The Reds Is Dead

On a raw and windy afternoon last week in Florida, Gene Freese, the regular third baseman for the National League champion Cincinnati Reds, came to bat in an intrasquad game and hit a looping single to right. When the outfielder booted the ball, Freese raced toward second. He started to slide as the throw came in, then changed his mind and tried to stay on his feet. But the spikes of his right shoe caught in the hard ground, spinning his body around so that he was facing first base while his foot was still facing second. Freese screamed and fell heavily near the bag as players rushed toward him from all parts of the field. He lay on his back, his hands clasped tight to his head. "Oh, my God, my God," he sobbed. "It's broke. I broke the God damn ankle. Oh, no, no."

The next few moments were a horror of confusion. The team trainer cut the sock on Freese's right foot, revealing an ugly purple lump. Freese was in great pain, and some players knelt beside him trying to comfort him with soft words. Others milled about the outer rim of the circle, swearing or kicking at the ground. "Damn halfhearted slide," said Frank Robinson, the star of the team. "When you slide, you got to slide all the way."

A group of teammates picked up Freese tenderly and bore him back to the clubhouse, where they set him down on a table in the trainer's room to await an ambulance. Someone lit a cigarette and placed it between Freese's lips. Drops of sweat rolled off his forehead; the trainer wiped it clean with a wet towel. Manager Fred Hutchinson came in looking grim, dragging angrily on a cigarette.

"Feeling sick?" he asked Freese softly. Freese opened his eyes. "No," he said. Then he closed his eyes again. Hutchinson said nothing more. He stared at the two gray ice packs that had been placed on Freese's ankle to slow the swelling. He continued to stand there, silently staring at the ankle. The room was quiet except for the muted voice of a reporter somewhere in the dressing room, asking a telephone operator to get him a line to Cincinnati. Hutchinson didn't move or shift his gaze.

What Hutchinson must have been seeing beyond the ice packs, beyond the shattered right ankle of his third baseman, was the end of the season before it had begun. In the well-balanced National League, in which four different teams have won pennants in the last four seasons, the loss of one player can be enough to send a team from first place to sixth. Such was Pittsburgh's misfortune last year. Champions in 1960, the Pirates lost their big winner, Vernon Law, when he developed arm trouble, and they finished sixth. Perhaps they might not have won again even if Law had been sound, but without him they never had a chance. Now, with Freese hurt, a Cincinnati sportswriter paraphrased Charley Dressen's famous remark about the New York Giants and said, "The Reds is dead."

Gene Freese may not have been as vital to Cincinnati in 1961 as Vern Law was to Pittsburgh in 1960, but he was an important member of a team that needed top performances from almost everyone in the lineup in order to win the pennant. To be sure, he had some oddball tendencies. One day, having hit a meaningless home run, he skipped and danced around the bases in imitation of Bill Mazeroski's famous World Series-winning home run.

Freese brought with him from the American League a reputation as a scatter arm, but first baseman Gordy Coleman, himself a sketchy fielder, insists Freese didn't make many poor throws. "The nice thing about the bad throws he did make is that they were over my head," Coleman said. "Some guys are always skipping them into your shins." When Coleman roomed with Freese, it was a team joke that there was no use calling their room because both of them had such bad hands they wouldn't be able to pick up the phone.

But Manager Hutchinson insists that Freese was a good fielder for Cincinnati. As a hitter, the record shows Freese hit 26 home runs, and one of them was the single most important hit of the season for the Reds. The Los Angeles Dodgers had won the first two games of a four-game series in late August, to move within 1� games of the first-place Reds. In the third game, the first of a Sunday double-header, the Dodgers had a 5—1 lead with two out in the seventh inning. It was apparent the Dodgers were about to sweep the series and take over first place. But with two out and two runners on base, Freese hit a home run and the Reds were back in the game 5-4. Freese had reversed the momentum, and now the Reds had it. They scored two more runs to win the game, won the next game easily, and were never seriously threatened again.

Now Freese, hero of the Reds' pennant drive, lay in agony on a table. It was the second blow to Fred Hutchinson's plans to get the team off to a fine start in spring training. The first was the prolonged holdout of Pitcher Joey Jay, a 21-game winner last season. Of the two events, it is possible that Jay's holdout may have a more damaging effect over the course of the season.

The holdout began in routine fashion, with Jay requesting a lot more money than General Manager Bill DeWitt was willing to offer. For a while Jay had the sympathy of his teammates, allies against a common enemy: the front office. Then Jay startled everyone by offering to buy his own contract from the Reds for $150,000—an almost unprecedented move. DeWitt promptly rejected it, but the damage had been done. If Jay's offer was sincere, he was saying that he didn't want to play for Cincinnati. If the offer was insincere, he was just seeking publicity. In either case he lost the sympathy and support of many teammates.