Glory in the Fall by Peter Golenbock

Author:Peter Golenbock
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Union Square Press
Published: 2010-10-05T00:00:00+00:00

In the seventh game Bob Gibson took the ball. There was a time, only recently past, when that would have surprised people, a black pitcher getting the call in a decisive seventh game of the World Series, for it had long been part of the myth of white America that blacks were not mentally as tough as whites and therefore could not be counted on in the clutch: It was the performances of such athletes as Gibson that destroyed that particularly scabrous fiction. In a way Gibson’s very presence on the mound in so big a game showed how much baseball had changed in its ethnic makeup in so short a time. Only fifteen years earlier, in the final regular-season American League game that would decide the pennant, neither team had a black player on its roster, and when the Yankees took the field, four of the nine players, DiMaggio, Rizzuto, Berra, and Raschi, were Italian-American. Now four of the nine Cardinal starters were black, and if Julian Javier had not been injured, the total would have been five black or Hispanic players. The only black starter for the Yankees was Ellie Howard. Now Gibson, starting the seventh game of the World Series for the Cardinals, was a long, long way from the moment seven years earlier, when he had been pitching for Columbus in the Sally League, a brief unhappy stint lasting only eight games, and someone had yelled out at him, “Alligator bait! Gibson, you’re nothing but alligator bait!” Alligator bait, he thought, what the hell is that? for he had no idea at all what it meant. Later he was told it was an old Deep South expression, and it recalled the good old days when the good old boys went into the swamps in search of alligators and tied a rope around a black man, or so they claimed, and threw him in the water as bait.

In the seventh game Bob Gibson was battling his own fatigue as well as the New York Yankees. [He had pitched Games 2 and 5.] He was determined not to give in to it. Most pitchers as tired as Gibson was on this day, with only two days’ rest, slowed down their rhythm so that they could rest between pitches. Not Gibson. If anything he sped up his pace so the Yankees would not know that he was tired. He did not want to show even the slightest hint of weakness, and so he set a blistering pace. Gibby was struggling, Tim McCarver, who was catching him, thought. He was sure that Gibson was more tired than he had been when he pitched against the Mets in the final game of the season. Then, McCarver had been able to see the fatigue in his face, but on this day he could see it even more clearly in Gibson’s pitches. Against the Mets his breaking ball had been a little flat, but now, in his third World Series start in a week, it was not only his breaking ball that was flat, it was his fastball as well.

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