So you thought the Los Angeles Angels learned a bitter lesson about the dark side of celebrations last year, when teammates broke Kendry Morales' leg piling onto him, whooping it up at the plate after he hit a walk-off grand slam. That only helped them lose their usual annual shot at the American League West.
A comparable whoop-it-up in a slightly different location ended up costing the Pittsburgh Pirates and their best pitcher in the long run, even though in the short run they'd go on to win a thriller of a 1960 World Series Pittsburgh still can't forget.
The Pirates clinched the National League pennant in Milwaukee, where they'd lost to the Braves while the Chicago Cubs, of all people, were manhandling the St. Louis Cardinals to secure the Pittsburgh flag. The Pirates went nuts in the clubhouse and it spilled over to the team bus, where reserve catcher Bob Oldis playfully yanked a shoe off Vernon Law, the Pirates' best pitcher and the Cy Young Award winner in waiting.
That cause a sprained ankle and compelled a motion change that turned Law's shoulder, little by little, into an undetected mess that — despite his winning two World Series outings — would end up dictating his immediate baseball future. He spent the next three or four years pitching in varying pain, with mostly declining results to show for it. And he spent the next four or five decades saying nothing publicly about who he thought the real instigator of the bus-bound hijinks was.
John Moody, a longtime journalist (he made a career in the wire services and on Time before helping co-found FOX News Channel) who grew up in Pittsburgh with Law as his baseball hero, actually got Law to talk about the injury that turned him from one of the National League's best pitchers into a near-also ran who made an unlikely self-resurrection in 1965-66 before calling it a career in 1967, far from the greatness his 1959 and 1960 seasons suggested would be his.
Kiss it Goodbye: The Mystery, the Mormon, and the Moral of the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates — the title, of course, was broadcast legend Bob Prince's customary home run call — isn't exactly long on real in-depth analysis. Don't look for sophisticated sabermetric surgery upon Vernon Law's or that Pirate team's rise and fall. (It took the Pirates a decade to return to the World Series.) Moody comes from a world in which the counting statistics were the statistics that mattered. But if you're looking for a character study, and a pleasantly-written recollection by a fan grown up, you'll find it in abundance.
Law is not the kind of man to hold a grudge. But even he can't help wondering whether the pennant-clinching hijinks whose continuance on the team bus was instigated, he now reveals, by none other than the fun-loving Prince himself, cost him even an outside shot at the Hall of Fame. Prince and his broadcast partner Jim Woods playfully led a round of shirt and tie shredding and reached Law, popping his shirt buttons and then reaching for his underwear, which unnerved the deeply religious Law, but somewhere in there was the opportunity for Oldis to strip Law's shoe and sprain the pitcher's ankle.
Law was murdered in his next and last regular season start, when the Braves strafed him for 8 earned runs in 2.2 innings' work, en route a 13-2 drubbing, shooting his earned run average from 2.84 to its final 3.03. There were fears he wouldn't be able to pitch Game 1 of the Series as was manager Danny Murtaugh's plan. He made the start, however, holding the Yankees to a pair of runs through seven full, coming out for Elroy Face with two on and no out in the eighth, and getting the win despite Face surrendering a two-run bomb to Elston Howard in the ninth.
Pitching in pain again, Law started Game 4 and won a squeaker, 3-2, surrendering the second Yankee run on a seventh-inning groundout that allowed a run to score, then surrendering a base hit before Face relieved him to save it. He was tapped to start Game 7, and had a 4-1 lead when Murtaugh noticed his man faltering somewhat, the ankle barking a little more profoundly and Law showing a little hesitance in his shoulder, punctuated by a leadoff single up the pipe by eventual Series MVP Bobby Richardson and a followup walk to Tony Kubek.
Law could only watch from the dugout as the Yankees overthrew that lead (including Yogi Berra hammering a mammoth homer off Face), the Pirates wrestled them back for a 9-7 lead (Gino Cimoli, leadoff hit; Bill Virdon setting it up further with the hopper that caught Kubek's throat and left all hands safe; Dick Groat, RBI single; Roberto Clemente, RBI single when Yankee reliever Jim Coates missed covering first base; Hal Smith, 3-run bomb), the Yankees tied it in the top of the ninth (Mickey Mantle, RBI single; Berra, RBI groundout), and Bill Mazeroski hitting Ralph Terry's second pitch over the left field wall in the bottom of the ninth for game, set, and rings.
A decent man who was raised a strict Mormon and has lived likewise, Law married a girl who happened to share his first initial (though they tell different stories about why she hesitated to date him at first); so devoted to each other were they that, among other things, they named every one of their eight children with the same first initial. Law was so respected even as a young prospect that, when he stood up and walked out of a Southern restaurant that refused to serve a black teammate, his entire team followed him out without his saying a word.
Law had to be dragged kicking and screaming, so it seems, to reveal the real source of the injury that dictated his post-Series career. Oldis might not have had the chance to jerk his shoe off, Law tells Moody, had it not been for Prince, of all people.
"Bob Prince ... was probably more of an instigator [of the continuing celebration] than anyone," Law says, "as he was in front of me leading the pack on ... I wasn't about to stay in the clubhouse any longer than necessary, so my roommate, Smoky Burgess [the Pirates' catcher, and the pinch-hitting legend in waiting], another non drinker, and I showered, dressed, and got out of there as quickly as we could.
"Most of the others came pretty soon after we did. I think most of them were anxious to get back to Pittsburgh. They were pretty lit up, loud, and doing crazy things. So was Bob ... Bob grabbed my shirt and popped the buttons right off it. Then he put his hands on my underwear, and I said, 'I wish you wouldn't do that.' And he said, 'Ohhh.' He recognized what it was, he knew a bit about my church and what we believe, the undergarment we wear and what it means to us. But by then, it was too late, the damage had been done. So yes, it's true, he was the one more than any other who was responsible for the things that happened to me."
Law suffered a slow-burning shoulder injury on the unlikely lift, but he refuses to consider any recourse other than forgiveness even now. It was in his religious upbringing and thus second-nature to him. Nicknamed the Deacon because of his devout faith, Law managed to negotiate a baseball life without falling into the traps to which professional athletes are too often prey. Once, after beating the Braves, he was rousted out of a sound sleep by an ardent female fan. After politely brushing her invitations away, she asked what he did for fun. "Beat the Braves," he deadpanned through the telephone.
He simply tried to deal with the injury as best he could. Prince ("a good man who, like all of us, occasionally made mistakes") helped make life a little easier for him, recommending titles among the Western novels Law loved to read and cautioning the straight-arrowed pitcher against books that included "[a l]ittle too much cowgirl action, if you get my drift." He was also as tenacious a competitor on the mound as he was a firm but gentle fellow off the mound.
But his record collapsed in 1961; he had a serviceable if unspectacular 1962; he had a terrible 1963, so much so that he took his manager's advice and prepared to retire; he returned in 1964 to win twelve games; he went 17-9 in 1965 to earn the National League's Comeback Player of the Year award; he went a respectable 12-8 in 1966; but he suffered a groin injury in 1967 and retired for good after the season. He went on to coach Brigham Young University's baseball team, a job his son now holds while he coaches high school baseball in Provo, Utah.
Moody, who had bonded with his own father over Pirates baseball, saves most of his own concurrent story for last, just about. A world-girdling journalist, he settled with his family at last in New Jersey and they became, one and all of them, Yankee fans, of all things. But he never forgot his boyhood passion, his boyhood hero, or how his Pirates' rise seemed to hold hands with his city's rise through 1960, a story he tells simply but effectively.
He tells Law's story with a lot more care than he seems to refer to some of baseball history, alas. (Hint: Mickey Mantle's singular abilities were manifest long before 1960; Casey Stengel wasn't driven out of baseball after the 1960 World Series — the Yankees might have canned him because of his age, but he had a few influential innings yet to play in helping establish the infant New York Mets.) Pirate fans in particular and baseball fans in general may be pleasantly amused to learn that Law became a Pirate thanks to a little skulduggery instigated by their then co-owner.
Brooklyn Dodger legend Babe Herman was now working as a Pirate scout, and he was one of the band of scouts who'd caught onto Law's pitching potential in his school days on the farm in Meridian, Idaho. When the scouts arrived at the Law homestead, after Law had impressed one and all pitching American Legion ball in 1947, one and all caused the non-smoking Laws to quake at the sight of their cigars. Herman showed up brandishing not a cigar but a bunch of roses for Law's mother.
Then the telephone rang and Herman urged Mrs. Law to answer. What a surprise that the elder Laws approved their son signing with the Pirates. On the other end was the aforesaid Pirates co-owner — Bing Crosby.
"My mother," Law wrote in his yet-unpublished memoir, quoted by Moody, "about fell over in a faint. She couldn't believe she was talking to the great singer, Bing. That was about the determining factor in my signing with them. They made promises to the folks, that if I made the big leagues and pitched in a World Series, they'd have an expenses-paid trip."
It only took the Pirates and their son 13 years to make good on those promises. Before that, Law — with whom Crosby often corresponded as he made his way to the top of the Pirate rotation — learned from Crosby the backstory behind his signing with the club. One fine day after Law beat the Dodgers in Los Angeles, Crosby buttonholed him and reminisced about his signing day. Law mentioned how his father almost fainted at the scouts' cigars.
"I thought that might work," Crosby said in a kind of by-the-way fashion. Law asked what he meant. "Well," Der Bingle confessed, "I told Herman to go get a big box of cigars and pass them out to the other boys while they were waiting on your porch." Kiss 'em goodbye!
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