In 1960, a Series to Remember (or Forget)

By SEAN D. HAMILL
The New York Times
http://www.nytimes.com
Published: June 24, 2008

PITTSBURGH — Typically, Herb Soltman and his legion of Pittsburgh Pirates fans have only one day a year to pay homage to the most dramatic ending in the 104 years of World Series play, when Bill Mazeroski blasted a game-ending, Game 7 home run off Yankees reliever Ralph Terry at Forbes Field.

Jeff Swensen for The New York Times

DRAMATIC FINISH Yankees left fielder Yogi Berra watching the clinching homer by the Pirates’ Bill Mazeroski clear the ivy-covered wall at Forbes Field.

The victory is so revered here that for the last 22 years, on the game’s Oct. 13 anniversary, 100 or more Pirates faithful gather in the Oakland neighborhood where Forbes Field stood before it was torn down in 1973.

The ceremony has all the trappings of a religious occasion. There is the icon — the remaining 230-foot-long, 12-foot-tall, red-brick wall section covered in green ivy. There is scripture to be heard — a tape of the original game. And food to be consumed — hot dogs, of course, with the sainted 1960 Pirates players who return to enjoy the memory. The locals Bob Friend and Dick Groat often show up, and in a good year, Mazeroski.

“To me, it’s still the most important day of the year,” said Soltman, 72, a retired retail packaging distributor who attended the game in 1960 and helps organize the ceremony.

Thanks to interleague play, this year, Soltman and his fellow 1960 revelers have three more chances to reminisce about that Series and where they were that day. Beginning Tuesday, the Pirates host the Yankees in Pittsburgh for the first time since the 1960 Series.

So much time has elapsed that the Yankees never played in Three Rivers Stadium, which replaced Forbes and was replaced by the team’s current home, PNC Park, in 2001.

Remembering the game is not as fond for the visitors. “I still think we outplayed them,” said the Yankees’ Whitey Ford, who pitched two shutouts in the Series. “We just felt we were a better team. And then to get beat by a second baseman who didn’t hit many home runs? I still can’t believe it.”

The Pirates had not won a World Series since 1925 and were one of the worst teams in the majors for much of the 1950s, but their fans and former players recall the victory as not just a baseball win, but a boost for a city that had begun to lose its steel industry and its population and was looking for something to hold onto.

“I think the city of Pittsburgh more than any other city of the 20th century has used sports to tell its story to the world,” said Robert Ruck, a senior lecturer in the department of history at the University of Pittsburgh, who teaches a course on sports history. “And Pittsburgh used Mazeroski’s home run to transform itself from the Steel City to the City of Champions.”

Since interleague games began in 1997, there have been many of these series reminding fans of World Series games contested decades before.

Two weekends ago, the Pirates visited Baltimore for the first time since they won the 1979 — “We Are Family” — World Series against the Orioles. That same weekend, the Red Sox played the Reds in Cincinnati for the first time since the Reds won the 1975 — “Carlton Fisk Foul Pole Home Run” — World Series against the Sox.

But few, if any, approach the triumph and pathos that lingers in the wake of the 1960 World Series, called at times the most improbable, or schizophrenic, or simply the strangest Series ever.

The Yankees scored twice as many runs as the Pirates (55 to 27), got 31 more hits (91 to 60), had nearly double the number of extra-base hits (27 to 15) and established a team batting average record (.338). And they still lost.

The Yankees’ Bobby Richardson (12 runs batted in) is still the only Series most valuable player to come from the losing team.


Jeff Swensen for The New York Times

Mazeroski today

There was not a single strikeout in Game 7, the only time that has happened in 601 World Series games.

When it was over, the Yankees great Mickey Mantle cried, the only time his teammates said they saw his tears after a loss.

“It was one of the worst afternoons of my young life,” said Peter Golenbock, 62, a lifelong Yankees fan and the author of several books about the Yankees of that era. “I wasn’t used to that. None of us were. I was used to the three games they won that Series. I wasn’t used to losing close games to a second-rate team.”

Coming into the Series, the Pirates were widely seen as the sacrificial lamb on the altar of the Yankee Dynasty that was in the process of winning 10 out of 16 World Series from 1947 to 1962.

“The sportswriters, especially those guys from New York, never gave us a chance,” said Bill Virdon, the Pirates’ fleet-footed center fielder on the 1960 team. “They didn’t bother to look at how we got there.”

While the Yankees, led by Mantle, Moose Skowron and the newly acquired Roger Maris, lit up the American League, hitting a league-record 193 homers and winning 97 games, the Pirates were winning 95 games the hard way.

“This was a team that came from behind from the seventh inning on 40 times during the season,” said Groat, the Pirates’ shortstop and the 1960 league most valuable player. “We just didn’t think we could lose. And we just rode that into the World Series.”

Though they had that confidence, Mazeroski believes Game 1 was pivotal.

“I just think that first game, where we went out and played them and beat them, 6-4, I think that showed us we could play with them,” said Mazeroski, who, as if to rub the memory in a bit more, will throw out the ceremonial first pitch Tuesday.

Yankees fans still blame the loss on a fluke play in the bottom of the eighth when a potential double-play ball hopped hard off the infield and hit shortstop Tony Kubek in the throat, forcing him to leave the game with two on and no outs.

Both Pirates and Yankees believe the most pivotal part about that Series may have been Yankees Manager Casey Stengel’s decision not to start Ford in Game 1, which kept Ford from starting three Series games, including Game 7.

“He was a money pitcher,” said Vernon Law, the Pirates ace who won the 1960 Cy Young award and who won two of the three games he started in the Series. If Ford had started three games, he said, “Things might have been different.”

The Yankees won Games 2, 3 and 6 by scores of 16-3, 10-0 and 12-0, while the Pirates eked out their wins by 6-4, 3-2 and 5-2, setting up the Game 7 slugfest.

As Mazeroski tells it, when he led off the bottom of the ninth inning with the score tied, 9-9, his goal was simply “to hit it hard, get on and get us started.”

George Silk/Time Life Pictures, via Getty Images

Cheering the Series from the University of Pittsburgh.

Terry, a starter for the Yankees, was working spot relief in Game 7, and had warmed up five times before he was finally called in for the last out of the eighth.

He said he had grown used to the steep, little mound in the bullpen, but found he could not get his pitches down on the flatter, wider mound on the field.

“A lot of times, it’s the little details like that that makes a difference,” Terry said.

His first pitch, a fastball, was a ball, high in the zone. His next pitch was down a bit lower — right in Mazeroski’s power zone.

“He said it was a breaking ball, but it didn’t break too much,” Mazeroski said. “And this one came in chest high.”

It left the ballpark, soaring over Yankees left fielder Yogi Berra and the 406-foot sign, into the grass and woods behind the 12-foot wall, sending the Yankees into despair, the Pirates into euphoria, and turning Mazeroski into Pittsburgh’s hero. “Somehow, it just did something to the city,” Mazeroski said, “and they just can’t forget it.”

Recently, J. W. Eddy, 25, a Pirates fan from Uniontown, Pa., visited the remnants of that wall while taking a break from studying for the bar exam at the nearby University of Pittsburgh Law School. Why come to this old piece of brick wall to remember an event that occurred 23 years before he was even born?

“It’s kind of sacred here, really,” Eddy said. “To any true Pirate fan, it’s like folklore. You just come to touch some of that history.”