September 28, 1964: Phillies are shown loss No. 8

Bill White was third in the NL MVP vote in 1964, behind teammate Ken Boyer and presumptive winner (had the Phillies won the pennant) Johnny Callison. The Phillies got a good sense of why on this night in 1964. White singled and scored the game’s first run in the second inning, he singled behind Ken Boyer’s double to set up the Cardinals’ second run in the fourth, and he singled after another Boyer double to drive in the Cardinals’ third run in the sixth. White homered the next night and doubled and singled the night after that. All told in the three-game series, White was 7-for-12 with four runs scored and four RBIs. For the season he batted .303, hit 21 homers and knocked in 102 — the third straight season he drove in more than 100 — and won a Gold Glove. It was the kind of season, at age 30, that led the Phillies to trade for White after watching Dick Stuart mangle first base in 1965. It was also the kind of impulsive move that relegated the late-60s and early-70s Phillies to last-place finishes. The ’66 Phillies were still chasing what might have been in 1964, and White did his part — he batted .276, hit 22 homers, knocked in 103 runs (his last 100-RBI season), stole 16 bases and won a Gold Glove. The Phillies won 87 games, finished fourth and were quasi contenders. To do even that, they traded Ferguson Jenkins for Larry Jackson, who won 15 games, and Alex Johnson for Bill White in a six-player deal. Jenkins won 284 games and a place in the Hall of Fame and Johnson an AL batting title in 1970. By then, White and Jackson were retired. (The Cardinals replaced White early in 1966 via trade with Orlando Cepeda.) White played three years for the Phillies and he liked the are more than he did the manager. “I didn’t like playing for Gene Mauch,” White told Philadelphia Magazine in 2011. “He was a control freak. The way to win is to let players play.” White wasn’t the only one who didn’t like Mauch’s autocratic tendencies. Art Mahaffey, who was included in the deal for White, was another. But White stayed in the Philadelphia area even after being traded back to the Cardinal for his final season in 1969, and continued a broadcasting career he had begun in St. Louis. According to White’s bio at sabr.org, it was Howard Cosell who recommended White to the Yankees when they had an opening on their broadcasting team. Thus began White’s post-playing career which included broadcasting, the presidency of the National League and authorship of his autobiography Uppity: My Untold Story About the Games People Play. It’s not an exaggeration to say he was as good at all of them as he was as a player.

Editor’s note: This is one in a series of articles retelling the 1964 season. This is the unhappy ending part of the story.

Cardinals 5, Phillies 1

Losing streak: Eight games. Still counting. Good news is they can lose no more than 12 in a row since there are only four games left in the season.

How they stand: Cincinnati, 91-66, one game over St. Louis, 90-67, one-and-a-half games over the Phillies, 90-68; four-and-a-half games over San Francisco, 86-70.

What went right: Not much. Chris Short pitched decently on two days rest, but not great, giving up single runs every other other inning, in the second, fourth and sixth before being relieved in the latter. The Phillies got multiple runners in the last three innings, but could only score in one of them. They got two on in the second inning but didn’t score, and got a Tony Gonzalez double in the third ahead of Dick Allen and Johnny Callison, but didn’t score.

What went wrong: What didn’t? The Phillies were 0-for-7 with runners in scoring position, including the ninth inning when the first two batters reached and the Cardinals relieved Bob Gibson with 38-year-old Barney Schultz, who spent the first four months of the season in the minor leagues. Schultz saved 14 games in the season’s final two months and two in this series. The first came after Clay Dalrymple grounded into a double play and John Hernstein popped up. Phillies manager Gene Mauch on Schultz, from Schultz’s bio at sabr.org: “Eleven saves in two months. That’s more than Schultz had in his whole big-league career. He never saw the day he could get us out before.” Schultz saw it clearly on this night. The Phillies got the tying runs on in the eighth but Callison, fighting Gibson and the flu that would sideline him the next night (they didn’t call it flu-like symptoms in 1964), grounded out and Wes Covington flew out to deep center. In the bottom of the inning, a Covington error led to two unearned runs. The Phillies-Cardinals game was just one of two scheduled on this night in the majors. As other teams rested their pitching staffs, the Phillies played on, day after day. On the night Chico Ruiz stole home to start the losing streak, the Reds-Phillies game was just one of two scheduled in the major leagues; on the night of Game 4 of the losing streak the Braves-Phillies was just one of four games scheduled. As every other team in MLB had a day off, the Phillies, who needed one the most, played on until they had lost 10 in a row.

Did you know? Schultz wasn’t the only in-season call-up who helped turn the Cardinals into pennant winners. The Cardinals’ opening-day outfield was Charlie James in left, Curt Flood in center and Carl Warwick in right. The next day Johnny Lewis was in right. Only Flood was still a starter by season’s end. And while 24-year-old Mike Shannon made the opening-day roster, he batted just three times in two-and-a-half weeks, was used mostly as a late-inning defensive replacement or pinch-runner and was sent to the minors in early May. When he returned in early July it was as a starter in right field, with Lou Brock in left field. The Cardinals of September were a much better team than the Cardinals of April. Shannon hit .261 with nine homers and 43 RBIs in the half season that remained of 1964, and remained a starter for the next five seasons until kidney disease ended his career. He moved to third base in 1967 when the Cardinals traded for Roger Maris, and with Shannon in the lineup, the Cardinals won three pennants in five seasons. Shannon knocked in three runs on this night 56 years ago against the Phillies. His sacrifice fly gave St. Louis a 1-0 lead in the second, and his two-run single gave the Cards a 5-1 lead after Covington’s error in the eighth.