The Late Great Lou Brock

            Louis Clark Brock’s career defies the modern day statistical number crunchers who attempt to rank players with the precision of diamond cutters.  Statisticians whiff on the true measure of Brock’s greatness because his dynamic play and clutch performances cannot be quantified.  While he owned impressive career numbers, the whole of his game was greater than the sum of its’ parts.   Indeed, Lou Brock possessed that indefinable je ne sais quoi, which translated into championships.

Born in 1939 to a sharecropper family, Brock grew up near El Dorado, Arkansas, a small town in the Deep South located just north of the Louisiana state line.  He was born too late to play in the old the Negro Leagues, but young enough to be infused with the soul of old school black baseball whose players ran the bases with aggressive abandon.

As a youngster, Brock played sandlot baseball in the rural south, a far cry from today’s organized baseball with uniforms, scoreboards and coaches.   He attended Southern University, a ‘black college’ for those who sought escape from a rigid, poverty stricken world, where he tried out for the school’s baseball team.  As an unknown, the 18 year-old had to prove himself quickly or be cut from the squad.   There, he first demonstrated his penchant to perform under pressure as he tattooed baseballs driven by an explosive bat that sprang like spring steel from a tightly wound body blessed with sinewy power.  

By the late 1950’s, scouts scoured the hinterlands for an untapped talent pool to compete with the New York Giants and Brooklyn Dodgers, and later the Milwaukee Braves, teams that won every National League pennant from 1951 to 1959 because they struck black gold by signing talented African American players.

The Chicago Cubs paid heed to that success, and sent Buck O’Neil to search the bushes for players to pull them out of the doldrums. 

O’Neil found Billy Williams and Lou Brock, two players who made the Hall of Fame, albeit in decidedly different paths. Sweet swinging Billy Williams made it as Cub.  However, the raw backwoods talent took more time to refine.   The impatient Cub fans ridiculed him as Brock as in Rock because of his early defensive miscues.   After three years in Chicago, the Cubs traded Brock to the Cardinals for Ernie Broglio, a former 20 game winner that left Cardinals players—both black and white—scratching their heads.  History proved otherwise.

The 24 year-old arrived in St. Louis in June of 1964 to play for a team with pennant hopes after a near miss in 1963.   He brought with him a mediocre .253 batting average that matched his new team’s moribund .500 record.  His new Red Bird manager Johnny Keane, a religious man without bias except for those who could help the team win, told Brock that he was his everyday leftfielder, and gave the young  greyhound the green light to run the base paths.  Brock hit .348 the rest of the season and stole 33 bases igniting the Cardinals to their first pennant in 18 years.   He hit .300 in his first World Series, with Game 1 highlighting his impact when he scored the opener’s first run when he singled, took third on another hit,  and scored on a short fly to the outfield.

The Cardinals won two more pennants and another World Championship with their leadoff man extraordinaire.   St. Louis romped to the pennant in 1967, as Brock hit .299 with 21 home runs while leading the league in runs scored and  stolen bases.  

Game 1 of the World Series against Boston typified Brock’s electrifying post-season play in a game won by St. Louis, 2 to 1.  Brock collected four hits, stole two bases and scored both runs for the Cardinals.   

In Game 3, he rocketed a drive over a startled Carl Yastrzemski in left field as he cut the bases in record time for a hard-slide triple to ignite that victory.  Lou finished the Fall Classic with a .414 average, and ordinarily would have won Series MVP but for his famed teammate Bob Gibson who earned the award and the car on the basis of three overpowering World Series victories.  KMOX radio recognized Brock’s excellence by giving him a car, too.

It was more of the same the following season known as the “Year of the Pitcher” when Brock led the league in doubles, triples and stolen bases.   The World Series against the Detroit Tigers provided Brock with another opportunity to display his unique talent.

The preceding year, he set a Series record with seven stolen bases against the Red Sox, and he would swipe seven more against Detroit. Brock possessed what Stan Musial called inner conceit.  Lou ran the bases with a swagger that said you cannot throw me out.  It was a part of his psyche that made for clutch hitting and compelling devil dare on the base paths.  But Brock was destined for a reversal of fortune.   

With the Cardinals clinging to a one run lead in Game Five, the Tigers’ nemesis cracked a double, his third straight hit.  Javier followed with a line-drive single hit directly towards leftfielder Willie Horton who fielded the ball on a big hop, and fired a missile on a line to home plate.

The Cardinal speedster went in standing up and collided with the Tiger catcher just as he caught the ball.  The umpire called Brock out in a hotly disputed call.   Brock maintained that he was correct in trying to score on the dead run rather than sliding, and after having turned in such a superman performance that he was unfairly scapegoated for his role in the Series’ pivotal play.  Lou was certainly correct on the latter point. 

That lost run proved critical as the Tigers rallied to win that game, and later the Series in seven games. Oft overlooked in defeat was Brock’s phenomenal performance that included three doubles, a triple and two long home runs with a .464 batting average.

In the end analysis, Brock’s World Series statistics match any of the Games’ greats.  In 21 games, he lit up the scoreboard with a .391 batting average (second all-time); a slugging percentage of .655 (sixth); four home runs, and 14 stolen bases (first).  

St. Louis failed to make it to the post season in the 1970’s, due to blundering trades that included giveaways of pitchers Steve Carlton and Jerry Reuss, either of whom would have made the difference in several close but no cigar pennant races.   Brock did his best to carry the team that lacked the excellence and esprit de corp of previous Red Bird ball clubs.  The fleet-footed leftfielder continued his consistent hitting and electrifying base running.  He led the league in runs scored in 1971, and in 1974 he nearly carried a mediocre team to a division crown when he stole 118 bases at the age of 35.

Throughout this pennant-barren decade, Lou remained a St. Louis favorite whose partisans knew baseball on an intellectual and visceral level.   Brock possessed charisma—a rare trait in the pastoral world of baseball—whenever he came to the plate, and especially when he ran the bases.  His deadpan stares and feints on the base paths,  the stolen bases and his audacious sprints stretching singles into doubles and doubles into triples upset opponents and thrilled his fans. 

Aggravated opposing pitchers oft shaved the Red Bird roadrunner high and tight in retaliation.  Bob Gibson once remarked that he earned his stern reputation in part because he defended his swift teammate with his own chin music.   

In August of 1979, he needed two more hits to reach 3000.  The audio system played Paul McCartney’s tune, “With a Little Luck”,  but Lou hardly needed it as he seemed to always rise to the occasion.  He led off the first inning with a single, and in his second time up pitcher Dennis Lamb threw one high and tight that nearly decked the Red Bird favorite.  On  the next pitch, he lined a shot right back at the sacrificial Lamb that drilled the Cub hurler for hit number 3000.

Brock finished his career with over 900 stolen bases and 3,023 hits, yet inadequate numbers for statistical desk jockeys like Bill James who only ranked Lou #15 as all-time leftfielders behind the likes of such luminaries as Tim Raines, Minnie Minoso and Jessie Burkett, presumably because they drew more base on balls that fit within his defining formula for winning baseball games.

In response, one can only quote a show me Missourian named Mark Twain who once said:  “There are lies, damned lies and statistics.”  Limiting analysis to Brock’s career through number crunching leads to underrating his ‘ranking’ in the pantheons of baseball greats.   The man who rose from the backwoods of the old Jim Crow world of the Deep South played the game fearlessly, with the flair for the dramatic that ignited his team and electrified his fans.  Louis Clark Brock defined winning baseball, and his charismatic play made the game a thrill to watch.