Sept. 29, 1964 - There are two teams in first place in the National League, and neither of them is the Phillies. The Fabulous Phillies have become the Fainting Phillies, losing nine games in a row.
Tonight, there was pathos in the disintegration of the Phillies as they lost to the Cardinals, 4-2. As Cookie Rojas ended the game by grounding to Ken Boyer, almost to the second, news flashed through the park that Pittsburgh had beaten the Reds. A double wave of happiness rocked Busch Stadium. Such happiness, it seemed at one time, belonged only to Philadelphia this season.
Perhaps the pathos had been building all along, but it reached a climax before the game. The Phillies looked like they might not win until next Memorial Day, and now they were trying to salvage their wreckage with their best player, Johnny Callison, retching in the training room, and their starting pitcher, Dennis Bennett, trying to talk himself out of his pain.
Callison was lying face down on a table. He had a virus. He hadn’t been able to hold food all day. His head throbbed; his body was chilled. “I saw myself in a mirror, with my sunken cheeks, and I scared myself,” he said with a forced grin. He was waiting for a doctor.
Bennett was in the dugout. He had taken pills for the pain he knew would start to wrack his shoulder as soon as he began his warmup. “By the fourth inning,” he said, “I’ll get some hot stuff to put on my side. It burns like hell, but it takes my mind off the shoulder.”
There would be no fourth inning for Dennis Bennett. There was only a first and part of a second. The Cards scored three runs. His shoulder smarted, but the pain went much deeper than that.
“I tried my best,” he said. “I wouldn’t have gone out there if I couldn’t give my best. I made good pitches, but they hit them. So, what’s the difference if they were good? Maybe I tried too hard.”
Philadelphia manager Gene Mauch sent a messenger to the clubhouse in the fifth. The doctor had examined Callison; he told him to go back to the hotel and get into bed. The messenger said Mauch wanted to know if he could muster enough strength for one at-bat. Callison put his uniform on. “I knew once I got out there, I’d be in the game,” he said. “My head felt so light when I walked outside that I thought I’d fly up like a balloon.”
Callison pinch-hit in the seventh. He lined a single to right. They brought a red nylon jacket to him. He put it on and began to fumble with the buttons. His hands shook so that he could not button it up. Bill White, the Cardinal first baseman, buttoned it for him. “I was cold,” Callison said. He finished the game in right field and flied out in another appearance.
It was terribly sad. During the day, Callison, Bennett and other Phillies received telegrams and telephone calls from ghouls accusing them of all sorts of heinous crimes. Now, they sat in a clubhouse of broken dreams.
Callison murmured the sorrow he felt for the fellows not making much money, the despair he felt because all the great deeds of the team had been squandered in one nightmarish week.
“You just wonder,” Johnny said, “where it all went — and how fast.”
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