by Roger Angell
Two days later, whatever justice there was for the Tigers came when Leslie Mueller defeated the Athletics 1–0 in a five-inning game, while allowing only two hits.
On a Saturday morning late last May, Bert Gordon and Don Shapiro drove to the Detroit Metropolitan Airport to meet Max Lapides, who was returning from Chicago to attend his first Tiger game of the year with his old friends. Max’s wife and their two young daughters were staying in their Detroit home, in the suburban Birmingham section, until the end of the school year, so Max’s exile was still leavened by weekend paroles. On the way to the airport, Bert and Don considered the awful possibility that Max might someday be converted to the White Sox, but the subject died of unlikelihood, and in time the two began comparing some Tiger managers. Red Rolfe (1949–52), it was agreed, had been decent; Fred Hutchinson (1952–54) had been sound but touched with temper; Charlie Dressen (1963–66) had been deep in knowledge but past his prime. Surprisingly, the vote for the best manager since Mickey Cochrane (1934–38) went to the incumbent, Billy Martin, who had taken an aged Tiger team into the playoffs the previous fall, and who had the same seniors currently, if barely, at the top of their division again. “He’s winning ball games,” said Don, “and that’s absolutely all that counts.”
“Plus he’s exciting,” said Bert. “This is the first time since I was eleven years old that you see a Tiger base runner go from second to third on a fly ball.”
Another passenger inquired about Mayo Smith, the pilot who brought the Tigers to within one game of a pennant in 1967, and who won it all the following year. There was a painful pause, and then Don Shapiro, the resident strategist, said, “Listen, there were times when Mayo Smith was managing, and he would call in somebody from the bullpen, and I would know who he had chosen and I knew that he was going to be wrong. I knew the game was down the drain, and so did everybody else in the ball park. Why, that sense of impending disaster was so strong you could almost chart it. It was palpable. And then the disaster would happen. Mayo Smith absolutely lacked that mystical foreknowledge of baseball events, and as a manager you have to have that. Oh, this man was a monkey on my back for so long, and the worst part of it was that everybody loved Mayo Smith, because he was such a nice guy and such a charming guy. Mayo the nice poker companion, Mayo the great drinking companion—nobody had anything bad to say about him, and it was all absolutely true except for one thing: the man was overwhelmingly inept. Oh, boy, I hated that man, and I hated myself for hating him. I probably would have killed him if I’d run into him in ’67 after he blew the pennant for us.” The Tigers lost a famous three-way race on the last day of the 1967 season, when the Red Sox won the pennant by beating the Minnesota Twins while the Tigers lost the second game of a doubleheader to the California Angels at home. “That last game, he did everything wrong,” Don went on. “He let our pitcher stay in, and I was standing up on my seat screaming, ‘Take him out! Take him out!’ I was blind with rage. I can still see what happened next—that pitch coming in to the Angels’ Fregosi, and Fregosi getting ready to hit it—and I can see the ball going through the hole between short and third, and I can see the man coming around third to put them ahead. And then, like everybody else in this town, I can still see Dick McAuliffe, in the ninth, hitting into only his second double play of the entire season, to end it all. Listen, I’m like a dying man; I can see that whole game flashing before my eyes. It was like a scene out of Fellini, because right in back of me this guy is sitting there and listening to a football game—it was a Sunday, and football was on—and his radio is blaring football as the runner is rounding third base, and Mayo Smith is standing there, riveted to that post of his, holding up the dugout.” He shook his head and laughed hollowly. “That was the day I came home and went down in the basement and broke all our flowerpots.”
Bert, from the front seat, said, “Think about something happier. Think about 1968.”
“The trouble with you is you don’t suffer enough,” Don said.
“I don’t suffer enough!” said Bert, shouting with laughter. “I’m Jewish, I’m short, I’m fat, I’m poor, I’m ugly—what else do you want me to suffer?”
“That’s all true,” Don said, looking at his friend affectionately. “A man like you probably can’t bear the necessary onus of suffering. After all, this isn’t just a game of ours. It isn’t just a preoccupation. It isn’t an obsession. It’s a—well, it’s a—”
They said it together: “It’s an obsession.”
At the airport, Max was met and hugged, and the car aimed back toward the ball park. Suddenly, it was a party.
“Everything is fine, I guess,” Max said. “Only, I miss my friends, now I’m with them again. I like this so much I may do it every week. But things are not fine back there, really. Listen, the other night when we beat the Yanks I turned on the TV in Chicago and the guy forgot to give the Tigers’ score. He absolutely forgot. I couldn’t get to sleep until four in the morning. Nobody knew. You pick up the morning paper in Chicago, and it says, ‘N.Y. at Detroit (n.).’ I mean, doesn’t a man have a Constitutional right to the box scores?” He said that he was sometimes able to pick up Ernie Harwell on his car radio. “It only happens a little bit outside the city, on the north side,” he added. “Sometimes it’s only a snatch of the game broadcast, with a lot of static, but I can always tell from Ernie’s voice how we’re doing. Anyway, that’s how come we bought the new house in Highland Park—so I can get the broadcasts and be closer to drive to all the Tiger games in Milwaukee. Fortunately, my wife likes the area.”
At the ball park, the three friends sat in their accustomed place, in Section 24, between first and home; Tiger Stadium is an ancient, squared-off green pleasance, and the view was splendid. None of the three bought scorecards. (“The thing to do,” Bert said, “is remember.”) The World Champion Oakland A’s, who had barely beaten out the Tigers in a violent five-game playoff the previous fall, were the opposition, and a modest but enthusiastic audience was filling up the nearby seats. Don Shapiro has a dark, vivid face—a downturned mustache, some lines of pain, some lines of hope—and he now looked about with satisfaction and clapped his hands. “Well!” he said. “Well, well. What could be nicer than this? I mean that. I really mean it. I’m supremely happy. I like this park even better than my Eames chair.” He caught sight of the Oakland starting pitcher, Ken Holtzman, warming up, and his face fell. “Uh-oh,” he said. “A very tough man, and now I’ve got some ethnic problems, too. A Jewish pitcher against our guys.”
The game was a quiet, almost eventless affair for the first few innings, but Don was a restless spectator, twisting and bending in his seat, grimacing, groaning occasionally, leaping up for almost every enemy out. In the fifth, Gene Tenace, the Oakland first baseman, hit a home run into the left-field stands, and Shapiro fell back into his seat. He stared at the concrete floor in silence. “God damn it,” he muttered at last. “This is serious.” The A’s added two more runs off the Detroit starter, Woodie Fryman, but in the bottom half the Tigers put together two singles, a walk, and a third single, by Bill Freehan, the Detroit catcher, to tie it up, and the party was delighted.
“That was a good little rally,” Max said. “Just right. Lots of running, and we have a tie.”
“Yes, I don’t like that one big blow,” Bert said.
Don, watching the game and his emotions simultaneously, announced, “I’m elated. I’m back to my original state of anxiety. But listen, Max, we’re lucky they decided to pitch to Freehan.”
“Yes,” Max said. “First of all, I would walk him. But then I absolutely don’t throw him any kind of up pitch like that.”
Jim Northrup, the Tiger right fielder, came up to the plate in the sixth, and Bert said, “I still don’t see why this guy doesn’t hit about .380.”
“We’ve been saying that for ten years,” Don said.
Northrup flied out, and Rodriguez stood in. Bert cried, “Au-reeli-oh!”
“See, here’s another one,” Max said. “
This guy hit nineteen homers one year, and everybody called him a home-run hitter. They’ve been waiting ever since.”
“He hit nineteen?” said Bert.
“Yes, for the Angels.”
“Not for us, of course.”
“Aurelio has a lazy bat,” Don said. “He doesn’t whip that bat.”
“Frank Boiling had a lazy bat, too,” Max said.
“You can’t remember Milt Boiling?” Bert said.
Rodriguez hit a two-run home run to left, and Max, waving his arms and laughing, cried, “Exactly what I said! He’s a great home-run hitter. I always knew it. Anyway, Williams should have taken out Holtzman. The man was dying out there—anybody could see it.”
In the eighth, however, the Oakland designated hitter, Deron Johnson, jumped on a pitch by a Detroit reliever named Tom Timmerman and drove it high into the left-field seats. The game was tied. There was an enormous silence, and Don Shapiro, holding his head, stood up and turned his back on the field. “I knew it,” he said. “I knew it!” He swayed slightly. “Oh, listen to that damned organ, will you? They’re playing funeral selections.” (Another bitter cause: In 1966, Don and Max directed a barrage of letters at the Tigers’ general manager, Jim Campbell, protesting the installation of an organ at the stadium. Max wrote, “Baseball games are baseball games, and vesper services are vesper services.” Don wrote, “Who in hell wants to hear ‘Funiculi Funicula’ in the middle of a Tiger rally?” Max wrote, “The object of a ball game for the fan is not to be entertained. It is to win.” The organ was not removed.)
Rich Reese, leading off the bottom of the eighth, was walked, and hopes revived noisily. Dick Sharon stood in, and Max said, “He should bunt, but we have the worst bunting team in history.”
“It’s an absolute must-bunt situation,” Don agreed. Last year, Don mailed a lengthy letter to Billy Martin outlining a new defense for the must-bunt, which involved sending the second baseman to charge the plate on the right side of the diamond, instead of the traditional move by the first baseman. Don’s plan quoted from his correspondence with the Michigan State baseball coach, Danny Litwhiler, who had devised the new play. No answer came from Martin, but his response, relayed later to Don, was “I don’t go for that funny stuff.”
Here, in any case, Sharon did bunt, and was safe when first baseman Tenace muffed the ball. A moment later, Northrup smacked a triple for the go-ahead runs—good enough, it turned out, for the game. The Tigers won, 8–5, and Don, on his feet and clapping, had brightened perceptibly. “I was never worried for an instant,” he said. A moment later, he added, “Well, that’s a lie. My trouble is I tend to view these games viscerally. Baseball gives me that endogenous epinephrine. I’m hooked on my own adrenaline.”
Detroit in the nineteen-thirties had few visible civic or economic virtues, but it just may have been the best baseball town in the country. The Tigers—a dangerous and contentious team built around the power hitting of the enormous Hank Greenberg, and around Charlie Gehringer and Mickey Cochrane and, later, Rudy York, and around the pitching of Schoolboy Rowe, Tommy Bridges, and, later, Bobo Newsom—did not win nearly as often as the lordly Yankees, but victory, when it came, was treasured. There was a pennant in 1934 (the first since 1909), a championship in 1935 (the first ever for Detroit), and another pennant in 1940. At his home on Tuxedo Avenue, young Don Shapiro, listening to games over Station WWJ in the afternoon, tried to work magic spells to make the Tigers win: twenty-eight baby steps across his bedroom without losing his balance could bring Gehringer a hit (not quite pure magic, since Gehringer’s batting average between 1933 and 1940 was .336). The Ernie Harwell of those Piltdown days was Ty Tyson, for Mobil Oil and “The Sign of the Flying Red … Horse!,” who called Greenberg “Hankus-Pankus” and Schoolboy Rowe “Schoolhouse” or “Schoolie.” (“For a pitcher, Schoolie is sure pickin’ ’em up and layin’ ’em down.”) Whenever they could, Don and Bert and their friends took the Trumbull Avenue streetcar at noontime to the ball park, then called Navin Field, and stood beside an iron gate on the corner of National Street, behind home plate. In time, the gate rolled up, to a great clattering of chains, and a Tigers’ supervisor would conduct a mini-shape-up (“You and you and you and you over there”) for the job of assistant ushers. The designees took up their posts in the outer reaches of the upper deck, beyond the uniformed regulars, and returned batting-practice fly balls and dusted seats and, between times, eyed the Olympians on the field: not just Greenberg and Gehringer and Rowe but the others—Marv Owen and Gee Walker and Elon Hogsett and Pete Fox, and batboy Whitey Willis and trainer Denny Carroll and groundskeeper Neil Conway. A lot of the players lived in apartment houses out on Chicago and Dexter Boulevards, or Boston and Dexter, and if you walked out there and waited long enough, you could sometimes pick up an autograph. The game and the players must have seemed very near in those days. Once, in 1936, when Don Shapiro was twelve years old, he played catch with Tiger first baseman Jack Burns, who split Don’s left thumb with a throw; the wonderful stigma—a white cicatrix on the first knuckle—is still visible.
Bert Gordon’s father, a rabbi, was a passionate fan who sometimes got his tickets through the Detroit Council of Churches, which provided free seats for the clergy. “I’d be sitting beside him at the park, and I’d say ‘Father—’ and the whole section would turn around,” Bert said recently. He laughed, and went on, “My father was a city man—like all our fathers, I guess. He never went fishing, or anything. It was baseball that was the bond between us. Baseball was the whole thing. I don’t think anybody can imagine the terrific importance of Hank Greenberg to the whole Jewish community then. He was a god, a true folk hero. That made baseball acceptable to our parents, so for once they didn’t mind if we took a little time off from the big process of getting into college. And then, of course, Hank Greenberg was so big and so handsome—a handsome giant. Plus he didn’t change his name. I can remember Rosh Hashanah, or some day like that, in 1938, when Hank was going after Babe Ruth’s record of sixty home runs in a season. Of course, nobody in the synagogue could go near a radio that day, but somebody came in late from the parking lot with a report about the game, and the news went through the congregation like a wind.”
Don kept a scrapbook that summer, pasting up Greenberg’s pictures and box scores and headlines (“HANK’S NINE DAYS AHEAD!”). Under one photograph of Greenberg swinging a bat, he penciled “There she goes!” and under the headline “HANK NEEDS FOUR HOMERS IN NINE GAMES TO TIE” he wrote “Two bits he does it!” He was wrong; Hank hit fifty-eight, falling shy of the record by two. A year or two earlier, Greenberg had accepted an invitation to dinner with some friends of his who had a house in Max Lapides’ part of town, and word was sent out that he would shake hands with the neighborhood kids. The excited juniors lined up (in their sweatshirts with Greenberg’s number 5 inked on the back, and carrying, nearly all of them, first basemen’s mitts), but Max was not among them, for he had broken a leg a few days before and was forbidden to get out of bed. He cried himself to sleep that night, but he was awakened by his father turning on the light and ushering Hank Greenberg into the room. The sudden visitor was so enormous, Max recalls, that he had to duck his head to get through the door. Greenberg sat on Max’s bed and talked to him for half an hour. Before he left, he took out a pen and signed Max’s cast and then, seeing a copy of Max’s favorite baseball book—Safe!, by Harold Sherman—on the bedside table, he signed that, too.
“In our household, we used to talk about only three things—current events, the Jewish holidays, and baseball,” Max has said. “You have to try to remember how much easier it was to keep up with all the baseball news back then. For us, there were just the Tigers and the seven other teams in the American League, so we knew them by heart. All the games were played in the afternoon, and none of the teams was in a time zone more than an hour away from Detroit, so you got just about all the scores when the late-afternoon papers came. You could talk about that at supper, and then there were the
stories in the morning papers to read and think about the next day. Why, in those days we knew more about the farms than I know about some of the West Coast teams right now. By the time a Hoot Evers or a Fred Hutchinson was ready to come up from Beaumont, we knew all about him.”
Max’s father, Jack, did not need Hank Greenberg to introduce him to baseball. His father, in turn, had been a butcher in Rochester, New York, and young Jack Lapides had often made the morning rounds in the family cart and then sat next to his father in a saloon and studied the pictures of the baseball players of the day—with their turtleneck uniforms and handlebar mustaches—up above the big, cool bar mirror. Jack Lapides had a laundry business in Detroit, and by the nineteen thirties he had arranged things well enough so that in the stirring seasons of 1934 and 1935 he was able to attend every single Tiger home game and many on the road. “My father used to take me to fifty or sixty games a year,” Max recalled this summer, “and I recently became aware that between us we encompassed just about the entire history of big-league ball in this century. He went to most of the games every year right up to the end of his life, in 1967. I’d met Don by then, and in those last few years he would come along with us, too.”
Don Shapiro’s father, a tallow merchant, knew nothing about baseball, but one of Don’s uncles was a junk dealer who owned a semipro team in Lapeer, Michigan; and even as a very young boy, Don was sometimes allowed to sit on the bench with the players. That was enough—more than enough—to start it all for him. Don has a vivid and affectionate memory of Jack Lapides. “He was a very formal man, a reserved sort of man,” he said not long ago, “and I can still see him sitting up there in the stands, in his coat and collar and tie, with one hand on the railing in front of him. He kept me and Max on our toes. ‘Pay attention, boys,’ he always said. ‘This is a serious business.’”
