1958 Yankee of the Past: Bob Porterfield

"This former Yankee and Senators has been as good as any pitcher in the league in years he avoided injury. He won 22 games for the Senators in 1953 and was named Pitcher of the Year by The Sporting News.

Bob led the American League with nine whitewash jobs in 1953. He has twice been top man in complete games."

-1958 Topps No. 344

1958 Yankee of the Past: Karl Drews

DREWS' "ALMOST" NO-HITTERS

"High spots of Pitcher Karl Drews' career were one-hitters for the Yankees against the Red Sox in 1947 and for the Phillies against Brooklyn in 1952.

'In the game against Boston, Yogi was playing left field,' the 38-year-old right-hander now with Nashville related recently. 'Birdie Tebbetts hit a ball out there. Yogi misjudged it. He came in but the ball went over his head. If he'd stayed in position, he'd have caught it and I'd have a no-hitter.

'Jackie Robinson, the third hitter for the Dodgers, got the hit off me in Brooklyn. It was a grounder in front of Willie Jones at third base but it took a high hop over his shoulder.' "

-George Leonard, Nashville Banner (Baseball Digest, September 1958)

1958 Yankee of the Past: Ralph Terry

"Ralph posted the finest E.R.A. on the A's staff last season. After toiling in the Yankee chain for four seasons and compiling a 38-22 record, he was brought up to the Yanks late in the 1956 season.

He has a zipping fastball and is stingy with walks. Ralph was an all-state high school football player in Oklahoma."

-1958 Topps No. 169

1958 Yankee of the Past: Bob Cerv

"Cerv came up to the Yankees to stay in 1954 after a .317 year at Kansas City of the American Association in '53. He turned in creditable performances of .260, .341 and .304 with New York before Kansas City obtained him.

Bob got a pinch-hit home run for the Yanks in the 1955 World Series. He covers a lot of ground in the outfield for a big fellow."

-1958 Topps No.

CERV-IS WITH A SMILE 

KC Star's A Happy Fellow Now

"According to tradition, the happiest ball players in captivity are those who wear the uniform of the New York Yankees. 'It's great to be young and a Yankee,' Charlie Keller once said. 'It does something to you.'

Bob Cerv felt that way seven years ago when he first dressed for a game in the soundproof airy clubhouse of the perpetual American League champions. He was 24, going on 25. He had dominated the batters of the American Association the previous season in every department. He had every expectation of winning a regular spot for himself in the Yankee outer works. Of course, there'd be the usual problems of adjustment to big league surroundings, but within a season or two he'd be up there with Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra as a Big Town star.

It never happened.

A few weeks ago Bob made his first visit of 1958 to the Stadium. He was wearing the uniform of the Kansas City Athletics, a team that had been picked for no better than a sixth-place finish this season. On his first turn at bat, he drove a home run deep into the left field stands. It was his eighth homer of the young season. He was leading that department in the majors, as well as in RBI's, with 24. He was batting .404 and feeling great feeling like the most happy feller in baseball.

Seven years is one-half of a lifetime in big league ball and, looking back on his experience with the Yankees until the end of the 1956 season, when he was sold to the A's, Bob wishes he'd originally signed not with the Yankees but with the Pirates or A's, both of whom sought his services while he was knocking fences as a collegiate star at the University of Nebraska.

'I ran into Casey Stengel's two-platoon system,' he said, as he sat in a barber chair on Seventh Avenue, just off Times Square getting a Big Town haircut, two dollars a snip plus tip. 'In left field it was a three- and four-platoon. A hitter needs regular play to get into the groove, and I never got it as a Yankee except toward the end of the 1955 season when Mickey Mantle was injured and I played about 30 straight games in center field. That year I wound up with a .341 average but the next spring I was back on the shuttle system. I can't fault the Yankee theory that every game must be won- it's good for the Yanks, but not good for a player like me.'

It is a fact that Casey, although he won't admit it now, thought he had discovered a flaw in Bob's batting style. At morning practice in 1954, Casey expressed himself volubly while watching Bob work out in the cage, to the effect that he had a hitch, dropping his hands just before he swung. But Bob denies that anyone on the Yanks, coach of manager, called his attention personally to this fault.

'I haven't changed my style since I started to play baseball,' Bob says. 'My stance, grip and swing are the same. As for my early surge this year, it's due to two factors. First, I'm playing regularly; the left field job is mine. Second, I'm in perfect physical shape for a change. Last season, my first with the A's, I injured my leg in Chicago in June. During the layoff I let my weight run up to 235, and it showed up in my averages after I went back to work. But at the end of last season, I took myself in hand and began to diet.'

If any feminine readers of Baseball Digest want Bob's weight-moving prescription, it may be had free. 'Stop drinking liquids,' Bob volunteers. 'No beer, no hard liquors and only enough water to satisfy your thirst. No bread, potatoes or other starches but all the meat and green vegetables you want- ham and eggs for breakfast; steaks, chops and poultry for dinner. But- only two meals a day ... breakfast and dinner ... and don't snack in between.'

However, there's a gimmick in Bob's diet. 'I guess I'm an old-fashioned type. I like to hunt. Hunting makes you walk a lot, keeps you in the open air. That, and the diet, knocked off the poundage and I arrived in the A's camp this spring feeling great.'

Bob's enthusiasm for the A's is not just a passing fancy. Like Eddie Mathews, who played for the Milwaukee Brewers in the American Association and then returned to Milwaukee as a Brave, Bob began his baseball career as a Kansas City Blue in 1950 and returned there as an Athletic in 1957. Between times he shuttled back and forth between New York and Kansas City, while the Yankees still owned the Blues as a Triple-A farm club. 'I might still be shuttling to and fro if my options hadn't run out,' he says, which led Bob to express some opinions about the option system. 'A player like myself, arriving in the majors on a team which has no special need for him, suddenly finds himself bouncing back and forth until he's labeled as a might-have-been. He never gets a chance to show his real stuff in season-long competition. By the time the options have run out, he has wasted the potential he once had. It's no fun waking up at 32 and finding yourself playing regularly for the first time.'

Kansas City suits Bob better than New York. His home is in Lincoln, Nebraska, 200 miles away, which it makes it unnecessary for him to support two establishments, winter and summer, if he is to enjoy family life.

And Harry Craft suits him as a manager. 'I played for Harry when he managed the Blues,' he says. 'He knows what I can do, and I know what he expects. All he expects is that for two and a half hours each day, while you're playing ball, you are to play top ball. That means running out all hits and going after flies whether you think you can catch them as they start from the bat or not. That's all Harry wants, and it's getting results.'

Bob likes left field in Kansas City's Municipal Stadium better than the same area at Yankee Stadium. 'Gene Woodling said the other day the Stadium left field is the worst in the majors. It's a fact that the three tiers at the Stadium form a poor background for judging a fly ball- you don't really see it when the stands are crowded until it rises above the third tier and is against the sky. The situation of the Stadium in line with the setting sun creates shadows late in the afternoon, especially toward the end of the season. Perhaps that is why so many Yankee left fielders have failed to get a grip on themselves, and no one of them has held the job regularly in many seasons.'

Thus with happier playing conditions, happier relations with the management, and a chance to play regularly, Bob is hopeful of dominating American League batters this year as he did the American Association in 1951. He is a solidly built six-footer, dark-haired, blue-eyed, easy-smiling and well-spoken- and equipped with an above-average education for a professional baseball player, most of whom, if they've attended college, have majored in physical education.

'My parents are of Czech extraction,' he says. 'Although they were both born in this country. Dad is a truck driver- we lived in Weston, Nebraska, and my main sports interest used to be basketball, not baseball.

'I was playing basketball in high school when Tony Sharpe, our coach, who also coached the baseball team, asked me if I would catch for him, as he had no one for that position. I caught for a while but didn't hit the long ball until Tony shifted me to the outfield.

Then, when I was 17, the United States got into the war, and nothing could stop me from getting into a uniform at once. I didn't know what the war was about- I just wanted an adventure, and I got it. I enlisted and was assigned to the USS Claxton, a destroyer on radar duty in the Pacific, with a beat from Guadalcanal to Okinawa. I wanted action, and we got plenty of it- Japanese aircraft attacks and battle service off Leyte.

'I came out of the war with no illusions, no complexes. The GI Bill of Rights offered me an education and I decided to become a teacher. All my courses were to that end, and I was graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in education. If I hadn't been on the basketball and baseball teams I would have become a teacher at once, for I had a certificate and there were numerous openings in Nebraska.

'Instead, I was hitting around .500 in college baseball, and scouts were making tempting offers. I had a clear idea of what I wanted to do. I knew the chances for quick success in the majors were better with a second-division team like the A's or the Pirates. But the Yankees came along with the proposition that I would be signed for immediate service with a Triple-A club, in this case, Kansas City. So I signed for a $6,000 check, and that was it.

'As I know now, my original hunch was correct. Whatever my faults in 1952, I would have had a better chance of overcoming them if I had been allowed to develop day by day in play- bench-warming does something to you, and going up and down, from the majors and back to the minors, isn't conducive to morale-building. I had the normal bad breaks with the Yankees. I jammed my knee one year; I missed many opportunities to do better. I liked the team, the players, and New York. But, except for 1955 when Mantle was hurt, I could never report with the certain knowledge that I was to play a complete game. Now, I can.'

Bob married Phyllis Pelton while both of the young folks were undergraduates at Nebraska. Sithay- "That's a family name of my wife's"- and Sandra were already born when Bob first joined the Yankees. Sithay is now ten, Sandra, nine, and the Cerv household in Lincoln is now noisy with Denise, seven, Karen, six; and then the boys, Bob, Jr., four, and Joe, two. In August there'll be a seventh little Cerv.

The family followed Bob to New York in his Yankee days, but now they stay in Lincoln, 'where we've got a big house because we need one,' he says.

As for the extracurricular activities that keep Yankees busy, Bob neither envies nor disdains them. 'I've never told this before, because I don't think it's important, but I do own a cafe and bar in a little mining town in Colorado- Gunnison. It's so small that you can't find it on a map. A friend of mine offered the cafe to me several years ago for a small investment. I kept a hand in it for two years, until it began to make money. Now it's being run for me, and doing well. But that's my only interest outside of baseball.

'The future? I don't worry about that. If it's ever necessary, I can go back to the University of Nebraska, take a few refresher courses and renew my teacher's certificate.'

In the meantime, Bob Cerv is manufacturing singles, doubles, triples, homers and RBI's on a wholesale scale- and is the most happy feller this reporter has met in baseball in quite some time."

-Charles Dexter (Baseball Digest, July 1958)

1958 Yankee of the Past: Lew Burdette

BIGGEST FROGGY, BIGGEST POND

The Lew Burdette Story

"The greatest multiple-game pitching in a half century of World Series was contortionistically contrived by a fidgety, whipcordy West Virginian who used to be known as 'Froggy,' later was hailed as 'Squirrel,' and should now be known as 'Lion.'

Practical joking off the field has marked the 31 years of Selva Lewis Burdette, Jr. But on the mound the lanky righty is a cold, grim-lipped, steely-eyed performer, one with an amazing repertoire of sinker, screwball, knuckleball, curve, fast ball and who-knows-what-else.

It's that super-market repertoire, made especially lethal by near-perfect control, that carried the husky-voiced veteran to 4-2, 1-0 and 5-0 triumphs over the New York Yankees in the second, fifth and seventh games of the 1957 Series. This trinity plus Warren Spahn's 7-5 (ten-inning) fourth-game win, earned Milwaukee its glorious world laurels. Without Burdette, the Braves would have been dumped in five games.

Only four times before in all 54 World Series- and not since 1920- had a pitcher won three starts without an intermittent defeat. Only twice before- and not since 1905- had a pitcher shut out the opposition twice. And in blanking the Yanks twice, Burdette equalled the number of shutouts hung on the retiring champs by all American League pitchers throughout the regular 154-game season.

As one of the players remarked, 'A guy's gotta have a lot of 'belly' to do that.'

Consecutively, the rather gangling sidearmer pitched 24 shutout innings, 15 of them in the Yankees' own park. In his next World Series, he'll thus be in prime position to extend his scoreless skein beyond the record 29 2/3 by Babe Ruth (Red Sox, 1916-18) and the runnerup 28 1/3 by Christy Mathewson (Giants 1905-11).

Only Matty's three shutouts in as many starts against the 1905 Athletics outgleam Burdette's triad. The only challenger for all-time second-best could be Stan Coveleski. In 1920 the Cleveland spitballer beat Brooklyn three times, 3-1, 5-1, 3-0. While only one of his wins was a shutout, to Burdette's two, each of his games was a five-hitter (to Burdette's three seven-hitters) and he walked but two (to Burdette's four, one intentional). In his three wins Matty allowed 14 hits (two four-hitters, one six-hitter) and walked but one.

But whereas Matty and Coveleski started from scratch in the opening game, each of Burdette's wins came in a clutch contest. The Braves, having bowed to Whitey Ford, 3-1, in the opener,  were one down before he scored his first victory. He won next in a spectacular 1-0 duel with Ford when a  Yankee victory would have sent the American Leaguers home needing only one win in two games to retain their title. And finally, after the Braves had faltered again, 3-2, on the sixth afternoon, and with $3,000 a man at stake, he won the showdown game.

For the records, there were nine previous three-game World Series winners, but only four of them did it in complete games and without other defeat. Matty, Coveleski, Pittsburgh's Babe Adams over Detroit in 1909 (4-1, 8-4, 8-0) and the A's Jack Coombs over the Cubs in 1910 (9-3, 12-5, 7-2) had such a sweep. Two starting victories and a third in relief were accomplished by the White Sox' Red Faber against the 1917 Giants and the Cardinals' Harry Brecheen against the 1946 Red Sox. Pittsburgh's Deacon Phillipe and the Red Sox' Bill Dineen (who pitched two shutouts) won three each in the 1903 inaugural World Series, which went eight games, but Phillippe also lost two and Dineen one. The Red Sox' Smoky Joe Wood also lost one while winning three against the 1912 Giants, one in relief.

Accentuating Burdette's feats was the fact he took the mound distraught by an accident to his three-year-old Madge Rhea, whose sight was threatened by a rose thorn that had stuck in her eye. A third child, Mary Lou, was just a week old (son Lewis Kent is six) and Mary Ann Burdette whom Lew met at a Charleston bowling party in 1949, was just out of the hospital in Sarasota, Fla., where the family winters.

Paradoxically, Burdette's great inner control is encased in a jittery shell. He has been described as a man of a hundred motions and a thousand nerves, with a nervous pre-pitch dance of a toy monkey on a string. Before delivering a pitch, he rubs the back of his neck with his hand, tugs at the bill of his cap, takes off his glove, rubs the ball, rubs his forehead with his fingers, rubs his fingers on his uniform, licks his fingers, picks up the resin bag, smooths the dirt in front of the mound, turns around and looks at the outfield, and squeezes the ball a final time.

As Manager Fred Haney puts it, 'Burdette is the only man who can make coffee look nervous.'

Following his exaggerated antics, Burdette comes off the mound and onto the grass so fast that sometimes he appears it appears he's going to beat the ball to the plate.

All this started back in Nitro, West Virginia, November 22, 1926, where Lew was born the second of three boys and a girl to Agnes and Selva Burdette. Selva, Sr., is a maintenance man at American Viscose and it was for this firm 12 years ago that Lew got his start pitching in industrial ball.

Nitro is a town of 3,300 in what is known as Magic Valley, at one end of Kanawha County, just 17 miles from Charleston. It received its name, naturally enough, from an explosives plant established there during World War I. At the town limits signs proudly proclaim it to be 'Nitro, Home of Lew Burdette.'

Burdette- the West Virginians pronounce it BIRD-it, with the accent on the first syllable, although the baseball pronunciation is Burr-DETT, with the second syllable accented- wasn't known as Lew or even Selva or Junior, in his Nitro days. He was Froggy Burdette, a kid who was always carrying a frog or something live in his pocket.

His fourth-grade teacher still recalls- rather proudly now- how he used to drive her to distraction with his unusual pocket pieces. Once he made a pet of a mole-cricket and would bring to school, where the clicking would keep the other pupils snickering.

That extracurricular fun-loving continues to this day. Before a spring training exhibition at Bradenton, Fla., in 1956, Burdette captured a small garter snake and carried in his uniform hip pocket until he found a victim for his gag. He dropped the tiny reptile into the coat pocket of an advertising agency man, then asked the unsuspecting fellow for a match.

His practical jokes, like his pitches, know no bounds. When the Braves were on a train from New York to Philadelphia, he tied together the shoelaces of a snoozing sports writer, then abandoned him to his hobbling fate as the team detrained without him. On a bus trip, when one of the Milwaukee broadcasters was engrossed in a newspaper, Burdette stealthily lit a match to it. As the flames spread, the startled broadcaster dropped the paper. Another section of the paper which had fallen to the floor was ignited. Only prompt action by teammates saved the bus.

One of Burdette's favorite amusements is to harass traffic with his imitation of a policeman's whistle, done through his teeth so shrilly it imitates those of traffic cops. He gets a big kick in scaring passing motorists into believing a cop is on their tail. Once the hurler leaned out of the Braves' bus on a busy Chicago boulevard and made one of his best whistles. Two drivers of adjacent cars pulled over to the curb to await their tickets!

Whether it was conduct like this that brought about Burdette's team nickname of 'Squirrel' or whether it's an abbreviation of 'Squirrel Jaws,' as Lew and his older brother, Les, were known in Nitro, isn't clear. Either is appropriate.

The fact that the Yankees let Burdette 'get away' in their late-1951 deal for Johnny Sain has been well rehashed. (Incidentally, you can't fault the Yankees too much for the deal, for Sain helped them to their 1951-52-53 pennants.) Not so publicized has been the fact that the Braves also muffed Burdette.

When he was pitching for the University of Richmond, a seven-month's term as an Air Corps cadet, a scout for the then-Boston club told him that 'he had no ability and to forget about the game.' The next spring the same scout did an about-face and offered Lew a $100 dollar a month contract, but by this time a Yankee scout had made a better offer and Burdette went to pitch for the Yankees' Class B farm club at Norfolk, Va.

Burdette pitched a three-hit shutout over Lynchburg in his pro debut, but after a few rough innings subsequently, he was lowered to Amsterdam for further schooling. Then to Quincy, Ill., in the Three I League, where he had his one good minor league season (16-11, 2.02) in 1948, and from there to Kansas City, San Francisco and then Boston in late 1951. For the Braves he has won 85 games in his six full seasons.

Just another twist in the story of Lew Burdette, the man of many twists and the little Froggy who, in nine Indian summery days this past October, suddenly became the biggest Froggy in the biggest pond of all."

-Phil Allen, Baseball Digest, December 1957

CAN BURDETTE BEAT SERIES' 3-WIN JINX?

"Most anybody would give his good right arm to be able to pitch three victories in one World Series- and, come to look into it, some pitchers have. Literally. For there seems to be a jinx that endeavors to ensnare the mound's rarest of triads and it gets in its dirty work about half the time.

It's possible to beat down, of course, and here's hoping Lew Burdette does, but the inhuman punishment of powering out pressure pitch after pressure pitch, so frequently and in so short a time, has exacted retribution from such three-Series-winners as Christy Mathewson, Smoky Joe Wood and Deacon Phillippe.

None was the same the year after he did the triple honors; Smoky Joe and the Deacon never were the same any time after that.

Wood was the jinx's choicest victim. He was only 22 years old when he pitched the Red Sox into the 1912 World Series with 34 American League victories and then followed up by personally accounting for three of the four triumphs over the Giants that gave Boston the world title, but he never amounted to much after that big year. Though he was at an age when he should have been at the prime of his career, he dropped from 34 to 11 victories the next season and then to nine the following year. Another season and his pitching career was ended, though he hung on as an outfielder with Cleveland until 1922.

Phillippe also paid heavily for his week of glory in the 1903 Series. He won 25 league games in 1903, but after beating the Red Sox three times for Pittsburgh,  he was able to win only ten games the following season, when he was no better than a .500 pitcher. He came back in 1905 with a 20-win season, but wasn't overly successful beyond that.

Mathewson's three big ones in the 1905 Series also called for a reckoning the following season. While he did win 22 games for the Giants in 1906, a collection that would have been a creditable collection for any ordinary pitcher, for Matty it was his worst season in twelve, the lowest victory total for him in any season from 1903 to 1914 and a decided letdown from his 31 triumphs in his triple-Series-win year.

Red Faber, who won three times for the White Sox in the 1917 Series, also fell into a slump after that, but he believes an influenza attack was largely responsible. He did start out fast in 1918, winning four out of five with a 1.22 earned run average before enlisting in the Navy. Rejoining the Sox in 1919, he was able to win only 11 games because of a weak arm.

But Matty, Smoky Joe and the Deacon were called upon to pay off right away for their super-exertion. They really gave their good right arms for three Series wins."

-Harold Sheldon, Baseball Digest, December 1957

"Lew was the sensation of the 1957 World Series. He beat the Yankees three times, giving up only two runs. It was ironic that Lew, who was originally in the Yankees chain, should return to haunt his former bosses.

His fidgety motion bothers batters. Series star Lew baffled the Yankees with his low ball stuff."

-1958 Topps No. 10

"Burdette, a 17-game winner during the regular season in 1957, was the hero of the World Series. He became the first pitcher in 37 years to win three complete Series games. Two of them were shutouts."

-1958 Topps No. 289

SHAGGING OUTFIELDER STORY

"Lew Burdette, the Milwaukee Braves pitching hero of the 1957 World Series, lost an argument during spring training when he was being clobbered by the Dodgers in an exhibition game.

Manager Fred Haney sent Coach Billy Herman out to the mound to remove him for a reliever and the Braves' infield gathered about the pitcher.

'It's only an exhibition. Let me stay in. I need the work,' Burdette begged.

'Maybe you do, but the outfielders are getting more than they can use,' Red Shoendienst, the second baseman, countered."

-Sec Taylor, Des Moines Register (Baseball Digest, July 1958)