A great St. Louis Cardinal and great man, Lou Brock created indelible memories

There may have been better players in a St. Louis Cardinals uniform, but you could count them on one hand.

There may have been a better gentleman to have worn that uniform, but you’ll have to prove it to me.

When Lou Brock died Sunday at age 81, the memories flooded back:

• A ballplayer in a blur on the base paths, countless hard pop-up slides into second base, a man who could steal a base even if everyone in the ballpark — everyone — knew he was going to try.
• A player who came to the Cardinals known for his power — he hit one of the longest home runs ever at the Polo Grounds in New York — who at the team’s request became instead a fearless base runner and the greatest leadoff hitter in a generation.
• An elder statesman in a franchise known for its great players, a man who was unfailingly gracious and generous, humble and heartfelt.

“He was perhaps the happiest Hall of Famer I’ve ever encountered,” his agent, Dick Zitzman, said Sunday (not for nothing, another Zitzman client was named Stan Musial). “I think he led a life that will never be duplicated.”

They say, don’t meet your heroes. That’s not true for a kid, who grew up watching Brock and Gibson and Schoendienst from the cheapest seats in Busch Stadium, then much later got a dream job covering the Cardinals and found himself rubbing elbows with Hall of Famers.

I won’t forget the time I came upon No. 20 in a crowded mall in St. Louis. I was walking with my family when Lou and his beloved wife, Jackie, came the other way.

“Lou! Lou Brock!” I blurted out, unthinking and too loudly.

“Passersby stopped to watch, awed by the presence of an icon they hadn’t realized was in their presence.

“Sorry, Lou,” I said softly. “I blew your cover, didn’t I?”

“Yeah, you did,” he chuckled in an Arkansas drawl he never quite lost. “That’s OK, though. I don’t mind.”

That was the mellow, later-in-life Lou, far removed from the fearless competitor who played a major role in the team’s two World Series titles and three National League pennants in the 1960s.

He was at his best when the games counted most: A .391 hitter in the Cardinals’ World Series visits in 1964, 1967 and 1968, with 34 hits, 16 runs scored and 14 stolen bases in 21 games.

In 19 seasons with the Chicago Cubs and then the Cardinals, he stole a then-record 938 bases, including a then-record 118 in 1974. He had 3,023 hits and scored 1,610 runs, was named to six All-Star teams and made it to Cooperstown on his first try in 1985 — the 20th player in history to do so.

Despite the punishment on the basepaths — that hard slide to the bag, rubbing raw an open wound on his right hip that appeared in spring training and didn’t heal until sometime the following fall — Brock played at least 153 games in 10 straight seasons from 1965 through 1974. He averaged 99 runs scored and 65 stolen bases in those 10 seasons, a measure of what made him indispensable to those Redbirds teams. He led the league in stolen bases eight of the nine seasons from 1966 through 1974, and also led the league twice in plate appearances, once in at-bats, twice in runs scored, once in doubles and once in triples.

In a sport where showing up every day for your teammates is more than half the battle, Brock was always there. He averaged an astonishing 719 plate appearances a year in the five seasons from 1967 to 1971. That works out to an average of more than 4 1/2 trips to the plate for each game he played in that span.

Hardly a day off ever — to give your weary legs a rest, or to simply catch your breath, or to let your mind clear a bit after the daily cat-and-mouse battle with opposing pitchers.

“Competition,” he once said,” is what keeps me playing the psychological warfare of matching skill against skill and wit against wit.”

For Brock, that confrontation was personal. He revolutionized the game with an intense study of opposing pitchers, watching stock still from first base for the first flinch that signaled he could start his explosive race to second base.

“I don’t have to steal bases,” he said once. “I want to.”

Such was the mindset when he battled the illnesses that marked his final years — diabetes that forced the amputation of his left leg below the knee in 2015, followed by a battle with blood cancer two years later.

The most feared base stealer in the game cruelly reduced to leaning on a walker, one he stolidly gripped as he joined other Cardinals Hall of Famers for home openers since he fell ill.

There, 46,000 fans would cheer, “Lou! Lou! Lou!” as he found his way one more time to home plate. One hand would grip the walker even more tightly as he waved, a gesture that appeared effortless but was in fact a great strain.

A great player. An even greater man.

This story was originally published September 7, 2020 at 10:50 AM.