The Greatest Game Ever (until the Cubs Won)
Game 7 of the 1960 World Series was, until November 2, 2016 at approximately 11:45 Central Time the most thrilling championship baseball game ever played. It cost a legendary manager his job.
Casey Stengel, the Yankee manager, would start Bob Turley over Bill Stafford. He would send Yogi Berra to left field. Johnny Blanchard would catch. He would play Cletis Boyer at third; all the rest would remain the same, for the moment. Casey Stengel would hand his lineup card to the home plate umpire, return to the dugout, and assume his accustomed viewing stance, leaning on the leg he perched on the top step. Then he would do as he had done thirteen hundred times in Brooklyn and Boston and nineteen hundred times in New York and all the many times in Toledo, Kansas City, Milwaukee and Oakland: he would wait to see if his players could prove his decisions were wise.
Pittsburgh was unseasonably warm and unlike New York, where seats at the Stadium had gone wanted, the overnight crowd had still gathered outside of Forbes Field for tickets. They filed inside and took their seats after writing their names and addresses on the sheet outside the box office, so that they would not lose touch when the series ended, sometime that afternoon.
Stengel’s pitchers, starters and relievers alike, crowded into the bullpen, knowing he would not wait to call on them the moment Turley stumbled.
It came quickly. Danny Murtaugh’s starter, Vernon Law, worked an uneventful first. But with two out in the bottom of the inning, Turley ran the count full on Bob Skinner before losing him to a base on balls. Rocky Nelson stepped in. Nelson was a legend, though of minor league proportions; he was 35 years old, a veteran of parts of eight major league seasons distinguished by his inability to replicate in the big leagues the remarkable numbers he had amassed in the minors — two hundred thirty-four home runs, three Most Valuable Player awards and a .319 batting average. His batting stance suggested the boxing pose of John L. Sullivan, hands held close to his face and his right foot at an unorthodox ninety degree angle to the left. It had not served him especially well in his stops with the Cardinals, Pirates, White Sox, Dodgers, Indians, and second tours in Brooklyn and St. Louis. Joe Brown picked him up in 1959 as a back-up at first to Dick Stuart, whose vanity — “wouldn’t you like to be this good looking?” — was matched by fielded so poor there was little to be gained and much to be lost by playing him when he wasn’t hitting. He had three hits in twenty times at bat, all the evidence Murtaugh needed to rescind his promise of starting him so long as he produced. Turley ran the count on Nelson to two balls and a strike, the latter a call that displeased Nelson so much he squawked to the umpire. Turley’s next pitch arrived high in the strike zone, the one place Stengel had warned his pitchers to avoid. Nelson met it flush, driving it over the wall in right, sending Skinner home ahead of him. Rocky Nelson had been playing baseball professionally for eighteen years and had and never would hit a bigger one. Pittsburgh led 2–0.
Burgess’ single leading off the second ended Turley’s day. Stengel summoned Stafford, handed him the ball and returned to the dugout, careful, as always, to avoid stepping on the foul line; his luck had so far been bad enough. Stafford began his afternoon by walking Hoak on four pitches and then allowed the bunting Mazeroski to outrace his throw to first. Stengel’s superstitious tick, however, appeared to work when Law, so good with the bat in Game Four, grounded back to Stafford who threw to Blanchard who then threw to first to complete the double play. Two were on and two were out for Bill Virdon, whose hitting had so far been eclipsed by his fielding. His single, however, drove in Hoak and Mazeroski. Stengel was now down by four, and it was only the second inning.
Skowron brought him a run closer when he homered to lead off the fifth. Pittsburgh had been unable to press its advantage against Bobby Shantz, whom Stengel had sent in to relieve Stafford in the third and who had so far retired the nine men he had faced. Murtaugh, meanwhile, had ordered Face to begin warming up. Law’s ankle still throbbed and Murtaugh, seeing how he favored it, worried that if pushed the Deacon much longer he risked lasting injury. But Law retired the next three batters without incident and when he came to bat in the bottom of the inning narrowly missed a homer of his own.
His undoing came in the sixth. Richardson led off with a single and when Law walked Kubek, Murtaugh decided he could go no further. He had Harvey Haddix warm, too, but had advised the writers before the game that he would not hesitate to call on Face early. Murtaugh had been unusually philosophical before the game, and had gone so far as to quote from Kipling. “The tumult and the shouting dies,” he had said, reciting from “Recessional,” “the captains and the kings depart.” As if on cue, Law left to a standing ovation. In came Face, to happy applause.
It did not last. Maris fouled out to Hoak. But Mantle’s single just past Groat’s mitt scored Richardson. Kubek moved to third and Berra stood in. He fouled off Face’s first pitch. He drove the second over the wall in right, and in the all-too-familiar blink, the Yankees had gone ahead, 5–4. What could be better, Red Smith wrote that day, than for the pivotal moment in Stengel’s last game to feature Berra as the agent of his vindication — “how sweet that it should be a gift from Yogi, the only Yankee who was a Yankee when Casey arrived in New York, the only one who has shared his triumph and disaster since 1949.”
But the sentiment was premature; the game would not be settled here. Casey Stengel’s longest afternoon was just beginning.
Shantz preserved the illusion of normalcy through the sixth and seventh, retiring every man he faced save one. But even Smokey Burgess’ lead-off single in the seventh went for naught when Hoak lined to Berra and Mazeroski hit into a double play. The base hit, however, was not meaningless; only when the game was done would its true significance be understood. Because Burgess was a liability on the base paths, Murtaugh had replaced him with a pinch runner, Joe Christopher, and in the top of the eighth with a new catcher, Hal Smith. A predictable change of personal that would set in motion a chain of events that would transform the game into a contest the likes of no one had ever seen, not even the wizened man in the visiting dugout who, as the eighth inning began stood six outs from a championship.
His men were doing all they could to make things easier for him. Face dispatched Maris and Mantle but lost Berra to a base on balls. Skowron then sent a bouncer toward third that Hoak fielded. The play, however, unfolded too slowly for Hoak to force Berra at second and the Yankees had two on for Johnny Blanchard. His single scored Berra. Boyer, showing Stengel that he could be as able with a bat as he was with a glove, doubled Skowron home. New York led 7 to 4 and Forbes Field grew quiet as the game headed toward a conclusion so predictable it felt preordained: the Yankees were always going to win.
Gino Cimoli pinch hit for Face to open the home eighth and singled to right. Virdon took a strike on the outside corner and then committed the worst possible offense by sending a double play ball straight to Kubek at short.
At this point, it is worth pausing to recall Boyer’s comments before Game One on the subject of Forbes Field infield, an arid patch of land that the Pittsburgh groundskeeper, Eddie Dunn, maintained as if it were a Japanese rock garden. “You can’t feel certain about the bounce,” Boyer had said, adding that as bad as things were at third he was especially worried about the bounces that might come Kubek’s way — “Tony will have to judge two or three.”
Kubek, in fact, was a bit surprised that he was still at short; he had thought that given the score and the juncture in the game, Stengel might have had him replace Berra in left and sent Joe DiMaestri to short. Now he cheated a bit toward second, knowing that Richardson would be shading toward first, assuming that Virdon would try to pull the ball. Still, he was delighted by Virdon’s apparent bad luck at the plate. Frank Crosetti, who coached third and tutored the infielders, had always preached that the greater good lay not in getting the sure out but in trying for the double play, which, as the ball approached, was just what Kubek was thinking. Crosetti had also preached the ethic of never playing a ball assuming that the last hop would be true. Kubek had learned over the years that there were short hops and long hops and the most vexing of all, the in-between. Of those most treacherous hops, there was an even more menacing subset: the hop that came not to the fielder’s left or right, but straight at him. A man could at least take the measure of the hops that came to the side. But the in-between-straight-ahead hop was all the more difficult to gauge. Especially on the harsh terrain of the Forbes Field infield.
Years later, Kubek, a thoughtful and perceptive man, would be pressed to recall ever witnessing — let alone fielding — a hop like the one that now took flight toward him. No one could. Because this hop was headed not for his glove — as he intended — or for his chest, which would have been a bad though not unheard of event, but straight for the small and otherwise easy to miss target of his Adam’s apple.
It caught him flush on the neck and he was down quickly and could feel his mouth filling with blood. He grabbed his throat. He could not talk. His windpipe was swelling but he felt no pain. Richardson rushed to him, followed by Blanchard, the trainers, Mantle and Stengel.
He wanted to stay in the game, but that was out of the question; Stengel signaled for DiMaestri, who would play short. Cimoli was at second, Virdon was at first and Kubek, who left the field to a round of applause, was on his way to the hospital.
“The bad hop,” Mel Allen told his audience on NBC, “gives the Pirates a new lease on life.”
Shantz now faced Groat, the league batting champion who had had a decent, though hardly spectacular series at the plate. He came inside and nicked the corner for a strike, a call with which Groat took issue. He came inside again, further this time and Groat jumped back to avoid being hit. His third pitch was again inside, but this one caught too much of the plate and Groat was on it. His grounder skipped past Boyer, scoring Cimoli and cutting the lead by one.
Stengel had squeezed all he could from Shantz and wanted Coates to face Bob Skinner, a counterintuitive move: Skinner, like Shantz, was a lefty, and the advantage would presumably be with the pitcher. But convention, in Stengel’s approach, existed only to be defied. He wanted a ground ball and Coates, he would later say, “had his sinker and his slider ready.” So in he came.
Skinner squared and bunted. Boyer threw him out, but not before the runners advanced. Coates now had one man down but runners on second and third and another lefty to face in Rocky Nelson. Coates subscribed to the belief that no home run was to be left unpunished. He was not about to hit Nelson and put a second runner on base. But he was not averse, now or ever, to letting a man experience the menacing rush of a fastball under the chin. Nelson jumped back as the pitch approached and almost lost his balance. Coates decided to come inside again, but this time Nelson was prepared. His fly ball to Maris, however, was too shallow to score Virdon. There were two outs for Roberto Clemente.
The Yankees had decided that Clemente could be bullied with pitches that threatened to hit him. This was one of many views of Clemente that bore little relation to fact. Even now as he had emerged as a star, Clemente remained barely understood and in some quarters tolerated. He had hit .314 for the season, with sixteen home runs and ninety-four runs batted in and though it was understood among his teammates that he was the best player on a pennant winning team he was deeply disappointed when he finished only eighth in the balloting for Most Valuable Player. He was known, at turns, as Bob and Bobby, as if there was value and acceptance to be gained with an American nickname. His English was broken, and the writers thought nothing of quoting him verbatim, fractured syntax and all; even the black press was not immune to that bit of casual humiliation. Much as his teammates appreciated his talent they wearied of reputation for sitting out games when his body did not feel up to play; even that was a stretch — he missed only ten games all season. His more generous his teammates like Hal Smith tried gently to suggest that he try to be in the lineup every day; in America, a ballplayer carried himself with stoicism in the face of pain and failure. The Pirate clubhouse was an otherwise pleasant place where the chief cultural contribution could not have been more alien to a young man from Puerto Rico: the pick-up country music trio of Bob Oldis, Smith and Face. There had been rumors of a fist fight with Clemente and Face that were never confirmed and years later Face, who denied the fight ever took place, would say only that he “never had any problems with Roberto.” Clemente lived with a family in the black part of town and spent what time he did among the Pirates in the company of Joe Christopher, who came from St. Croix and spoke Spanish. Clem Labine, who knew something of good fellowship among ballplayers from his years in Brooklyn, had liked what he had seen when he arrived in Pittsburgh. But of Clemente, he would say years later, “he’s alone.”
Another rap on Clemente was that, like Berra, he had an expansive view of the strike zone, and could therefore be induced to swing at most anything. So while Coates’ sensibilities might have suggested at least one pitch at the skull, he chose to work Clemente away. He fouled off Coates’ first pitch and the second and broke his bat on the third. The bat boy brought him a replacement but Clemente declined the offer and instead retreated to the dugout to find something more to his liking. He did not choose propitiously.
His bouncer bled toward first, a rally killer. Skowron was on it quickly and ball in hand he rose and turned to throw to first and end the inning. But no one was there.
It should have been Coates; it did not take a spring semester in Stengel’s Academy to know that when the first baseman fields a ball, the pitcher covers the bag. Coates, however, had other ideas; “I thought,” he would say years later, “I could get the ball.” If Skowron yelled “I got it,” he went on, he never heard him over the din. “Maybe I should have gone to the bag.” He did, eventually, but Clemente was there before him. Virdon scored. The Yankees now led 7–6 and Coates, who had reason to believe the inning was over when the ball dribbled from Clemente’s bat, returned to the mound to face Hal Smith, who was there only because Smokey Burgess had singled and could not be relied upon the get much further.
The Yankees had signed Smith and run him through the farm clubs before sending him to Baltimore in 1955. He stayed for a year before moving to Kansas City, where he hit well and caught well enough to draw the interest of Joe Brown, who needed a catcher who could hit and spell Burgess. Smith had hit .295 with eleven home runs in the seventy-seven games he played that season, a good man with a bat though not, in Coates’ estimation, someone he need fear. His first pitch, a called strike, suggested he was right, and the second all but confirmed it as Smith wailed and missed at a high fastball. Coates came back higher still for ball one. Smith liked his fourth offering but changed his mind and checked his swing. Still, Coates would later say, “two and two, it’s my count. Not his.” It was time, as he put it, to change Smith’s “eye level” by throwing something lower in the strike zone. His pitch crossed the plate across from Smith’s belt and as it did he swung. The bat, he would later say, did not vibrate in his hands, a sensation that occurred only in those rare moments when a batter met a pitch squarely. “Doggone it,” Smith told himself, “that’s great.”
Berra watched the ball sail over the wall in left and as Smith reached second he could saw people beginning to cheer for him. “Oh man,” he told himself, “what have I done?”
Clemente was waiting at home to lift him in the air. Pittsburgh led 9 to 7 and needed only three outs in the ninth to make their comeback complete. The task would fall to Bob Friend.
To this point, Casey Stengel had made only three decisions since play began — he had had no choice but send in DiMasestri for the fallen Kubek. He had replaced Turley with Stafford who had surrendered two runs, and Stafford with Shantz, who might have escaped untouched were it not for Kubek’s unfortunate encounter with Virdon’s bouncer. Stengel had broken with standard practice by bringing in Coates to face a lefty and had paid the price with Coates’ failure to cover first — or generously, to try to make a play — on Clemente’s dribbler. Stengel ended the eighth by making his fourth substitution. He trudged back to the mound to fetch Coates and waited there long enough to hand the ball to Ralph Terry.
Terry was not, strictly speaking, a reliever but like every Yankee pitcher was expected to be available. Stengel had not been sure of what use to make of him, but wanted him ready just the same. He had warmed up with Stafford and then with Shantz and then a third time with Coates, only to sit each time. He would be up five times before Stengel called for him. His arm was a little tired, and as his warm-up pitches sailed high he understood that he had grown too accustomed to the smaller, lower bullpen mound. His first batter of the afternoon was Don Hoak who lifted a fly ball to Berra in left. An out, but a disconcerting one, on a pitch too high for comfort.
Bob Friend divided his seasons in thirds: those starts when he felt on top of his game; those in which he muddled his way through with less than his best stuff; and those worrisome starts when he took the mound with nothing. He had felt good in Game Two, and might have pitched longer had he not thrown the curve-that-got-away to Bob Turley. His pitches had velocity but no movement the day before in Game Six, and he was gone after fourteen batters, five hits and five runs. But now Murtaugh had presented him with the possible of redemption, to be the man on the mound at the last out.
Bobby Richardson led off.
“Bob, keep the ball down to this guy,” Hal Smith told Friend.
“I know it,” he replied.
Richardson took a pitch for a strike and then blooped a single to left, his eleventh hit of the series.
Stengel sent Dale Long, who had homered in eight straight games when he played in Pittsburgh, to pinch hit for DiMaestri. And he sent word to the bullpen to have Ford begin throwing.
Long fouled off Friend’s first pitch and drove the second to right for a single. Murtaugh came to the mound.
“Let’s bring Haddix in,” he said. Friend surrendered the ball.
“Good year,” said Murtaugh, meaning it.
Mel Allen introduced Haddix by reminding viewers of “the Kitten’s” singular, heartbreaking achievement: twelve perfect innings against Milwaukee, only to lose in the thirteenth.
He started Maris with a ball, low and away before getting him to pop up to Smith for the first out. Maris flung his bat and Mantle stepped in.
He had two hits on the day and had driven in a run. He took Haddix’ first pitch for a ball, low and away. He sent the second to right, a single that scored Richardson and sent Long to third. Berra was up and only after Haddix tried to get him to chase a ball low and away did Stengel send McDougald in to run for Long.
Berra let Haddix’s second pitch go for ball two but could not resist the third. His shot down the line came quickly to Nelson, who was hugging the line to keep Mantle close to first. What might have been a double instead sped toward Nelson as the double play ball that would give the Pirates the series.
Nelson had played three hundred fifty one games at first base, and while not known for his defense, generally fielded his position without incident. He did not make mistakes, but nor was he regarded as an asset in the field and perhaps that is the most generous way of explaining what he now chose to do. Nelson fielded Berra’s shot deftly. And then he stepped on first. A prudent play but not a bold one. The better play, the game ender, would have been to throw to second to retire Mantle, and be ready to take the return throw that would complete the double play. But by stepping on first Nelson had retired Berra, precluding the possibility of forcing Mante. He would have to tag him out.
Mantle knew this. He also knew that he had made a dreadful mistake. He had drifted too far off the bag and now stood in limbo as he faced Nelson, who had the ball and the game, in his hands and the chance to make good.
For a moment the two men looked at one another. And then Mantle dove for the bag. Nelson was a moment late in applying the tag. Mantle was safe. McDougald had scored. The game was tied at nine.
Skowron had the chance to put New York ahead. But his grounder to Groat forced Mantle at second. Bill Mazeroski would lead off the bottom of the ninth.
Forbes Field had been noisy with anticipation when the inning began and had roared with Friend’s first strike against Richardson. But the succession of Yankee base hits had so stilled the crowd that the public address announcer’s voice soon sounded like a clarion against the quiet. Friend had departed to a sprinkling of boos and Haddix had been welcomed with hopeful applause. People screamed at Berra’s shot to Nelson and moaned when Mantle evaded his tag. Skowron’s ground out was accompanied not with cheers but with what sounded like a collective sigh.
Now, as Mazeroski stood in, the stadium fell silent.
In the Pirate dugout, Dick Groat took his helmet and bat; he was scheduled to bat fourth. Dick Stuart waited on deck to pinch hit for Haddix. Vernon Law stood in the tunnel between the dugout and clubhouse. Clem Labine, still feeling fluey, was in the trainer’s room. In his box, Joe Brown, the general manager, turned the point of his pencil toward the field. Brown used the pencil to keep score and also to see if it might somehow jinx the visiting team by turning the point away when they batted — “maybe I’d help.”
Ralph Terry completed his ten warm-up pitches and still could not seem to get the ball to stay down. He had, by his own admission, been lucky on the fly ball that retired Hoak; the pitch, he would later say, had nothing on it.
His first pitch to Mazeroski sailed high for a ball. Blanchard walked halfway out to the mound and yelled, “Fire it in there.”
And so he did.
Labine could hear the crowd and raced from the trainer’s room to the field. Law had been closer and was already on the first dugout step as he saw Berra move back on the ball only to stop and watch as it sailed over the fence. Mazeroski began his leaping run around the bases, pin wheeling his arm, a group of fans already in pursuit as he rounded third.
Ralph Terry did not linger on the mound. He walked through the dugout into the clubhouse and when he saw the attendant he asked for beer. He had wanted a Schlitz but the attendant gave him a local brew. He wanted to talk to Stengel. He was grateful to Stengel for seeing good things in him, and for offering early, wise advice: “This is a serious business. This is a serious job. I want you to take it seriously.” He found Stengel his office, his uniform shirt off.
“What’s up, kid?” Stengel asked. “How were you trying to pitch him?”
“I couldn’t get the ball where I wanted, Casey,” Terry replied.
“As long as you pitch you’re not going to get the ball where you wanted,” said Stengel. “Forget it kid.”
Absolution.
Stengel kept the clubhouse door locked for fifteen minutes and when the writers at last came in they found him smoking a cigarette and drinking a beer.
They wanted to know his thoughts about the game. But more importantly, whether he had decided that this would be his last one.
“I won’t say anything about the future,” he told them. “I’m going to decide what I’m going to do later in October. I’ve got a lot of things to find out first.”
The writers, spotting Topping, tried him, too, but without success. “I won’t talk about it now,” he said and not warmly.
So the writers returned, as they had for so many years, to the game itself, and to Stengel’s analysis. He began by praising his team for its resilience but, as always, did not shy from attaching blame.
“Now I tell these fellers they can’t pitch these other fellers high but they do it and you have to say it was pitching that beat us,” he said keeping his kind comments to Terry between his pitcher and himself. “The infield and the outfield can play great, but when they hit those balls over the fence there is no defense in the whole world to take care of that. And that man hit one with two on in the eighth and the other fella banged his to send everybody home in the ninth. There was no way to catch those balls so you’ve got to say the pitchers made the wrong pitch. What else can you say?”
The writers tried to approach his players, but discovered they had nothing to say. Mantle sat at his locker, his face buried in his arms.
“Mickey’s crying,” someone said. “I don’t think he’d want you to see him this way.”
He tried to wipe the tears away. He sat silently for a minute or two and then, in a voice that was barely audible, asked “How’s Tony? They tell me his windpipe is broken.”
Someone told him that were it not for that bounce, New York would surely have won.
“Years from now,” replied Mantle, “all they’ll know is that we lost.”
It was all but impossible to squeeze through the door and into the bedlam of the Pittsburgh clubhouse. Mazeroski admitted that he had guessed on the pitch. His teammates poured a good deal of champagne on each others’ heads and, in the view of Joe Brown, consumed a good deal more. It was loud and happy place. One by one, the players, their manager, their general manager and even the mayor paraded to the microphone where Bob Prince, the Pirate announcer, asked them to describe their feelings to a “coast-to-coast” television audience. Everyone said they were very happy, and that things were great and “unbelievable.” Their effervescent joy offered a convincing argument for the narrative strength of tragedy over comedy.
Stengel and his men dressed and boarded their bus and as they pulled away from the ballpark the streets were becoming all but impassable. The crowd had surged onto the field, chasing Mazeroski home, and when he ducked into the clubhouse, they set to work grabbing the bases, and fighting to pry up home plate, which was finally wrested away by Alex DeMao, a tavern keeper. Boys wrestled behind home and people in the cheap seats threw what paper they could find onto the field. Church bells peeled and air raid siren wailed as people ran out onto the streets. Men and women raced to tops of office buildings where they began to drink and toss paper onto the streets. Within half an hour downtown Pittsburgh was so crowded with people and confetti that trolley cars could no longer pass. The bars filled up so quickly that for the first time in anyone’s memory, doormen were posted outside to keep the crowds at bay. The police issued an alert advising people to avoid downtown, but no one paid any mind. Office girls snake-danced through the streets and the confetti was so deep it looked as if there had been a blizzard. Strangers hugged and though the police detail was doubled there was no stopping the tens of thousand of people who would not leave the city center as night began to fall.
The Yankees somehow made it out of town, and the Pirates worked their way to a victory party at the Webster Hotel where everyone showed up, except for Roberto Clemente, who was packing to go home. And when the party drew to a close, Groat, Skinner, Virdon and their wives, not quite ready for the evening to end, ventured out into the dark but happy streets. They could see there was no point in trying to drive through the throng and so parked their car and walked into a restaurant where a table for six was already set for them, as if they had called ahead. Clem Labine, who knew how to celebrate, finally made it back to the friend’s apartment where he’d been staying only to be woken up at 3 in the morning by two nuns who were staying next door. “Excuse me, ladies,” he said, “I didn’t expect you for breakfast.”
Ralph Terry tried to get drunk on the plane back ride home. He drank double bourbons but to no affect; the adrenaline was still rushing and he still felt sober by the time the team arrived back in New York.
Whitey Ford had been unable to bring himself to talk to Stengel on the flight — so much for not being able to stay angry at Casey very long. “The way I was pitching,” he wrote in “Slick,” “I know I would have beaten them three times and we would have been world champs again.” Mantle, too, blamed Stengel for what he later called “the worst disappointment of my baseball career.” He and his teammates were convinced that theirs was the better team, and that the loss had been an avoidable fluke. “The truth is,” he wrote in “All My Octobers,” “Casey blew it by not using Whitey Ford in the opener.”
Stengel had tinkered with his pitching, and with his lineup and with his substitutions, just as he always had. But too little of his plotting had succeeded and for this he was punished, again and again, by having to witness the failures his choices had wrought. He had gambled with Ditmar in the opener, and then watched what Ford accomplished with such command in Game Three. He gambled again with Ditmar over Stafford in Game Five, and then watched Stafford follow him with five shutout innings. He had humiliated Clete Boyer before he could even bat in Game One, and for his decision to pinch hit Dale Long he was subjected to the dispiriting sight of Long’s useless fly ball. There is no way to knowing whether Boyer might have made the catch that Gil McDougald dropped in Game Four. But then Boyer played because of his glove, not his bat; yet when Stengel finally decided to play him again he tripled in Game Six and doubled home a run in Game Seven. Every move was now open to question: why did Stengel wait a pitch before dispatching McDougald to run for Long in the ninth inning of Game Seven? Why, by his own admission, didn’t he pull Turley early in the Game Two rout, so he could save him for another day? Had he ordered Ralph Terry to warm up a few too many times in Game Seven?
All of which begged one question: had he really blown the series? Or had the players he selected at key moments failed to do what he had asked of them, which is, of course, the fate of every manager? The problem for Stengel was not one of execution — Murtaugh had made his share of questionable choices, perhaps trying to squeeze too many innings from ElRoy Face. Rather, it was a flaw far deeper: forgetting that a manager’s role was, in the end, limited by the performance of the men on the field, and by factors that only the heavens controlled. How else to explain the bad hop that bloodied Tony Kubek’s windpipe? But Casey Stengel had always managed his Yankees with a boldness that suggested a belief that his great intelligence and vast experience could be antidotes to the vagaries and mysteries of the game. It was as if he could not tolerate simply letting his men play their game. But it had been and would always be their game and there was just so much even a daring and clever fellow like Stengel could do to make it his. He had tried, this time perhaps too hard. And for his troubles he had lost at the very moment when winning was the only way he might somehow save the job with which he did not wish to part.
Excerpted from Bottom of the Ninth: Branch Rickey, Casey Stengel, and the Daring Scheme to Save Baseball From Itself. [Read on Amazon]
