October 1964 by David Halberstam

October 1964 Reviews

• 
  Matt

  The title of David Halberstam’s baseball classic, October 1964, is a bit misleading. It encourages you to believe that the book’s focus is on the 1964 World Series that pitted the young, modernizing St. Louis Cardinals against the New York Yankees, a regressive, crumbling giant trading on past glory.
  
  That’s just not the case.
  
  Oh, to be sure. Halberstam covers the World Series. But it’s almost as an afterthought. Only 34 of the book’s 373 pages are actually devoted to the seven-game series, won by St. Louis. This averages out to roughly five pages per game. Thus, if you are looking for a pitch-by-pitch account within these covers, one that covers every towering home run, every blazing fastball, every inning in which absolutely nothing happens (it’s baseball after all) you are not going to find it.
  
  Instead, this is a book that is a lot like an early summer ballgame itself. It is languidly paced, packed with nostalgia, and never imbued with any real sense of drama. The ’64 Series may have been a barn burner, but Halberstam doesn’t go out of his way to ratchet up the tension. Though this has a definite throwback feel – it was originally published in 1994, but feels older – there is nothing here to remind you of the vivid prose or phrasemaking of, say, Grantland Rice. October 1964, much like Halberstam’s earlier Summer of ‘49, is a bit of a meander. At times, it is nothing more than a string of baseball anecdotes strung together. It’s like you sat down to talk to Grandpa Simpson, except with the knowledge of Peter Gammons.
  
  And that’s what makes it great!
  
  You often hear people say that the NFL has become our national pastime. That’s nonsense. It is, to be sure, the most popular sport. But a sport and a pastime are not the same thing (it is the title, however, of a mildly erotic novel by James Salter). A baseball season becomes the background of your life. If you have a hometown team, you have 81 chances a year to go see them. The stakes are often low, the games are often long, but they give you a chance to sit with your family and friends for a few hours, beneath a clear blue sky and a warming sun, and have a beer (or seven, or eight), and talk and laugh and just enjoy the fact that you are there, existing, beneath the sun with a beer in your hand, without a clock winding down. Because there is, after all, a clock winding down, on all of us. Baseball lets us forget that for a moment.
  
  Halberstam leads us through the entire 1964 season, alternating between the Cardinals and the Yankees. Though this is a mild read, there are two relatively serious threads running through it. The first is race. The other is labor versus capital.
  
  Halberstam, as he must, devotes a lot of time to the issue of race and baseball. Seventeen years after Jackie Robinson debuted, blacks were still treated as second or third-class citizens, especially when they had to travel down south, where the vestiges of segregation still existed.
  
  As Halberstam moves through the season, he compares and contrasts the Cardinals and Yankees, exploring both the moral and practical effects of their race relations. The Cards, like the National League in general, were quicker to integrate. They seized on the power and speed that black ballplayers brought to the game. This resulted in a lineup that included base stealer extraordinaire Lou Brock, star center fielder Curt Flood, and flame-throwing hurler Bob Gibson. The Yanks were far slower to embrace the trend. Well, that’s too mild. They held the line of racial supremacy longer than all but three other teams. Led by executive George Weiss, a racist and a Hall of Famer (the two are not mutually exclusive), the Yanks were built around an aging core of Whitey Ford, Mickey Mantle, and Roger Maris. The choices made by the Cards and the Yanks set them on vastly different trajectories in the near term. (The Cards made it to two more World Series in the 60's; the Yanks entered an 11-year period of mediocrity).
  
  Labor relations, though not given as much space, is also an important theme. It is customary today to bemoan the astronomical salaries of athletes. Reading this provides a fascinating perspective on how different – and unfair – things used to be. Before Curt Flood made his bid for free agency, teams enjoyed almost complete leverage in negotiations, holding players to a fraction of what they’d be worth on an open market.
  
  These are heavy topics, but like I said, this is not a heavy book. Halberstam doesn’t pound on these motifs. Instead, he unspools them gradually, as he introduces you to the various managers, coaches, executives, and players on both sides. See, Halberstam isn’t interested so much in the games as he is the personalities. He wants you to meet Mickey Mantle, and understand how difficult it was for him to let go, even with a knee held together by skin and bandages. He wants you to know the good and decent Buck O’Neil, a famous Negro League first baseman who never got his chance in the majors, and who scouted future Hall of Famer Lou Brock for the Cubs. By introducing these people, and telling their stories, he is able to gently explore a lot of issues without coming across as didactic. The games are always going on in the background, but the personalities are what interest Halberstam, not the box scores.
  
  There are parts of October 1964 that haven’t aged well, especially if you are a baseball fan interested in advanced statistics. In keeping with the sepia-tinged, old-timey feel, the only statistics that matter to Halberstam are win-loss records and ERA for pitchers, and batting average, home runs, and RBIs for hitters. Back then, those numbers meant something; today, if you tried to use those measures to rate a player, you would be mocked by statheads.
  
  Baseball has come to mean a lot to me. That’s why I read this. I grew up with the game. In true Field of Dreams style, it was the only connection I had with my dad. Over time, I drifted away. I preferred playing basketball or watching football. Baseball seemed to belong to a different era, when everything was in black-and-white and men always wore suits with vests.
  
  Then I had kids, and I came back to the game. Life seemed to be moving super fast, and I needed to slow it down every once in awhile. Know what slows things down? An afternoon of baseball, because baseball takes as long as it takes.
  
  But it’s not just the unhurried pace, so unusual our 21st century lives. It’s the connection with the past. At the end of Ken Burns’ Baseball, the Washington Post sportswriter Thomas Boswell gives a kind of summation for why the game matters to him.
  
  “We respect the people of other generations in baseball perhaps more than we respect other generations in other fields in this country,” he observes. “We’ve been called a disposable society, but we don’t dispose of Babe Ruth. We don’t dispose of Walter Johnson. We treat them as though they are equals, and contemporaries though they’re dead. That’s a very special thing to hand onto children.”
  
  We’ve had losses in our family that are hard to explain to our children, because we can’t explain them to ourselves. The other day, just as I was finishing this book, my five year-old Emilia wanted to know if you could celebrate the birthday of someone “in heaven.” I immediately thought of Boswell’s observation. “Yes,” I told her, “And you should.”
  
  The remarkable thing about baseball is how it is so thoroughly alive. It is incredibly attuned to the past, but the past is always vividly present, kept there by stories told and retold, passed on like heirlooms. The old players are never gone. We talk of them as though they are beside us in their primes. I find that to be a beautiful notion. Baseball makes you believe in endless worlds, worlds where Mantle is loping across the outfield grass on two healthy knees, where Gibson is still young, and bringing the heat, worlds where the summer never ends.
• 
  Paul Haspel

  October of 1964 saw the playing of a World Series for the ages. History records that in that Series, the Saint Louis Cardinals defeated the New York Yankees, four games to three. Yet this particular World Series was important for reasons that stretched far beyond the world of baseball, as David Halberstam makes clear in his 1995 book October 1964.
  
  It is appropriate that one of Halberstam’s best-known books is titled The Best and the Brightest (1972) – for Halberstam himself was among “the best and the brightest” of the journalists of his era. He was among the leaders of a group of idealistic young reporters who traveled to Vietnam to chronicle the American war effort in that country – only to find that U.S. policy in Vietnam was driven in large part by domestic politics back home, and really had little to do with defending democracy abroad. The skeptical, critical-thinking spirit that Halberstam developed and nurtured in the course of his Vietnam experience served him well in chronicling many areas of American life, as it does in October 1964.
  
  But why did Halberstam focus on the 1964 World Series? What made the ’64 Series different from any of the more than 100 others played before and since? Part of the answer has to do with baseball history: the New York Yankees dynasty whose beginnings Halberstam had chronicled in an earlier book, Summer of ’49 (1989), came to an effective end when the Yanks lost to the Cards in 1964. But another, deeper reason – one that should matter to all readers, whether they are baseball fans or not – has to do with the ways in which the 1964 World Series reflected changing racial norms in America.
  
  We all know that Jackie Robinson integrated the major leagues in 1947, when he first took the field with the National League’s Brooklyn Dodgers. What may not be as well-known, as Halberstam explains, is that the two major leagues operated quite differently when it came to integrating their teams: “In 1954 the Supreme Court of the United States had ruled that white Southern school districts should move with all deliberate speed to integrate; in baseball the National League moved with speed, but the American League moved with deliberation instead of speed” (p. 54).
  
  The Yankees, complacent in an era when new Yanks players were told that they could count on a World Series winner’s check as part of their “salary,” catered to the whims of a frankly racist owner who not only doubted the capabilities of black players but also feared that white middle-class fans would not want to sit with African American fans at a ball game. Teams like the Cardinals, meanwhile, embraced the faster, more innovative style of play that African American players brought to the game, and welcomed fans of all backgrounds.
  
  October 1964 chronicles the entire 1964 season, showing how differently the two teams conducted themselves on the way to the World Series. The Yankees continued to trade on the skills of great but aging stars like Mickey Mantle; Halberstam writes that “There was a certain gallantry to Mickey Mantle as he pressed forward in the twilight of his career….He was the man who carried the team, and yet he played now in constant pain, reaching for physical skills that were no longer there” (p. 71).
  
  The Cardinals meanwhile cultivated young, talented players from a variety of backgrounds, and built a team ethic that defied the racial norms of the time. The Cardinals had their spring training in Florida in 1964 – the year of the signing of the Civil Rights Act, with passage of the Voting Rights Act still a year away – and Florida law still mandated residential segregation. The Cardinals’ solution to this injustice was inspiring:
  
  [A] wealthy friend of [Cardinals owner] Gussie Busch bought a motel, the Skyway, and the Cardinals leased it for six weeks and rented some rooms in an adjoining one, the Outrigger, so that the entire team and their families could stay together. A major highway ran right by the motel, and there, in an otherwise segregated Florida, locals and tourists alike could see the rarest of sights: white and black children swimming in the motel pool together, and white and black players, with their wives, at desegregated cookouts. That helped bring the team together. (p. 59).
  
  Indeed, how many organizations across the United States today – more than 50 years after that long-gone baseball season – have achieved that degree of harmonious and genuine racial integration? It is a troubling question to contemplate.
  
  Once the 1964 MLB season is properly underway, and both the Yankees and the Cardinals are having to struggle for the league pennants that they will eventually win, Halberstam excels in providing quick, economic portraits of the key players for both teams.
  
  Among the Yankees whose portraits most stood out to me: Roger Maris, three years after breaking Babe Ruth’s home run record in 1961, was still troubled by the cruelty with which Yankees fans had treated him because it was the taciturn, workaday Maris and not the charismatic star Mickey Mantle who broke the record. Elston Howard, the catcher who became the Yankees’ first African American player, “handled with great skill the pressure of being a pioneer in a reluctant organization”, but years later his wife still believed that the pressure of being the first black Yankee cut his life short (he was just 51 when he died from a stroke). And Jim Bouton, the future author of the iconoclastic baseball exposé Ball Four (1970), was in 1964 “a power pitcher, but a relatively small one – he once compared himself to a Volkswagen at the Indy 500. He had to use his entire body on every pitch”; his hat flew off with almost every pitch, and his joy at actually making the big leagues was always evident.
  
  Portraits of the key Cardinals are comparably vivid. The singularly intense pitcher Bob Gibson was known for “The Look” with which he would bear down on opposing batters; for him, baseball was war, the opposing team were the enemy, and “he never talked to opposing hitters, lest his ability to dominate them be weakened by ever the smallest show of humanity.” Catcher Tim McCarver, a white Southerner from segregated Memphis, learned a great deal about baseball, and about life, from serving as Gibson’s battery-mate. And the skilled and speedy base-runner Lou Brock “gave [the Cardinals] not only far more speed, but a new degree of aggressiveness. No player worked harder at the game, and none studied his job more closely than Brock.”
  
  Halberstam captures well the drama of the 1964 World Series, a championship that went the full seven games – again, with attention to what these games meant with regard to American life. Consider, for instance, Halberstam’s discussion of what it meant when the Cardinals went with pitcher Bob Gibson as their starter for the decisive Game 7:
  
  There was a time, only recently past, when that would have surprised people, a black pitcher getting the call in a decisive seventh game of the World Series, for it had long been part of the myth of white America that blacks were not as mentally tough as whites and therefore could not be counted on in the clutch: it was the performance of such athletes as Gibson that destroyed that particularly scabrous fiction. (p. 344)
  
  Playing through severe pain, with his customary physical and mental toughness, Gibson pitched a complete game; the Cardinals won the game, 7-5, and took the Series, four games to three. It was much more than a game – more, even, in many ways, than a World Series.
  
  In a thoughtful afterword, Halberstam considers the changes that the 1964 World Series foreshadowed. The once-great Yankees went into a long period of decline, and more teams in both major leagues meanwhile sought to emulate the Cardinals’ example of building a team where skilled players of all backgrounds work productively together. It is a worthy model not just for baseball but for American life – a message that comes through loud and clear from a reading of October 1964.
• 
  Murray

  As Paul Haspel (fellow GR book warrior) has pointed out we have here not only an exceptional book about baseball ⚾️ but about race and about a breaking down of segregational barriers. Halberstam was a terrific writer and this book flies. I love it when one story becomes many stories in one and then becomes a metaphor for something even more.
• 
  Jay Schutt

  A good read for baseball fans of any age. Covers the pivotal 1964 season of the New York Yankees and the St. Louis Cardinals. Tells how both teams were put together and how they adjusted to age, injuries and racial tension. The baseball draft was started to combat the high bonus payments to players signing contracts for the first time. Also, the beginning of free agency with Curt Flood's refusal to accept a trade. I lived through this season that saw my Phillies collapse, losing a ten game lead in the last two weeks.
• 
  HBalikov

  David Halberstam is a great writer who has written about sports. He is not a sports writer. But you would not know that by reading October 1964 his analysis of the amazing 1964 Major League Baseball season that culminated in a memorable World Series matchup between the perennial power, New York Yankees, and the St. Louis Cardinals who hadn’t been in the World Series since they were an all-white team in 1946. Halberstam makes a strong argument for the 1964 season's importance both to issues of race and compensation.
  
  My GR friend, Matt, has given some of his masterful insight to this book.
  https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
  
  Not much that I choose to differ on or add. Halberstam tried to interview almost everyone associated with the two teams and the World Series. He almost succeed, falling only a few short. By doing so, he gathered some very nice stories and observations.
  
  This is a well-written, important book, for anyone interested in placing the baseball of 1964 in a proper context.
  
• 
  Joseph Sciuto

  As a child in the mid-sixties and after as a teenager through 1970's it was baffling to me how one league could dominate another league in the All-Star game. At one point the National league beat the American league like 19 out of 20 games. Statistically, it literally seemed impossible, especially since a pennant winning team who won 100 games, lost 62 games.
  
  Throughout most of the 20th century it was said that baseball was a reflection of the country at the time, and in many ways it was, as were many corporations.
  
  In 1947 the great Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, and the Dodgers went on to sign a number of outstanding black ballplayers and after awhile the rest of the National league caught on and started signing the likes Willie Mays, Hank Arron, Bob Gibson, Lou Block. Wille McCovery, Curt Floyd, and the list goes on and on.
  
  Now, there was no secret how great the potential these ballplayers possessed and the Yankees could have signed Wille Mays but past on him simply because he was black and the Yankee front office was racist, as were most of the many American league teams.
  
  Despite cries from the legendary Babe Ruth and Ted Williams that it was a disgrace that more black ballplayers weren't in the majors it seemed to fall on deaf ears in the American league front officers.
  The Kansas City Monarch's of the Negro league, at certain times, had so many future major league superstars on their team that they could have easily competed against nearly any team in both the American and National league.
  
  As I learned more and more about baseball, a sport I truly love, I came to realize that it wasn't such a surprise that the National League won so many All-Star games. They possessed the cream of the crop, the very best in either league, and they were mostly black ballplayers who the American league passed on.
  
  David Halberstam, one of my favorite historians, dissects the aging and ailing Yankee team in 1964 and the great black stars the St. Louis Cardinals had on their team...top among them Hall of Framer Bob Gibson and Lou Block.
  
  But, he goes much further than just that series and gives us a disturbing look at the history of baseball. A history fulled with a profusion of racism, and corrupt ownership that tried to steal any penny they could from the players.
  
  He also gives us a portrait of ballplayers like Bob Gibson, Lou Block, Mickey Mantle, and Whitey Ford that shows their competitiveness, humanity, and a willingness to play severely hurt that would sideline 95 percent of the players of today. Baseball fan or not, I strongly recommend this book.
• 
  Michael

  Outstanding historical journalism of the 1964 season. The Cardinals and Yankees both came from behind to win pennants and Cards took the Series in 7 games. So many great players, managers, and scouts are profiled. The coverage of racial issues in baseball is a major focus, with the stories of Bob Gibson and Lou Brock portrayed a fascinating detail. Halberstam is great at telling a story with transparent prose. Am not much of a baseball fan, but I recognize it as a major contribution of our civilization and love this big slice of key figures at a significant turning point in its history.
• 
  Riley Vermilya

  Let's get one thing straight. I am a girly girl who reads EVERYTHING under the sun for the sheer education and enjoyment of it.
  
  However, book club introduced me to this historically power packed baseball book of facts, personal accounts, and experiences via management, owners and players.
  
  Since this is not my typical reading genre, I dreaded reading this story about 1964's year in baseball. Once I dug in, I was NOT disappointed! I was surprised and discovered I already knew some of the facts and players due to my sports crazed Dad and my love of movies. Films like 42 and Jerry McGuire really can educate the female out of touch baseball fan like myself. Thanks, Dad and see you at the game!
• 
  Blaine DeSantis

  Very enjoyable book that takes a look at the 1964 NY Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals baseball teams and their eventual meeting in the World Series. Lots of interviews and research done on this book which outlines the "one last gasp" of the lengthy Yankees dynasty and domination, as well as the "here we come" outlook on the Cardinals who were a highly successful franchise in the mid to late 60's. Alas, the Cardinals rise coincided with the epic collapse of my Philadelphia Phillies - an event so traumatizing to me when I was 10 years old that it has stayed with me and so many other Phillies fans for over 50+ years!
  But the book takes a good look at the background of a lot of the players, race relations in that era and a close look at so many interesting games that helped make that season. From the author who brought us "Summer of '49", we get a very fascinating and detailed look at an amazing time in both our national history as well as the history of baseball. Very good read for everyone, but baseball fans should especially take an opportunity to read this one!
• 
  Gavin

  The Yankees of the aged Mantle, Maris, and Ford vs the Cardinals Gibson, Flood, Brock, and White along with David Halberstam's astute writing. Loved this book, need to read again.
  
  Basically the Yankees were left in the dust by how the game changed at this time. Too white and slow.
  
  Well worth your time and the 382 pages fly by.
• 
  Brian

  This is a great book. For sure it's a baseball book, but Halberstam really explains what's going on and brings you back in time. He explains the characters and their motivations and brings the context of this 1964 season to life. It would be easy to say the 64 series was about the Cardinals and the Yankees. But so much more is happening. The issue of race is very evident in '64. Halberstam goes in depth on emerging stars like Bob Gibson for the Cards and what they go through to get to the bigs. You learn about declining stars like Mickey Mantle and his personality. The business of baseball- much different than now- is shown in a clear light.
  
  This is not just a baseball book, but a snapshot of America in 1964 shown through the venue of the 64 season and world series. Fantastic.
• 
  Tom

  One of the best books I've read in quite a while. Halberstam is a master of the telling anecdote (what rsearch he must have done!)and the character sketch. The primary characters, like Roger Maris and Bob Gibson, are something out of a fine novel, or maybe Greek mythology. And there is so much to learn about America of that time, particularly race relations. In the story of Gibson, Flood, White, and Brock--the nucleus of young African-American players on the Cardinals--there is a great deal of what-might-have-been.
• 
  Linda

  Halberstam’s October 1964 gives readers an exhilarating ride through a pivotal season in baseball. I began the book expecting a play by play of a landmark World Series, and the games leading up to it. In the end, the details of the games themselves are actually the lesser part of the story. What you get instead is so much more: a detailed, humanizing, and illuminating portrait of many of the faces of baseball, from background actors like scouts and coaches, to the big name managers and owners, to superstar players themselves. Halberstam not only captures the personalities of all these players (in the theatre sense of the word) but also creates a detailed picture of an era of change and challenge, both in the world of baseball, and in the country itself.
  
  I came to this book with barely more than a beginner’s knowledge of baseball. Until this year, I knew just the basics – there’s a pitcher, an infield and an outfield, a team at bat, strikes, outs, and home runs. But as fate would have it, I returned to the US after several years away just in time to catch the 2010 pennant chase by the hometown heroes of my current city, the Philadelphia Phillies. I began watching the games solely to keep my sports-fan boyfriend company, and at first, I mostly just tolerated the games. Within a week or two, though, he began to hear me reminding him, hey, isn’t there a baseball game on tonight? By the end of the month, it was me saying, OK, we’ve gotta get home, there’s a Phillies game tonight! In this short span I seem to have fallen in love with baseball, and I can just about begin to talk about ground rule doubles and sacrifice plays, and I know what it means when I hear a pitcher is behind in the count, or a batter strikes out looking.
  
  It was in this frame of mind, excitedly cheering on October baseball behind “my” new-found Phillies, that I reached for my boyfriend’s copy of October 1964. In a word, I was captivated. Halberstam’s exhaustive treatment – he interviewed close to one hundred people for the book – excels in weaving together countless essential moments in the history of baseball: the rise and decline of individual players, the motives and missteps of some of the powerful owners, the insights and commitment of legions of scouts, coaches and managers. Before this season, I could have told you that Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris were big names in baseball, but that’s about it. After reading this book, I have a vivid mental picture of not only the marquee names that even a non-baseball-fan would know, but also of other notables like Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, Elston Howard, and Pete Mikkelsen, and dozens more.
  
  One of the things that struck me most in Halberstam’s book is the feeling I got of an element of almost Greek tragedy in baseball, where fortunes can turn on an instant, and nothing can be taken for granted. Take, for example, the intersecting fates of pitchers Tom Metcalf and Pete Mikkelsen. Metcalf was an up and coming pitching star, seemingly poised for his best season yet, with a strong and consistently improving record, and a well-rounded arsenal of pitches. Mikkelsen was a struggling minor-league pitcher, sure he was on his way out, with sagging stats, and an injury to start the season. But then, Mikkelsen’s injury forces him to alter his pitching style, limiting his range of pitches, but ironically resulting in a wildly effective sinking pitch. Now, pitching star Metcalf is unexpectedly eclipsed by the sudden, peculiar consistency of the erstwhile loser’s spot-on sinker. Mikkelsen makes the cut on the Yankees roster; Metcalf does not. Sent back down to the minors, the former pitching star tries to compensate by throwing all his work into his sinker – and is rewarded for his trouble by a season-ending injury, and never plays major league ball again.
  
  The other standout element of Halberstam’s book is his masterful treatment of the racial dynamics of the era. The book covers the critical early period of integration in baseball, and Halberstam’s insight into the tensions at play is clear-eyed and frank. He does not dress up blatant racism where he sees it, nor does he oversentimentalize the real achievements of racial integration when they occurred. His presentation of the inner and outer struggles of black players such as Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, and Elston Howard is nuanced and careful, and I came away awed by the fierce sense of presence of Bob Gibson, inspired by the unwavering determination of Lou Brock, and heartsore over the slings and arrows endured by Elston Howard, and the resulting effects on his health and on his psyche.
  
  The book was excellent, and I enjoyed it completely. My only quibbles with it are partly a result of my lack of knowledge about the subject, but still important to mention. One, with the encyclopedic scope of the narrative, I feel the book suffers for lack of an index. Especially for a baseball-novice reader like me, at times it was difficult to keep everything straight, and I often lamented not being able to easily flip back to a previous section to refresh my memory on a particular story. Two, a schematic of how the key personalities relate to each other or to the game – even just a roster of Yankee and Cardinal staff – would have been immensely helpful in locating each of the individual characters in the greater narrative. Still, these are quibbles, and some will hopefully be remedied simply by me expanding my knowledge of baseball before going back for my inevitable re-read of October 1964.
  
• 
  Harold Kasselman

  The style of writing and the mode of revealing the contents of this book was very similar to The Summer of 49. This book falls a fraction short. My biggest criticism is the lack of in depth analysis of the NL pennant race which almost ended in a three way tie.
  The book instead focuses more on the background of the players. I'm not suggesting that that wasn't enjoyable, but the race itself could have been done more intensely.
  Again, Halberstam frames his story in the context of the cultural changes in the country as well as the game of baseball itself. It was the years when black athletes were dominating the MVP awards and yet still found deep seated hatred from fans, especially in the south,but even from managers or owners.(Keane and Berra the exception).
  And baseball was changing. The players were able to make more money often from endorsements and commercials than from salary. Televison made even the utility players instant stars. It gave them independence. That led to disdain for the austere disciplinarians of yesteryear like Solly Hemus, Eddie Stanky, or Leo Durocher. And players rebelled and ridiculed the philosophy of such managers. Perhaps the inability of the Phillies to relax under Gene Mauch was a major reason in their historic fall from grace.
  It was also the year that marked the end of the once great Yankee dynasty of 28 years. George Weiss' selfishness and greed robbed a once great farm system of its youth and so after 64 the Yankees were no longer the talk of the town.
  Still this is a very good book for anyone who loves the history of the gam and who idolized players like Brock, Gibson, Mantle, Maris, Ellie Howard, Flood and so many more.
  There are also a few laugh out loud anecdotes and I feel compelled to share them. Both of course involve Bob Uecker who played that year for the Cards. In the first, the team was posing for a team picture. Uecker whispered a moment before the photographer shot, that they should smile and hold hands which they did. When Cardinal brass saw it, the picture was redone.
  Uecker's humor helped relax the team and that should not be undervalued-the clubhouse was loose in contrast to the ravings of Mauch. The second story, please don't be offended by the messenger, involves a card game invented by Uecker. He had a friend with the Philly detective bureau who would give him mug shots of ugly people who would get arrested. Uecker would keep them in his Ugly Deck until he had 52 cards. Then players would play like hearts. Whomever put down the ugliest photo of the four players put down, the winner would get all the cards. There was one card of a woman serial killer that was hands down the ugliest and Uecker would hide it up his sleeve like an ace up hi sleeve. Once he showed the card to Dixie Walker and told him, "Dixie, that's my mother. Walker replied, "She's rather attractive isn't she". Okay so call me immature(I loved Ball Four for the same reason).
  
  
• 
  Lou Schuler

  I was 7 years old when my hometown Cardinals beat the Yankees in 7 games in the 1964 World Series. I have just the vaguest memories of the series itself, like the fact they played the games during the day, and the nuns at my school would wheel a tiny black-and-white TV into our classroom so we could watch.
  
  As I got older I came to think of the players in that series as baseball demigods. The Yankees had Mantle, Maris, and Ford, along with all-stars like Elston Howard, Tom Tresh, and Tony Kubek. Their best pitcher in the series was Jim Bouton, who later became famous for writing Ball Four.
  
  And the Cardinals! They had Hall of Famers Lou Brock and Bob Gibson, borderline Hall of Famer Ken Boyer (whose brother Clete played for the Yankees), and so many guys who later made their mark on baseball off the field.
  
  Curt Flood, the brilliant center fielder, became famous for challenging baseball's reserve clause. Bob Uecker, a backup catcher, became a brilliant comedian and broadcaster.
  
  It seems like every key player in that series stayed in the game as a broadcaster, coach, or executive. On TV and radio you had (and in some cases still have) Tim McCarver, Mike Shannon, Bill White, Dick Groat, Kubek. Roger Craig and Mel Stottlemyre were influential pitching coaches. Dal Maxvill, the Cards' shortstop, was later the team's GM. Bill White became president of the American League.
  
  Stottlemyre's son was later a pitcher for the Cards. The Cards had a young utility player named Ed Spiezio, whose son Scott, a utility infielder, was a key player on two world championship teams -- the Angels in 2002 and the Cardinals in 2006.
  
  I knew all that before I picked up October 1964. And I still learned a lot from the book, particularly the racist abuse the Cardinals' African American players, including Gibson and Flood, had to endure. But the qualities they brought to the game, the athleticism and toughness, changed it forever. The 1964 World Series also marked a shift from decades of Yankees dominance to the post-dynasty era, with one team after another rising up for a short time, and then quickly dropping back to the pack.
  
  I recommend this book to anyone who's a baseball fan and a history buff.
• 
  Annie

  Perhaps my expectations were too high, but I was disappointed by this book. I've never read Halberstam and have heard only the most glowing things about him as a journalist. But the whole book felt kind of thrown together and even sloppy, down to typos, grammatical errors, and even, at times, a wooden style of writing that suffocated the flow of the story. The chronology is all over the place, which could have been much more interesting than a straightforward start-to-finish season review. But it felt more happenstance than deliberate, and the shift among the personal stories of multiple ballplayers and management figures actually made it hard to keep track of some of them without consistent threads to weave them together.
  
  What surprised me the most is that Halberstam had no problem making cheap, throwaway journalistic commentary where facts alone would have told the story (the final line of the book pre-Epilogue is "Keane answered with one of the nicest things a manager ever said about a baseball player: 'I had a commitment to his heart.' " Keane has been so well-drawn at this point that the "nice" comment is unnecessary and even belittles the beauty of it; this kind of thing is all over the book.) But when it comes to a straightforward thesis or truly insightful commentary of this season's place in society -- the very thing you'd expect from a journalist of Halberstam's caliber -- he backs down. Obviously racism and the integration of baseball is a major topic of the book, but here of all places Halberstam just presents the facts and never pulls together what this meant/means to the greater American society. None of it is ever really put in context, not even in an Epilogue which is more a "Where are they now?" listing than anything else. That kind of social commentary is what I've come to expect from writers like Roger Angell, and Halberstam in this case just didn't measure up.
  
  Where he excels in this book, though, is character description. A lot of these historical figures really come alive without stereotypes or the opaque sheen of celebrity, and Halberstam also has a tremendous grasp of relationships and how they color the story. My biggest takeaway from the book was probably what an utter badass Bob Gibson is.
• 
  Christopher

  The year 1964 was, according to David Halberstam, the pivotal baseball season of the 1960s. It was the year when one great team, the New York Yankees, was coming to the end of their long dynasty, and another team, the St. Louis Cardinals, began reestablishing their dominance in the National League. It was the beginning of a new era and the end of an older era.
  
  Importantly, Halberstam highlights the racial differences between the Yanks of '64 (with aging white stars and a reluctance to feature black players) and the Cardinals of '64 (with fast, young, talented black players moving baseball toward a speed-oriented game). This progression was key to the end of the Yankees' dominance.
  
  Not to be missed in this narrative is the colossal late-season flopparoo by the Philadelphia Phillies, who lost 10 of their last 12 games and all but handed the NL pennant to the Cardinals on the last day of the regular season. The Phillies' tragedy enabled the Cardinals to squeak through the door to challenge the Yankees, in what should have been a big year for Philadelphia. It remains one of the classic el-foldos in sports history.
  
  October 1964 is an excellent book and a great pleasure to read. It is the bookend piece to Halberstam's earlier The Summer of '49, which documents the beginning of the great Yankees dynasty of the 1940s, 1950s, and early 1960s. Halberstam wrote baseball very well, and it's a shame he's gone.
• 
  Bella

  In the novel October 1964 written by David Halberstam tells the story of the game between the Yankees and the Cardinals. The story is told by a narrator who is all- knowing when telling the story. In the book Halberstam does not only tell the story of the fall of the Yankees but also the fall of the sixties. It was the 1964 playoff season and the Yankees and the Cardinals will go head to head to see who will go to the World Series. Some of the Yankee players were getting old or run out. Elston Howard (35) and Whitey Ford (35) were hurt. The Yankees were also up for no good because of their manager who considered whites over blacks so it made the draft hard.
  
  One of my favorite parts in the book was the interviews because I felt like I was actually in present time with them. "My life in and around baseball" was my favorite line in the novel because I could relate to it. I can relate to this book because my how life my brothers and my Dad have pushed me to be my best. My family and I live at the baseball field because everyone in my family play. I recommend this book to not only baseball lovers but anyone who loves a great story.
• 
  Nick

  In 1958, my family reluctantly switched from rooting for the former Brooklyn Dodgers to rooting for the Yankees. It was not the same experience at all. When the Mets came along, we tried to appreciate them but at least in the first couple of seasons at the Polo Grounds, there were real obstacles, like the ghosts of the Giants and the early, cartoonish Mets' level of play. So for my formative years, I became a Yankees fan and this book reminded me of the heartbreak of 1964, when it became clear to all that Mantle, Maris, Ford and Berra could not carry the team to its former heights.
  
  Which maybe explains why reading Halberstam's classic book was an emotional experience for me, especially since he was wise enough to scatter references to the former Dodgers and the future "amazing" Mets. Apart from that, I stand in awe of Halberstam's profiles of the Cardinal and Yankee players and his recaps of the regular season as well as the climactic World Series.
• 
  Ryan

  I picked this up back in October as I had a bad case of baseball fever. My team was in the World Series and I wanted to read something that confirmed the importance of the fall classic. The book however is not aptly titled. This is not so much about the '64 World Series as it is about the convergence of two different teams over the course of that season. The book deals 90% of it's writing with a breakdown of the roster and what the players had to endure individually that season. Citing firings, trades, injuries, tirades, disgruntled players, racial issues, and aging superstars. I found most of this just fine, but some of it got a bit tiring and just not overly interesting. This is a book only for the die hard baseball fan. One that loves the history of the game and likes the game the way it used to be. I really wanted to read a short few chapters on the 64 season, and then a few hundred pages on the WS that year. It's not what I got, but too be fair that would be a difficult task without contextualizing the nuances of the teams and the winding roads they took to even make it to WS. Pick this up if you want to know how different baseball was 50 years ago. You'll appreciate these guys as being alot tougher then the players today. Just know...you have to REALLY like baseball.
• 
  Chad

  Another great book detailing one of baseballs great past seasons. I enjoyed the details on Lou Brock. I met Lou Brock when I was in 8th grade at a local baseball card show. He signed a ball that is still a prized part of my baseball collections.
  
  This book goes into great detail about many of the players, both stars and average joes from the 64 season.
  
  For context, it even adds details from previous years and experiences had by many of the players.
  
  It’s a well written book. It’s very detailed when it needs to be. Just touches on topics that don’t need lots of fluff.
  
  I’m continually fascinated by the amount of interaction between players and managers of all teams. Friendships and conflicts all over the place.
  
  I’d love to have a baseball card from any one of the players in this book!!
  
  This is definitely a book you just listen to for enjoyment. ( or read). Not much effort is required of the reader. Some games from 64 are recapped in detail. Some just a key play here and there.
  
  Overall it’s a great recap for the everyday baseball fan, especially for someone like me that wasn’t alive to experience it.
• 
  Jennifer

  In my entire life, I have only owned the autographs of two athletes: Lou Brock and Bob Gibson (both a childhood gift from my father). If not for this book, I would never have understood the true value of these Cardinals. Even I, not much of a baseball fan, despite living in STL my entire life, knew their names and knew that they were highly respected, but this book taught me the sociopolitical impact that both had on the game. More enchantingly, it gave me a tiny glimpse into their gorgeous artfulness, their flawless instincts, and their professional grit. I now understand more fully why the Cardinals are such a lauded team with such a storied past. And I also get why the Yankees were considered so intimidating and fierce. Overall, I learned quite a bit about baseball, and the history of the game. This is a meticulously detailed, while at the same time entertaining, account that I am glad I found the time to read. All St. Louisans should take a swing at this book. It's a love letter to our Redbirds.
• 
  Ken Heard

  Baseball fans who've read stories about the Yankees' dynasty over the years probably know most of the stories offered in David Halberstam's book that chronicles the 1964 season. But, it's Halberstam so you know it's going to be written well.
  
  There are a lot of anecdotes and each chapter presents portraits of key players of those 1964 Yankees and St. Louis Cardinals' teams.
  
  The Yankees lost the Series in 7 game to the Redbirds and it signified the end of the pinstriped dynasty for a while. Halberstam gives background and reasons for the fall in an easy, well-moving book.
  
  This one is a must for baseball fans. Halberstam is better known for his books on war and social, but his sports stuff... 1964, Summer of '49, Breaks of the Game, Teammates and Education of a Coach... are all amazing reads.
• 
  J.D. Frailey

  I read this book roughly 30 years ago, tons and tons of baseball history and anecdotes, revolving primarily around the Yankees and Cardinals who played a classic 7 game World Series. The Yankees were the dynasty of dynasties back then, but were mainly aging white guys— Mickey Mantle, Roger Maris, Whitey Ford, Joe Pepitone, Yogi Berra, many more. The Cardinals were the face of the future, they had been smart and active in recruiting young black players, fast and athletic—Kurt Flood, Lou Brock, Bob Gibson, and Bill White, who was later president of the national league. In 2022, after the Cardinals were eliminated In the first round of the playoffs I lost some interest in baseball so I ended up skimming the last part of the book, but for baseball levers, fans of the game, historians, and trivia hounds this is about as good as it gets.
• 
  Craig Werner

  If you're a baseball fan with any kind of social awareness at all, this is a terrific book. Halberstam, who's beyond prolific--must have averaged about a zillion words a week--tends to repeat details a bit more than I like, but what the hell. He introduces the players/characters nicely and establishes the major differences between the Yankee/AL/Old School/mostly White approach and the Cardss/NL/Part of the Sixties/Black-inflected approach to the game and life. You come out with huge respect for Bill White, Lou Brock, Curt Flood, Bob Gibson and the Yankees' semi-token Elston Howard. Plus, it was a hell of a season and the good guys won.
• 
  Matt

  For fans of this era of baseball and either the St. Louis Cardinals or New York Yankees, this is a meticulously told five-star book. For intense fans of baseball but not necessarily those two teams, you will probably come away with a four-star story. Average sports fans used to average sports books might find this too in-depth but still rate it three stars and worth reading.
• 
  Ed McKinley

  Halberstram is uniquely great at writing about the intersection of sports and cultural/societal trends. Such a great writer and really elevates professional sports into the individually heroic and into examples of the broader forces within American society.
• 
  Phil

  This is the first book I’ve read by this author. It will definitely not be the last. He was one fine writer.
  
  This book is ostensibly about baseball but it is about much more than that. It’s about race, equality, fair labor practices, inflated egos, individual lives, greed, athletic achievement and yes, also about baseball.
  
  Two teams were headed toward meeting in the World Series that year. Everyone was confident the powerful Yankees would be there but no one had the slightest inkling St. Louis would be. No two teams could be so different.
  
  The mighty Yankees were in decline stuck in a concept of a baseball organization that had seen its day. Mantle, Ford and Maris were all in decline sidelined again and again by injuries. The ownership was racist as well as stingy with its pay. Their attitude was that it was prestigious to play for the Yankees and you wanted to be paid, too?
  
  While other teams (like St. Louis) embraced bringing black players on to their team, the Yankees held out to the very end only bring on Elston Howard as a backup catcher for Yogi Berra.
  
  The Cardinals had brought on young talent in the form of Lou Brock, Curt Flood, Ken Boyer and the domineering pitcher, Bob Gibson. They were young but more importantly they were fast.
  
  What was the same about the two teams was that they were really teams. Team play was everything to them. The year before when St. Louis was mathematically eliminated from winning the pennant, Curt Flood came to Dick Groat who was the short stop for the Cardinals and told him, “We’re out of the race and you have a good chance of winning the batting title this year so just give yourself over to that.”
  
  The next game the man batting in front of Groat got on base without anyone out. Groat sacrifice bunted him to second. After the game Flood came up to Groat and pushed him angrily saying. “You just couldn’t do it, could you?”
  
  The Yankees were much the same. A horribly injured Mickey Mantle who in extreme pain would not take himself out of the lineup unless there was absolutely no way he could help the team that day.
  
  Halberstam says of him:
  
  He was the man who carried the team, and yet he played now in constant pain, reaching for physical skills that were no longer there. However, in some remarkable way, the athlete within continued to rebel against the pain and refused to accept the limits set by his body.
  
  Clete Boyer, third baseman for the Yankees put it best, “He is the only baseball player I know who is a bigger hero to his teammates they he is to his fans.”
  
  The author does an excellent job in delving into the history of each player, their backgrounds, how they developed their skills, what their personality was like and how they fared after the season was over.
  
  What really brought me to this book and why I so enjoyed reading it was I remember this year. I was a huge Yankees fan and followed every game.
  
  Baseball unlike any other sport is such a competition of strategies. Athleticism certainly plays a major part but feint and subtlety are equally as important. If you will excuse me for saying so but it is a thinking person’s game unlike any other sport. What other sport is there that you can keep a scorecard and years from now someone look at it and from the scratchings there on see how that particular was played out that day?
  
  The baseball club owners do not come off well but Halberstam honors the game with this book as he also honors the people who played it. That’s what the story should be about and with this book it was.