Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever Read Online Free PDF Page B

field. That was just a sample of something you saw from Gibson every time he went out there.”
    Putting such loyalty, money, and success aside, what’s startling about the Sports Illustrated cover shot remains the racial makeup. Even today, with the rise of Latinos in the game, where they make up roughly 25 percent of major league rosters, ballclubs often break along ethnic and racial lines. Yet the 1968 Cardinals, in this iconic photograph, were represented by five white players (Maris, McCarver, Shannon, infielder Dal Maxvill, and manager Schoendienst), three black players (Gibson, Brock, and Flood), and two Latinos (Cepeda and infielder Julian Javier). Long before Jesse Jackson, the Cardinals “were the rainbow coalition of baseball,” Gibson said.
    A pitcher, even an ace, isn’t necessarily one of the leaders of ballclub. After all, he plays only every fourth or fifth day. No matter how memorable his performance, the impact has usually finished rippling through the clubhouse long before he takes the mound again. Yet in 1968, there were several exceptions to this rule. Nobody made more headlines in Motown, good and bad, than Denny McLain. Like it or not, many considered him the face of the franchise. For McLain embraced the glitz and the glamour of celebrity wholeheartedly, becoming the jokester, the trickster, the life of the party. He realized that if somebody was a superstar, the normal rules didn’t really apply.
    In comparison, Gibson was all business. “I’ll never forget the look he gave me. It scared me to death,” Reggie Smith said after the 1967 World Series. “He sent a stare right through me, like, ‘Who do you think you are?’ I thought for sure there was a knockdown coming, but he fooled me with a slider that I tapped out in front of the plate. McCarver picked it up and tagged me out.”
    Gibson knew full well how his public persona and the sight of a no-nonsense black man on a big-league mound worked for and against him back in the mid-1960s. “There’s no way to gloss over the fact that racial perception contributed a great deal to my reputation,” he wrote. “I pitched in a period of civil unrest, of black power and clenched fists and burning buildings and assassinations and riots in the street. There was a country full of angry black people in those days, and by extension—and by my demeanor on the mound—I was perceived to be one of them.
    “There was some truth to that, but it had little, if anything to do with the way I worked a batter. I didn’t see a hitter’s color. I saw his stance, his strike zone, his bat speed, his power, and his weakness.”
    Still, Gibson knew as well as anybody that perception often becomes reality, especially in a year like 1968. “As a black man, I was member of a race that had been intimidated by the white man for more than two hundred years, in which we learned something about the process,” he added. “When one is intimidated, he resigns himself to the backseat. He defers to his so-called superior, having no other legitimate choice, and allows himself to be dominated. As a major-league pitcher, I had the opportunity, at least, to push off the mound in the other man’s shoes.”
     
     
    The Cardinals’ home, Busch Memorial Stadium, had opened in 1966 and was the first multipurpose concrete bowl in the National League. (San Diego’s Jack Murphy, Pittsburgh’s Three Rivers, Cincinnati’s Riverfront, and Philadelphia’s Veterans soon followed.) Busch II, which the locals called the new digs to distinguish it from its predecessor, Sportsman’s Park, was arguably the best of the cookie-cutter stadiums. Designed by architect Edward Durrell Stone, whose credits include the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the stadium sported a distinctive circular roof and was within a short walk of the new Gateway Arch and, ironically, the Old Courthouse, site of the infamous Dred Scott trial in 1846.
    Early on, certainly in 1968, Busch II was a pretty good