Bob Gibson Is Still Playing Hardball

There was never a hitter or an issue that Bob Gibson didn’t attack with all the ferocity and simplicity of a fastball aimed at an esophagus.

In life he has minced few pitches or words. In a batter’s box you always knew where you stood with Gibson and it usually meant you wouldn’t be standing for long.

Nothing much has really changed about Gibson in the 20 years from 1967 to 1987. He comes at you today with much the same tenacity he threw at the Boston Red Sox two decades ago, when he won three World Series games to lead the St. Louis Cardinals to the championship.

And if time has faded from memory the vision of Gibson’s chorus-line leg kick and pinpoint control, you might consider leaving early for today’s Angel game, before which the 51-year-old Gibson will be pitching at high noon at Anaheim Stadium as part of the Equitable Old-Timers Series. All proceeds from the city-to-city series benefit former major league players in financial need.

The game between a group of former all-stars and Angel old-timers will mostly be for kicks, although it doesn’t always turn out that way.

“Every once in a while, I’ll throw the ball hard to the younger guys,” Gibson said Friday. “And I’ll throw behind them. Just to remind them. Of course, it wouldn’t hurt if it hit them.”

Recently in St. Louis, Gibson went pitch-to-head with former Cincinnati great Johnny Bench in a remake of a classic 1970s matchup. After fouling off several 3-2 pitches, Bench went spinning from the plate after missing the nastiest changeup he’d ever seen.

“Bench chased me all around the park,” Gibson said.

Gibson was never one to let up. Not on the field or off. He won 251 major league games in 17 seasons with St. Louis and made the Hall of Fame in 1981.

Gibson’s frankness has sometimes been misinterpreted as aloofness. But Gibson always pitched and spoke from the hip, and still does.

So if you ask Bob Gibson what ever became of him, well, he won’t dodge that question, either.

Gibson, one of the great pitchers of his generation, lost his job as pitching coach of the Atlanta Braves in 1984 when he was fired in a package deal along with manager Joe Torre.

Not one job offer has come since. Gibson was so desperate that he even called around the league looking for a job as a scout.

Bob Gibson, astute and talented as he is, can’t get work in the major leagues.

Surprised?

“You shouldn’t be,” he said. “With what’s come out out in the last few years, you know why. It’s the same that goes along with what Al Campanis said. That’s the reason. There’s no reason I shouldn’t be in baseball someplace, if I chose to be.”

So it is with great humor that Gibson reads stories about him possibly becoming the first black baseball manager since the comments of the former Dodger Vice President Campanis, who said on national television a few months back that blacks perhaps lack, among other things, the “necessities” for front-office positions.

Gibson wonders how a man becomes a manager when he can’t even get a job as a scout.

But his name surfaced again on Friday in the wake of the firing of Philadelphia manager John Felske, who was immediately replaced by former Chicago manager Lee Elia.

Civil rights leader Jesse Jackson, who has been pressing professional sports leaders to examine their minority hiring practices, was appalled that Elia would be hired without at least consideration for top black candidates such as Gibson, Lou Brock and Joe Morgan.

“Jackson is right in that respect,” Gibson said. “I would liked to have had the opportunity to turn it down. I always said that I didn’t want to be a manager, but I used to say that because I knew I wasn’t going to get the opportunity.”

Gibson’s two coaching jobs in baseball since his 1975 retirement have both been associated with friend and former teammate Torre, who as manager of the Mets hired Gibson in 1980 and then again in 1982 when Torre moved to the Braves.

Gibson did receive an offer to stay with the Cardinals after his retirement in 1975, but decided he was tired of baseball and instead went into private business. He wonders whether turning down that job has hurt his chances to get back into baseball.

Gibson has known the feeling of discrimination in baseball since his days at Creighton University, when the 17-year-old was told by his coach during a road trip that he would have to stay at a hotel on the other side of town. Gibson said he cried.

He wonders why people want to listen to him now.

“If what I had to say had any impact on people, maybe all this crap would have been over years ago,” he said. “Because I’ve been saying this for a long, long time. But no one paid attention when I said it. But when Campanis says it, wow, now everyone listens. You see the difference? I was saying the same things.

“Baseball is probably one of the most antiquated businesses you’ll ever run across. You talk about just recycling (old managers), they’re always the last to change their ideas. Life is changing constantly and baseball pretty much stays the same.”

Gibson said he doesn’t know if he would manage now if given the chance.

“It’s a hard job and eventually you’re going to get fired, which really ticks me off. You’re going to get fired, regardless of whether you’re a good manager or not. And the problem with the press putting pressure on clubs now, if they want to hire me now, everyone will say the only reason they did it was because . . . “

Gibson, though, might add a certain edge to the game he says is lacking with this generation’s pitchers. It’s a tenacity that he possessed. It came in doses of Gibson’s brush-back pitch, an art form all but lost with today’s pitchers.

“I didn’t realize I was such a bad (guy) until I started playing in some of these games,” Gibson said, smiling.

Gibson, in fact, was one of the most feared pitchers of any generation. And much of his success came from keeping hitters on their heels with an occasional fastball near the chin. Gibson, though, says the current lack of knock-down pitches has actually made the game more dangerous.

“The game’s changed to the point that if you come inside on a guy, the umpire comes out to warn you and the benches clear because you can’t knock guys down anymore,” Gibson said. “So now you’ve got a fight on your hands and some guys are going to get hurt because they don’t fear the ball coming inside. There’s a couple of guys that have already been hurt--badly.”

Gibson said his reputation as a knock-down pitcher has been exaggerated over the years.

“They use me as the example all the time,” he said, “but that’s the way everybody did it. Still, they always pointed at me. Lou Brock’s the one who got me in trouble all the time because he’d steal bases when we were up 5-0. People would get mad and knock him down and then I’d knock them down. But they’d only remember the last guy who did it.”

And that guy of course was Gibson, still coming in high and hard after all these years.