Perfect: Don Larsen's Miraculous World Series Game (52 page)

Some said that Gilliam’s self-sacrifice may have cost the team the pennant. “There must have been twenty times last season,” said one umpire in early 1963, “when Wills was on first that I saw Junior Gilliam lay off a pitch. They were pitching outside to Gilliam then, and he can hit an outside pitch as well as any man in baseball—especially with the shortstop covering second, which he always was with Wills.”

By 1964, time seemed to be catching up with Gilliam. He struggled at the plate and wound up with a .228 batting average, the lowest of his career. Despite the sagging numbers, the Dodgers valued his knowledge and the quiet manner in which he conveyed advice. The decision to make him a coach for the 1965 season (making him only the third black coach in the major leagues) was announced in September 1964, and Gilliam received well-deserved recognition on the last day of the season with a standing ovation from the fans and his teammates.

Little did they know that Gilliam would be activated early in the 1965 season to help his team win yet another World Championship. The accolades that followed his performance in that World Series did not affect the Dodgers’ decision for the 1966 season, and, once again, the Nashville native retired to become a Dodger coach. And once again, Alston changed his mind after the season started and reactivated Gilliam so that there would be someone who could be available in late innings to play third base or pinch-hit.

However understandable Alston’s decision may have seemed at the time, Gilliam could not achieve the same glory he had enjoyed in the 1965 season. He saw action in only eighty-eight games and plunged to a career low in batting average (.217). And so, while the Dodgers won the pennant again, Gilliam was disclosing to anyone who would listen that he was
really
going to retire and become a full-time coach in the following season. “I’ve had it,” the thirty-seven-year-old player told one sportswriter. “This time I mean it.”

And mean it he did. He became—and remained—the first-base coach for the entire season. And enjoyed it as well. “As a coach,” he explained to one sportswriter, “I feel I’m just as much a part of the game as the men on the field. And I get just as much of a kick out of seeing a player I’ve worked with get a hit or make a tough stop as I would doing it myself.”

He also had the time to pursue other interests at spring training or in Los Angeles’ mild climate. “He loved his golf,” said former teammate Clem Labine, who frequently played with him. And through it all, he appeared to be in good physical health. He did not smoke or drink and kept himself in shape through exercise. But there was one matter that escaped his disciplined approach to life: high blood pressure.

It was Friday, September 15, 1978. The Dodgers were on the verge of winning the divisional title that would eventually entitle them to face the Yankees in the World Series. Gilliam attended a meeting at a downtown Los Angeles hotel, and, after driving manager Tommy Lasorda to Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine, left to visit a friend before the evening game against the Milwaukee Braves. He never made it. He was stricken by a cerebral hemorrhage and was rushed to Daniel Freeman Memorial Hospital in nearby Inglewood. He spent seven hours in surgery, but the results were not good. The patient slipped into a coma. Hours became days, and the hospital reported that it was receiving an average of a telephone call every minute from people inquiring about his status.

Jim Gilliam never regained consciousness and died of cardiac arrest on October 8—only days before his fiftieth birthday.

 

Enos Slaughter returned to his farm in Roxboro in the fall of 1956 with a World Series ring—and a new wife. The relationship with Vickie had soured by early 1955. (A turning point occurred when Enos and Vickie became embroiled in an argument while driving to spring training and, as the car flew down the highway at sixty miles an hour, Vickie threw open the passenger door and spilled out—or, as Enos later said, “jumped” out). The alternative was Helen Spiker, a TWA stewardess whom Enos had met in 1955. She became wife number five on December 21, 1955, and would provide Enos with three daughters in almost twenty-five years of marriage.

Enos was able to play sporadically for the Yankees for three more seasons (and bat .304 in 1958 when, at forty-two, he became the oldest player to be in a World Series). And then, in August 1959, Stengel approached him in the dugout. “We’re going to finish third,” said the Yankee manager, “but you might get a chance to play in another World Series this year.” And that was how Slaughter learned that he had been traded to the Milwaukee Braves, who were locked in a battle with the Dodgers for the National League pennant.

The former Cardinal tried to help his new team, but he was still suffering from a leg injury that hampered his mobility and could not even pinch-hit. And that was the end of Enos Slaughter’s career in the major leagues. He would implore major-league owners in later years to give him another chance, but it never came. Retirement might have been bearable if the Cardinals had made good on their earlier promise to give him a job, but the offer never came, and it left the North Carolina native feeling “bitter.”

Slaughter managed some minor-league teams and then coached the Duke University baseball team until the school decided not to renew his contract in 1977. And so Enos Slaughter became a full-time farmer in Roxboro. Not that he minded. “I can’t go on enough,” he said after he reached his seventy-fifth birthday, “about how I enjoy working on the farm.” He would get up early in the morning, make coffee and bring a cup to Helen in bed (at least until they divorced in 1980), and start cooking breakfast for everyone. “He went like he was playing the last game of the World Series,” said his daughter Gaye.

The only void in those first years of retirement was the question that preoccupied him most—whether he would be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Year after year, it pained him that he could not secure the necessary seventy-five percent of the vote to win election. The favorable decision finally came from the Veterans’ Committee in March 1985. “My life is complete now,” he told one sportswriter who had called to congratulate him.

Slaughter’s election to the Hall of Fame coincided with a change in his schedule. He now found himself inundated with invitations to appear at charity golf tournaments, fantasy baseball camps, card shows, and other events that, as he told one sportswriter in 1992, allowed him “to stay home probably three weekends out of twelve months.” The increased travel made it necessary for him to rely on daughters Sharon and Gaye (who lived nearby) to help him with daily chores. And one day in the late 1990s he brought some vegetables from the farm over to Sharon and mentioned that it was time to think about his funeral. “You know,” he said, “we ought to go ahead and get a tombstone over at the church because prices keep going up.” And so the daughters arranged for the creation of a black granite tombstone that would have the Baseball Hall of Fame emblem, a bat and two cardinals, and an inscription from them: “Take me out to the ball game. We love you, Daddy.”

The unwanted event came sooner than any of them would have liked. In June 2002, Enos, now eighty-six, was diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Recovery would have been difficult enough if cancer had remained the only problem. But the prescribed radiation burned a hole in his stomach, which in turn led to diverticulitis. Surgery at Duke University Hospital corrected the problem with his intestine, but Enos slipped into a coma, needed an artificial respirator to breathe, and required drugs to keep his blood pressure up. The attending physician explained to the four daughters (Patricia, Gaye, Sharon, and Rhonda) that there was no hope for their father to survive without that support system.

Years earlier, Enos had signed a living will that gave his daughters the discretion to withdraw life support if they concluded that the situation no longer warranted artificial assistance. The fateful day arrived on August 11. At midnight, the four daughters—along with Rhonda’s husband—joined hands in a circle around the hospital bed while Enos lay there unconscious. “Daddy,” Sharon asked her father, “do you want us to sing you a song?” There was, of course, no response. But the five of them—full of sadness and choking back tears—then sang “Take Me Out to the Ball Game.” When they had finished, Gaye—the oldest daughter by Helen—placed her hand on her father’s head and leaned over him. “Daddy,” she said softly, “you can run now. You’re going to be safe at home.”

 

The Dodgers may have faltered in 1957, but Gil Hodges did not, lifting his batting average to .299 and finishing with twenty-seven home runs along with ninety-eight runs batted in. And there was reason to believe that Hodges could continue those stellar performances after the team moved to Los Angeles, where the Coliseum’s 250-foot foul line in left field seemed ideally suited to a right-handed batter like Hodges. But the Indiana native was now thirty-four, and, while there were moments of glory (including a home run to win the fourth game of the 1959 World Series), his record began to show the signs of age.

Hodges hit his 352nd career home run in 1960—thus establishing a new National League record for right-handed batters—but the Dodgers soon decided that they needed to make room for younger players. And so Hodges was released to the New York Mets in October 1961. He struggled with the Mets for two seasons and seemed destined for a forced retirement in May 1963 when he received a call from George Selkirk, general manager for the American League’s Washington Senators. The team was foundering in last place, and Selkirk was eager to find a new manager.

The Senators quickly learned that their new manager was a stern disciplinarian (leading first baseman Ken Harrelson to describe Hodges as a “Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” character who could be “a real gentleman” off the field but who became “a different person” when he put on a baseball uniform). Still, no one could quarrel with the results. After a last-place finish in 1963, the team finished ninth in 1964, eighth in both 1965 and 1966, and in a tie for sixth place in 1967. It was a remarkable accomplishment. So there should not have been any surprise when the Mets pursued Gil Hodges as the manager for their team.

The Mets confronted Hodges with a challenge that surpassed anything he had known with the Senators. Except for a ninth-place finish in 1966, the team had finished last in the standings in every year since its formation in 1962.

It was a situation that demanded change, and Gil was not afraid to experiment. The changes would come in ways large and small. Jackets and ties that had to be worn on the road. Platooning. And a hierarchy that generally required players to communicate with him through his coaches. Not surprisingly, Hodges’ managerial style generated different reactions from different players. “He was a big, imposing guy,” said outfielder Ron Swoboda, “who scared the shit out of you.” In contrast, pitcher Jerry Koosman saw the new Mets manager as “a gentleman’s gentleman” who was “happy-go-lucky” and brought “a lot of fun” to the team.

The fruits of the new manager’s effort came at a high personal cost. To others, he appeared serene. But he was anything but relaxed during a baseball game. (Duke Snider remembered the time he watched the Dodger first baseman light a cigarette on the bench during a close game at Ebbets Field. “His hands were shaking so much,” said Snider, “he could hardly light the cigarette.”) Hodges would closely watch events unfold from the dugout, and woe to any player who blocked his vision of what was happening on the field.

The day of reckoning came during a road trip at the end of September. The Mets had arrived in Atlanta to play the Braves. “I had sharp pains in the chest,” Hodges recalled, “along with other discomforts that I never experienced before in my life.” Before the game was over, he was diagnosed with a heart attack.

Gil was placed in the hospital, and the team finished the season without their manager on the bench. He was in the hospital for three weeks and then took a few weeks of rest in Florida. “I feel great,” he told an inquiring sportswriter in November. “I don’t feel like I’ve had a heart attack.” Hodges’ satisfaction with his physical recovery extended to his hopes for the Mets. When asked for his prediction of team victories in the 1969 season, Hodges said, “A minimum of eighty-five.”

The Mets had never won more than seventy-three games in a season, and much of the press was skeptical about that prediction. Hodges nonetheless pushed ahead, and by June sportswriters were beginning to think his prediction might prove to be accurate. Much of the team’s success reflected Hodges’ continued demand for discipline and commitment. Never would he tolerate a player who made mental mistakes or failed to hustle on every play. The standards were easy to articulate but often difficult to execute, and there were times when he would express his frustrations to Joan when he came home in the evenings. She tried to be philosophical about it. “Gil,” she said at one point, “these are grown men. And they each have their own character. They are not your children. You have to understand that.” Her husband did not agree. “Well, honey,” he replied, “I feel that once they put on that uniform and walk on that field, they represent me. And if they’re going to represent me, they are my children.”

Cleon Jones—the team’s leading hitter with a .340 average—learned about Hodges’ perspective in a game against the Houston Astros at Shea Stadium in July. A ball was hit to left field for a double by one of the Astros, and Jones appeared to be very casual in chasing the ball down and then lobbing it back into the infield. Within seconds Hodges, wearing a somber look, emerged from the dugout on the first-base side of the field and began a slow, deliberate walk across the field. The manager passed Nolan Ryan—who was standing on the pitcher’s mound and thought Hodges was coming to take him out. And then he passed Bud Harrelson, who was standing in fear at shortstop. (“Oh, my God,” he said to himself. “He’s coming to get me.”) Hodges stopped when he reached Jones in left field and made a simple observation: “I didn’t like the way you went after that last ball.” He then invited Jones to return to the dugout with him while another Met came out to play left field.