Talk Talk – "It's My Life" (1984)

It’s my life

Don’t you forget!

In the last 2 or 3 lines, I told you about St. Louis Cardinals star Bob Gibson’s complete-game win over the New York Yankees in the 7th and deciding game of the 1964 World Series.  (You can scroll down to read that post if you haven’t already.)

What’s most remarkable about that game is that Cardinals manager Johnny Keane left Gibson in even after he  surrendered a three-run home run to Mickey Mantle in the 6th and solo blasts to Clete Boyer and Phil Linz in the top of the 9th.  

I doubt that any current-day manager would have stuck with Gibson after the Mantle HR, much less left him in the game after he gave up those home runs to Boyer and Linz in the 9th.  But Johnny Keane did just that.  

When asked why he left Gibson on the mound even after the Boyer and Linz home runs, Keane told reporters that “I had a commitment to his heart.”

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If you’re any kind of baseball fan, you know that Gibson was an outstanding pitcher for years after the 1964 World Series.

Gibson’s 1968 season was arguably the most dominant any starting pitcher has ever had.  He won 22 games that season and had an astonishing 1.12 ERA – the best mark of the last hundred years by a significant margin – while also leading the league in strikeouts and giving up fewer hits per inning than any other pitcher.    

And he completed 28 of his 34 starts that year and had 13 complete-game shutouts – more shutouts than any major-league pitcher has had in a single season in the last hundred years.  Last year, the pitching staffs of all 15 National League teams had a total of only 15 complete games and ten shutouts – fewer than Gibson achieved all by himself in 1968.

Not surprisingly, Gibson won the Cy Young Award and the regular-season Most Valuable Player Award that year.  And he came close to also winning a third World Series MVP as well.  (He had previously won that award not only in 1964 but also in 1967 – when he surrendered a total of only three runs in three complete-game victories over the Boston Red Sox.)

Baseball decided to lower the pitching mound and reduce the height of the strike zone from the batter's armpits to the jersey letters after the 1968 season.  By legislating these so-called “Gibson rules,” MLB hoped to limit the advantage pitchers had vis-à-vis hitters.

Gibson hung up his glove after the 1975 season, finishing with career totals of 251 wins, a 2.91 ERA, and 255 complete games in 482 starts.  He was easily elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame the first time he was eligible to be on the ballot.

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The trajectory of Johnny Keane’s post-1964 baseball career couldn’t have been more different than Gibson’s.

One day after Gibson’s World Series-clenching performance, Keane shocked the baseball world by resigning as the Cardinals’ manager.  A few days later, he was signed by the Yankees to replace Yogi Berra as that team’s manager.

Keane and the Yankees were not exactly a match made in heaven.  In his first season with the team, the Bronx Bombers finished with a 77-85 record – their first losing record in 40 years.  The team got off to a terrible start in 1966, and Keane was fired only one month into the season.  

Later that year, Keane was hired as a scout by the California Angels.  But he died of a heart attack in January 1967.  He was only 55.

Some believe that the immense pressure of managing the Yankees during the team’s collapse – which was probably inevitable given that Keane’s roster was loaded with aging players whose best years were behind them – contributed to Keane’s death.

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That’s a pretty sad story – right?

Before you answer, you should know a little more about Johnny Keane’s baseball career 

Keane – who was born in 1911 – signed a minor-league contract with the Cardinals when he was 18.  But any hopes he had of playing in the major leagues ended when he was hit in the head by a pitched ball in 1935 and lay in a coma, near death, for six weeks.  

After recovering, Keane managed in the Cardinals minor-league system for some 20 years before becoming the big-league team’s third-base coach in 1959.  When the team’s manager was fired in the middle of the 1961 season, Keane took over the job and led the team to four consecutive winning seasons – culminating in the Cardinals’ 1964 World Series victory.

If you’re a glass-half-empty kind of person, you look at Keane as see someone who failed horribly as the Yankees manager and then suffered a fatal heart attack when he was relatively young. 

But if you’re a glass-half-full guy, you see Keane as someone who might have died when he was only 24 years old, but who instead lived another three decades and eventually rose to the very top of his profession – becoming one of the only 74 men in the history of baseball who have managed their team to a World Series victory. 

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It’s not at all unusual for a band to name an album after the band or one of the tracks on that album.  But it’s very rare to name a track after the band. 

I can only think of two examples of that.  One is “Talk Talk,” which is the first track on Talk Talk’s first album, The Party’s Over.  

But Bad Company did them one better, releasing a single titled “Bad Company” on their Bad Company album.

Click here to listen to “It’s My Life,” which is the title track from Talk Talk’s second album.

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.