July 16, 1964 - When his Los Angeles Dodgers came to St. Louis, manager Walter Alston talked of how they couldn’t score any runs.
Great man for jokes, that Alston.
The Dodgers were riding high as they flew back to Los Angeles tonight. They had just wrapped up their second straight victory in a three-game series with the Cardinals — a series in which they swung for 39 hits, five of them homers, and scored 30 runs.
Ray Sadecki, the southpaw who had won three in a row to become the Redbirds’ winningest pitcher with a 10-6 record, was sent on his way in the third inning as the Dodgers were on their way to thumping the Cards, 10-2, at Busch Stadium.
The Dodgers had decked Sadecki with four runs in the first — on singles by lefthanded hitters Derrell Griffith and Willie Davis, a single by righthanded hitter Tommy Davis, and a homer by lefthanded Ron Fairly (pictured).
One of baseball’s commandments states that lefthanded hitters shalt not belt lefthanded pitchers. But Fairly added a run-scoring single for his second hit off Sadecki and his fourth RBI of the game in the third inning.
In the three games, the Cardinals tumbled from fifth to sixth, where they are now a mere half-game ahead of the Dodgers. In three games, Fairly soared to great heights. He batted .462 and drove in 10 runs, a third of L.A.’s total. Three of his six hits in 13 at-bats in St. Louis were home runs.
But Fairly wasn’t the only Dodger hero.
Willie Davis’ speed in beating out a topped curve that was bounced to first baseman Bill White helped the Dodgers along in the first. And Willie twice took hits away from Dick Groat, each time with a runner on base.
He crashed the wall in right-center to catch Groat’s drive in the fourth. Then, after Ken Boyer, who had three of the Cards’ eight hits, singled in the seventh, Davis raced in to catch Groat’s falling liner in short center.
“That Willie Davis has been driving me nutty ever since he came into the league,” said Groat, shaking his head.
Alston had a grin and shrug by way of explanation for his suddenly hitting Dodgers. “All that was wrong with us,” he said, “was that we weren’t scoring runs.”
Manager Johnny Keane of the Redbirds had a different view.
“You can’t win with pitching that isn’t any better than ours was,” he said. “I didn’t think Sadecki had much stuff on his fastball at all.”
“I had stuff,” countered Sadecki. “They were just better than I was tonight.”
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