The Tigers of '68

by George Cantor

  “Later on, they transferred me to police headquarters in down-town Detroit. Now that was a little scary, watching those wagons come in and unload the prisoners, one right after the other. Some of them were in really bad shape. The major in my unit decided that me and him should go out and patrol the surrounding streets. Nothing was moving downtown. It was a ghost town. Since I was the top-rated marksman in the unit, I suggested he drive while I rode shotgun. And wouldn’t you know he stopped at the red lights! There’s no other car on the street for miles, snipers are all over the place, and this guy is stopping on the red. ‘Ahhh, sir,’ I told him. ‘Don’t you think it would be better if we just kept moving?’ Oh, sure. Right, Mickey,’ he said and floored it. But that was about as nervous as it got for me.”

  By this time, the Baltimore Orioles, who were scheduled to start a three-game series in Detroit on Monday, had been told to stay home. Instead, the Tigers and city officials had come up with a wonderful plan. They would save the city with baseball. The games would be switched to Baltimore and put on television. Everyone would be so caught up in the pennant race that they would stop looting and watch the games on TV. It was brilliant in its simplicity. After all, what American didn’t prefer baseball to rioting any day?

  The sad part was that this plan was regarded as realistic. There was absolutely no understanding of what caused the riots or of the depth of passions that they had unleashed. Baseball was still convinced that it had the power to douse the flames and rescue Detroit.

  The Tigers flew to Baltimore on Tuesday and took the field for a night game as Detroit reeled through its third straight day of gunfire and death. TV cameras beamed the pictures from Memorial Stadium back to Michigan. The teams battled to a 0-0 tie into the second inning. The Tigers put two men on base with Joe Sparma coming to bat. Then it started to rain.

  The grounds crew reacted as if rain on a July night in Baltimore was an absolute meteorological stunner. While the playing field turned into a dismal pool of goo, crew members hesitated, stumbled, slipped, ran into each other, and appeared to be auditioning for The Keystone Cops Go to the Вallgame.

  The Detroit television crew, mindful of the critical role it was playing in this great social drama, desperately looked for some-one to put on the air before viewers got it into their heads to start rioting again. The crew settled on Eddie Stanky, the manager of the White Sox. It was not a fortuitous choice. Stanky’s team was spending an off day in Washington, so he had driven over to watch his rivals from Detroit. He was a small, excitable man, easily roused to a towering fury by imagined slights. The previous weekend, the Detroit Free Press had carried an extended question-and-answer interview with him. Usually, bad grammar and malapropisms are cleaned up in such an interview. But Stanky had been so abrasive that the two interviewers, Joe Falls and I, decided to let it run just as he said it. So the text contained gems like: “He couldn’t hit the sidewalk with a bag of beets.” and “The word ‘defeat’ is not in my category.”

  Stanky was furious. As he started his TV interview, he spotted me observing the proceedings. That did it. He instantly went off on a tirade, blasting me and Falls and even the baseball writer for the Detroit News, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the story. He said we were malicious rascals, lying troublemakers. He said we were bad for baseball. Stanky went on and on, growing more agitated by the minute. The TV producer instinctively understood that this was not the right sort of thing to broadcast to an already overheated populace. He got Stanky off the air as fast as he could and focused the cameras instead on the rain pouring down on the tarp, which hadn’t quite made it all the way to the first baseline. The field was now an unplayable swamp, and the game was called off after an hour. The great rescue mission had failed, a victim of recalcitrant weather. The rioting in Detroit went on, eventually winding down of its own accord. And the 1967 season spun itself out to its own sad conclusion in a cruelly wounded city.

  CHAPTER 2 APennant Squandered

  It should never have come to this. The Tigers knew it. On the last, cold October evening of the 1967 season, with the home crowd pleading for one more rally, just one more big hit, they stood three outs from oblivion. If they lost, the race was over. Boston would conclude an incredible comeback season by winning its first pennant in twenty-one years. If they won, Boston would have to fly to Detroit for a playoff game, winner take all, the next day. The Red Sox sat in their Fenway Park clubhouse, seven hundred miles away, listening to Detroit radio announcer Ernie Harwell’s voice piping in the transmission over a Boston station.

  The California Angels held an 8-5 lead in the ninth. But it never should have come to this. Two weeks before, the Tigers had been tied for first place with Boston and Minnesota, and Chicago was just 1½ games behind. It was going to be the tightest finish in American League history. This is what the Tigers had waited for. They had claimed all along that their talent would be the decisive factor down the stretch. But four times in the next eleven games they blew leads in the eighth inning or later. Their bull pen failed. They made mistakes, horrible mental blunders. McLain turned up with a mysterious foot injury and fell out of the starting rotation. Manager Mayo Smith benched slumping first baseman Norm Cash, who was booed unmercifully by unforgiving Tiger Stadium crowds. He was replaced by fading National League star Eddie Mathews, picked up from Houston in an August waiver deal.

  Then, just as in Baltimore during the riots, even the weather failed the Tigers. The closing four-game series against California had been scheduled over four days. But on Thursday and Friday, drenching early autumn rains fell on Detroit without a break. The games were rained out and had to be made up as two consecutive doubleheaders on the weekend. The Tigers would have to win three of the four games to tie for the league lead.

  The delay enabled the rejuvenated Lolich to pitch the first game Saturday. He threw a shutout, his second straight whitewash and ninth win in ten decisions since the day of the riots ten weeks before. But the bull pen blew a four-run lead in the second game. Now there was no more margin. One more loss and it was over.

  There were 15,000 empty seats at the ballpark for the deciding games Sunday. Attendance had fallen off sharply after the riots. The team would draw only 1.4 million people for the season. In 1961, when the Tigers stayed in the race until early September, 1.6 million had come to the ballpark. The attendance difference between those two years was the fear factor.

  Detroit was a wounded, suspicious city. Many streets were still in ruins, the bumed-out husks of stores and houses dotting block after block. Suburbanites stopped coming into the city. The fastest growing plant in Detroit that summer was a “For Sale” sign on the front lawn. What had been a slow, steady out migration to the suburbs turned into a stampede after July 23. With images of the riots burned into their memories, thousands of Detroiters decided they’d had enough. They took whatever price they could get for their homes and fled. Accusations flew across a widening racial divide. An understanding that civic leaders thought had been well crafted between the races turned out to be made of hot air, with neither value nor meaning.

  Still, the city hung on the fate of the Tigers. Sparma stopped California in Sunday’s opener. Then McLain, who hadn’t pitched in thirteen days, walked to the mound for game two. He had fallen asleep on his living room couch one night while watching TV, he said, when he was awakened by the rattle of a trash can. He thought it was a raccoon. When he tried to leap from the couch to investigate, he said, his foot was asleep and wouldn’t support his weight. He fell and twisted his ankle, he said. It was a good story, typically McLain in its bizarre sequence of events. Not until two years later would a darker version emerge.

  McLain had not won a game since August 29 and was 17-16 for the year. The Tigers had expected much more after his twenty-win season in 1966. His appearance was brief this time out. The Angels drove him out in the third while taking a 4-3 lead. They continued the assault on every pitcher Detroit put in, running the margin to 8-3. Dick McAuliffe chopped
two runs off the lead with a hit in the seventh. But now it was the ninth, with just three outs to go and extinction staring right at them.

  It had turned ugly. While pursuing a pop foul, Mathews nearly stumbled over a news photographer. Photographers were allowed to work on the field then, and when the photographer lost sight of the ball he did what he was supposed to do—stay in a crouch and allow the players to get around him. But Mathews, not used to the ground rules in Detroit, nearly dropped the ball as he dodged to avoid the photographer. Then Mathews stopped and hurled the ball right at the feet of the photographer, as the crowd booed.

  By the ninth, there was no more booing. The crowd was begging its team to fight back into it. When Freehan led off with a double and Don Wert drew a walk to put the tying run at bat, hope lurched convulsively back into the ballpark. The Angels brought in George Brunet, a left-handed journeyman who beat the Tigers with disturbing regularity as a starter. He got pinch hitter Jim Price on an infield fly. That brought up McAuliffe. As he left the on-deck circle, a fan leaped to the roof of the Detroit dugout and bowed in an attitude of prayer. He appeared to be a drunk, out of control. But those sitting closest to him could see that he was sobbing.

  McAuliffe, the most relentless competitor on the team, had enjoyed a good season after being switched from shortstop to second base. Second was a far more comfortable position for him on defense, and the improvement was apparent on offense, as well. He had, in fact, hit into just one double play all year long. He now did it for a second time—a hard grounder directly at the second baseman. And just like that, the long season was over.

  In Boston, the Red Sox leaped from their seats in the club-house, hugging each other, spewing champagne around the room, dancing in wild celebration. Manager Dick Williams, who had brought his young son with him to wait out the score in Detroit, embraced the boy. “Don’t ever forget this,” he murmured to him. “Don’t ever forget this.”

  In Detroit, the lights were going out all over the stadium. In the tunnel from the dugout, Green turned and fired a baseball at a TV crew filming the Tigers’ retreat from the field. Mayo Smith ran into his old friend, California manager Bill Rigney, in the cold stadium corridor outside the clubhouse. The two men hugged. “I’m sorry, Mayo,” said Rigney. “Naah,” said the Detroit manager. “I’m proud of you. You fought us all the way.” When the Tigers clubhouse doors finally opened, most players were still seated at their lockers, heads slumped in numbed resignation. Many of them had been crying. “All summer long it was, Oh, well, we’ll get ’em tomorrow,’” said Freehan, his big frame sagging in weary defeat. “Now there’s no more tomorrow. I can’t believe it.” They were convinced that the best team had not won. They would now have four and half months to think about that.

  CHAPTER 3 Springtime in Lakeland

  The players started drifting into Lakeland in mid-February. The central Florida town had been the Tigers’ spring base since 1934 (aside from a three-year break because of World War II travel restrictions), the longest continuous association between any big league team and its Florida training site. Detroit had won its first pennant in twenty-five years immediately upon moving there and thus saw no good reason ever to move again.

  After the war, the Tigers purchased a tract of land that had been used as a base to train British naval pilots. The team converted the land into Tigertown, a complex of diamonds and dormitories where every player in the entire minor league system was trained and domiciled. It was the first such operation in baseball. The Tigers felt it created an organizational unity. Detroit believed in its farm system with an almost religious fervor. It was convinced that a core of players, all indoctrinated in the same basic approach and techniques, was essential in building a winner. Of the twenty-five men who eventually formed the roster of the 1968 Tigers, fifteen had come through the Tigertown complex. About half of them arrived in the majors within a year or two of each other in the mid-60s. They were called “the Boys from Syracuse,” which was then the system’s top AAA affiliate.

  “It was like family,” Jim Northrup says of that group. “We barbecued together with our wives and kids. We partied together. When we had problems we talked to each other. Hell, we even loaned each other money when things got tight—although we’d try and run the other way when McLain came along. He was constantly looking for a few bucks ‘to get something for Sharyn.’ It wasn’t a loan with Denny. It was more like a gift. But by the time we reached the bigs we had known each other for years. It was a closeness I don’t believe can exist anywhere in professional sports anymore.”

  Lakeland in 1968 was not the Florida of the travel posters. After Walt Disney World opened in the ’70s a few miles east on Interstate 4, Lakeland joined the rest of Florida. Condominiums, malls, traffic, and high growth have transformed the place. But in the spring of 1968 it was still part of the Deep South in its drowsy ambience, racial attitudes, and sense of itself. There were two movie theaters in town, not counting the drive-in, which primarily showed films that bore titles like Preacher Man Meets Widder Woman. The nearest ABC television affiliate came in as a ghostly flicker on most sets. Finding an out-of-town newspaper or a corned beef sandwich could involve a trek that lasted for miles. Lakeland was in another dimension from the glitzy Gold Coast resorts or even from the beachfront towns on the gulf. This was citrus country, the top orange-producing county in America, with a little phosphate mining thrown in. Still, there was a certain charm about the town and the string of small lakes around which it had grown. Spring training was a soothing, unvarying cycle of golf at the country club, dinners at the yacht club, black bean soup at the Cuban restaurants in nearby Tampa, and the annual chamber of commerce steak-and-shrimp cookout in a hangar at the old air base. For the Tigers and their general manager, Jim Campbell, who prided himself on running a conservative organization both fiscally and socially, it was bliss.

  The Holiday Inn, where team officials, rookies, and media stayed, had been open for just three years and was regarded as the height of luxury—which it was when compared with the former team hotel, with its front porch full of rocking chairs that appeared to have been broken in by Stonewall Jackson’s troops. This was also the third season of operation for Joker Marchant Stadium, home field for Tigers spring games. Its odd name was a tribute to Lakeland’s director of parks and recreation, a man who favored cowboy boots and Stetson hats and looked as if he knew some really great stories, if he ever chose to tell them. He never quite got around to that, though. It seemed that the funniest thing he ever saw was when a young journalist, trying to file a story at the Western Union office, absent mindedly walked into the appliance store next door. “Son, were you going to send that story over a washing machine?” Joker would ask whenever he saw the young man for years afterward, almost howling in glee. “Were you fixin’ to give it to a refrigerator?”

  Although the Civil Rights Act of 1964 had legally ended segregation, Lakeland remained a town fixed in its racial attitudes. There was a black part of town, and there was a white one. There was no overlap. The team’s black players found it difficult to find acceptable accommodations for their families, so they lived at the Holiday Inn. The Tigers ran a bus service for them to the black neighborhood in the evening. Most white veterans lived with their families in a motel on the Old Tampa Road. It was far from luxurious, but it was the best of its kind in Lakeland.

  The organization had not been idle after the crushing failure of 1967. Mostly, it had been occupied attempting to trade McLain. There was a strong suspicion that the twenty-game season of 1966 was an aberration and that the 17-16 season of the next year was a closer measure of his real ability. More than that, there was the unmistakable perception that he was just not Tiger material. He was way too cocky, far too independent and outspoken. Moreover, he had failed the team down the stretch. He hadn’t backed up the brag. But no trade was made. Warning flags about McLain were up all over the game, and no franchise was willing to make a commitment to him. Campbell had to settle for pick
ing up Dennis Ribant, a pitcher who had impressed very few at Pittsburgh the previous year.

  The entire pitching staff had been overhauled. Only five men remained from those who had left Florida with the team the previous spring. Campbell and Mayo Smith were convinced that the bull pen blew the pennant, and they were looking hard for strong, young arms. Otherwise, the team was unchanged from the one that had ended the 1967 season. McAuliffe was set at second, Wert at third, and Freehan behind the plate. There would be a four-man outfield rotation with Kaline, Horton, Northrup, and Stanley. Mayo wasn’t quite sure how he would work that out. But both Kaline and Horton seemed to be injury prone, and he was sure that the rotation would take care of itself. At first base, there were Cash and Mathews. Cash was thirty-three and Mathews thirty-six, but both men lived hard off the field and appeared much older. The joke was that Mayo would throw the glove out at first base and see which one would pick it up—unless, of course, they couldn’t straighten up again. Shortstop was troublesome. Ray Oyler was the designated starter and an excellent defensive player. But he was helpless as a hitter. Dick Tracewski was not quite as good on defense and hit somewhat better. Tom Matchick had shown some potential as a minor league hitter, but there were severe questions about his defense. That was where the Tigers needed help, and to fill that position they had shopped McLain. But they would have to make do with what they had.

  Earl Wilson had won twenty-two games as a starter and appeared firm as the staff leader. Behind him would be Lolich, who had finished the 1967 season with an encouraging rush, and Sparma, coming off his best year at 16-9. And, of course, McLain.