The Tigers of '68

by George Cantor

  McLain had arrived in Lakeland with orange hair (“I’ve been out in the sun a lot,” he explained) and contact lenses to replace his thick spectacles. The cap was worn at a rakish angle, bill shading his eyes. He seemed unconcerned with the events of the previous season and reports of his impending departure. To all appearances, he was the same old Denny, sizing up the world with a knowing eye and finding it choice and fat.

  But McLain, like every other veteran of 1967, had changed. Beneath the clubhouse laughter there was a new seriousness of intent. This was a team who had been through the grinder. The pain would never go away. But it had made them harder, tougher.

  There were still the timeless, numbing spring routines to endure. But Mayo did not run a tight camp. Conditioning drills were minimal. Strength coaches were unknown then. Mike Marshall was a great believer in building up durability by lifting weights. But the twenty-five-year-old pitcher, who was working toward a Ph.D. at Michigan State University, was regarded as a moon man. The other players called him “Professor” and exchanged amused glances when he started talking about his theories of pitching, about using alternate sets of muscles on alternate days. In six more seasons, putting his theories into practice, he would break every record for appearances and innings pitched by a reliever. But that would be with the Dodgers. The Tigers could hardly wait to get rid of this crackpot.

  Pitching coach Johnny Sain was not a believer in running. He believed that games were won with attitude and mental toughness. Although strong legs and healthy bodies were nice, they would not be the critical component when the game was on the line. So aside from a few serious athletes—Freehan, Stanley—it was not a camp that went in for serious athleticism.

  The biggest event of the spring, as always, was introducing rookies to The Mongoose. This mysterious creature was kept in a large box, guarded by the assistant clubhouse attendant, a local lad named Gator. Newcomers to the team were told of this wonder in hushed tones and asked if they wanted to see it. Gator was then dispatched to get The Mongoose. He made a big show of struggling with the container and the creature thrashing around inside. A new player was told to look through a small peephole to see The Mongoose. When he did, Gator would release a spring, and a racoon tail would suddenly come flying out of a hole at the top of the box. The unsuspecting viewer’s scream and wild leap, some of them attaining impressive measures in height and length, were always a highlight of the Lakeland experience and an initiation rite of the Tigers.

  But something else was stirring, something much more powerful than The Mongoose. The Tigers had been installed as preseason favorites to win the pennant. No one in Lakeland disagreed. But they now knew something else, too. They knew what it would take to be the team left standing in October.

  CHAPTER 4 Selling the Dream

  Running late. Gotta catch up. No time.

  They had shut down a freeway on him in Detroit, and Bill Freehan was an hour late for his appointment. He was inspecting a factory he had invested in, trying to get back into the swing of the business world after six years off chasing a dream.

  His company, Freehan-Bocci, was renting second-floor space above a beauty salon in Birmingham, a wealthy suburb of Detroit. Only temporary, he said. Only until he got himself organized again. Baseball memorabilia is the primary decor, but little about the setting is permanent.

  At fifty-five, beneath the conservative businessman’s suit and striped tie, he still has the athlete’s walk. The drive that turned him into the best catcher in the American League for almost a decade still ticks away inside him, guided in other paths. He is seated behind a bare desk in a cubicle of an office defined by low, movable walls. He keeps his voice down to retain some privacy.

  “The analogies between baseball and the business world are so apparent that they almost go without saying,” he says. “When a team goes bad it’s because people are trying to find fault, blaming somebody else, undermining the total effort. You have to learn what it’s like to win, and that’s true whether you’re running a corporation or a ball club. And when you learn, you have to do everything you can to reinforce the lessons.”

  If Freehan sounds a little like the primary speaker at a motivational sales meeting, that was always part of the package. The first person he learned to motivate was himself. He had been thrust into a leadership role on a major league team before reaching his twenty-fifth birthday. He was given the job of calling pitches for some of the most talented and quirkiest individuals in the game. It had been more of a sales job than most observers ever guessed, a constant process of building up his own confidence, talking himself into success. But if you had to predict which of the ’68 Tigers would do well after his career was over, top choice on most ballots would have been Freehan.

  And yet, right in the middle of a successful career as a manufacturer’s rep, with his finances assured and future clear, he tossed it aside for the chance to become baseball coach at the University of Michigan. Then six years later, just as abruptly, he quit.

  “I’d never worked in an institutional setting before,” he shrugs. “It was an adjustment I never got used to. But maybe it was something I had to get out of my system. I always wondered if I’d missed something, walking away from baseball when I did. I retired in 1976 and left the game completely—went right into business. So maybe the Michigan job was a chance to see how much I really missed it.

  “I did in some ways. But you forget a lot of the negatives. That feeling of walking out of a ballpark after midnight, when every-one else has gone home and the only people left are the ones cleaning out the concession stands. I used to hate that feeling. There’s nothing as lonely as an empty ballpark at night.

  “After I made my decision at Michigan, it crossed my mind that maybe I should call the Tigers and see what was available. I knew they were going through some major reorganization and that there might be a place for me. I never made the call. It dawned on me that I was afraid they’d say yes. That image of walking out of the empty stadium—is that what I still wanted to be doing when I was fifty-five years old? I guess it was just time to make the final decision about what it is I want to do when I grow up.”

  That was the same phrase he had used to describe his situation during an interview conducted more than twenty years before, as he was preparing to retire from the Tigers. Growing up. Moving on. Easier to say than to complete.

  Freehan started growing up only about three miles from this office, in the suburb of Royal Oak. He remembers clutching the money he earned on his paper route and taking the long bus ride to see games at Tiger Stadium. He was a Little League standout. In one All-Star game when a runner came in a little too hard at the plate, the two of them wound up rolling around in the dirt, flailing away at each other. The runner was Willie Horton.

  Freehan’s family moved to Florida just before Bill Freehan entered high school. He enrolled in a Catholic school in St. Petersburg and was a star in both baseball and football, with his choice of college scholarships. He wanted Notre Dame, but they told him he had to pick one sport or the other. So he settled on Western Michigan, then changed his mind at the last minute and went, instead, to Michigan.

  “I went to a small high school in Florida,” he explains, “and we were always getting beaten by the numbers. I wanted to be on the other side for a change.”

  At Michigan, Freehan was a starter at end as a sophomore football player. But it was in baseball that he excelled, hitting over .500 as a catcher during the 1961 Big 10 season. He signed a bonus contract with the Tigers and within two years was the regular catcher in Detroit.

  Just before the end of spring training in 1968 he sat beside the pool of the Holiday Inn. It was a balmy April night, a soft breeze barely rustling the palms in the motel courtyard. The veterans always moved there for the last week of training, sending their families back to Detroit. It was a symbolic drawing-together before the start of the season, a gathering of strength by the team for the season ahead. Freehan understood, however, that this
year was different. Of all the Tigers, he was the most bitter about the previous year’s defeat. He had puzzled over it all winter, trying to understand what had happened.

  “We got into the habit of thinking it was going to be automatic,” he said. “Shoot, we knew we were the best. We thought we’d win easily. Maybe you have to learn that nothing comes to you. You have to take it.

  “If it was just one game . . . hey, no problem. Anybody can get up for that. I did it as a football player all the time. But this is different. This is day after day after day. You can’t get too high or you’ll run yourself into the ground. But you’ve got to stay focused. Maybe it’s because I’m a Detroit kid and I know what a pennant would have meant to this city. Maybe that’s why it hurt as much as it did.”

  He was already balding in 1968, which made him look older. But there was an elfish twinkle, too, almost incongruous on a man of his size, like a leprechaun on steroids. He was the agitator, the back-of-the-bus wise guy, calling out, “Hey, Bussie, you’ve got it surrounded,” when the driver keeps circling the wrong block in search of the team hotel. To a teammate wearing a white suit, he’d chortle, “Hey, two Fudgicles over here.” But Freehan, more than any other single player, took 1968 on his shoulders as a personal mission.

  “I always believed in competition rather than confrontation,” he says in his tiny office. “I still do. I believe you build relationships to get the most out of people. That’s the way I was as a catcher. I look at these computers and pitching charts they have in the dugouts now, and I have to laugh. The computer says pitch a guy this way so that’s what you’re supposed to do. But it’s not that way. Can’t be. You’ve got to understand everyone in the equation as an individual. Hitters adjust all the time, and you have to know what’s going on inside your pitcher’s head.

  “You’re always asking yourself questions about the pitcher. ‘What do I do now? Is this the time to be blunt with this guy or to kid him along? What kind of stuff does he have? Is he losing it? Does it correspond to the book on this hitter?’ What computer is going to tell you all that? That’s absurd.

  “It’s all in the relationships. When Earl Wilson came over from Boston he was used to having Dick Radatz in the bull pen. He got into the habit of looking for help in the late innings. We didn’t have any Radatz in Detroit. I had to get him to want to finish his games. With Lolich, it was a matter of confidence. He had one bad game and he was ready to change his whole style of pitching. His attitude changed entirely after the World Series. But before that he didn’t have enough confidence in himself to get through trouble in the late innings. Afterwards, no problem. And Denny was Denny. We all believed in each other that season. Maybe Denny believed in himself a little bit more than anybody else.

  “Now all the pitchers want raises if they have so many quality starts. Quality starts. When we played that meant you couldn’t finish. It wasn’t a stat you especially wanted to keep track of. Management would hammer you with it at negotiating time.

  “I will say this about Mayo that season,” Freehan says. “He gave me the authority to call the game I wanted. He wasn’t big on signals from the dugout. We both had our ideas about things, and we’d go over them. But he’d listen to what I had to say. He wasn’t trying to impose a viewpoint. Not every manager I played for was that way. Charlie Dressen always had to be in control, but I was just breaking in when I played for him. Billy Martin ran hot and cold. It dawned on me that it was all theatrics with Billy, all for effect.

  “I remember once he brought in Hiller to pitch to Mike Epstein when he was with the As. Billy said he wanted nothing but curveballs. John threw a lousy curveball, and Epstein hit it into the seats to beat us. I’m at the locker after the game and reporters come up to me and starting asking me why I changed the sign. I looked up and said, ‘Excuse me?’ Billy had told them that I called for the curve and changed the pitching plan. I went into his office and shut the door and asked him what the hell was going on. ‘They misunderstood what I was saying,’ he said. Yeah, sure. But that’s the kind of manager he was.

  “Back then we were all bulletproof and going to live forever. We acted as if nothing could ever hurt us. Now the technology is so much better. The kids are prepared better than we were. They’re bigger and stronger. But the motivation has changed. You didn’t play to become a millionaire then. You think that’s why Al Kaline and Eddie Mathews played the game? But I was an eyewitness to the start of the change. I was the player rep, one of the guys who was in on the decision to bring in Marvin Miller to be the attorney for the players’ association. The key to the whole thing was that our attorney was twice as good as theirs.

  “Now it’s all different. Maybe it’s because I’m on the other side, in business, but I think it’s swung too far. I wonder sometimes why anyone would want to buy a big league franchise. Mike Ilitch spent $90 million to buy the Tigers and his annual return is something like one percent. That makes no sense at all. No one lays out that kind of money for that return.”

  Freehan still lives in the same home he bought as a player, in an area with some of the highest real estate values in Detroit. When his former teammate, the late Hank Aguirre, got the idea to start his company, Mexican Industries, to go after minority manufacturing contracts, Freehan was an investor. It was one of the firm’s six factories that Freehan had just been looking over. The company is thriving. Life is good.

  “What do I want to do when I grow up and get big?” he asks. It makes you wonder if the leprechaun lurking in his eyes will ever be entirely subdued by the white-shirted businessman with the accountant’s mind. In an empty ballpark at night, you can still hear the roar of the past.

  CHAPTER 5 AMatter of Race

  Spring training ground to its tedious conclusion. By the first week in April, everyone was thoroughly sick of Lakeland, eager for real competition. All the good stories had been told several times. The brew had gone flat. Routines settled into stagnation. The only thing to look forward to was the bus ride to the Tampa airport and the flight home to Detroit.

  The Tigers managed to win about as often as they lost that spring, finishing one game under .500. That’s what a manager looks for from a contender in the exhibitions. Too many wins is the mark of mediocrity, matching regulars against the other teams’ farmhands and building up an air of false confidence. Too many losses, on the other hand, is the mark of indifference. The last two games of this spring, however, quickened more than the usual interest. The Tigers would play a home-and-home series against the world champions, the St. Louis Cardinals. In these last days of spring training, regulars would fill both lineups. Each side intended to start top pitchers—Bob Gibson and Nelly Briles against Wilson and McLain. It wasn’t quite the real thing but close enough to taste.

  On the evening before the first of these games, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was murdered in Memphis.

  The Tigers were among the last major league teams to integrate. Along with the Red Sox and Yankees, Detroit was known as a franchise that didn’t especially welcome the coming of black ballplayers. The first one hadn’t reached Tiger Stadium until 1958, more than a decade after Jackie Robinson first stepped on the field wearing a Dodgers uniform. Even then, the move won no cheers from the city’s large black community. The player who integrated the Tigers was Ozzie Virgil, who came from the Dominican Republic. It was, black fans pointed out, not quite the same thing.

  Within three years, however, the Tigers had traded for Milwaukee’s star center fielder, Billy Bruton, and had brought up rookie second baseman Jake Wood. They hit one-two in Detroit’s 1961 lineup and added some speed to a team that was notoriously slow. Bruton and Wood set the table for the sluggers hitting behind them. The fans were delighted, urging them raucously to run each time they got on base. They combined for fifty-two steals, almost as many as the entire team had managed the previous year.

  By 1968, there were three African-Americans on the team. Horton had come off the streets of Detroit, a local legend even as a high
school star because of his long home runs. Gates Brown had been scouted behind the walls of the Ohio State Penitentiary. His story of personal redemption also made him a popular figure in Detroit. The third man was Earl Wilson. He was obtained from Boston midway through the 1966 season and turned into the team’s most effective pitcher, going 35-17 since the trade.

  To all appearances, there was no racial divide on the Tigers. Gates was a regular in endless games of tonk (which vaguely resembled gin rummy) and pinochle. The games were played on airplanes and in hotel rooms, with a core of Brown, McLain, John Hiller, Pat Dobson, and an ever-changing cast of others. McLain was especially welcomed. He played cards so poorly that Jake Wood nicknamed him “Dolphin,” because he was regarded as a fish on the hook. Racial bantering in the card games and in the clubhouse was low key and went both ways. Gates was often quoted as saying that his friend, Horton, had had a schedule in high school that had included “taking math, history, and overcoats.” A few seasons before, Horton had been accidentally cut on the hand while Gates was cleaning his spikes with a knife. There was a racist edge to the whispers about that because both men were competing for the starting job in left field. In reality, the two were close friends, and Gates was mortified by the accident.

  Wilson was a bit more aloof. He was a tall, almost regal man. Gates referred to him as the “Duke of Earl,” a tribute to his extensive wardrobe and the elegant style with which he wore it. Some of the older Tigers felt that it was “too flashy, Hollywood stuff.” But even in those years, when most teams, including the Tigers, required their players to wear coats and ties on the road, Wilson’s attire was impressive if not somewhat conservative with a decided emphasis on double-breasted suits and striped ties.