Another black mark in tough year
2020 is the worst year in American history. The world- wide pandemic with more than 209,000 dead from COVID- 19 in our country. Our president has the coronavirus. Social injustice. Racial unrest. Political turmoil …
Did you see the debate last week?
2020 also has been the worst sports year. It’s not just that the virus interrupted everything and still is a major threat to the NFL, college football and even MLB as it tries to get to its finish line. It’s the sports people we have lost this year, starting with Yankees World Series hero Don Larsen and former NBA commissioner David Stern on Jan. 1. Kobe Bryant was gone on Jan. 26, Don Shula on May 4, John Majors on June 3. Since Aug. 30, John Thompson, Tom Seaver, Lou Brock, Gale Sayers and Bob Gibson have passed, Hall of Famers all.
Gibson might have been the brightest star.
“I’ve always said Sandy Koufax is the greatest lefthanded pitcher of all time and Bob Gibson is the greatest right- hander,” Dick Groat was saying over the weekend from his Champion Lakes Golf Course after hearing of Gibson’s death Friday at 84 from pancreatic cancer.
Groat, the National League’s MVP with the Pirates in 1960 and one of the best athletes to come from Western Pennsylvania, played with Gibson with the St. Louis Cardinals from 1963- 65.
“He was everything you wanted in a pitcher and more,” Groat said. “He could do it all.”
Gibson was, first and foremost, an incredible athlete. He was good enough in basketball growing up in Omaha, Neb., that he got a scholarship from Creighton and then played one year with the Harlem Globetrotters. Groat wasn’t kidding when he said Gibson could do
it all. Gibson fielded his position spectacularly and won nine Gold Gloves. He was anything but an automatic out at the plate, twice hitting five home runs in a season.
Gibson’s otherworldly pitching statistics could fill an encyclopedia, but what he did in 1968 when he was the NL MVP and Cy Young Award winner almost defies belief. He went 22- 9 with a 1.12 earned run average and 13 shutouts. He pitched 28 complete games, including 24 in a row to end the regular season. He then struck out a World Series- record 17 Detroit Tigers in Game 1. He was so dominant — so virtually unhittable — that he changed the game with MLB lowering the mound from 15 to 10 inches before the 1969 season to give hitters a fighting chance.
“That’s one of the great baseball questions of all time: Who beat him nine times that year?” Steve Blass asked Sunday morning. “How did he ever lose?”
The Cardinals scored two or fewer runs in 18 of Gibson’s 34 starts in 1968. That’s how he lost nine times.
Blass pitched for the Pirates from 1964- 74 and watched much of Gibson’s career.
“His intensity. He was all business. There was absolutely no give in him,” Blass said. “He was down and dirty from the second the anthem ended …
“[ Former Cardinals catcher] Tim McCarver tells a great story about him. He said every time he tried to go to the mound to talk to Gibson, Gibson would shoo him back. ‘ The only thing you know about pitching is you can’t hit it,’ Gibson growled at him. I love that story.”
Blass watched two significant moments of Gibson’s career that happened against the Pirates.
In July 1967, Roberto Clemente smacked a line drive off Gibson’s right shin, breaking the bone. Gibson continued to pitch, walking Willie Stargell, getting Bill Mazeroski to pop up and walking Donn Clendenon. On the 3- 2 pitch to Clendenon, he collapsed on the mound, the bone snapping above his ankle.
“Only Gibson could do that,” Blass said. “There was absolutely no give in him.”
In August 1971, Gibson pitched his only no- hitter, beating the Pirates, 11- 0, at Three Rivers Stadium. The Pirates were really good that season. You might remember they went on to win the World Series.
“It was a typical Bob Gibson game,” Blass said. “The first seven or eight innings, it looked like it was almost effortless for him. He just went about his business. We always used to joke that he had the best spot in the rotation every year. The other team never scored any runs when he pitched.”
That night the Pirates didn’t get any hits.
“Did you know I had to hit Gibson one time with a pitch?” Blass asked, suddenly changing topics, fairly giggling.
Here is the background: Stargell hit a home run off Gibson. The next time he came up, Gibson, who was known for intimidating hitters, plunked him with a pitch in the ribs.
“So I’m pitching for us that night and I see [ Pirates manager Danny] Murtaugh looking down the dugout at me,” Blass said. “I just nodded at him. I knew what I had to do. Now, I’m a skinny kid, maybe about a buck- 70 soaking wet. Gibson is ripped, maybe 6- foot- 6, 225 pounds. I think it took me three pitches to do it, but I finally hit him in the thigh or [ backside]. I know Willie appreciated it. But when I hit him, I’m thinking, ‘ This could be the day that I die.’ But Gibson just dropped his bat and went to first base. That’s the way we did it back in those days.”
Gibson spent all 17 of his big- league seasons with the Cardinals and retired after the 1975 season. He was a first- ballot Hall of Fame inductee in 1981 and was named on 84% of the ballots.
That leads to another of baseball’s all- time great questions:
Who are the 64 people who didn’t vote for Gibson?
What were they thinking?