Sixty Feet, Six Inches: A Hall of Fame Pitcher & a Hall of Fame Hitter Talk About How the Game Is Played by Reggie Jackson; Lonnie Wheeler; Bob Gibson

Author:Reggie Jackson; Lonnie Wheeler; Bob Gibson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: Sports
ISBN: 0767931106
Publisher: Anchor
Published: 2010-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Bob Gibson

My Bob Welch was Mickey Lolich. That might sound a little strange, because it wasn’t like we went after each other, one-on-one, tooth and nail, from sixty feet, six inches. But we had a fantastic battle, and he beat me.

In 1968, after two World Series MVPs and seven straight World Series victories and a single-game World Series strikeout record (in the opener against the Tigers) and two World Series series strikeout records (I broke my own record from 1964 in the seventh game), and after we blew a three-to-one lead in games—in part, possibly, because my teammates felt deep down that we’d win Game Seven anyway since I’d be pitching it—I was beaten by a left-hander with a big gut and lots of guts.

I’m glad, at least, that it wasn’t Denny McLain. He won thirty-one games that year, while I was only winning twenty-two with my 1.12 ERA, and he was on all the TV shows and magazine covers—which was all fine with me until he said before the World Series that he didn’t want to just beat the Cardinals, he wanted to humiliate us. That helps explain my seventeen strikeouts against him while throwing a shutout in Game One.

The other thing that explains those strikeouts is that, even though it was my third World Series, the Tigers’ scouting report still said—apparently—that my game was my fastball. So I kept striking them out with sliders, as I usually did. I guess they thought they were fastballs. In the ninth, I got Al Kaline, Norm Cash, and Willie Horton, and the third strike to Horton was an inside slider that he claimed he never saw.

McLain was also my opponent in Game Four, which we won easily. But we all remembered that, during the season, when McLain was ripping off one victory after another, Roger Maris had told us that the guy we had to worry about in the World Series was not McLain but Lolich. Sure enough, Lolich had beaten us in Games Two and Five, and although it should have been McLain’s turn in Game Seven, the Detroit manager, Mayo Smith, went with the right guy.

I retired twenty of the first twenty-one batters in the seventh game, but we couldn’t break through against Lolich, even though he must have been physically exhausted. It was 0–0 until the seventh, when, with two outs, Cash and Horton singled and Jim Northrup hit a two-run triple to deep center field. That was enough for Lolich, who proved that pitching under pressure is as much about brains and attitude as anything else. Of course, he had pretty good hard stuff, too. The winner of that game would surely be the Series MVP, and he was the best man.

And don’t think that’s easy for me to say, even forty years later.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.