The Cardinals Are Coming Tra La Tra La

Last Friday morning Charles Dallan Maxvill, 30-year-old shortstop for the St. Louis Cardinals, awoke and began to think about impossibilities. Without ever doing anything controversial in his life, Dal Maxvill has become a much-discussed personality among baseball fans because he draws a salary of $50,000 while carrying an average of .168—a fine figure only if one happens to be a pitcher and the decimal point is moved over one digit to the right and called an earned run average.

When Maxvill was growing up in Granite City, Ill. he was so small for his age that his mother would put him up on the handlebars of a bicycle and pedal him through town so he could play for the Little League team. Today he is a very aware man who can reflect on those days and savor the genuine humor in them. On Friday morning, however, he could not muster the faintest of smiles. The night before, after 122 games of a frustrating season, the Cardinals had botched another chance both to save face and put some excitement into the race for the championship of the National League's Eastern Division.

"The Cubs had lost in the afternoon," Maxvill said, "and we had the chance to pull within seven games of them, but we played as bad as we could and lost. Opportunities to pick up games this late in a season do not come along too often, and we had messed ours up. When I woke up in the morning after that terrible defeat I still felt rotten about the game the night before and hoped for just one more opportunity. If only the Cubs would stub their toes one more time we would still have a chance. Chicago was playing Houston in Wrigley Field, and when I got into my car and drove to the ball park I turned on the radio and heard that Chicago had lost. The opportunity was there again. Suddenly we had another chance. For the Cardinals this part of the season is the one that's fun. Now is the time this team wants to play hard. It's when the club gets itself organized. Only a ballplayer realizes this. Naturally, you play all the games hard, but something else takes over at this point of the season."

Maxvill made two excellent plays in the seventh inning against the Atlanta Braves that evening. They helped tremendously in a victory that put the Cardinals within seven games of the Cubs and gave them a long-shot chance to pull off one of the greatest comebacks in baseball history. (The classic reference point for comebacks concerns the Boston Braves of 1914 who were 15 games behind on July 4 and won by 10�.)

Within recent weeks the Cardinals have been playing the kind of baseball that people had expected them to play since early April. Neither the Cubs, leaders of the Eastern Division since the first day of the season, nor the New York Mets, a young team with strong pitching, have been coming back to them in the standings; the Cardinals have been moving forward purposefully and gaining ground by winning series after series. For most of this year people asked, "What's the matter with the Cards?" They now ask, "Does St. Louis have a chance?" The answer to the first question is: the normal quota of complacency that creeps up on successful teams after a couple of years at the top. To the second: yes.

After easily winning pennants in 1967 and 1968, the Cardinals started the 1969 season in a dream world. Following a long period of holdouts they never got themselves organized because there was not enough time. They also lost three key people through retirement and the hurried league expansion to 12 teams. Roger Maris had been invaluable because of the knowledge he passed on to the other players as well as for his ability to keep the team loose. Because of expansion, St. Louis traded Catcher John Edwards to Houston rather than lose him in the draft and the occasion arose for Coach Joe Schultz to become the manager of the American League's Seattle Pilots.

The Cards entered 1969 as 2-to-5 favorites to win the Eastern Division, but they swiftly began to resemble a million-dollar misunderstanding. They lost their first three games of the season to the Pittsburgh Pirates, then won their next three to reach .500. That .500 figure was to become a bugaboo to the team and its fans for a long time thereafter. On April 15 the Cardinals were again at .500, but it was three months and 82 games later before they managed to get that high once more.

During their two previous pennant-winning seasons, the Cards usually seemed capable of producing the pinch hit that would win or tie a game or start a rally. In 1969, however, the pinch hitters marched away from the plate their first 17 times without getting a hit. Late in April, Vada Pinson, acquired from Cincinnati in a trade, was hit on the right leg by a pitch, suffered a hairline fracture of the fibula and was out of the lineup for nearly a month. On May 25 Dave Giusti, the right-handed pitcher St. Louis traded twice to get, wrenched his back and was put on the disabled list for 21 days. But major league scouts watching the Cardinals play began to notice certain odd things happening to the team that had not occurred during the two previous years, and those things had little to do with injuries. The defense was having trouble, and the cutoff plays on outfield throws, so vital in holding the opposition down, were being butchered.

Jim Russo, the superscout for the Baltimore Orioles, and a St. Louis resident who has watched the Cardinals often this year, says, "Apparently, when you win, a little complacency develops. But the Cardinals were not making the plays defensively that they used to make, and the catching was not throwing runners out."

Others began to notice different things. While it cannot be said that the Cardinals had become the playboys of the Western world, there were indications that they were on their way to becoming the crybabies of the Eastern Division. Too often the players called the official scorer to suggest strongly that an error be changed to a hit or a hit to an error. Of all the things that seemed to be going wrong, this seemed to be the most un-Cardinal-like. General Manager Bing Devine and Manager Red Schoendienst stopped that, but not before the team had lost a little of its glow for knowing baseball people.