September 11, 1964: Bennett over Marichal and Mays

One of Dennis Bennett’s shortest outings was his start on June 12, 1964, but without it his brother Dave might not have had a major-league career. Dennis started against the Mets and after two scoreless innings, leading 2-0, Dennis gave up four hits and a walk in the third and was relieved by Ed Roebuck, The Mets went on to score five runs in the inning and four more in the seventh and won easily, 11-3. It was one of only three times in 18 games the Mets beat the Phillies in 1964. The Phils brought in Dave Bennett, six years younger than Dennis, to pitch the ninth. He allowed a Joe Christopher triple and wild-pitched him home, then gave up a Roy McMillan double. In between he struck out Charley Smith and finished the inning without further damage. It was the only inning Dave Bennett would pitch in the major leagues, though he threw 1,400 in the minors until 1974. From Dave Bennett’s bio at sabr.org: “Dave allowed, ‘I throw harder. I think Dennis will admit that. And I feel I am getting stronger every year.’ Dennis agreed with Dave: ‘Listen, if the kid had my curve and I had the kid’s fastball, we’d be unbeatable.’” Dave was 18 years old when he pitched his major-league inning, but he never made it back. He was 28 when he pitched in the minors for the final time. From sabr.org: “They briefly drew comparisons to Dizzy and Paul Dean, the zany Dennis being the Dizzy-like character. ‘One of these days we’ll (win) 20 apiece,’ Dennis once said, sounding very much like Dizzy Dean.” In total they won 43, all by Dennis.

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

Whether you believed in data or superstition, it was clear on this date 56 years ago the Phillies were going to win the pennant.

If it’s math you believed in, they were six games ahead with 21 to play. Run the possibilities through the computer any way you want, but what were the odds that a team which had won 85 of its first 141 games wouldn’t win enough of its final 20 plus one to win the pennant?

It it’s omens you followed, the Phillies had left a season’s full of clues. Jim Bunning pitched a perfect game on Father’s Day. Johnny Callison homered in the bottom of the ninth to win the All-Star Game. And on this night in San Francisco, talented but chronically sore-armed left-hander Dennis Bennett, a winner of 43 career games, outdueled Hall of Famer Juan Marichal, a winner of 243 career games, and shut out the Giants, 1-0.

It was the kind of win that would make even the most rational of fans suspect there was something supernatural going on with the ’64 Phillies. They scored the game’s only run even after manager Gene Mauch’s favorite play, the sacrifice bunt, had failed to work. Marichal had lost just six games all season; Bennett was a win away from having lost seven in a row. And three times on this night Bennett faced Willie Mays, the best player in the National League, with runners in scoring position. Three times he struck him out, and three times Mays couldn’t even offer a swing, as if the baseball gods were holding his bat back. How else could it be explained?

But there was also, if one looked hard enough, an ominous sign. Bennett’s performance was the kind the Phillies would miss in the final three weeks plus two days if his shoulder worsened, as it did.

After the 1962 season, the Phillies sent Bennett, then 23 years old, to Puerto Rico to play winter ball. And on January 7, 1963, according to Bennett’s bio at sabr.org, the car Bennett was riding in was in a terrible accident.

According to the baseballhistorian.blogspot.com, Bennett said the driver had a heart attack and died, and the car hit a bridge. Bennett went through the windshield and broke his ankle, pelvis and shoulder blade. Sabr.org: “The Phillies were most concerned with Bennett’s ankle, but it was the shoulder injury that would linger, and cause problems throughout the remainder of his career.”

It was the shoulder injury that would haunt the ’64 Phillies,

Bennett, from baseballhistorian.blogspot.com: “They told me I might have trouble walking, let alone pitching, but I overcame all of that though I couldn’t overcome the shoulder.”

On this night the injuries weren’t apparent. Bennett couldn’t get out Hal Lanier, who was 3-for-3, but he held Mays, Orlando Cepeda, Jim Ray Hart and pinch-hitter Willie McCovey hitless in 11 at-bats (Hart walked and was hit by a pitch). Bennett threw a six-hitter and fanned eight. He fanned Mays looking in the first inning with a runner on third and one out, he fanned him looking again in the third with Marichal and Lanier on third and second, respectively, after pulling off a double steal, and fanned him looking one more time in the eighth with second and third and one out.

And he popped up McCovey, pinch-hitting for reliever Masanori Murakami, for the final out.

The game was scoreless until the fifth inning, when Clay Dalrymple led off with a double. Tony Taylor bunted, as Mauch was wont to do (the Phillies’ 97 sacrifice bunts were second in MLB to the Dodgers’ 120; even their two best hitters, Dick Allen and Johnny Callison, who combined for 60 homers, weren’t unaffected by the sign. They each sacrificed six times).

Dalrymple, a slow catcher, didn’t make it to third and instead of a runner in scoring position, the Phillies had Taylor on first base with one out. But Ruben Amaro doubled, Taylor scored and Bennett had a lead he didn’t give up.

It wasn’t a totally unexpected performance by Bennett. He came back from the accident in 1963 to pitch 119.1 innings, win nine games and post a 2.64 ERA. He was the Phillies’ opening day starter in 1964 and he was 9-5 before the seven-game losing streak, which he finally broke in his previous start, a complete game five-hit, 5-1 win over the Dodgers four days before.

He followed up his shutout of the Giants with six more shutout innings at Houston, making it 24 innings in which Bennett allowed 14 hits, four walks and a single run. What the ’64 Phillies wouldn’t have given for three more starts like that from Bennett.

But in his final three starts, he only lasted six innings once, and couldn’t get past the third inning in either of the other two starts. It was Bennett’s injury, and Mauch’s disdain of Ray Culp, that made the manager pitch Jim Bunning and Chris Short on two days rest, which he did twice each during the 10 fateful games in September. We know how that turned out.

Sabr.org: “Bennett said he believed the team would have won the pennant ‘hands down’ had his arm stayed healthy,” and he was probably right.

But Bennett never was healthy for long after the accident. The 1964 season was the only one in his seven-season career in which he pitched more than 200 innings, and the Phillies, perhaps sensing he wouldn’t be able to do it again, traded him to Boston for Dick Stuart. That Mauch would take on Stuart, as dangerous to his own team in the field as he was to the other at bat, tells us all we need to know about his belief in Bennett’s prospects.

(So much for fundamentals. For the record, Stuart had no sacrifice bunts in 1965, either because he failed when asked or Mauch knew better than to do so.)

Bennett pitched for two-and-a-half years for the Red Sox, but the shoulder limited him. He threw 141.2 innings in 1965, just 75 in 1966 after surgery and 69.2 in 1967 before he was traded to the Mets. Poor Bennett. He stayed till the end for the ’64 Phillies, but wasn’t around for the end of the Impossible Dream ’67 Red Sox. You’d think someone who had to endure such a miserable ending in 1964 would most deserve to relish the happy ending of 1967. The baseball gods, as the ’64 Phillies learned the hard way, aren’t much on sentiment.

“I played on the ’67 Red Sox,” Bennett said in Steve Wulf’s 1989 Sports Illustrated article on a ’64 Phillies reunion, “but people hardly ever ask me about that team. They always ask me about this team.”