Jul 11 2009 07:00 AM
Got an email this morning from Bret S:
I finally got to meet Bill Wakefield and interview him yesterday. I don't know if you remember this, but I contacted Wakefield, asking to interview him, for the CPF many years ago--we've been corresponding by email on and off and he finally sat down with me (at the Pines on 114th street) before last night's game.
Anyway, I thought I'd give you guys the chance to see this piece, which I just wrote up from my notes before I forgot them. A few things (the name of the hotel he lived in, for example) I still need to fact-check but if you want to put this up on the CPF while the Reds are still in town, that's fine with me.
There's also some photos attached. Let me know if you want to put this up on the CPF--obviously I can't post them myself, but I thought you guys might like them anyway.
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On 45 Years’ Rest: Pitcher Bill Wakefield opens his second Mets’ home stadium in Queens
If you could pitch in the major leagues for one complete season, and set a franchise record for “Most Game Appearances” that would stand up for well over a decade, but never again throw another pitch in a big league game, would you be satisfied?
For many of us, that scenario might seem a little frustrating, but for Bill Wakefield it’s an easy call. The former Met, who returned to Queens to throw out the ceremonial first pitch of the July 10, 2009 game against the Reds, seemed perfectly content with his strange and exciting big league career, which began and ended as Casey Stengel’s rookie relief ace on the 1964 Mets.
“I signed a $60,000 contract with the Cardinal organization in 1961 when I was nineteen,” the 68-year old Wakefield said over a glass of iced tea before the Reds game. “I have no complaints at all. The guys I think who really got hurt were the ones who had longer careers but who got underpaid year after year.” Wakefield shrugged. “A guy would play for ten years, but never earn more than 20 or 25,000 a year. Even Mantle back then, never making more than $100,000.” Wakefield shook his head. “But you know who I feel sorriest for? The kids who signed right out of high school for nothing, no bonus, just a chance to play professionally, but got cut a few weeks into spring training. What were they going to do? Too late to go to college, right? What could they do? They just packed up and went back home.”
Wakefield graduated from Stanford University two years after his big-league season, and owned a food distribution company, eventually travelling for Mattel Industries, while some of his teammates, like Nolan Ryan, went on to enjoy long major league careers. “I met Nolan in 1966,” Wakefield recalled. “He was called up to Double-A ball, the Williamsport Mets. A 19-year-old, a quiet kid from Texas, pitched a few games for us—in one of them, a night game, under these old-time Polo Grounds-style lights, he struck out 19 batters. When our season was over, he got called up to New York.”
Ryan, now an executive with the Texas Rangers, has recently been advocating an end to strict pitch-counts, which hadn’t existed in the 1960s. “He might be on to something,” Wakefield concurred. “At least as far as a strict pitch-count goes. If you’re going to cut a pitcher off at 110 pitches, doesn’t it make sense to ask if it’s a very hot day? Or if the pitcher has thrown over 20 pitches in any inning? Or just the difference between one pitcher and another. In some situations, 100 pitches might be too many, and in other spots 120 might be just fine. You need to apply good judgment, don’t you?—Nolan might be right.”
He mentioned other pitchers from the 1960s who worked long into games, and on a four-man rotation: Koufax, Drysdale, Gibson. “Well, Koufax might not be such a good example,” he chuckled, “of a pitcher whose arm was healthy after pitching 350 innings a year, but lots of those guys got a lot of work and still had long careers.” Before Wakefield was traded to the Mets, he was competing with Bob Gibson, Curt Simmons and other star pitchers for a place on the Cardinals’ staff, so he was pleased to find himself now competing among the more modest pitching talent on the early Mets. “I had friends from Stanford,” Wakefield recalled, “fellows from New York, who called me up when they heard about the trade and told me this would be the chance of a lifetime—the way the Mets are playing now, they told me, you could be starting for them this year. And they were right.”
Wakefield recalled that first spring training. “I arrived in Florida on March 7th,” he said. “which was kind of late to be reporting to camp, but I pitched well my first few times out. One spring training game, I remember, was against the White Sox, and Casey [Stengel, his first manager] was yelling over to his friends in the White Sox dugout, like Al Lopez, about how well I was throwing, and then I threw some more good games and I came north with the team. I asked Casey why the Mets had traded for me, and he said that he had friends back in Kansas City-- where I’m from, and where he’s from, that’s how he got the name ‘Casey’ -- who spoke well of me. It was surprising how much he knew about me. He knew my father was a doctor, and he told me that he had gone to dental school when he was young. Casey’s friends followed my career, and when he had the chance to pick me up, he did.”
“I had a good spring,” Wakefield said, “and also Carl Willey, who was the Mets’ best pitcher at the time, got hurt badly in a spring training game against Detroit. Gates Brown hit a line drive to the mound that broke Willey’s jaw. It was an awful sight—Willey never pitched effectively in the major leagues again. And that kind of opened up a spot for me. I played with Carl in the minors the following year in Buffalo,” Wakefield mused. “He was from Cherryfield, Maine. Worked in a clothing store in the off-season. That was a different time.”
Major league players may have been more aggressive in 1964—certainly, Ron Hunt, the Mets’ first elected All-Star that year, struck Wakefield as highly competitive. “Ron was a kind of, well, arrogant type of guy. He invited pitchers to throw at him. If you’re going to crowd the plate, you’re going to get hit by a lot of pitches, but Ron didn’t care if other players liked him so much.”
“I did hit a number of batters that year, but that wasn’t deliberate. It wasn’t part of my style, or my intention, but I did hit some batters just by throwing inside a lot,” Wakefield noted. He ranked fifth in the NL in “batters hit by pitches” in 1964, which was very high considering the number of renowned head-hunters in the league who pitched twice or more Wakefield’s 120 innings. “One game, I hit Jeff Torborg with a fastball right after I’d balked and people thought I hit Torborg because I was frustrated, but I just liked to jam guys on the first pitch.”
Wakefield didn’t mention that, between his balk and the inside fastball to Torborg, his manager had protested the balk vigorously to Shag Crawford’s umpiring crew, while 40,000 fans at Shea were roaring. Stengel had brought along many star pitchers in his long managerial career, Wakefield being the final young pitcher he had nurtured to big-league success, though Stengel’s use of his pitching staff might strike a current fan as anything but nurturing. “Pitchers didn’t really have specific roles back then, not like they do today. You weren’t a starter or a reliever, you just played when the manager put you in the game,” Wakefield said. “I wasn’t about to beg off of any assignment I got –I started, I relieved, sometimes in both ends of a doubleheader. I got the chance to get into a lot of games.” Wakefield appeared in 62 ball games in 1964, setting a club record that would stand until 1977. “No, I don’t follow baseball all that closely, but that was one record I kept track of.”
A modern pitcher who set a club record for appearances, of course, wouldn’t start any games at all, but Wakefield got several starting assignments in 1964, including the first night game at Shea. “When I was starting, I relied mainly on my four-seam fastball. I probably threw in the low 90s then, maybe 93 miles per hour, but when I was relieving,” Wakefield said, “my main pitch was the two-seamer, the sinker, because I’d come into games with runners on base, and it was important that I get the batters to hit into double-plays. In the Mayor’s Trophy game that year, I got Yogi Berra—he was the Yankees’ manager, but he played in the Mayor’s Trophy game—I got him to hit into a doubleplay. I remember this tremendous roar when he came into the game—the fans were surprised to see him batting, I suppose.”
By the next season, Berra would join the Mets, as would veteran pitcher Warren Spahn, and during that 1964 season, Wakefield got to play alongside such veterans as Frank Lary, Tom Sturdivant, Frank Thomas, and Roy McMillan, all of whom Wakefield remembered as being helpful to a rookie. “McMillan couldn’t really throw very well any more, but he was a very good shortstop. I liked Frank Thomas, he was very fair to me. Players joked with him, called him ‘Big Donkey’ and all that, but Thomas was a good guy. Sturdivant and Lary were willing to share ideas about pitching—but the guys I was competing against directly, the younger players, weren’t interested in helping me succeed,” Wakefield laughed again. “And I wasn’t trying very hard to help them, either.”
“Some of the younger players I liked a lot. Larry Bearnarth, who had gone to St. John’s-- later became the Expos’ pitching coach, died very young-- was a good guy, and a good coach. A lot of the pitchers on that club went on to become pitching coaches—Craig Anderson went to coach at Lehigh College, though Craig wasn’t so much interested in the mechanics of pitching back then. I still keep in touch with him. Galen Cisco had a long career as a pitching coach in the major leagues. Al Jackson, too.”
“Mel Harder was our pitching coach in 1964,” Wakefield said, “and his advice was mostly that we should throw the curveball more. Of course, Mel threw a great curveball when he was pitching, but for those of us without a terrific curve, that maybe wasn’t such good advice. Spahn joined the club as a pitching coach, and an active pitcher, in ’65, and gave very simple advice: don’t throw the ball down the middle of the plate, he said. And also, because he never liked to run, he told us not to bother running a whole lot. But as far as the mechanics of pitching, Spahn just told us what worked for him. He’d hurt his right [non-pitching] arm as a young man, so he kept his right shoulder in towards his body as he pitched, but he didn’t tell us that we should pitch the same way as he did—that was just what worked for him, he said.”
Wakefield appeared in many historical games that 1964 season: the 33-inning Memorial Day doubleheader against the Giants, Jim Bunning’s Father’s Day perfect game, the pennant-deciding final game against the Cardinals. “I faced one batter in Bunning’s perfect game and I got him out—Bunning faced twenty-seven men and got them all out. The last batter was John Stephenson. Casey told Stephenson to get up there in the bottom of the ninth, and Stephenson said something like ‘I think I might strike out,’ and that’s exactly what Stephenson did.”
In the final game of the season, and of Wakefield’s big-league career, the Mets were trying to defeat the Cardinals, who were in a very tight three-way struggle for the pennant. The Mets had won the first two games of the series, and if they won the last game, there would be a three-way tie for the 1964 pennant. “I remember how the fans in Sportsman’s Park were right on top of us, yelling, screaming the whole game. I gave up one hit, to [light-hitting reserve infielder] Dal Maxvill, it must have bounced twenty-five times before it got through the infield…” The Mets lost that game, and the Cardinals, Wakefield’s former team, went on to win the World Series.
Some of Wakefield’s fondest memories of that season were off the ballfield. “The All-Star game was played at Shea, but I was off in California, golfing at Pebble Beach with my future father-in-law. That was a beautiful vacation, and a real break from baseball for a few days.” During the season, Wakefield commuted to Shea from the Times Square area, where he lived in the Hotel Manhattan at 44th Street and 8th Avenue, where several other Mets, like Jesse Gonder and Frank Thomas, were living. On his 2009 visit to Citifield, Wakefield toured the Times Square district with his family, showing them where he had lived (“It’s called the Bismarck Hotel now,” he said, “but the lobby’s still the same as I remember it”), and the Wakefields made the trip on the #7 train, as Wakefield had all throughout his rookie year.
Bill Wakefield has a remarkably vivid memory of his one season as a big-league star, but more remarkable perhaps is his compassion and empathy for the men he played with. Of his final big-league appearance, he remembers that it was popular Mets’ utility player Rod Kanehl’s final game as well, and that Kanehl got a hit off St. Louis reliever Barney Schultz in his final at-bat. “Rod understood that this would be his last big-league at bat, and when he got that hit, an RBI single with two outs in the ninth,” Wakefield recalled, “well, that was very satisfying to him, going out on a good note.” He smiled at the memory of Kanehl standing on first base in the ninth inning of his final game. Bill Wakefield didn’t sound the least bit sorry that Kanehl would never play in the big leagues again, nor did he sound sorry for himself—but pleased that he’d gotten to play for Casey Stengel, to pitch to Hall-of-Fame batters like Willie Mays and Frank Robinson, and to play alongside his Mets teammates in a brand-new Shea Stadium that summer forty-five years ago.