October 1964 Read Online Free Page B

It was no surprise that as the Yankee players arrived for their first workout that spring, there was a cartoon on the New York Daily News sports page entitled, “A Few Words Before the Season,” which showed a grinning Berra in baseball uniform with a tiny cartoonist armed with pen and sketchbook standing on his arm and saying, “A cartoonist’s dream! With that mug of yours I hope y’ stick aroun’ forever.” As a player, Yogi had been surprisingly quick and nimble in a body that did not look particularly athletic, and he was a very dangerous late-inning hitter. “A rather strange fellow of very remarkable abilities,” Stengel once said of him. His new assignment was going to be difficult: he was replacing a popular manager who was still close to the players and who was now his boss. Moreover, he was going to be managing his former teammates, who respected him as a player but who had frequently joked about him, and who thought him, among other things, uncommonly close with a dollar. Yogi was not a man who by his very presence inspired the respect of his teammates, as Mantle, Ford, and even Elston Howard, the catcher, did (though it was too early for anyone in baseball to think of a black man like Howard as a manager). When his friend and teammate Mickey Mantle was asked how the team would do now that Berra had replaced Houk, Mantle answered, “I think we can win in spite of it.”
    Berra was aware of the reservations of his teammates, and he was determined to get off to a good start with them. Before his first team meeting he stopped by to see Bobby Richardson, the veteran second baseman, in order to give a dry run of his first speech to the team as its new manager. “Okay,” he was going to say, “this is a new season. We’ll put 1963 behind us. We’re going to have new rules: no swimming, no tennis, no golf, no fishing.” Then he would pause and say, “I’m kidding. We’ll play hard, we’ll play together, we’ll be relaxed, and we’ll win.” Richardson thought it a fine way to start the season, particularly for a manager addressing former teammates. But during the actual speech, when he got to the list of fake new rules, Mantle said very loudly, “I quit!” and the speech had been ruined. It was not a good start.

2
    T HAT 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