That'61 Ford

Eyes fixed on the ground and thick arms hanging limp at his sides, he stepped from the mound and shuffled toward the shadowed dugout, looking for all the world like a dejected pitcher who had just been shelled out of a crucial game. Only when his teammates swarmed about to pat his back and the Independence Day crowd of 74,246 at Yankee Stadium* cut loose with a tumultuous roar did a faint grin flicker across the lips of Edward ("Whitey") Ford, the New York Yankees' crafty southpaw pitcher. Whitey Ford had just won his ninth straight game and lifted the Yankees into first place in the American League--for at least a few hours--by setting down the Detroit Tigers, 6-2.

Win or lose, Whitey Ford takes his baseball with the same deliberate, almost insolent coolness. Says he: "I don't fool around when it comes to pitching." Rounding out an even decade as a Yankee regular, Ford is on the way to his best year. He has a dazzling 16-2 record that has accounted for nearly one-third of his team's victories. He leads the league with 122 strikeouts, owns the highest lifetime won-lost percentage among all active major-league pitchers (149-61 for .710) and the lowest earned-run average, with 2.74. Yet for all these flashy figures, Whitey Ford until this season seemed often to fall short of his promise.

Tiger by the Tail. Born in a Manhattan tenement district and raised in Queens, Ford burst upon the Yankees in the middle of the 1950 season, a brash 21-year-old with strawberry-blond hair, flashing blue eyes and an asphalt-seasoned sense of humor. He had tried out four years earlier as a first baseman and, after being told that he was too scrawny, turned to pitching in a tough sandlot club until a record of more than 20 wins earned him a $7,000 bonus to play Class C ball for the Yankees. As a rookie he had a 9-1 record, won the final game of the World Series against Philadelphia in 1950. After two years in the Army, he returned to an 18-6 season, went on to become the clutch pitcher of the Yankee staff.

But the Yankee front office often wondered whether it had a tiger by the tail. Ford's flip self-confidence and wry, big-city wisecracks seemed to annoy the brass-hats even more than his winning pleased them. "He's one of those typically fresh New York kids who aggravate you out of sheer contrariness," ex-General Manager George Weiss once said. In 1957 he was fined $1,000 when he and five teammates got into a post-midnight brawl at the Copacabana while celebrating ex-Yankee infielder Billy Martin's 29th birthday.

Gout in his arm has bothered him intermittently, and he punches a bag occasionally and watches his diet (by stinting on meat proteins and fried foods) to strengthen his throwing--even while working as an off-season customers' man on Wall Street. He has never won 20 games in a season, partly because the Yankees pulled him out of the regular pitching rotation to use him as a "stopper" in the big games. In 1960 he had his worst year, 12-9, although he redeemed himself with two shutouts against Pittsburgh in the World Series.

10 Lbs. a Game. The key to Ford's record this year is work--lots of it. Before the season began, squarejawed, tobacco-chewing Manager Ralph Houk asked Ford if he wanted to pitch every four days. Whitey said he did. "It's good for him," says Houk. "I just hope it keeps up." Says Whitey, the father of three: "I've talked to guys who said when they got to be 32 and 33, they had to bear down harder. I'm 32." The big test should come in the heat of August, which melts 10 Ibs. from Ford's 5-ft. io-in., 182-lb. frame during each game, and could prevent him from pitching so often.

This season's Ford has so far been anything but aggravating to the Yankees. After an opening-day 6-0 loss to Minnesota, he won six straight. Boston stopped him, 2-1, on May 29 but since then he has won ten straight.

Before the season is over, Ford hopes to overcome two bugbears. One is the elusive 20-game mark, which he missed by a hair in 1956. "Sure I'd like to win 20," says Ford, "if only to stop everybody from talking about it." He would also like to do well in an All-Star game. In five previous appearances, he staggered to an 0-2 record and a ghastly earned-run average of 10.00. This week, when National Leaguers face the '61 Ford in San Francisco for the first All-Star game, they will see the same broad-shouldered, chunky lines as last year. But when Whitey Ford cranks up and kicks out his right foot in the easy, flowing motion that American Leaguers have learned to respect, he aims to prove that the performance of this year's model is vastly improved.

* Biggest in 14 years at the stadium, outdrawing the entire National League for that day by 8,112 and New York's two race tracks, Aqueduct and Roosevelt, by 5,126.

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