October 1964

However, Halberstam's take on the demise of the Establishment Yankees is the more accurate one. The '63 World Series was won single-handedly by a couple of white guys, Koufax and Drysdale. Yes, the Dodgers did have five black regulars in the starting lineup, but apart from the second inning of the opening game, they just didn't hit, or make history the way Koufax did.

The 1964 World Series was won by the heroics of men that the Yankees didn't understand, by men who couldn't play for the Yankees, by virtue of who they were. The Yankees could accept being struck out 15 times by Sandy Koufax, but when they struck out 13 times against Bob Gibson -- on whom their sole scouting report was woefully inaccurate -- it was an outrage. Gibson wasn't supposed to have courage, or determination! Lou Brock wasn't supposed to get more hits in the Series than Mickey Mantle!

And yet, the '64 Yankees didn't go quietly in the Series, and in fact they scored more runs than St. Louis. Mantle had an incredible seven games. The Yanks had more walks and homers than the Cardinals, and their pitching (behind white youngers Jim Bouton and Mel Stottlemyre) basically matched St. Louis out for out. At least on paper. The Series turning point came when the Yanks' lone black pitcher, Al Downing, gave up a grand slam homer to a Southern good-ol'-boy, Ken Boyer.

This is why "October 1964" is a great book. It's no mystery as to who the heroes are -- the book frontpiece is a team photograph, and that team isn't the Yankees. However, the bad guys gave it a mighty effort. 40 years later, it's hard to remember how much the Yankees represented a world that simply had to end. As someone born well after '64, I didn't even know at first that spring training in Florida was segregated that late. The struggles of Gibson and Brock and Flood and Bill White were relatively new stories when Halberstam first told them. Since Halberstam's skill is in creating whole lives in three or four pages, these mini-biographies are the heart of the book, and not the more desultory game descriptions that reduce the World Series to a sequence of monochrome postcards.

The best anecdote in the book has little to do with the World Series. Yankee pitcher Ralph Terry, then a rookie, brashly introduces himself to a few old men watching a baseball game. "Well, Ralph," one of the men says. "my name is Cy Young. And these fellas over here next to me are Zack Wheat and Ty Cobb."

If you subscribe to the theory of baseball as social history, "October 1964" is a book you'd do well to have on your shelf, and one worth reading every few years.


Social History Written for a Broad Audience   November 25, 2004
Roger D. Launius (Washington, D.C., United States)
17 out of 18 found this review helpful

I recently reread David Halberstam's "October 1964," about the World Series between the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals. As other reviewers of this book on Amazon.com have noted, it is social history of a high order. Halberstam uses the World Series of 1964 as a foil to discuss race relations in the decade, both inside baseball and out, for the Yankees represented an approach to society reflective of a status quo that had much more to do with police brutality against civil rights workers in Selma than the Yankees would care to admit. Meantime, the Cardinals expressed much more of the changing climate in America.

As Halberstam points out, it looked as if all the ingredients of a great team were coming together for the Cardinals in the early 1960s. The team had all of the attributes of its successful teams of the past, excellent pitching, great defense, and speed. But there was something more that was critical to the Cardinals success in 1964, as Halberstam emphasizes, how the team bridged the racial divide in the United States to create a cohesive unit. Everyone who visited the Cardinals locker room recognized that something was different from other teams. The African American, White, and Latino players seemed to have an easier relationship than elsewhere. No question, many of the premier players for the Cardinals were African Americans in 1964--Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Curt Flood, and Bill White--and they certainly helped set the tenor of the clubhouse. But southerners like Ken Boyer and Tim McCarver were also committed to the successful integration of American life and brought that perspective to the team as well. This relative racial harmony was significant for the Cardinals and stood in striking contrast to the problems present with the Yankees and other major league teams.

One anecdote about the Cardinals offered in "October 1964" elucidates this issue. Curt Flood recounted a story in "October 1964" of going to Cardinals spring training camp in Florida in the latter 1950s and finding himself sent to an African American boarding house in another town, instead of staying in the same hotel where his white teammates were housed. A sensitive and thoughtful man, Flood was both hurt and angered by this situation and when the opportunity presented he said something. When the Cardinals owner, August A. Busch Jr., saw him at the training camp and struck up a conversation Flood let slip that the situation of the black players was not the best. Busch was genuinely surprised that Flood and the other black players were not staying at the main hotel with the "rest of the guys" and promised to do something about it. He went out and purchased a hotel in St. Petersburg where all the Cardinals could stay together with their families during spring training.

In later years, players from other teams recalled visiting that hotel to see members of the Cards and finding cookouts taking place with entire families, black and white, together. The fact that they lived together for several weeks during spring training may have broken down the barriers of prejudice more than any other action the Cardinals could have taken. The team was, without question, more successful in integrating its players than many other major league clubs. This contributed to the success of the team on the field and the attraction of the team off it.

Halberstam emphasizes that the match between the Cardinals and Yankees in 1964 had symbolic value far beyond the match-up on the field. The Cardinals were a well-integrated team with excellent African American players. The Yankees had failed to integrate until the mid-1950s and then only modestly so. Indeed, their first African American player was St. Louis native Elston Howard and he only came up to the Yankees in 1955. A superb player, the Yankees ballyhooed Howard's breaking of the color line on the team by saying that he was a true "gentleman," and thereby appropriate to wear Yankee pinstripes. One wit observed that this was so much nonsense, after all since when did baseball players have to be "gentlemen?" The Yanks in 1964 were also a franchise on the verge of collapse, with aging superstars and not much down on the farm to call up to the majors. Their best player, Mickey Mantle, was nearing the end of his Hall of Fame career, and his replacement in the outfield would be Bobby Mercer, a decent journeyman player but not someone who would carry on the tradition of Ruth-DiMaggio-Mantle.

The Cardinals victory in the World Series in 1964 symbolized for Halberstam the death of the old manner of baseball, and thereafter every championship team would have African American stars as a critical element to success. It is an excellent discussion of the subject, well-written and thought-provoking.


I Felt Like I Was There   February 18, 2005
Maestroh (Dallas Theological Cemetery)
12 out of 12 found this review helpful

This is not just the story of October 1964 although that is the title of the book. It is in fact the story of the 1960s cultures surrounding baseball. Halberstam observes that the Giants of the 1960s were - on paper, at least - better than the Cardinals virtually every year. Yet the World Series tally for the 1960s was the Cardinals went to THREE World Series (winning two and losing one in seven games) and the Giants to ONE (losing in the last inning of the seventh game).

It was also the last World Series for Mickey Mantle. The book touches on the Philadelphia collapse of 1964 (blowing a 6.5 game lead with only 12 to play), the pennant race of Phillies, Reds, and Cardinals. But best of all it deals with what happened AFTER 1964.

It is a strange irony that the NY Yankees were a powerhouse from 1921 to 1964. The Yankees never went longer than three seasons w/o making the playoffs during that time span. But after the 1964 loss, the Yankees fell out of contention for 12 long years. CBS bought the team and ruined it until a guy named Steinbrenner bailed them out.

This was also a strange series for another reason. Within a couple of days of the end of the series, BOTH managers were out of work. Johnny Keane of the Cardinals was canned and Yogi Berra, a first-year manager of the Yanks was sent packing. And to top off that list of ironies, Keane was hired as the new Yankee manager. This was a victory for the workingman - or so it seemed.

And despite dominance that carried through managers Miller Huggins, Joe McCarthy (not the famous Red baiter), Bucky Harris, Casey Stengel, Ralph Houk, and even Berra - Keane took over a collapsed empire. By 1967, Keane was dead, the Yankees were in a coma, and the Cardinals were back in the World Series with a new manager, Red Schoendienst.

The setting of October 1964 is the platform for what would change baseball in the 1970s, the reserve clause. Curt Flood played for those 1960s Cardinals and later rejected a trade to the Phillies. The seeds of free agency, the designated hitter, and the demise of Mickey Mantle were in bloom in October 1964. Read the book and enjoy the trip.




Lush portraits of Mantle, Gibson, Maris, Brock, Flood, etc.   May 8, 2000
Andy Orrock (Dallas, TX)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful

The book's title - 'October 1964' - is in a way misleading, as it is more about how the teams *got* to the '64 World Series as opposed to the Series itself. In fact, Halberstam doesn't begin his coverage of the Series until page 316, and then it's seven quick chapters (one per game) and a fine epilogue to the completion at page 373.

Regardless, '64' is an outstanding piece of work. Written in Halberstam's inimitable style, the book hops back and forth between the Yankees season and the Cardinals season. For true Yankee and Cardinal fans, the amazingly detailed & finely researched chapters on Mickey Mantle (Chapter 7, get it?) and Bob Gibson are the absolute high points of the many richly detailed portraits that form the core of the book.

On Mantle in 1964: "That spring training was more an ordeal than ever for Mantle. He was only 32, a relatively young age for outfielders, but his body was an old 32. Convinced by his family history that Mantle men died before they were 40, he had never taken care of himself. He had played hard and caroused hard during the season, and he had both caroused and loafed when each season was finished, letting his body slip out of condition by not doing even minimal exercise."

On Gibson in 1964: "Later, in the seasons that followed, as he watched Gibson intimidate opposing hitters, Tom Tresh thought the Yankees had been relatively lucky in this series in the sense that they were new to Gibson. They were battling only his skills, no small thing in itself, instead of having to battle both that and his reputation, as teams would have to in the future. For after this World Series he would not be just Bob Gibson, he would be the great Bob Gibson, and his myth would loom bigger, and because of that, in the minds of hitters, his fastball would be faster, the slider would break sharper and wider, and the word about how he shaved hitters with a fastball would be more ominous."

Great stuff or what? And plenty more where that comes from. The portrait of Gibson alone - all of it incredibly strirring material about his hard work and perserverance in making it to the Cardinals - stretches to 24 pages.

This book is an absolute must-read for any true fan of baseball and its rich history.


Baseball at its best.   November 6, 1999
Michael J. Berquist (Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania USA)
6 out of 7 found this review helpful

The 1964 baseball season was a time of great change and re-alignment in baseball. David Halberstam's "October 1964" captures the entire story. Reading this book is like reading a Greek tragedy- the great hero Mickey Mantle battling a multitude of injuries in one final attempt to capture the glory of the world series, the decline and fall of the great Yankees dynasty, the brash young upstarts (the St. Louis Cardinals) whose style of aggressive baserunning, hard-nosed defense and take-no-prisoners pitching would define the way the game has been played. There are dozens of stories of hard-ache and triumph, and they are all here written in Halberstam's you-are-there prose. "October 1964" is a true treasure.