Doug Feldmann - Gibsons Last Stand: The Rise, Fall, and Near Misses of the St. Louis Cardinals, 1969-1975

With little knowledge of what it would launch in the subsequent years of my life, I attended my first St. Louis Cardinals baseball game on June 19, 1974, at the age of four. After scurrying my legs as quickly as possible to stay with my family up the long, winding ramps to the top of old Busch Stadiumwhich at that time was still the new Busch StadiumI imagine my next experience was the same as most first-timers. Standing with mouth agape upon emerging from the narrow tunnels into the seating area, I was stunned at the massive expanse of the lower deck and field that sank far below, as if I were gazing into the Grand Canyon with an equal magnificence of beauty. We had been up in the Arch just a couple hours earlier, and both heavenly views seemed all the same to me. Suddenly anointed as the master of the universe, I was now in command of all my favorite players down on the field, pretending to maneuver them as I did with my baseball cards on our living room floor.

As my mother handed me a game program she had purchased, I noticed that the presumed starting lineups for the evening were already printed on the cardsomething particular to the stadium operations in St. Louis, but not in most other big league parks, which leave the spaces blank. At the bottom of the Cardinals' batting order, I saw a name with the number 45 next to it. Before today, I had heard of their starting pitcher for the game, Bob Gibson, but had never seen him in action on television. Someone sitting near us informed me that this hurler was the team's longtime ace. Being more critical of players than the average four-year-old, I was not too impressed with this pitcher once the game began, and by the time we left the ballpark later that night, this Gibson guy had permitted the San Francisco Giants a total of fourteen hits and had lost the game, dropping the individual season record of this so-and-so to 38, making him quickly forgotten in my mind. I had been, instead,more interested in a new guy for the Cardinals named Bake who had stolen a base in the game. Not giving number 45 any more thought beyond quick relapses of anger for his blowing the contest, I next looked forward to the obligatory postgame pizza we always enjoyed at the Knotty Pine in Breese, Illinois, on the way back to my uncle's house. Getting out of the car in the parking lot, the first thing I always did was look at the temperature on the bank clock down the street. In summertime in the St. Louis area, it always seemed to be in the ninetieseven now in the blackness of midnight, with the only illumination in Breese being the colorful electric Knotty Pine sign and the streetlights, which hung like small frosted moons along U.S. 50 until vanishing from my eyes' reach.

Little did I know at the time was that the Bob Gibson I had witnessed was a shadow of his former self. By this June night in 1974, he was now a man fighting pain in his pitching arm as well as in both legs, struggling in the twilight of a career that was once dominant and straining to summon the power he had, in past seasons, unleashed on batters with unparalleled fury.

Glancing over the scorecard that my family helped me to fill, I noticed that this pitcher Gibsoneven though he was besieged by the Giants' bats all night longwas permitted to complete the entire contest by his manager of ten years, Albert Red Schoendienst. Schoendienst had grown up playing ball with my father in Clinton County, Illinoisappropriately from the village of Germantown, just four miles due south from the Knotty Pineand had always been loyal to Gibson, never short on confidence to give his best pitcher the chance to finish what he started. No one took the ball from the pitcher in Gibson's greatest season of all, the turbulent summer of 1968, when he started thirty-four games and pitched every inning in twenty-eight of them, while shutting out the opponent in almost half of those complete games. I doubt we'll ever see that happen again, Gibson said in the 1990s in mourning that closing salvo of the golden era of baseball. The ensuing changes in the game would be partially blamed on him, as his pitching success caused team owners in later years to believe that cash-paying customers instead wanted base hits and home runs. But as far as Gibson was concerned, pitchers after 1968 never stood a chance as the strike zone was shrunk, the mound was lowered, and the age-old rancor between the pitcher and hitter, as he liked to put it, was ultimately softened into a more politically correct version of the sport. It's really sad that everybody blames the pitchers for not completing ballgames. It really has nothing to do with the pitchers. It has to do with the way the game is played today.

The right-hander would make only thirty-three more starts in a Cardinals uniform after the one I witnessed, hanging up his spikes for good after the 1975 season.

As our car rolled westward on U.S. 50 through Trenton and Aviston before pulling into the Knotty Pine, we caught a few more sounds of the mighty KMOX radio station in St. Louis, by then the longtime home of the Cardinals (and now so once again). Now in his fifth season as the Cards' lead announcer after many more patiently waiting in a secondary role, Jack Buck had concluded his postgame show with one of his usual closing lines: If you're driving home from the game, watch out for the other guyhe's dangerous. Buck's voice, as well as his message, always reassured me; throughout all the changes of Gibson's final years with the Cardinals, Buck's presencealong with that of his partner, Mike Shannonwas the one constant with the ball club as the team on the field endured numerous changes in personnel, attempting to recapture the glory days of the 1960s.

If only I could, just one more time, be riding on some isolated patch of road, somewhere in southern Illinois on another steamy June night, and hear Buck once again.

Turn the radio on, he would implore his listeners at his induction speech to the Radio Hall of Fame in 1995. You will hear a friend. You will enjoy, you will learn, you will imagine, you will improve. Turn the radio onin your car, in your home, in prison, on the beach, in the nursing home. You will not be aloneyou will not be lonely.