August 20, 1964: Phil Linz, Yogi Berra and the harmonica incident

With starting shortstop Tony Kubek injured — according to Kubek’s bio at sabr.org, he punched a door on September 20 and hurt his wrist — Phil Linz started all seven games in the 1964 World Series for the Yankees, the harmonica incident long over. Results were mixed. The Yankees lost, four games to three, though it’s doubtful Kubek would have changed that. Linz had three hits in Game 2, including a homer off Cardinals reliever Barney Schultz to lead off the ninth with the Yankees up 4-2. They won, 8-3, after losing Game 1. He erred on a Tim McCarver grounder in the ninth inning of Game 3 with the score tied, 1-1. But Jim Bouton stranded McCarver, and Mickey Mantle homered in the ninth, also off Schultz, to win the game, 2-1. (The unfortunate Schultz pitched four innings in the series and allowed eight runs for an 18.00 ERA. More to come.). In Game 4, Linz doubled in the bottom of the first, and would have been out stealing third but Ken Boyer dropped the throw. He then scored on Bobby Richardson’s double as the Yankees built a 3-0 lead, but Boyer atoned for the error with a grand slam homer to win the game, 4-3. Linz broke an 0-for-10 stretch in Game 6 with an eighth-inning single (no surprise, off Schultz) as the Yankees, ahead 3-1, clinched it with a five-run rally. And Linz had two hits in Game 7, including a two-out homer in the ninth with the Cardinals up, 7-4. Linz made a second error, trying to complete a 3-6-3 double play, as the Cardinals scored three times in the fourth. All told, Linz had seven hits, two walks, two homers, one double and scored five runs. And committed two errors.

Editor’s note: This is one in a series of articles retelling the 1964 season. Stay for the end.

Phil Linz didn’t start in the Yankees’ 5-0 loss to the White Sox on this day in 1964, but he certainly provided the finish, even if his manager, Yogi Berra, didn’t think much of the performance or request an encore.

Linz fanned as a pinch-hitter in the sixth inning, than struck out with Berra on the bus to the airport. The Yankees had lost four in a row and had fallen four-and-a-half games behind the first-place White Sox; Linz fell out of favor with his manager as he played his harmonica, the sound as jarring to Berra as the cheers of the 36,667 White Sox fans who rooted John Buzhardt on to a seven-hit shutout.

Linz’s impromptu concert on this day is perhaps what’s best remembered, besides the Phillies’ end-of-season collapse, about the 1964 season. Without it, Linz, a utility infielder who played seven undistinguished seasons for the Yankees, Phillies and Mets, would barely be acknowledged.

“If people remember me at all,” Linz told USA Today’s Bob Nightengale for a 2013 story, “they remember me as a harmonica player, because I sure wasn’t too good of a baseball player.”

That’s mostly true, but in 1964 he hit .250, walked 43 times in 417 plate appearances, hit 21 doubles and compiled 2.7 WAR (his career total was 2.0, which is a pretty good indication how the rest of it went). Linz’s .696 OPS wasn’t great, but on a 1964 Yankees team with second baseman Bobby Richardson (.626) and .229-hitting shortstop Tony Kubek (.615), Linz was a slugger.

The Yankees’ frustration had been building that week in Chicago, one loss piled on top of another like a stack of newspapers with mocking tabloid headlines. On Monday, Juan Pizzaro and Hoyt Wilhelm frustrated the Yankees, 2-1. On Tuesday, Linz tripled twice, scored twice, had three hits and helped the Yankees to a 3-0 lead. But Floyd Robinson tied it in the eighth with a three-run homer off Al Downing, and the usually punchless White Sox won it in the 10th, 4-3, on Mike Hershberger’s two-out single. On Wednesday, pitcher Jim Bouton dropped a toss from first baseman Joe Pepitone on what would have been the third out of the third inning and the White Sox scored twice. In the seventh the Yankees’ defense failed to get an out on a bunt and the White Sox scored twice more. Chicago won, 4-2, on four unearned runs.

On Thursday the Yankees went down early and meekly and lost, 5-0. Mickey Mantle was hurt and batted just once in the series. Whitey Ford lasted three innings in his return from injury Thursday, routed by nine hits. The Yankees had a rookie manager, an unusual deficit and the forecast for September was bleak.

“It looked like we were out of it,” Clete Boyer said, according to Phillip Bashe’s Dog Days: The New York Yankees’ Fall from Grace and Return to Glory, 1964-1976. “We figured Chicago and Baltimore couldn’t both go into slumps.”

The mood on the bus to the airport was as gloomy as that at Hillary Clinton’s campaign party on Election night 2016. Perhaps in playing his harmonica, Linz was trying to lighten it. Maybe he was protesting his absence from the starting lineup on Thursday. Maybe he was bored and learning to play his new instrument the way he might learn to play a new position.

Whatever his motivation, the sound of the harmonica piqued Berra. If Berra seemed angry when Jackie Robinson stole home in the 1955 World Series, that was a controlled temperament compared to accounts of Berra on the bus.

“It was hot, we were tied up in Sunday traffic, we’d blown a doubleheader, we’d lost four or five in a row, we were struggling for a pennant and tempers were short,” wrote Bouton in Ball Four. “Linz was sitting beside me, stewing because he hadn’t played, and all of a sudden he whipped out a harmonica he’d bought that morning and started playing ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb.’ The reason he played ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ was that it was the only song he knew how to play. He really played very respectfully and quietly, and if ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ can sound like a dirge, it did.

“Yogi, who was in the front of the bus, stood up and said, ‘Knock it off.’

“Legend has it that Linz wasn’t sure what Berra said, so he turned to Mickey Mantle and asked, ‘What’d he say?

“‘He said play it louder,’ Mantle explained.

“Linz didn’t believe that. On the other hand he didn’t stop. In a minute Yogi was in the back of the bus, breathing heavily and demanding that Linz shove that thing up his ass.

“‘You do it,’ Linz said, flipping the harmonica at him. Yogi swatted at it with his hand and it hit Pepitone in the knee. Immediately he was up doing his act called, ‘Oooooh, you hurt my little knee.’ Pretty soon everybody was laughing, even if you’re not supposed to laugh after losing, especially a doubleheader.

“And that was really all of it, except that I should point out that in the middle of it all (coach Frank) Crosetti stood up and in his squeaky voice screamed that this was the worst thing he’d ever seen in all his years with the Yankees.”

Bouton wrote that some 50 years ago, so he didn’t have access to Google. Or, apparently, a competent fact checker. The Linz harmonica incident happened on a Thursday, not a Sunday. It was a single game, not a doubleheader. All of that goes to show that in the course of a longer career, as in a pandemic, it’s hard to distinguish one day from another.

But Bouton’s account, in all other respects and all pertinent detail, jibes with contemporary and recollection stories. The Associated Press story of that day said Pepitone required a Band-Aid and confirmed the incident’s place in Crosetti’s view of Yankee history.

It says something about prevailing attitudes that Crosetti thought the harmonica incident was the nadir of the sport’s most successful franchise and not the eight years after Robinson debuted it took the team to play an African-American. Or even the Copacabana brawl of 1957, which unbeknownst to Crosetti in 1964, wasn’t the fault of the Yankees there. Not even Billy Martin.

“‘Why are you getting on me,’ Linz asked Berra, according to the Associated Press story. ‘I give a hundred per cent out on the field. I try to win. I should be allowed to do what I want off the field.’

“Berra replied:

“’Play it in your room.’”

“Berra also was overheard telling Linz: ‘I’ll take care of you.’”

Which Berra did, gently after Linz apologized the next day. Berra fined Linz $250, which sounds like a lot for an infielder who said he was making $14,000 in 1964. But Linz more than made up for the $250 in endorsements and publicity. In the end it cost Berra more than it did Linz. He was fired; Linz kept his job as utility infielder.

The Yankees came back and won the pennant, but not before they lost two more games in Boston to stretch their losing streak to six. From there they went 30-11, squeaked past the White Sox by a game and the Orioles by two. They lost the World Series, in which Linz started every game, in seven games to the Cardinals. Linz batted .226 but homered twice.

Berra was fired after the Series, and became a coach for the Mets. The winning manager of the Series, Johnny Keane, spurned the Cardinals to take over the losing team. It was not his best move. Linz batted .207, the Yankees won only 77 games in 1965 and four of their first 20 in 1966 when Keane was fired.

By then Linz was in Philadelphia, where he played the harmonica more than the infield. The Phillies traded him in mid-1967 to the Mets, where he was reunited with Berra, still there as a coach.

“Yogi never held that against me,” Linz said, according to Nightengale’s USA Today story. “He never really brought it up again, but once he heard about my endorsement, he did say, “I should have gotten in on that.'”

• Phillies 2-3, Pirates 0-2: Frank Thomas’ ninth-inning home run won Game 1, and Johnny Callison drove in all three runs in Game 2 as the 74-46 Phillies swept the Pirates and moved a season-high seven-and-a-half games ahead of the second-place Reds and Giants. Art Mahaffey spun a two-hitter to win Game 1, but Bob Friend matched him for eight innings. In the ninth, Thomas followed Clay Dalrymple’s one-out single with his sixth homer of the season. In Game 2, Rick Wise, age 18, pitched eight innings, allowed eight hits and initiated the winning rally with a leadoff single in the eighth. Tied 1-1 (trailing, 1-0, Callison homered in the sixth), Wise singled, advanced to second when the Pirates erred on Tony Gonzalez’s bunt, and to third on Dick Allen’s single. With the bases loaded and none out, Callison’s long fly to center field — where the wall was 447 feet away at its farthest — scored both Wise and Gonzalez. In the ninth, Wise exited for Ed Roebuck after a Smokey Burgess single and Bill Mazeroski double. Jerry Lynch’s sacrifice fly scored pinch-runner Gene Alley, but Callison threw out the potential tying run in Mazeroski trying to advance to third. A good thing because Bill Virdon singled, but Roebuck fanned Bob Bailey, who had homered in the third, for the final out and his 12th save.