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St. Louis Cardinals Hall of Famer, legendary tough-guy Bob Gibson dies at 84

How dominating was he? He pitched an astounding 255 complete games and his 1.12 ERA in 1968 spurred baseball to change its rules, lowering the height of the mound.
 
In this Oct. 2, 1968, file photo, St. Louis Cardinals ace Bob Gibson pitches to the Detroit Tigers' Norm Cash during the ninth inning of Game 1 of the World Series at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. Gibson, the dominating pitcher who won a record seven consecutive World Series starts and set a modern standard for excellence when he finished the 1968 season with a 1.12 ERA, died Friday, Oct. 2, 2020. He was 84.
In this Oct. 2, 1968, file photo, St. Louis Cardinals ace Bob Gibson pitches to the Detroit Tigers' Norm Cash during the ninth inning of Game 1 of the World Series at Busch Stadium in St. Louis. Gibson, the dominating pitcher who won a record seven consecutive World Series starts and set a modern standard for excellence when he finished the 1968 season with a 1.12 ERA, died Friday, Oct. 2, 2020. He was 84. [ AP ]
Published Oct. 3, 2020

ST. LOUIS — By almost any account, Stan Musial was considered the greatest Cardinals player. By the same accounts, Bob Gibson, who died at age 84 Friday night in Omaha, Neb., under hospice care after fighting pancreatic cancer for more than a year, was considered the franchise’s greatest pitcher.

Gibson was the Cardinals' second National Baseball Hall of Famer to die in the past month. His longtime teammate Lou Brock died at age 81 on Sept. 6. And another Hall of Fame pitcher from this era, the Mets’ Tom Seaver, died in late August at 75.

Gibson’s death came on the 52nd anniversary of perhaps his greatest game, a record 17-strikeout performance in Game 1 of the 1968 World Series.

Gibson, like Musial a rarity who played his entire career (1959-75) with the Cardinals, set club records for games won at 251 and complete games at a staggering 255, let alone a franchise-best 56 shutouts, strikeouts (3,117) and innings pitched at 3,884.

But, when he was young, there was little to suggest Gibson would achieve what he achieved. His father died before he was born, and his mother, Victoria, worked in a laundry to raise her seven children. Gibson’s early years were filled with medical troubles — rickets, pneumonia, asthma, hay fever and a heart problem.

Despite all the illnesses, Gibson became an all-round athlete, starring in baseball, basketball and track in high school in Omaha. He then played baseball and basketball for Creighton University before becoming a Harlem Globetrotter for one year. After going a combined 6-11 for his first two seasons with the Cardinals, he put together 14 straight seasons of double-figure wins.

Gibson had five 20-win seasons, two with 19 victories and another of 18. He was so good in 1968 that baseball had to change its rules. Gibson compiled a modern-day best earned run average of 1.12 while winning 22 games and throwing 13 shutouts to lead a parade of pitching dominance in baseball and, for 1969, the height of the mound was lowered by 33 percent, from 15 inches to 10.

This didn’t seem to make a whole lot of difference, though to the hard-throwing right-hander, who was 20-13 with a 2.18 ERA in 1969 while pitching 314 innings, nine more than his previous season and striking out 269 hitters, one more than he had in 1968.

But he had leapt to the national forefront in 1964 when he worked five times, 40 innings' worth, in a 14-day span, four of them starts, as he helped the Cardinals win the National League pennant by one game and then starred as the Cardinals beat the New York Yankees four games to three in the World Series, the Cardinals' first Series crown since 1946.

Gibson pitched 27 innings in three Series games. One of the starts went eight innings but his second went 10 as he won Game 5, 5-2. Then he came back on two days' rest and worked a complete-game 7-5 win in Game 7.

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“That last game ... I was tired,” admitted Gibson.

The Cardinals, who held spring training in St. Petersburg throughout Gibson’s career, held a 7-3 lead into the top of the ninth and manager Johnny Keane had left-hander Ray Sadecki warming up in the bullpen.

“In the ninth inning, I wasn’t pitching, I was throwing,” Gibson had said. "Before the inning started, Keane said, ‘I don’t want you to try to be fancy. Just throw it over the middle of the plate. I don’t believe they’re going to hit four home runs.’

"They hit two, by Clete Boyer and Phil Linz. And Phil Linz couldn’t hit home runs. Clete knocked the crap out of it and then they did it again.

“I had good stuff. I didn’t just lay it in there, but I looked in the dugout and Johnny wasn’t anywhere to be found,” Gibson said.

At this point, Gibson said he thought he would try a different approach.

“I thought maybe I should start pitching instead of just throwing,” said Gibson, who got Bobby Richardson to pop to second baseman Dal Maxvill for the final out.

With that putout, Gibson had started a string of pitching nine-inning complete games in the World Series. In 1967 and 1968, he pitched six times, with all of them complete games.

The best of that lot was one of the most dominant games in World Series history. In the first game of the 1968 Series, he struck out 17 Detroit Tigers although the Tigers would win the Series in seven games. In his book Pitch by Pitch, centering on that game, Gibson revealed that, perhaps for inspiration, he had put a button over his locker before the Series that said, “I’m not prejudiced. I hate everybody.”

Gibson pitched a no-hitter on Aug. 14, 1971, at Pittsburgh and three years later became the second pitcher in history, behind Washington’s Walter Johnson, to reach the 3,000 strikeout plateau. How tough was he? He faced three more batters after suffering a broken leg when hit by a Roberto Clemente liner on July 15, 1967. Gibson missed 52 days, returned in time to pitch the pennant-clincher and then won three games in the World Series besides hitting a home run in Game 7 at Boston.

Besides being the best Cardinals pitcher, Gibson perhaps was the most intense Cardinals player ever. When he was pitching, he rarely even talked to his own teammates, let alone the opposing players. And if he did have something to say, it was brief and to the point.

When a catcher, even longtime batterymate Tim McCarver would come to the mound, to ask a question, or, dare to offer a suggestion, Gibson was said to have snarled, “The only thing you know about pitching is you can’t hit it.”

After outfielder Mike Shannon was switched to third base, Shannon came to the mound on opening day to ask Gibson where to play a certain hitter. Gibson said, “Don’t worry about it.”

Shannon replied, “What do you mean?”

Replied Gibson, “I won’t let them hit the ball to you.”

And, basically, he didn’t. Shannon rarely had a chance when Gibson was pitching, other than when Gibson needed a double play against a right-handed pull hitter.

Gibson announced in January 1975 that that would be his last season and the club had a day for him on Sept. 1. Two days later, having been banished to the bullpen, Gibson allowed a pinch-hit, game-losing grand slam to unheralded Chicago Cubs first baseman Pete LaCock (When the two faced off a decade later, at an old-timers game, Gibson beaned him). Gibson retired the next batter, Don Kessinger, on a groundout, then walked off the mound for the final time.

“I had reached my absolute limit in humiliation,” Gibson said in his book Stranger to the Game. "I said to myself, ‘That’s it. I’m out of here.’ "

Gibson remained idle while the Cardinals fell out of contention and on Sept. 15, two weeks after his special day, Gibson said goodbye to his teammates and headed home with 10 games remaining in the season, knowing he would never pitch again. No one ever wore his uniform No. 45 again, either. And some six years later, he was enshrined in the Hall of Fame.

The Cardinals confirmed Gibson’s death shortly after a 4-0 loss to San Diego on Friday night in the National League Wild Card Series ended their season.

One of baseball’s most uncompromising competitors, the two-time NL Cy Young Award winner was named the World Series MVP in their 1964 and ’67 championship seasons. And though the Cards came up just short in 1968, Gibson was voted the National League’s MVP.

“I just heard the news about losing Bob Gibson, and it’s kind of hard losing a legend. You can lose a game, but when you lose a guy like Bob Gibson, just hard,” Cardinals All-Star catcher Yadier Molina said. “Bob was funny, smart, he brought a lot of energy. When he talked, you listened. It was good to have him around every year. We lose a game, we lose a series, but the tough thing is we lost one great man.”

At his peak, Gibson may have been the most talented all-around starter in history, a nine-time Gold Glove winner who roamed wide to snatch up grounders despite a fierce, sweeping delivery that drove him to the first-base side of the mound; and a strong hitter who twice hit five home runs in a single season and batted .303 in 1970, when he also won his second Cy Young Award.

Averaging 19 wins a year from 1963-72, he finished 251-174 with a 2.91 ERA. He didn’t throw as hard as Sandy Koufax, or from as many angles as Juan Marichal, but batters never forgot how he glared at them (or squinted, because he was nearsighted) as if settling an ancient score.

But it was his fierce competitiveness that set him apart, a drive that didn’t even spare his own family.

“I’ve played a couple of hundred games of tic-tac-toe with my little daughter and she hasn’t beaten me yet,” he once told The New Yorker’s Roger Angell. “I’ve always had to win. I’ve got to win.”

Equally disciplined and impatient, Gibson worked so quickly that Hall of Fame broadcaster Vin Scully joked that Gibson pitched as if his car was double-parked.

His concentration was such that he seemed unaware he was on his way to a World Series single game strikeout record (surpassing Koufax’s 15) in 1968 until McCarver convinced him to look at the scoreboard.

McCarver once called Gibson “the luckiest pitcher I ever saw. He always pitches when the other team doesn’t score any runs.”

He was, somehow, even greater in the postseason, finishing 7-2 with a 1.89 ERA and 92 strikeouts in 81 innings.

Gibson’s 1.12 ERA in the 1968 regular season was the third lowest for any starting pitcher since 1900 and by far the best for any starter in the post-dead-ball era, which began in the 1920s.

His performance, the highlight of the so-called “Year of the Pitcher,” left officials worried that fans had bored of so many 1-0 games, so they lowered the mound from 15 to 10 inches in 1969 and shrank the strike zone.

“I was pissed,” Gibson later remarked, although he remained a top pitcher for several years.

Gibson had a long major-league career even though he was a relatively late bloomer and was in his early 30s in 1968. Signed by the Cards as an amateur free agent in 1957, he had early trouble with his control, a problem solved by developing one of baseball’s greatest sliders, along with a curve to go with his hard fastball. He knew how to throw strikes and how to aim elsewhere when batters stood too close to the plate.

Hall of Famer Hank Aaron once counseled then-Braves teammate Dusty Baker about Gibson.

“Don’t dig in against Bob Gibson; he’ll knock you down,” Aaron said, according to the Boston Globe. “He’d knock down his own grandmother if she dared to challenge him. Don’t stare at him, don’t smile at him, don’t talk to him. He doesn’t like it. If you happen to hit a home run, don’t run too slow, don’t run too fast. If you happen to want to celebrate, get in the tunnel first. And if he hits you, don’t charge the mound, because he’s a Gold Glove boxer.”

Only the second Black man (after Don Newcombe) to win the Cy Young Award, he was an inspiration when insisting otherwise. Gibson would describe himself as a “blunt, stubborn Black man” who scorned the idea he was anyone’s role model.

But he was proud of the Cards' racial diversity and teamwork, a powerful symbol during the civil rights era, and his role in ensuring that players did not live in segregated housing during the season.

He was close to McCarver, a Tennessean who would credit Gibson with challenging his own prejudices, and the acknowledged leader of a club that featured whites (McCarver, Mike Shannon, Roger Maris), Blacks (Gibson, Brock and Flood) and Hispanics (Orlando Cepeda, Julian Javier).

“Our team, as a whole, had no tolerance for ethnic or racial disrespect,” Gibson wrote in Pitch by Pitch, published in 2015. “We’d talk about it openly and in no uncertain terms. In our clubhouse, nobody got a free pass.”

Current Cardinals pitcher Jack Flaherty, who is Black, grew close to Gibson in recent years. The right-handers would often talk, the 24-year-old Flaherty soaking up advice from the great who wore No. 45.

“That one hurts,” said Flaherty, the Cardinals' losing pitcher on Friday night against the Padres. “He’s a legend, first and foremost, somebody who I was lucky enough to learn from. You don’t get the opportunity to learn from somebody of that caliber and somebody who was that good very often.

“I had been kept up on his health and where he was at. I was really hoping it wasn’t going to be today. I was going to wear his jersey today to the field but decided against it."

He was born Pack Robert Gibson in Omaha on Nov. 9, 1935.

“Growing up without a father is a hardship and deprivation that is impossible to measure,” Gibson wrote in From Ghetto to Glory, one of a handful of books he published.

Gibson went to Omaha Tech High School and stayed in town, attending Creighton from 1954-57, and averaging 20.2 points during his college basketball career. The roughly 6-foot, 2-inch Gibson, who seemed so much taller on the mound, spent the 1957-58 season with the Globetrotters before turning his full attention to baseball.

At Omaha in the minor leagues, he was managed by Keane, who became a mentor and cherished friend, “the closest thing to a saint” he would ever know in baseball.

Gibson was often forced to live in separate hotels from his white teammates and was subjected to vicious taunts from fans, but he would remember Keane as “without prejudice” and as an unshakeable believer in his talent.

His early years with the Cardinals were plagued by tensions with manager Solly Hemus, who openly used racist language and was despised by Gibson and other Cardinals. Hemus was fired in the middle of the 1961 season and replaced, to Gibson’s great fortune, by Keane.

The pitcher’s career soon took off. He made the first of his eight National League All-Star teams in 1962, and the following year went 18-9 and kept the Cardinals in the pennant race until late in the season.

In 1964, a year he regarded as his favorite, he won three times in the last 11 games as the Cardinals surged past the collapsing Philadelphia Phillies and won the National League pennant. Gibson lost Game 2 of the World Series against the Yankees, but he came back with wins in Games 5 and 7 and was named the MVP.

The Series was widely regarded as a turning point in baseball history, with the great Yankee dynasty falling the following year and the Cardinals embodying a more modern and aggressive style of play.

Gibson was also close to Keane’s successor, Red Schoendienst, who took over in 1965 after Keane left for the Yankees. Gibson enjoyed 20-game seasons in 1965 and 1966 and likely would have done the same a third straight year, but Clemente’s line drive broke his leg in the middle of the season.

Gibson returned in September, finished 13-7 during the regular season and led the Cardinals to the 1967 championship, winning three times and hitting a home run off Red Sox ace Jim Lonborg in Game 7 at Boston’s Fenway Park. The final out was especially gratifying; he fanned first baseman George “Boomer” Scott, who throughout the Series had been taunting Gibson and the Cards.

But 1968 was on a level few had seen before. He began slowly, losing five of his first eight decisions despite an ERA of 1.52, and fumed over the lack of hitting support. (“Starvation fare,” Angell would call it).

But from early June to late August, Gibson was unbeatable. He won 15 straight decisions, threw 10 shutouts and at one point allowed just three earned runs during 101 innings. One of those runs scored on a wild pitch, another on a bloop hit.

He was at his best again in the opener of the World Series against the Tigers, giving a performance so singular that his book Pitch by Pitch was dedicated entirely to it.

On a muggy afternoon in St. Louis, facing 31-game winner Denny McLain and such power hitters as Al Kaline — who also died this year — Norm Cash and Willie Horton, Gibson allowed just five hits and walked one in a 4-0 victory. Gibson struck out at least one batter every inning and in the ninth fanned Kaline, Cash and Horton to end with 17, the final pitch a slow breaking ball that left Horton frozen in place.

“I was awed,” Tigers second baseman Dick McAuliffe later said. “He doesn’t remind me of anybody. He’s all by himself.”

In Game 4, Gibson homered as he led St. Louis to a 10-1 romp over McLain and a 3-1 advantage in the Series. But the Tigers won the next two and broke through in the finale against Gibson, who had a one-hitter with two outs in the seventh inning and the score 0-0.

Gibson allowed two singles before Curt Flood, a Gold Glove centerfielder, misplayed Jim Northrup’s drive to left-center and the ball fell, before the warning track, for a two-run triple. The Cardinals lost 4-1, and Gibson would grimace even decades later when asked about the game.

By the mid-1970s, his knees were aching and he had admittedly lost some of his competitive fury. On the last day of the 1974 season, with a 2-1 lead and a division title possible, he gave up a two-run homer to the Montreal Expos' Mike Jorgensen in the eighth inning and the Cards lost 3-2.

He retired after 1975 and had a far less successful career as a coach, whether for the New York Mets and Atlanta Braves in the 1980s, or for the Cardinals in 1995.

He was married twice, most recently to Wendy Gibson, and spent much of his retirement at his longtime home in the Omaha suburb of Bellevue. He was active in charitable causes and hosted a popular golf event in Omaha that drew some of the top names in sports.

Gibson worried that young people were forgetting about baseball history, and he spoke with dismay about a Cardinals player who knew nothing about Jackie Robinson. But in 2018, Gibson himself was honored when the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra commissioned a rap song in his honor.

The lyrics inspired by From Ghetto to Glory — “He was a game changer The complete gamer Throw a pitch so fast It’ll rearrange ya He’s no stranger He’s Bob Gibson been on a mission He changed the game forever The pitcher was his position.”

Information from Rick Hummel of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch and Hillel Italie of the Associated Press was used in this report.