Cards legend Gibson dies
Hall of Fame righthander was 84
Throughput his remarkable 17-year career as the greatest pitcher in St. Louis Cardinals history, there was no foe Bob Gibson couldn’t intimidate, no opponent he couldn’t beat when he put his mind to it. That’s why Friday, it came as such a surprise to the 84-year old Hall-of-Fame righthander’s many friends, teammates and baseball rivals that he lost his battle with pancreatic cancer.
“If anyone can beat this, it’s Gibby,” was the universal response when news of Gibson’s grim diagnosis was first revealed, July 14. Or as his longtime Cardinals’ batterymate, Tim McCarver, put it: “I wouldn’t bet against that sucker and I don’t think many people will either.”
From the beginning of his life, growing up in Omaha, Neb. — which he called “the ghetto” in one of his autobiographies — he was once bit by a rat in his ear and later suffered from rickets (which made his long legs a target for mishaps in his athletic careers), asthma, pneumonia and a heart murmur, it would have been foolhardy to bet against Bob Gibson, who overcame all of that. He was first a standout basketball player and then the first black athlete at Creighton University in Omaha. He played one year with the Harlem Globetrotters before becoming a five-time 20-game winner, National League Most Valuable Player and two-time Cy Young Award winner, all with the Cardinals, from 195975.
But in looking back now, considering his reputation, of all of Gibson’s stats — the 3,117 strikeouts (which were second all-time to only Walter Johnson at the time of his retirement), the 251 wins, the 2.91 career ERA — the most eye-opening was his lifetime 102 hit batters. That’s 105 fewer than the all-time record-holder in that dubious category, somebody named Gus Weyhing who pitched in the 1800’s stone age, and 50 fewer than notorious head hunters, Don Drysdale, Roger Clemens and Jim Bunning.
Because according to the Gibson legend, there was nary a batter he didn’t love to intimidate with a high hard one.
When Tommie Agee came over to the Mets from the White Sox in 1968, the first pitcher he faced in spring training was Gibson, who promptly beaned him and allegedly yelled: “Welcome the National League!” Agee had to be hospitalized and after an early-season 0for-34 slump, went on to have the worst year of his career.
“Bob was just downright mean,” said Pat Corrales, who was both a teammate and opponent of Gibson.
Bill White, who was Gibson’s best friend and longtime Cardinal teammate, loved relating the story of the first time he faced Gibson after being traded to the Phillies in 1966: “Before the game, Bob warned me that he wasn’t gonna let me dive in on him and pull the ball. I did it anyway and the next time up, he drilled me right on the elbow and screamed: “I warned you, you sonofabitch!”
In all, Gibson pitched 255 complete games, including 13 shutouts in his phenomenal first Cy Young season, 1968, in which he was also voted National League MVP after having posted the third lowest ERA (1.12) in modern baseball history and at one point stringing together 47 2/3 consecutive scoreless innings. In 18 of his starts in ’68, the Cardinals scored two or fewer runs and two of his nine losses were by 1-0. Making the feats of his ’68 season even more amazing was his revelation to St. Louis Post-Dispatch baseball writer Rick Hummel in January 2018 that the acid indigestion he felt all season, in retrospect, may have been the result of a heart attack he’d unknowingly suffered at some point.
He was just as durable and unyielding in the postseason. In nine starts — all complete games — across three World Series, he was 7-2 with a 1.89 ERA. In the first game of ’68 World Series against the Tigers, he struck out a record (since-broken) 17 batters. So it was no wonder pitchers like him and Tom Seaver would sit around at the Hall of Fame in later years expressing their disgust at what analytics has done to the current state of starting pitching where complete games have all but vanished.
For if there was one thing Gibson hated even more than opposing hitters, it was a visit to the mound by his manager or his catcher. One time, when McCarver came out to the mound to discuss how to approach a certain batter, Gibson growled at him: “What the (bleep) are you doing out here? The only thing you know about pitching is that you can’t hit it.”
No doubt a lot of Gibson’s anger stemmed from the prejudice he was subjected to in his youth. At Creighton, despite his superior talent in baseball and basketball, he was not allowed to room with his teammates or eat in the same restaurants on the road. It was more of the same with the Cardinals, who trained in segregated St. Petersburg in the ’50s and ’60s where there were still “whites only” public bathrooms and drinking fountains and the black players had to stay in separate hotels. He was convinced Solly Hemus, his first manager with the Cardinals in 1959, was a racist “who tried to ruin my career” by pitching him sparingly.
In the end, it was not Gibson’s arm that forced his retirement in 1975 but rather his knee, on which he underwent surgery the year before to remove much of the cartilage, leaving him hobbled. “I’m frustrated,” he said. “Some guys have 3-4 knee surgeries and come back. I’ve had two broken legs and never had this kind of trouble recovering.”
As intimidating a presence as Gibson was to opposing batters, he was even more so to sportswriters, who approached him with trepidation. In 1981, the year of his Hall of Fame induction as the 11th player elected on the first ballot (after the first class in 1936) Joe Torre, his longtime friend and former Cardinal teammate who was now managing the Mets, coaxed him out of retirement and hired him to be what he termed, “my attitude coach.” Dan Castellano, the Mets beat writer for the Newark Star-Ledger,
remembered his first encounter with Gibson.
“Joe brought me over and introduced me to Gibby,” Castellano related. “I put out my hand and it just hung there for at least 20 seconds as Gibby glared at me, saying nothing, before he finally shook it.”
“That was Bob,” Torre told Roger Angell of the New Yorker in 1980. “He alienated a lot of people — most of all the press, who didn't know what to make of him. He had this great confidence in himself: ‘Take me or leave me.'”
In time, those of us Gibson did allow to get to know him came to understand exactly who he was: A principled, uncompromising, obdurate individualist who also just happened to be one of the fiercest competitors and greatest pitchers baseball has ever known.