Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever (35 page)

Brown retires after the 1975 season, all of them with the Tigers, ranking tenth on the American League all-time pinch-hitting list. Decades later, he can still be found at the ballpark in Detroit, signing autographs and talking with the fans.

Dick McAuliffe

After leading the American League in runs scored in 1968, Dick McAuliffe is limited to seventy-four games the following season due to a serious knee injury. Even though he will play another four seasons in Detroit, he will never be the threat he was in 1968.

After the 1973 season, the Tigers trade McAuliffe to Boston for outfielder Ben Oglivie. Expected to challenge Doug Griffin for the Red Sox’s second base job, McAuliffe hits only .210 and retires after playing just seven games the following season. “I never should have left Detroit,” he says. “That’s where I was the most comfortable. That’s where I should have finished up.”

Jon Warden

Despite being the only player on either roster in the 1968 World Series (fifty players in total), not to appear in a single game, the future appears bright for the hard-throwing left-hander. With baseball expanding by two teams in the American League and National League, Warden is left unprotected by the Tigers and selected by the Kansas City Royals. Soon after reporting to camp in the spring of 1969, though, Warden becomes sidelined with a sore shoulder. Instead of going north with the big-league club, he is sent down to the minors. While Warden struggles to find the prowess he exhibited early in the ’68 season, he discovers he has a knack for making people laugh. In Oklahoma City, where the hometown team has a cowboy fire blanks to the sky after an 89ers’ home run, Warden decides the visiting Omaha Royals could do just as well. He brings a blank-shooting pistol to the ballpark and teammate Steve Boros helps him tape on a fake mustache. When his team hits a long ball, Warden comes bounding out of the visiting dugout, firing away. Jack McKeon, then the Omaha manager, calls Warden the team’s cheerleader and appreciates his ability to keep his teammates loose.

While clowning comes naturally to Warden, making it back to the majors proves to be much more difficult. After the Royals release him, Warden signs on with Evansville and the St. Louis Cardinals’ team in the Texas League. After that he tries out with the Cleveland Indians before retiring. His will be a single line in
The Baseball Encyclopedia
: four victories, one loss and an ERA of 3.62.

After making a name for himself on ESPN’s
Cold Pizza
as a wisecracking baseball analyst, Warden travels the country for the Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association, making appearances at golf outings and old-timers games across the country. In addition, he begins auditioning for stage shows on both coasts.

“What’s the old saying? ‘You’ve got to laugh instead of cry sometimes?’” he says. “I guess I’m an ambassador for baseball. I wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for that year with the Tigers. I’ve gotten more mileage out of that one year in the big leagues. I’m very thankful for it. I would never trade that one year.”

THE ST. LOUIS CARDINALS

Roster changes begin soon after the final out in Game Seven in St. Louis, as the Cardinals trade outfielder Bobby Tolan and pitcher Wayne Granger, two players they probably would have lost in the upcoming expansion draft anyway, to the Cincinnati Reds for outfielder Vada Pinson. Pinson replaces the retiring Roger Maris in right field. While the ballclub appears ready to make a run at another championship, management then sends first baseman Orlando Cepeda to Atlanta for catcher-first baseman Joe Torre. (Three years later, Cepeda will be traded from the Braves for Denny McLain.)

“Trading Cepeda signaled to us, loud and clear, that things would no longer be the same around the Cardinal clubhouse,” Gibson writes in his autobiography. “The front office apparently had very little regard for what the players considered to be the special character of the ballclub.”

The New York Mets, led by pitchers Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, and Gary Gentry, out-duel the Chicago Cubs down the stretch to take the new National League East Division. The Cardinals fall to fourth place and the front office decides more changes are needed. Tim McCarver, Curt Flood, Joe Hoerner, and Byron Browne are sent to Philadelphia in a seven-player trade. Flood refuses to report and St. Louis eventually sends Willie Montanez and Bob Browning to the City of Brotherly Love to complete the blockbuster deal. But what the remaining Cardinals realize is that Gibson has called it: the era when the ballclub won two, almost three championships in five seasons has come to an end.

St. Louis doesn’t return to the World Series until 1982, when it defeats the Milwaukee Brewers in seven games.

Bob Gibson

While much of the ballclub is dismantled around him, Bob Gibson remains—once again pushing back against the heartache the world offers. A critic of lowering the mound, because he contends it will give hitters too much of an advantage, the intimidating right-hander nonetheless carries on, winning twenty games in 1969, with a league-high twenty-eight complete games, and the following season he notches a league-leading twenty-three victories.

By the mid-1970s, Gibson’s best performances are behind him and he retires after the 1975 season. With 251 victories and 3,117 strikeouts, the second-highest total ever in baseball history at the time, Gibson enters the Hall of Fame in 1981.

“I’m glad I had the opportunity of playing against a person of Bob’s caliber,” Hank Aaron says. “I feel that he was one of the best pitchers I faced in baseball.”

Rusty Staub adds, “In my thirteen years in the big leagues, for consistency of performance, competitiveness, desire and plain old guts, Bob Gibson was my idea of what it takes to be a true champion. I wish I could have played on the same team with him.”

Of all the lofty statistics of his seventeen-year career, none stand out more than his three World Series campaigns: a cumulative record of seven and two, eight complete games and ninety-two strikeouts. Unfortunately for the pitcher, and perhaps the game itself, he doesn’t appear in the Fall Classic again after the ’68 season.

Lou Brock

If the Cardinals had captured the 1968 World Series, Lou Brock certainly would have given Bob Gibson a run for MVP honors. His .464 batting average raises his career mark in postseason play to .391, breaking the record of .363 set by J. Franklin (Home Run) Baker.

After ’68, Brock leads the league in stolen bases five more times, establishing the career thefts mark of 938, which stands until Rickey Henderson surpasses him in 1991. His goal of being remembered as something more than a base stealer, somebody mentioned in the same breath with the all-time greats, becomes reality as Brock is elected to the Hall of Fame in 1985.

“He sometimes doesn’t get the general credit that Babe Ruth or Lou Gehrig or Reggie Jackson get, but you talk about Mr. October,” says Bob Broeg, the longtime sportswriter with the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch
. “His last two Series were fabulous. In those games, he would combine power and speed.”

Orlando Cepeda

Throughout much of his career, behind the smile and ability to rally his teammates, Orlando Cepeda worried about his balky knee. He initially hurt it after the 1962 season—a secret he kept hidden from nearly everybody. By 1968, however, it becomes apparent that he’s playing on borrowed time.

The Cardinals trade him for Joe Torre after the 1968 season and he’ll play in Atlanta until 1972 when he moves on to Oakland in the deal involving Denny McLain. From there, Cepeda does brief stints in Boston and Kansas City before retiring in 1974. His seventeen-year career includes nine .300 seasons and eight seasons of twenty-five or more homers. Along with Roberto Clemente and Orestes (Minnie) Minoso, he’s recognized as one of the Latino pioneers in the game.

Soon after his playing days end, Cepeda is arrested trying to pick up 160 pounds of marijuana. Sentenced to five years in prison, he serves only ten months. But the incident certainly delays his entrance into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. In 1993, Cepeda is inducted into the Puerto Rico Sports Hall of Fame and misses being voted into Cooperstown by just seven votes—the fifth-narrowest margin a player has ever missed being inducted by in baseball history.

He is finally elected into the Hall in 1999, with a class that includes Nolan Ryan, Robin Yount, and George Brett.

Mike Shannon

With close ties to the Busch family, Mike Shannon is one of the few regulars from the 1967–1968 teams to remain in St. Louis. But he begins to suffer from a serious kidney infection. He plays only fifty-five games in 1970, batting .213 with no home runs. Shannon continues to try to play until the ballclub takes away his uniform, permanently sidelining him.

“Mike reminds me of Eddie Mathews,” Joe Torre says. “He couldn’t be hurt bad enough to keep him out of the lineup. The only way they could take Mike out of the lineup is to do what they did. Take him out of uniform.”

Shannon retires at the end of the season, taking a position in the Cardinals’ front office. Soon he finds his second calling, behind a microphone. Even though he doesn’t know how to keep score at the time, he joins the legendary Jack Buck in the KMOX broadcast booth. The guy with the no-bones-about-it baritone soon gains a following among Cardinals’ fans. He isn’t especially smooth behind the mike—one of his best malaprops comes after St. Louis catcher Ted Simmons homers against the Dodgers. “That’s the kinda pitch that’s bread on Simmons’ butter,” Shannon tells listeners.

Shannon’s misadventures aren’t limited to calling games, either. He loses and finds his 1964 World Series ring an amazing four different times. The precious bauble falls out a car window along Interstate 70, drops from a coat pocket while at the barbershop, and survives being eaten and passed by the family’s pet goat. “That ring has got nine lives,” Shannon says.

Roger Maris

Memories of the stoic, strong-armed outfielder invariably go back to his 1961 season with the New York Yankees when he hit sixty-one home runs, breaking Babe Ruth’s single-season record. But Maris never liked the bright lights, big city, and was much more at home in St. Louis.

“I was born surly,” he tells the
New York Times
, “and I’m going to stay that way. Everything in life is tough.”

After retiring in 1968, his career line reads: 275 home runs, 850 runs batted in, and an average of .260. Perhaps most impressively, he hit six home runs in seven World Series.

Once Maris hangs up his uniform, he avoids old-timers games and only begins to attend team reunions late in life. He moves to Gainesville, Florida, where he owns a beer distributorship. After a two-year battle with cancer, he dies in 1985. He is only fifty-one years old.

In 1998, slugger Mark McGwire, playing for the St. Louis Cardinals, breaks Maris’s single-season mark. Mike Shannon, who once roomed with Maris, calls the game on the radio. “And somewhere up there Roger is looking down at all this and cheering for McGwire, too,” Shannon tells the Cardinal nation.

Nellie Briles

In July 1967, Bob Gibson suffered a broken leg when struck by a line drive off the bat of the Pirates’ Roberto Clemente. Nellie Briles took his place in the St. Louis rotation and closed the season with nine consecutive victories. A year later, in 1968, Briles posted a 19–11 record, helping the Cardinals repeat as National League champions.

After 1968, Briles survives the first round of house cleaning in St. Louis. Still, he struggles, in large part due to the lower mound, and in 1970 his ERA soars to 6.24. Before the 1971 season, he’s sent along with infielder /pinch-hitter Vic Davalillo to the Pittsburgh Pirates for outfielder Matty Alou and journeyman pitcher George Brunet. Briles plays a key role in the Pirates’ title run that season, pitching a two-hit shutout in Game Five of the World Series against Earl Weaver’s Baltimore Orioles. Thanks in large part to Briles’s pitching gem, the Pirates become only the sixth team in baseball history to win the World Series after losing the first two games. A year later, Briles falls one hit shy of hurling a perfect game against the San Francisco Giants.

Off the field, Briles proves to be a better entertainer than Denny McLain or any of the other ballplayers to take a star turn after the 1968 season. An accomplished singer, Briles also does a great impersonation of President Richard Nixon. In 1974, with Hank Aaron on the verge of breaking Babe Ruth’s all-time home-run record, Briles releases a single for Capitol Records called “Hey Hank.” At three-plus minutes, the song’s chorus is a lament by big-league pitchers everywhere: “Hey Hank, I’ve got a reputation. And I’ve got a family.... So please don’t hit it off me.”

After fourteen years in the majors with five different teams, Briles returns to Pittsburgh. He’s in the broadcast booth in 1979 when the Pirates again defeat Baltimore in seven games to take the World Series. Soon he moves into the front office as the ballclub’s corporate vice president and head of their alumni association. Briles dies of a heart attack while playing golf in 2005. Pallbearers at his funeral include Manny Sanguillen, Jim Leyland, and Roberto Clemente’s son, Luis.

Steve Carlton

After the 1968 World Series, the Cardinals travel to Japan for a series of exhibition games. There left-hander Steve Carlton begins to experiment with a slider—a pitch that will soon become his signature offering. Thrown nearly as hard as his fastball, the slider breaks down and in, with great late action, against right-handed batters. In 1969, his first year with the pitch, Carlton’s ERA drops to 2.17. In addition, he strikes out nineteen batters in a close loss to the New York Mets.

The left-hander wins twenty games for the first time in 1971 and holds out for a $5,000 raise. In response, the Cardinals’ front office trades him to Philadelphia for right-hander Rick Wise. With the Phillies, Carlton becomes only the sixth pitcher to win twenty games for a last-place ballclub, going a league-leading 27–10. That season includes a fifteen-game winning streak, eight shutouts, and thirty complete games. In addition, he wins pitching’s equivalent of the Triple Crown, leading the National League in victories, ERA, and strikeouts.