[quote="Beast of the East" post=399181]Thought you guys would enjoy this:
The Baseball 100: Bob Gibson
By Joe Posnanski Feb 11, 2020 360
Starting in December and ending on Opening Day, Joe Posnanski will count down the 100 greatest baseball players by publishing an essay on a player every day for 100 days. In all, this project will contain roughly as many words as “Moby Dick.” Yes, we know it’s nutty. We hope you enjoy.
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“Are you from Sports Illustrated?” Bob Gibson asked, and I nodded because in those days I was from Sports Illustrated. He glared at me for a moment — that famous glare, the one that used to pierce through hitters. He seemed to be thinking hard about something and then his face softened as if whatever it was, whatever he was thinking about, well, it happened a long time ago and didn’t need to be brought up again.
And just then a man walked up to him. He was an older man, older than Gibson, and he wore thick glasses and white hair stuck out of the crumpled Cardinals hat on his head.
“Mr. Gibson,” this man said. “Oh, do I remember the way you pitched. I remember all those batters you hit. They were so scared of you.”
Gibson smiled hard. How many times had he been here? Too many to count. This was his trademark scene. People came up to him again and again through the years, if they had the courage, and they told him exactly this: You were so scary. You were so intimidating. You were so angry. You owned the plate. You stared them down until they melted. You glowered. You had them shaking in their cleats. You weren’t like those wimpy pitchers today. You hit them if they got too close. You showed them who’s boss.
And this time, like most other times, Gibson thanked the man in a voice that is higher pitched and warmer than people expect. He signed a baseball and handed it back to the man and smiled again. Together we watched the man walk off with a spring in his step that made him look 50 years younger. Then Gibson looked at me, and I thought there was a little bit of sadness on his face.
“Is that all I did?” he asked. “Hit batters? Is that really all they remember?”
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This will be an attempt to tell a different kind of Bob Gibson story. I can’t tell you that it will satisfy. The canonical story of Gibson as an intimidator, as a head-hunter, as an indomitable force, yes, it’s irresistible. And it is largely true. There are so many stories within that story, so many witness accounts of Gibson’s badassery. For instance, you might know that a hitter named Pete LaCock — son of the game-show host Peter Marshall — hit a grand slam off Gibson in 1975. It happened to be in the last inning of Gibson’s last appearance, so there was no payback.
Until … years later, they faced each other in an old-timer’s game. Gibson plunked LaCock with the first pitch. “I’ve been waiting YEARS to do that,” he shouted out.
So that’s great enough, but even funnier, Gibson once brushed back his dear friend Reggie Jackson in an old-timer’s game. Why? Because Jackson had the gall to homer off Gibson … in the previous old-timer’s game. I mean, seriously, who else has two classic stories about throwing at hitters in an old-timer’s game?
Who else could pull it off?
If Bob Gibson didn’t exist, we’d have to make him up. There have been others — Don Drysdale, Early Wynn, Big Unit, Sal Maglie — who would move you off the plate, make you dance, knock you down if you got too feisty. But Gibson is the archetype, the terrifying pitcher standing tall on the mound, like an Old West sheriff, armed with a dangerous fastball that he would use as needed. If the name “Lombardi” (as NFL Films reminds us) evokes images of duels in the snow, the name “Gibson” evokes images of a batter lying flat in a cloud of dust and the merciless man on the mound, glowering, daring, never ceding ground, never forgetting.
A quick scan of famous quotes about Gibson, and these truly are limitless:
Dick Allen: “Gibson was so mean, he’d knock you down and then meet you at home plate to see if you wanted to make something of it.”
Joe Torre: “Bob wasn’t unfriendly when he was playing. I’d say it was more like hateful.”
Don Sutton: “He hated everyone. He even hated Santa Claus.”
Norm Cash: “If he’s pitching, I’m coming up sick.”
Red Schoendienst: “He couldn’t pitch today because they wouldn’t let him. The way he’d throw inside, he’d be kicked out of the game in the first inning.”
Tim McCarver: “I remember one time going out to the mound to talk with Bob Gibson. He told me to get back behind the plate where I belonged and that the only thing I knew about pitching was that I couldn’t hit it.”
Dusty Baker: “The only people I ever felt intimidated by in my whole life were Bob Gibson and my daddy.”
And so on. Perhaps the most telling words about Bob Gibson’s persona came from Henry Aaron in his poetic advice to Dusty Baker:
Don’t dig in against Bob Gibson.
He’ll knock you down.
He’d knock down his own grandmother.
Don’t stare at him, don’t smile at him, don’t talk to him.
He doesn’t like it.
If you happen to hit a home run, don’t run too slow.
And don’t run too fast.
If you want to celebrate, get in the tunnel first.
And if he hits you, don’t charge the mound.
Because he’s a Golden Gloves boxer.
This is Bob Gibson’s story, and it is inescapable, and it grows larger every year. Baseball is so much richer for it. Gibson — like Sandy Koufax, like Ty Cobb, like Roberto Clemente, like Babe Ruth — is a main character in the winding story of the game.
But that story, as thrilling as it is, is not Bob Gibson.
“That’s a whole lot of !@#$%^,” is how Gibson explains it. “I wasn’t trying to intimidate anybody — are you kidding me? I was just trying to survive, man.”
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Roger Kahn told a story that might start getting us a bit closer to the real Gibson — not the legend, not the bully, but the real man, flesh and blood, pain and triumph. It’s still a story of toughness. But this one has a twist.
In January of 1971, Kahn picked up the phone at his home and, to his surprise, heard the voice of Bob Gibson on the other line. “Do you think I’m worth a column?” Gibson asked. It seemed they had a mutual friend who believed sportswriters were focusing too much on Gibson’s fierce reputation and not enough on the deep and intelligent and proud man behind the mask. Gibson probably grunted at first, but he thought about it and then called up Kahn, who was writing for Esquire and who was just finishing up his classic book “The Boys of Summer.”
Kahn agreed that, yes, Gibson was worth a column, and they agreed to talk over dinner after Gibson pitched on Opening Day.
That game turned out to be a classic, but not for reasons Gibson appreciated. Gibson locked up at Wrigley Field with another great pitcher, Ferguson Jenkins, and for nine innings they each allowed just one run.
Then came the 10th. In those days, extra innings didn’t mean a starter’s day was over. Jenkins pitched a scoreless 10th inning. And Gibson gave up a walk-off home run to Billy Williams.
“You gonna talk to Gibson now?” Stan Musial asked Kahn with a big smile on his face.
“We’ve had the date since January,” Kahn said sheepishly.
“Better you than me,” Musial said, and he walked away laughing.
Kahn cursed his bad luck. Then he stalled. He stayed in the press box for a good while, talking to other writers and then some baseball people. After a long while, he caught a taxi to the hotel and told the driver to take a scenic route. When he got to the hotel, he braced himself for an angry Bob Gibson. Instead, he found four messages, the first three wondering where the heck he was and the fourth telling him to meet Gibson at a nearby restaurant.
When he got to the restaurant, Gibson was sitting alone and waiting.
“Where you been?” Gibson asked.
“I didn’t think you’d want to talk right away after losing a game like that.”
And Gibson’s entire face changed. He was deeply annoyed. There was that reputation again. Did this reporter — the one who people told him was serious and different — really think Gibson would have him fly out to Chicago for an interview only to postpone because he lost a ballgame?
“Hey,” Gibson said, “did you come out here to work or play around?”
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Nobody knew for sure why they called Bob’s brother “Josh.” That wasn’t his name. His given name was Leroy Gibson. But everyone called him Josh. You might suspect that they named him after the great Negro Leagues player Josh Gibson, but Bob never thought so. “The kids in the ghetto,” he once wrote, “never paid much attention to professional sports.”
Josh was 15 years older than Bob and the closest thing he ever had to a father. Bob was the youngest of seven, and his real father died three months before he was born. His mother, Victoria, worked at a laundromat and cleaned houses.
The first home Bob Gibson can remember was a four-room shack without heat on the north side of Omaha. His most vivid memory of the place was that he was once bitten by a rat there.
In time, the family moved to a segregated government housing project called Logan Fontenelle. It was, as Gibson often wrote, the ghetto, but he came to think of it as “heaven in Nebraska.” Yes, it was segregated and it was rough — there were daily fights — and racism was palpable and a daily part of life. But the units were heated and there was a ballfield in one corner, and a kid was judged by how fast he could sprint around one of the two homemade tracks that looped around the place.
Most of all there was Josh. He was a singular figure, an almost unknown American hero. He had been a supreme athlete as a kid, but at 18 he went to war, and when he returned, he was different. Angrier. He earned a degree in education, then a Masters in history, but he could not get hired as a teacher or a coach.
So, instead, he took a job at a local meatpacking plant and taught and coached at the YMCA. He had an astonishing impact on some of the greatest athletes of his time.
Josh taught Bob Boozer how to rebound. Boozer went to Kansas State, where he was one of the most dominant players in the history of college basketball, a two-time All-American. He played in the NBA for 11 seasons, averaging almost 15 points a game.
Josh worked with Gale Sayers on his ball carrying. Sayers went on to become one of the greatest players in NFL history.
Josh was Johnny Rodgers’ first baseball coach. Rodgers won the 1972 Heisman Trophy and had perhaps the most famous punt return in the history of college football.
Josh told Marlin Briscoe that no matter what anyone said, he was a quarterback. And although it was short-lived, Briscoe became the first black man to be a professional starting quarterback when he got into a game for the Denver Broncos against the Cincinnati Bengals in 1968.
And so on.
And in 1947, when Bob was 11 years old, Josh made his brother the most important project of all. Why 1947? Well, you should know: That was the year Jackie Robinson joined the Brooklyn Dodgers. That was the year a new world opened up for African-Americans, and Josh expected his youngest brother to bust right through that door.
It wasn’t a prophecy. It was an order. Josh turned all of the anger that bubbled inside him and turned it on his brother. Every single day, he threw the hardest fastballs at Bob to make him lose any fear of hitting. Every single day, he smashed hard groundballs at Bob in the expectation that he would become a great infielder like Jackie. (“He figured it would be a long time before black pitchers would make much of a dent in the big leagues,” Bob wrote in his autobiography.) Bob resented it and every now and again would race home to their mother and tell her to make Josh stop. She would tell Josh just that.
But the next day, they were at it again.
Once, Josh hit a groundball at Bob that skipped off a rock, bounced up high and smashed Bob’s face, just above his left eye. It left a permanent scar. Sometimes when he was playing ball, he would look at the scar and remember.
It wasn’t just baseball. Josh also pounded against Bob on the basketball court, moving him around, making him fight for his space.
And yes, Josh also built a pitching mound at a nearby school. And he would take Bob out there and make him throw fastball after curveball after fastball until his arm felt disconnected from his body.
For years, Bob did not understand why his brother was so much harder on him than he was on the other kids in the neighborhood. “I resented it,” Bob has said. But he kept coming back for more, which is exactly what Josh wanted to see. Josh knew how tough the road was going to be for his brother. He knew how long the odds were. And he was leaving nothing to chance.
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Gibson signed with the St. Louis Cardinals in 1957, and his first stop was Columbus, Ga. — his memories of the eight games he started in the South in the 1950s would always remain pungent and bitter and too personal to talk about. That was how baseball began for him. He made it to the big leagues in 1959 when he was 23, then got beat around for a year and a half. He became a full-time starter in 1961 and led the league in walks. He was no instant sensation. He did not win 20 games until 1965, when he was 29 years old.
“People don’t know what it was like to be a young black pitcher in those days,” he said, not defensively but as a point of fact. The way Gibson saw it, people wanted him to fail. Hitters wanted him to fail. Racists wanted him to fail. Opposing fans wanted him to fail. He had to beat them all. Every game was a fight to the finish, every hit a dagger that could get him sent down, every loss a disaster from which he might not recover.
“In a world filled with hate, prejudice and protest,” he wrote in his 1968 book, “From Ghetto to Glory,” “I find that I too am filled with hate, prejudice and protest. I hate phonies. I am prejudiced against all those who have contempt for me because my face is black and all those who accept me only because of my ability to throw a baseball. I am not proud of that ability. It is not something I earned or acquired or bought. It is a gift.”
That is what people missed about Gibson. The thing they loved about him — his pitching gifts — did not have anything to do with who he was as a man. They also did not explain him as a pitcher. He didn’t become a star pitcher easily, and he did not become a star pitcher because of his gifts. When people used to say he scared people, he’d scoff, “You think Roberto Clemente gets scared?”
When people used to talk about how hard he threw, he’d scoff, “Hank Aaron could hit God’s fastball.”
When people would talk about the nastiness of his slider, he’d scoff, “You don’t think Eddie Mathews or Billy Williams knows how to hit a slider?”
No, they refused to see how hard he worked at his craft, how inventive he had to be to win, how much it all took out of him. They treated him like he was some bully. Didn’t they see that he never threw the same pitch in the same location to the same batter? Didn’t they see that he fielded his position better than anyone else? (He did win nine straight Gold Gloves.) Couldn’t they see how good a hitter he was, how much he helped his own cause? He had 73 extra-base hits in his career, one of the highest percentages for any pitcher ever. He had 18 sacrifice flies for his career, which is a record.
In the 26 games he homered, he threw six shutouts, and the Cardinals went 23-3.
Two of those games were in the World Series.
He would do what it took to win.
“I wasn’t mean,” Gibson said. “I don’t buy into any of it. You hear people talk about this glare that I had. You know, I’ve been wearing glasses for almost 60 years. I wasn’t glaring … I just couldn’t see the catcher’s signals. I was just trying to see. That’s all. But people turn everything into something else.”
I’ve told that story to so many people around baseball — the glasses story. And they nod and laugh. “Yeah,” they say, “that’s what he told me, too. It was his glasses.”
And then they lean in close and say, “It wasn’t the glasses.”
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One more Bob Gibson story: Remember when I noted he seemed to be thinking about something when I said I worked for Sports Illustrated? Turns out he was thinking about something — thinking about how he had not talked to a Sports Illustrated reporter in many decades.
Gibson said he stopped talking to Sports Illustrated after the magazine ran a story about him that he thought was filled with condescension and disdain. A few years ago when he was writing his autobiography, he tried to find that story, but Sports Illustrated couldn’t locate it, which upset him all over again. The past was filled with a lot of hard memories. “I’m sorry,” I said, and he waved me off.
“It’s not your fault,” he said. “That’s why I’m talking to you.”
“I’ll find that story for you,” I said.
“It doesn’t matter,” he replied.
I did look for that story for a long time. I went through the archives and searched every single story that even mentioned Bob Gibson. Finally, I came across one that seemed closest to what Gibson was describing — it was in the March 1960 edition, and it was called “The Private World of the Negro Ballplayer.” This didn’t feel like an exact match, though, because it barely mentioned Gibson and did not quote him, but it did have paragraphs like this:
“Slang is a rich field. The words mullion, hog-cutter, drinker and pimp apparently came from the Negro leagues. Drinker and pimp barely survive today. A pimp is a flashy dresser, and a drinker — so Jimmy Banks, a Negro Memphis Red Sox first baseman, told me — is ‘a fielder who can pick it clean. He catches everything smooth. He can “drink” it.’ Ernie Banks also told me about some other words, but I have been unable to find them used in the majors. A choo-choo papa was a sharp ballplayer. An acrobat was an awkward fielder. A monty was an ugly ballplayer, and a foxy girl was a good-looking girl. Unfortunately, my research came to an abrupt end when I foolishly asked Banks if he had a nickname. ‘I’m a ballplayer, man,’ he said as he walked away. ‘I’m not gonna nickname myself. Man, you have to calm down!'”
This seemed a bit like what Gibson described, but it wasn’t clear why he specifically felt wounded by it. There were a couple of anonymous quotes — maybe one of those was his? There were a couple of broad references — maybe one of those hit him hard?
I didn’t know the answer for years. And then, while writing this, I found it.
It turns out it wasn’t the story that upset Gibson. It was a photograph in the story — there’s an image on the second page that shows Gibson talking with George Crowe in an empty clubhouse. There seems nothing wrong with the actual photo.
But the caption reads: “In a dressing room empty of whites, pitcher Bob Gibson consults Crowe.”
The caption made it sound like either there was a special dressing room for black players or all the white players leave when black players talk.
But there was something else about it. Gibson believed that when the photographer took that picture, there were white players all around them.
“I don’t know photo techniques and lab stuff,” Gibson said to Kahn in that Esquire story, “but when the guy took it, we were sitting with some whites. And when they printed it, all the whites were gone. We were two segregated cats.”
And that was what set him off so much that he didn’t talk to SI for 50 years. He thought the magazine, like so many through the years, had made him an outsider.
And that was the thing he could not accept. Bob Gibson never asked for a favor. He wanted only to be judged the way others were judged. Did anyone say Tom Seaver won games because he was mean? No. Did anyone say Sandy Koufax won games because he was intimidating? No.
Bob Gibson struck out 3,000 batters and he pitched his way into the Hall of Fame because he had worked all his life to become the greatest pitcher he could become. And he said that he did it all because that was the job. He was just doing his job. In 1968, the year he was at the height of his powers, he made 34 starts and finished 28 of those games. “I couldn’t come out,” he said. “We needed me to pitch.”
He had a modern-record 1.12 ERA. “Well, we never scored any damn runs,” he said.
He threw 13 shutouts. “I felt like if I didn’t throw a shutout, we’d lose,” he said.
“It was hard,” he said. “People make it sound like it was easy, like all I had to do was stare at a hitter or throw inside and they’d wilt. It wasn’t like that. It wasn’t easy. There wasn’t anything easy about it.”[/quote]
Great stuff Beast, thanks. When Bob Gibson stepped on the field, the opposing team was the enemy. Pure and simple. Many of the great players of his generation, and earlier ones, had that mentality. It made for no fraternizing and fierce battles. Every once in a while you might see a runner standing on 1st base interact with the 1st baseman. But there was none of the laughing and joking we see today, before and during games, between opposing team players. Not the kind of baseball I watched as a kid, or played.
