1961 Profile: Billy Gardner

THIS SHOTGUN PROTECTS THE BIRDS

Rifle-Armed Gardner Keys Oriole Infield

"The free-spending Baltimore Orioles, who long ago shelled out $100,00, a couple of cars and a fistful of other benefits for a raw outfield fledgling named Dave Nicholson, haven't had to gamble that lavishly for all their bargains.

At second base they have a virtually inexhaustible pay-lode working for them in Billy Gardner, who came at rummage rates.

This crack-fielding, clutch-hitting little keystone nugget cost the Birds a modest $25,000 in a waiver 'steal' they inflicted on the New York Giants in April 1956.

And what had the Giants paid to get him 11 years previously?

Merely the price of a bus ticket from Waterford, Connecticut, his home town near New London, to the club's wartime training site at Lakewood, New Jersey. The cost couldn't have been much more than $2.98.

'It was like this,' recalled Gardner, who opened the current season with his 266th consecutive game for Baltimore at the in-prime age of 30. 'I always followed the Giants. They were my favorite from childhood and Mel Ott was my favorite player. So when they offered me that bus ticket to training camp in 1945, I jumped at the chance.'

Gardner won his free bus ride the same way Nicholson last January won his $100,000-plus bonus- by slugging several practice pitches over outfield barriers.

When Billy was only 16, a friendly policeman friend named Joe Rafferty, who umpired games and busied himself in recreation work in the New London area, tipped off George Mack, a Giant scout, that here was a lad with major league potentialities.

Mack lined up an audition for Gardner at the Polo Grounds during the 1944 campaign.

'It was a chilly night and the Giants were playing host to the Boston Braves, so they let me work out before the game started,' says Billy. 'I hit a few into the left field seats. They also let me work out at third base and I remember that my arm felt okay. Johnny Mize seemed to think so, at least. He ran over and told Ott, who was managing, to give him a catcher's mitt so he could 'hold' me at first base. It was a joke, I guess, but Mize made me feel pretty good.'

Mize may not have been joking. Gardner's arm is rated one of the most powerful in baseball. He got the name 'Shotgun' because of his bullet pegs, though he won't tell you that- or anything else much- unless you ask him.

At any rate, Ott sent Billy back to Connecticut as a more contented if not wealthier young man. He invited him to training camp the following spring in Jersey, a promise which had Billy humming a merry tune.

'Bonuses then were unheard of. I'd have dropped dead if somebody had told me then that a kid could command pay checks like the ones being paid these days. The Red Sox, Cardinals, Yankees and Dodgers had all shown interest in me, besides the Giants, but my mind was all set. I went to Lakewood that spring of 1945 and quit high school with two years yet to go, that's how eager I was to get into organized baseball.'

Gardner had more going for him his first year in training camp than Nicholson this spring.

Billy debarked from his bus at Lakewood prepared as few teen-age rookies, including Nicholson, are- he could hit the curve ball.

As early as age 14, he had rubbed elbows with such pros as Yogi Berra, Bill Johnson and Babe Dahlgren, who were serving Uncle Sam and playing ball with submarine base and Coast Guard teams in New London. Stationed there also were a couple of fair-to-middling pitchers named Junior Thompson and Red Branch. They threw the breaking stuff to sharpen up Gardner's untrained eye.

Billy's grandmother owned the concession at Mercer Field in New London, where these gifted landlubbers trained and Billy peddled peanuts for Granny during the games. But before the contests got under way he could generally be found either in the outfield shagging flies or sneaking into the batting cage for a few hasty turns between peanut sales.

As a result, in training camp that spring of 1945, Billy gave a creditable account of himself pronto. The Giants farmed him out to Bristol, Tennessee, a Class D club, at the princely salary of $100 a month, but he didn't remain there long. In scarcely more than two months, he rattled out a thundering .329 tatoo, with 56 runs batted in and five homers. So Gabby Hartnett, the Jersey skipper who had worked with him in spring training, promptly whisked him up to Triple-A. There he got his monthly pay check hiked to $250.

Bill got in 49 games with Jersey City that year and tacked up a fairly-decent .273. Returning Service vets later crowded him down to Jacksonville, but he was on his way. Or so he thought.

How could he know, at that meteoric milestone of his career, that his beloved Giants would never really give him a chance ... that it would take a strange quirk of fate, namely being 'sold down the pike' to Baltimore, before he would ever become a big league regular?

In two separate tenures with the parent Giants, the first of which came exactly a decade after his spectacular 1944 fence-busting tryout, Gardner appeared in a mere total of 121 contests for the New York club.

The mention of Leo Durocher, who was masterminding the Giants when Gardner supposedly 'arrived,' is enough to make fire shoot from Billy's ice-blue eyes.

'Here's an example of the consideration I got from Durocher,' spews the normally-placid Gardner. 'In 1954, the year the Giants won the pennant and swept the World Series in four straight from Cleveland, Leo started me at third base in a game against Milwaukee.

'I hadn't been allowed to hit a whole lot because I was supposed to be an infield 'insurance man' to back up Davey Williams at second, Alvin Dark at short and Hank Thompson at third.

'Well, we're ahead 5-1 when Andy Pafko hits a grounder that I dive for in the hole. I can't throw him out, but I stop the ball.

'On the next play Joe Adcock tops a slow roller. I come in fast, whirl and try to nail Pafko at second, but, being off balance and rushing myself, I throw the ball wide and it goes into right field.

'That's all for me. Durocher calls time, comes out of the dugout and removes me from the game on the spot. I'm boiling at myself already, but when he lifts me I get carried away. So I say to him:

' 'Here Leo, take my glove. You've already got my bat.' '

The incident will be hard for Baltimore fans to believe. In the Monument City, Gardner has earned a reputation, and justifiably so, for being one of the least temperamental men on the squad.

As this season got under way he hadn't missed a game since June 6, 1956. His deceptively-rugged, heavy-boned 180-pound chassis has been as durable as his sunny disposition since he has been under the wing of Paul Richards, the Birds' manager-general manager.

'I never saw a tougher competitor or a better team man,' says Tall Paul. 'When we first purchased him, fans were asking us, 'Who's Billy Gardner?' That's one question I never hear anymore.'

Gardner's Baltimore adventure began to gain him prominence when Charles P. McCormick, a spice-and-tea tycoon who follows sports closely, presented the crewcut athlete an 'Unsung Hero' award which, up to then, had been meted out annually by McCormick strictly to amateur simon-pures.

That was last July. Since then, recognition of him has been mushrooming by leaps and bounds. A panel of Baltimore scribes and sportscasters made him virtually a unanimous choice last fall as 'the most valuable Oriole player of 1957.'

A glance at the ledgers shows why.

His .987 fielding mark for 154 games won him honors as the sure-handedest keystone operator in the American League, giving him a one-point edge over Chicago's Nellie Fox.

Although hitting a so-so .262, he came through in the clutches with 55 RBI's in the leadoff spot in the batting order. Doubles were his specialty. With 36, he tied Minnie Minoso for the league lead in the two-bagger category.

He committed only 11 errors and, at one glue-gripped stretch, went through 55 games without a miscue.

He rapped out his noisiest average against the pennant-winning Yanks, collecting 30 hits for a .341 mark against them, which caused Casey Stengel to describe him as 'one of them bust-your-neck kind of ball players.'

Thick wrists, like Nicholson's, give Gardner his power. He says he developed them when he was a youngster by milking cows and pitching hay on his dad's farm, on the outskirts of Waterford. But he was never too busy with the chores to bone up on his hitting and fielding.

Leslie Gardner, his father, was a semipro outfielder. Billy also has an older brother, Leslie, Jr., now 32, to play rounders with. Les is an infielder, too, and might also have made the majors had not a touch of paralysis in his leg cramped his style. So he earns his living instead as a machinist.

Practice, though, is something Gardner never has trouble arranging. He has a steady partner. His beautiful wife, the former Barbara Carnaroli, is a star athlete in her own right. Three times she was voted the outstanding feminine athlete in New London.

She pitched for a girls' baseball team, played softball and basketball in scholastic and amateur ranks, and also swam in a water ballet until she settled down to the full-time job of being Mrs. Gardner.

A striking, statuesque brunette in the mold of the Italian belles who grace motion picture screens, Babs also won a beauty contest.

Gardner had admired her from afar while he was attending a high school called Chapman Tech as a many-lettered athlete and Barbara was doing her stuff for an all-girls school, Williams Memorial Institute.

'I never got up nerve enough to talk to her, though, until I saw her at Ocean Beach, near New London, one summer- it was either 1949 or 1950, I forget which- when I was recuperating from an appendicitis operation,' Billy shyly explains.

Everything seems to have worked out fine from that juncture.

The Gardners have a little one now- blonde Gwen Lee Gardner, who just turned three.

Barbara, of course, has become a ball park devotee, seldom misses a game, in addition to keeping hubby healthy with spaghetti, chicken, steaks and salads- his favorite foods- and occasionally playing catch with him in the back yard.

'She can catch my best pegs,' says rifle-armed Billy. 'She might have been a professional athlete if she hadn't met me.'

Baltimore hopes the Gardners stay in Maryland a long time. Oriole fans have always been 'suckers' for anybody who hustles and in Mr. Shotgun Arm they've got a 24-karat bargain who bears down all the way."

-Jim Ellis (Baseball Digest, June 1958)

D.P.'S DON'T JUST HAPPEN

Practice And More Practice Made Billy Gardner Adept

"Double plays don't just happen. They are practiced for split-season precision until the movements become monotonously repetitious.

The Baltimore Orioles made that the first order of business one day this spring and for 40 minutes the center of the infield looked like a rehearsal for the Ballet Russe.

Coach Luman Harris was standing behind the pitcher's mound throwing grounders to Billy Klaus at shortstop. Klaus, in turn, was feeding them toward second base as Billy Gardner, Marv Breeding and Jerry Adair came across the bag, made the catch and relayed the ball to first base.

Gardner, later traded to Washington, easily had the finest technique of any of the three. The second base pivot is the toughest in baseball. And maybe even one of the most difficult physical maneuvers required in any sport.

The relay man must contend with a sliding runner, a thrown ball coming with speed from six feet away and still another objective- first base, which is 90 feet away.

Often the second baseman doesn't see the incoming runner who is trying to body-check him into the left field seats. Nor is he able to square off and straighten up before throwing to first.

That's where the ballet comes in and if a second baseman can't make with the dance steps, or acrobatic innovations, then he's not long out of the infirmary.

There are at least five different pivots a second baseman can make. Gardner usually steps over the bag with his right foot. The left foot flicks by and catches a corner of the base as he spins away from the incoming runner, who is eager to upset him.

Breeding and Adair have strong arms but they can't get the ball out of their gloves and on the way to first base the way Gardner can. He's an artist in this foot-and-hand work. He makes the catch, tags the base and throws about as swiftly as you can snap-snap your fingers.

But Gardner wasn't always the 'old smoothie' at second. He was once more than a bit rough around the edges.

'I'll never forget the day the New York Giants put me at second base in the Polo Grounds,' Gardner says. 'I had always played shortstop and third base. Then they shifted me to second.

'A ball was hit to Hank Thompson, who was playing third. I came across to take the throw at second. What happens? My feet get twisted up and I fall over the bag. The ball hits me in the chest. What a way to break in at a new position.

'But I worked on the double play after that. Sometimes I'd do 50 a day in infield practice until it became almost 'second nature.' The double play at second is tougher than for the shortstop who comes across and has everything in front of him. At second, you make the play with your back to first base.'

Gardner endeavors to time the throw from short or third so he can catch it and hit the bag with his left foot. But, left or right, the important thing is to get the force-out.

Who's the toughest runner coming into second base? 'I'd say Bob Allison, Bob Cerv and Hank Bauer,' he says. 'But Bauer is clean.'

Does that mean Allison and Cerv thunder-in with 'blood' in their eyes?

'I didn't say that,' he answered, 'but I'm not so sure they wouldn't hurt you. But after all, I have the advantage. I got the ball.'

The best defense second basemen have for foes who deliberately want to bruise or cut them is a low-sweeping pivot throw which winds up, accidentally, of course, between the eyes of the runner. But Gardner says he has never willfully tried to hit a runner coming into him.

'I think I grazed a couple of pitchers who didn't know how to slide and came in real high. I might even have bounced one or two off their helmets, but I never hurt them,' adds the man who was Baltimore's second baseman for four seasons running.

The toughest throws to handle on the double play usually come from third. The ball will frequently sink or sail and that compounds the problem for the second sacker.

The goings-on at second base take practice, practice and more practice. Even for major leaguers it's a grind 'em out procedure to attain timing and perfection. They don't just happen."

-John F. Steadman, Baltimore News-Post (Baseball Digest, June 1960)

"One of the best deals the club [Minnesota Twins] made was when they obtained him from Baltimore. A smart-fielding second baseman, he's a valuable man in the field and difficult to fool at the plate since he hits so well to right field.

Born in New London, Connecticut, Gardner was with the Giant chain for nine years, finally getting his chance with New York in 1954. Dealt to the Orioles in '56, he was among the most popular of Birds and always seemed to deliver the clutch-fielding play or rally-moving safety.

Gardner has a quick pair of hands and a powerful arm."

-Don Schiffer, Major League Baseball Handbook 1961

1960

April 12: Opens at second for Senators, who got him from Orioles for Clint Courtney and Ron Samford.

April 20: Beats Orioles, 8-7, with RBI single in 8th.

May 22: Goes 3-for-3 in 7-5 win over Chisox.

June 2: Hits grand slam and solo homers in sweep of Red Sox.

June 7: Gets three hits in 7-2 win over A's.

September 23: Goes 4-for-4 in 4-0 win over Orioles.

September 24: Gets four hits again in 10-9 loss to Orioles.

Comment: "Gardner helped the Senators rise by solid play at second base and had his best RBI season."

-Joe Sheehan, Dell Sports Magazine Baseball, April 1961

"As the 1961 season started, the Yankee management considered its first line players of championship calibre, but due to the expansion losses and the retirement of Gil McDougald, the second line was weak. Bench strength has been the hallmark of recent Yankee pennant winners. So General Manager H. Roy Hamey and Manager Ralph Houk set out to rebuild the bench.

The acquisition of a dependable utility infielder like Billy Gardner went a long way toward accomplishing that objective. Another 'Connecticut Yankee,' Billy has served as a big league regular the last five and a half years. He plays second and third in big league style, and with Joe DeMaestri at short, gives the Yankees second-line infield strength to match the club's recent strong bench. His value was quickly demonstrated when Clete Boyer was benched with an ailing shoulder in mid-season.

Billy led the American League in doubles in 1957 and in fielding the same year as a second baseman."

-The New York Yankees Official 1961 Yearbook

William Frederick Gardner (IF)     #12

Born July 19, 1927, in Waterford, Conn., where he resides. Height: 6-0, weight: 180. Bats right and throws right.

Married and father of one girl, Gwen (6).

-The New York Yankees Official 1961 Yearbook

"As the 1961 season started, the Yankees management considered its first line players of championship caliber, but due to the expansion losses and the retirement of Gil McDougald, the second line was weak. Bench strength has been the hallmark of recent Yankee pennant winners. So General Manager Roy Hamey and Manager Ralph Houk set out to rebuild the bench.

The acquisition of a dependable utility infielder like Billy Gardner went a long way toward accomplishing that objective. Billy had served as a big league regular the last five and a half years. He plays second and third in big league style, and with Joe DeMaestri at short, gives the Yankees second line infield strength to match the club's recent strong bench."

-1961 World Series Official Souvenir Program