The Greatest Game Ever Pitched Turns Fifty

It was a Dark and Stormy Night

That is the only cliché that befit this May evening at County Stadium in Milwaukee, where the Braves, formerly of Boston and later of Atlanta, played host to the Pittsburgh Pirates. At times there were swirling winds, rain, and pitchforks of lightning in the background.

It was 1959. This was a point in time before baseballs, and later baseball players, were juiced. Babe Ruth’s record of 60 home runs in a season would stand for two more years. Around this time, America would add two more states, Alaska and Hawaii, in fairly rapid succession. Castro ousted Juan Batista, making Cuba a Communist nation. The cold war raged, and in the US entrepreneurs were designing and selling fallout shelters, which looked like over-sized septic tanks.

If you stopped at a gas station, you did not have to leave your car. A young man with a bow tie would pump your gas, check the oil, clean the windshield, and on request bring you a 35 cent pack of Camels or Lucky Strikes.

Before the Game

The Milwaukee fans might have anticipated an offensive fireworks show to rival the lightning that flickered in the distance. The Braves had won the NL pennant the last two years. Hank Aaron was currently batting .435. The team also boasted Wes Covington, Eddie Mathews, Del Crandall and Joe Adcock, the first man to hit a ball out of Ebbets Field over the left field cheap seats.

Visiting southpaw Harvey Haddix had a nasty cold, but he also had a plan. He had mapped out exactly how he intended to pitch each Braves batter. Pirates third baseman Don Hoak looked over the strategy, and told Haddix: “If you do what you say you’re going to do, you’ll pitch a no-hitter.” That comment drew good-natured laughter from the other Pirates listening in. Throwing no-hit ball against the powerhouse Braves in their own house would be no mean feat. Of historical interest Haddix’s first win had come against the man he would face tonight, Lew Burdette.

Meanwhile, in the Braves locker room, a plan was also being formulated. It was common knowledge that Pirates catcher Smokey Burgess did not bend over well enough to cover his signs, which could be read from the Braves bullpen with the aid of binoculars. If Burgess called for a fast ball, a towel would be displayed, casually, in the bullpen. No towel meant that Burgess had signaled for a breaking ball.

One thing that was not happening- television cameras were not being set up to broadcast the game. It would not be aired, largely because then Vice-President Richard M. Nixon would be giving a speech to the nation that night, an odd event in itself except that Nixon was setting up a presidential run in 1960. That meant that only the 18,000+ in attendance at County Stadium that night would be eye-witnesses to a magical pitching performance.

One more fact of note: no one in the stands or the press box, or those listening to Bob Prince on the radio, was quite prepared to bear witness to ‘the greatest game ever pitched.’ This had already happened less than three years ago, after all, when Don Larsen hurled a perfect game in the 1956 World Series. How could anyone top that?

Nine Perfect Innings

Today, if a starting pitcher goes six innings and gives up no more than three runs, he is credited with a ‘quality start.’ If he goes nine innings and wins, that’s even better. If he pitches a shutout, it’s Miller Time. A no-hitter is a real cause for celebration; enough of those will generate salary increases, bonuses, trips to the All-Star Game, perhaps even a Cy Young Award or induction into the Hall of Fame.

Then there is the perfect game. In a no-hitter, the opposing team can put men on base, as the result of walks, hit batsmen, or errors. In a perfect game there cannot be any base runners for any reason. No hits, no walks, no errors, no bean balls. 27 men come to the plate and 27 men go back to the dugout.

On this night of May 26, 1959, Harvey Haddix took the mound and threw nine perfect innings against the Braves, despite Milwaukee’s offensive talent and the fact that Smokey Burgess’ signs were being stolen by the Braves bullpen. It was one of those nights when Haddix had complete control over the velocity and placement of his pitches. He would later say: “I could have put a cup on either corner of the plate and hit it.” Braves reliever Bob Buhl, who was in on the sign-stealing gambit, would have agreed: “Harvey had such marvelous movement and changes of speed that it didn’t matter if the hitter knew what was coming or not.”

There are some superstitions in baseball, and one is not to remind your pitcher, especially late in a game, how many zeros he’s put on the scoreboard. But when Haddix came to the plate at the top of the ninth, Braves catcher Del Crandell commented through his mask: “Hey, you’re pitching a pretty good game.”

Haddix responded by being perfect in the bottom of the ninth. Only one thing prevented him from being mobbed by his teammates and probably getting a standing ovation from the Braves fans- the game wasn’t over yet. Lew Burdette had given up hits, yet not one Pirate had crossed the plate. To his credit, Burdette had scattered his hits. He had also been aided by three double plays which had in turn been aided, at least according to the Pirates, by Burdette’s spitball. The split-fingered fastball had not been invented yet, but Burdette’s spitter could put enough downward movement on his fastball that a batter with a man on first would ground one to the infield, setting up the double play.

In any event, the game would go into extra innings, with lightning flashing in the gloom behind the ‘Marlboro Country’ endorsed scoreboard, and neither starting pitcher was ready to quit.

Three More Perfect Innings

At some point, radio broadcaster Bob Prince would say: “Don’t go away. We are on the verge of baseball history.”

Inning 10 went by, the Pirates did not score, and Haddix was perfect. Haddix was not thinking about his performance. He wanted a win and that meant the Pirates needed a couple of clean hits in a row. It should not have been that difficult; even Haddix got a hit off Burdette.

Yet inning 11 passed the same way, and so with the 12th. Haddix had now made history. No major league pitcher before him, or in the fifty years hence, has ever thrown 12 innings of perfect ball. When the telegraph operator (that’s right, telegraph) signaled “nothing across” for the 12th time, sportswriters in Pittsburgh knew they had to stay up late, because something extraordinary was happening in beer town.

The 13th Inning

Even an ill wind blows someone good, and in this case it was Lew Burdette. He held the Pirates scoreless in the top of the 13th. Harvey Haddix, fighting a cold, told his manager “Your horse is getting tired.” Even so, he still had some pitches left in him.

Haddix threw a good pitch to the first batter he faced, Felix Mantilla. Mantilla hit a bouncer to the left of third baseman Don Hoak, who fielded the ball cleanly, but rushed his throw to first. The throw went in the dirt and pulled the first baseman off the bag. Mantilla was on first with Hoak charged with a throwing error. That ended the perfect game. Yet Haddix still had a regulation perfect game, a no-hitter, and a pitching duel to be won.

The next Braves batter laid down a sacrifice bunt, moving Mantilla to second. Next up was Hank Aaron.

Aaron was the only man on the Braves roster who was ignoring the bullpen signals. At this point in his career he was seeing the ball well and hitting like Ted Williams. With a man in scoring position and only one out, it would have been folly to pitch to him, so Haddix gave him a free pass to first. But that meant that Haddix had to pitch to Joe Adler.

Adler came to the plate with the same mind-set Aaron had- to drive the ball deep enough to score Mantilla and win the game. Adler lacked Aaron’s Herculean batting average, yet he came to the plate with two important pieces of information. First, he knew that Haddix had previously given him a steady diet of sliders over the outside part of the plate. Second, he observed that, after a night of gusty winds that had often blown toward the plate, the flag at straight center was hanging limp.

The first pitch was a slider, high, and Adcock took it. The second offering from Haddix was also a slider, but a tired one that hung in the strike zone. Adcock swung and crushed the ball. It left the park quickly, cleared the center field fence, took a couple of bounces and struck a second fence that stood before a row of pine trees. The Pirates center fielder made a futile leap at the ball, which may have had Aaron thinking it had not left the park. Seeing Mantilla cross the plate, Aaron, believing the game was over, jogged back to the Braves dugout and was passed by Adler; this meant that Aaron was out.

The umpires therefore counted two runs as a result of Adcock’s homer, and the morning papers announced that the Braves had won the game 2-0. It was soon adjudicated that because of Aaron’s base running mistake, Adler’s homer was reduced to a double, leaving Mantilla’s score the first tiebreaker, and the final score was 1-0. Haddix’s nine inning performance went in the books as a perfect game. That was cold comfort for a man who had pitched his heart out and lost.

Haddix gets a Locker Room Call from Burdette

It is true that when the game was over Lew Burdette called Harvey Haddix in the visitor’s locker room. There is a dispute as to what was said during that conversation. According to Haddix, Burdette told the Pirate lefty that he should learn to scatter his hits. That was a sardonic observation, since Haddix had only given up one hit in 13 innings. Burdette had given up 12. According to Harvey Haddix, he hung up on Burdette.

The winning Braves pitcher told the media a different story: “I called Harvey that night in the visiting clubhouse. I told him ‘I realize I got what I wanted, a win, but I’d really give it up because you pitched the greatest game that’s ever been pitched in the history of baseball.’”

Aftermath

In the days following the game, Pittsburgh sportswriters would claim that Haddix’s performance would probably earn him a raise, perhaps as much as $10,000 a year, or at least a bonus. Haddix got neither. It was also projected that Haddix would probably make money doing commercials, which in those days meant endorsing razor blades. Yet he was never to be seen shaving with Gillette or any other brand of blades. Nor would his face be portrayed on a box of Wheaties. He was invited to appear on the ‘Ed Sullivan Show’ and ‘What’s My Line?’ but he turned both offers down.

Haddix himself did not think the ‘59 performance was the high point of his career. That would come later when he won game 5 in a World Series and game 7 as a relief pitcher.

He also seemed unfazed when in 1991 a new definition of what a perfect game was changed in a manner that erased his 1959 effort from the record books because he had given up a hit during extra innings. “I know what I did,” he said. Though the jersey he wore that fateful day has gone missing, his glove and a baseball he threw that night are in Cooperstown. So future generations of fans will be reminded of the unequalled performance he put on back in 1959.

Lew Burdette would later say: “I have to be the greatest pitcher who ever pitched, because I beat the guy who pitched the greatest game ever pitched.”