Mostly Sssssst!

Baseball pays St. Louis' Bob Gibson $40,000 a year, but that doesn't mean he has to make it complicated. "I can't stand heehawing around," says Pitcher Gibson, 29, "studying the catchers' signs, staring at the hitters -- all that jazz. My philosophy is to hum it in there, baby, and let's find out who's best -- them or me." Other pitchers play around with windups, curves, sliders, screwballs and such. Not Gibson. He uses hardly any windup at all, simply rears back and fires--with a great paroxysm of flailing arms and legs that carries him halfway to the plate. He throws fastballs 90% of the time, and he often has only the foggiest notion of where they are going to go. "Mostly," says Philadelphia's Johnny Callison, "they just go sssssst!"

Six Straight. Two weeks ago, Gibson shut out the Phillies on one hit--a single by Callison. Last week he gave up ten hits to the meddlesome New York Mets, but he struck out nine and won the game 4-3 for his sixth straight against no defeats. With the 1965 season a month old, the World Champion St. Louis Cardinals have won 13 games (out of 27), and Righthander Gibson has personally accounted for 46% of those victories. Last week he led both leagues in strikeouts (with 54) and shutouts (with three), and his earned-run average was a stingy 2.57. Says Philadelphia's Clay Dalrymple: "Bob Gibson has got to be the toughest pitcher in this league."

The toughness comes naturally. Gibson's father died a month before he was born, and as a tot, recalls his mother. Bob had rickets, hay fever, pneumonia and a rheumatic heart. Childhood ailments did not keep him from becoming a two-letter man (baseball and basketball) at Omaha's Creighton University. But when he tried touring with the Harlem Globetrotters, he had a series of asthma attacks and quit.

Signed by the Cards for a measly $4,000 bonus. Bob won 15 games in 1962--before he broke his ankle taking his cuts in batting practice. In 1963 he came back strong, won 18 and lost only nine. Then, last summer, he developed a sore arm: in one 18-day stretch, he started five games and was bombed for six runs in each game. Once again, Gibson bounced back. He won nine out of his last eleven games, for a 19-12 record, went on to star in the World Series--beating the New York Yankees twice in the space of four days and striking out 31 batters to break a 61-year-old Series record.

90 m.p.h. Gibson has come a long way since the day a Cardinal official confided: "Bob could throw a ball through the side of a barn, if he could only hit the barn." Now and then, of course, he still uncorks a wild one: two years ago, a stray Gibson fastball broke the shoulder of San Francisco's Jim Ray Hart, and in 56 innings this season, Bob has walked 26 men. But now it's the catchers who have to look out. The speed of his "hummer" is estimated at well over 90 m.p.h. Sighs the Cards' Bob Decker, "You'd better bring along an extra sponge."

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