runways for a last look around Fenway Park, and discovered several thousand fans still sitting in the sloping stands around me. They sat there quietly, staring out through the half-darkness at the littered, empty field and the big wall and the bare flagpoles. They were mourning the Red Sox and the end of the great season.