Free October 1964 by David Halberstam Page A

quoted.
    This clubhouse code was set not by Mantle or Ford or Berra, who by and large could have cared less (and who were probably delighted to see the local sportswriters bothering someone other than themselves). Instead, it was the older players, more often than not the part-timers of marginal talents, who were bothered most. It was not surprising that the second-tier players were unusually zealous to protect their privileges as Yankees, for it was not individual play that secured their niche in baseball history, but their place on those dynastic teams. They viewed a younger player who talked too much and whose locker became something of a haven for the beat reporters as seeking too much publicity and promoting himself. He was a member, they said, of the Three-I League: I-I-I. In addition, there was a suspicion that a player who talked too much was somehow disloyal to the team, and might be giving away secrets. When Bouton or Linz or Pepitone were too available to reporters, the other players would pass their lockers and make a gesture with their fingers of a mouth moving, the implication being that the player was talking too much, and was too close to the press.

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    T HE YANKEE ROSTER WAS essentially set when spring training began. There was, the players believed, one additional place left—Yogi Berra was looking for a reliever, and in early spring it came down to a contest between a player named Tom Metcalf and one named Pete Mikkelsen. By all odds Metcalf, then twenty-three, was the favorite, for he had gone further and accomplished significantly more than Mikkelsen, twenty-four, whose career had been rocky. Metcalf had played for three years at Northwestern and pitched at a high level in the minor leagues: he had a wide variety of pitches, with a particularly good curve. Johnny Sain, the perceptive pitching coach, thought him just on the verge of becoming a good big-league pitcher. Metcalf had been brought up to New York from the Triple A farm club in Richmond in mid-1963 when Houk began to worry about his bullpen. Because he had spent time with the parent club, it did not occur to him until rather late in the spring of 1964 that he was competing with a pitcher who had never pitched above Class A. Even Pete Mikkelsen himself thought the fact that he had been invited to the major-league camp something of a fluke. He did not have a very good fastball (“at best it was mediocre”) and he did not have a very good curve. He did have a wicked palm ball, a pitch that allowed him to rear back and throw with a violent arm motion, while the ball itself proceeded slowly toward the plate. In much of his career in the minors he had been on the edge of failure; in 1961 with Binghamton he had been 4-10, and the next year, with Augusta, he had been 3-5 and he felt he had pitched badly. At that point he was sure he was on his way out of the world of professional baseball to one populated primarily by blue-collar workers, like most of his high school classmates from Staten Island. To make bad matters worse, in early 1963 he hurt his arm at the start of the season. Because of the pain, Mikkelsen had been forced to start throwing his fastball with a shoulder-high delivery instead of a straight overhand delivery as he had in the past. When he began to do that, the ball started to sink on the hitters, and they regularly beat the ball into the ground. He had become, quite involuntarily, a very good sinker-ball pitcher.
    Rube Walker, Mikkelsen’s manager in Class A, spotted the sinker and told him to stay with it. “Don’t change a damn thing,” he told Mikkelsen. Mikkelsen pitched well during 1963 with Augusta—his record there had been 11-6 in 49 games, and his ERA had dropped to 1.47—and much to his surprise he joined the big-league club in the spring of 1964, largely on Walker’s recommendation, he was sure. He did not think he was pitching terribly well that spring, but he kept surviving the successive roster cuts. Finally,