Gibby, fiery pitcher

By Ed Piper

I'm enjoying a new baseball book by Sridhar Pappu, The Year of the Pitcher, about the 1968 baseball season when Bob Gibson had a 1.12 ERA for the Cardinals and Denny McLain won 31 games for the Tigers. I was 14 years old at the time, and at the height of my baseball interest and ability to memorize statistics. (I can still quote you stats off the back of my baseball cards from that era, which I still have.)

I recently have acquired some baseball jerseys, something I had never done before. My wife is from St. Louis, and I have attended a Cardinals game at the new Busch Stadium on Cap Day with her favorite uncle, Uncle Rudy. So it was natural that I would look into a jersey for one of the Cards, an organization with a rich history.

But economics kicked in, and the two players I zoned in on from back in my young baseball-crazy era, Bob Gibson and Lou Brock, don't have jerseys available that are in the lower tier price-wise of already-pricey items. So I settled for Stan Musial's number six. (I had to go check on the rack what Stan the Man's number was--any true-blue--oops! red--Cardinals fan would have known off the top.)

I decided earlier this year that it made more sense to collect jerseys than baseball caps, because I perspire heavily, and I cannot tell you how many good baseball caps I have absolutely ruined over the years. (I still buy caps, but they mostly hang from racks high up the walls in our computer room.)

Anyway, in Pappu's new book, which came out this year, I am relishing the author's research on Gibson, especially. Gibson wasn't a favorite of mine as a kid. He pitched for an opposing team to my Dodgers (I grew up in the greater L.A. area), but he was fiery, took no guff, and was a killer competitor. He threw so hard, that in the completion of his windup he always fell to the left off the mound, in a dramatic finish that is discussed in detail in the book.

I admire Gibson's courage. As a young black man with his mother in the home and his older brother his role model and sports coach (Gibson was an outstanding 6'1" basketball player at Creighton University), he learned a protective posture of walling people outside his family out of his private life.

This was intimidating to many people, and Gibson didn't endear himself to Cardinal fans or the August Busch organization that owns the team's franchise. He just won a lot. But Pappu's narration of Gibson's life makes the glare and the me-against-the-world attitude more understandable, and less threatening. The early parts of the book have increased my admiration for the man, and made me feel a connection in some way, though I never grew up in the projects or faced racism the way he did (though I lived a year in Mexico City, and dealt with being the only non-Mexican in many groups--but I chose to go and live there, and I wasn't the one at the bottom of the totem pole as African-Americans are made to be in our society).

Gibson grew up in the Logan Fontenelle Homes in North Omaha, Nebraska, as Pappu tells us. It was a tough neighborhood. These were the "projects", and you had to learn to be a survivor.