A glance at the results—the record number of consecutive shutout innings, the sweep by the team picked to lose—underscores the impression of the day that the 1966 World Series constituted one of baseball history’s biggest upsets. It had been presumed, at the least, that this would be a replay of the 1965 World Series. It wasn’t. Six hurlers over four games pitched some of the best baseball of their careers. Sandy Koufax was not among them.
Still, many Orioles believed that the experts weren’t so far off. “I think we still have the lowest team batting average for a winning team, and they’ve got the lowest team batting average for a losing team,” Brooks Robinson noted years later. 1
“It was just a fluke,” Wally Bunker agreed. “Everybody says we weren’t that good and they weren’t that bad, and well, that’s about right, you know what I’m saying?” 2
The Dodgers attributed their poor performance to the wear and tear of the tight National League chase. Unlike the Orioles, they’d had no chance to adjust to the idea of a postseason contest—to catch their breath, raise their sights, and ready themselves for a fight. “By the time we flew all the way back from Philadelphia,” Ron Fairly recalled, in an assessment confirmed by most of his former teammates, “we were mentally done. We were whipped. I think there were eight or nine teams that could have beaten us. I’m not taking anything away from the Baltimore Orioles, because they had one heckuva club. But it was such a strain on us just to get to the World Series.” 3
After winning the pennant on the last day of the season, Phil Regan remembered, “there was just a sense of phew!” They had hardly rested for two weeks and needed “time to regroup.” 4 But they couldn’t afford the luxury. Instead, Wes Parker remembered, “all of a sudden, two days later we run out on the field—and there’s Baltimore.” 5
In their autobiographies, both John Roseboro and Maury Wills wrote that they fully expected the team to return to form at any moment. Nate Oliver, however, remembered that after losing the first two games in such embarrassing fashion—unable to hit Drabowsky or Palmer, unable to field the ball behind Koufax—the team was “hit with a case of shock.” 6
“Before we knew it,” Fairly added, “hell, they’d beat us four straight. It was quick. And the games didn’t even last very long.” 7
It wasn’t only that the Dodgers lost, of course, but that they established records for fewest runs, fewest hits, lowest batting average, and most errors in an inning. The Dodgers may have been tired, but could they conceivably have been more tired than any other club in the history of the World Series?
“These guys won their ninety-five games,” one of the Dodger brass told a reporter before Game Three. “They won the pennant. They could care less about this thing.”
“Two swings won two games,” noted Oriole reliever Eddie Fisher, summarizing the Baltimore half of the series. Bunker figured that it had to be luck, more than anything else, that allowed his team to defeat LA’s vaunted staff of champions. “If that series went ten more games,” Wally would contend, “Koufax and Drysdale might have won the last six. And Osteen too.” 8
Wes Parker disagreed, later saying, “Even if that World Series had gone ten games, I don’t think we would have scored a run. 9
“A lotta guys were very upset, because O’Malley had made plans for us to go to Japan right after the World Series,” continued Parker. “If the World Series had gone seven games, we would have left the next day. And when we lost the first game of the World Series, nobody said this, but it was almost like we felt, ‘Okay, well, since we lost the first game, we might as well lose four straight, because then we’ll get three or four days off before we have to go to Japan.’ Everybody was really mad about that Japan trip. Really mad.” 10
Parker, of course, did not suggest that the Dodgers threw the Series, nor did anyone associated with the team. And he was careful to distinguish that the team’s lack of motivation in the Series sprang from a desire for some rest and respect rather than revenge and recompense. “If we’d won the first game, it would have changed everything for us,” he explained. “We would have been much more fired up about sweeping them and getting our four days off before going to Japan.” 11 But it was not to be.
Four days off would not have been enough for Claude Osteen, who did not particularly want to go to Japan at all. In October 1966, his wife was pregnant with their third child and near the end of her last trimester. Osteen desperately wanted to be present for the birth. In addition, including Game Three, he’d already pitched in forty games that year. He needed time off. His arm was exhausted, his fastball laughable.
Don Sutton, however, was in even worse shape. Neither the still-injured Sutton nor Koufax or Drysdale would be accompanying the team to Japan.
“I need you to go over there,” Buzzie Bavasi informed Osteen. “The first game’s gonna be on Wide World of Sports. I need you to pitch that one. If you want to come home after that, you can. It’s up to you.”
Reluctantly, Osteen assented. After a brief stopover in Honolulu, during which the NL champs played two games against a team of Hawaiian all-stars, they flew on to Tokyo. There, on October 22, Osteen started the opener of the exhibition tour. He pitched well, he hit a home run, and his team won. But Wide World of Sports did not elect to broadcast that particular victory. Instead, ABC aired the next day’s game, when a diminutive southpaw from the Yomiuri Giants shut out Los Angeles 5–0.
“So that,” Osteen would later observe drily, “wasn’t very pleasing.” A consummate team player, he nonetheless decided to remain with the Dodgers for a little while longer. He pitched two more games and lost them both. It wasn’t just his tired arm that was to blame. The pitching mounds in Japan were flat, the strike zone high, and every batter unfamiliar. 12
In midtour, after traveling north to Sapporo, Sendai, and Toyama, the Dodgers came around to rest again in Tokyo. With his wife back in the States due any day, Osteen decided that this represented an opportune moment to depart. Unfortunately, Maury Wills felt the same way. The shortstop’s bad knee had been getting worse. When the Dodgers refused him permission to return home for a medical consultation, Wills jumped the tour and vanished.
Osteen was preparing to pack when he was hastily summoned to Walter O’Malley’s suite in Tokyo’s New Otani Hotel. Wills had just been located. While flying home, he’d stopped off in Hawaii and apparently stayed. Osteen was shown photographs that had been wired to Japanese newspapers. Instead of receiving X-rays and heat treatments, Maury had been caught singing on a bandstand beside Don Ho, playing banjo with a Dixieland band. The Dodgers’ hosts had also received pictures of the supposedly injured Don Drysdale. He was golfing.
O’Malley had been visiting the official residence of the premier of Japan, who had interrogated him thoroughly about Wills’s disappearance and the absence of Drysdale and Koufax. The Dodger owner had felt humiliated. “Look,” he told Osteen, “I need you to stay.” The owner’s bright eyes popped flashbulb-like behind large, flat, wire-rimmed spectacles. He was a tall, wide man, his black hair silvering at the temples. “I’ll get you home immediately if there’s an emergency with your wife. You can call home every day; I’ll pay the telephone bills. But I’d like for you to stay.”
Osteen didn’t see O’Malley too often. The owner rarely made personal pleas. He stayed. Ten days later, with Osteen and his teammates in Shizuoka, his third son was born.
By now it was apparent that all the Dodgers were weary and homesick. “I didn’t dig sitting cross-legged on the floor and chewing raw fish,” Roseboro would grumble afterward. 13 They were playing far sloppier than any Americans had ever played in Japan. No previous major-league visitors had dropped more than four games; the Dodgers had lost eight. Of their last nine games, they had won but two.
Then, just as this rotten tour thankfully neared its end, things really deteriorated. A knock came on Osteen’s hotel door. A Japanese journalist stood there. After exchanging polite greetings, the journalist inquired, in halting English, “Have you heard? Mister Koufax, he retire.” 14
In Los Angeles the previous afternoon, November 18, seventy-five reporters had been summoned to a suite in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel, where Sandy Koufax momentously revealed that he’d just asked the Dodgers to place him on the voluntary disabled list. “I’ve got a lot of years to live after baseball,” Koufax announced into a battery of microphones, “and I’d like to live them with the complete use of my body.” 15
He paused, glancing down at his hands, folded serenely on the table before him, his fingers interlaced. It was his oversize hands and lengthy digits that had given him his second pitch, his magnificent breaking ball, which as much as anything had established him as a success. “Sandy has the longest fingers I’m sure in the league, if not in all of baseball,” Vin Scully had observed during the second game of the 1966 World Series. “That’s one reason why he gets such fantastic rotation on the pitch. He has the fingers of a concert pianist.”
Employing a slightly different patois, John Roseboro confirmed Vinnie’s assessment. “To throw a curve hard overhand, you have to let it roll off of your index finger,” the Dodger catcher would explain to Koufax biographer Jane Leavy. “As they say in the ghetto, shit, he had great big fucking hands. He could wrap that ball. He wrapped it.” 16
Koufax’s left hand could hold six baseballs, but it could not throw one without further aggravating the arthritis in his elbow. So he was quitting.
The reporters in the suite were as thoroughly flummoxed as were the nation’s sports fans. “Nobody believed it,” Roseboro remembered, “except the ballplayers who knew he always meant what he said.” 17 The farewell scene was not without humor. When the newsmen pressed for specifics about his financial well-being, Koufax smiled. “Well,” he responded, as if deep in thought, “I have enough for lunch and dinner… today.” 18
They wondered about his plans for the future. He had none. “Right now,” he said with a chuckle, “I guess you’d have to say that I’m unemployed.”
One reporter teasingly inquired whether the Dodgers might be interested in keeping the southpaw (a career .097 batter) around as a pinch hitter. At this Koufax roared with laughter. 19
More jarring Dodger changes were to occur when baseball officials convened in Pittsburgh at month’s end. Tommy Davis had seen only limited use during the exhibition tour, garnering just thirteen at bats. Still, he’d hit .462 in Japan, better than any other Dodger—but not, apparently, good enough. On the morning of November 30, while golfing with Willie Davis, Tommy was met at the ninth hole by a television camera and crew. They wanted his reaction to the trade.
“What trade?” he asked.
“You’ve been traded to the Mets.” 20
Walter O’Malley, in the meantime, found that he could not forgive Maury Wills for the embarrassment he’d caused the team in Japan. He instructed GM Buzzie Bavasi to get rid of their superstar shortstop.
A day after the trade of Tommy Davis was announced, Maury’s home phone rang. “The rumor,” said the reporter on the other end, “is that you’ve been traded to the Pirates.”
Wills was inconsolable. “I don’t want to be traded,” he insisted, close to tears. “I’ve spent all my life playing for the Dodgers. The Dodgers are my life. Tell the people of Los Angeles that I’m praying I won’t be traded.” 21
His prayer went unanswered. A moment later, the rumor was confirmed.
In less than two weeks, the Dodgers had lost their best pitcher, their best runner, and their best hitter.
Even as Bavasi aggressively continued with more off-season deals and demotions, he steadfastly denied that the Dodgers were entering a rebuilding phase. Such an admission might adversely affect attendance in such a fidgety and forgetful place as Southern California. If they performed poorly just once, Bavasi mused to a reporter, “do you think this club would survive in Los Angeles, a town which demands, and is entitled to, a winner?” 22 Dodger fans were notorious for arriving late and leaving early. Would they show up at all if their team wasn’t competitive? The answer would come soon, for in dealing Wills, Bavasi had both dispatched the spark plug of their offense and dissolved the glue of their infield. In losing Koufax and Davis, the two Brooklyn boys who had blossomed so beautifully out west, more links to the past had been severed, more franchise history erased. By the beginning of 1967, of the forty men listed on the Dodgers’ 1966 spring training roster, only twenty-seven remained. That year the team would finish in eighth place, attendance would drop by almost a million, and the rebuilding would begin in earnest.
Wills would go on to play two years as a third baseman in Pittsburgh, then a few months in Montreal, before returning to Los Angeles in 1969, in a midseason trade. There he’d finish out his playing days as a Dodger.
As for Tommy Davis, he would never fully recover from his ankle injury. Traded frequently, from one league to the other, from contenders to expansion teams and back again, he would limp his way around the majors for another decade. The American League’s implementation of the designated hitter would help extend his career several seasons. Increasingly, he would become a one-tool player. His motto, he joked, was “Have bat, will travel.” John Roseboro recalled, “He was a straight, clean fellow, who loved just playing more than anything else.” 23 Although Davis would never win another batting championship, he would retire, at age thirty-seven, with the highest pinch-hitting average of any player in baseball history.
On November 1, 1966, Brooks Robinson headed for South Vietnam. Accompanying him on this tour were Stan Musial—one of the very few major leaguers who had played in more games and possessed more at bats than Brooks eventually would—as well as Harmon Killebrew, Hank Aaron, Joe Torre, and broadcaster Mel Allen. The six of them visited troops throughout the war zone, at frontline outposts and airstrips, in field hospitals and encamped villages. 24 They traveled in C-130 transports whose wings were riddled with bullet holes, or in helicopters that descended from three thousand feet in a corkscrew spiral in order to avoid sniper fire. 25 They heard constant gunfire and watched the countryside being bombed. Gazing down at the unfamiliar terrain of plains and deltas, of saturated rice paddies, elephant grass, and sticky, airless jungles, they were informed that the people in pointed lamp shade hats who were running for cover were the enemy. The rest, the ones who didn’t flee, were friendly. That was the only way to discern who was on the side of the Americans. “A strange war,” Joe Torre recalled, “where there were no lines drawn.” The ballplayers had presumed the Vietnam War to be akin to the Korean conflict of the early 1950s. It was infinitely less straightforward than that. Fighting there, Brooks realized, was “like trying to grab at quick-silver.”
Over three weeks, the six men ran what were termed “baseball clinics” at Da Nang, Pleiku, Banmethuot, Nha Trang, and Phan Thiet, as well as in encampments near the Cambodian border. For the most part, these involved chatting, shaking hands, signing autographs, and showing a film of 1966 World Series highlights. The troops had avidly followed the postseason contest on Armed Forces Radio. Still, they couldn’t fathom how the Dodgers had lost four straight. Pressed about this at every battle station, Brooks would always beam and say, “They underestimated us. And we outplayed them.”
“You Orioles cost me money,” complained one GI who had bet on the favorite.
“That’s why I had to come over,” Brooks replied. “To get you on the right horse next year.”
The baseball representatives were repeatedly assured that they were in little danger, only to discover otherwise. The site on the infamous “Marble Mountain” where they lunched one day with Marine commanding general Lewis W. Walt was leveled by mortars the next day. Torre came across a soldier staring dazedly at his helmet. A bullet had entered in the front and exited from the side while miraculously just grazing his head. 26 This was an amorphous conflict; no one’s safety could be guaranteed. One night Torre and Musial visited a unit bunkered in a cemetery. At nine o’clock, when the troops began firing off rounds to scare the Vietcong, they almost shot Musial by accident. 27 Stan later concluded that touring Vietnam had been a foolish adventure. 28 Similarly, Robinson recalled, “I wasn’t scared at the time, but the more I think about it now, I should have been.”
Brooks was impressed by the courage of the servicemen but distressed by the carnage he saw. “I met a lot of brave American kids who were badly shot-up,” he remembered. “It shook me to see them—arms and legs missing, faces shattered, blind.” In one ward, he found a young soldier who’d lost both legs after stumbling into a booby trap. Musial approached. “How you doin’, son?” he inquired softly, extending a hand. “I’m Stan Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals.” Brooks watched as the soldier, in his hospital bed, jerked to attention. “Oh, Mr. Musial!” he exclaimed, profusely apologetic. “I’m sorry I didn’t recognize you!”
Brooks swallowed hard as he remembered the incident. “I’ll tell you that just tore me up. My lasting impression of Vietnam is that kid lying there without any legs, apologizing because he didn’t recognize Stan Musial.” 29
Ultimately, Brooks was led to rethink the war. Having viewed the conflict as a representative of the national pastime, he developed a response that was representative of his countrymen. “I came back pretty gung-ho about our participation then,” he conceded in his 1971 autobiography, “but like many others, I believe we’ve stayed long enough and paid a dear price—we should be gone already. But that’s just a balding third baseman’s opinion.” 30
Brooks Robinson would eventually go on to become a balding (and highly popular) Oriole broadcaster. His would not be the only fortunes changed by 1966, nor would he be the only veteran of that World Series who would find a livelihood in the game after his playing days were over. Others likewise would become announcers—Drysdale and Ron Fairly, most successfully, as well as Wes Parker. Many would end up as professional bench coaches, pitching coaches, or scouts. A select few—Jim Lefebvre, Jeff Torborg, Davey Johnson, Phil Regan, and Maury Wills—would take on the job of big-league manager, with varying success.
Undoubtedly, the biggest beneficiary of the 1966 World Series would be its MVP, Frank Robinson. Having capped his phenomenal season of vindication by succeeding so notably in the postseason, in plain view of America, Frank unhesitatingly jumped at the chance to reintroduce himself to the country. “I hope I’ll be invited to a lot of cities this winter,” insisted a champagne-drenched Robby, speaking with great earnestness in the clubhouse after the fourth game. “I want to meet people. A man matures that way.” 31
Robby, like Koufax, had always been as private off the field as he was competitive on. What had changed? In the wake of the championship sweep, Frank—brimming with confidence and flushed with joy, having a second time been named a league’s Most Valuable Player—glimpsed opportunity. It wasn’t just the chance for greater fame and fortune, although on this point he was not coy. The Orioles owed him. He’d earned $68,000 that year and desired $100,000 in 1967. A $32,000 raise might have sounded outrageous at the beginning of 1966, but no more. “There’s no doubt but that Koufax and Drysdale, with their double holdout last spring, helped all ball players,” Frank explained. “Now it’s possible, after a good season, to go in and ask for a $20,000 to $50,000 raise. A few years ago, such a request would get you thrown out of the office by the general manager.” 32
It wasn’t only about the money. Around the time that Koufax announced his retirement, Robinson was elsewhere in Los Angeles speaking with a reporter. Robby and Sandy were both the same age, both “an old thirty,” but one was bowing out while the other was calling attention to his entrance. “If I play seven or eight more years,” Frank mused, “then I think I’d have sufficient baseball knowledge to step directly into managing.” 33
It seemed so simple: he had strong opinions; he understood the game. But for all his credentials, he may as well have announced that he wanted to become an Apollo astronaut or president of the United States. No African American had ever expressed publicly such an ambition, much less actually been handed the reins of a major-league team. In 1966, however, Emmett Ashford had become the first black umpire in the major leagues, and Frank’s former basketball teammate from high school, Bill Russell, had been named to coach the Boston Celtics, becoming the first black American to run a major sports team.
Emboldened by all he was accomplishing, Frank assured reporters that there would soon be a black manager, and he named four active players—Jim Gilliam, Maury Wills, Willie Mays, and Ernie Banks—who he felt already had enough experience and skill to do the job.
As a teen, Frank had suffered the taunts of racism. In his twenties, he’d felt tainted by that night when he’d brandished a gun in anger. Now, in his thirties, he spoke like a man emerging from a bitter isolation, determined to reengage with the world at large. Whatever the cause—whether it was his exposure to sincere humanitarians such as Mayor McKeldin and Brooks Robinson, his warm acceptance by the players and fans of Baltimore, his wife talking him through the summer’s tumultuous events, or his near-death experience in the deep end of an undertaker’s pool—Frank no longer spoke of racism as intractable. The civil rights movement suddenly didn’t seem so futile. He was optimistic about change. He could do anything, and anything could happen. Gradually, he settled into a role as a leader in the clubhouse and, from there, of the black community.
Early in 1966, disillusioned ex-Dodger Jack Robinson had stated flatly that baseball’s owners lacked nerve, and for that reason he didn’t think there would ever be a black manager in the major leagues. 34 Frank had made a career out of proving people wrong—first the dad who doubted his son’s talent, then the racist minor-league customers, then the boobirds in Cincinnati, then Bill DeWitt. Now Frank set out to prove that his hero, Jack Robinson, also was wrong.
Robby focused on fulfilling his managerial ambitions the same way he ran the bases: determined, single-mindedly, un-afraid, spikes up. He spent nine winters working as manager of the Santurce Crabbers in the Puerto Rican league, giving up spending his off-season with his beloved family. Between March and October, Robby studied his own managers in the major leagues, questioning and prompting them, watching and learning. During the other months, he tried to translate what he’d learned onto the diamonds of Santurce, San Juan, Caguas, and Mayagüez, twisting into shape a theory of tactics and strategies that felt wholly his own. He had the good fortune, over the next decade, to study under some of the most respected managers in baseball.
After Earl Weaver replaced Hank Bauer at the Baltimore helm halfway through the 1968 season, Frank observed how successfully Weaver sacrificed everything for the big inning, how willingly he overlooked bad fielding by someone who wielded a crucial bat. Weaver was a bold, emotional micro-manager. He fidgeted and bellowed, kept statistics, and used the entire roster more inventively than Bauer.
In the winter of 1971–72, Weaver allowed the Orioles to trade Robby to the Dodgers. In Los Angeles, where Frank played but one season, he found Walter Alston’s reserve baffling. He ran the game cautiously. In his quiet way, he was also versatile and shrewdly adaptable. He’d been victorious with radically different teams using radically different talents in radically different home parks. But after the theatrics of Earl Weaver, Alston seemed to be made of stone.
Gradually, Frank came to understand that Alston was not dead, but he would give him scant more praise than that. A few times a season, the strong silent manager would erupt in rage and dress down the team, after which his players predictably would straighten themselves out—for a while.
From the Dodgers, Robby headed inland to play most of the next two seasons in Anaheim. Though nearly forty and looking ahead to his next job, he nonetheless kept putting up historic numbers. As a Dodger, he’d homered enough to surpass Mel Ott, Eddie Mathews, and Ted Williams on the all-time home run list. As an Angel, he passed first Jimmie Foxx and then Mickey Mantle to claim fourth in the record books. His address changed again at the end of 1974, when he was traded to Cleveland. Before the next season began, he was named player/manager, thus becoming the game’s first black manager. In the season opener, in his first at bat, he hit a home run. His team won. He added eight more home runs that season, and three the next, to end up with a total of 586, behind only Hank Aaron, Babe Ruth, and Willie Mays. He securely held that position for almost three decades.
By the time Barry Bonds surpassed him, in 2002, Frank had managed three teams—the Orioles, Giants, and Indians, each for three years. While he was managing in San Francisco, in 1982, he was voted into the Hall of Fame (as a player) on the first ballot. In his induction speech, Frank thanked first his wife and family and then Jack Robinson. “Without Jackie,” he said, turning to Jack’s wife, Rachel Robinson, “I don’t know if the door to baseball would have opened again for a long, long time. I know I couldn’t have put up with what Jackie put up with.”
Robby’s team performed well that season, and United Press International (UPI) named him Manager of the Year. He was praised for his aggressive managerial style. He routinely accomplished a lot with very little, was a fantastic motivator, and had an intense, commanding presence in both the locker room and the front office. He’d even learned how to engage the press.
As a manager, however, Frank Robinson was no Hall of Famer. After eleven years of managing a lot of mediocre ballplayers, he’d lost more games than he’d won. Baltimore fired him on May 21, 1991, and for nine years he remained on the game’s fringes, a hearty, hale figure, much respected and admired, until Major League Baseball found the perfect post for him. They consolidated the handling of on-the-field disciplinary matters into the hands of one “discipline czar” and offered Frank the position. He accepted. Everyone agreed that it suited him.
In the summer of 2002, Barry Bonds hit his 587th home run, passing Robby on the all-time list. At age sixty-seven, Frank was back out on the field that season, managing the Expos on behalf of Major League Baseball, which had assumed control of the dying Montreal franchise. Needing instant credibility, they’d asked Frank to leave his desk job to manage the team. Only Frank Robinson could climb back down into the dugout and make it look like a promotion.