Cards Take Game 1 of Series

Oct. 7, 1964 - The Cardinals returned today to the scene of their dramatic last-day pennant victory and defeated the favored Yankees, 9-5, in the opening game of baseball’s 61st World Series.

They did it without Sandy Koufax, but with a 38-year-old knuckleball pitcher named Barney Schultz, who had started the season in the minors and finished it last Sunday by nailing down the National League pennant.

Schultz held off the Yankees for the final three innings just after the Cardinals had scored four runs in the sixth to wrest the lead from Whitey Ford.

“He’s been that way for two months,” said Tim McCarver, the Cards’ 22-year-old catcher. “When he needed to make a good pitch, he made it.”

Schultz has been that way for more than two months, but until Aug. 1 he was pitching for Jacksonville. Today was his 31st game for the Cardinals, 73rd of the year. “I don’t think that’s so many,” Schultz said.

It wasn’t too many for Schultz to make the good pitch when he had to get Mickey Mantle out or have the game tied up again. Johnny Blanchard had dropped a double in the right field corner, and Bobby Richardson’s two-out single had made it 6-5 in the top of the eighth. Roger Maris then beat out a slowly played topped ball to second baseman Julian Javier. That left the balance of the game to Mantle and Schultz’s knuckler. “It breaks to either side, down, or sometimes it sails,” McCarver said.

Mantle grounded to second. Schultz put the Yanks down in order in the ninth, and by that time the Cards had scored three more times against Roland Sheldon and Pete Mikkelsen.

Ford, the “old pro” of the Yankee pitching staff — appearing in his 22nd game in his 11th World Series — suffered his fourth straight defeat at the hands of the N.L. champions, while the Yanks suffered their fifth straight World Series defeat.

The Cards supplied plenty of youth to support Schultz against the Yankees.

Ray Sadecki, a 23-year-old lefthander, outlasted Ford over the first six innings and received credit for the victory in his first World Series game.

Mike Shannon (pictured #18), a 24-year-old outfielder in his second year as a big leaguer, drove a two-run home run off Ford to tie the score at 4-4 in the sixth. And McCarver hit a double and triple and scored the run that put the Cards ahead.

Tom Tresh, who is 26 and is one of the Yankees’ young old pros, knocked in three of his team’s five runs with a homer and a double. But the Yankees left 11 men on base as the Cardinals overtook them and rolled up the score.

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