Gibson’s last time taking the mound for the Cardinals was exactly 31 days before my fourth birthday, so even though I grew up a Cardinals fan, I (quite unfortunately) never really got to watch him pitch. I say never really though, because I did get to see him take the mound on one sunny May Sunday in 1987. It was an old-timers’ game more than a decade after he’d retired, so of course it’s not like it was prime Bob Gibson. After all, at such an exhibition, the pitcher’s job ordinarily is merely to toss the ball over the plate so the other players can hit it.
I will remind you though, that Gibson was anything but ordinary. Perhaps the fiercest competitor the game has ever seen, throughout his Hall of Fame career he infamously wouldn’t even talk to his National League teammates at the All Star Game, because they weren’t really his teammates; a few days later they were going to be the enemy. And the legend is that once in an old-timer’s game, facing Pete LaCock (who had hit a grand slam off Gibson in the final game of Gibby’s big league career), Gibson intentionally drilled him with a pitch.
Well, on this particular Sunday afternoon, Gibson actually followed all the unwritten rules...for the most part. He leisurely tossed pitches to the middle-aged (or older) hitters who had assembled at Busch Stadium on that day, letting them put the ball in play.
There was one exception though. The great Johnny Bench was on hand that day. Having retired at the age of 35 in 1983, he was still only 39. There were players active in the big leagues who were older than him, and the 51-year old Gibson’s competitive juices apparently began to flow as he saw a potentially worthy opponent amble into the batter’s box.
It’s possible that I have the details slightly off, but here’s how I remember it: The first pitch, Gibson threw a fastball that caught Bench off-guard. He took it for strike one. Bench geared up, now realizing that they were playing for real, but he still couldn’t catch up with Gibson’s heater, as he smoked a second fastball past the swinging Bench. With two strikes on Bench, Gibson did something that just wasn’t very nice. While Bench prepared to finally catch up to Gibson’s fastball, Gibby instead through him an off-speed pitch. Bench awkwardly offered an off-balanced, futile swing that basically made him look like the guy in the old cartoon batting off of Bugs Bunny.
Not long ago, I did a little research to try to verify that my recollections of the day’s events were correct. I am, after all, of such an age that sometimes I find that my adolescent memories aren’t quite as I, well, remember them. In doing that research, I came across this picture from the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Yep...that’s pretty much the swing from Bench I remember!
And that’s the story of how I got to see Bob Gibson’s 3,118th strikeout!
RIP, Gibby.
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Related story: The same day I saw Gibby pitched, I also saw a number of other greats, and even got their autographs. I wrote about that here.
