October 1964 by David Halberstam

Author:David Halberstam
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
ISBN: 9781453288917
Publisher: Open Road Media
Published: 2012-12-18T08:00:00+00:00

15

THE CARDINALS WERE A troubled team at the All-Star break. The addition of Lou Brock had added a badly needed spark and given them a new dimension of speed, but as a club they still were faltering. They were one game under .500 and ten games behind Philadelphia. At the beginning of the season the Cardinal players had felt that they could beat the Phillies in head-to-head competition, and that they were a better team. Yet here were the Phillies doing everything right, with Johnny Callison making a bid to become the National League’s Most Valuable Player and a young player named Richie Allen looking like he might be the Rookie of the Year. The Phillies were looking harder and harder to catch. For St. Louis it was turning into a season of disappointment: the Cards would go on a small streak of three or four wins, and then they would slip back and match it with a comparable losing streak. The Cardinals decided they had to make their move at the All-Star break. They had started the season needing to fill two positions in the outfield. Curt Flood and Lou Brock were set, but they were still looking for an everyday right fielder. They were still, Bing Devine thought, incomplete as a team; both their power hitters were infielders, and they were falling short in getting sufficient power from the usual source—the outfielders. They were using something of a patchwork combination in right, so Devine decided to call up a young outfielder named Mike Shannon. He was twenty-four, a big, strong local boy who signed with the Cardinals in 1958 after playing quarterback with the University of Missouri freshman football team. Football was his game of preference, and he was probably better suited to it physically than he was to baseball, but baseball not only offered more money, more important, it offered its money up front—in his case, a fifty-thousand dollar signing bonus. Because he was a local boy, the Cardinals had watched him grow up, and they took him into Busch Stadium for a tryout. It was a day on which Shannon, who was built more like a tight end than a quarterback, simply hammered the ball. Devine had asked Hutchinson what he thought, and Hutch had said, “Lock the goddamn door and don’t let him out until we sign him.” The Cardinals, Shannon thought, were very good to him; they moved him up quickly, letting him skip a classification every year. In 1963 he went to spring training with the big-league club, one of several players trying to crack the outfield. He showed up only to find George Altman’s name written in on the board for the right-field job. He immediately went in to see Johnny Keane. “Hey,” he said, “I hit .300 in the minors and I may be the best defensive outfielder you have, and I’m not getting a chance here.” It was more than a little audacious, he later decided, but Keane was not put out.

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