There are those who hold that the World Series is one of the most exquisite tortures devised by man. Take two baseball teams, put them through a grueling, 162-game pennant race, then pit them against one another in a short, four-out-of-seven series with the world championship riding on the outcome. No wonder the hapless Los Angeles Dodgers committed six errors in one game last year, three of them by Outfielder Willie Davis. And yet more often than not, all the fierce pressure produces some of the year’s best baseball and brightest heroes—as it did last week at the start of the 1967 Series be tween the National League’s St. Louis Cardinals and the American League’s Boston Red Sox.
Not that anyone expected less. Though few experts picked St. Louis for the pennant at season’s start, Manager Red Schoendienst’s Cardinals were clearly the class of the league, soaring home with a huge 1(H game lead and the kind of statistics fans like to brag about—a .263 team batting average and five pitchers with wins in double figures. So it was hardly surprising that they went into the series as 3 to 2 series favorites, while Boston was still reeling from one of the most frantic four-team pennant scrambles in American League history. That the Red Sox made it at all was due largely to the heroics of their two stars: Leftfielder Carl Yastrzemski, 28, winner of batting’s triple crown (.326 average, 44 home runs, 121 RBIs), who got seven hits in his final eight times at bat, and Fireballing Righthander Jim Lonborg, 25, who locked up the pennant and his 22nd victory (v. nine losses) by cutting down the Minnesota Twins in the very last game of the season.
Back to the Burglar. In the first game of the Series last week, all the heroes belonged to St. Louis. On to pitch came Veteran Righthander Bob Gibson, 31, twice victor over the New York Yan kees in the 1964 World Series, twice a 20-game winner, and well on his way to another big season before a line drive broke his left leg last July. If there were any lingering effects, they certainly did not show. Boston’s one real hit was a fluke homer by Pitcher Jose Santiago; only six other Red Sox batters even got to first, and in the strikeout column stood ten big Ks. With that kind of pitching, all it took to wrap up the game was a pair of runs, both of them supplied courtesy of Leftfielder Lou Brock, 28, the Cards’ hardhitting (at .299) lead-off man and baseball’s most artful burglar since Maury Wills decided to go straight. Lean, whippet-fast, a master of getting the jump on a pitcher, Brock has stolen no fewer than 189 bases in the last three years, and reform never entered his head last week. Four times he came to bat, four times he singled; twice he stole second, and once he went all the way from first to third on a hit to leftfield. All that scampering around produced two runs, and the ball game 2-1.
Boston’s heroes immediately began plotting revenge. Soon after the game, Fenway Park was the scene of a vignette that would have brightened the eyes of any mother whose kiddies hate their homework. While most of the other players were sipping beer in the locker room, there in the batting cage stood Boston’s idol, the man they call Yaz-Tremendouski, taking batting practice, while Coach Bobby Doerr called “Keep your hands high! Quick, now! Snap those wrists!” For 30 minutes it continued before Yaztrzemski was sat isfied. “Tomorrow,” he said, “I’m gonna get three hits.”
The Blast and the Brush. Which, since he is Yaz, is just what he did. Stepping up to bat in the fourth inning he cracked a fastball into the rightfield bleachers, then blasted another even deeper into the stands with two on in the seventh, and followed that with a line drive sin gle in the eighth. Total RBIs: four. One would have been enough. On the mound now was Boston’s other ace, Jim Lonborg, fully rested and feeling mean. Always the possessor of a smoking fastball, Lonborg had only a so-so record until the spring when Pitching Coach Sal Maglie convinced him to be less of a gentleman out there: a little brush back once in a while keeps the batters nervous. Result: Lonborg led the league in hit batsmen (19)—and also in strikeouts (246).
His very first pitch of the second game sent Lou Brock spinning back from the plate; two pitches later Brock popped out to short. That set the pattern. Unable to dig in against Lonborg’s low, fast stuff, one after another of the Cards went down—three, then six, nine, twelve. As the tension mounted, 24 Cardinals came to bat, and not one got a hit. At last, with two out in the eighth, St. Louis’ Julian Javier looped a hanging slider into leftfield for a double. Lonborg threw his hands to his face. “It was utter agony,” he said later. “I really thought I had it.” What he had was plenty good enough. Retiring the next four batters, he gave Boston a 5-0 shutout to even everything up, and copped the fourth one-hitter ever in World Series history.
Cast Off & Clutch. It was all such a tough act to follow that the third game in St. Louis had to suffer by comparison—except that most of the agony was in the Red Sox dugout. Four pitchers gave the Cards ten hits and five runs, and once again, Lou Brock was the messenger of doom. He scored his third and fourth runs of the series, the last on a line single by Roger Maris, that Yankee cast-off who now hustles like a rookie for the Cards, with three hits and three RBIs in the first three games of the series. The real glory boy, though, was Righthander Nelson Briles, 24, until last week a journeyman speed-bailer with only four complete games all season. He allowed the Red Sox seven hits and two runs, but for nine long innings last week no one could fault him in the clutch—least of all Carl Yastrzemski, whom he forced into ground outs three times, all three of them with men on base.
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