September 7, 1968 5:06PM, Yankee Stadium
Twi-night Doubleheader.
(First game)
Washington............. 2 13 3
Yanks....................16 19 0
Time of Game 2:44
(Second game)
Washington............. 0 2 0
Yanks.................... 10 8 0
Time of Game 1:53
Attendance 20,613
Yankees 72-70, 5th place, 17-1/2 GB
Price tickets:
$4.00 Boxed (up from $3.50 in 1967!)
$3.00 Reserved
$1-2 General Admission (roughly, can't remember)*
$.50-1.00 Bleachers (again, it's been a while)
*General Admission: Any seat in the house not reserved. In 1968 there were 67,000 seats in Yankee Stadium. That means there were 46,000+ empty seats to chose from on this particular date. Of course, on this particular day, most of them were temporarily empty, as everyone was standing, cheering, yelling, and watching the Senators chase the baseball around the outfield.
I know. Because I was one of them. My parents brought us in from Long Island, sixty-some-odd-miles, to watch the New York Yankees beat the stuffing out of the Washington Senators. I had no idea how bad the Senators were, or for that matter, how bad the Yankees were.
The Bronx Bombers were bombers no more. But in 1968 I was still too young to realize that. I did not watch the Yankees on TV... did not follow them in the papers. I spent my daylight hours playing baseball, not watching it. But I knew the names... knew the baseball cards... Mantle... Maris... Ford... Berra. I did not even appreciate that these guys were all gone, except for the Mick, who was literally on his last legs... legs that could no longer carry him to first base with any semblance of speed, nor across the vast expanses of the old YS center field. Mickey made the transition to first base rather smoothly. But he could no longer hit or run like he had. I had never seen Mantle at his best. I did not know until later, during the age of ESPN classic and YouTube, how blindingly fast he really was. The Mantle I saw could line a fastball off the right field wall, and get a single out of it, limping 90 feet to the bag he used to fly across just ten years before.
The Yankee management did a lot of things wrong during the 1960s... things that directly led to the Yankee decline. The Yankee ownership proved conclusively what I have been saying ever since: that the Yankees did not, and do not enjoy ANY advantage whatsoever, because they play in NYC, or any other so-called 'big-market' town. The Yankees had enjoyed an unprecedented forty year run because their management and ownership had been uncommonly, historically great... smart, savvy, and slick. The Ruppert Years, with Ed Barrow directing traffic... the Topping-Webb Years, with George Weiss... cold, calculating and correct always, and even Larry McPhail, eccentric but excellent, both as a Brooklyn Dodger exec AND a Yankee... the Yankees ALWAYS had the American league by the throat. They won because they were smarter, better prepared and more focused on the prize... winning.
But by 1968, that was all gone. CBS owned the Yankees. Remember the great Red Barber? He's the one Chris Berman pays tribute to with his 'back-back-back' HR call... from the 1947 World Series. Red also broke in Vin Scully as a Brooklyn Dodger announcer. Well, by the mid sixties, Mr. Barber was with the Yankees. During one telecast he stirred up a hornet's nest by having the camera crew pan the rows and rows of empty Yankee Stadium seats. With a 67,000 seat capacity, and a now perennial punching bag of a team on the field, 60,000 empty seats make for a lot of sad echoes. Red Barber was never a shill for the teams he broadcast for, and pretty soon, predictably, he was no longer a Yankee broadcaster. The Yankees were owned by CBS... a marriage one would think would be baseball heaven. I am here to tell you, it was completely the opposite. The Yanks were in free fall without a parachute. And that's the way it was. (Thanks Walter!)
As bad and boring the team had gotten, the Yankees were smart enough, or desperate enough, to still emphasize their storied history. They still had their Old Timers Day annually. Our family always went. That probably confused my young mind. I knew who Steady Eddie Lopat, Tommy Henrich, Goofy Lefty Gomez, Yogi Berra, and Billy Martin were... because they were still all there... as was I, every year. Of course, the great Joe DiMaggio showed, getting as big an ovation as Mantle got... sometimes five or six solid minutes of roaring and clapping. The Clipper was still young and spry enough to take center field. An he still occasionally hit a long one. Sitting besides the Yankee dugout, were Mrs. Claire Ruth and Mrs. Eleanor Gehrig, royalty in the Yankee family. I got to know these 'old timers' better than I knew most of the current 1968 Yankees, or the crosstown Mets.
Besides that, to get to the Stadium, you walked down Babe Ruth Plaza, near the Grand Concourse. You walked into the stadium, and somewhere nearby, there was this huge bank of phones. If you picked up one of the phones, you heard somebody talking on the other end... a recording. You heard the Babe, talking about his called shot in the 1932 WS, or Lou Gehrig, again telling you he was the luckiest man on the face of the earth, or Joe D, thanking the Good Lord for making him a Yankee... and so on. There were dozens of phones, with big pictures... kind of like a telephonic Yankee Hall of Fame.
The Yankees embraced their tradition, because by 1968, that was all they had. To be a Yankee fan in 1968 was to be a history buff... which I was then and am now.
But the distinction between happy past and horrid present was still muddled in my mind in 1968. We were going to see the Yankees play! Twice! Two-for-one! And i knew enough that even the last place Washington Senators had somebody I wanted to see... big Frank Howard, who was by far the most enormous player anyone had seen up to that time.
We sat in the upper deck, reserved seats. They were good seats, behind first base... a bit down the right field line, but close enough to see and enjoy all of the action. Frank Howard, who batted in the top of the first, indeed was as big as I had heard... even from the upper deck. He was 6'7'' and 250-275, and waved a 40-ounce bat like it was a whiffle bat. The field seemed to tilt toward wherever he was at any given time.
But soon the field itself seemed to TILT like a pinball machine. The Yankees came to bat, and started pounding the ball like it was a Sunday afternoon beer league softball game. It was as if all the ghosts of the past returned. The innings seemed to go on forever... pinstripers circling the bases. Mel Stottlemyre started for the Yankees. I seemed to remember that he was in complete command, and that he also had a good day at the plate. Recently I discovered the box score of the game, and the evidence bears out my memory. Mel scattered 13 hits, as an ace with 16 runs to work with should. He went the distance, again, as an ace did in those days. And Mel went two for four with a double, driving in two of the sixteen, and scoring another himself. By the way, another guy who drove in two runs batted just ahead of Stottlemyre in the line-up... a light hitting third-sacker named Bobby Cox. Several Yanks homered. We all cheered heartily. Mel put down the side in the ninth, and everyone except the Senators cheered one final time, and then relaxed, hit the bathrooms, hit the hot dogs, and awaited game two.
After a brief respite, the Yanks and the Senators went at it again. Mantle did not play. But the Yankees throttled the Nats again, 10-0. Fritz Peterson also went the distance. I did remember that he had shut the Senators out. But I did not realize then that he yielded only two hits... two lonely singles away from immortality. The box score also reminds me that i saw another great player winding his career down as a Yankee... Rocky Colavito, who's demise was as sudden and in may ways, more puzzling than even the Mick's. Rocky had been a long bomber back in his Cleveland days, and I do remember that he still had a fantastic arm... he took the mound for the Yankees at least once that I can recall... and he threw hard!
So... after the second Senator-smashing performance of the day, 20,000 some-odd fans (some-very-odd) went home very happy... including yours truly. Somewhere in my young mind I must have thought that everything is just fine, Yankee-wise. This was easy! These guys could do this every day! Extra base hits all over the lot! Using two pitchers in a double header while the other guys emptied their whole bullpen twice... geez! This is easy! This is FUN! Let's do this again tomorrow!
The most remarkable thing to me, looking at the box score now, is the times of the games. The Yanks scored 26 runs, and played two games. But the game times were 2:44 and 1:53 respectively. That's 4:37 for two games. I've been to many single games that now pass the four hour mark! No wonder people leave in the seventh inning nowadays! No wonder there are no more two-fers! I love baseball, but to spend eight hours at the ballpark... sheesh! They'd have to pay ME time-and-a-half!
That day, the first game (according to the box score) started at 5:06pm. The second game started at 8:21pm. Even with the intermission, and even with the sixteen run, nineteen hit barrage... and remember, even the Senators collected thirteen hits... the Yankees managed to throw the first pitch of the second game only twenty minutes past their normal starting time of a single night game, 8:05. And Fritz Peterson, knowing everybody had to get up in the morning, still fired a shutout in under two hours.
My memories of that day are fading. When I first recalled that double header, I had thought the score of the first game was 18-2, not 16-2. But the euphoria of that double-dip of butt-stomping on the Yankees part cemented me as a Yankee fan forever. And fortunately, for me, the days ahead looked promising. The Yanks had a couple of prospects ready to take over, a couple of kids named Munson and Murcer. The Stadium was due for a badly needed face lift. And then there was this guy that nobody had ever heard of, who bought a piece of the franchise in 1973. He promised that the Yanks would never leave New York (there had been rumors). And he promised that the Yanks would return to their rightful former place of glory. He said that it would happen within five years, if not sooner.
Yeah. We had heard that before. But this guy, from Cleveland of all places, seemed serious. He meddled. He butted in. He brought in another one of those Cleveland people, Gabe Paul, who in turn brought in some more Clevelanders himself... guys named Nettles and Chambliss. He hired and fired managers, players and waitresses so fast the turnstiles smoked.
But five years after he wedged his way into the New York sports scene, the Yankees celebrated their third consecutive pennant and their second consecutive World Series under the meddling ownership of George M. Steinbrenner.
We were back!
And we're here to stay!
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