50th Anniversary of the Game That Changed Sports History

Baseball is just around the corner. Time for predictions, time to remember….

Fifty years ago, the American pastime provided one of the all-time classic World Series match-ups, and produced the most dramatic end in the sport's history.

The 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates, a team sometimes so bad that one player opined, "In an eight-team league, we should have finished ninth," ambushed the heavily favored New York Yankees, a squad comprised of names like Mantle, Maris, Ford and Berra. The climactic moment was Bill Mazeroski's Game 7, bottom of the ninth walk-off home run, a shot that caused Mantle to burst into public tears, and put Pittsburgh, often derided as the "Smoky City" because its steel mills darkened its skies, on the world's map.

Author John Moody, a former executive vice president of Fox News, was 6-years-old in 1960, and he followed the Pirates with the rapture of youth. Moody's hero was not Mazeroski, nor the Pirates' super-talented rightfielder, Roberto Clemente. Instead, he idolized Vernon Law, a righthanded power pitcher who was the ace of the staff and won the Cy Young Award and two games of the World Series that year. Law was, for a time, the only Mormon in the Major Leagues. His nickname,  "The Deacon," paid homage to his standing in his church and his clean-cut lifestyle -- a reputation for integrity and honor that  today's superstars would have a hard time emulating.

Kiss It Good-bye is a story about baseball, about underdogs, about growing up, and about a mystery that has endured for half a century: who was responsible for injuring Law just before the World Series, an injury so severe that he was never again the same dominant pitcher?

Here is an excerpt from Moody's book:

Kiss It Good-bye: The Mystery, the Mormon and the Moral of the 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates

By John Moody

For all our attempts to leech competition out of our Lives, to delude ourselves that we are all equally able and glad of it, that we are all winners, there are few substitutes for the pleasures of domination.

Nowhere is the scent of victory sharper or more pronounced than in the world of sport. “Swifter, Higher, Stronger” goes the Olympic motto. There are no measures more satisfying than those. Who is better, or, better yet, best? It is a question that remains worth arguing about and answering because it defines us as a species.

On Sunday, September 25, 1960, that visceral distinction was blurred. The Pittsburgh Pirates lost 4–2 to the third-place Milwaukee Braves. But the Pirates, though disappointed with the loss, had just won the National League pennant. That was because the St. Louis Cardinals, the second-place team, also lost that day, assuring the Pirates their first trip to the World Series since 1927.

They would meet the New York Yankees, who had sewn up the American League flag the same day.

This 1960 squad included Mickey Mantle, Yogi Berra, Whitey Ford, and manager Casey Stengel. Vegas bookies put the Pirates’ odds of winning at 1 in 15.

The Pirates had been a joke for a generation, the perennial cellar rats of baseball. They had had only one winning season between the end of World War II and 1958.  “In an eight-team league, we should have finished ninth,” said the catcher and future TV personality, Joe Garagiola.

But on September 25th, 1960, the die was cast: The Pirates were going to the World Series.

Slowly, as they viewed the bottles of champagne on ice that had been prepared for them, the Pirates realized what they had done. The corks popped and the wine and beer gushed.

Vernon Sanders Law, the right-handed pitcher who would start the first game of the Series against the Yankees, disdained the bacchanalia. Law took a shower, dressed quickly, and escaped to the waiting bus that would transport the team to the airport. In wobbly knots, the rest of the Pirates came out and boarded the bus. Law told me: “They had decided to tear everyone’s shirt off. The shirts were tied together so there was a long string of them hanging out of the bus window.”

Vernon Law was, and is, a devout member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints—the Mormons. So well known was his faith that he was nicknamed The Deacon. Devout Mormons wear a temple garment beneath their shirts, which has religious significance to them.  And so, when one man on the bus lunged at Vernon Law to remove not just his shirt, Law fought back. He remembers: “Someone had hold of my right foot and was trying to get my shoe off. As he was twisting, I felt something pop. At the time, I didn’t say anything, but I knew I had strained something in my ankle.”

As the others on the bus looked on in suddenly sobered horror, Vernon Law, the ace of the Pirates, on whose powerful overhand fastball the Pirates’ chances to win the World Series relied,  rubbed his ankle and forced a smile that fooled no one. Vernon Law has never publicly identified the man he believes caused his ankle to pop, or the leader of the pack, who grabbed his garment, and so bears even greater responsibility. By the time you finish this book, you will know who they were.

Kiss It Good-bye is available now in bookstores everywhere, or on amazon.com or at Barnes and Noble.com