1960 Game 7, 2nd inning: Pirates break it open!

1960 World Series programPreviously: First inning

Mickey Mantle leads off the second for the Yankees. Was he just trying to drag a bunt there? You’ve got to be kidding me. The Pittsburgh fans think it should have been a strike but it’s a ball.

Mantle is a 28-year-old 10-year veteran with 320 home runs. I’m trying to picture someone like him today trying a drag bunt in the seventh game of the World Series, down 2-0 in the second inning. Of course there isn’t anyone like him today, not really. Most other days either.

The only active players who are among Mantle’s top 10 most similar players through age 28 are Albert Pujols and Andruw Jones. Now, Andruw Jones at 28 was a very different Andruw Jones than the marginal big leaguer he’s been for the last four years. His age-28 season was 2005, the year he hit 51 home runs. It also happened to be the last year he played in the postseason. I can’t remember him ever trying to bunt his way on, which doesn’t mean he didn’t. He did have a sacrifice bunt in the 1999 NLCS.

Pujols put down a sacrifice bunt in an interleague game against the White Sox on June 16, 2001. It was the 67th game of his career. He’s played in 1,555 games since then, including postseason and All-Star Games, and we’re still waiting for sacrifice number 2.

Ken Griffey Jr., recently retired, is also in Mantle’s top 10 most similar through age 28. He actually was sort of like Mantle, a power-speed center fielder, and he did bunt occasionally, so maybe it’s not so strange to see Mantle try to bunt. The Mick had one or two sacrifices most years up to this point, 13 total, but he’d only have one more, in ’61, and he never sacrificed in the World Series. But he knew how to bunt, and of course he was very fast.

Even though I know he was fast, I think of him more as a slugger than as a fast guy because he hit all those homers and he was so famous for hitting them so far. And, largely a product of the era he played in, for all his speed he didn’t steal that many bases. He swiped 138 in his career, which at the time was a lot. He was in the top 10 in the American League in steals seven times and the top five three times, even though his career high was only 21. He also stole at an 80 percent clip. But still, when I think Mantle, I don’t think of a guy who’d try to drag bunt his way on. This may have a lot more to do with my ignorance of Mantle than with anything else.

Mantle gets back in there. It always strikes me, watching old games, how casual the batters look. Here’s Mantle, an all-time great slugger, with that prodigious strength, and he just sort of stands there, waves the bat, waits for the pitch. It’s such a contrast to someone like Pujols, who looks like 230 pounds of coiled spring as he waits.

I wonder what they would have made of Gary Sheffield if he’d showed up in 1960, menacingly twitching his bat in that way he did. Today’s hitters are all pigeon-toed and twisted, crouched and curled. They know what they’re doing. It’s the state of the art. It’s just funny to see these old-timers walk up there, settle in, calmly set themselves.

Yankees logoMantle flies out to Bill Virdon in right center and here comes Yogi Berra, swinging two bats as he steps into the batter’s box. He’s actually swinging two sticks as he stands there and shares a laugh with the Pirates catcher, Smoky Burgess. He peels one off and hands it to, I guess, the bat boy, out of frame. There’s another thing you don’t see anymore, a guy carrying two bats to home plate. In fact, you never see guys swinging two bats in the on-deck circle. They swing one weighted bat, or some weighted bat-like object. Lead pipes were popular for a while. I used to swing two bats at a time as a kid. Fat lot of good it did me.

Smoky Burgess is a familiar name to me, so much one of those old baseball names that I’m a little surprised to see him here in 1960, so recent. Offhand I would have thought he was a 1920s guy, and that’s without even confusing him with Smoky Joe Wood, who was actually a teens guy. I quick trio to the BR Bullpen reminds me why I know Burgess: He’s the guy who held the record for pinch hits that, for a good stretch of my youth, Manny Mota, the Dodgers’ pinch-hitting specialist, was chasing. Mota eventually broke Burgess’ record of 145 career pinch hits in 1979.

Lenny Harris broke Mota’s record and ended up with 212, which is a record that will probably never be broken because with teams carrying so many pitchers, nobody can afford to carry a pinch-hitting specialist anymore. The active leader in pinch hits is Matt Stairs, who’s about to turn 43. He has 99.

Berra has that same slightly closed left-handed stance Mantle has, bent slightly at the waist, leaning over the plate. I’ve seen both of them play in a rebroadcast game before, the Don Larsen perfect game, but one difference between that broadcast and this one is the main camera. In 1956, most of the action was viewed from behind home plate and up, a press-box view. In this game, the main camera is the same center field view that’s used today. So you get a little better peak at the hitters’ stances, though you get less of a sense of how much Berra moved around before he swung. He’d literally walk around in the box as he started his swing.

He swings at a bad one here, down and away, and hits a bouncer to the left side. Pirates third baseman Don Hoak scrambles to his left, smothers it awkwardly on his hands and knees, springs to his feet and fires to first to get the slow-footed Berra. It’s a nice play. I instinctively wait for the three replays, and of course they don’t come.

“Here’s the Moose,” Bob Prince says, not mentioning Benito Mussolini, whom Bill Skowron’s boyhood friends named him after. Hey, same batting stance as Mantle and Berra, only from the right side. Skowron yanks his head out, toward the third base dugout, as he swings. He hits a low-and-away pitch foul to the right, and I have no idea how he reached it. Skowron was one of the 10 best hitters in the American League in 1960 by OPS, OPS-plus and offensive WAR, but it looks like he has no chance up there. He grounds out to shortstop Dick Groat on an easy play.

Burgess leads off the bottom of the second and Prince says he’s “known to his teammates as ‘the little round man.'” People complain about the deterioration of baseball nicknames, how colorful monikers like “The Dominican Dandy” and “Old Aches and Pains” have been replaced by unimaginative coinages of the A-Rod, K-Rod, Juan-Gone variety. But so far in this one we’ve got a guy named for a dictator and “the little round man.” Not too impressive.

Then again, “the little round man” is a nickname for a guy named Smoky, whose real name was Forrest. Why would a guy named Smoky need another nickname? Did his teammates say, “Smoky just sounds so formal. Why don’t we call him ‘little round man.'” And how did that work? Did they actually walk up to him and say, “Hey, little round man, can I have some of your sunflower seeds?”

The little round man, who has a similar stance to Mantle and Berra, only slightly open instead of slightly closed, whacks one inside first and down the line. Roger Maris makes a nice play to field the ball in Forbes Field’s very short corner — 300 feet down the line — and holds Burgess to a single.

New Pirates logo, 1960
New Pirates logo, 1960

Prince describes Maris fielding the ball “brilliantly” and says, “Ladies and gentleman, that’s all great credit to Roger Maris. Normally, that’s a double.” But Burgess played five and a half years in Pittsburgh and I’d bet folding money he never had a double on a ball like that. A fast runner would have had to bust it to make second. Burgess had no chance, even if Maris had been a lot more leisurely. This was Prince’s home field. Did he really think a slow-footed catcher would routinely get to second on a sharply hit ball into the corner 300 feet from home plate?

Casey Stengel’s headed to the mound, lineup card in hand, and he and Bob Turley talk to each other without looking at each other. Stengel’s seen enough, though, and he summons Bill Stafford from the bullpen. Stafford’s one of the boys who was warming up in the top of the first, and as he walks in — we haven’t reached the brief era of the “bullpen car” yet — Prince asks Yankees announcer Mel Allen to talk about him.

He’s 22 and was brought up from Richmond late in the year when the Yankees staff was struggling, Allen says. He mentions Stafford’s 3-1 record, mostly as a starter, but not his fine 2.25 ERA in 60 innings. Stafford would win 14 games each of the next two years. He would eventually be sent to Kansas City, that graveyard for unwanted Yankees, in a deal that also included Roger Repoz, who I mention just to mention. Repoz was an Athletic only briefly before moving on to the Angels, where he would be one of the first ballplayers I knew about.

Stafford faces the crouching Don Hoak, author of that scrambly play on Berra’s ball in the top of the inning. Stafford’s wild, throwing three straight balls and looking annoyed with himself. The fourth one misses, but it looks like not by much. Hard to tell as we were on the upstairs, behind the plate camera for that one. Two on, nobody out, Pirates up 2-0, and Casey looking worried on the top step. Bobby Shantz and Ralph Terry are working furiously in the bullpen as Bill Mazeroski steps up.

Remember that name, not to give anything away.

Maz bunts Stafford’s first pitch in the air down the first base line. It lands fair but Stafford and Clete Boyer let it roll foul. Prince praises their “very smart execution” but doesn’t mention whether Mazeroski should have perhaps taken a strike instead of bunting at the first pitch, given that Stafford, a 22-year-old rookie, had just come into the game and walked the first hitter on four pitches.

Maz bunts again on the next pitch, this time a bouncer down the third base line. It looks to me like it’s going to go foul again, the last bounce much closer to the line than the second to last, the ball looking like it’s got some serious english on it. But Stafford has pounced off the mound sharply and he cuts in front of Boyer, makes a barehand pickup just before the ball bounces onto the dirt and, falling backward across the foul line, throws to first. Safe! The bases are loaded with nobody out. “And Casey’s beside himself,” Prince says. Maybe he thought that ball was going foul too.

New MLB logo, 1960
New MLB logo, 1960

Stengel charges out of the dugout. He’d been booed last time he emerged and he’s booed again. He gives Stafford a lecture, looking right up into his face this time and resting his index finger on Stafford’s chest as he speaks.

Vern Law is the hitter. For a pitcher, he’s no slouch with the bat, a lifetime .195 hitter with eight home runs at this point, and he’d had 17 hits that season, a career high to that point. He takes one, misses one, fouls one on a check swing. Virdon waits in the on-deck circle — on one knee, with two bats. Law hits a comebacker. Stafford jumps to spear the one-hopper and start a 1-2-3 double play. The crowd is silent.

Prince had just mentioned that the Pirates hadn’t had many chances to KO the Yankees in one shot in the Series, and now the double play had put a big damper on this chance. But Virdon could still make it a 4-0 game with a hit. Virdon fouls one off to the right, another to the left. Stafford works from a windup. The 0-2 pitch is inside, and then Virdon lofts a soft liner toward right center. Maris charges but has to play it on a short hop, which he bobbles. Two runs score and Virdon slides into second. Hit and an error.

MLB Network shows Virdon, in the theater in Pittsburgh watching the game in 2010, smiling and shrugging. Back in 1960, Groat grounds out to Boyer on a check-swing grounder to end the inning, but the damage is done.

“We were up 4-0 and it felt pretty good,” Mazeroski says in a contemporary interview, “but by a long shot it didn’t feel like we had won this game yet. There was still a lot of game left to play, and, you know, you’re never comfortable with any lead. I don’t care if it’s a 15-0 lead. You’re never comfortable with that many innings to go.”

I don’t know, Maz. Four to nothing after two with the Deacon on the mound? I like your chances.

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All images from Chris Creamer’s Sportslogos.net, used without permission, but in the hope that no one minds.