Bob Gibson: king of hill

The Grim Reaper, as we know, is hardly a respecter of persons but there’s growing evidence that he’s a baseball fan, if not a sentimentalist. He might even have an autographed Mickey Mantle rookie card.

Deaths and plane crashes, it is said, come in threes, so a sense of trepidation was felt with the recent passings of Lou Brock and Tom Seaver. The call came Friday for Bob Gibson, and the timing was especially poignant.

This Oct. 2 marked the

52nd anniversary of Gibson’s

17- strikeout performance against the Detroit Tigers in Game One of the World Series. That one game summed up the Year of the Pitcher as well as any, Gibson breaking Sandy Koufax’s single-game World Series strikeout record. A baseball fan, especially if for the Cardinals, might not know his Social Security number but can tell you Gibson’s earned- run average that season: 1.12.

Gibson won a matchup that day against Denny McLain, the first 30-game winner in the major league since Dizzy Dean in

1934. Afterward, someone asked Gibson if he were surprised. With typical bluntness, he replied, “Nothing I do surprises me.”

Gibson won Game 4 in the same series, hitting a home run, but took the loss in Game 7 when paired against lefthander Mickey Lolich, the portly winner of games 2 and 5. A rare defensive miscue by Curt Flood, a center fielder anyone would want on his team back then if he couldn’t get Willie Mays, proved costly.

Gibson never made it back to the World Series but had done enough to rank with Reggie Jackson as Mr. October. He won games 5 and 7 in the last World Series (1964) that Mickey Mantle appeared. Gibson was pitching on memory in the finale, giving up two home runs late in the game, but held on to bring St. Louis its first Fall Classic since 1946 and its first of two in the decade.

Johnny Keane, the Cardinals’ manager (though not for long, soon to replace a fired Yogi Berra with the Yankees), was asked why he stuck so long with his best pitcher. “I had a commitment to his heart,” Keane said, an answer that seems out of place in an era of sabermetrics and pitch counts.

In St. Louis Keane replaced Solly Hemus, who had alienated his black players with a racial taunt against an opponent. The Cardinals came to lean heavily on black players ( Gibson; Brock; first baseman Bill White, future president of the National League) and won over a fan base that had been openly antagonistic toward Jackie Robinson when he broke the sport’s color barrier.

Gibson was invincible in the

1967 Series, a seven- game set against the Boston Red Sox that he allowed 14 hits in three complete- game victories. He tied records for earned runs (three) and hits allowed set by Christy Mathewson in 1905. Game 7 was against Jim Lonborg, who had thrown a one-hitter in Game 2 and whose manager, Dick Williams, spoke of “Lonborg and champagne.” enraging the Cardinals, before the AL Cy Young Award winner faced Gibson.

Gibson helped his cause with a home run and, with Brock stealing three bases to tie a seven-game Series record of seven thefts, the Cardinals won

7-2. The Red Sox of Carl Yazstremski, in the club’s first Series since 1946 (another Game 7 win for the Cardinals), were not done in so much by the Curse of the Bambino as a pitcher at peak form.

That was the year that Gibson took a shot off his right leg from Roberto Clemente in a July game against the Pirates. A profile in courage, Gibson faced three more batters before his right fibula bone snapped above the ankle. He was back for the pennant clincher, a 5-1 win on a September Monday in Philadelphia, spinning a three-hitter with four strikeouts.

Back when you could listen to Cardinal games on local ra

dio, Gibson said on the postgame show, “I just wanted to go nine innings.”

The greatest baseball player ever to come from Omaha, Neb., Gibson played briefly with the Harlem Globetrotters ( so did basketball’s Wilt Chamberlain). Unlike Chamberlain, whose passive nature undermined his greatness on court, Gibson would deck his own mother in the batter’s box. In 17 years, he went 251-174 with a 2.91 ERA and 3,117 strikeouts. A batter with two strikes on him was advised not to dig in against Gibson.

In one respect, he was like Chamberlain in that he changed the game. Major League Baseball lowered the pitcher’s mound in 1969 from 15 inches to 10 inches and reduced the height of the strike zone from the batter’s armpit to the jersey letters. Those are sometimes known as the “Gibson rules.”

I was fortunate to interview Gibson, one of my boyhood heroes, when he came to Hot Springs on a promotional visit in 2015. He was pinch-hitting that day for an ailing Lou Brock. The Cardinals won the previous night and we talked of their ongoing playoff series against the Cubs, from which Brock came in 1964 in that infamous (to Chicago fans) deal for pitcher Ernie Broglio.

On that day, I admitted my longtime admiration of Gibson, who seemed surprised at the tribute. I remembered asking a boyhood friend, who worked at the old KBHS radio station, to stick around after the AM affiliate signed off (at local sunset) and the FM band took over. The Cardinals were playing the Pirates and Gibson had a no-hitter going. My friend’s car lacked a radio, so I implored him to stick around after his shift was over to see if Gibson could finish the gem. My friend, bless his heart, and Gibson both came through.

Pancreatic cancer, an especially virulent form of the disease, finally knocked Gibson out of the box, age 84. Cardinal fans took it especially hard, coming on top of a season- ending shutout loss to the Padres. Someone looked it up that on the same date in 1968, with the Beatles’ “Hey Jude” topping the charts, the pitcher they called “Hoot” had his greatest game. It was as if Gibson (or the Grim Reaper) had chosen time and place.