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. 

Manfred Mann – "Do Wah Diddy Diddy" (1964)

She looked good (looked good!)

She looked fine (looked fine!)

She looked good, she looked fine

A few days ago, an old friend sent me a video of Mickey Mantle’s final World Series home run, which he hit off Gibson in game 7 of the 1964 Fall Classic.  Click here to watch that video.

It was Mantle’s record 18th World Series roundtripper.  No currently active player has more than seven, so that record will likely stand for a very long time.

Mantle’s blast came in the top of the 6th inning, driving in Bobby Richardson and Roger Maris (both of whom had singled) and cutting the Cardinals’ seemingly comfortable 6-0 lead in half.  

If that game had taken place in 2024 instead of 1964, Gibson would have almost certainly been yanked in favor of a relief pitcher after surrendering Mantle’s home run.  But Cardinals manager Johnny Keane left him in the game even after he gave up a two-out walk later in that inning.

Gibson got out of the 6th with no further damage, and retired the first two Yankee batters the 7th before giving up a single to the pesky Richardson.  Would any current major-league manager have left him in the game to face slugger Roger Maris rather than calling in a lefty relief pitcher?  I doubt it.  But Keane stuck with Gibson – who retired Maris on a line drive to right.

The Cardinals added an insurance run in the bottom of that frame, and Gibson set the Yankees down in order in the 8th.  With a 7-3 lead going into the 9th, Keane told Gibson that he was leaving him in to close out the game.

“Don’t be cute and don’t go for the corners,” the Cardinal skipper told his ace. “Just get it over. They’re not going to hit four home runs off you.”

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But after the big right-hander struck out Tom Tresh to open the 9th, he gave up a long four-bagger to Clete Boyer.  Keane no doubt breathed a sigh of relief when his pitcher fanned pinch-hitter Johnny Blanchard for the second out.  But Phil Linz then deposited a Gibson offering into the left-field seats, cutting the Redbirds’ lead to just 7-5.  

If Bobby Richardson had gotten on base, would Keane have relieved Gibson rather than let him face Maris and perhaps Mantle with the game – and the Series – on the line?

We’ll never know because Gibson induced the New York second-sacker to pop up for the final out, giving St. Louis the championship.

After the game, Keane was asked why he left Gibson on the mound in the top of the 9th even after the Boyer and Linz home runs.  “I had a commitment to his heart,” the manager replied.

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Any baseball fan would agree that Gibson’s game seven performance was remarkable.  But you can’t appreciate just how remarkable it truly was without knowing that only three days earlier, the big righty had started – and finished – game five of the ’64 Series, which went ten innings.

Think about that.  Gibson pitches a ten-inning complete game, takes two days off – starting pitchers today usually get four days off between starts – and then pitches a nine-inning complete game.

I haven’t been able to find Gibson’s pitch counts for those games.  But the most widely-followed formula for estimating pitch counts tells you that Gibson likely threw around 153 pitches in game five and 146 pitches in game seven.  

Today starting pitchers rarely throw more than 100 pitches in a game.  In fact, no major-league pitcher has thrown more than 112 pitches this season.

And no major-league pitcher has started a game on three days’ rest this year – much less two days’ rest.

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Not surprisingly, Bob Gibson was named Most Valuable Player of the 1964 World Series, while Johnny Keane won the Sporting News Manager of the Year Award. 

But in 1965, the two men’s career trajectories diverged sharply.

I’ll tell you more about what happened to Gibson and Keane after their 1964 World Series triumph in the next 2 or 3 lines.

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Jeff Berry and Ellie Greenwich – who penned numerous pop classics (including “Be My Baby,” “Chapel of Love,” “Leader of the Pack,” and “River Deep, Mountain High”) – wrote today’s featured song for the Exciters, who released their recording of it under the title “Do-Wah-Diddy” in 1963.  Click here to listen to that recording.

Click here to watch a very young Bruce Willis singing the song to Cybill Shepherd in an episode of Moonlighting.

Click here to watch Mary-Kate Olsen – or perhaps Ashley Olsen – singing the song on Full House.

Click here to listen to Manfred Mann’s recording of “Do Was Diddy Diddy,” which hit number one on the Billboard “Hot 100” the week that the St. Louis Cardinals won game seven of the 1964 World Series.

Click here to buy that recording from Amazon.

Steppenwolf – "Monster/Suicide/America" (1969)

'Cause the people grew fat and got lazy

Now their vote is a meaningless joke

[NOTE: Today, we’re reprinting a post from 2012.  At the time it was originally published, American troops had been stationed in Afghanistan for a very long time – over a decade, in fact.  Back then, no one would have predicted that U.S. forces would remain in Afghanistan for almost another decade, finally departing in 2021.  (I’m sure you remember what a debacle that was.)  In any event, today we’re inducting the record featured in that 2012 post – Steppenwolf’s “Monster/Suicide/America” – into the 2 OR 3 LINES “GOLDEN DECADE” ALBUM TRACKS HALL OF FAME.]

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Only two weeks left in the 2012 campaign – we're getting down to the short strokes, boys and girls!

"Monster/Suicide/America" is from Steppenwolf's 1969 album of the same name.    The group's first three albums all made it into the top ten in the U.S., but Monster peaked at #17 and was the first Steppenwolf not to feature a top ten single.

The three-part title of the song reflects the fact that it consists of three somewhat disparate segments joined together.  But let's just refer to it as "Monster" – OK?

"Monster" is nine minutes, fifteen seconds long, and I remember hearing it on the radio a number of times the year it was released.  I'm pretty sure the station I heard it on was KWTO-560, an AM station in Springfield, Missouri, that played a lot of rock album tracks before that format had become popular.  (The other l-o-n-g song I remember hearing on KWTO was "Midnight Rambler" by the Rolling Stones.  KWTO was a great station.)

Songs with political themes were fairly common in 1969, and "Monster" is certainly a political song.  It  summarizes the entire history of the United States, warts and all – it decries witch-burning, slavery, the displacement of native Americans, the Civil War, and so on.  

But the song saves most of its bile for contemporary American society:

The cities have turned into jungles

And corruption is strangling the land

The police force is watching the people

And the people just can't understand

Not surprisingly, the song alludes to the Vietnam War:

We don't know how to mind our own business

'Cause the whole world's got to be just like us

Now we are fighting a war over there

No matter who's the winner we can't pay the cost

In 1969, we had no idea that American involvement in Vietnam would drag on for several more years.  It officially ended in May 1975 – not quite eleven years after the Gulf of Tonkin incident.

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The war in Afghanistan began on October 7, 2001 – so it has lasted longer than the war in Vietnam.  

The number of American troops in Afghanistan grew gradually under the Bush Administration.  There were roughly 34,000 soldiers in Afghanistan when President Obama was inaugurated.  Obama ordered 17,000 more troops to Afghanistan as part of a planned "surge" in troop levels within weeks of his swearing-in.  

There were 71,000 American soldiers there at the beginning of 2010, and almost 100,000 there at the beginning of 2011.  The gradual withdrawal of those troops began late in 2011.

American troops in Afghanistan

Joe Biden got a little confused a few weeks ago, telling a New Hampshire audience that there were 650,000 troops left in Afghanistan.  There are actually about 68,000 soldiers left in Afghanistan.  

President Obama has said that the drawdown of American forces will continue through 2014, but about 20,000 troops will stay in Afghanistan – perhaps for years to come.  (The week before the Democratic convention, Obama mistakenly said that "[w]e will have them all out of there by 2014," but his press secretary later said that "[h]e never said that all the troops would be out.")

When he originally announced the withdrawal plans in June 2011, the President declared that the U.S. had largely achieved its goals in Afghanistan.  But everything that I've read indicates that the Afghan government will likely lose control over more and more of the country to local warlords as the Americans leave.

Here's what Michael Cohen, a former Democratic speechwriter, had to say about how Obama would likely handle the Afghanistan issue during the rest of the campaign:

He will take credit for winding down the war, he will claim that the surge blunted the Taliban's momentum – which is partially true – and he'll argue that Afghanistan is on its way to security and stability – which is not really true, but isn't quite a lie either.  That things are falling apart and that the administration is making no effort to ensure that there is a viable political process after we withdraw combat troops – I'm guessing that won't come up.

I'm guessing that's a pretty good guess.

There's been almost no substantive discussion of Afghanistan in the campaign to date.  It's an unpopular war, and both candidates seem to prefer just to pretend that it doesn't exist.  

The third and final presidential debate – which took place last night – was supposed to focus on foreign policy, so perhaps there was some discussion of Afghanistan during it.

I have no idea, because I didn't watch a minute of that debate.  I'm a big baseball fan, and I was watching the World Series.

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You say the World Series doesn't begin until tomorrow night?  OK, OK – I told a little white lie.  To tell the truth, I wouldn't have been watching the World Series even if it had been on last night. 

I was hoping for a St. Louis win so I could rant about a World Series matching the 5th-best team in the National League and the 7th-best team in the American League.

The Cardinals lost their division to the Reds by nine games – their regular-season record was much worse than any of the other NL playoff teams.  If they hadn't added a second wild-card team this year, the Cardinals would have been on the golf course a couple of weeks ago.

And the Tigers were even worse.  If the Tigers had been in either the AL East or the AL West, they wouldn't have finished first – or second – or even third.  They would have finished FOURTH.  Their only hope of sneaking into the playoffs this year was to win the AL Central.  That shouldn't have been much of a test, considering that the other teams in that division are the White Sox, the Twins, the Royals, and the Indians – whose cumulative won-loss record was 66 games below .500.

I vividly remember the 1968 Tigers-Cardinals World Series.  The Cardinals were led that year by their unhittable pitcher, Bob Gibson (who had 28 complete games, 13 shutouts, and a 1.12 regular-season ERA – all of which were truly mind-boggling accomplishments).  They had a 3-1 lead in the Series after Gibson shut out the Tigers (and hit a home run) in game four.

Bob Gibson and Lou Brock

But the Redbirds proceeded to lose three games in a row, including Gibson's start in game seven.  It was the third-most shocking baseball game I've ever seen.

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Click here to listen to "Monster/Suicide/America."

Click here to buy the record from Amazon.

Sara Evans -- "Missing Missouri" (2005)

Where they love me

Where they know me

Where they show me 

Where is this place that Sara Evans is singing about?  (Pretend you didn't see the song's title above, although you would have to be pretty damn clueless to have missed it.)

There's a clue in the last line that is quoted above, but it's a pretty subtle one.  Here's another excerpt from the song that provides a second clue:

Every time my bus wheels hit the Bootheel

There's no limelight, and I'm all right

'Cause I'm almost home

If you still don't get it, just take a gander at the title above -- she's talking about Missouri, of course.

When Sara Evans recorded this song, she lived in Nashville -- she first moved there in 1991 when she was just 20 years old, and has lived most of her adult life there.  

But home isn't where you move when you're 20 years old.  It's where you grow up -- where you go to high school.  Sara Evans could live in Nashville until she was a hundred and it wouldn't be home.

Sara Evans in high school

Home for Sara Evans was New Franklin, Missouri, a town of just over 1000 souls that's just north of the Missouri River and pretty much right smack dab in the center of "The Show Me State."  Missouri is home for Sara Evans -- and for me -- in a way that no other place ever can be. 

(Note: Sara Evans was born in nearby Boonville, Missouri, which presumably was the nearest town to New Franklin that had a hospital.  Boonville, which was named after Daniel Boone, is located in Cooper County.  Just to the east of Cooper County is Boone County, also named after Daniel Boone.  Why Boonville didn't end up in Boone County is a mystery to me.  Why the "e" got dropped from Boonville is also a mystery to me.)

I don't know a lot about the six albums that Sara Evans has recorded since moving to Nashville and becoming a big country star.  I only know about this song because my younger sister gave me the singer's 2005 album, Real Fine Place, which includes "Missing Missouri."  (My sister's a bigger fan of mainstream country music than I am.  My daughters are also fans of mainstream country -- I have no idea how that happened.)

Like me, my sister was also born in Missouri and lived there through her high school years.  (Our parents still live there.)  I have a feeling these are her favorite lines from "Missing Missouri":

Late summer nights sneakin' out the window

Me and the girls driving down the backroads

Tobacco fields and bumblebees

And the Cardinals playing on TV

We grew up in Joplin, which is in the extreme southwest corner of Missouri.  Joplin doesn't have a lot in common with New Franklin.  We certainly didn't have tobacco fields -- we had mostly corn and soybeans, as I recall -- but there were plenty of backroads if you drove a couple of miles in any direction from our house.

Some of the 1968 St. Louis Cardinals

We did have the Cardinals playing on TV, although I mostly remember hearing Cardinals games on the radio -- legends Jack Buck and Harry Caray handled the play-by-play, and the team was very good when I was a teenager.  

In fact, the Cardinals went to the World Series in 1964, 1967, and 1968 -- not a bad run.

A ticket to game four of the 1967 World Series

Before I left Joplin for college, I rooted for the Cardinals and the Yankees.  I'm 100% faithful to the Yankees now, having given up the Cardinals long ago.  But my sister and my parents have remained faithful to  the Redbirds -- it's clear that their loyalty will never waver.

Back to Sara Evans, who got married in 1993, when she was 22.  She and her husband had three children -- the youngest was born in 2004.  She released "Missing Missouri" -- which starts with the line, "I love my life, love my husband" -- a year later.  

But in 2006, Evans filed for divorce.  Her husband's court papers accused her of having affairs with a dozen or so men, including country superstar Kenny Chesney, her Dancing With the Stars partner, members of her band, and -- this is where it gets weird, boys and girls -- four off the five members of the rock group 3 Doors Down.  (A spokesman for the band denied the allegation.  But he would, wouldn't he?)

(3 Doors Down could have done a lot worse)

Hell hath no fury like a country-western singer scorned.  Evans fired back at her hubby, alleging that her husband cheated on her, drank excessively, was verbally and emotionally abusive, watched porn in their house (he was caught at least once by the couple's oldest child), and had at least a hundred photos of himself nude and "in a state of arousal."  (I'm guessing someone's home computer wasn't password protected!)

The divorce became final in 2007.  Evans was ordered to pay her ex a half a million bucks in alimony.  She paid another $500,000 to an ex-nanny, who sued her for naming her as one of the women the ex-husband had slept with while he was married. 

The next year, Evans married Jay Barker, a former University of Alabama quarterback who led the Crimson Tide to a national championship after the 1992 season.

Here's a video of Sara Evans singing "God Bless America" at the 2009 MLB All-Star Game, which was played at the home of the St. Louis Cardinals, Busch Stadium:

Here's "Missing Missouri."  The person who created this video is clearly not a native of Missouri.  The lyrics that he or she added to the video mistakenly substitute "boot hill" for "Bootheel."

Bootheel (Missouri)

Boot Hill (Tombstone, AZ)

As any Missourian knows, the "Bootheel" is the odd-shaped little geographical irregularity in the southeastern part of the state.  The Missourians who live in the Bootheel is highly susceptible to Mississippi River floods and are sitting on top of the New Madrid fault, which is overdue to produce a major earthquake.  But they still have much to be thankful -- if mapmaking logic had prevailed over politics, the Bootheel would be in Arkansas today.  

Here's a link you can use to order the song from Amazon: