Part 12

adapted from material previously posted at Othertimelines.com

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One of the most intriguing subplots of the 1961 ALCS-- maybe even the most intriguing --was the personal home run duel that fans and sportswriters expected to witness between Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris. While Maris had won the regular season chase for the title of successor to Babe Ruth’s legacy as single-season home run king, the conventional wisdom held that Mantle was likely to outdo Maris when  it came to hitting round-trippers in the playoffs. But neither Maris himself nor his manager at the time, Hank Bauer, were particularly keen on that idea and resolved to prove conventional wisdom wrong; for  his part, Mantle was just as determined to redeem himself after having fallen short of the goal of being the first to surpass Ruth’s mythic total of 60 homers during the 1927 season.

In any case, millions of eyes and ears would be focused on the Bronx as the contestants took the field at Yankee Stadium for the 1961  ALCS series opener. At least a few of those eyes and ears would belong to scouts for the NL West champion Cincinnati Reds, who were gearing up for a bitter postseason fight themselves as they faced the NL East champion Milwaukee Braves in the 1961 NLCS; the Reds scouts’ presence at the ALCS opener suggested that Cincinnati, like most sportswriters and fans that October, was expecting the 1961 World Series to end up being a rematch of the Kings-Reds battles of the 1939 and 1940 Series. In the end, that assessment would turn out to be the right one....but that didn’t mean either the Redlegs or the Purple & Gold would have an easy time getting to the Fall Classic this time around.

Indeed, when Los Angeles starting pitcher Bill Monbouquette gave up five runs in the first inning of Game 1 of the 1961 ALCS and got pulled out midway through the third inning, some Kings fans began to worry their boys might not get to the Series at all. And the fact the Yankees went on to win the game 11-4 couldn’t have helped matters any. It certainly didn’t do anything to calm down an irate Harry Hooper, who ripped into his players in a post-game tirade loud enough to have  been heard in the team trainer’s room. If the Kings lost Game 2, L.A. area sportswriters warned, all hell would break loose inside Hearst Palladium.

Fortunately for the ears, nerves, and self-esteem of Monbouquette and his teammates, Don Drysdale pitched a three-run shutout in Game 2 to even the ALCS as the series headed west to Southern California for Game 3. And in Game 3 Felipe Alou turned the momentum of that series irrevocably in Los Angeles’ favor, going 3 for 4 at the plate with two  RBIs and making three critical defensive putouts in a 10-3 Purple and Gold rout of the Bronx Bombers. Meanwhile, Mickey Mantle was winning his personal postseason home run rematch with Roger Maris; Mantle had three round-trippers compared to just one for Maris, and one of those been a sixth-inning grand slam which helped clinch the Game 3 victory for the Kings.

A sense of impending catastrophe hung over the Yankee dugout on the eve of Game 4 even as New York fans were loudly boasting the Yanks would rally to take the series. Game 4 would feature Reynaldo Montoya making one of his final ALCS appearances, and even though Montoya’s fastball had lost some of its velocity over the last two seasons he could still get it over the plate when he needed to. Furthermore, his  reputation as a strikeout specialist would be preceding him when he took the mound to face the Pinstripes.

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The Yanks’ foreboding would prove well-founded-- although one might not have thought so at first given the way the early innings of Game 4 played out. Yankee third baseman Clete Boyer landed the first punch with a one-out RBI single in the second inning; catcher Elston Howard followed up with a double to center in the same inning that scored Boyer from second. By the second out of the third inning New York was leading 3-1 and showed every sign of expanding that lead.

 But in the bottom of the third the Kings’ power started to reassert itself with a vengeance as Stan Musial and Orlando Cepeda both hit wicked line drives to right to put runners at the corners with nobody out. A Felipe Alou RBI double cut the Pinstripes’ lead to 3-2, and after Mickey Mantle struck out swinging Ed Bailey tied  the score on a sacrifice fly to right field; only a dramatic force play by Tony Kubek at second base kept Los Angeles from blowing the game wide open right then and there.

As it was, the Kings took the lead with two outs in the fifth inning on a solo homer by reserve infielder Deron Johnson; a Mantle bunt stretched L.A.’s lead to 5-3, and from there it was all downhill for New York. A Roger Maris RBI single in the seventh inning managed to pull the Yankees to within a run at 5-4, but in the eighth Musial delivered the knockout blow with a bases-loaded line drive that just missed being a grand slam by less than half an inch. It would end up being noted in the record books as an RBI triple and stake the Kings to a comfortable 8-4 lead.

The final score: Los Angeles 9, New York 4. The Kings had punched their ticket to the 1961 World Series-- now the question in the minds of sportswriters and fans was whether the Purple and Gold could exorcise the ghosts of their 1960 Series loss, or if history would repeat itself and L.A. go down to defeat at the hands of a National League champion for the second consecutive year. Orlando  Cepeda, Harry Hooper’s chosen leadoff hitter for Game 1 of the ‘61 Series, was eager to make certain that history didn’t repeat itself against Cincinnati.

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Many Reds fans were expecting Cincinnati to land the first punch against Los Angeles in their third Fall Classic go-around with the Kings. They were on a roll after making short work of the Braves in the 1961 NLCS, and Reds right fielder Frank Robinson was hitting a torrid .409 in the postseason; the Cincinnati pitching staff had been highly impressive too, particularly relievers Jim Maloney and Sherman Jones, who had combined for a save of the crucial Game 3 win against Milwaukee. Last but not least, the first two games of the Series were being played at Crosley Field in Cincinnati, so the odds favored the Redlegs at least splitting that two-game set before the action shifted to Hearst Palladium for Games 3 and 4. If things worked out, it might even be possible for the Reds to arrive in Southern California with a 2 games-to-0 Series lead.

Orlando Cepeda began chipping away at that hope on the fifth pitch of Game 1. After missing the first two pitches for strikes and fouling off the next two, the Baby Bull-- as his fans called him -- belted a searing double to center field to put himself in potential scoring position with nobody out. Three pitches later, new Los Angeles third baseman George Thomas homered to put the Purple & Gold ahead 2- 0. By the bottom of the third inning, the Kings were staked to a 3-1 lead and had runners on second and third ready to expand that lead, which they did when Stan Musial socked a towering line drive into deep right field. By the time that Musial slid into third base with an RBI triple to his credit, a funereal silence had descended on the stands at Crosley Field and wouldn’t lift again for the rest of the ballgame. If anything, it got progressively deeper as L.A. pitching shut down  Cincinnati’s bats(with the conspicuous exception of Frank Robinson, who belted a solo home run late in the sixth inning to cut the Kings’ lead to 5-2). In the top of seventh inning Mickey Mantle slammed the door shut on the Reds with a two-run homer; the Kings won the Series opener by a final score of 7-2.

Game 2 of the ’61 Series brought more of the same troubles to Cincinnati, with the added kick in the teeth of Frank Robinson getting ejected in the bottom of the fourth inning after a heated argument with the home plate umpire over a particularly close strike  call. The argument itself might have earned Robinson the heave-ho, but he guaranteed his banishment when at the height of the dispute he shoved the umpire in the chest. At the moment Robinson was tossed the Reds were already trailing 3-0; by the time Robinson made it to the showers that deficit had stretched out to 5-0.

And whatever slim hope Cincinnati might have had of closing  that deficit effectively vanished when Orlando Cepeda hammered an 0-2 Joey Jay fastball into the cheap seats for a grand slam late in the sixth inning. By the seventh inning stretch L.A.’s lead had swelled into double digits; a two-out Stan Musial RBI double in the top of the eighth put the exclamation point on a decisive Kings victory. Harry Hooper and crew left the Queen City with a 13-1 win under their belts and the Series momentum shifted markedly in their favor as the clubs flew back to Southern California for Game 3. The mayor of Los Angeles, in a show of support for the surging Kings and a bid to court votes from some of their fans in anticipation of the next election, decreed that the day before Game 3 should be declared Baseball Appreciation Day in metropolitan Los Angeles.

To the Reds, though, it was more like Baseball Depreciation Day. From the moment they arrived at their hotel they were the target of merciless pranks by Los Angeles radio disc jockeys who wanted to shake Cincinnati off their game and exact at least a small measure of revenge for 1940 no matter how the 1961 Series turned out. And as if this wasn’t enough for the Redlegs to endure, they also had to put up with headlines from all of the city’s major newspapers predicting that the Reds would be cannon fodder for the Purple & Gold when they took the field at Hearst Palladium. Such predictions were liking waving a, well, red flag in front of a bull...

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....and in Game 3 L.A. got stuck by the horns. The Kings’ starting pitcher for that day, Bill Monboquette, took 4-1 deep into the eighth inning only to see Cincinnati erase with a six-run scoring barrage which was launched by a one-out single from Reds first baseman Gordy Coleman and ended with a two-run homer by reserve outfielder Gus Bell. The final score was Cincinnati 9, Los Angeles 5; the Kings’ last chance to salvage the game went by the boards when relief pitcher Dean Chance, who’d been brought on in the top of the ninth to replace Bill Monboquette as pitcher, grounded out to shortstop to end the game. It was a humiliating setback for L.A. skipper Harry Hooper, and he vowed to avenge that setback ten times over in Game 4. If anyone was looking for evidence that he was serious about getting payback, they needed to look no further than the Al Capone-like scowl on his face when he came out of the Kings locker room to do post-game interviews with the local and national sports media.

Hooper made good on his pledge and then some. The Purple & Gold jumped on the Reds early in Game 4 and never looked back; Stan Musial and Orlando Cepeda each notched two-run homers against Cincinnati, and Mickey Mantle drove home the game-winning run in the sixth inning with a bases-loaded bunt single that zipped like a Formula 1 racer past the desperately outstretched glove of Reds starting pitcher Jim O’Toole. A raucously joyful Hearst Palladium crowd erupted into a window-shaking ovation for the Kings at the end of a very convincing 16-2 L.A. win. With just one more victory, the Kings would clinch their first World Series since 1958 and eighth in franchise history-- a prospect which excited even the most jaded members of Kings fandom. Former Kings and Yankees infielder Wally Pipp, then a third base coach for the Kansas City Longhorns, flew out to Los Angeles to watch his old team try and close the book on the Reds.

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The Reds’ hopes for mounting a storybook comeback to upset the Kings and take the 1961 World Series championship were dealt a mortal blow just hours before the start of Game 5 when scheduled Cincinnati starting pitcher Joey Jay got hit in the left knee with a line drive during Reds batting practice. After examination by team doctors determined that the knee had been injured too seriously to permit him to make the start, Reds manager Fred Hutchinson was forced to turn to seldom-used reliever Claude Osteen to fill the breach. Los Angeles, meanwhile, was sticking with Game 1 hero Don Drysdale as its starter for Game 5.

It was like putting a washed-up club fighter in the ring to face Muhammad Ali. While Drysdale pitched magnificently, lasting a full eight innings and coming within two strikes of a no-hitter, a visibly rattled Osteen barely made it through the second inning and gave up three runs on his first five pitches. By the time Osteen was taken out of the game, the Reds were already trailing 4-0-- and an unlucky Osteen would be charged with two more runs after Felipe Alou smacked an RBI triple to straightaway center. By the sixth inning the Kings were ahead 6-1; in the seventh inning Mickey Mantle drove the last nail in the Reds’ casket with a solo homer off left-hander Bill Henry, who had replaced Osteen as pitcher for Cincinnati after the fourth Los Angeles run. Dean Chance, jumping at the opportunity to wipe away the sting of his Game 3 misfortunes, struck out the side in the eighth and ninth to earn the save and help the Purple & Gold secure their first World Series pennant in three years.

Just a few miles away, at the Dodgers’ executive offices, Walter O’Malley and company were thinking ahead to the inevitable--and closer than anyone expected --day when Don Drysdale, the Kings’ number one postseason ace, finally went toe-to-toe with O’Malley’s own pitching superstar Sandy Koufax in a World Series game. The gate, everyone in O’Malley’s office agreed, would be massive for such an event....