October 1964 – David Halberstam, 1994 ★★★½

How Success Got Untrenched

Some World Series mark time; others define them. The 1964 World Series belongs in the latter category; David Halberstam explains why.

Players were still regarded as property then; their careers dictated by greedy, sometimes capricious owners. Television amplified and monetized their success. Pitchers were becoming more dominant as the strike zone was expanded and raised.

Most importantly, the racial divide of the game was changing, if slowly. Nearly 20 years after Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, there were still many whites who didn’t care for blacks, including some American League club owners.

This ignorance was costing them plenty by 1964.

Halberstam writes: In fact, most astute baseball observers believed now that the entire American League was inferior to the National League because it had lagged behind in signing black players.

October 1964 is either a book about race told through the prism of baseball, or a book about baseball told through the prism of race. I can’t decide; either way, it works.

Halberstam had established his formula for writing about a transformative baseball season in his earlier Summer Of ‘49: Spotlight two important teams as they set about contending for a title, focus each chapter on an individual player, and work in some social themes.

1964 was a transitional year in baseball, as it was in pop music and American politics. The book begins with a quote from Senator George Romney about the auto industry, “There is nothing more vulnerable than entrenched success.” Romney was referring to General Motors in the 1960s, but the sentiment applied just as well to baseball’s dominant franchise, the New York Yankees.

The New York Yankees in 1964. More than with most teams at the time, Halberstam writes there was a strong divide between veterans and rookies, with the former feeling the latter lacked what was called "the Yankee way." Image from https://lelands.com/bids/1964-new-york-yankees-vintage-team-signed-photo.

It’s hard to blame the Yankees for being arrogant. In 1962 they had won their tenth World Series in just 16 years; they made the next two World Series as well.

“Listen, Steve, the good thing about the Yankees is that you don’t just get a ring for yourself,” Halberstam quotes Yankee Clete Boyer telling teammate Steve Hamilton. “You get yours the first year, then you get one the next year for your wife, and the year after that for your oldest kid, and after that for your other kids.”

At the center of the Yankees’ most recent success was centerfielder Mickey Mantle. He was the Mike Trout of his day, except he played in a city and time where that sort of thing mattered a lot. He hit massive home runs, outran nearly everyone, and galvanized his teammates to play their best. But even his success contained a kernel of failure.

Mickey Mantle watches one go. "He is the only baseball player I know who is a bigger hero to his teammates than he is to the fans," Clete Boyer once said. Image from http://www.espn.com/mlb/photos/gallery/_/id/17018662/image/7/version/mobile/all-american-league-all-star-team

For one thing, Mantle played on two bad knees that were grinding down fast. For another, his outsized abilities had made his team complacent.

Halberstam notes:

Ironically, Mantle’s greatness increased the arrogance of the front office, for his exceptional speed and power convinced the Yankees that they did not need to change. He helped bring them an additional decade of dominance, and in so doing, he helped create the attitude among their executives that would lead to their eventual decline.

A key ingredient the Yankees were missing were African-Americans. It was well-known, Halberstam states, that Yankee management didn’t regard black players as worthy of pinstripes. In the 1950s, general manager George Weiss had seen them as unpalatable to the Yanks’ middle-class fanbase, and not very good on the field or in the clutch.

Over on the National League, it was a different story. “How can it be the great American game if blacks can’t play?” asked Gussie Busch, the Cardinals owner, as pigheaded as they came on many things according to Halberstam, but also an astute businessman who wanted to be on the right side of this question when he bought the team in 1953.

Gussie Busch takes in a game with third wife (of four) Trudy. Halberstam writes he was cantankerous, stubborn to a fault, too often heeded meddlesome friends, but also understood early how profitable a marriage beer and baseball made. Image from https://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/gertrude-trudy-busch-third-wife-of-beer-baron-gussie-busch-jr-dies-at-89/article_43fea24f-0633-5006-b09e-1f28dcaf0b68.html.

Before Busch, the Cardinals resisted integration, but when they came around, they did so in a hurry. By mid-1964, trading for speedster Lou Brock gave them four key black players: First baseman Bill White, centerfielder Curt Flood, and pitcher Bob Gibson were the others.

Of all of them, Halberstam makes a case Gibson mattered the most. Always a hard thrower, Gibson by 1964 had contained his wildness on the mound, just as the greatest pitcher in the National League, the Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax, was beginning to wear down. Gibson was also a fierce competitor and a stone-cold intimidator, which gave his teammates a player to rally around like the Yankees had with Mantle.

Halberstam writes of Gibson: He was a man who lifted an entire team. His own standards were so high that the other players did not like to let him down, and they played harder when he pitched. In time this became true on the other days as well.

Bob Gibson on the mound. His wild motion was usually matched by pinpoint accuracy. Only batters knew not to dig in on Gibson, a notorious beanballer. Image from https://medium.com/joeblogs/39-bob-gibson-5a069e5e3b97. 

So passionate a competitor was Gibson that he wouldn’t talk to players on other teams: “He hated All-Star Games, where his sworn adversaries, the best hitters of the rival National League teams, cavorted as if they were not only his teammates but his friends,” Halberstam notes.

Halberstam devotes ample attention on other matters and people, including the power struggle in the Cardinal front office between General Manager Bing Devine and Busch advisor Branch Rickey; the young reporters called the “chipmunks” who challenged the established order of things; and the stories of how various journeymen made it to the World Series; but Gibson’s story is the book, basically.

If this was Ken Burns’ Baseball, the public-television documentary broadcast the same year as this book was published, racial lessons would come in the form of a dripping trowel. But Halberstam makes his points deftly, keeping his focus on Gibson as an athlete rather than equality pioneer. There is a lot of focus on the struggle for black recognition in what still was largely a game run by whites for whites, but it works because it feeds a sports-driven narrative about honing the right competitive edge, rather than shoehorning a civics lesson.

Curt Flood slides into third. The Cardinals' centerfielder was dependable on the field, on the bases, and at the plate in 1964. Five years later, his dispute over being traded set in motion events that ended baseball's reserve clause and introduced free agency. Image from https://www.ksdk.com/article/sports/campaign-aims-to-induct-curt-flood-into-hall-of-fame/63-e6f99871-61ed-4992-8504-a5f7dc831aa8

The Yankees get some attention in the book, too; just not as much. Halberstam didn’t talk to their manager in 1964, Yogi Berra, for reasons he doesn’t explain, nor to shortstop Tony Kubek, one of the Yankees’ most garrulous players (Kubek declined an interview about what he still considered too painful a season 30 years later). The Yankees made it to the post-season that year on sheer guts, with an outfield so badly bruised that when they walked off the field one day, Mantle joked: “All we need now is a flag and a drum.” Halberstam describes them as “patched together and carried by memories.”

The Cardinals, by contrast, zipped into the postseason, “the heat of the pennant race had come so quickly that there was no time to play under pressure,” Halberstam explains. No playoffs then; in 1964 only the top finisher in each ten-team league went on to the World Series.

Mickey Mantle (left) helps young Jim Bouton celebrate a win in the clubhouse. According to Halberstam, some older players resented Bouton's willingness to talk with reporters. Image from http://static.espn.go.com/mlb/ballfour/neyer.html

Halberstam doesn’t do a great job explaining the team’s rise; one week they are struggling so badly Busch fires Bing Devine, the next they are soaring into first place behind the speed of Brock, the fire of Gibson, and the cool leadership of manager Johnny Keane, who Halberstam notes was pretty sore about what happened to his friend Devine and well aware he could well be next to go:

He was not a man who smiled very much, and he seldom laughed. There was also a certain rigidity to him. Some of the young white players thought he loved the rules too much. By contrast, the young black players thought that if there were too many rules, at least they were enforced fairly.

Halberstam’s renown as a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist, and the fact the 1964 World Series was still recent history, meant most of the main players on both teams and even some coaches were not only still alive but willing to talk to him. Halberstam made the most of this, filling out his canvas with many side stories, some bitter, some funny, most quite interesting and revealing.

Halberstam’s coverage of the 1964 World Series itself is disappointingly brief. He spends a few pages on each game, but you don’t feel the same passion you get in the rest of his book.

The Cardinals celebrate winning Game 7 of the 1964 World Series at home. Built in 1902, Busch Stadium, formerly Sportsman's Park, remained the Cardinals' home until 1966. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/103934703878871867/.

The Yankees just don’t seem to belong somehow, which I think is a failing of Halberstam’s given they not only showed up for the World Series in 1964 but stretched it into seven games. Rookie pitcher Mel Stottlemyre (who tallied a win for the Yanks) and Jim Bouton (who won twice) do get some page time, but the emphasis is on the struggles of star players like Mantle, Whitey Ford, and Roger Maris.

“Life is filled with self-fulfilling prophecies, and, fittingly enough, the longer Maris played in New York, the less he liked it,” Halberstam writes. When he acknowledges Mantle hit three homers in the Series, he feels the need to harp on him being just a shell of the legend he had been. It’s not inaccurate, just annoying.

But the Cardinals were the winners of the Series, and Halberstam hits the right notes in explaining their success. They played smart, built a team around component parts, and challenged outmoded thinking on race and other matters.

“How do you create a winning team if you aren’t fortunate enough to have a superstar in the lineup every day?” Halberstam asks. The Cardinals got by with regular stars; in 1964 they were quite enough.