Free Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever by Tim Wendel Page B

when I actually threw the ball as well or had just as much stuff. To go 58 2/3 innings without yielding a single run, you have to be doing something right, true. But you have to have some luck, too. There has to be a combination of both, and I had it.”
     
     
    Nearly every athlete believes that if you think too much about what’s going on in the surrounding world, you’ll lose your focus. Yet early in the ’68 season, Bob Gibson decided that “there was no escaping the pervasive realities of 1968—the assassinations, the cities burning, the social revolution.”
    While Martin Luther King’s death had greatly saddened him, Gibson found that Kennedy’s assassination affected him as no event ever had. Whether or not it was coincidence, Gibson pitched his first shutout of the season the day after Robert Kennedy died. At that point in the ’68 season, Gibson considered himself a mediocre pitcher, who hadn’t done much yet to warrant any accolades. It bugged him that Drysdale “was hogging the headlines.” After Kennedy’s assassination he felt he had so much rage he might as well try to utilize it to raise his game. Some of what he was feeling had to do with what was going on in the country around him. Another aspect was the embarrassment he felt when comparing himself with his peers early in the 1968 season. In any event, Gibson decided that the only thing he could do was outpitch his situation.
    “The answer, clearly, was to take a cue from Drysdale,” he later wrote, “and throw some damn shutouts, which was something that appeared to be within my power at the time. My fastball was boring into [Tim] McCarver’s mitt and my sliders were behaving like smart missiles. I was definitely settling into what would be referred today as a zone....
    “I really can’t say, in retrospect, whether Robert Kennedy’s assassination is what got me going or not. Without a doubt, it was an angry point in American history for black people—Dr. King’s killing had jolted me; Kennedy’s infuriated me—and without a doubt, I pitched better angry.”
    After blanking the Houston Astros, Gibson shut out the Atlanta Braves. In short order, his performances caught on with the rest of the Cardinals’ rotation—Nellie Briles, Steve Carlton, and Ray Washburn. As a staff, they were considered the best in the National League and they eventually carried St. Louis into first place. “Bob pitched with such intensity that it rippled through an entire staff,” Briles said years later. “All you had to do was watch him, as a teammate, and you felt yourself getting excited about your next turn on the mound. If you could emulate him, even just a little bit, you’d probably win, too.”
    Gibson’s third consecutive shutout was an epic affair against Cincinnati’s Gary Nolan. The Cardinals’ ace struck out thirteen and allowed four hits in dropping his ERA to an impressive 1.30.
    Next up was the Cubs and Ferguson Jenkins, and it took a 1–0 shutout for Gibson to win that game. After throwing a four-hitter against the Pirates June 26 in St. Louis, Gibson’s shutout streak stood at five. Only a few weeks after Drysdale had established a new standard, supposedly one for the ages, Gibson was now in his rearview mirror, with forty-seven consecutive scoreless innings and counting.
    To a large extent, Gibson excelled by becoming caught up in the incongruity, even the mayhem that defined 1968. In fact, when asked about the pressure of the mounting shutout streak, Gibson replied that he felt more pressure being a black man in America at the time.
    His next start was July 1, 1968, a Monday night in Los Angeles, against none other than Drysdale and the Dodgers. More than 42,000 fans were in attendance, knowing that another shutout would put Gibson within just three innings of surpassing Drysdale’s new mark. But in the first inning, with two out, Gibson gave up a single to the Dodgers’ Len Gabrielson. Tom Haller then hit a hard groundball that