October 1964 Read online

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  THAT SPRING BING DEVINE knew his job was on the line. He had been general manager of the Cardinals since 1957, but he had not yet produced a pennant winner, and Cardinals owner Gussie Busch was hardly the most patient of men. Busch was the Budweiser tycoon, accustomed to having his every whim fulfilled. Since he was immensely successful in the beer business, he assumed that he would be equally successful in the world of baseball, about which he knew almost nothing. Busch was an extroverted, zestful man, “a booze-and-broads” kind of guy in the words of Harry Caray, the team’s announcer, who by his own word was also a booze-and-broads guy and a close pal of Busch’s until he got too close. Busch was a generous man, albeit generous on his own terms. He had to win at everything, most notably at card games. He did not like to be alone, and he tended to be followed by an entourage of cronies. Being truly claustrophobic, he did not like to fly on airplanes, so he traveled either in a massive custom-built and custom-outfitted bus or in his own luxuriously outfitted railroad car. On either of these vehicles there were likely to be a lot of drinking, cards, and attractive young women.

  It was the rare Busch crony who did not believe in his heart that he was a baseball expert. Therefore, being a baseball manager or a general manager for Gussie Busch was a high-risk occupation. To make matters worse, the tycoon thought himself a man of the people and was prepared to listen to this endless parade of self-styled baseball experts he ran into every day. He was also readily accessible to local reporters, often, it turned out, after he already had a head start drinking either his own product or that of other alcohol manufacturers. If the team went on a losing streak, as it often did, and if a reporter reached Busch at home to ask if he was happy with the way the team was going, he was likely to say no, he goddamn well was not happy. That had happened when Eddie Stanky was managing and the team was on an eight-game losing streak. When the words were in print the next day, it was clear that time was running out for Stanky. Every day of August Busch’s life, Bing Devine thought ruefully years later, there had to be any number of people telling him, “Hey, Gussie, you made a winner out of Bud, how come you can’t make a winner out of the Cards?”

  At the tail end of the 1963 season, the Cardinals had launched a furious if belated drive for the pennant, winning nineteen of twenty games, and that had whetted everyone’s appetite for what was going to happen in 1964. Whether the 1964 team was as good as it had been in that miraculous, almost flawless three-week stretch was by no means a certainty. Devine had spent his entire life in the Cardinal organization, apprenticing from the bottom up, and there was no job so insignificant that he had not performed it. Back in the thirties, when Branch Rickey ran the organization, there were some thirty teams in the farm system, and Bing Devine made sixty-five dollars a month for the most menial of tasks. He began every day by collecting the telegrams from all the general managers of the different Cardinal farm clubs reporting what their team had done the previous day. Then Devine went to the various blackboards that listed each league and each Cardinal team, erased the old standings, and wrote in the new ones. He was therefore an expert on how a seemingly unbeatable team could unravel almost overnight based on an injury or two, he knew how two star players could have unexpectedly bad seasons at the same time and cripple a team, and he knew how the combination of these—an injury and an individual bad season—could end a team’s chance as a pennant contender.

  Devine was well aware that Busch was not a baseball man, but a sportsman, accustomed to winning. His explosive temper was fueled not merely by a fondness for his own product (which was never beer, but always a Bud; there was a fine at Gussie Busch’s ongoing card game for anyone who asked for a beer, not a Bud), but even more so for what he called “silver bullets”—very, very dry martinis. In those days, a sportsman meant a rich man with a passion for hunting, fishing, and horse racing, a man who would shoot at the best lodges in the nation and fish distant waters for giant billfish, but who rarely knew about baseball, which was essentially a blue-collar sport. As a Budweiser executive, Busch was an unqualified success. His knowledge of the beer business was exceptional, and he had brought Budweiser to a position of dominance in the industry after World War II. But knowledge and expertise in one field did not travel lightly to another, as he had found after trying to purchase his first black player, Tom Alston, from the minor leagues.

  Busch was irate when he found out that instead of being twenty-three years old, as he had been told, Alston was actually twenty-five. Busch was accustomed to buying machinery rather than human beings, and thereafter depreciating his machinery according to the wear on it. Since the average baseball player’s career was ten years, as Busch had been told, and since Alston was two years older than had been claimed, then roughly 20 percent of his career was clearly gone, so Busch demanded twenty thousand dollars back on the price. That he did not get it was a sign of how difficult doing business was going to be with a rather worn-down baseball franchise. On another occasion he pushed for the signing of the son of a well-known former player named Dixie Walker. When his scouts and player-personnel people dissented, saying that they did not consider the younger Walker major-league potential, Busch became annoyed. He did not know baseball, he said, but he knew horses, and in the world of horses, you always went with the bloodlines and the gene pool—why not in baseball as well?

  The Cardinals’ previous owner, Sam Breadon, had come to baseball after owning an auto dealership in St. Louis, during the years when Branch Rickey was the general manager. Breadon was, if anything, cheaper than Rickey, a legendary skinflint: in 1942, when the young Musial had come in third in the National League batting race in his first big season, Breadon offered him the magnificent raise of $1,000 for his good work. With Rickey gone to Brooklyn as general manager, the Cardinals still managed to win regularly throughout the forties. But, getting older and fighting cancer, Breadon began in the mid-forties to sell or trade many of the team’s better ballplayers. There was a ceiling on what a Cardinal ballplayer could make in those days, and it was $13,500. Only Marty Marion, as good a salesman as he was a shortstop, it was said, had been able to breach the 13.5 ceiling; he received $15,000 because he was a favorite of management and because, in 1944, he was also the Most Valuable Player in the National League. Generally, when a player reached $13,500, it was as good as buying a train ticket out of St. Louis. At one point, angered by the demands of the Cooper brothers for salaries as large as Marion’s, Breadon essentially sold both of them off, getting $60,000 plus another ballplayer for Mort Cooper in 1945 from the Boston Braves, and, a few months later, selling Walker Cooper to the Giants for $175,000, then a record price. Breadon also allowed Branch Rickey’s great farm system, which in the thirties and forties had fed so many great players into the team, to atrophy. The last hurrah for the old Cardinals came in 1949 when they dueled the Dodgers in a momentous pennant race. Up two games with only five games to play, they blew that lead at the end. On the train back to St. Louis late that season, Bob Broeg of the Post-Dispatch asked Eddie Dyer, the Cardinals’ manager, when he thought the Cardinals might challenge for the pennant again. Dyer said, “Funny, Bob, I was just asking my wife the same thing.” Then Dyer pondered the question for a moment. “Not for a long time,” he said, for the farm system was gone and Branch Rickey, who had built it up, was gone, to archenemy Brooklyn, and there were not that many good young players coming up.

  The era of the Cooper brothers, Whitey Kurowski, Terry Moore, and Howie Pollet was over. Soon only Musial and Red Schoendienst remained from the glory years. After the 1949 season Breadon sold the team to new owners, headed by a man named Fred Saigh. Saigh’s role as a principal Cardinal owner was a cameo, as he was soon sentenced to a federal penitentiary for income-tax evasion. He was ordered to wind up his affairs before May 1953, which meant, among other things, getting rid of the Cardinals. Saigh wanted to sell the team locally, but, surprisingly, not a lot of buyers were interested. Saigh’s main act of civic duty came when he sold it
to The Brewery for $3.75 million, or an estimated half a million dollars less than he could have gotten from buyers in Milwaukee. That did not mean that Saigh came out of the deal badly, for as part of the transaction, according to Bob Broeg, he got an estimated $600,000 worth of Anheuser-Busch stock, which some forty years later, Broeg estimated, was worth about $60 million. But Gussie Busch, it turned out, had bought a name, a logo, and little else. The Cardinals did not even have their own ball park, playing in rickety old Sportsman’s Park, which belonged to the lowly Browns.

  The first lesson Gussie Busch learned was a painful one: he could not buy success overnight in baseball. What worked in the world of beer—hiring, if need be, the best men available—did not work in baseball. Great players were not for sale, no matter what the price. In his first season Busch asked Eddie Stanky, his manager, what it would take to create a championship team. Stanky answered that if he got a first baseman and a third baseman he would have a contending team. “Which would you rather have,” Busch asked, “a first baseman or a third baseman?” Stanky thought about it for a bit. “A first baseman,” he answered. Did Stanky have anyone in mind? Busch asked. “Sure,” he answered, “and I think he’ll play for me, Gil Hodges.” Hodges, he explained, had just come off a bad World Series in Brooklyn and might want a change of venue. “No problem,” said Busch. “Let’s go and get Hodges.” So, quite excited, Gussie Busch went the next day to visit with Walter O’Malley, in order to buy Gil Hodges. He came back in shock. What happened, Gussie? aides asked him. “O’Malley wanted six hundred thousand dollars for Hodges, and then he said even if I had the money he wouldn’t sell him anyway because he was one of the most popular players on the Dodgers and he’d be run out of Brooklyn if he sold him. What kind of business is this anyway,” he asked rather plaintively, “where they want six hundred thousand dollars for one player and even if you have the money they won’t sell him?” A few years later he made another try at buying a player, this time Ernie Banks, the talented shortstop of the Cubs. Busch authorized Frank Lane, then his general manager, to go as high as $500,000 for him. But Lane returned empty-handed. “How high did you go?” Busch asked. “Five hundred thousand,” answered Lane. “And you couldn’t buy him?” asked an incredulous Busch. “Mr. Busch, I was politely reminded that Mr. Wrigley needs half a million just about as much as you do,” Lane said. That was one trouble with being a sportsman: there were all those other sportsmen to deal with, and they were every bit as rich. Clearly, building a team was going to take time and cost a great deal of money. Neither spending nor waiting came easily for Busch, and one of his favorite retorts to the St. Louis writers when they told him what he ought to do, which trades he might make, or which deals he could pull off to strengthen the farm system was to say, “Pal, you’re really good at spending other people’s money.”

  A decade after Busch purchased the team, Bing Devine still had his job as general manager cut out for him: to rebuild the farm system on a smaller scale in a new and more expensive era while trying to jump-start the existing club. Busch was still looking for his first pennant. He had bought the franchise in part because he was a good citizen of St. Louis, and there was talk until the last minute when he entered the bidding that the team might leave St. Louis and relocate in Milwaukee, a rival midwestern city and, worse, a rival center of beer brewing. If Gussie Busch did not entirely understand baseball, he did understand that baseball could help sell beer. He presided over Budweiser at the precise moment of dramatic change in the industry brought about by modern communications, most notably televised advertising. Local breweries were on the way out, not because their beer was not as good as that of the giants but because they could not compete with them in terms of advertising dollars spent on national television. As with many aspects of American life during that postwar era, the big companies became bigger and richer, with new, handsome regional satellite plants, and the smaller ones withered away. Beer, more than most products, lent itself to national advertising, and it was part of Busch’s genius that as his company expanded relentlessly in the fifties, he knew enough to increase the percentage of the corporate budget reserved for advertising—this was the means with which he could crush the competition. Busch realized that baseball was an effective and relatively inexpensive advertising vehicle for beer, and it was not entirely by accident that Bud’s resurgence as the nation’s best-selling beer coincided with The Brewery’s purchase of the Cardinals in 1953. (From 1949 to 1955, Schlitz was the best-selling beer in the nation, but in 1955 Budweiser soared past Schlitz.)

  Indeed, when Busch bought the Cardinals, he also bought Sportsman’s Park, dilapidated though it was, and refurbished it. Ever the beer salesman, he tried to call his new ball park Budweiser Park, but was talked out of it by aides who said that you could not name a park after a beer. Phil Wrigley, they pointed out, had not named his stadium Spearmint Park after his chewing gum. Forced to choose between ego and advertising, Busch conceded: in Chicago it was Wrigley Field, and in St. Louis it would be Busch Stadium, not Budweiser Park.

  Baseball turned out to have an added, unexpected advantage for Gussie Busch: owning a baseball team made him a celebrity. Before, as a beer magnate, his face might have been known to a fair number of people in St. Louis and to avid readers of Fortune magazine. When he called a press conference to announce the opening of a new regional multimillion-dollar brewery, though, there was little media interest. But now, as the owner of a major sports franchise, everything that Busch said was news. People coveted his friendship, and he loved it.

  He seemed to have little patience for watching his own team play, and his interest quickly waned during the games. In fact, his closest friends doubted that he had followed baseball at all before he bought the Cardinals. To manage his team he tended to hire small, feisty overachievers, men who were considered strict disciplinarians. Two of his first three managers, Eddie Stanky, whom he liked, and Solly Hemus were cut from that cloth. Their very manner seemed to promise the owner that they would keep his young athletes in line; after all, the players were being paid to play a game, and might therefore easily relax and exploit the essentially benign nature of the owner-sportsman.

  Stanky, Hemus, and Fred Hutchinson, who served a tour as manager in the fifties, had either grown up in a tougher, harsher America or had apprenticed under men who had. They were not always supple in dealing with younger men who often had greater natural gifts than those once possessed by their managers. The Depression was a thing of the past, the country was dramatically more affluent man it had been, and such gifted athletes as Ray Sadecki, Tim McCarver, and Mel Stottlemyre often had other options in life, whether it was college or jobs in other fields. The nature of authority was slowly beginning to change. As for the black players, treating them with a harsh authoritarian hand had even more ominous implications and was likely to produce even less positive results, as Solly Hemus’s handling of Bob Gibson and other players would soon show. Young baseball players, white or black, could no longer be treated as if they were recruits at a marine drill camp.

  In the past, a manager intimidated his players. Stanky was the prototype of that breed, a tough little man whose nickname was “The Brat.” As a player and a manager, he was always engaged in some kind of confrontation. Stanky knew a great deal about baseball and later turned out to be an exceptional scout and a valuable instructor within the Cardinal organization, but he was having trouble adjusting to a changing America. The time had come when he began to look at altogether too many young men and was unable to see a reflection of himself. During one game he told a young player named Tom Burgess who had hit .346 in the International League the year before, “Get out of here and go down to the bullpen. I’m sick of looking at you.” Stanley’s technique had worked with limited success when he first began to manage the club. But the more talented and sophisticated his ballplayers became the less effective the technique. Perhaps the moment that signaled the end of his effectiveness came one day at a team meeting when the manager
was chewing out his players. There was nothing new in that, but while the tirade was going on, Stu Miller, one of the Cardinal pitchers, sat in the back reading The Sporting News. Stanky continued to lecture all the while, becoming angrier and angrier. Finally he yelled at his pitcher, “Miller, that’ll cost you a hundred dollars!” Miller never looked up. He simply turned to Butch Yatkeman, the clubhouse attendant, and said, “Butch, can you go down to my locker and get a hundred dollars out of my wallet and give it to him?”

  Hemus, the third of Busch’s managers, saw himself as a Stanky disciple. Perhaps nothing reflected Hemus’s attitude better than his way of rewarding a player who had had an unusually good day. He would reach into his pocket and give the player one hundred dollars in cash and tell him to take another player to dinner. That was what Hemus had seen managers do when he was coming up; it was the way big-timers operated. Hemus had got the job in part, the Cardinal players believed, by writing Busch a fawning letter when he himself had been traded from the Cardinals in 1956; the letter, many of the players felt, went far beyond the call of duty, particularly as it was addressed to an owner whose team had just sent him to another team. The contrast between his reverence for his superiors and the roughness with which he treated the players who worked for him did not increase his popularity with the players. Like Stanky, he was a prisoner of his own baseball experience, and he seemed to lack the capacity to treat different players in different ways. His blunt manner and words especially bothered some of the black players, who considered him racist.

  In 1956, after some twenty years in the Cardinal organization and six years as general manager of its Triple A team in Rochester, Bing Devine was brought back to St. Louis, having been told that he was now going to be named general manager of the big-league club. But a man named Taylor Spink, editor of The Sporting News, a baseball weekly published in St. Louis, suggested to the owner that he hire Frank Lane, a professional baseball man known for his propensity to trade players. Egocentric, profane, and voluble, Lane was far better known than Devine at the time, and Busch hired him. Unfortunately, Lane was a man who traded not so much to build a better team, but almost out of psychological need, an irresistible impulse driving him to move players around. There was no particular grand scheme to Lane’s trades, and it appeared likely that given the chance, he would continue to trade as an end in itself, thereby inevitably destabilizing his own team. The very act of trading seemed to feed his ego; a general manager who traded all the time became better known than all but the most famous of his players. Frank Lane’s incessant trading in the end made Frank Lane the center of media attention rather than his players. In that sense he was not unlike George Steinbrenner, the owner of the Yankees who went about furiously hiring and firing managers some thirty years later—thereby guaranteeing himself endless coverage on the back pages of New York’s tabloid press.