St. Louis Cardinals pitcher Bob Gibson throws during the ninth inning of Game 1 of the World Series versus the Detroit Tigers on Oct. 2, 1968. Gibson, the dominating pitcher who won a record seven consecutive World Series starts and set a modern standard for excellence when he finished the 1968 season with a 1.12 ERA, died Friday. He was 84.Associated Press
Bob Gibson at spring training in 1967.Associated Press
Bob Gibson, the St. Louis Cardinals’ Hall of Fame right-hander who became one of baseball’s most dominating pitchers, winning 251 games in 17 seasons with an intimidating fastball and an attitude to match, died Friday. He was 84.
His death was confirmed by Brian Bartow, a spokesman for the Cardinals. Gibson announced in July 2019 that he had pancreatic cancer.
Through the summers of the 1960s and early ’70s, Gibson proved a relentless force, and he was at his best in the World Series.
Gibson won both the National League’s MVP Award and Cy Young Award, as its best pitcher, in 1968, when he won 22 games, struck out 268 batters, pitched 13 shutouts and posted an ERA of 1.12. The following year, Major League Baseball lowered the pitchers’ mounds to give batters a break, but Gibson won 20 games and struck out 269.
He won at least 20 games five times and struck out 3,117 batters, relying on two kinds of fastballs, one breaking upward and other downward, and a slider that he threw at about three-quarters speed. He threw 56 career shutouts and captured a second Cy Young Award in 1970. He was an eight-time All-Star, won a Gold Glove award for fielding nine times and pitched a no-hitter against the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1971.
Pitching for three Cardinals pennant-winners, Gibson won seven World Series games in a row, losing in his first and last Series starts. His physique was not especially imposing – he was 6 feet, 1 inch tall and 190 pounds or so – but he holds the records for most strikeouts in a World Series game, 17, and in a single World Series, 35, both against the Detroit Tigers in 1968.
He was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1981, his first year of eligibility.
Bob Gibson, left, and Tim McCarver, members of the St. Louis Cardinals' 1967 World Series champion team, take part in a ceremony honouring the 50th anniversary of the victory, before a game on May 17, 2017.Jeff Roberson/The Associated Press
Gibson disdained conversations with opposing players, even at All-Star Games. He bristled at reporters’ questions he considered silly. And he was feared for his high, inside fastballs that set batters up for pitches on the outside corner.
“Bob wasn’t just unfriendly when he pitched,” Joe Torre, a Cardinals teammate who later hired Gibson as a coach when he managed the New York Mets, the Atlanta Braves and the Cardinals, told sports writer Roger Kahn in an article for The New York Times shortly before Gibson’s induction into the Hall. “I’d say it was more like hateful.”
“My thing was winning,” Gibson said in his autobiography, Stranger to the Game, written with Lonnie Wheeler and published in 1994. “I didn’t see how being pleasant or amiable had anything to do with winning, so I wasn’t pleasant on the mound and I wasn’t amiable off it.”
“For my money, the most intimidating, arrogant pitcher ever to kick up dirt on a mound is Bob Gibson,” Tim McCarver, the Cardinals’ catcher and a long-time broadcaster, recalled in his 1987 memoir, Oh, Baby, I Love It!
“If you ever saw Gibson work,” McCarver said, “you’d never forget his style: his cap pulled down low over his eyes, the ball gripped – almost mashed – behind his right hip, the eyes smouldering at each batter almost accusingly.”
Profiling Gibson for The New Yorker in September 1980, Roger Angell told how after his 17-strikeout game against Detroit, a reporter asked if Gibson had always been as competitive as he seemed that day.
“He said yes,” Angell wrote, “and he added that he had played several hundred games of tic-tac-toe against one of his young daughters and that she had yet to win a game from him. He said this with a little smile, but it seemed to me that he meant it: he couldn’t let himself lose to anyone. Then someone asked him if he had been surprised by what he had just done on the field, and Gibson said, ‘I’m never surprised by anything I do.’”
Bob Gibson was at his best during the World Series, where he won seven consecutive games and once struck out 17 batters in one game, a record that still stands.The Associated Press
Pack Robert Gibson was born on Nov. 9, 1935, in Omaha, Nebraska, the youngest of seven children, and grew up in a housing project there. His father, Pack Gibson, died a few months before his birth and his mother, Victoria, worked in a laundry. His brother Josh, a graduate of Creighton University in Omaha, became his mentor and introduced him to recreational programs he oversaw. Bob Gibson became an all-city basketball player in high school and played several positions on an American Legion baseball team that won a city title.
His favourite sport was basketball, and he became the first Black athlete to play basketball and baseball at Creighton. He averaged more than 20 points a game for his collegiate basketball career and pitched, caught and played several other positions for the baseball team.
After graduating from Creighton, Gibson signed with the Cardinals’ minor league organization in 1957.
He pitched in the American Association and South Atlantic League that year, played basketball for the Harlem Globetrotters in the off-season, then focused solely on baseball. He made his debut with the Cardinals in 1959, then began to emerge as a leading pitcher two years later under the tutelage of manager Johnny Keane, who had managed him in the minor leagues.
Gibson helped pitch the Cardinals to the National League pennant in 1964, when they surged past the collapsing Philadelphia Phillies, and he beat the New York Yankees in Game 7 of the World Series, pitching on two days’ rest. It was his second victory in the Series, and he was named MVP.
Bob Gibson receives a congratulatory hug from catcher Tim McCarver after he pitched a three-hit complete game in Game 7 to win the World Series over the Boston Red Sox on Oct. 12, 1967.Associated Press
He missed two months of the 1967 regular season after a line drive off the bat of the Pirates’ Roberto Clemente broke his leg, but beat the “impossible dream” Boston Red Sox three times in the World Series, including a victory in Game 7, and won MVP honours again.
In the 1968 World Series, Gibson twice outpitched the Tigers’ Denny McLain, a 31-game winner that year, but lost to Mickey Lolich in Game 7.
Gibson faced the racial segregation of the South, first as a minor leaguer in Columbus, Georgia, and then with the Cardinals when their Black players were barred from the team’s spring training hotel in St. Petersburg, Florida.
When Gibson was in his prime on Cardinal teams that also featured Black stars like Lou Brock, Curt Flood and Orlando Cepeda, his reputation as an intimidating, if not surly presence, may have been influenced by racial issues.
“I pitched in a period of civil unrest, of black power and clenched fists and burning buildings and assassinations and riots in the street,” Gibson recalled in his memoir. “There was a country full of angry black people in those days, and by extension – and by my demeanour on the mound – I was perceived as one of them. There was some truth to that, but it had little, if anything, to do with the way I worked a batter. I didn’t see a hitter’s color. I saw his stance, his strike zone, his bat speed, his power and his weaknesses.”
Gibson tore cartilage in his knee in 1973, but in ’74 he became the second pitcher, after Walter Johnson, to strike out at least 3,000 batters in a career. Gibson retired after the 1975 season with a career record of 251-174 and an ERA of 2.91. He hit 24 regular-season home runs, plus two in the World Series.
In addition to coaching with Torre after he retired as a player, Gibson became a broadcaster for national and Cardinals outlets and pursued commercial ventures in Omaha, where he owned a restaurant and was board chairman of a bank that largely served the city’s Black residents.