October 1964 (7 page)

There was a sense among the other players that although Bouton was entitled to more money, somehow he was different. He was part of the new breed who had joined the Yankee roster in recent years. Their style puzzled the old-time players. Bouton, Phil Linz, and Joe Pepitone—all of whom had played at Amarillo together in the Texas League—were considered distinctly un-Yankeelike by temperament. It was not that they were playboys, although Pepitone obviously liked being a major-league baseball player because it was not a disadvantage in meeting beautiful young women. If anything, both Bouton’s and Linz’s work ethic exceeded that of some more naturally gifted players from the past. Nor had they joined a team that scorned carousing, for the Yanks had more than their share of serious skirt chasers and drinkers, tough men who were throwbacks to the golden age of macho pursuits. Rather, their sin was in being lighter of heart than most Yankees, and of not taking defeat quite as hard as their predecessors did. (When Linz retired from the game and opened a restaurant-bar in New York, he did not, like most retired ballplayers cum restaurateurs, choose a name summoning up his past glory as a player; he called it Mister Laffs.) They were more exuberant than their teammates and their behavior on occasion puzzled them. Linz, for example, practiced self-hypnosis, and did it so successfully that after one early session of looking into a candle and repeating “I will time the ball perfectly ... I will time the ball perfectly. I will hit the ball through the middle ... I will hit the ball through the middle,” he went 5-for-5. He reluctantly gave up the practice only because it was taking so much time, cutting into his sleep so that he arrived at the ball park tired.

Later some traditionalists claimed that the Yankee decline began with the arrival of the newcomers, that they had not understood the Yankee tradition of seriousness and commitment. However, while it was true that Pepitone squandered as much talent as any player who ever wore pinstripes, it is also true that no one played harder than Bouton or Linz. It was certainly true that Bouton was more political than most players, and more interested in arguing about the merits of politics than the merits of women; this was viewed as unnecessarily contentious and more than a little weird. Bouton was, among other things, quite possibly the only ballplayer in the major leagues who was for gun control. Nor was his friendship with such irreverent sportswriters of the day as Leonard Shecter, Stan Isaacs, and Maury Allen considered a plus by his teammates. Many of the complaints about Bouton, though, came only after his arm went bad, at which point his personality began to jar on his teammates. Linz was also a tough, aggressive player, and he loved being a Yankee. “Play me or keep me,” he once told Houk.

Whether they represented the coming of a new and different generation, no one was sure. Frank Crosetti clearly disliked them. Crosetti was the third-base coach, who had broken in with the team in 1932, almost a decade before some of these players were born, and he had been playing or coaching ever since. He was the keeper of the flame, a man determined to force rookies to adhere to the Yankee rituals of the past. In particular, he did not think Linz took his job seriously enough. Their conflict was generational. Linz (and some of the other younger players) felt that much of what Crosetti stood for was not so much designed to make someone a better player as to inhibit personal freedom, to take the fun out of life. Linz also thought there was a double standard at work, that the stars on the team could take liberties without being criticized because they were the stars. The new breed, as some of the sportswriters (themselves the new breed as far as
their
colleagues were concerned) called them, flouted the code of conduct: those yet unproven were barely to be seen, let alone heard. Pepitone, a poor kid from a harsh environment in Brooklyn, managed to spend five thousand dollars the day he signed his first contract. He bought, among other things, a brand-new convertible, and showed up at his first spring training, barely out of D ball, driving the aforesaid convertible. Worse, it was hauling a giant boat, which he had no earthly idea how to use. Yankee rookies did not arrive in camp in flashy new convertibles, hauling brand-new boats, and he was given exactly twenty-four hours to sell the boat.

The new-breed players were not deferential to the veteran players. From the start they talked to the senior players—the great stars of the team—as if they were equals. The first time Pepitone was sent in to replace Moose Skowron for defensive purposes, the brash Pepitone told Skowron, “Moose, you must have the bad glove.” Skowron, a veteran ballplayer and firm upholder of tradition, would walk through the locker room, looking at the younger players and shaking his head, saying that it had never been like this when he was a rookie. Pepitone answered by telling Skowron to watch out, because he was going to take his job, which in fact he eventually did. When in November 1962 Skowron was traded to the Dodgers, Pepitone sent him a cable after the trade:
DEAR MOOSE: TOLD YOU SO
. JOE PEP.

From the start, Pepitone, in particular, ignored the team hierarchy. If the normally unapproachable DiMaggio walked into the locker room, it was Pepitone who might yell out, “Hey, Clipper, how are you—do you want to have dinner tonight?” To everyone’s amazement this seemed to please DiMaggio. It was Pepitone who, when asked by Mantle to bring him a beer, demanded that Mantle bring
him
a beer, which seemed to amuse Mantle as well. It quickly became clear that Pepitone loved Mantle, loved being Mantle’s pal and basking in his reflected glory; in fact, Pepitone wanted nothing so much as to be Mantle’s caddy. One or two of the older players thought there was a certain desperate quality to Pepitone’s clowning, and his need for Mantle’s approval. In the locker room, Pepi always had his eye on Mantle, watching to see if the great star approved of what he was doing. Some were reminded of school days when an insecure and not particularly popular kid wanted to win favor with the most popular boy in the class.

Generally Pepitone was successful in his attempts to charm Mantle. Pepitone, an amused Mantle said at the time, was “the freshest rookie I ever saw,” but he also had a quick bat, a good swing, and could play both first and the outfield. Pepitone loved it when Mantle nicknamed him “Pepinose” (Stengel, in those days before ethnic slurs were taboo, called him “Pepperoni”) and was thrilled when Mantle told a sportswriter that Pepitone was the key to the 1963 season. “I figure we’ll win by a nose,” Mantle said. Yet even the easygoing Mantle, a player always looking to be amused, thought there were times when Pepitone overstepped the bounds. Once, during batting practice, Pepitone jumped into the batting cage and got ready to take his swings when Mantle wanted to take extra swings because he wasn’t hitting well. “Five swings, Slick,” Pepitone said to an astonished and then enraged Mantle. The two exchanged sharp words, and even though Pepitone was embarrassed to have done the unthinkable, to have provoked his idol, he was in too deep and could not back down. Much to his regret, he heard himself telling Mantle to get to the ball park earlier and get himself wrapped earlier if he wanted extra swings, and not to hold up his teammates. It was not, as far as Mantle was concerned, a small matter, and he did not speak to Pepitone for several weeks, leaving Pep increasingly dispirited and desperate.

There were other sins. During spring training the Yankees had a dress code: the players were to come down to breakfast in the motel in their civilian clothes, which meant a sports jacket, and then go back to their rooms and change. On one occasion Pepitone and Linz came into the restaurant in their Yankee uniforms. Houk was furious, as if this were somehow demeaning the uniform, and he sent them right back to their rooms to change. Pepitone was the first Yankee to bring a hair dryer into the locker room, as much as anything else to fight his onrushing baldness. On occasion he seemed to enjoy going on the field without his cap, as if to unveil himself for the young women in the stands. He not only tended to wear his street clothes tighter than most of his teammates did (on the same day he bought his new convertible, he also bought several flashy suits, styled, in his words, like those of “the younger, sharper racket guys”), he also started to wear his uniform tighter than the prevailing style of the day for ballplayers.

Because they were young and ebullient and somewhat surprised to be playing for, of all teams, the Yankees, they showed their pleasure openly, especially to the younger sportswriters. Those writers were frustrated with the often unsympathetic older players, whose quotes seemed to come from some central clearinghouse of approved and sanitized athlete-speak, so, in turn, they were drawn to the extroverted new breed. But in the Yankee clubhouse the younger players were believed not only to talk too much, but to have talked before their turn. The ability to be quoted in a newspaper was not, in the Yankee tradition, a God-given right; rather, it was like being given a low rather than a high uniform number, something that was supposed to be earned, preferably over many years. They had not yet earned the right to be quoted.

This clubhouse code was set not by Mantle or Ford or Berra, who by and large could have cared less (and who were probably delighted to see the local sportswriters bothering someone other than themselves). Instead, it was the older players, more often than not the part-timers of marginal talents, who were bothered most. It was not surprising that the second-tier players were unusually zealous to protect their privileges as
Yankees,
for it was not individual play that secured their niche in baseball history, but their place on those dynastic teams. They viewed a younger player who talked too much and whose locker became something of a haven for the beat reporters as seeking too much publicity and promoting himself. He was a member, they said, of the Three-I League: I-I-I. In addition, there was a suspicion that a player who talked too much was somehow disloyal to the team, and might be giving away secrets. When Bouton or Linz or Pepitone were too available to reporters, the other players would pass their lockers and make a gesture with their fingers of a mouth moving, the implication being that the player was talking too much, and was too close to the press.

T
HE YANKEE ROSTER WAS
essentially set when spring training began. There was, the players believed, one additional place left—Yogi Berra was looking for a reliever, and in early spring it came down to a contest between a player named Tom Metcalf and one named Pete Mikkelsen. By all odds Metcalf, then twenty-three, was the favorite, for he had gone further and accomplished significantly more than Mikkelsen, twenty-four, whose career had been rocky. Metcalf had played for three years at Northwestern and pitched at a high level in the minor leagues: he had a wide variety of pitches, with a particularly good curve. Johnny Sain, the perceptive pitching coach, thought him just on the verge of becoming a good big-league pitcher. Metcalf had been brought up to New York from the Triple A farm club in Richmond in mid-1963 when Houk began to worry about his bullpen. Because he had spent time with the parent club, it did not occur to him until rather late in the spring of 1964 that he was competing with a pitcher who had never pitched above Class A. Even Pete Mikkelsen himself thought the fact that he had been invited to the major-league camp something of a fluke. He did not have a very good fastball (“at best it was mediocre”) and he did not have a very good curve. He did have a wicked palm ball, a pitch that allowed him to rear back and throw with a violent arm motion, while the ball itself proceeded slowly toward the plate. In much of his career in the minors he had been on the edge of failure; in 1961 with Binghamton he had been 4-10, and the next year, with Augusta, he had been 3-5 and he felt he had pitched badly. At that point he was sure he was on his way out of the world of professional baseball to one populated primarily by blue-collar workers, like most of his high school classmates from Staten Island. To make bad matters worse, in early 1963 he hurt his arm at the start of the season. Because of the pain, Mikkelsen had been forced to start throwing his fastball with a shoulder-high delivery instead of a straight overhand delivery as he had in the past. When he began to do that, the ball started to sink on the hitters, and they regularly beat the ball into the ground. He had become, quite involuntarily, a very good sinker-ball pitcher.

Rube Walker, Mikkelsen’s manager in Class A, spotted the sinker and told him to stay with it. “Don’t change a damn thing,” he told Mikkelsen. Mikkelsen pitched well during 1963 with Augusta—his record there had been 11-6 in 49 games, and his ERA had dropped to 1.47—and much to his surprise he joined the big-league club in the spring of 1964, largely on Walker’s recommendation, he was sure. He did not think he was pitching terribly well that spring, but he kept surviving the successive roster cuts. Finally, during the last two weeks in Florida, he realized that it had come down to himself and Metcalf. Mikkelsen later said, “Metcalf was a prospect, and I was a suspect.” But Berra had liked sinker-ball pitchers in the past, and now that he was about to manage, he liked them even more, because they could come in during tense situations and get the batter to hit the ball on the ground. Walker kept telling Mikkelsen that he was doing well, that all he had to do was to keep throwing the sinker, which he did, even in batting practice, much to the annoyance of the veteran hitters. “All those hitters, they have this belief—thou shalt not pass,” Walker said. “It’s like a sin for them to get a walk. So they’re going to swing and if you throw them the sinker, they’ll beat it into the ground. And then you’ll make the club.”

Metcalf, in the meantime, thought he was throwing well, and not giving up very much in the way of hits or earned runs. He had not been pleased earlier in his career when the Yankees had turned him into a relief pitcher. He thought they had done it because he was tall (six feet two and a half inches) and slim (about 165 pounds), and they had decided that a player that skinny might lack the stamina necessary for a starter. His best pitch was a big roundhouse curve. Metcalf could throw it for a strike when he was behind in the count. “The Hammer,” Ernie White, his manager in Augusta in the Sally League in 1962, liked to call it. There had been a clash of coaching wills that season when the Yankees sent the old Phillies reliever Jim Konstanty down for a few days as a pitching coach. Konstanty taught what the players called the Jim Konstanty Curve, which was a smaller curve that did not break as wide, but more sharply. Konstanty told Metcalf that his curve was too big, and that he needed to work on one that was smaller and sharper. “Your curve may break out of the strike zone,” Konstanty said, “and maybe you won’t get the call.” So Metcalf had worked on the Konstanty Curve and started throwing it. As soon as he tried it in a game, Ernie White called time and ran out to the mound. “Where the hell is the Hammer, kid?” he asked. Metcalf said he was not throwing it anymore on Jim Konstantys advice. “Listen, you dumb son of a bitch. You’ll be riding the first train back to Whiskey Rapids or wherever the hell you’re from if you don’t go to the Hammer on the next pitch, and as for Konstanty, he’ll be gone in two days, but I’ll still be here managing this goddamn team, even if you’re not on it.” With that Metcalf went back to his big curve, winning 14 games and losing only 6. He reached Richmond in 1963, his third year in organized baseball, gaining a record of 9-5 there with an earned run average of 2.69 before being called up to New York. In New York he had one bad outing and appeared in seven other games. But with Hal Reniff, Marshall Bridges, and Steve Hamilton pitching well, the Yankees used Metcalf less and less. That bothered him, and late in the season he asked Ralph Houk to send him back to Richmond where he would be able to play regularly, but Houk said it was too risky, because the World Series rosters were set and if Metcalf were sent back, Houk might lose an eligible player. He said he was sorry the way things had turned out, but that Metcalf would get a good shot to make the roster and do some serious pitching next season. Gradually that spring it dawned on Metcalf that he and Mikkelsen were competing for the last spot on the roster, that they were pitching on the same day against the same teams, to see how they did against the same hitters. That did not strike him as fair, since Mikkelsen had not yet pitched above Class A.
What do I have to prove?
Metcalf thought.
I’ve been in Triple A and I’ve done well, and he’s never been above Class A.
There were stairs to climb, and in his mind he had climbed them and Mikkelsen had not. The other Yankee pitchers watched the competition with interest. They noticed one additional difference between the two players, and that was that Mikkelsen seemed to carry himself with more physical authority than most minor-leaguers. There was a sense that he would be grizzled one day, and there was an obvious physical toughness about him. By contrast, Metcalf had a cherubic face, innocent and unlined; he looked like someone who might be the most popular member of a college fraternity. This did not mean that Metcalf was, in fact, more innocent or gentler than Mikkelsen or that Metcalf cared any less about getting to the majors, but Metcalf
looked
innocent, and Mikkelsen
looked
tough. To some of the other players that was an important distinction, for they believed in the macho theory of baseball decision-making: you could put pictures of two equally talented players in front of several coaches and a manager, and they would, being pretty grizzled themselves, invariably choose the tougher-looking player.