The End of Winter

Don't tell me about the world. Not today. It's springtime and they're knocking baseballs around fields where the grass is damp and green in the morning and the kids are trying to hit the curve ball. ~Pete Hamill

Pitchers and catchers reported a week ago. The “regulars” rolled in just the other day. In Arizona and Florida, at least, spring has officially started. For those of us restricted to northern terrains, a sunny day and a picture of young men tossing long-ball will suffice. Baseball is as much about imagination as reality, allowing grown men to overcome abandoned dreams and to be transported in time to the simpler days of youth. For baseball fans, spring is when the cool winds of March and the smell of a leather glove awaken in the senses the hope of new beginnings, when every team is a contender. This year is no exception.

Winter in Philadelphia lingers as the last remnants of snow refuse completely to disappear, the sun’s rays meekly penetrating the cold air. Although nature bequeathed us a day or two of softness, a February flirtation with the gentle touches of spring, the winds quickly strengthened in intensity and the temperatures dropped once again, permitting us to escape the harsh chill of winter only in the daily reports of the Grapefruit and Cactus Leagues.

My normal excitement level for the start of spring training and anticipation of a new season has been tempered this year by a reminder of the darker, business side of baseball, talk of money and contracts, revenue and payrolls. I speak particularly of the Albert Pujols contract negotiations, which for Cardinals fans is the source of sleepless nights and intestinal distress. For those of you living on the planet Zortec, let me explain. Pujols is in the last year of an eight-year, $111 million contract. If the Cardinals cannot find a way to sign him to a new deal by the end of this season, he becomes a free agent and the Cardinals, a team of moderate wealth and a payroll that befits its Midwestern television market, will have to compete potentially with every team in the Major Leagues to bid on his services. That means that the Yankees, the Red Sox and, God forbid, even the Cubs, will legitimately be allowed to offer Pujols any amount of money they are willing to dish out to lure him to their team. Some might call that free enterprise. I call it Armageddon.

Being a fan requires certain fortitude and a willingness to endure pain and heartbreak. Only true fans can really understand this. When everyone else says, “Grow up” or “Get a life”, we just shake our heads with the knowledge that the non-fan lacks discernment. A true fan connects to a team the way one connects to immediate family; we are wrapped up in our team’s identity, its players form part of our secret inner circle. I can criticize a player on my team, but if a Phillies fan knocks my second baseman, they just may find extra spices in their cheese steak, if you catch my drift. The star players, of course, are extra special, for they disappoint us less and provide us with the hope of a winning season and the dream of a championship. The longer a star player remains with us, the more we identify with him.

I became a Cardinals fan in the spring of 1967, when I was eight years old. Yes, I know, I am from New Jersey. It is simple really. My second grade class was studying the many different species of birds. Always one to choose favorites, I took an immediate liking to the cardinal, lured by its magnificent, bright red coat and distinctive black trim. There was simply no other bird like it. As it happens, my ornothological studies coincided precisely with when I fell in love with baseball. I had started to play the game with my older brother and his friends and learned that baseball and me were a natural fit. I quickly became consumed by it. When that summer I discovered the St. Louis Cardinals and the “birds on the bat” that adorned their uniforms, I was an immediate fan. Soon I was following my favorite team and my favorite players – Orlando Cepeda, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, Curt Flood, Mike Shannon, and Tim McCarver – colorful players who lit up a ballpark with their grace and athleticism. The bond permanently cemented in the fall of 1967 when the Cardinals won the World Series; I was forever hooked. (Only years later did I discover that it was somewhat frowned upon to root for anyone other than the home team. I have finally stopped looking surprised when someone asks me, “Are you from St. Louis?” after confiding my team loyalties.)

To this day, I identify the Cardinals of my youth with Lou Brock and Bob Gibson. Although the surrounding cast occasionally changed, especially since the advent of free agency, Gibson, like Stan Musial before him, was a Cardinal for life. So was Mike Shannon, who still does the play-by-play more than 40 years later on the Cardinals’ radio network. Brock, who the Cardinals acquired from the Cubs in 1964, remained a Cardinal until he retired in 1979. I can still recite the daily lineup card for the Cardinals teams of the late 1960’s and early 1970’s. At the age of eleven, I started playing Strat-O-Matic baseball, an extremely realistic, statistic-based board game, played with dice and individual player cards formulated from the previous season’s statistics. I “managed” eight straight 162-game seasons of Cardinals games, keeping box scores and calculating the season’s at bats and innings pitched, hits, runs, RBIs, walks and strikeouts, batting averages and earned run averages. To this day, I can compute batting averages in my head. I spent more time in study hall writing out that day’s lineup card and studying my team’s statistics than I did doing homework. Hmmm. Perhaps this is why I did not attend an Ivy League college, or why I wince when asked about the works of William Shakespeare. I mean, what was his batting average?

More than four decades hence, you must forgive my indulgence, then, of Albert Pujols. When a player is as uniquely talented and identified with one team as Pujols, it takes a bigger man than me to resist the need for common sense and patience in something as mundane and legalistic as a long-term contract. There is something a little disconcerting about the business of baseball. I am a fan because, for 2 ½ hours each night, baseball reminds me of what life was like when I was twelve, when the most important event was how the Cardinals did against the Mets. I did not know or care about the players’ salaries, or how much money the team made in a given season. I knew nothing of television royalties, ticket sales and merchandise revenues. I paid little attention to union disputes and work stoppages. It was the game and what it represented, devotion to a team and identification with its players, which captured my imagination.

I understand that the Cardinals must protect the future of the franchise. Pujols is 31 years old. He will turn 32 before season’s end, when his present contract expires. According to unsubstantiated reports, Pujols and his agent have asked for a contract in the range of 10 years, $300 million. The Cardinals reportedly offered Pujols somewhere in the neighborhood of $200 million over nine years, plus an equity interest in the team for life. Cardinals’ management is naturally reluctant to commit 30% of their payroll for ten years on a player who, in six or seven years, will be in the twilight of his career. The Cardinals would likely agree to pay him $30 million a year for five or six years, but they do not want to be tied into a deal that pays even a player as great as Prince Albert upwards of $30 million a year when he is 39, 40, and 41 years old. Pujols is a great player, and there is no reason to believe he will not continue to be among the best players in baseball for the next several years. But even the great ones do not play at 39 the way they played at 29.

I cannot justify the amount of money we are talking about here. And yet, despite my past moralizing over the inequality of income between the rich and the poor in the United States, when it comes to baseball you can dismiss all talk of economic justice, morality and politics. There is really only one consideration. Do what it takes to win! Pujols is a once-in-a-lifetime player. His first ten years are matched historically only by Ted Williams and Joe DiMaggio. In ten seasons, Pujols has accumulated 1,900 hits, 408 home runs, 1,230 RBIs, 1,186 runs, 426 doubles, and 914 walks (compared to only 646 strikeouts). Divide each number by ten and you have pretty close to what he has done each season. He is that consistent. He has a career batting average of .331 and an on-base percentage of .426. He has never batted below .312, has never knocked in less than 103 runs, has never scored less than 99 runs. He has twice won the Gold Glove Award for his superb defensive play at first base. By all accounts, he is a great teammate and clubhouse leader.

The famous actress, Tallulah Bankhead, once said, “There have been only two geniuses in the world. Willie Mays and Willie Shakespeare.” I don’t know about Shakespeare (see above), but Albert Pujols must be added to the list. If the Cardinals do not sign Pujols and make him a Cardinal for life, I dread the amount of therapy that will be needed to restore my sanity. All of Cardinal Nation will be on Prozac. I know that it will take a lot of money to sign El Hombre, and I hope he means it when he says he wants to remain a Cardinal for life. But if somehow it doesn’t work out, if Prince Albert someday betrays Cardinal red, it will induce panic-stricken psychosis in the annals of Cardinalville. He is the franchise. He is the St. Louis Cardinals.

Perhaps it is as simple as what one Cardinal fan recently advised Bill DeWitt, Jr., the Cardinals' owner, in an email to ESPN's Mike and Mike in the Morning, “He wants it. You have it. Give it to him.” I really do not know what to think about it all. In my moments of dispassion and sanity, I can understand the reluctance to give away the store. Then the fan in me takes over, and I don’t want to hear about contracts and money and long-term revenue projections. For the past six weeks, I have awakened each morning with the hope that the headlines would read, “Cards Sign Pujols for Life.” So I have stopped trying to think about it, and will focus on the game and prepare for another long and beautiful season, when my childlike fascination with baseball and the Cardinals will overtake all the messy details of life.

Ernie Harwell, the longtime announcer for the Detroit Tigers, once said, “Baseball is just a game as simple as a ball and bat. Yet, as complex as the American spirit it symbolizes, it is a sport, a business, and sometimes almost even a religion.” As a rational man with a sense for business and economics, I understand the arguments on both sides of the Pujols contract negotiations. But as a Cardinals fan, I simply cannot comprehend life without Pujols.

High and Inside: Appreciating Bob Gibson

It all came together in the summer of 1967, when I was eight years old, and baseball entered my life for good. I caught my first fly ball that summer, a high arcing loop hit by a fungo from my little league coach. A bright, blue sky in the background, the whiteness of the ball reflecting the sun’s glare, my eyes were glued on the rotating seams as the ball sailed high in the air, drifted ten feet to my right and landed square in the web of my glove. Learning to overcome the fear of the ball and recognizing my capacity for the game bestowed a quiet confidence in me – on the baseball diamond – that has remained with me ever since. From that moment forward, there was no ball hit in my direction that I could not glove, or so I believed – the most important dimension of any sport. A bond was formed between baseball and me. The smell of grass in the air, the feel of leather on my hand, the sound of the ball connecting with a wooden bat, the beauty of the fenced-in green fields and perfectly dimensioned base paths, this became my religion. Hitting, fielding, and throwing a baseball became part of my everyday existence as the game took on a higher dimension. Baseball was more than just a game; it was a serious activity with meaning and purpose. Above all, it exposed my competitive instincts. I became someone who wanted to win, who needed to win, my identity tied to success or failure on the baseball field.

It was during that summer I first learned of Bob Gibson, the great pitching ace of the St. Louis Cardinals. As a young boy with a love of baseball and a passion for the Cardinals, there was no player I wished to emulate more than Gibson. From the naïve and innocent longings of a young child in central New Jersey, Gibson was everything I desired to become – a talented athlete, a great competitor, a winner.

I recently stumbled across a Bob Costas interview of Gibson and Tim McCarver on the MLB Network, which caused me to reflect on Gibson and his significance to me. When I think of Gibson, a portion of me reverts to when, as a nine year-old boy, I watched on our black-and-white television as Gibson pitched the first game of the 1968 World Series, striking out seventeen Detroit Tigers and setting an all-time Series record that stands to this day. Watching Gibson pitch was like observing a great artist at work. He had a full, overhead windup and a graceful, athletic delivery. His left leg kicked and looped around his waist as he leaned back, peering over his left shoulder, until his body shifted toward home plate. When he delivered the pitch, his arms flailed as his right leg sweeped across his body with a sudden sidewise rush that finished with all his weight on his right foot, wrenching his body and all his momentum toward first base. As Roger Angell described it in Late Innings (Ballentine Books, 1982), “the pitch and its extended amplifications made it look as if Gibson were leaping at the batter, with hostile intent. He always looked much closer to the plate at the end than any other pitcher; he made pitching seem unfair.”

For much of Gibson’s career, his pitching did indeed seem unfair. In seventeen seasons with the Cardinals, Gibson won 251 games, struck out 3,117 batters, and threw 56 shutouts and 255 complete games. He no-hit the Pirates in 1971 (I still have the newspaper clipping from that one), won two Cy Young Awards (1968 and 1970) and an MVP (1968), nine consecutive gold gloves (1965-1973), and he was the last pitcher to win 20 games and hit for a .300 average (1970). In 1968, his best year, Gibson achieved near perfection, throwing 13 shutouts and finishing with an almost inhuman 1.12 earned run average in 305 innings pitched. Unlike today’s starting pitchers, who rarely throw more than a few complete games in a season, Gibson completed 28 games in 34 starts, and he was not removed once from a game in the middle of an inning all season long. It is difficult to comprehend that Gibson actually lost nine games that season (he finished with a 22-9 record), until you realize he lost five games by a score of 1-0. His teammates provided him with meager run support, averaging just 2.8 runs per game in his starts. “No wonder I was always grumpy,” Gibson later recalled. Gibson’s performance was so spectacular (in a year of many great pitching performances) that the Major Leagues lowered the pitching mound by five inches and shrunk the strike zone in all directions at the start of the 1969 season.

Gibson became my all-time favorite player when I read his book, From Ghetto to Glory (Popular Library, 1968), an autobiographical account of his life and, for me at the age of nine, the first full-length book I ever read. The youngest of seven children, Gibson was raised without a father in the slums of Omaha, Nebraska, when segregation and racism prevailed throughout much of the country. From Ghetto to Glory and a later, updated version, Stranger to the Game (Penguin Books, 1994) exposed Gibson as an exceedingly intelligent and thoughtful man possessed of an honest frankness, a strong sense of justice, and an intensely competitive spirit.

Gibson was such an intense competitor that he hated playing in All-Star games because it required him to talk with players he pitched against all year. He especially hated pitching to a catcher from another team for fear the catcher would discover something about his pitching techniques. He refused to sacrifice any competitive edge he might have. After his record setting performance in the 1968 World Series, a reporter asked him if he had always been as competitive as he appeared that day. Gibson said yes, noting that he had played his young daughter in several hundred games of ticktacktoe and had beaten her every time. Although he said it with a slight smile, no one doubted he spoke the truth. Gibson would not let himself lose to anyone.

As a young boy, I viewed Gibson as nothing short of a hero and role model, yet I have since read that many people perceived Gibson to be somewhat distant, even cold and impersonal at times. I find this interesting if only because it is so at odds with my perception of him. His friends and teammates have always described a warm and caring man who takes seriously the bonds of friendship. Joe Torre, who played with Gibson on the Cardinals in the early 1970’s and became one of his closest friends, told Roger Angell in Late Innings that Gibson “can seem distant and uncaring to some people, but he’s not the cold person he’s been described as. . .. Things go deep with him.” Torre described how Gibson once sent him a photograph of himself and signed it, “Love, Bob.” In the machismo-filled world of professional athletics, Torre asked, “How many other ballplayers are going to do that?”

During the Costas interview, McCarver told the story of how, when he was first called up to the Cardinals as a young catcher in the early 1960’s, manager Johnny Keane urged McCarver to tell Gibson to slow his pace (he was always a very fast worker on the mound). In one game early in the season, Keane instructed McCarver to visit the mound and talk with Gibson. When McCarver approached the pitching mound, Gibson just stared at him with that famous Gibson glare and said, “What are you doing here? Just give me the ball. The only thing you know about pitching is that it is hard to hit.” McCarver walked back to home plate having not said a word. He told Keane between innings, “If you want Gibson to work slower, you tell him.” For the next six years, McCarver refused to approach the mound when Gibson was pitching. That was just how Gibson liked it. Yet despite their different styles and backgrounds, the two men became very close friends and remain so today.

Gibson told Costas that, after he retired, he learned that everyone thought he was mean because he glared in at the batter, as if he was trying to intimidate him. Gibson said this was simply not true. He wore glasses off-the field, and due to his poor vision, he had to squint to see the catcher’s signs. He said had he known that batters were intimidated by him, “I would have tried to look even uglier!”

Gibson’s competitive intensity and mastery of the brushback pitch enhanced his reputation for intimidating opposing hitters. Some thought he intentionally threw at batters, but this was not so and, in Gibson’s mind, smacked of racism. He did what all good pitchers did then, including Drysdale, Koufax, Wynn, and Seaver – he pitched inside to prevent the batter from feeling comfortable at the plate and trying to extend his arms on pitches on the outside corner. As Gibson explained in Stranger to the Game:

I pitched in a period of civil unrest, of black power and clenched fists and burning buildings and assassination 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 as 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 weaknesses.

In the world according to Bob Gibson, most batters that get hit have only themselves to blame. They fail to respect the inside pitch and find themselves lunging over the plate, looking for the outside pitch. Gibson believed that the outside part of the plate belonged to him. If he caught a batter leaning to get an advantage, he would drill a fastball six inches inside “to make an honest man out of him.” To Gibson, the brush back is “the most misunderstood pitch in baseball. It is not meant . . . to punish a batter for the pitcher’s own mistake, as is often speculated. If I threw a bad pitch, I deserved to get creamed. But if I threw a good pitch and the batter still hit it hard, then I had to find another way to establish myself. [P]itching inside might be a starting point – to let the batter know, at least, that I’m out there and have to be reckoned with.”

Of course, Gibson willingly took advantage of his reputation. In 1968, after the White Sox traded Tommie Agee to the Mets, Gibson hit Agee on the helmet on the first pitch in the first inning of the first Cardinals spring training game. When Agee slowly rose to his feet, several baseball writers called out, “Welcome to the National League, Tommie!” Agee would never be comfortable batting against Gibson, who had successfully established his presence.

Gibson was all business, in everything he did. He knew no other way. When he played with the Harlem Globetrotters in the late 1950’s (Gibson was a star basketball player in high school and college), Gibson later said that he “hated that clowning around. I wanted to play all the time – I mean, I wanted to play to win.” He played for two seasons before devoting all his energies to baseball.

Gibson’s teammates knew that whatever bond they enjoyed with him as his teammate or friend could work against them as his opponent, should they ever be traded. Bill White, who played first base for the Cardinals and roomed with Gibson in 1964 (when they beat the Yankees in the World Series), was one such friend. When White was traded to the Phillies after the 1965 season, Gibson hit him with a fastball the first time he faced him. As Gibson later explained to Angell, “Even before Bill was traded, I used to tell him that if he ever dived across the plate to swing at an outside pitch, the way he liked to, I’d have to hit him. And then, the very first time, he went for a pitch that was this far outside and swung at it, and so I hit him on the elbow with the next pitch.” For Gibson, this was all part of the game. “That pitch, that part of the plate, belongs to me!”

Gibson is a proud man, confident of his self-worth, and sensitive to racial slights and historical discrimination. A man of strong opinions about race and politics, in his playing days he rarely expressed them in public and did not let his social concerns interfere with his competitive instincts. One day, in 1968, a television reporter asked Gibson about a civil rights demonstration that was taking place that day. Gibson replied, “I don’t give a [expletive]. I have a ballgame to pitch.”

Gibson, however, has always had a strong sense of right and wrong. A victim of racism and extreme poverty, his father died before he was born and Gibson suffered from numerous childhood ailments, including asthma, a heart murmur, and rickets, from which he contracted pneumonia and nearly died; as a young infant, he was bitten on the ear by a rat. He overcame all of this to become a star athlete in high school basketball, baseball, and track, yet he was turned down by Indiana University because it had already filled its quota of black basketball players (one). When he was an 18 year-old sophomore at Creighton University, he accompanied his basketball team to Oklahoma by train to play the University of Tulsa. On the way, Gibson was told that he would not be able to eat or sleep with his teammates when they arrived. “I cried when I was told that,” Gibson recalled to Angell. “I wouldn’t have gone if I’d known. I wasn’t ready for that.” In 1959, when he arrived for spring training in St. Petersburg, Florida, and tried to check into the team hotel, he learned that the black players had to stay in a separate part of town.

Shaped by these experiences, Gibson developed a compassion for the victims of hatred and prejudice. In Late Innings, Angell described an incident many years ago in which another player made anti-Semitic remarks about a Jewish public relations man who was Gibson’s friend. Gibson stopped the player mid-sentence and advised him to keep his distance. “And if I ever pitch against you, I’m going to hit you on the coconut with my first pitch.” (According to Angell, this particular player, fortunately or unfortunately, never faced Gibson).

Curt Flood, who played center field for the Cardinals during most of Gibson’s career, and who was a very close friend of Gibson, once reminiscensed to Peter Goldenbock in an interview published in The Spirit of St. Louis (Spike, 2000) about the human dimension of baseball, about friendships made and bonds formed. Although Flood would eventually change baseball forever when he challenged the reserve clause in a case that went all the way to the United States Supreme Court, he reflected on the impact that Gibson and others had on the St. Louis Cardinals teams of 1967 and 1968, and how this racially and geographically diverse group of ballplayers overcame their differences to develop lasting relationships. Flood’s description reinforces for me what I most admire about Bob Gibson, and leaves me with a sense of hope and optimism:

The men of that team were as close to being free of racist poison as a diverse group of twentieth-century Americans could possibly be. Few of them had been that way when they came to the Cardinals. But they changed. The initiative in building that spirit came from black members of the team. Especially Bob Gibson. . . . It began with Gibson and me deliberately kicking over traditional barriers to establish communication with the palefaces.

“How about coming out for a drink after the game?” Hoot [Gibson] would ask a player who had never gone to a bar with a black man in his life. He was turned down more than once. So was I. But the spirit was infectious. After breaking bread and pouring a few with us, the others felt better about themselves and us. Actual friendships developed. Tim McCarver was a rugged white kid from Tennessee and we were black, black cats. The gulf was wide and deep. It did not belong there, yet there it was. We bridged it. We simply insisted on knowing him and on being known in return. The strangeness vanished. Friendship was more natural and normal than camping on opposite sides of a divide which none of us had created and from which none of us could benefit. . . .

It was baseball on a new level. On that team, we cared about each other and shared with each other, and face it, inspired each other. As friends, we had become solicitous of each other’s ailments and eccentricities, proud of each other’s strengths. We had achieved a closeness impossible by other means.

There we were, including the volatile [Orlando] Cepeda, the impossible [Roger] Maris, and the impenetrable Gibson – three celebrated noncandidates for togetherness. There we were – Latins, blacks, liberal whites, and redeemed peckerwoods – the best team in the game and the most exultant. A beautiful little foretaste of what life will be like when Americans finally unshackle themselves.

Towards the end of From Ghetto to Glory, Gibson wrote, “I would much rather be known as Bob Gibson, great American, than Bob Gibson, great baseball player.” Here’s to you, brother.