September 2, 1964: O’Toole’s shutout is extra special

Jim O’Toole’s last attempt to make a major-league roster was in 1969 with the Seattle Pilots. He had pitched exclusively in the minors in 1968, including 16 games for the AAA Seattle Angels. He was nowhere near the pitcher who won 98 major-league games — he was 2-8 with a 5.53 ERA for Seattle in 1968 — but he arrived in camp in 1969, arm and shoulder no doubt aching, to try and make the expansion Pilots. That brought him in contact with another pitcher trying to reinvent his career with the Pilots named Jim Bouton, who wrote a fairly famous book about the expansion team’s season. And it was O’Toole whom Bouton compared himself to for the poignant and oft-quoted end of the book. Both were one-time successful pitchers trying to make an expansion team they would have been aces of a half-decade earlier. Both had success in the early ’60s, followed by severe arm injuries, an occupational hazard. O’Toole was 32, Bouton 30. Both were married with kids, though O’Toole had several more (the O’Tooles had 11 children in 13 years. “In 1967 and 1970 we did not have a child,” wife Betty said, according to O’Toole’s bio at sabr.org. “Jim told people he had pneumonia those years.”) And both wanted to pitch because they once excelled at it, probably never imagined they could be as good at something else, and where else could they find employment that was as much fun? Only one of them was able to do so. “Bill Stafford and Jimmy O’Toole got their releases today,” Bouton wrote in Ball Four in the March 23rd entry. “… I’ve had some discussions with O’Toole. His father is a cop in Chicago and was in on the Democratic Convention troubles. I’d been popping off, as usual, about what a dum-dum Mayor Daley was and O’Toole said hell, none of those kids take baths and they threw bags of shit at the cops, and that’s how I found out his father was a cop. Even so, I feel sort of sorry for him because he’s got about eleven kids (I should feel more sorry for his wife) and he seemed a forlorn figure as he packed his stuff. I told him good luck but somehow I didn’t get to shake his hand, and I feel bad about that.” Bouton said O’Toole was “shopping around,” and O’Toole’s sabr.org bio said when the Pilots “asked him to start the season in AAA he decided it was time to quit.” It doesn’t explain further. The Pilots’ AAA team was in Vancouver, and perhaps it was too far for a family that big to be uprooted from Cincinnati or to be away from. O’Toole retired. Bouton made the team, was farmed, recalled, traded and wrote a best-selling and groundbreaking book. And in Ball Four’s last entry, Bouton was reminded of O’Toole, and how they started 1969 in similar places. “And then I thought of Jim O’Toole and I felt both strange and sad,” wrote Bouton. “When I took the cab to the airport in Cincinnati I got into a conversation with the driver and he said he’d played ball that summer against Jim O’Toole. He said O’Toole was pitching for the Ross Eversoles in the Kentucky Industrial League. He said O’Toole is all washed up. He doesn’t have his fastball anymore but his control seems better than when he was with Cincinnati. I had to laugh at that. O’Toole won’t be trying to sneak one over the corner on Willie Mays in the Kentucky Industrial League. Jim O’Toole and I started out even in the spring. He wound up with the Ross Eversoles and I with a new lease on life. And as I daydream of being Fireman of the Year in 1970 I wondered what the dreams of Jim O’Toole are like these days. Then I thought, would I do that? When it’s over for me, would I be hanging on with the Ross Eversoles? I went down deep and the answer I came up with was yes. Yes, I would. You see, you spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”

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

Jim O’Toole pitched 18 shutouts in his major-league career, but none as long as the one he pitched against the Chicago Cubs on this night in 1964.

For 11 innings, O’Toole’s Reds couldn’t score against three Cubs pitchers, and for 12 innings, O’Toole made sure the Cubs didn’t either. In the bottom of the 12th, O’Toole finally departed for pinch-hitter Marty Keough, a .250 hitter, who singled. Keough moved to second when Chico Ruiz, a .242 hitter, singled, and came around to score the game’s only run when Mel Queen, a .207 hitter, singled to center.

With a month to go, the unlikely rally and 1-0, 12-inning win might have seemed as if it were delaying the inevitable, but it was only preparing the Reds for a capricious final month. The Reds still trailed the first-place Phillies by five-and-a-half games with 30 to play. The Cardinals and Giants were even farther back, and trailed by seven-and-a-half games.

The win was the 14th of a season in which O’Toole would win at least 16 games for the fourth straight season. It was also, perhaps the grittiest. He shut out the Cubs on four hits through the first nine innings, thanks to a Vada Pinson-to-Ruiz-to-catcher-Don Pavletich relay to nab Billy Cowan, trying to score on Jimmy Schaeffer’s double, in the second inning.

O’Toole didn’t allow another hit until the seventh, when Billy Williams doubled, but as the pitcher went through the Cubs order a fourth and fifth time, things got hairy. The Cubs had runners in scoring position all three extra innings — Cowan doubled with two outs in the 10th; Jimmy Stewart stole second after forcing out Leo Burke, who had singled leading off the 11th; Ernie Banks doubled with one out in the 12th.

And each time O’Toole kept the game scoreless, twice walking Schaeffer intentionally to get to rookie infielder Ron Campbell, who fanned and popped out, and once fortuitously getting Williams to line out to Pinson. It was O’Toole’s last shutout for the Reds and the 17th of his career.

It was the kind of combativeness O’Toole was known for in his four-year stretch in the upper class of NL pitchers. “Cocky? Put it this way. I think O’Toole believes in himself,” said Reds manager Fred Hutchinson in a 1962 Sport magazine story, according to O’Toole’s bio at sabr.org. “That’s great … He likes a fight … When he’s competing, he’s aggressive. He works hard to beat you.”

From 1961-64, the Reds weren’t easy to beat when O’Toole pitched for them. He won 69 games, lost 43 and had a 3.05 ERA. Nineteen-sixty-four, his final good year, might have been his best. He had a career-low 2.66 ERA, and after beating the Cubs for win No. 14, he took a no-decision at St. Louis, lost at Milwaukee (his last loss of the season), and then won three games in a row to pitch the Reds back into the pennant race.

But it was his final start, and the shutout and win he didn’t get on October 2, that has come to stand for the ’64 Reds’ failure, every bit as frustrating in its own way as the Phillies’ 10-game losing streak.

Having failed to score for 34 innings over four games in the final week (including a 1-0, 16-inning loss to Pittsburgh), the Reds began play on the final Friday a half-game behind the first-place Cardinals and two games ahead of the Phillies, their opponent.

O’Toole shut out the Phillies, having lost their last 10, through seven innings. The Reds took a 3-0 lead on a Frank Robinson RBI double, and a double steal led by Chico Ruiz with Robinson batting, on which the frustrated Phillies committed two errors. (Stealing with the Hall of Famer Robinson batting would be frowned on by sabermetrics, no doubt, but it worked out pretty well for the Reds in September 1964).

O’Toole was working on a four-hitter and had retired eight in a row as his team batted in the seventh. With one on and out, shortstop Leo Cardenas was hit by a Chris Short pitch and the Reds’ season inexorably uraveled.

From Frank Deford’s October 12, 1964 Sports Illustrated story: “Cardenas, thinking that Short had thrown at him intentionally, moved menacingly, bat in hand, toward the Philadelphia pitcher. Phillie Catcher Clay Dalrymple moved in front of Cardenas and players from both teams came running. Cardenas finally was calmed down, but Phillie Coach Bob Oldis growled: ‘He’ll let you know if he’s going to throw at you,’ and that upset Cardenas anew.” 

When the Reds went back on the field in the eighth inning, Cardenas’ frustration apparently accompanied him.

From Deford’s Sports Illustrated article: “Cardenas went out to shortstop. He should have forgotten all about the flare-up, but the Reds don’t think he did. The first thing (interim manager Dick) Sisler said after the game was: ‘It all started when Cardenas was hit. I think he took it out to his position with him.’

“With one out in the Phillies’ eighth, Frank Thomas blooped a miserable little pinch-hit pop fly over second base, not even onto the outfield grass. Cardenas and Second Baseman Rose went for the ball, and though Cardenas seemed to have the better chance for it he slowed down. Rose, looking up for an instant to check on Cardenas, could not hold onto the ball. Then Jim O’Toole, who had been pitching well, caved in.”

Cookie Rojas walked. Tony Taylor singled to score pinch-runner Johnny Briggs and send Rojas to third. O’Toole’s shutout was gone, and so was he. Reliever Billy McCool fanned Johnny Callison for the second out, but Richie Allen tripled to tie the game and rookie Alex Johnson singled to give the Phillies a 4-3 lead, their first since the second inning of Loss No. 7, five days earlier.

Reliever Jack Baldschun retired all six batters he faced to hold it, and the Reds returned to the locker room having lost an opportunity to pass the Cardinals, beaten by the Mets, and eliminate the Phillies.

Then things got unseemly. Hutchinson had said O’Toole likes a fight, and provoked by a perhaps unnecessary loss, he was ready for one. Maybe it wasn’t O’Toole’s fault or Cardenas’ fault, or any Red’s fault. Maybe it was all the pent-up angst of three losses in four games when they needed to win the most, the 16 scoreless innings or having to watch their manager Hutchinson wither, slowly dying of cancer, that released itself after the game.

From sabr.org: “O’Toole was furious; in all his accounts of the incident Jim claimed that Cardenas did not even attempt to field the ball. Angry words were exchanged between O’Toole and Cardenas; the pitcher grabbed the Cuban and threw him against the wall. Cardenas then came after O’Toole with an ice pick, but Joey Jay stopped him before any harm could be done.”

Perhaps the harm to the team had already been done. After a day off on Saturday, the Reds needed to win the finale to assure themselves a playoff. They lost, 10-0. Cardenas was 0-for-3, but the Reds had just six hits, all singles. Sisler’ choice to pitch, John Tsitouris, had blanked the Phillies 1-0 as Ruiz stole home not two weeks previously, but he didn’t get through the third inning. Jim Maloney, who pitched 11 shutout innings against the Pirates in a 1-0, 16-inning loss on Wednesday, sat idle. Jay the peacemaker gave up five hits in the sixth inning and a 4-0 deficit was 9-0 in the time it took Pete Rose to hustle to first after a walk.

O’Toole’s anger over 1964 never abated much. “Dick Sisler had no idea what to do that last week,” O’Toole later said, according to sabr.org. “If Hutch had been healthy we’d have won.” 

Instead the Reds and Phillies tied for second, a third straight win by the 109-loss Mets over the Cardinals away from a three-team playoff.

And O’Toole, who had twice dueled with Whitey Ford in the 1961 World Series (he lost the opener, 2-0, and left Game 4 down 2-0 on the way to a 7-0 loss), never pitched in as weighty a game again. In 1965 he was 3-10 with a 5.92 ERA as the injuries that ended his career took hold.

His 18th and final shutout came for the Chicago White Sox in May 1967, and it was in the fashion of both the White Sox and their pitcher. The ’67 White Sox didn’t score many runs, but O’Toole only needed one.

O’Toole threw a two-hitter over 10 innings against the California Angels, retired 15 in a row from the fifth to the 10th, and the game was scoreless until the White Sox eked out a run on a Pete Ward double and Smokey Burgess pinch-sacrifice fly.

Within two months O’Toole was hurt once more and never pitched in the major leagues again. He was 4-3 with a 2.82 for those ’67 White Sox, who like the ’64 Reds had a frustrating finish in a pennant race they might have won but didn’t.

• Phillies 2, Colts 1: Chris Short pitched a four-hitter and Tony Taylor singled in two runs as the first-place Phillies remained five-and-a-half games ahead of the second-place Reds. The win was the Phillies’ 80th of the season against 51 losses. Short walked two and fanned 10, and didn’t allow a hit after Bob Aspromonte’s sixth-inning RBI single. In the ninth, Short pitched around a one-out error by Richie Allen. The win was his 15th against seven losses. The Phillies had only seven hits, but three came in the fourth inning. Wes Covington and Clay Dalrymple started the inning with singles, Frank Thomas sacrificed, and Taylor followed with his big hit.