Joe Billetdeaux was watching a replay of Game 7 of the 1960 World Series recently when he struck up a conversation through text message with Pirates legend Bill Mazeroski.
Billetdeaux, the Pirates’ director of alumni affairs, promotions and licensing, asked Mazeroski how often groundskeepers would drag the Forbes Field infield (once), and the two wound up enjoying a humorous exchange about its quality — or lack thereof.
It was the worst in Major League Baseball, Mazeroski explained last week in a phone interview with the Post-Gazette. So awful, in fact, that opposing teams would routinely refuse to take pregame grounders on it because they didn’t want to get hurt, develop bad habits or both.
“It was bad,” Mazeroski said. “It was not a very good infield at all.”
What made it so bad, Mazeroski would later explain, involved the dirt and its lack of firmness. Whenever anyone would run with any force on the infield dirt, a bunch of divots were left behind, creating an array of bad hops for anyone trying to field a routine ground ball.
Arguably the best defensive second baseman of all time, Mazeroski found a way to adjust, as evidenced by his eight Gold Gloves and seven All-Star selections, plus induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2001.
But “Maz” took plenty of shots to the mug, as well.
“Just being there every day and having to take ground balls, I’d play the ball over my right shoulder instead of right in front of me,” Mazeroski said. “So if there was a bad hop coming, it would miss my head most of the time. Every once in a while I got it in the face.”
It’s incredible, really.
Mazeroski led the National League in assists nine times, holds the MLB record for double plays turned by a second baseman, and had a career fielding percentage of .983, making just 204 errors on 11,863 chances over 2,094 games in his 17 seasons as a Pirate.
The legendary Bob Prince often referred to Mazeroski as “The Glove.” He probably should’ve instead referred to the Pirates second baseman as “The Mask.”
“I got to where I didn’t worry about it anymore,” Mazeroski said. “The more you worried about it, the worse it got. I just went out and played. I didn’t think about it. I tried to catch what I could. It seemed to work out.”
Has Mazeroski ever thought about what his career might’ve been like on a better infield?
“Not really, no,” he said. “I got used to it.”
They’d drag the infield in the fifth inning back then as opposed to the third and sixth now. Mazeroski said that did help, although in his text exchange with Billetdeaux, they agreed that by the eighth inning, the infield was once again a wreck.
Former Yankees shortstop Tony Kubek knows that all too well. In the eighth inning of Game 7, after the Pirates’ Gino Cimoli singled, Bill Virdon hit into what probably should have been a double play — except that the ball hit something and wound up drilling Kubek in the larynx, sending him to the hospital while coughing up blood.
“If you took a big step in [the dirt], it would dig a big hole,” Mazeroski said. “Every day, anybody ran across the infield, it just made divots.
“I was always ready for a bad hop.”
While he remembers liking the infields at Wrigley Field in Chicago and Crosley Field in Cincinnati, Mazeroski wasn’t a fan of Dodger Stadium after it opened during the summer of 1962.
“I didn’t like theirs because it was crushed brick,” Mazeroski said. “It wasn’t a real good one. I think they’ve changed it since then.”
The funny thing about the Forbes Field infield was that it didn’t affect Mazeroski at all stats-wise.
In fact, he was actually a better fielder at home than he was on the road, making 113 (.102 per game played) of his 204 errors on the road compared to just 91 (.092 per game) at Forbes Field, according to the Elias Sports Bureau.
There really wasn’t any magic formula for Mazeroski’s success fielding the ball on a bad, unpredictable infield. The best thing he could do was try to avoid in-between hops because nobody knew where that ball was going to go.
“I just tried to get a good hop all the time,” Mazeroski said. “Move enough to make that hop a little longer or real short, one or the other. On in-between hops, you had no idea. I played tons of them off my chest, I know that.”
Jason Mackey: jmackey@post-gazette and Twitter @JMackeyPG.
First Published: May 19, 2020, 12:14 p.m.
