Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever (4 page)

Fanned back alongside of him, each astride a red-and-white stool, were the players who made up the best team in baseball. Their civilian threads were bright hues of blue, red, yellow, and even an off-pink. The scene would have held its own with any of the day’s fashion shoots. The Cardinals’ ranks included Roger Maris (the single-season home-run leader), catcher Tim McCarver, pitcher Bob Gibson (the reigning World Series MVP), third baseman Mike Shannon, outfielders Curt Flood and Lou Brock (the top base-stealer in the game) and first baseman Orlando Cepeda (one of the top Latino players of the day).

At this point in history, they were also considered the best team that money could buy.
Sports Illustrated
had no reservations about hanging a price tag on each of the stars: Maris, $75,000; McCarver, $60,000 ; Gibson, $85,000 ; Shannon, $40,000 ; Flood, $72,500; Brock, $70,000 ; and Cepeda, $80,000. Of course, such figures seem like a pittance today. As Gibson later remarked, today one would be hard-pressed to sign a utility infielder for the team’s total payroll of $607,000. Yet in ’68 this was considered an unprecedented chunk of coin. At the same time, there was no arguing the fact that the investment had certainly yielded results. The Cardinals were a budding dynasty, the world champs in 1964 and 1967, and many expected them to repeat in 1968. But the team was also perceived by some fans and certainly some sportswriters as enjoying the spotlight, the fancy threads, and the big money a bit too much.

Among the everyday players, the flamboyant Cepeda had established himself as one of the team leaders. Nineteen games into the 1966 season, the Puerto Rican star had been traded away from his adopted city, San Francisco. At first he dreaded leaving the Giants for St. Louis, a city that he considered to be as segregated as any in America’s heartland. Then he met his new teammates and quickly became one of their most vocal clubhouse personalities.

“When I was traded from the Giants to the Cardinals in ’66, it was a complete shock to me. A real heartbreaker,” Cepeda said. “I grew up with the Giants’ organization. While I’d had my differences with them before the trade, you always thought you’d be with the team you came up with. I was a Giants player, first and foremost, and then to be shown the door was difficult.

“People need to remember it was a different time back then. Almost everybody thought they’d begin and end their careers with the ballclub that signed them. It’s not like today when you go from one team to another. Back then you were proud to play with the same team your whole career. But I have this gift—I never look back. And that’s what I did after I was traded to St. Louis.”

When Cepeda joined the team, he was surprised by how fast his new teammates made him feel welcome. It soon became apparent to the slugger that the Cardinals were “a bunch of great personalities, great teammates, and we knew how to play the game.”

Cepeda added, “Each and every one of them went out of their way to tell me how much I was going to like playing in St. Louis, how we were going to win a World Series together. You couldn’t have asked for more. I’ll be honest—it took me awhile to get over that trade. But soon I realized what a good situation I was in. Soon I was beginning to look at those guys as my brothers.”

Cepeda became so at home with the team that he helped with a pregame ritual that the old Cardinals still love to talk about. Before big games, Cepeda would stand atop the money truck, the place where the team’s rings, watches and wallets, were locked away and stored during games. From his perch, he would lead the group in a round of cheers.

“All right, El Birdos,” Cepeda began. It was Cepeda who made sure the mangled Spanish nickname, originally authored by coach Joe Schultz, stuck with the team. “Who made the great play out there tonight? Was it Heinie Manush?”

(For those scoring at home, Hall of Famer Henry Emmett Manush was a left fielder for a half-dozen teams in the majors.)

“No,” the team would chant.

“Was it Toulouse-Lautrec?”

“ Was it Curt Flood?”

“Yes!”

And so it would go, with Cepeda playing cheerleader, highlighting the efforts of as many of his teammates as he could until the entire clubhouse was chanting, “El Birdos, El Birdos.”

“That team was a group of guys who knew how to get along,” Cardinals pitcher Nellie Briles said. “Orlando had no problem fitting in with us. He brought a real passion to the game.”

In ’67, the Cardinals won the pennant by ten and a half games over the second-place Giants, Cepeda’s old team. Then they defeated the Boston Red Sox in that season’s Fall Classic. “The whole thing was as satisfying a season as I’ve ever had as a player,” said Cepeda, who hit twenty-five home runs and a league-leading 111 RBI (runs batted in) that year.

As the
Sports Illustrated
cover showcased, this was one confident, aggressive bunch, more than willing to stick up for each other. And no incident better illustrated that than the famed brawl against the Cincinnati Reds.

On a hot day in July of 1967, the Cardinals got off to a quick start against Milt Pappas and the Reds. They batted around in the first inning, opening up a 7–0 lead. When Lou Brock reached base after his second bat in the inning, he tried to steal second. Even though he was thrown out, the Reds were infuriated by the attempt. Some in baseball consider stealing bases when your team is already staked to a big lead to be rubbing it in. The gambit would later upset the Tigers’ Mickey Lolich in Game Two of the ’68 World Series, ending with Lolich yelling a few choice words at Brock. In the game against the Reds, things escalated into a far more serious situation.

“Much of my reputation as a badass pitcher resulted from the fact that Lou Brock was on my side,” Bob Gibson explained in his candid memoir with Lonnie Wheeler,
Stranger to the Game
. “There was no other player who irritated the other team as Brock did, and consequently no other who was knocked down quite as often. When somebody on the other team threw at Brock, I considered it my duty to throw at somebody on the other team. That’s simply how the game was played—at least in my book.”

In the fourth inning against Cincinnati, Brock was hit by Don Notte-bart, the Reds’ new pitcher. That resulted in Gibson buzzing Reds slugger Tony Perez, high and tight.

After flying out, Perez shouted at Gibson as he trotted past the pitcher’s mound. Gibson stared him down as Cepeda moved in from first base to get between the two. In quick order, the benches emptied. Things further escalated when Reds reliever Bob “Man Mountain” Lee raced in from bull pen, wanting a piece of Cepeda. Instead of waiting for the mountain to come to him, the Cardinals’ first baseman decided to go to the mountain. As the players jostled and yelled at each other, Cepeda tapped Lee on the shoulder. When Man Mountain turned around, Cepeda decked him with a single punch and the fight was on in earnest.

Eventually, twenty policemen came on to the field, but they couldn’t immediately stop the wide-ranging brawl, which soon spread to both dugouts. Gibson ended up in the Cincinnati bench, wrestling Perez, Tommy Helms, and Pete Rose. “I’ll never forget the sight,” Cardinals announcer Jack Buck said. “There was Gibson in the Reds’ dugout, visibly manhandling about three Reds and tossing them bodily out of the dugout and onto the field. That was just a sample of something you saw from Gibson every time he went out there.”

Putting such loyalty, money, and success aside, what’s startling about the
Sports Illustrated
cover shot remains the racial makeup. Even today, with the rise of Latinos in the game, where they make up roughly 25 percent of major league rosters, ballclubs often break along ethnic and racial lines. Yet the 1968 Cardinals, in this iconic photograph, were represented by five white players (Maris, McCarver, Shannon, infielder Dal Maxvill, and manager Schoendienst), three black players (Gibson, Brock, and Flood), and two Latinos (Cepeda and infielder Julian Javier). Long before Jesse Jackson, the Cardinals “were the rainbow coalition of baseball,” Gibson said.

A pitcher, even an ace, isn’t necessarily one of the leaders of ballclub. After all, he plays only every fourth or fifth day. No matter how memorable his performance, the impact has usually finished rippling through the clubhouse long before he takes the mound again. Yet in 1968, there were several exceptions to this rule. Nobody made more headlines in Motown, good and bad, than Denny McLain. Like it or not, many considered him the face of the franchise. For McLain embraced the glitz and the glamour of celebrity wholeheartedly, becoming the jokester, the trickster, the life of the party. He realized that if somebody was a superstar, the normal rules didn’t really apply.

In comparison, Gibson was all business. “I’ll never forget the look he gave me. It scared me to death,” Reggie Smith said after the 1967 World Series. “He sent a stare right through me, like, ‘Who do you think you are?’ I thought for sure there was a knockdown coming, but he fooled me with a slider that I tapped out in front of the plate. McCarver picked it up and tagged me out.”

Gibson knew full well how his public persona and the sight of a no-nonsense black man on a big-league mound worked for and against him back in the mid-1960s. “There’s no way to gloss over the fact that racial perception contributed a great deal to my reputation,” he wrote. “I pitched in a period of civil unrest, of black power and clenched fists and burning buildings and assassinations and riots in the street. There was a country full of angry black people in those days, and by extension—and by my demeanor on the mound—I was perceived to be one of them.

“There was some truth to that, but it had little, if anything to do with the way I worked a batter. I didn’t see a hitter’s color. I saw his stance, his strike zone, his bat speed, his power, and his weakness.”

Still, Gibson knew as well as anybody that perception often becomes reality, especially in a year like 1968. “As a black man, I was member of a race that had been intimidated by the white man for more than two hundred years, in which we learned something about the process,” he added. “When one is intimidated, he resigns himself to the backseat. He defers to his so-called superior, having no other legitimate choice, and allows himself to be dominated. As a major-league pitcher, I had the opportunity, at least, to push off the mound in the other man’s shoes.”

The Cardinals’ home, Busch Memorial Stadium, had opened in 1966 and was the first multipurpose concrete bowl in the National League. (San Diego’s Jack Murphy, Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers, Cincinnati’s Riverfront, and Philadelphia’s Veterans soon followed.) Busch II, which the locals called the new digs to distinguish it from its predecessor, Sportsman’s Park, was arguably the best of the cookie-cutter stadiums. Designed by architect Edward Durrell Stone, whose credits include the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the stadium sported a distinctive circular roof and was within a short walk of the new Gateway Arch and, ironically, the Old Courthouse, site of the infamous Dred Scott trial in 1846.

Early on, certainly in 1968, Busch II was a pretty good place to watch and play baseball. Back then the field was still natural grass. However, even here, in a longtime baseball town, football eventually gained the upper hand. In 1970, the outfield at Busch was ripped up for football as the stadium was also home to the St. Louis Cardinals of the National Football League. The infield was replaced by Astroturf seven years later and an unforeseen consequence was that the man-made stuff caused the temperature on the field to soar past 100 degrees Fahrenheit. (Lou Brock resorted to putting aluminum foil inside his cleats to beat the heat.) In addition, the change in turf at times made the game unrecognizable to the way the Cardinals played in the mid-1960s. Manager Whitey Herzog loaded up with speedsters (Vince Coleman, Willie McGee. and Ozzie Smith), who could turn bouncing hits to the outfield into doubles and triples. Such a brand of baseball took St. Louis to the World Series in 1982, 1985, and 1987.

That last ballclub brought me to St. Louis for the first time. I was covering the San Francisco Giants, my first year of big-league ball, and that divisional series went seven games, with the Cardinals taking the last two to upend Roger Craig’s “Humm Babies.” It was my first experience in being drenched with cheap champagne. As I was covering the winner’s clubhouse, Tommy Herr, whom I’d pestered for quotes throughout the series, got me. I didn’t think about it until I returned later that evening to my hotel, changed into a new shirt, and wrote away as the sun came up over the Mississippi River. But when I went to run a hand through my hair, the fingertips became stuck. The bubbly had dried into a shellac-like dome-do.

The same week Catfish Hunter pitched his perfect game, Jim Ryun ran the trails under a dormant volcano outside of Flagstaff, Arizona. The best miler in the world ran alone, gasping for breath.

Two years before, at the age of nineteen, Ryun had set world records in the half-mile and mile.
Sports Illustrated
named him its “Sportsman of the Year” and he won the James E. Sullivan Award as the nation’s top amateur athlete. But in the spring of 1968, everything went seriously off track. Three days after announcing his engagement to Anne Snider, it was confirmed that Ryun had mononucleosis. As a result, he missed the first round of the U.S. Olympic Trials.