BY Wayne Coffey
DAILY NEWS SPORTS WRITER
http://www.nydailynews.com
Saturday, October 9th 2010, 7:41 PM
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An hour or so after the strangest and most improbable World Series in history finally ended, at exactly 3:36 p.m. on the day of the third Kennedy-Nixon debate, the coal miner's son who finished it was a hero in need of respite.The Pittsburgh Pirates' clubhouse was a den of delirium, the hollering and whooping going on everywhere. Bill Mazeroski shared in it. Sure he did. How could he not, after hitting the only Series-clinching, Game 7 home run in October annals? After the Pirates had just won their first World Series since 1925 by beating the mighty Yankees, who had spent seven games not hitting baseballs as much as strafing them?
Still, there's only so much merriment a man can take. Mazeroski's ears hurt and his senses were overloaded. So he found his wife, Milene, slipped out of Forbes Field and walked over to Schenley Park, just beyond the right-center field fence, where Mr. and Mrs. William Stanley Mazeroski sat on a bench and listened to the birds and reveled in the stillness.
It wasn't a time to think about his own journey, how he came out of riverside poverty in Rush Run, Ohio, and lived without electricity or plumbing, or about how he was completing the big-league dreams of his late father, a promising prospect for the Indians before losing a foot in a mining accident.
This was just a time to be quiet in Schenley Park, and to be with Milene. The date was Oct. 13, 1960.
"There wasn't a soul there," Mazeroski says. "It was just the squirrels and us."
Bill Mazeroski pauses and says he can hardly fathom that he is still being asked about it all.
"When I hit (the home run) I thought it was just another hit to win a game. I didn't think I'd be talking about it 50 years later," Mazeroski says.
Bill Mazeroski is a Hall of Famer, and a 74-year-old grandfather now, a man who just last month was honored with a statue outside PNC Park, where the current Pirates just finished their 18th straight losing season. The statue depicts Mazeroski's gleeful trip around the bases, helmet held high in his right hand. He choked up at the ceremony, and deflected the glory, because Bill Mazeroski would much rather go fishing than take credit, or talk about himself. For a half-century, his perspective on his ninth-inning homer off the Yanks' Ralph Terry has not changed; if he hadn't gotten the hit, someone else - maybe Roberto Clemente or Don Hoak or Dick Groat – would have. It still seems entirely fitting that the last blow of a 10-9 game was struck by a defense-first second baseman whose glovework put him in Cooperstown.
"I've always said that if my wife could've caught a ground ball, she would've led the league in double plays playing alongside Bill Mazeroski," says Groat, the Pirates' star shortstop and NL MVP in 1960. "He was the greatest second baseman who has ever played. I don't have any doubt about it."
Bill Mazeroski and Dick Groat
Nor should there be any doubt about the bizarre ebb and flow of the 1960 World Series, seven ballgames that were more a miniseries than a set of competitions, a drama that wrapped up with 65 records being set, from most total bases by a team (142 by the Yankees) to most RBI in a game (Bobby Richardson's six), and that came to life again just last month, with the stunning discovery of the only complete film of the seventh game among the contents of Bing Crosby's wine cellar.
"In the World Series, unusual things happen," says Bob Turley, who started that Game 7 for the Yankees.
* * *
The most striking aspect of the 1960 World Series, from a Yankee perspective, was that they lost. Lost even though they had a record team batting average of .338 – 82 points higher than the Pirates' .256. Lost despite winning three games by an aggregate score of 38-3, and outscoring the Pirates by a record margin of 55-27. Lost even with the two complete-game shutouts they got from their best pitcher, Whitey Ford, who won Game 3, 10-0, and Game 6, 12-0, results that made Casey Stengel's curious decision to start Art Ditmar in Game 1 seem even more questionable.
Ditmar was a 15-game winner in the regular season, but pitched a total of 1 2/3 innings in two losing starts in the Series.
"None of the players could understand why Casey didn't start Whitey (in Game 1)," says Richardson, whose record 12 RBI and .367 average made him the first player from a losing team to be named Series MVP. "You have the Chairman of the Board, you don't wait until the third game to use him. Whitey won his two, but didn't get his third shot (in Game 7)."
Ford, indeed, kept the Yankees in the Series after Harvey Haddix and Elroy Face shut them down in Game 5 at the Stadium, won by the Pirates, 5-2. He yielded seven hits and the Yankees pounded out 17, and the Bombers seemed primed to capture their 19th championship as Game 7 arrived, with almost an entire lineup that was hot, led by Mickey Mantle, who would finish the Series with three homers, 11 RBI and a .400 average, and a memorable righthanded bolt in the top of the seventh in the Yankees' Game 2, 16-3 victory – a line drive to right-center off of Joe Gibbon that may well have traveled 525 feet or more. Pirate center fielder (and future Yankee manager) Bill Virdon called it "the hardest-hit ball I've ever seen in my life."
The Pirates may have been wowed by the Yankees' power, but they weren't going away. They had spent an entire season coming from behind, starting with their fifth game. They were down 5-0 to the Reds with one out in the ninth. They scored six to win.
"I don't think anybody on our club thought we could lose," Elroy Face says. Groat, for his part, says the one-sided nature of their three Series losses made them easier to forget.
"It's not like you're sitting there thinking, ‘If I had done this or done that, we would've won,' when you lose 16-3," Groat says.
* * *
And so began Game 7, two hours and 36 minutes of perhaps the greatest October drama of them all. The Pirates scored four times in the first two innings, on a Rocky Nelson homer and Virdon's two-run single, chasing Yankee starter, Bob Turley. Moose Skowron, the Yankee first baseman, homered off Pirate ace Vernon Law to make it 4-1 in the top of the fifth, before the Yankees exploded for four more runs to take a 5-4 lead, the big hit coming from Berra, who smashed a three-run homer off Face. The Yankees added two more in the seventh, and were up 7-4 with six outs to go, and Bobby Shantz, the little lefty reliever, who had given up but one hit in his first five innings of work, was looking for more of the same.
Manager Danny Murtaugh celebrates the 1960 World Series championship with Mazeroski.
What ensued was perhaps the most scrutinized half-inning the Yankees have ever played in October. Gino Cimoli led off with a pinch-single, before Virdon ripped a hard grounder to shortstop Tony Kubek, who was set to start a certain double-play when the ball bounded wickedly off the dirt. It hit Kubek in the throat.
"He didn't have a chance," Richardson says. "It was scary." Kubek, on the ground, gasped for air and had to be taken to the hospital. Joe DeMaestri replaced him. The Pirates had two on and nobody out, and Groat singled to make it 7-5. Shantz was lifted for Jim Coates, who got two outs and then overpowered Roberto Clemente, who hit a harmless chopper toward first. Skowron fielded it wide of the bag, and the inning should've been over, except that when Skowron looked to toss the ball to Coates, the pitcher wasn't there. Clemente had a gift single, the Pirates had another run and when catcher Hal Smith belted a ball over the left-center field wall, they had much more than that: a five-run inning and a 9-7 lead.
"We made too many wrong mistakes," Berra said later, referring to Coates' failure to cover.
The Yankees had hit all Series long. They weren't done yet. Richardson blooped a single for his 11th hit. Dale Long followed with another hit off the Pirates' Bob Friend, and Pirate manager Danny Murtaugh had seen enough, calling for another starter, Harvey Haddix. After Haddix retired Roger Maris, Mantle ripped an RBI single to right, sending Long to third. Up stepped Berra, the best 5-7, 185-pound clutch hitter around. Berra smoked a hard, low-hopping liner that first baseman Nelson snared near the line.
Nelson touched the bag for the second out, but as he looked momentarily toward second, Mantle was making a spectacular, sprawling dive back into first, barely eluding his tag. If Nelson had made the tag, the Series would've been over. Long scored, and the game was tied at nine.
The game moved to the bottom of the ninth.
Ralph Terry, who relieved Coates after Smith's homer, had warmed up five times during the game, his adrenaline on overdrive in each instance. He was 24 and about to pitch the bottom of the ninth in Game 7 of the World Series. "I had nothing left," Terry says. "My ball didn't have any life." Everything was up, even in warmups. He threw the first pitch to Mazeroski and it was up, too. Catcher Johnny Blanchard came out and told him he had to get it down. Terry nodded, got on the rubber, and wound and fired, a slider he wanted low and away, just what the scouting report called for. Don't throw anything up to Mazeroski, the report said.
The pitch was up. Bill Mazeroski, from Rush Run, Ohio, swung and drove it high and far toward left-center, and the 406 sign on the ivy-covered brick wall. Berra, the left fielder, raced back. Nobody in the Pirate dugout thought it was going to get out, Groat says. They were all thinking, "Get off the wall."
Says Mazeroski, "I didn't know if it was out, but I did know Yogi wasn't going to catch it."
At second base, Richardson watched Berra turn his back, and the sight of his No. 8 was a very bad sign. Berra hoped for a carom. It never came.
"I think it grazed the ivy going over," Berra says.
Thinking triple, Mazeroski was running full-out from the start, and was near second when he realized that the Series was over and the Pirates, whose last Series appearance had ended with a four-game sweep by the 1927 Yankees, were champions at last. He held his helmet aloft and by the time he hit third, he was being chased by fans and Forbes Field was exploding like a blast furnace, the upset complete.
In the Yankee clubhouse, Mantle cried and and 70-year-old Casey Stengel sat in his office, pants at his ankles and a beer in his hand. He would be fired not even a week later, his storied Yankee run finished. On the other side of Forbes Field, under the first-base stands, the celebration was just beginning, big and loud and rollicking, and at heart of it was Bill Mazeroski, coal miner's son turned Steel-City superman, who reveled for a while and then needed to get away. seeking the quiet of a park bench, where he and Milene sat with the squirrels and birds on a late autumn afternoon, the moment meaning everything, the history for others to ponder.
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