Book Excerpt: One Nation Under Baseball: How the 1960s Collided with the National Pastime

By John Florio and Ouisie Shapiro.

I am a man of few words. So I’ll just say this about number 11 in our book excerpt series: “Great read.” And “one of my favorites.”

It is “One Nation Under Baseball: How the 1960s Collided with the National Pastime” by John Florio and Ouisie Shapiro (April 2017, University of Nebraska Press, $9.99 Kindle, $19.38 Hardcover).

To give you an idea of the work in its entirely, I asked Mr. Florio to introduce “One Nation” to curious readers. Here is that introduction:

“One Nation Under Baseball explores the intersection between American society and America’s pastime during the 1960s. It looks at the central issues -- race relations, the role of the press, and the labor wars between the players and the owners -- and reveals the events that reshaped the game.

“The decade was rich with memorable events. We spoke with insiders like Bill White and Elston Howard’s widow, Arlene, about the Jim Crow laws in Florida that segregated black players during spring training. Civil rights leader Andrew Young gave us a firsthand account of what it took for the city of Atlanta, determined to set itself apart from the backward South, to attract Henry Aaron and the Milwaukee Braves.

“We also look at the assassinations of JFK, RFK, and MLK through the eyes of ballplayers who were deeply affected by the events. Mudcat Grant had met John Kennedy in 1960 and was devastated when he heard the news of Kennedy’s death. Bob Gibson reacted to Dr. King’s murder by channeling his fury onto opponents during the ’68 season. Don Drysdale, who’d had a personal connection to Robert Kennedy, took his death to heart.

“We also cover fascinating stories featuring lesser-known names. George Gmelch was a minor-league prospect for the Tigers when he was called to the draft board. Fearing deployment to Vietnam, he and two other players schemed to flunk their physicals. And Michael Feinberg, who as a teenager worked as a vendor at Shea Stadium, smoked pot with John Lennon in the dressing room before the Beatles went on stage.

“The bad boy of the decade, [the late] Jim Bouton, [told] us how he threw the sport into chaos with baseball’s first tell-all. 'Ball Four' shook the game to its core; no one was more shaken than Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, who did his best to censor the book. Bouton’s recollection of his encounter with Kuhn the day he was summoned to the commissioner’s office is both hilarious and disturbing.”

The excerpt I have chosen is Chapter 10, with topics of including, but not limited to the 1965 Mets, the Beatles at Shea Stadium, Sandy Koufax, the Watts riots, Johnny Roseboro and Juan Marichal, and the 1965 World Series.

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The excerpt begins here. Enjoy:

In 1965, the Mets lost 112 games. A desperate fan might have seen this as an improvement. In their inaugural season of 1962, they’d lost a record 120.

Yet, since moving to Shea, the perennial losers were consistently outdrawing their crosstown rivals. If CBS, the new Yankee owners, wondered why fans would sooner follow the Mets than they would a team with twenty-nine pennants and twenty world championships, the answer wasn’t on the field—it was in the stands.

Mets fans giddily flocked to Shea as if they were off to a neighborhood block party. They showed up with tambourines, hoisted flags on fishing poles, hung banners, blew trumpets, and lit firecrackers. Forget Yankee Stadium; when it came to hosting a mass jubilee, Shea was even outdoing the World’s Fair.

As Chipmunk Leonard Shecter wrote, “The Mets are a lively example of this being an age for zaniness. Look for another word to explain why the bedraggled Mets are, in this age of sleekness—in women, cars, and filter tips—so much more popular than the ultra-sleek Yankees. Zany is the only word that describes it.”

Perhaps no player symbolized the team’s ineptitude more than first baseman Dick Stuart, who went by any number of nicknames, the two most famous being, “The Man with the Iron Glove” and “Dr. Strangeglove.”

Stuart couldn’t field—and for the brief time he was in New York, he couldn’t hit either. But he was popular, so much so that he had his own pregame TV show, “Stump Stuart.” The show, sponsored by Thom McAn shoes, consisted of Stuart going into the stands and answering questions posed by the fans. The basic premise was that any fan who stumped him would walk away with a new pair of Thom McAn’s.

Michael Feinberg, the vendor who won Banner Day at Shea, tells the story:

They taped the show hours before they opened the gates. So a whole group of vendors would take off their outfits, put on their regular clothes again, fill up a couple of rows of seats in the stands, and the camera would zoom in and make it look like a big crowd. But, if anybody watched this show, they would see that the same guys were sitting there day after day, winning pairs of shoes. I must’ve had forty pairs because I would always ask [Dick] the same question: ‘What was your batting average in the World Series?’ It was terrible and Dick would always come up with some ridiculous answer.

Feinberg also took part in another Mets tradition. Banner Day, a holdover from the Polo Grounds, put the spotlight on the fans, inviting them to march their homemade signs across the field in a sort of ragamuffin parade, the kind you might expect to see in a small town on Halloween. The winners took home a year’s worth of bragging rights, along with a prize package roughly comparable in value to a pair of Thom McAns.

The competition was stiff, mostly because the fans had so much fertile material to work with.

One banner read, “We Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire, We Just Want to Finish Ninth.”

Another called out to President Johnson: “Thanks for Medicare, LBJ. Apply it to the Mets Right Away.” 

Yet another played on a popular ad campaign: “I Dreamed I Won the Pennant in My Maidenform Bra.”

The year that Feinberg and his friend, Roy, entered the contest, they made a sign out of cloth stretched over a giant wooden frame. They covered the cloth with a picture of the team’s mascot, Mr. Met, holding a get-well card to Casey Stengel, who was recovering from a broken hip.

Feinberg’s story illustrates just how homespun the entire operation was.

We had two-by-fours and we were trying to build a frame during the first game of a doubleheader. We get all the wood lined up and we don’t have a hammer. So I run through the bullpen and I get [Mets’ pitcher] Tug McGraw to get me a hammer. Tug McGraw gets me a hammer and we finish making the sign. It was a two-man sign and the gates open and the parade starts and we start bringing it out, and it’s too windy, and the thing is twisting all over the place. So we call people from the stands on the third-base side to jump over and help us. We had about eight people helping us carry it. But when we got to the infield we told them to leave, because [we were in the two-person competition and] that’s when you walk past the judges. And we were picked as one of the finalists. The banner covered basically half the infield. It was huge. When the parade finally ended, they called all the finalists together.

And they said, ‘And now for first prize in the two-man category is the big banner…’

And me and Roy started running up.

‘Casey Stengel!’

We stopped short. Oh my god, that’s not us, our banner’s not Casey Stengel, ours is Mr. Met.

And Tug McGraw jumps up from the top step of the dugout screaming at us, ‘That’s you, idiot! That’s you!’

Banner Day was one of the season’s biggest draws, but ironically, Mets ownership couldn’t stand the signs—or the circus-like atmosphere that came with them. As George Vecsey explains, “The Mets were run by a stuffy old WASP owner, Mrs. Payson….It was a grim organization that somehow produced a funny team. Mets management wanted nothing to do with banners; they wanted to get those things out of the ballpark.”

One of the club’s biggest nuisances was Karl Ehrhardt, a Mets-aholic who’d worked as a German translator for the Allies during World War II. When the Mets arrived at Shea, Ehrhardt was a commercial artist who designed ads for American Home Foods. It wasn’t long before he was creating banners at his home in Glen Oaks, Queens, and driving to Shea to hold them up during Mets games.

One of Ehrhardt’s early banners referred to the team’s losing record and its chairman and minority owner, M. Donald Grant. The sign read, “Welcome to Grant’s Tomb.” Stadium security guards confiscated it, slicing it to pieces on the charge that it was an insult to the team’s ownership.

Seeing the Mets as the people’s team, and the action of the guards as an affront to free speech, Ehrhardt brought his case to the press box, telling the writers that he’d just been censored. The newsmen rallied around him, and Ehrhardt was quickly back in his seat, his Mets derby on his head, holding up the sharp-witted placards that would make him a local celebrity and give him the nickname, “The Sign Man.”

After one of many Jose Cardenal strikeouts, Ehrhardt raised his sign, “Jose, Can You See?” When Frank Tavares made an error, he proclaimed, “Look Ma, No Hands!”

Robert Lipsyte sees those years at Shea as the point of inflection during a decade of change. “What was really happening in baseball, and at arenas everywhere, was the sensibilities of the rock generation infiltrating sports,” he says. “And that was reflected by the banners, by the fact that the crowd now became more engaged, expressing themselves in ways they never did before. You weren’t going to church, but there [had been] a certain kind of respect and dignity in ballparks. By the sixties, people were dancing in the aisles at concerts, expressing themselves in the ballpark.”

The rock generation invaded Shea in more ways than one.

In August of ’65, the Beatles were back in the U.S., kicking off their two-week tour with a stop at Shea. The group was already enjoying unprecedented fame, having sold a hundred million singles and more than twenty-five million albums worldwide.

Afraid that Beatles fans would clog the tunnels from Manhattan to Queens, the police escorted the four pop stars from their midtown Manhattan hotel to the East 34th Street Heliport. There, they put them into a helicopter and flew them to a rooftop landing at the World’s Fair, where a Wells Fargo armored van was waiting to bring them to Shea.

Michael Feinberg, the Mets’ vendor, worked that evening, and remembers wandering the ballpark’s underground passages hoping to find the rock stars: “I was walking toward what I figured would be the Beatles’ dressing room…and there’s nobody there and I hear an argument, and the argument is between Sid Bernstein, the guy who promoted the concert, and Brian Epstein, the Beatles’ manager. And Brian Epstein is livid because there are no refreshments in the Beatles’ dressing room. And I’m listening to this. So I walk in wearing my vendor’s uniform, and I say, ‘Excuse me, I was just at the commissary and I was wondering if you guys need any food.’”

When Feinberg received a resounding “Yes,” he rushed upstairs, grabbed a bunch of sandwiches and drinks, and brought them back to the dressing room. Minutes later, he was joined by the four Beatles. Feinberg elaborates:

The Lovin’ Spoonful were in there, the Mamas and the Papas were in there, the Stones came after the Beatles were already on the stage. There were these girls who had baked heart-shaped cakes for the Beatles, and they were crying and begging to bring them into the dressing room…. I had never smoked marijuana in my life, and they were smoking marijuana. And I had just sat down next to John Lennon when the pot was going around, and my first marijuana experience was John Lennon handing me a joint, and going, ‘Here.’ The only person in the room not smoking pot was Ed Sullivan [the sixty-three-year-old television personality, who was the evening’s emcee].

The Beatles took the stage at 9:17 after being introduced by Sullivan. The crowd noise was so deafening that the police plugged their ears with cotton. The band’s three front men—Lennon, McCartney, and Harrison—were forced to look at each other for musical cues, since they couldn’t hear the beat coming from their drummer, Starr, who was stationed immediately behind them.

The New York Times reported, “Several of the fans in the first row of the grandstands moaned, wept, and called to the special police on the field, ‘Please, please, give us some blades of grass. They walked on the grass.”

It was the first time a rock concert had been staged in an outdoor sports stadium and it brought in record receipts—not only the $304,000 in ticket sales, but also the Beatles’ take of $160,000.

It was doubtful any of the 55,000 fans could hear the band over their own screams. But one thing was certain: the rumble could be felt across America.

By the fall of 1965, the Dodgers’ Sandy Koufax was thriving in Los Angeles. Not yet thirty years old, he’d thrown four no-hitters (one a perfect game), won two Cy Young awards, and collected an MVP trophy.

As Pittsburgh Pirates slugger Willie Stargell said, batting against Koufax was “like eating soup with a fork.”

Koufax was the most dominant lefthander in the game—and with that title came celebrity status. Yet, the reluctant star guarded his privacy to the point of reclusiveness. For most celebrities, the paradox would be unmanageable, but Koufax handled it brilliantly.

He realized his name was feeding his retirement account, so he leveraged it whenever possible, figuring he’d relax when his playing days were over. The young star also recognized that time was working against him, that there were only a finite number of innings left in his arthritic elbow. His left arm was nearly always in pain. He’d already taken to plunging it into ice water after games; he’d also been downing codeine pills and Butazolidin, a non-steroidal anti-inflammatory used on racehorses. Koufax was even known to slather his arm with capsaicin, the compound found in the world’s hottest chili peppers. The stuff was so harsh that ballplayers called it “atomic balm.” (One teammate, who’d innocently donned one of Koufax’s long-sleeve workout shirts, came in contact with the cream; his skin was soon blistering, and he was doubled over, vomiting.)

It was to Koufax’s advantage that he was in Los Angeles—even better, that he was in Hollywood. When word reached entertainment producers that the handsome, raven-haired athlete was available, they began calling, often to inject life into a sagging television series. (They also called the Dodgers’ ace righthander, California-blond Don Drysdale, and the team’s fiery third-base coach, Leo Durocher.) Koufax played a cop in 77 Sunset Strip, a doorman in Bourbon Street Beat, and a soldier in Colt .45.

The pitcher’s moneymaking ventures also extended to Santa Monica Boulevard, just south of the Sunset Strip and a short walk from the legendary Troubadour nightclub. There stood the Tropicana, a modest motel that Koufax had purchased in 1962, renaming it Sandy Koufax’s Tropicana Motor Inn, and promoting it with advertisements that touted air-conditioned rooms and friendly prices.

By the mid-sixties, the Trop had become a second home to musicians performing at the Troubadour—up-and-comers like Bob Marley, the Mamas and the Papas, the Byrds, Van Morrison, and Janis Joplin. Jim Morrison also stayed there, spending his nights hanging out at the Palms, a lesbian dive across the street, before returning to the Trop in the wee hours to crash and write songs, many of which became hits for his group, the Doors.

“The rooms looked like Little Richard decorated them with somebody’s Midwestern grandma on a lost weekend, and they were continually being trashed,” writes Iris Berry, a musician and pop culture historian. “[The Trop] was the Chelsea Hotel with poolside AstroTurf. Parties sometimes lasted for months and often ended in mayhem. There was a constant parade of groupies, photographers, and drug dealers.”

Despite the cultural history being made at his motel, Koufax was seldom, if ever, there. Instead, he was focused on baseball. With two months left in the season, the Dodgers were in first place—with the Braves, the Giants, and the Reds nipping at their tail. On August 10, they came back to Dodger Stadium for an eight-game homestand. Koufax started it off by striking out fourteen and beating the Mets for his twentieth win. 

But just as Dodger fans were getting excited about their team’s chances, the real world suddenly intruded, casting a giant pall over the city, and the rest of the country.

On Wednesday, August 11, as Don Drysdale stood under the lights at Dodger Stadium and traded zeroes with Mets starter Larry Miller, a skirmish was breaking out only twelve miles south. Two police officers, both white, had stopped a black motorist suspected of drunk driving—and were soon surrounded by a crowd of angry, fired-up locals. This was Watts, a black neighborhood in South Central Los Angeles with a history of simmering resentment, a community plagued by high unemployment, inadequate schools, and a tense relationship with a mostly white police force. The scene became all too familiar. Words were exchanged. Punches were thrown. A bottle crashed by the cops’ feet. Blood was spilled. Out came more bottles. And more cops. And more spectators. And a gun.

By the time the Dodgers’ game ended around 10:30—Drysdale had beaten the Mets 1-0—the situation in Watts had escalated into a full-blown riot. Enraged locals were shooting at the police and firefighters, torching buildings, and looting stores. When the Dodgers took the field two nights later, plumes of black smoke drifted over the crowd of 32,551, hovering like storm clouds as Claude Osteen beat the Pirates 3-1.

Forty-six square miles of South Central LA had turned into a war zone. The city called for a curfew and declared martial law, dispatching 15,000 National Guard troops to the area. Yet the Dodgers continued to play. On Saturday night, Sandy Koufax nailed down his 21st win, a ten-inning, 1-0 masterpiece against the Pirates. After the game, Dodgers outfielder Willie Crawford, who lived in the curfew zone, couldn’t go home. Instead, he stayed with teammate Johnny Roseboro.

The melee finally calmed on Tuesday, but the week of violence had left 34 dead, more than a thousand people injured, four thousand arrested, and $40 million worth of property destroyed.

Five days later, on August 22, the Dodgers were in San Francisco, closing out a four-game series with their archrivals, the Giants. Only one-and-a-half games separated the two teams, and tempers had been running high all weekend.

Dodgers catcher Johnny Roseboro and Giants pitcher Juan Marichal were especially on edge.

The Watts riot had rattled Roseboro. He lived on the fringes of Watts and feared that the violence would spread to his street. On more than one occasion, he spent the night on his front stoop, clutching a gun, guarding his home and his family.

Marichal was deeply troubled by the news coming from his homeland, the Dominican Republic. The country, where he was born and raised, was in the midst of a civil war and the twenty-seven-year-old pitcher hadn’t been able to reach family members.

Fans poured into Candlestick Park, filling it to near capacity. Not only were the Dodgers and Giants fighting for the pennant, the game’s matchup was a beauty: Sandy Koufax was squaring off against Marichal, who’d already won nineteen games.

When the Dodgers jumped out to a 2-0 lead—on a Ron Fairly double in the first and Roseboro single in the second—Marichal went looking for a fight. His first target was Maury Wills. He threw an inside fastball that sent the shortstop sprawling to the dirt.

The next inning, Koufax responded by whizzing a fastball over Willie Mays’s head.

In the top of the third, Marichal knocked down Fairly.

In the bottom of the inning, with the Dodgers clinging to a 2-1 lead and Juan Marichal at the plate, Roseboro called for an inside pitch. Koufax threw a heater, and Roseboro intentionally dropped it. When he picked it up, he threw a laser back to Koufax, barely missing Marichal’s face.

Marichal confronted Roseboro, who came out of his crouch and threw his glove to the ground. Before anybody could intercede, the two were going at it. In the heat of the moment, Marichal raised his bat and brought it down on Roseboro’s head—opening a gash that would require 14 stitches.

Both benches emptied. The players ran onto the field and vented their frustrations on one another, brawling for fourteen minutes. Two of the teams’ biggest stars, Koufax and Mays, did their best to make peace—with little success.

Roseboro wound up missing two games right in the thick of the pennant race. Marichal, the ace of the Giants’ staff, was suspended, missing two outings.

As for the game, Koufax, who’d started the day with a 21-4 record, was clearly shaken. He promptly served up a three-run homer to Mays, lost 4-3, and dropped his next two starts.

By September, though, he was back in form and doing what he could to get the Dodgers into the World Series. He threw a perfect game against the Cubs, silencing a lineup that featured all-stars Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, and Ron Santo. On the second-to-last day of the season, he struck out thirteen Braves en route to a 3-1 victory.

The Dodgers clinched the pennant, beating out the Giants by two games.

Koufax was ready for the Series. The only issue would be his religion.

It was no surprise that Dodgers manager Walter Alston had slated Koufax to pitch the Series opener. Not only would Koufax give the Dodgers their best chance against the Twins, but he’d also be available to face them three times.

Unfortunately for Alston and the Dodgers, the ’65 World Series would open on October 6th. That day happened to be Yom Kippur—and Koufax happened to be Jewish. Although not overly observant, Koufax had said earlier that he wouldn’t work on the religion’s holiest day. For eleven seasons, the Dodgers had respected his wishes, although Yom Kippur had yet to conflict with the postseason. For the record, Koufax was not the first player to make such a request. In 1934, Hall-of-Fame first baseman Hank Greenberg, also Jewish, had asked for, and received, a similar concession from the Detroit Tigers during the team’s drive for the American League pennant.

Alston had no choice. In place of Koufax he sent his second best arm, Don Drysdale, to the mound. The righthander gave up three earned runs in 2 2/3 innings. When Alston walked to the mound to pull him in the third inning, Drysdale reportedly said, “I bet right now you wish I was Jewish, too.”

All concerned agree that Koufax in no way wanted to be the face of Hollywood, baseball, or Judaism. Yet he immediately became the poster-child for a generation of Jewish-Americans. Newspapers wrote about him. Television commentators spoke about him. Jewish baseball fans deified him. Rabbis praised him.

Writer Jane Leavy covered the issue in Sandy Koufax: A Lefty’s Legacy. “By refusing to pitch that day,” she wrote, “Koufax became inextricably linked with the American Jewish experience. He was the New Patriarch: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and Sandy. A moral exemplar, and single, too! (Such a catch!)”

According to Jonathan Sarna, a professor of American Jewish history at Brandeis University, “A generation of young Jews considered [Koufax] the greatest Jew in America. In an era when lots of Jews thought it was best to keep their Judaism quiet, he gave some Jews courage to be outwardly Jewish in other ways—by wearing a Jewish symbol, demonstrating for Soviet Jews, or the like.”

Mitchell Wohlberg, a Baltimore-based rabbi, remembers how, before Koufax sat out that Series opener, Jews would often keep their religious beliefs to themselves. “And along came Sandy Koufax,” he said in a sermon, “the Jewish kid from Borough Park, Brooklyn, who announced to all the world, ‘I’m not pitching. It is Yom Kippur, my holy day... On every Bar and Bat Mitzvah questionnaire, I ask the young man or young lady who their three favorite Jewish people are… to this day, the most frequent answer is Sandy Koufax.”

Years later, Koufax would meet with Steve Lipman, a writer for the newspaper, Jewish Week, at the Dodgers’ spring training headquarters in Arizona. Koufax would tell Lipman the incident drew more notice simply because it coincided with the World Series.

The following exchange is from Lipman’s article, published shortly after the interview:

Why didn’t he play that game?

“Respect.”

 It’s as simple as that?

 “It’s as simple as that,” Koufax said.

 He wasn’t trying to make a statement about Jewish pride?

“Absolutely not.”

Did anyone—owners, management, teammates—pressure him to start the Series, a pitcher’s most prestigious assignment?

He shook his head. “No pressure.”

Was it a risk—could he have endangered his standing with the team?

“No.”

When did he start to realize that, for many Jewish fans, he would become more famous for the one game he didn’t pitch than for the hundreds he did?

The buzz began, a little, the next year; the momentum built after that.

When Koufax did take the mound, in Game 2, he was sharp, throwing five scoreless innings before giving up a pair of runs in the sixth. The Twins, a hungry bunch that hadn’t been to the World Series since 1933 when they were still the Washington Senators, jumped on reliever Ron Perranoski for three runs and beat the Dodgers, 5-1.

LA won the middle three games at home, but dropped the sixth at Metropolitan Stadium to Mudcat Grant, who pitched a gem for his second Series win.

The Series came down to the final game. Alston had a decision to make: go with a rested Drysdale, or give the ball to Koufax, who’d thrown nine innings of shutout ball only two days earlier.

He went with Koufax. How could he not? Koufax had gone 26-8 during the season, striking out 382 batters and posting a 2.04 ERA.

Pitching on two days’ rest, Koufax made Alston seem prescient.

On October 14, the most famous Jew in America reduced the headlines over his skipped start to wasted ink. He threw a complete-game, two-nothing shutout, clinched World Series MVP honors, and ensured that yet another championship trophy would be delivered to the Dodgers’ clubhouse. 

Mudcat Grant, like Koufax, had gone 2-1 in the Series. But while Koufax scored all the gifts and accolades one would expect—not to mention a long list of high-paying, national endorsements—Grant had received little more than the standard World Series bonus.

Steve Jacobson commented on the disparity in Newsday. “[Grant] won two games and lost one, just as Koufax did. But there were other things even a victory in the seventh game wouldn’t have brought Grant. For one thing, he’s married. For another, he’s a Negro. He won twenty-one games, pitched two complete games in the Series and wears clothes as well as anybody around. But nobody has been around yet to ask him to endorse a product. Being the biggest winner in the American League won’t get those fringe benefits for him.”

Phil Pepe had this to say in the New York World-Telegram and Sun: “Jim Grant is a Negro and the world is not quite ready for Negro heroes, and so Jim must struggle because nobody is breaking his neck to sign him for movies and endorsements. He is handsome and he is famous, but he is black…. Sandy [Koufax] could get $100,000 just for demonstrating the way he soaks his arm in a bucket of ice after he pitches. Jim Grant has the kind of pleasant face that would look good in a television commercial…if television was ready for his kind of face.”

Grant wasn’t surprised by the lack of endorsement offers, but he did expect a sizeable raise from the $21,500 he’d earned that season. Anybody could see he was worth more, even the famously insensitive Twins owner, Calvin Griffith. (Years after moving the Senators Minnesota, Griffith spoke at a Lion’s Club, saying he’d brought the team to Bloomington when he realized the area had only 15,000 black residents. “Black people don’t go to ball games, but they’ll fill up a rasslin’ ring and put up such a chant it’ll scare you to death,” he said. “It’s unbelievable. We came here because you’ve got good, hardworking, white people here.”)

Grant met with Griffith after the ’65 season. He wanted to raise his salary to $50,000.

“How much money you guys get from the World Series?” Griffith asked him.

“Forty-five hundred dollars.”

“How many games did you win?” Griffith said.

“Twenty-one.”

“Yeah, you won two games in the World Series. I’ll tell you what I’m gonna do. I’m gonna give you a $2,000 raise, and you take that two thousand, and you put it with the forty-five hundred, and you’ve got a lot of money.”

Grant stared back in disbelief. “You can take that offer, cut it up into little bitty pieces, and shove it…”

Griffith started laughing. At which point he had the pitcher removed from his office.

In the end, Griffith agreed to $35,000.

Luckily for Grant, he had another talent besides baseball. When the World Series ended, he flew to New York, where he cut a record with his singing group, the Kittens. His agent, Bob Messenger, had booked him on a national tour, and after seeing Grant’s heroic performance in the Series, raised his client’s performance fee.

Mudcat and the Kittens hit the club circuit; they played the Holiday Inn in Groton, Connecticut; Steelman’s Steak House in Cherokee, Iowa; the Winona Winter Carnival in Minnesota. And they performed everything from show tunes to rock-and-roll standards. Grant donned white Mohair suits, told jokes, and danced; the Kittens sang and shimmied behind him, at times purring in their feline getups. One performance puts Grant in New York’s Basin Street East nightclub the same night Maury Wills was crooning folk songs and spirituals. The two played together between sets.

For one performance, in Minnesota, Twins fans received free tickets from a local automobile dealer.

A local music critic, reviewing the act, said that Grant was at his best singing or joking with the audience. “Mudcat Grant,” he wrote, “is unquestionably the best singer in the area to have won two World Series games this year.”

It hardly mattered. Only two hundred people had shown up to support the man who’d brought their team within one victory of a world championship.

About the authors:

John Florio and Ouisie Shapiro are frequent contributors to the New York Times, the New Yorker, the Atlantic, the Nation, and ESPN. They are the authors of One Nation Under Baseball: How the 1960s Collided with the National Pastime, and One Punch from the Promised Land: Leon Spinks, Michael Spinks, and the Myth of the Heavyweight Title. Their young adult books include War in the Ring: Joe Louis, Max Schmeling, and the Fight between American and Hitler, and the upcoming Doomed: Sacco, Vanzetti, and the End of the American Dream. John is also a novelist and teacher; he is on the faculty of the Stonecoast MFA creative writing program at the University of Southern Maine. Ouisie is a six-time Emmy-award-winning writer of sports documentaries. John and Ouisie are married and live in Brooklyn, NY.

Howard Cole has been writing about baseball on the Internet since Y2K. Follow him on Twitter. Follow OBHC on Twitter here. Be friends with Howard on Facebook.

Read OBHC online here.