For baseball fans who mark the history of the game with honorifics, 1930 has long been known as the Year of the Hitter and 1968 as the Year of the Pitcher. In the former, the batting average for the entire National League was .303, with New York Giant Bill Terry hitting .401 and Chicago Cub Hack Wilson batting in 191 runs. In 1968, when the regular season came to a close, Bob Gibson of the St. Louis Cardinals had produced an astounding 1.12 earned-run average—surpassed among modern big leaguers only by Dutch Leonard’s 0.96 mark from 1914, back in the dead ball era. Mr. Gibson still managed to lose nine games to go along with his 22 victories. Over in the American League, Denny McLain of the Detroit Tigers posted a 31-6 record, making him the last pitcher to win more than 30 games in a season.
The two men were polar opposites in disposition. Mr. Gibson cut an imposing figure. Handsome, trim, disciplined and ever-scowling, he was only 6-foot-1 but looked much bigger as he delivered his 12 o’clock fastball from atop the 15-inch-high pitcher’s mound. He was above all intimidating. “Don’t dig in against Bob Gibson,” Hank Aaron once told Dusty Baker before he faced him for the first time. “He’ll knock you down. He’d knock down his own grandmother if she dared to challenge him. Don’t stare at him, don’t smile at him, don’t talk to him. He doesn’t like it.”
Mr. McLain, by contrast, was a happy-go-lucky type given to smirking. Off the field, he was a 1960s-style free spirit whose major passions were playing the organ and bowling. He was brash and outspoken and had little regard for team rules. When Time magazine put Mr. McLain on a 1968 cover, the article compared him to a “high-school wise guy.” Behind these two dynamic but very different pitchers, the Cardinals and Tigers won their respective pennants, and Messrs. Gibson and McLain were positioned to face off to start the World Series.
This was before the divisional playoff system came into being a year later, so there were no playoffs to clutter the run-up to the big event. There was no interleague play in 1968, which meant that most of the batters really would never have seen either pitcher in the regular season. Game 7 would take place on Oct. 10. Game 1 took place on Wednesday, Oct. 2, when the two pitchers faced each other at Busch Stadium in St. Louis.
The game lasted two hours and 29 minutes, and Mr. Gibson threw a complete-game 4-0 shutout, striking out 17 batters, besting by two Sandy Koufax’s 1963 record for strikeouts in a postseason game. It still stands as the World Series record 47 years later. Mr. Gibson allowed five hits and one walk and faced 32 batters. He finished the game by striking out Tiger sluggers Al Kaline, Norm Cash and Willie Horton for the third time each. His effort in game one remains one of the most dominant pitching performances in World Series history.
Now, in time for the 2015 World Series, the 79-year-old Mr. Gibson has produced a remarkable narrative based entirely on that game. “Pitch by Pitch” is at once enjoyable and instructive. We are given a lively glimpse into the craft of pitching at a time when fans were as likely to see a complete game pitched as we are to see a middle reliever today.
The book is appealing on many levels, including its explanations of the mechanics of the game. For example, Mr. Gibson discusses shake-off signals given by the pitcher that are not intended to reject the pitch but rather to confuse the batter. Not only does Mr. Gibson take us through every challenge and nuance of Game 1, but he also talks about the players on both sides of that game. The portraits are poignant and often surprising. He admires teammate Roger Maris as much for his humility as for his remarkable accomplishments as a slugger.
Like many of the rest of us, Mr. Gibson struggles with the dynamics of the game, especially the elusive strike zone: “To this day, the definition of a strike remains fluid and vague to me. Depends on the year. And the umpire. And sometimes the inning.” He also recounts the cultural and outside influences that affected him in that extraordinary and sad year, including the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., which occurred just before Opening Day. He recalls seeing King in an airport not long before his death. The two men recognized each other but did not speak. It is one of the author’s few regrets.
Mr. Gibson had another complete-game victory against Mr. McLain in Game 4 of the 1968 series, when he also hit his second World Series home run. In this 10-1 victory in Detroit, Mr. Gibson established another World Series record: seven consecutive wins, all of which were complete games.
Ultimately the pitching hero of the 1968 series was neither Mr. Gibson nor Mr. McLain but Detroit’s Mickey Lolich. According to this book, Roger Maris had warned his teammates about Lolich early in the Series. Mr. Lolich notched three complete-game wins and beat Mr. Gibson head-to-head in Game 7. Mr. Gibson had pitched six scoreless innings before he gave up four runs. Even with that loss, he remains one of the most brilliant World Series performers of all time. The loss in Game 7 was his seventh World Series complete game in a row, a record likely to be unassailable.
After the 1968 season, Major League Baseball took drastic measures to increase offense, including lowering the mound from 15 inches to 10 and shrinking the strike zone. The name now bestowed on these changes is the “Gibson Rules.” Even with the changes, Mr. Gibson posted 20- and 23-win seasons in 1969 and 1970. In “Pitch by Pitch,” he notes that the lowering of the mound was the first time since the end of the dead-ball era that the actual properties of the game had been altered. He also wishes that the changes were called the “McLain Rules,” since it was Mr. McLain who generated more of the buzz about the pitcher dominating in 1968. He adds: “Denny might even like the irony of that, given how he felt about rules in general.”
