Every time I think of Lou Brock, I think about the angel.
Lou Brock’s life was touched by angels. Nothing came easy. He grew up
poor and without a father in the small town of Collinston, La.
Some of
his most powerful memories were of the bus taking him past the schools
where the White kids studied and dropping him off at the one-room
schoolhouse where he would spend his childhood. He was vividly aware of
what it meant to be Black in America in the 1940s and 1950s.
He worried a lot about never escaping Collinston.
Brock used to say that he discovered baseball after he threw a
spitball at a girl in class … and it hit the teacher instead. His
punishment was to do a report on some of the great baseball players of
the day — Jackie Robinson, Joe DiMaggio, Don Newcombe and so on. In
studying them, he realized that the players got $8 per day in meal
money. That sounded like a pretty good deal to him. So he started
playing ball.
He was a pretty good ballplayer in high school, but not really good
enough to get noticed. Instead, he got an academic scholarship at
Southern University to study math. He decided to try out for the
baseball team. And that’s where the angel story comes from.
But before we get to that story, we should recount the baseball life.
Buck O’Neil signed Brock to play for the Chicago Cubs. Brock struggled
his first couple of seasons with the team and the Cubs dealt him to St.
Louis for Ernie Broglio, which turned out to be one of the worst trades
in baseball history. Buck always said there was a racial reason behind
the deal; the Cubs already had stars Ernie Banks and Billy Williams
along with several other Black players and were concerned about angering
their fans if they became, as they saw it, too Black. So they traded Brock for a 28-year-old White pitcher, who, to be fair, had been pretty good in 1963.
As it turns out, the trade was the greatest thing that could have
happened to Brock: He immediately felt gloriously at home with the
Cardinals. He hit .348/.387/.527 in 103 games after the trade and was
probably the key player for the Cardinals coming back from as many as 11
games back and winning the 1964 pennant.
He then hit .300 with a homer in the World Series as the Cardinals beat the Yankees in seven.
His greatest World Series performances were yet to come.
Brock was not an especially devoted base stealer while with the Cubs,
but as soon as he got to the Cardinals, he ran with abandon. Brock had
good speed, but it was often noted that others were faster. What Brock
had was fearlessness and a genius for studying pitchers. He led the
league in stolen bases all but one year from 1966 to 1974 and retired
with a record 938 stolen bases. Only the inimitable Rickey Henderson has
surpassed him.
He was at his best in the biggest games. He loved the big stages. In
the 1967 World Series, he hit .414, stole seven bases and scored eight
runs. In the 1968 World Series, he hit .464 with another seven stolen
bases and six extra-base hits.
In 1974, he decided before the season even began that he would try
and break Maury Wills’ single-season record of 104 stolen bases. It was
an audacious — and seemingly foolish — goal. He was 35 years old. He had
never stolen even 75 bases in a season. He didn’t steal a single base
in the first week of the season.
But then he stole two bases at Pittsburgh. He stole three against the
Astros. He stole 17 bases in 19 games in May and stole 18 more in June.
The only question was if he would get on base enough times … and he
did. He stole four bases on Sept. 1 in San Francisco to get to 98. He
stole four in a series against the Mets to get within one of the record.
Then against the Phillies, he stole his 104th and 105th bases with Dick
Ruthven on the mound.
Cool Papa Bell — the legendary base stealer in the Negro Leagues who
helped teach Brock how to steal bases — presented him with the base that
broke the record.
“We decided to give him this base,” Cool Papa told the crowd, “because even if we hadn’t, he was going to take it anyway.”
Brock finished his career with more than 3,000 hits, more than 1,600
runs scored and was elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot.
And now for the Lou Brock story I always think about.
When he tried out for the Southern baseball team, he was not a
confident player. The only baseball he’d played was in a small town; he
had no idea if he was good enough. He remembered being so nervous on
tryout day that he could barely stand up. And then, he saw a boy running
around on the field. He couldn’t have been older than 12 years old.
And what struck Brock was how joyful that kid was. He just ran around
the field like he was the happiest person on earth. He laughed and
joked and patted players on the back and jumped around in the sunshine.
He played catch with everybody. Just seeing that kid play ball like that
brought out Brock’s inner joy. He forgot his nervousness.
“If that little boy has the courage to run on this field with all these college players,” Brock told himself, “So do I.”
And so he left behind all his doubts. He happily ran around the
field. He ran around so much that he actually passed out. That caught
the coaches’ attention. When he recovered, the coaches told him he had
five pitches to show what he could do. He hit four of them out, and his
career began.
After it was all over, Brock wanted to thank the boy who had inspired
such joy and confidence in him. But the boy didn’t come back to
practice.
He asked a couple of teammates, “Hey, what happened to that little boy who came out here to practice with us?”
And they said: “What little boy?”
“You know, the one who was running around here, playing catch with everybody.”
“Lou,” they said, “there was no little boy out here.”
Brock was too embarrassed to tell that story for a long time. But
then, one day, he told it to his mentor and friend Buck O’Neil. And Buck
didn’t laugh. He didn’t doubt.
Instead, he asked: “You think that boy was an angel? There are angels everywhere.”
Lou Brock smiled. And from that day on, whenever he would see O’Neil, he would say: “Hey Buck, there are angels everywhere.”
