San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
CARDS PITCHING LEGEND CAUSED RULES CHANGE
Bob Gibson, the St. Louis Cardinals’ Hall of Fame right-hander who became one of baseball’s most dominating pitchers, winning 251 games in 17 seasons with an intimidating fastball and an attitude to match, died Friday in Omaha, Neb. He was 84.
The cause was pancreatic cancer, the Cardinals said. Gibson announced in July 2019 that he had the disease.
Through the summers of the 1960s and early ’70s, Gibson proved a relentless force, and he was at his best in the World Series.
He won both the National League’s Most Valuable Player Award and the Cy Young Award, as the league’s best pitcher, in 1968, when he won 22 games, struck out 268 batters, pitched 13 shutouts and posted an earned run average of 1.12, the lowest in more than 50 years (and a record that remains unmatched). The next year, even though MLB lowered the pitchers’ mounds to give batters a break, Gibson won 20 games and struck out 269.
He won at least 20 games five times and struck out 3,117 batters, relying on two kinds of fastballs and a slider that he threw at about threequarters speed. He threw 56 career shutouts and captured a second Cy Young Award in 1970. He was an eight-time All-star, won a Gold Glove award for fielding nine times and pitched a no-hitter against the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1971.
Pitching for three pennant-winning Cardinal teams, Gibson won seven World Series games in a row, losing only in his first and last Series starts. His physique was not especially imposing — he was 6-foot-1 and 190 pounds or so — but he holds the records for most strikeouts in a World Series game, 17, and in a single World Series, 35, both against the Detroit Tigers in 1968.
He was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981, his first year of eligibility.
Gibson disdained conversations with opposing players, even at All-star Games. He bristled at reporters’ questions he considered silly. And he was feared for his high, inside fastballs that set batters up for pitches on the outside corner.
“Bob wasn’t just unfriendly when he pitched,” Joe Torre, a Cardinals teammate who later hired Gibson as a coach when he managed the New York Mets, the Atlanta Braves and the Cardinals, told sports writer Roger
Kahn in an article for The New York Times shortly before Gibson’s induction into the Hall of Fame. “I’d say it was more like hateful.”
“My thing was winning,” Gibson said in his autobiography, “Stranger to the Game,” written with Lonnie Wheeler and published in 1994. “I didn’t see how being pleasant or amiable had anything to do with winning, so I wasn’t pleasant on the mound and I wasn’t amiable off it.”
“For my money, the most intimidating, arrogant pitcher ever to kick up dirt on a mound is Bob Gibson,” Tim Mccarver, the Cardinals’ catcher and a longtime broadcaster, recalled in his 1987 memoir, “Oh, Baby, I Love It!” (written with Ray Robinson).
“If you ever saw Gibson work,” Mccarver said, “you’d never forget his style: his cap pulled down low over his eyes, the ball gripped — almost mashed — behind his right hip, the eyes smoldering at each batter almost accusingly.”
Pack Robert Gibson was born Nov. 9, 1935, in Omaha, the youngest of seven children, and grew up in a housing project there. His father, Pack Gibson, died a few months before his birth; his mother, Victoria, worked in a laundry. His brother Josh, a graduate of Creighton University in Omaha, became his mentor and introduced him to recreational programs he oversaw. Bob Gibson
became an all-city basketball player in high school and played several positions on an American Legion baseball team that won a city title.
His favorite sport was basketball, and he became the first Black athlete to play basketball and baseball at Creighton. He averaged more than 20 points a game for his collegiate basketball career and pitched, caught and played several other positions for the baseball team.
After graduating from Creighton, Gibson signed with the Cardinals’ minor league organization in 1957.
He pitched in the American Association and South Atlantic League that year, played basketball for the Harlem Globetrotters in the offseason, then focused solely on baseball. He made his debut with the Cardinals in 1959 and began to emerge as a leading pitcher two years later under the tutelage of manager Johnny Keane, who had managed him in the minor leagues.