CHAPTER 4

A Work in Progress

WHILE I FINISHED school, the Pirates sent me the finalized contract with a letter saying I was to report to their Niagara Falls team in the New York–Penn League on June 18, the day after graduation. So rather than stay out late and party after I got my diploma, I packed, and turned in early. In the morning I called my brothers to say goodbye and had some breakfast with Dad. As ever, he took it all in stride. “Go have fun and play hard,” he told me. “Don’t worry about where you hit in the lineup. Don’t worry about where you play. You’re a good player; all you have to do is have fun and do your best.” More Yogi commandments to remember.

I climbed into my old Nova—I had to, the door was still stuck—and headed for the place where newlyweds used to go, Niagara Falls. The team was in the Class A Short Season league, which plays only a half season, seventy games, beginning in June. It serves as the entry point for a team’s draft picks, about half out of high school, half out of college—with zero pro experience. When I got there, I was the youngest, at eighteen. They gave me a uniform, and two days later I was at third base in my first minor league game. My first at-bat, against Batavia, I hit a line drive over the third baseman’s head for a double. Next time up, a base hit to right. I drove in a couple runs. It seemed pretty easy.

The minors are a trip, the dues-paying part of the dream. That uniform was the only one you got. Two, actually—one home, one road. You had to wash them, send them to the dry cleaners, but you couldn’t do that on the road, so you had to go to the laundromat. And if you played a night game that ended after eleven, you washed it in your sink and dried it out for the next day. You would go through the season with those two uniforms, unless they got totally shredded. The minors are where a lot of dreams go to die, in the middle of nowhere, riding old buses with no air-conditioning that smell and break down all the time and living out of hotel rooms with one bathroom with a stopped-up toilet on the floor and bedbugs sleeping with you.

This was the “romance” of the minor leagues that they make movies about. And I loved it. I loved the fans and people around the team. Money didn’t matter. We all lived in an apartment building, and we had to pay $65 a month rent. I’d have three or four roommates. We were literally stacked on top of each other. It did have a certain charm for an eighteen-year-old kid living away from home for the first time. But hanging over all this was that I knew I was too good to waste my time in the bushes. I was a confident guy. I had swagger. I didn’t show it, because Dad would slap me if he thought I was acting arrogant or privileged. And, believe me, no one on that team would have let me get away with that. In fact, I never had to defend myself as Yogi’s son—I defended myself as a first-round draft pick. That made me much more of a target for bench-jockeying. I’d hear trash-talk—“Hey, Mr. First Round, this ain’t high school, boy!”—and it stoked me. Because I knew I’d be moving up, before I even had time to learn most of these guys’ names.

That 1975 season was a good one for me, but not so good for Dad. The Mets struggled all season and the team’s chairman of the board, Donald Grant, fired him on August 5, after the team’s fifth straight defeat. Grant and some New York sportswriters were still steamed that, with a three-games-to-two lead in the ’73 Series against the Oakland A’s, Dad had started Tom Seaver on short rest rather than saving him for a seventh game on full rest. But Tom didn’t have it and lost, then Jon Matlack pitched game 7 and lost, too. Dad told me his biggest regret in baseball was not winning a World Series as a manager. However, contrary to what some have assumed, the decision to pitch Seaver was not his alone; it was a joint decision made by him, pitching coach Rube Walker, and the general manager, Bob Scheffing. He would always ask for input from people, not just decide precipitously on his own. And Dad trusted Matlack, too. He had a wealth of pitching experience. It just didn’t work out. That was what bothered him.

The Mets plummeted in ’74 to fifth place when everybody seemed to slump. Still, in ’75, they were above .500, at 56-53, and nine and a half games back, much like ’73, when he made them “believe” it wasn’t over ’til it was over. Dad’s reaction to the firing was a little more biting than usual.

“I could sort of see the handwriting on the wall,” he said. Referring to Grant—who Whitey Herzog once said “didn’t know beans about baseball”—he went on, “Mr. Grant was saying there was a lack of communication on the team. But lack of communication? I’ve managed four years and won two pennants.” You can’t beat logic. His replacement, Roy McMillan, didn’t rally the team; they finished third, at 82-80.

But being canned allowed Dad some idle time during a baseball season for the first time since he was a teenager, and he used it to come watch me play. He and Mom drove up to Niagara Falls then followed me to Auburn and Oneonta, New York, where the Yankee team played—and their draft picks were soon of interest to him, because he would go back to the Yankees the next year as a coach, bringing good luck to a team that had sucked since they’d fired him in ’64. The first time he was there, I could see in his eyes that he was proud of me. Even when I was twelve, I saw it in his eyes. When he took me to Shea, I’d get to take a few cuts in the batting cage against the Iron Mike machine and hit 85- to 90-mile-an-hour pitches. He’d tell Rube Walker, “Look at him, Rube. He’s gonna be good.”

When he came to my minor league games, people would gather around him like he was a circus act. So they put him and Mom in the owner’s box, and he’d schmooze with the general managers and owners. But before the games, he’d come down and talk to me on the field. After the game we’d do dinner, and then he and Mom would hit the road again. Again, I never felt I was under pressure when he was there. I think there was only one time that a newspaper photographer took a picture of us. But I wanted to show him I could play. I hit a home run in one of those games, over the left field fence in our home park, which was 450 feet away. It was an old motorcycle track, and hitting home runs there was ridiculous. Nobody hit any. If you played at Niagara Falls, your low homer total didn’t really count. So that was pretty impressive.

I know he thought so. He didn’t get up and clap wildly like Mom, but when he said after, “Tough park to hit in,” that was a high compliment. I would have never asked, “Dad, what’d you think of that home run?” And he wouldn’t ever have answered, “That was a hell of a home run you hit there, hell of a shot.” He would say something like, “Good hitting there, kid.” It never got any more technical.

We had some good players, and three made it to the show for more than a cup of coffee, me and pitchers Al Holland (who had his best years with the Philadelphia Phillies) and Bryan Clark (though not until 1981 with the Seattle Mariners). By contrast, the Yankee team in Oneonta had nine who did, but nobody who stuck beyond a few years (the one who lasted the longest, Willie Upshaw, had his best years with the Toronto Blue Jays). We went 29-40, in fifth place out of six teams, but while I didn’t hit great—.254—I led the league with forty-nine RBIs and won the Statler award, which the local sportswriters gave to the player they thought would have the most successful major league career. What I had to work on was my fielding—I made twenty-four errors in sixty-seven games. But if you hit enough, baseball people won’t hold your fielding against you. They’ll find a place for you.

In September, I came back home to Montclair. Usually, that was the month Dad’s teams were driving for a pennant. I could see he missed that—how many autumns had he owned in his day?—and that he was definitely ready to get back to the game. And so was I. Evaluating myself, I thought I could play in the big leagues right now, at nineteen. I had kind of a baby face and thought maybe growing a mustache would make me look older. But reality kicked in when I went to spring training at the Pirates’ Bradenton, Florida, camp and was assigned to their higher-class A ball team in Charleston, South Carolina, the Patriots. This was the Western Carolinas League, a much stiffer challenge. The competition was fierce. We would practice against Double-A teams, and they’d really work you hard. And, again, never once did I hear, “Let’s see what Yogi Berra’s kid has.” It was about numbers. It was about when you were drafted and whose place are you going to take coming up, jumping over the people in front of you. I still had a few to hurdle.

Now, when I watch Bull Durham it all feels very familiar to me. That was the meat and potatoes of A ball. Charleston was the definition of the bush leagues. The buses again broke down and had no air-conditioning. The money was still peanuts. They wanted to pay me $525 a month, a twenty-five-dollar raise. You would get the contract, and there was a section for you to add comments if you didn’t sign it. So I sent it back unsigned and wrote, “I won the player to go the furthest award, and I think I deserve $550 a month.” That’s what I held out for—a whole twenty-five bucks. I was going to have to pay $90 a month in rent, so $25 would merely cover the higher rent. Two weeks later, they sent another contract with the same amount, $525. They told me, “This is all we’re offering, take it or leave it.” I called Dad, hoping he would encourage me. I hoped wrong.

“What are you going to do, fight about twenty-five dollars a month?” he said, which helps explain why he made so much less than Mickey; whereas Mickey held out to get his hundred grand, Dad just never wanted to rock the boat. So I took his advice and reluctantly signed.

On brutally hot nights, we slept in the luggage racks on top of the seats. I’d been warned by guys who’d played on the team, “Wait ’til you see the locker room there.” When I saw it, I looked for a floor. It had none. The floor was mud. There was no air-conditioning, and the showers had no hot water and leaked. Rats were running around. We had no team trainer. If someone got hurt, no one knew what to do. Those were the worst conditions I ever saw at any level in baseball, including the sandlot.

And yet, down in the sticks, I ran into some of my favorite people. Country rockers used to play throughout the backwoods. The Allman Brothers Band had a recording studio in Bradenton. They would hang out in the same redneck bars we did, so I befriended band members Butch Trucks and Dickey Betts. I would leave Butch tickets for spring training games, and the whole band would come and sit in the right field bleachers. They’d be in their shorts, tank tops, and flip-flops drinkin’ beer, and you would never know they were the famous Allman Brothers Band.

One night in Spartanburg, I was eating in a diner at midnight, when Toy Caldwell walked in, the lead singer of the Marshall Tucker Band. I said hi, he just sat down, and we had dinner together. You wouldn’t think a Jersey boy from the same neck of the woods as Bruce Springsteen and who loved James Brown, the Commodores, Cream, and Led Zeppelin growing up could be a country rock fan, but because of those guys I became one. Lynyrd Skynyrd, the Outlaws, Jerry Jeff Walker. Makes me feel old, too, because almost all those good ol’ boys are dead. Butch killed himself with a gunshot to the head. You wonder what made it all go wrong for a guy like that, who seemed to have it all. But life never promises you anything, especially happiness.

The Charleston manager, Mike Ryan, a former catcher who’d played for the Boston Red Sox and Philadelphia Phillies, was in his second year at the helm; the first year, he went 45-96, buried in the basement—thirty-six and a half games out. A ruddy-faced Irishman, he was a red-ass, which is what players called a tough guy. He had a dog named Harp, which in Mike’s New England accent sounded like “Hop.” We all called him Hop, thinking that was his name, until one day I saw his dog tag. But Mike left his mark on his players. He believed injuries were a crutch to slack off; if you could walk, you played.

We were a bunch of young kids, high school and college. Al Holland and Bryan Clark also moved up to that team, and some other good future big leaguers came off it. Like me, Don Robinson and Tony Peña were just nineteen. I’d make it to the big club before either of them. But Big Don was the hardest thrower in the league. He could throw it through a brick wall, or over it—he had twelve wild pitches that season—and pitched for fifteen years in the bigs. And Tony couldn’t hit a lick then, but he would bloom and wind up playing eighteen big-league seasons as one of the finest catchers in the game. Shortstop Nelson Norman, the baby of the team at eighteen, would eventually be claimed and brought up by the Texas Rangers.

Meanwhile, I played every game, every inning, at third. I made forty-one errors—that part of my game was a work in progress—but during those 139 games Mike told me I was the Pirates’ third baseman of the future. Dad said he’d heard good things about me from baseball people—and, again, it had absolutely nothing to do with him saying what I wanted to hear, just the facts. For sure, my bat was ready and itchy for major league pitching. I hit .298, sixteen homers, a team-high eighty-nine RBIs. And I did that for another terrible team, though we made it a little easier for Mike by going 59-80 and moving “up” to third place.

I turned twenty that fall, not a kid anymore. I had a serious girlfriend back home and wanted to keep progressing through the minor leagues. The country was settling down after Vietnam and Watergate. A smiling peanut farmer from Georgia was president. It was as if my maturation was peaking just in time for a new generation, including new young stars in sports. I knew the Pirates were high on me, and when I got to Bradenton for spring training, I didn’t get farmed out right away. Chuck Tanner—who had just become the manager after the legendary Danny Murtaugh retired—got me into a few games, and suddenly I was a story in the press. I remember Chuck saying in one of the articles, “Dale’s got a chance to make a lot of money in this game.” He also said, “He’s a lot better looking than his dad, he runs better and plays third base better than Yogi ever did,” adding, “And if he hits like his old man he will be in the Hall of Fame, too.”

When we played the Yankees, Chuck made sure I was in the starting lineup, playing third base. Billy Martin, who was managing them, got in on the fun that day. After I lined a hard single off Catfish Hunter, Billy yelled at me, “I started to order Catfish to knock you down, but I suddenly remembered I know your mother.” I could understand that. Billy wasn’t afraid of many people, but Mom put the fear of God in everyone. I was not averse to joining in the fun—asked if it was difficult being Yogi’s son, I cracked, “After nineteen years, I’m used to it”—but I was a little bold, too. About being snubbed by the Mets and Yankees, I said, “If they didn’t want me, I didn’t want them.” I meant, it, too.

Dad was also blunt, saying it would be better for me to play every day in Triple-A rather than stay with the Pirates and sit on the bench. Chuck thought so, as well, but he made it sound like I had a job waiting in Pittsburgh. That was Chuck. They called him “Mr. Sunshine” and he was the most optimistic and supportive manager I ever played for. Like Dad, he’d been in the baseball bloodstream since 1946. And he had his baubles of wisdom, too. “The greatest feeling in the world is to win a major league game,” he said. “The second greatest feeling is to lose a major league game.” As a manager, his rosy demeanor was infectious, showing signs of great potential with the Chicago White Sox and Oakland A’s. Chuck was from Pittsburgh, and the Pirates wanted him so much they actually agreed to give the A’s Manny Sanguillén and $100,000 to buy Chuck out of his contract.

When I was sent out again, it almost seemed like a reward because Chuck sent me hurdling over Double-A ball entirely, to start the season in Triple-A, with the Columbus Clippers in the International League. This was literally one step beneath the big leagues, the exact step taken by my father in 1946 from Newark to the Bronx. The Clippers had just become the Pirates’ Triple-A team, at least for that and the following season, after which the Yankees took it over. I didn’t need to hold out this time. They bumped me up to $750 a month. I said, “Holy shit, this is big money.” Okay, I was still a little naïve, but I was learning about a lot of things.

The manager there was a spunky guy named Johnny Lipon, who had played shortstop for four big-league teams over nine seasons back in the ’40s and ’50s and then turned to managing, in ’71, as interim skipper for the Cleveland Indians. Lip was a great guy, another baseball lifer. And my Lord, the talent we had. The guy I had to beat out at third base was Ken Macha, and we really pushed each other—he hit .335, I hit .290, though I would start all but four games. Kenny was a real mover; he played forever in the minors, all around the diamond, got into 180 games over the course of six seasons in the majors, went to Japan, and came back to win over ninety games three times in four years managing the Oakland A’s and two lesser years managing the Milwaukee Brewers.

Several guys would get promoted to the Pirates—Steve Nicosia, Al Holland, Don Robinson, Mike “Hit Man” Easler, and two others we’ll run across in much different contexts later in this story, Rod Scurry and Ed Whitson. Ex–big leaguers Bob Oliver and Jim Nettles, Graig’s brother, were hanging on, fighting the clock. Several others would get called up with other teams. So the scent of the majors was strong all summer. And I was ready. It was crazy. I’d jumped over everybody in the Pirates’ minor league system just that season. That’s how good I was. Forget about pretty good; I was the best prospect in the Pirates organization, the best minor league prospect in the country. Triple-A is filled with the best prospects, and I was better than all of them. That was just a fact.

I was going to be called up in September when the minor league season ended. But the Pirates were in a tight race, only two games behind the Philadelphia Phillies, when on August 21 their second baseman Rennie Stennett broke his leg on a slide into second. Chuck needed infield help, and the next day I was called up. At the time, I was leading the league in home runs with eighteen and fifty-four RBIs. I’d cut my errors to twenty-nine, and my fielding percentage was 92 percent. I was ready.

I called Mom and Dad immediately and told them I got called to the big leagues. Dad was actually excited. “Goddamn, that’s great,” he said. “This is the big time.” Mom was so excited she was crying. Larry and Tim were slapping high fives. Of course, Tim had known what it was to play in a big league, and both had seen their careers crash and burn too soon. But neither had any jealousy that I might go further—they wanted that more than anything. They never talked about what might have been. All they knew was that they could brag on their little bro.

TIM: It’s like I say, Dale was always the best athlete among us, despite what he says. He was the one who was going to go furthest. It almost seemed predestined. Larry and I were good athletes, but we never kidded ourselves. We were marginal. We went to school to be able to have a fallback. Dale had no other fallback. He went to school to play ball. He had no other interests. It was all or nothing.

I flew into Pittsburgh and two days later, Monday, August 22, 1977, I found myself in the starting lineup under the lights at Three Rivers Stadium. At twenty, the second youngest player in the National League, I was officially the 11,537th man to play in the big leagues—thirty years after my dad became the 7,927th. I remember when I walked into the stadium how enormous it looked. I felt like an ant. The stands were triple-decked in a perfect circle all around the field. They swallowed you up. You couldn’t see anything but concrete and seats, not the beautiful scenery outside, the rivers, the bridges, the downtown skyscrapers. A lot of ballparks have a fun atmosphere, but Three Rivers was dark and foreboding. Still, walking into a big-league clubhouse was not intimidating to me. I’d done it countless times before as a kid.

The game that night was against the San Diego Padres. Batting sixth, my first at-bat came in the bottom of the second, with no outs, Al Oliver on first. I saw the ball well out of Bob Shirley’s hand but didn’t get enough wood on it, lifting a fly ball to left. After that, I grounded out and popped out. When my turn came up again in the bottom of the ninth, we were down 1-0 and Chuck pinch-hit for me. I understood why. I would have had to go up there against the handlebar-mustached Rollie Fingers, perhaps the best relief pitcher of all time. But that didn’t mean I wasn’t disappointed, more so when Ed Ott flew out and Duffy Dyer struck out to end it.

Dad said, “Hey, that’s how it goes in baseball. You can’t play what-if. You turn the page.” The next night, I went zero-for-three, with a walk in another close game, and again Chuck pinch-hit for me, in the seventh when Oliver singled with two outs. We were down 5-4. Omar Moreno, in my place, grounded out. But when Al blasted a homer, Mazeroski-style, leading off the bottom of the ninth, personal disappointment faded away. Being in a pennant race was what baseball is all about, not one’s own stats. Or money. When you get called up, you get a pro-rated share of baseball minimum salary, which at the time was $17,500. So I went from $750 a month to about twice that.

Yet I felt like I would play for free if I could watch Stargell, Oliver, Parker, Bill Robinson, and all the other veterans stay so focused each day, each at-bat, never getting down after a loss. That was a priceless education. All of them made me feel at home. Willie was the most amazing man I’ve ever met, next to my father. He couldn’t have been kinder to me. “Pops” had been around since 1962, but he made me feel like an equal. He didn’t care if you were a rookie or a veteran. He wouldn’t let you get down on yourself. He took it as his job as the team leader to make you believe in yourself. Sort of like Dad, but with a much more verbal, hands-on approach.

Seeing Willie hit—which was his ticket to the Hall of Fame—I noticed he and Dad were a lot alike. They had the same rhythm in hitting. Remember how Willie took his pre-pitch swings? He’d windmill the bat ’round and ’round. He was so relaxed he looked like he might nod off. Then he would pounce on a pitch, like a rabid lion. His swing was frightening. Yeah, he did strike out a lot—154 times one year—but he was a long-ball hitter and swung so hard it could cool the park off on a hot day. He hit over forty homers twice, over thirty-four times, 475 in all. He was so fluid he never looked out of sync. His whole body fused to create all that power.

Pops and my pop were the most respected players of their generations. How lucky was I to have been brought up by one and play with the other? To me, the greatest measure of their standing among their peers was that pitchers wouldn’t throw at them. One time Dad was hit, and he said to the pitcher as he was going to first, “Are you trying to hit me?” And the guy was very upset at the thought. He said, “No, it was an accident, Yogi, believe me.” Same thing with Pops. You didn’t throw at Pops. A Drysdale or Gibson might throw him inside, because you have to with a power guy. But if a manager ever told them to hit Stargell, they’d say, “No way, I’m not hitting Pops.” Hitting me, on the other hand, they had no objections to that.

The Los Angeles Dodgers rolled into Pittsburgh next, a big series, both teams among the best in the game. Like us, Tommy Lasorda was loaded—Steve Garvey, Ron Cey, Dusty Baker, Reggie Smith, Bill Russell, Tommy John on the hill. I didn’t get into the two games other than a pinch-hitting appearance. I didn’t play much the rest of the way. I got my first hit, a pinch-hit single against Tommy John, out in LA, but Chuck, trying to find the answer at third, began to use Ken Macha there. The Phillies left us for dead, even though we kept winning—we won ninety-six games and finished five games behind, but there was no wild card then. Amazingly, we did that even though Willie was getting old; he was thirty-seven and hurt most of the season. Bill Robinson filled in for him and hit .304, but Willie had more left in the tank. As for me, I did break out in one game, going three-for-four against the Chicago Cubs the day before the season ended, raising my average to a robust .175. That average got me another ticket back to Triple-A when the ’78 season would begin. But Chuck assured me I’d be back, and soon. That wasn’t just his optimism talking; he was a man who saw something special in me.

Other than New York and the Yankees, I don’t think there’s a better baseball town than Pittsburgh, or a team as entrenched in history than the Pirates. They go back further than the Yankees, having begun in 1881, and their blue-collar fans are the opposite of the blasé crowds that came to Dad’s games in the Yankees’ U.S. Steel era, even though, ironically, Pittsburgh is the home of the actual U.S. Steel. There were often a lot of empty seats, and years of losing, but most fans lived and died with the “Bucs,” mostly dying, which is why the whole town exploded when Mazeroski hit that ball out of Dad’s reach. They had won it all only four times by the time I got there. The late, longtime Mets’ play-by-play man Ralph Kiner, a Hall of Famer, played eight years for the Pirates after World War II, leading the league every year in homers, but only once did they finish above .500, and lost 112 games one year. But where the club made its biggest contribution to baseball was in cultivating the first wave of great Latino players after Howie Haak got Branch Rickey to sign Clemente. That wave would lead to the majority of ballplayers today being Latinos.

It wasn’t until the ’70s that the working-class ethnic population of Steel Town were rewarded with consistent winning. I would watch Pirates games then and see the aging Clemente and the younger stars like Oliver, Stargell, Parker, Bob Robertson, and Richie Hebner. Dad would just shake his head. His Mets were a good team, a World Series–level team, but they were thin in the minor leagues. He’d say, “The Pirates come out on the field and they got Mike Easler, Mitchell Page, Tony Armas. Who do we got in the minors? We got nobody.” Soon enough, I’d be among them, although I thought it was a little sad that the team had by then switched from those great old sleeveless uniforms to the yellow ones with the nonbelted, elastic waistbands and horizontal-striped, pillbox-style caps. We weren’t Pirates; we were canaries.

Dad and I didn’t talk much during that ’77 stretch drive. First of all, he had one of his own in New York. With him as the good luck charm in 1976, the Yankees had gone to the World Series, losing in four straight to Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine. But they were about to take back the town from the Mets and dominate the sports page headlines with the numerous antics of “the Bronx Zoo.” In ’77, my rookie year, he was right there when Billy Martin almost fought with Reggie Jackson after pulling him from a game in Boston for loafing in the outfield. Dad helped Ellie Howard, also a coach then, separate the pair in the dugout. The effect of that was something like Dad’s blowout on the bus with Phil Linz; the team put it together after that, just like in ’64, and Dad got another ring for his collection. And he was right there in ’78 when George Steinbrenner fired Billy and the team went on a tear under Bob Lemon to repeat. Ring number 12. Both years, Yankee players said Dad was a major factor keeping them sane in that Zoo, the only rock of stability in a circus of daily chaos.

If the ’77 season was like a rerun for Dad, that ’78 season was like one for me. Back in Columbus, I hit .280, with eighteen homers and sixty-three RBIs and was the top vote-getter in the International League All-Star Game when I got the word in late July that the Pirates were again calling me up. The difference from the year before was that the Pirates weren’t in a pennant race—or so it seemed. We were eleven and a half games behind the Phillies on August 12 after losing seventeen of twenty-one games, bringing our record to 51-61. And I didn’t exactly help. I went hitless in my first twenty-four at-bats. That was brutal, but Chuck always wore his rose-colored glasses. “This may not be the end; it may be the beginning,” he told us. And like Dad’s ’73 Mets, we believed. From that point on, I began to hit, along with everyone else. We became nearly unbeatable.

During that run Chuck had me splitting time at third with Phil “Scrap Iron” Garner and shortstop with Frank Taveras. He had me hitting eighth, which became a real advantage. Normally, the number 8 hole is where you put your weakest hitter. But something about it motivated me. From that slot, I hit my first big-league homer on Sunday, August 20 at home against the Houston Astros’ Tom Dixon, a solo shot in the fourth inning that put us up 6-2. I also singled in the sixth and we hung on to win 7-6. Chuck then shifted me to the 7 hole, and I hit my second homer two games later, another solo, putting us ahead of the Atlanta Braves 2-0, a game we won 3-1.

But he liked me hitting eighth. I could drive runs in from first and second base. I could hit doubles. And I would be walked to get to the pitcher, so our leadoff hitter would be up the next inning. That happened twice in the next game, a 5-1 win. Was I as crucial as Pops or Parker? No. But I was a piece of the puzzle. After August 12, we went 27-14, winning twenty-four straight at home, going 21-9 in September and putting the fear of God into the Phillies. My biggest contribution was on September 3 against the Atlanta Braves. We came in three and a half games back, but the Phillies lost. Chuck put me in the game at third in the seventh inning when John Milner got hurt, moving Bill Robinson from third to first. In the bottom of the ninth, it was 3-3, one out, runners on first and second, Braves reliever Gene Garber on the hill.

I stepped in, hitting all of .171 but on a roll. Garber tried to sneak a fastball by me inside. I turned on it, laid a quick, smooth swing on it, and the ball jumped off the bat, a line drive not fifty feet above the ground that landed in the left field stands—my first walk-off homer, and the first time I was mobbed at home plate after joyously rounding the bases and given a bear hug by Pops. The UPI wire service covered it with an inevitable angle, leading with: “A pennant race and a guy named Berra. It’s an old story with a new twist… it appears [Yogi’s] son, Dale, has inherited some of the old man’s flair for performing under the pressure.” That was probably the first time many fans outside of Pittsburgh knew I was in the big leagues, and I played down the connection with Dad, though I equated our team with the ’73 Mets, calling both teams “a bunch of young guys having a lot of fun out there on the field and winning, too.”

It was my fourth big-league homer, the third over twelve days, with two more to come in September, but I’d never hit a bigger one. The win was our seventh straight at the time, nineteenth in the last twenty-two. Because the Phillies lost a doubleheader to the Giants, we gained a game and half on them. We got within a half game of them but were three and a half back when the Phillies came in to Three Rivers for the last four games of the season. We needed to sweep, but figured the pressure was on them. We took the first two, both in thrilling fashion in the bottom of the ninth. In the latter game, our toothpick pitcher Bruce Kison homered—off Steve Carlton, no less—and we won on a walk-off balk, of all things.

LARRY: We followed every game. We thought he was doing great and would do much better as time went by. We would get the Pirates’ radio station, and we’d always have the games on. One time later on in Dale’s career I was driving down the Jersey shore with my wife at the time and he hit a home run off of Steve Carlton, too. I almost drove off the road. I was screaming, “Atta boy!” I think Timmy and I were more emotionally invested in Dale than we were listening to Dad’s games as kids. It’s indescribable when you see your brother, who grew up before your eyes, make it on his own in such a big-time, high-pressure situation.

All of Pittsburgh was going nuts. The park was packed for those games. But then, we cracked. Pops hit a three-run homer in the first inning and we led 4-1, only to see the Phillies chip away. Greg Luzinski, one dangerous hitter, hit a three-run shot off Grant Jackson in the sixth to go up 6-4, and we couldn’t recover. We scored four in the bottom of the ninth but fell short, 10-8, and were eliminated. We won the meaningless finale, finishing 88-73, crushed because we believed we had jelled into a title team. Parker was the National League’s MVP, and Pops was defying Father Time, hitting twenty-eight home runs with ninety-seven RBIs, winning Comeback Player of the Year. Our starting and relief pitching were strong. We were, of course, a Fam-a-lee. And I knew all about what that meant.