Throwback Thursday: Herb Score, Gil McDougald, And The Liner That Kind Of Changed Everything

(Editor's note: Each week VICE Sports will take a look back at an important sports event from this week in sports history. We are calling this regular feature Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.)

My life is awash in notebooks, which I keep nearby so that I can jot down any scrap of an idea that might later be useful to me, or at least present an intriguing what-was-that-about mystery. Some of these notes get thrown into the blender right away, but others languish; context fades, the notebook is subsumed in the rest of the mess of my life, and by the time they resurface I have not the foggiest notion of where those thoughts came from, or why I wrote them down in the first place. Recently, I found, on a long-neglected pad, the words, "You can't know where you are if you don't know where you've been. You can't tell how far you've traveled if you don't know where you started."

I'm not sure what my original intention was in recording this less-than-profound thought, but those words seem to be trying to answer the musical question voiced by the Talking Heads in "Once in a Lifetime," which asks the question "How did I get here?" and, by association, how did things go so right? On May 7, 1957, Yankees infielder Gil McDougald lined a ball into Indians pitcher Herb Score's right eye, shattering his nose, breaking his cheek, and damaging his vision for who-knew how long. As the incident is often remembered, it derailed the lives of both men. As it actually happened, that's not true. In the short term it was a catastrophe, but taking the longer view—and this outcome is every bit as profound as if both had been destroyed by that single swing of the bat—they were both kind of okay. Who is to say that their journey to the good places at which they wound up did not begin with that very same swing?

McDougald, a native of San Francisco, was signed by the Yankees in 1948 and whipped through the minors in three seasons, hitting a combined .340 and impressing no less than Rogers Hornsby, his manager at Beaumont in 1950. He reached the majors in 1951 and immediately stood out for both his bat and his excellent defense all around the infield. Manager Casey Stengel shuffled him between second and third base in what amounted to a defensive platoon—McDougald played whichever position was likely to see more chances on the day. Mickey Mantle came up that same season, but it was McDougald who won the Rookie of the Year Award.

McDougald was the original Ben Zobrist, in other words, and a player so good that Stengel used him to force weaker teammates out of the lineup. Stengel was ruthless about getting rid of players who could no longer help him. That McDougald enabled him to do so was a subtlety that was not fully understood at the time. It didn't help that defense was, until recently, the most difficult baseball attribute to value but, as a right-handed hitter at Yankee Stadium when the left field fence was a regulation half-marathon from home plate, McDougald's hitting abilities were also obscured. In a 10-year career in New York he hit only .255/.333/.348 with 29 home runs in the Bronx, but .296/.379/.469 with 83 home runs on the road. During the prime years of his career, from 1951 to 1957, among Yankees with over 1,000 plate appearances in neutral parks, McDougald trailed only Mantle in production, batting .310/.395/.486. Teammate Yogi Berra, who won three MVP awards during those seasons, hit .272/.337/.443.

Score, a left-hander, reached the majors four years after McDougald. Born in New York but raised in Florida, he was a standout pitcher in high school, throwing six no-hitters. On his 19th birthday, he was signed by Indians scout Cy Slapnicka, who had also signed Score's eventual teammate Bob Feller back in the 1930s. Both McDougald and Feller would later swear that Score threw harder than fellow lefty Sandy Koufax, who reached the majors that same year. Like Koufax, Score had to overcome the typical wildness that comes with being a hard-throwing young lefty. Score took a major step in this direction at Indianapolis of the American Association in 1954, going 22-5 with a 2.62 ERA and winning the league's MVP award. Sure, he walked 140 in 251 innings, but even that was more than a 50 percent haircut on his walk rate of the year before, and he struck out an astonishing 330 while holding batters to just 140 hits.

Note the innings pitched total, and remember that Score, who was then 21, completed 21 of his 32 starts. No one thought of this as pitcher abuse then, and still wouldn't 30 years later when Dwight Gooden would be running up the same sort of innings totals (and worse) for the New York Mets. In the context of baseball, this was a barbaric time, and those innings figure more prominently in Score's dénouement than McDougald's liner.

Score was still wild when he reached the majors, even in an American League where pitchers averaged nearly four walks per nine innings. He was no less effective for it, going 16-10 with a 2.85 ERA (fourth in the league) and a league-leading 245 strikeouts in 1955. Like McDougald, he was voted Rookie of the Year. The next year he went 20-9 with a 2.53 ERA that ranked second in the league; again, he led the league in strikeouts. And then, in his fifth start of the 1957 season, when Score was 24 years old, came the line drive off McDougald's bat.

Score had a dangerous pitching motion that left his face turned away from the hitter when he completed his delivery. When McDougald, the second batter of the game, ripped a fastball back up the middle, Score never saw it coming. The ball hit his face so hard that it rebounded to third baseman Al Smith, who completed the play to first base. It was then that everyone gathered around Score, who lay on the mound in a fetal position, clutching his face. He never lost consciousness, but there was a great deal of blood. The public address announcer said, "If there is a doctor in the stands, will he please report to the playing field." Six came. Score was carried off the field on a stretcher.

McDougald was devastated. "If he loses his sight," he said after, "I'm going to quit this game." Sleepless that night, McDougald, Berra, and Hank Bauer tried to visit Score in the hospital but were not granted admittance. It wasn't personal; Score's teammates had been turned away too. The pitcher had already told Indians executive Hank Greenberg, "Please tell Gil that I don't blame him for what happened. It's part of the game, that all."

Things looked better in the light of day, and when it seemed Score wouldn't lose his eye, McDougald backed off of his vow. "What I said last night was a spur of the moment thing. Things look better today." And yet, emotionally he wasn't unscathed. On May 12 at Baltimore, McDougald faced Hal "Skinny" Brown. Brown was a knuckleballer, but he threw a fastball to McDougald. "I came close to decapitating him," McDougald later told Dom Forker. "His cap flew off, and the ball went right between his cap and his head, and I could see the look on his face, and I could tell he didn't want any more of pitching that day. That's when I really thought of quitting."

McDougald was coming off of his best season, .311/.405/.443, and he was hitting .313 going into the Score game. McDougald remembered that, after the Brown incident, he decided he wasn't going to hurt anyone anymore. He would cease trying to hit the ball where it was pitched and pull everything; as McDougald told the story, this instantly ruined his hitting. It didn't happen quite that way. From the Score game until the end of August he hit .305 with 12 home runs. But something did change: McDougald slumped in September, hitting a homerless .167 over the final two weeks. He hit .250 in the World Series, and every hit was a single.

McDougald remained a .250 hitter from then on, and the pop was gone from his bat. Sick of it all, satisfied with his career accomplishments and goaded by Yankees GM George Weiss who had told him, "You need me to make a living," he quit baseball at the end of 1960 to go into business. He was 32. Lucrative offers from the two expansion clubs did not tempt him to come back. McDougald loved children, and jumped at the opportunity to spend more time with his family. He raised four kids, adopted another, fostered more; when they were all grown, he adopted two biracial sons. "You don't see color or religion when you adopt," McDougald said. "Who cares? We just wanted kids." His business ventures were successful, too. The only blemish on his later years was a growing deafness, the result of being hit by a line drive himself, when Bob Cerv caught him in the side of the head during batting practice. In 1994, McDougald received cochlear implants, and his hearing was restored for the final years of his life.

As for Score, he was fine. His vision returned. He didn't pitch again in 1957, but he picked up where he left off in 1958. In his fourth start of the season, on April 23, he shut out the White Sox on three hits, striking out 13. In his next start, though, another complete game, something in his elbow tore. He kept trying to come back, tried for five years, but the arm just didn't respond. "I could still throw hard," he said, "but the ball didn't move as it had before." And so he gave up—and became a beloved Indians broadcaster. A 33-year term with the Indians began in 1964, and though Score saw an incredible amount of miserable baseball during that period, he got as much out of the game as anyone. He too raised four children.

And so May 7, 1957 was a very bad day. Or was it? And you may find yourself in a beautiful house, with a beautiful wife. And you may ask yourself, well, how did I get here? The answer may be: I threw a pitch. I swung a bat. It was not as I would have wished it to be, but it took me where I was going nonetheless. Once in a lifetime indeed.