Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever (23 page)

Since reaching the big leagues in 1961, right-hander Ray Washburn had been an enigma for the Cardinals. Despite a quality fastball and outstanding slider—stuff that drew comparisons with Gibson at times— Washburn rarely had the record to show for it. Beginning the ’68 season, his major-league record stood at just 51–44. Yet, perhaps to the surprise of many, he would be the author of one of the most fitting footnotes to the regular season.

On September 17, 1968, the Giants’ Gaylord Perry no-hit the visiting Cardinals at Candlestick Park. Undoubtedly Perry received a major assist from the fact the contest came days after St. Louis clinched the National League pennant in Houston. Matched against Gibson, Perry allowed walks to Mike Shannon and Phil Gagliano in no-hitting the Cardinals. Tim McCarver and Gibson himself were the only visiting hitters to even get the ball out of the infield. With the feat, Perry became the second pitcher from eastern North Carolina to no-hit a team in the majors that year. The A’s Jim “Catfish” Hunter, who grew up in Hertford, North Carolina, about sixty-five miles from the Perry’s family farm, twirled his perfect game on May 8, 1968.

Perry’s no-no highlighted how hit and miss the Cardinals’ attack had become, and how much the team depended upon such speedsters as Brock and Flood to reach and steal bases. “The tendency was to view the Cards as the same club that beat the Red Sox in the 1967 World Series,” wrote the
Washington Post
’s Shirley Povich. “They are not. They have the same personnel but they are playing like imposters. Their hitting is sadly off.”

The following day, many of the 4,703 fans at Candlestick must have thought they were witnessing a Yogi Berra moment of déjà vu all over again. For Washburn went out and matched Perry’s accomplishment of the previous day almost batter for batter. The performance didn’t surprise Cardinals’ trainer Bob Bauman. Before the second game at Candlestick, he predicted a great outing for Washburn. “I told him, ‘You are going to pitch a no-hitter today because you’re going to get even with those guys.’” Bauman said in the
Sporting News
. “It was as simple as that. I wanted Ray to make up for that no-hitter Gaylord Perry threw at us the night before.”

Back in Williamston, North Carolina, Perry’s mother usually stayed up late, listening to her son’s starts on the radio. Yet she somehow missed the no-hitter, thinking Gaylord’s start wasn’t until the following day, September 18. No matter. She tuned in the next day, an unlikely witness to baseball history.

In Washburn’s start, there were again only two batters who managed to hit the ball out of the infield. This time it was the Giants’ Hal Lanier in the sixth inning and Willie McCovey, who popped out to Flood for the final out. Washburn escaped a two-men-on, two-out jam in the seventh inning by striking out Dick Dietz, who had done his utmost to break up Don Drysdale’s scoreless streak earlier in the summer.

Sixteen hours after Perry’s feat, Washburn had pitched the second consecutive no-hitter in the same ballpark. It marked the first time in major-league history that back-to-back no-hitters were pitched by the same two teams on consecutive days in the same place. “In Gaylord’s no-hitter, only two balls were hit out of the infield,” Washburn said. “The same thing happened with me.”

“They talk about ’68 being the ‘Year of the Pitcher,’” Perry later said. “Those forty-eight hours at Candlestick kind of summed that up, didn’t they?”

The no-hitters were the fourth and fifth in baseball that season. Perry threw 101 pitches in “the biggest thrill of my career,” while Washburn delivered his in 138 pitches.

“It was a fine day to pitch,” Washburn said. “The wind wasn’t strong. I felt real good going into the ninth. I had control of my breaking pitches when I was behind the batters. My slow curve was working. If you have good motion and can keep it away from hitters, it’s a very effective pitch.”

That Candlestick Park would host back-to-back no-hitters was especially improbable. Anybody who remembers the old ballyard can recall that games at the ’Stick were part punishment, part comedy, and part wonder for players and fans alike.

As part of the enticement to move his team west along with the Brooklyn Dodgers following the 1957 season, New York Giants’ owner Horace Stoneham had been promised 40,000 seats and 12,000 parking spaces. Such real estate was difficult to come by in San Francisco even back then. As a solution, the city scrambled to build a new ballpark on a jagged stretch of land well south of downtown that extended out into the bay. In 1960, then-vice president Richard Nixon threw out the first ball at the stadium’s opener, declaring, “San Francisco can say this is the finest ballpark in America.” It wouldn’t be the last time Nixon stretched the truth. During the summer, thanks to the prevailing weather pattern, fog and strong winds funneled through the hills to the west and down through the Golden Gate, causing cold temperatures and plenty of mayhem. It soon became known as one of the game’s most notorious and unpredictable homes. It was where reliever Stu Miller was once blown off the mound by a gust of wind. (A balk was called.) In the late 1980s, the Giants handed out “Croix de Candlestick” pins to those who stuck it out to the end of extra-inning games. Players had it written into their contracts that they couldn’t be traded to San Francisco.

Unlike the Dodgers’ idyllic home at Chavez Ravine, the elements were nearly always in play at the Giants’ venue. Some nights the flags beyond the center-field fence didn’t blow in or out but rather straight up. The gale-force conditions blew many a foul ball fair over the years. Center fielder Brett Butler was once asked how he managed to persevere under such conditions, with wind currents that could take a ball in any direction as if it were on a string.

“Prayer,” he answered.

By 1968, the American Football League was steadily gaining a following thanks to its explosive offenses and a growing legion of quality quarterbacks. Within the game, though, the upstart league was also turning heads in another significant way. While the more established National Football League had such African American stars as running back Jim Brown and Super Bowl hero Herb Adderley, as the 1968 season unfolded, black stars in the AFL were making serious inroads playing in notable positions that had long been held by white players. Marlin Briscoe started as quarterback for the Denver Broncos. Willie Lanier took over as the starting middle linebacker for the Kansas City Chiefs, calling the shots on defense. These were the developments that Dr. Martin Luther King and his inner cadre had kept abreast of; watching sports, as Rev. Billy Kyles said, with “an historical eye.”

“Not just in style of play, but also in its social fabric, the culture of the new league was distinct from that of the NFL, particularly in race relations,” wrote Michael MacCambridge in
America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation
. “The AFL was hardly an idealistic utopia of racial equality, but the topic was more contemplated, more easily confronted, and better understood than in the NFL.”

Ironically, nobody better understood or seemed more comfortable with this transformation than a white quarterback who wore distinctive white cleats and played in New York, the largest media market. Football and the sporting world in general may not have been ready for Joseph William Namath. But, frankly, he didn’t give a damn.

Raised in western Pennsylvania, a football-crazed region that would later produce such legendary quarterbacks as Dan Marino and Jim Kelly, Namath went south to play his college ball. At Alabama, he headlined Bear Bryant’s Crimson Tide. Somewhere along the way, Namath became comfortable with blurring the lines of segregation that extended throughout sports in this watershed season. As a handsome bachelor, he certainly transcended the game, but what really turned heads within the game was how he could, in an almost off-hand way, bring blacks and whites together in a fashion that perhaps only the St. Louis Cardinals and Detroit Tigers could really duplicate at the time.

As an example, MacCambridge cites the observations of acclaimed sportswriter Paul Zimmerman. In 1968, Zimmerman covered Namath’s team, the New York Jets, for the
New York Post
. “Most teams, no matter how close they are, break down into some loose kind of black-white arrangement at meal times,” Zimmerman wrote. “To a casual observer, it would give the appearance of a segregated dining room. But I have seen Namath plunk his tray down at one of those all-black tables, and then a few white players join him, and soon it becomes a mixed table. I’ve seen this happen too many times to assume it’s accidental. The same thing on buses. I’ve seen Namath integrate a little knot of black players by his presence.”

As the 1968 season got rolling in football, Namath’s Jets were by no means considered the best team in the sport. They had plenty of competition within the supposedly inferior AFL, from the Oakland Raiders, Kansas City Chiefs, even Briscoe’s Denver Broncos, whom they lost to early in the 1968 regular season. Few could foresee them toppling the power structure of professional football, let alone that of sports in America. Yet that’s exactly what they were about to do.

“Baseball is a game that was designed to be played on a Sunday afternoon at Wrigley Field in the 1920s,” Roone Arledge told
Sports Illustrated
, “not on a 21-inch screen. It is a game of sporadic action interspersed with long lulls. Last year we tried re-running plays in slow motion. It was redundant.”

If anything, the sixties was a decade of change, with the lines often drawn between those who embraced change and those who resisted it. And time after time, it was those who embraced it who prevailed. Even though few saw it coming, football was about to supplant baseball as the top sport in the country, and it would be none other than the quarterback with the Fu Manchu mustache and the signature white shoes who would soon deliver the unlikely but decisive blow.

The stretch drive in ’68 held plenty of heartbreak and disappointment for Luis Tiant. The right-hander was struggling, and he was doing so alone. In addition to being apart from his wife and children, who were in Mexico City where they made their year-round home, after the heated argument with Alvin Dark, Tiant didn’t trust his manager anymore. Instead the right-hander tried to carry on as best he could on his own—now insisting that he was healthy enough to take the ball even though his elbow was still killing him.

During that stretch, he allowed seven earned runs, while his ballclub scored only five runs for him. At one point, Tiant sprayed the team bat rack with ladies perfume in the hope of attracting more hits from the baseball gods. It may have worked. His nineteenth victory came in one of his worst outings of the season, a 9–5 victory in Anaheim. Five days later, Tiant won his twentieth against Minnesota, striking out sixteen. In today’s era, that would have been it. Tiant would have been shut down for the season, told to rest up for next year. But Tiant had other ideas.

“I’m a pitcher,” he said, “and what I’m meant to do is pitch.”

So on September 25, 1968, Tiant made his last start of the season against the Yankees in the Bronx. His teammates weren’t surprised to see him on the mound for what many considered a meaningless game. While McLain was the hands-down favorite to win the American League Cy Young Award, in the Indians’ clubhouse they still talked about what a competitor Tiant was. How his nostrils “flared like a bull” when he pitched. Even the Cleveland radio broadcasters began to call him “the little bull” during the ’68 season. So perhaps what happened at Yankee Stadium as the regular season drew to a close shouldn’t have surprised anyone.

In the first inning, the Yankees’ Mickey Mantle singled through the infield. From there, Tiant didn’t allow another hit for the rest of the game, shutting down New York, 3–0. He struck out eleven in the process, raising his season total to 264, what would be the highest number in his nineteen-year career. More importantly, his ERA of 1.60 was the lowest in the American League since Walter Johnson’s 1.49 in 1919. One could argue he was the best pitcher in the game after Bob Gibson, regardless of what McLain and Drysdale had accomplished.

“Yeah, Denny won thirty-one, but if anybody had asked me which one was the better player, I’d have taken Luis one hundred times in a row,” said Stan Williams, Tiant’s teammate that season. “We have a little saying, it’s called ‘bowing the neck.’ It means getting a little tougher when the situation is tougher. Some pitchers can do it and some can’t. Luis could.”

With the regular season over, Tiant prepared to move his family to Venezuela for winterball action. He had played there the previous off-seasons and believed the extra work had played a major role in helping him transform into one of the game’s best pitchers. He maintained that the winter games made his arm stronger, more durable. The Indians had other ideas, however.

The organization determined Tiant needed a break and ordered him not to pitch until next spring. No winterball allowed. The pitcher replied that if he didn’t pitch, his arm would stiffen and the muscles could even shorten. The front office dismissed his protests. Even though Tiant would be named the team’s “Man of the Year” by the Cleveland press, Dark’s criticism of Tiant, that the pitcher supposedly abused his arm with that funky delivery of his, had struck a chord with the front office. Instead of heading to Venezuela to pitch in the off-season, Tiant was advised to rejoin his family in Mexico City and instructed not pick up a ball until training camp opened in the spring. The right-hander predicted that without following his regular training regimen, he wouldn’t fare well next season. Nobody cared to listen.

“Instead they told me to stay home,” Tiant said, “and watch TV.”

While the rest of the league finished out their regular season games, the Tigers and Cardinals prepared for the upcoming World Series. With no wild-card teams or divisional rounds, by clinching the pennants, Detroit and St. Louis were headed directly to the Fall Classic. “It was the end of an era for baseball,” historian William Mead said. “But like so many things of consequence, nobody really realized it at the time. So much in sports was about to change forever.”