Maz Hysteria : The Ballpark Is Gone, but 30 Years After Homer, Memories of Mazeroski Still Strong in Pittsburgh

The sky has been gray all morning and now it’s starting to drizzle, leaving students at the University of Pittsburgh to scurry between classes.

Preoccupied, they walk with their heads down, never stopping to contemplate the nearby ivy-covered brick wall, the one that separates the campus from the torn-up softball field behind it.

There’s no plaque. No monument. There are two rusty beer cans and a sandwich wrapper.

“It’s sad, isn’t it?” says Peter Sukernek, a Pittsburgh real estate broker. “You’ve got to realize, most of these kids today could care less about this. But me, standing right here now, I get goose bumps, thinking what happened 30 years ago.

“You know, everybody over the age of 40 in Pittsburgh remembers two things.

“They can all tell you where they were when John F. Kennedy was shot, and exactly what they were doing at the time it happened.

“And they can tell you what they were doing the moment Maz hit that homer.”

Thirty years ago Saturday, at 3:36 p.m., Bill Mazeroski homered in the bottom of the ninth inning at Forbes Field, giving the Pittsburgh Pirates their first World Series championship in 35 years.

Fans poured onto the field the moment the ball cleared the wall, escorting Mazeroski to home plate as he wildly waved his cap in the air. Folks ran out of their homes onto the streets, sharing the celebration with neighbors. Horns began honking. Businessmen and secretaries began shredding everything they could find for confetti, leaving about 110 tons of it for city crews to sweep up.

“I’ve never seen anything like it in my life,” said Bill Halloran, the Pirate clubhouse man. “It’s like it brought a whole city together. You know, we won those championships in the ‘70s, but it was nothing compared to what happened that day.

“There’s not a person in town who was here at the time who’ll ever forget it.”

Many of the physical remembrances of that glorious afternoon, however, have disappeared. They tore down Forbes Field in 1970, replacing it with student housing and a law school. The Pirates now call Three Rivers Stadium home.

But there is the wall, a 12-foot high, 150-foot long section of the original center-field wall at Forbes field, still standing.

Across the street is a thin strip of bricks from the wall, and a plaque embedded in the sidewalk, reading: “This marks the spot where Bill Mazeroski’s home run ball cleared the left-center field wall at Forbes Field on Oct. 13, 1960, thereby winning the World Series championship for the Pittsburgh Pirates. The historic hit came in the ninth inning of the seventh game to beat the New York Yankees by a score of 10-9.”

Inside the law school, along the main corridor, about 360 feet away from the outfield wall, is home plate from the final game played at Forbes Field. It sits under a clear pane of hard plastic, with students walking atop of it on their way to classes.

“Maybe they’re too young to understand the meaning,” Sukernek said. “They don’t realize what it meant to this city. Maybe you had to be here, because everyone that was will remember it until the day they die.”

It was a time when the nation feared the spread of communism. The second Kennedy-Richard Nixon debate was taking place that week. Lenny Bruce was playing at a Pittsburgh nightspot. Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev was taking off his shoe and slamming it on a table at a session of the United Nations’ General Assembly.

It also was the week of the World Series, played between the powerful New York Yankees and the underdog Pirates, a team that looked woefully overmatched. The Pirates had not been in the World Series since they lost in four games to the team regarded as the greatest, the 1927 Yankees. The same was expected this time around.

“The irony about it is that people compare our ’61 team to the ’27 Yankees as being the best of all the time,” former Yankee shortstop Tony Kubek said. “But to tell you the truth, that ’60 team was the best I ever played on. I know Pittsburgh won it, but I’d think they’d be the first to say they (beat) the better team.”

Said Bill Virdon, Pirate center fielder: “I don’t know about everyone else, but I’d certainly agree. I’m not sure if we belonged on the same field with those fellas. But something special was happening all year for us, and it happened again in the World Series.”

It was a strange series. The Yankees beat the Pirates 16-3 in Game 2, 10-0 in Game 3, and 12-0 in Game 6. But even though they were outscored 38-3 in those three games, the Pirates managed to win three games of their own by a combined score of 14-8, setting up Game 7.

“It was a crazy series,” Kubek said. “I don’t believe in predestination, but my gosh, everything seemed to go their way. It was like it was meant to be.”

The Yankees were six outs away from winning their ninth World Series in 12 years when they went out for the eighth inning. Gino Cimoli led off with a pinch-single. Virdon followed with what appeared to be a routine double-play ball to Kubek at shortstop, but on the third hop, it took a bad bounce and hit Kubek in the throat, forcing him to leave for the hospital.

“I still don’t know what happened,” Kubek said. “That infield was a mess. It was so torn up with all of the baserunners that day, and all the scoring, there were divots everywhere. Remember in those days, they didn’t drag the infield after the fifth inning, so you can imagine the condition.”

It proved to be the beginning of the Yankee demise. Dick Groat followed with a single, scoring Cimoli. Roberto Clemente then reached first when pitcher Jim Coates failed to cover first. Then came a three-run homer by Hal Smith, giving the Pirates an 8-7 lead.

But in the top of the ninth, the Yankees tied the game when Yogi Berra’s ground ball to first scored Bobby Richardson, the eventual Series MVP, from third. There they went to the bottom of the ninth, the game tied.

Mazeroski, who had hit a two-run homer in Game 1, and a two-run double in Game 5, was the first batter. Reliever Ralph Terry was the pitcher.

“When I walked up to the plate, all I thought about was getting on base,” Mazeroski said. “But deep in my mind, I just knew we were going to lose.

“I thought, ‘Well, you can’t feel too bad taking the Yankees into the seventh game of the World Series and losing in extra innings.’ ”

Said Terry: “I didn’t have a thing left, and I knew it. It’s funny, I even started thinking, ‘Geez, why didn’t Casey (Stengel) start Whitey Ford in Game 1? Then he could be pitching now. But we didn’t have anyone. The whole staff was tired.”

Terry’s first pitch was high. Yankee catcher John Blanchard went to the mound and, knowing that Mazeroski was a high-ball hitter, pleaded for Terry to keep the ball down.

The next pitch dropped a bit, but it still was belt-high. Mazeroski swung with all of his might. Terry prayed with all his.

“I was almost at second base when it finally went over,” Mazeroski said. “I was running so hard, just trying to make sure I’d get to third. Then it took a moment or two to realize what happened. It was gone.

“You know, all I could think about was, ‘We beat the Yankees! We beat them! We beat the damn Yankees!’ ”

Terry remembers trying to fight through the crowd to get into the clubhouse, finally giving up, going through the Pirates’ dugout on the first-base side, away from the commotion.

“To this day, it was the wildest celebration I’ve seen in my life,” said Terry, currently playing on the senior golf tour. “It was pandemonium. I sat in the clubhouse, just feeling awful, and then I went into Casey’s office.

“He had told us before the game that he’d probably never see us again. We knew (the Yankee ownership) wanted him out, that they wanted to hire Ralph Houk before he got away. And that’s why it hurt so much, knowing this would be the last game he’d ever manage for us.

“I walked in, and said, ‘Case, I feel real bad. I let you down.’ He said, ‘Kid, what were you trying to throw there?’ I told him I was trying to keep the ball down and away to him, but I just got it up.’

“He said, ‘Good, because that’s what you’re supposed to do there. You followed my report, it just didn’t work out. I’ll sleep good tonight. Now, you forget it.’ ”

Terry posted a 16-3 record the next year, then became a 20-game winner in 1962 and was standing on the mound in Game 7 when Willie McCovey lined out to second baseman Richardson for the final out, making Terry the MVP of the World Series.

“I often wonder what would have happened to my career without Casey,” Terry said. “If he had started screaming at me, blaming me for everything, who knows what would have happened?”

Mazeroski, who spent his entire career with the Pirates until retiring in 1972, won nine Gold Gloves, was selected to five All-Star Games, and hit 138 homers.

But yet, he is remembered mostly for one home run.

“I get people coming up to me and talking about that home run all of the time,” Mazeroski said. “But you know, for once I’d like someone to say, ‘You were a damn good defensive second baseman. You were one of the best I ever saw.’

“To tell you the truth, that’s what I’m most proud of, that I could turn the double play as well as anyone that played the game. But no one remembers that. No one cares.

“It’s kind of funny isn’t it? Thirty years later and people still are talking about it.

“Who would have ever figured?”