The Last Out
Facing sky-high expectations, a loud-mouthed manager, and Hank Aaron.
Project 3.18 is honored to tell a few stories from the incredible life of former major league pitcher Ken Holtzman, with some posthumous assistance from Ken himself. Today we go back to August 19, 1969.
Pitching in the top of the seventh inning with a 3-0 lead, Ken Holtzman screwed up, and he understood that right away, even before the scolding crack reached his ears.
“That pitch was a fastball right down the middle,” Ken said at the time. He had just grooved one to the Atlanta Braves’ Hank Aaron, and you weren’t supposed to do that.
Aaron, the greatest power hitter of the era—with 541 home runs under his belt and 31 already that season—swung at Holtzman’s oopsie and was entirely satisfied with the result. The ball launched as if by artillery, on a path towards the hooting encampment of the left field Bleacher Bums, struck so hard that it might leave the park and deny the Bums the satisfaction of throwing it back.
“After I hit it, I knew it was gone, and started my home run trot around the bases,” Aaron said.
Ken agreed. “When [Aaron] hit that ball,” Holtzman said, “I said to myself, ‘It’s 3-1. Bear down now.’”
Billy Williams, the Cubs’ left fielder, was not so sure. He stayed with the ball, tracking a blast that should have ended up on Waveland Avenue, or even the houses across the street, just in case.
Williams, who saw it best, confirmed that Aaron had done his job. “It was gone,” the outfielder said. “It was in [the seats] by at least four or five rows…before the wind caught it.”
Above the park, the lake-effect wind was a veritable gale, whipping the scoreboard flags tautly inward at 16 miles an hour. While the weather was clear and the air temperature mild for the season, the elements had nonetheless decided that on this summer day, Wrigley Field would play as the most pitcher-friendly venue in baseball.
As Williams stalked it from below, Aaron’s ball left the playing area, only to slow, stop, and eventually reverse. With wind marking a sure home run as “Return to Sender: Undeliverable,” the left fielder knew he’d have a chance. “I knew I had to get back to the wall. I was in the vines and it came back to me.”
The ball did come back, but on a slant. At the last second, Williams scrambled four or five steps to his right, his back pressed into the peak-season ivy covering the brick outfield wall, now standing in the deeper well of the left-field corner. With his glove brushing the leaf-tips, Williams caught the ball for a deafening out.
As late as 2013, Aaron maintained that the ball Williams caught in the seventh inning that day was one of the best-struck balls he hit in his career.
“That’s the only place that ball could have been caught,” Aaron said. “If I’d hit it another three or four feet to the right or if I’d pulled it down the line, that ball would have been gone. I thought it was, anyhow. I have never been more sure of a home run than I was of that one.”
Seeing that ball end up in a glove, the Braves’ right fielder perceived unseen powers arrayed behind Ken Holtzman. “When the wind completely stopped that thing, I just told myself, ‘with that kind of luck, he’s going to pitch a no-hitter.’”
Down in between the couch cushions of the Cubs’ depth chart that season was 34-year-old Gene Oliver, a clubhouse guy whose presence on the team had a lot to do with the fact that the Cubs’ manager, Leo Durocher, liked having him around. Oliver got into only 22 games all year, most as a pinch hitter. He was also the team’s emergency third catcher, but with Randy Hundley expected to start every day behind the plate, and little-used back-up Bill Heath behind him, emergencies were few and Oliver was more coach than player.
On August 19, however, Hundley was unexpectedly out of action, hospitalized with an ear infection. That left Heath, the back-up, to catch Holtzman. He and Ken were doing just great until the eighth inning, when the unseen powers decided to throw the Braves a bone. An errant foul ball struck Heath on his throwing/signaling hand, breaking one of the metacarpals behind his index finger. “Ollie!” Durocher barked. “Get ready!”
Putting on his little-used gear, “I was scared as hell,” Oliver said. “I don’t catch much anyhow, and to go in and try to finish a no-hitter, well, I was shook up.”
Project 3.18 asked Ken how he handled this shotgun marriage:
“[Oliver] came out to the mound before the inning started,” Ken said, “and asked me if I had any special instructions for him. I told him I was having control problems with my curve so just signal for fastballs. I’ll change speeds on my own.”
In telling the terrified Oliver that he “was having control problems” with his curve, Ken underplayed his true predicament: “After I warmed up [for the game], I realized that all I had was my fastball,” Ken explained to reporters. “My curve and changeup weren’t working at all.”
The new battery handled a Braves pinch-hitter, Tommie Aaron (yes, relation), who hit a ground ball to second baseman Glenn Beckert. Beckert was having an extremely busy day, making several ranging, semi-wondrous stops far to his left, but this chance was routine. The inning ended, giving Oliver a few minutes to hyperventilate into a paper bag.
From the start, Ken had appreciated that without his good change up or his superlative curve to help him strike anybody out, he was nobody’s ideal starting pitcher.
“When I saw my curve wasn’t breaking early on, I thought it might be a long day. The umpire was squeezing the corners on me, too…wasn’t giving them to me. I thought, ‘If I have to throw my fastball down the center of the plate, I’m in trouble.’” Ken started pitching to survive, something Leo Durocher had seen him do before, and it drove the manager crazy.
Durocher had publicly complained about what he saw as Ken’s tendency to “throw lollipops” or “play catch with the catcher” instead of throwing hard on every pitch, bad habits that were keeping his young lefty from true greatness. That day, after a few innings spent watching Ken trying and failing to get calls on the corners, Durocher had taken him aside for a few terse but impactful words.
“He said, ‘Don’t go out there and start fighting the umpire or yourself. Just try to get the first guy out and then take ‘em one at a time.’” Ken did as instructed, and even started buying in:
“Along about the sixth inning I decided, well, if all I’ve got is the fastball, I’ll throw it. I thought, “[the Braves] could hit it at somebody, so I challenged everybody. I figured if they did it, they’d have to do it on my best pitch.”
All afternoon, a beyond-capacity crowd of 41,033 blanched and winced as Brave after Brave put the ball in play. Aaron’s near-miss in the seventh stopped every heart in the park, and after that, each out became an event. When Ken stepped back out onto Wrigley Field’s shaggy grass (some Braves grumbled that it had been deliberately left long that day) to work the ninth, the entire park became standing-room only and the standees let him hear it.
“Sure, I was nervous near the end because I could hear the crowd and I knew of course that I had a no-hitter going. I thought about it, but I said to myself, ’I’ll just go out there and try to win the game. If they get a hit, they get a hit, that’s all.’”
Getting the 25th out was nearly a calamity. The Braves’ center fielder, Felipe Alou, lifted a ball into the air on the fourth pitch, a shallow fly into short center field. Don Young, the Cubs’ center fielder, came in, and Don Kessinger, the shortstop, went out. It was Young’s play, but the ball had gotten into that devilish wind, and it took a wild ride among the zephyrs as Young tried to stay underneath. Keeping one eye on the ball and one eye out for Kessinger, Young was out of eyes with which to watch the ground and he lost his feet and fell, almost taking out his shortstop in the process.
The two men performed what the Chicago Tribune reporter described as a “neat adagio,” avoiding contact and allowing Kessinger to make a successful last-second lunge for the ball. The crowd made a guttural, indescribable noise, but if you’ve ever had the wind knocked out of you, the sounds you made afterward are a pretty close match.
Batting second was Felix Millan, the Braves’ second baseman. Ken threw two quick strikes, then two balls. Millan hit the 2-2 pitch hard, lining it sharply into right field, but ten feet too far to the right. The crowd swooned again. Everyone reset, and then Millan hit a high bouncing ball to third. Ron Santo threw him out by several steps.
In a perfect game, the last three outs come against the bottom of the opposing team’s lineup, but Ken had issued three walks that day, forcing him to face the top of the Braves’ order in the ninth. Now, with 26 outs, if Ken wanted his no-hitter, he’d have to take it from Henry Louis Aaron, back for a fourth look at Ken’s fastball and with a particular interest in seeing another one of those middle-middle mistakes.
“I could have pitched around him,” Ken said, “but right behind him were a couple of pretty good hitters in Rico Carty and Orlando Cepeda. If I walked him and somebody else got on, I could lose the game. So I decided to challenge him, man to man.” To Leo Durocher, such sentiments from Ken were like music.
His first pitch to Aaron was a strike on the outside corner, but the next two pitches strayed high and outside, balls. Behind his mask, Gene Oliver started feeling the moment. He signaled for a curve.
“When we got behind Aaron,” Oliver said, “I called for a curve, figuring, ‘what the hell if we walk him.’” Ken shook him off, prompting a short and pointed mound conversation, where Ken reminded his catcher that the day’s menu was a prix fixe and substitution requests could not be accommodated. His next course missed outside.
The rest of the Cubs’ defenders were feeling the moment, too. A reporter noticed that Ernie Banks had started running around in strange little circles at his position at first base, and asked him about it afterward. Banks acknowledged he’d been trying something.
“Yes,” Banks said, almost sheepishly. “I guess I did that a little bit. I thought it might make [Aaron] try and hit the ball my way.”
Aaron fouled the next pitch off, deep into the seats behind first base. The count had run full.
“I wasn’t going to throw a breaking ball because I didn’t want to hang a curve or change-up for him,” Ken said. He’d accepted the situation and his role in it. Either somebody was going to manage a hit off of his fastball or the game would be over. Now that was all up to Aaron. The great power-hitter just missed clubbing Ken’s next pitch, sending it zipping straight back into the screen behind home plate. Aaron was gaining on him, but it made no difference. The fastball was all he had.
So, that’s what Ken Holtzman threw Hank Aaron. From Oliver’s vantage, this last one was “perfect,” and it produced the day’s 27th ball in play, bouncing casually toward Glenn Beckert at second base.
Beckert had been keeping sharp by running through all the possible scenarios, readying his twitch reflexes for an inevitable rocket hit far to his left or right. So intense were his mental preparations that when Aaron’s nothing of a ground ball came right to him, Beckert looked stiff and surprised. “I was ready to go after anything Aaron hit, but I was expecting anything but a ball right at me…that gave me a scare.”
The resulting stop wasn’t his best work, but Beckert threw Aaron out at first base. Ken threw his long arms in the air.
Ron Santo was the first Cub to reach his pitcher and it’s a small wonder he didn’t kill him. The Cubs’ third baseman was probably close to 200 pounds of muscle at that point in his career and the signature photo of the moment captures Santo leaping at Ken, his shoes at the height of the pitcher’s belt. Photographers got several different angles of this leap and they all suggest Holtzman is about to be flattened.
The fans along the outfield wall, particularly in left field, had been perched upon the ledge for some time, waiting and chanting. As Ken induced weak contact from Aaron, jubilant fans leapt off the ledge and ten feet down to the playing field, celebrating even before Beckert could field the ball. Civilians quickly clustered around Ken and the other players, perhaps to pat backs and give hugs, but the entire scene was quickly tinged by frenzy and some of the congratulations got rough. Ken remembered that part with characteristic matter-of-factness: “I was surrounded and choked by dozens of fans.”
“I was scared,” he said afterward. “Some guy was choking me. I thought it was Santo, but I don’t know. I was on cloud nine myself…I didn’t know what was going on.”
At least 50 people made it out to the field and eventually a complement of ushers, security personnel, and a squad of Chicago police rallied to Ken and the other players. The police formed a ring around the buffeted pitcher and shoved him back to the Cubs’ dugout. Ken reminded us that in those bygone days, “we still had to pass by the fans to get to our locker room. There was no dugout access like there is today. The police had to rescue me, and they kept me in our dugout for about half an hour until they could disperse the crowd.”
Large numbers of fans remained celebrating in the stands after the field had been cleared, so the police kept up their detail on Ken the rest of his day. “They escorted me to the locker room,” he told us, “and even escorted me to my car an hour later.”
Some coverage of the disorderly scene was remarkably flip. The Tribune called the aftermath a “love-in,” saying that only “a few” fans had made it to the field, even as, several pages later, someone else reported that “an undetermined number of arrests were made,” mainly for trespassing. After quoting Ken saying that someone choked him, the game reporter, Richard Dozer, signed off with this clanger:
“You might say that was only fair, because, after all, it was he who choked the Braves.”
Project 3.18 asked Ken how that frightening experience complicated the emotions of a triumphal and cathartic moment, but on that point he was silent. Perhaps, in the wake of throwing baseball’s 172nd no-hitter, he had been too busy wading through even more complex emotions.
After the game, from opposite sides of the park and two very different men, the same assessment emerged.
In the visitors’ closet/clubhouse, a gracious Hank Aaron tipped his cap. “When you get a guy like Holtzman who has a great curve but it isn’t working and he still wins, he has to be some kind of pitcher.”
“Koufax could do it when he didn’t have his usual good stuff, but there haven’t been too many more that I have seen who could. I told people two and three years ago that this kid’s good enough to pitch some no-hitters.”
In the manager’s office adjoining the Cubs’ clubhouse, you would think that Leo Durocher himself threw the no-hitter, holding court as he did for the press with the general manager, John Holland, looking on. The manager, who had been calling Ken Holtzman “the Next Sandy Koufax” since their first spring training in 1966, relished in his I told you so moment.
“I have said it all along,” he reminded the press. “Gentlemen, you may have seen the beginning of a new Mr. Koufax. That game today might be just what the kid needed. He has had the talent right along, but now he’s finally put it together.”
For years, from Durocher and a national press who loved the line, Ken had to hear regularly how he could be the league’s next great left-handed power pitcher (since Holtzman was Jewish, the exemplar was always Koufax). But the qualifier followed him along with the rest. It would have been one thing to be “the Next Koufax,” but being “Could Be the Next Koufax” turned praise into purgatory. Finally, in Ken’s no-hitter performance, Durocher finally saw what he felt was the missing piece: prey drive.
“What I liked,” Durocher said, “was the way he challenged those hitters [in the ninth]. It was like he said, ‘Ok, it’s you and me…let’s go.’ He showed me something, really challenged them. You’ve got to have great plays in a no-hitter and you’ve got to pitch like hell to do it…Holtzman pitched like hell.“
“He was some kind of a pitcher out there today.”
With the no-hitter, Holtzman had finally touched Durocher’s expectations of greatness, and he was praised for it, but unfortunately the manager had a short memory and if he’d ever had a fuse, it had burned off long ago. In subsequent years, multifront conflicts with Durocher would push Ken to seek a way out of Chicago, a place he’d otherwise come to think of as a second home.
The Tribune reported that Ken would be “rewarded financially,” for throwing a no-hitter, as was something of the custom at the time. “You can say he’ll be taken care of,” John Holland said.
Durocher was less circumspect: “He should get $100,000 and the first seven floors of the Wrigley Building!”
What he got, a few days later, was a new contract, boosting his salary by $2,500. Ken would have been making somewhere around $30,000 that season, so this was a seven or eight percent raise. The Cubs also paid tribute to Holtzman’s busy defense by putting $1,000 in the fund the players used to pool and divide endorsement money.
Up in the press box, “historians couldn’t recall” how many pitchers had pulled off a no-hitter without any strikeouts, and in 1969, that was plausible, because it hadn’t happened in a very long time and there was no Sarah Langs and the internet to cover what memory didn’t. In fact, it had happened twice: Earl Hamilton did it for the St. Louis Browns in 1912 and Sam Jones did it for the New York Yankees in 1923. After that, no-hitters involved strikeouts. Until Ken did it, the only time in the last century anyone has. Between that fact and the Heath/Oliver switcheroo, Ken’s no hitter was a miracle of probability.
In the music-blaring good cheer of the post-game clubhouse, a somewhat-dazed and exhausted 23-year-old pitcher answered a hundred questions about his day, and we laid most of his comments into our account. After no-hitting one of baseball’s best offenses using just one good pitch, young Ken was still modest to the point of self-deprecation.
“Today I was very lucky. I threw 10 or 12 pitches that were right over the plate and they popped them up. Another day, maybe any day but today, they would have been out of the park. I might not have gotten away with them.”
Asked if this was his greatest moment, baseball’s least-hyperbolic man had to agree, in his way: “For the time being, it is,” he said. “But when we win the pennant, this will become only the second-ranking thrill.”
Ken rose on unsteady legs to head for some important time in the trainer’s room. The reporters pressed around him but the Cubs’ trainer shooed them away. “Hey guys, give him a rest. Kenny, you want these guys in here?”
“No, give me a few minutes alone.”
The no-hitter relieved some of what had become a stifling burden of expectations. By pitching such a game and seeing it through, Ken had transited out of the “potential” phase of his early career (a period also pock-marked by military service interruptions) and into the era where he would routinely live up to the hyperbole others had pointed at him since he was drafted as a teenager. Sitting alone in that trainer’s room, he could reflect on what it felt like to finally do enough.
The police eventually escorted Ken to his car and he went home to his Chicago apartment. His day was capped off when the phone rang.
It was the First Sandy Koufax, calling to congratulate the First Ken Holtzman.
Folks, it’s been a lot lately: Interviewing real people, bidding unexpected farewells, posting pictures of our dad. Let’s lighten things up a little.
Regular readers may recall that in honor of Gary Frownfelter, we promised to tackle the 1918 forfeit that led him to research and index the whole bunch. According to Gary, some naughty folks in Philadelphia were throwing seat cushions. Sounds like a lark—as long as there wasn’t any historical melodrama going on in the summer of 1918 that Frownfelter didn’t mention… Ah.
Well, a promise is a promise around here, and we’re rolling with it! It’ll be seat cushions AND a baseball season thrown off its axis by the wartime implementation of America’s first military draft. But don’t worry, we promise to have some fun.
On July 8: “Work, Fight, or Forfeit”
Omgosh, Paul, what exciting descriptions and narrative! I felt like I was there. And the details that put Oliver in as catcher. Ken’s limited repertoire that day. That no-hitter was meant to be!
That's a homer your own self there Paul. It's outta here !