For He's A Jolly Good Fellow

Gomez had become one of those problems that will continue to vex baseball operators as long as we insist upon playing human beings instead of computers. Ruben was a good, workmanlike No. 3 man on anybody's staff until he made the mistake of hitting big Joe Adcock with a pitch. When Adcock unexpectedly came after him, Gomez threw the ball at him and ran. Pictures of him in full flight appeared in papers all over the country—and probably back in his native Puerto Rico.

That one moment of his life wrought its change in Ruben Gomez. It was as if he felt that he had lost the respect of the other players and, having forfeited their respect, he seemed to lose all respect for himself. When you're out there in the big-league pressure cooker, a pitcher's attitude—his utter confidence that he has an advantage of will and luck and guts over the hitter—is almost as important as his stuff. Fred Hutchinson won 95 games in the big leagues on little more than character and strength of purpose. Early Wynn won his first 275 games on stuff and his last 25 on memory and meanness. Usually it's the other way around. Every team has its can't-miss pitcher who always manages to throw the home run ball at the wrong time. He throws it at the wrong time because he knows he's going to throw it at the wrong time.

Gomez, having broke and run—Lord Jim to the life—was never the same man. With Philadelphia, he won only three games in two years. Sanford was a good pitcher for the Giants from the start and in their pennant year won 24 games.

In November 1959, Paul Rapier Richards, a cold, professorial type, known in faultless sports page prose as the Sage of Waxahachie, came riding into town sitting tall in the saddle to trade livestock with Horace through the long night. Paul, who was then manager of the Orioles, has one of the great minds in baseball. He is so careful that he will pause for perhaps 30 seconds to find the precise word he is looking for. He is so cold that when he enters his clubhouse, with his rigid military bearing, the whole room goes silent.

Just as dawn was about to break over the ice cooler, Paul convinced Horace that he should surrender a brawny outfielder, Jackie Brandt, for a nonwinning little left-hander, Billy O'Dell. There are eyewitnesses who will swear that Paul, having stolen the center fielder he so badly needed, left the room chortling—although anyone who knows him must suspect gross exaggeration. When Paul is delirious with joy, a small, scarcely perceptible smile plays across his lips.

It happened that Brandt had become a problem to Stoneham because Willie Mays had somehow got it into his head that the manager, Bill Rigney, thought Jackie was a better ballplayer. Willie, having lost the great man of his early career, Leo Durocher, still had a great need to be shown that he was appreciated as a player and liked as a person. And so, through no fault of his own, Brandt had become spectacularly expendable.

When the Giants won the pennant three years later, O'Dell won 19 games. Brandt has never really done what was expected of him in Baltimore.

In November 1961 my good friend Ed Short of the White Sox arrived upon the scene to pit his youth, exuberance and staying power against Stoneham's experience. Short had a dream, too. It was to talk Horace out of a couple of good young players in return for two aging pitchers, Bill Pierce and Don Larsen. Ed emerged, doing a slightly swoozled buck-and-wing, happy in the fond belief that he had swindled Horace out of four players. We won't trouble you with the names of the players, because you still never heard of any of them.

As for Pierce, he won 16 games for the Giants that year, while Larsen was giving them the middle relief man they had desperately needed. (The rumor that Horace really wanted Larsen as a drinking companion who could go the full distance is not to be wholly discredited either.)

That Horace, everybody said, he sure is lucky. Lucky as a fox.