The Tigers of '68

by George Cantor

  Most members of that team, however, spent their best years with the Tigers. Many of them did well financially after leaving the game, making comfortable livings in business or broadcasting. A few became quite wealthy. But some could never quite put behind the baseball life, and others paid a high price for it.

  Oyler died of a heart attack at the age of forty-two. He had moved to the Seattle area after being drafted by that team and worked for Boeing after his retirement. As in Detroit, he became a semilegendary figure because of his inability to hit. He retired during the 1970 season with a lifetime average of .175. “He never carried a grudge about my replacing him during the series,” said Stanley. “He was simply a great guy.”

  Sparma died of a heart attack at the age of forty-four. He was struck by a massive coronary in a Columbus hospital just days after undergoing a triple bypass. He never regained the touch that he displayed the night the Tigers clinched the pennant. He won just seven more games in his career and was out of baseball at the age of twenty-eight. One of the last phone calls he received in the hospital was from Earl Wilson, the man he had been called in to replace in the pennant-clinching game. Sparma’s sister told reporters that the call had cheered him up immensely.

  Hiller had his heart attack at the age of twenty-seven but recovered and fought his way back to the majors. McMahon, who went on to become an assistant to his childhood buddy, Al Davis, owner of the NFL’s Raiders, died of a heart attack at the age of fifty-seven.

  But for most of the Tigers, an entire era seemed to end when their center of laughter, Norm Cash, fell off the end of a dock and drowned in Lake Michigan. He had taken a boat to Beaver Island with his wife. After a social evening in one of the island’s inns, he told his companions that he was heading back for his boat. Friends noted that it had been raining, the dock was slippery, and he was wearing cowboy boots. His body was found in fifteen feet of water near the dock the next morning. It was eighteen years and two days after the final game of the 1968 World Series.

  Although he had been a target of boos throughout his playing days, Cash was treated with deep affection and regard after his retirement. He moved to Detroit and came to symbolize the ethos of the ’68 team: fun-loving and scrappy, indomitable, and very human. He worked as a color commentator on cable television for a few seasons. His wit and the tales he told about his illustrious teammates carried well over the tube. But he had to give it up after a stroke left his face partially paralyzed and caused him to slur his words. In an old-timer’s game several months before his death, fans gasped when an easy throw from across the infield hit him in the head and bounced away. “Well, I field about as good as I always did,” he said later. But he was deeply embarrassed over the incident and despondent over how the stroke had robbed him of his physical gifts. He was fifty-one at the time of his death.

  McLain claimed that the Tigers had shortened his career and ruined his arm by forcing him to take cortisone shots for a chronically sore shoulder. He lost twenty-two games with Washington in 1971 and, after several attempts at a comeback with various teams, left the majors for good after 1972. He moved to Tennessee and then Florida. Both he and his wife declared bankruptcy on separate occasions to wipe out accumulated debts. In 1985, he was convicted of drug-related charges and racketeering. Sent to a federal prison, he served twenty-nine months and was released after an appeal, alleging irregularities in his trial, was upheld.

  Ballooned to over 300 pounds, he returned to Detroit in the late 1980s and seemed to rebuild his life. He became the host of an early-morning radio talk show, displaying a surprising ability to gab engagingly about a wide range of subjects. His populist approach to most issues appealed to the local audience, and his ratings put him among the leaders in the highly competitive time slot. But the death of his daughter in an auto accident left him badly shaken. A dispute with his station over a new contract and his demands to broadcast from a home studio abruptly ended his media career. He then announced that he had become part-owner of a meat-packing company in the small town of Chesaning. But after a few months, the company went out of business. McLain and his partners were found guilty in December 1996 of conspiracy, fraud, and theft for raiding the company pension fund and using the money for, among other things, a down payment on a Puerto Rican condominium and an airplane for McLain. As of this writing, the case is pending trial.

  You will find scant sympathy among his former teammates for the mess McLain made of his life after baseball. Most of them remain closely knit, helping each other in business when they can, keeping the friendships that were forged all those years ago. But McLain remains always the outsider. He was tolerated for the enormous talent and competitive fire he brought to the game, but regarded with suspicion, and even hostility, for his endless self-promotion. That hasn’t changed.

  The game itself changed enormously after 1968. It was, in many regards, the last year of its kind, a season out of time. The players staged their first walkout at the start of spring training in 1969 over pension benefits. The walkout lasted only a few days and affected very little, but it was a show of resolve. Within three years, the players walked again, and this time it took a week off of the start of the 1972 season. The game shut down for more than a month in 1981, and in 1994 the season was cancelled after mid-August, and no World Series was played. The sport is still trying to recover from the public relations disaster of that stoppage.

  Curt Flood, the man who couldn’t quite get to Northrup’s drive in 1968, was traded by St. Louis the following season. Instead of reporting to Philadelphia, he decided to legally challenge baseball’s reserve clause in the standard player contract. He was unsuccessful, and his career was sacrificed as a result. “You don’t really think they would ever let a black man bring down the system,” says Earl Wilson bitterly. But it was the first step in ending the old order that had kept player salaries artificially depressed. By the end of the ’70s, the pendulum had swung fully to the other extreme. Million-dollar contracts were common-place. By the ’80s, individual players were making more money than the entire payroll of the American League in the 1960s. Ballplayers were paid like movie stars, and they began to act that way, too.

  Drug use derailed several promising careers. The designated hitter brought specialization to a game that had always depended on multitalented generalists. The philosophy of pitching changed. The phrase “complete game” almost vanished from the game’s lexicon. Now there were long relievers and short relievers and stoppers. Managers shuttled them in and out in the late innings, and the game slowed to a crawl. The three-hour ball game was almost the norm. All of it turned the game into some-thing far different than it was in 1968. Maybe not worse. But undeniably different.

  It is now extremely rare, for example, to play a World Series game in much less than three hours. But the seventh game in ’68, on which everything was riding, played amid almost stifling tension, took a grand total of two hours and seven minutes.

  Mayo Smith died of a stroke in 1977. He never managed again, and over the years his reputation has remained fairly unchanged. He is still regarded as a very lucky man who ended up in the right place at the right time. When a group of expatriate Tigers fans located in the Washington, D.C., area rummaged about for a suitable name for their organization—unpretentious and a bit obscure—they settled on the Mayo Smith Society. So in the nation’s capital, at least, Mayo enjoys a certain kind of immortality.

  In Detroit, members of the ’68 Tigers remain as popular as ever. Jerry Lewis, who had thrilled to their exploits then as a young man, began holding fantasy camps featuring members of that team in the early ’80s. The camps have sold out every year since. Several of his customers return annually and have become close friends with the players they once idolized. Willie Horton fires up his barbecue, old stories are told again, drinks are passed around. It’s the next best thing to having been there.

  Because this team still occupies a special place in the history of the city. The players have joined their pr
edecessors of 1935 as an almost mythic unit—more than a baseball team. The belief has passed into Detroit folklore. Many people swear, as Willie Horton says, that they were “put here by God to save the city.”

  At the risk of sounding sacrilegious, it should be pointed out that the Almighty didn’t have much of a follow-through. The city’s racial split was too wide for the temporary euphoria of a championship to overcome. White flight continued unabated. The homicide rate soared, and throughout the ’70s and ’80s, Detroit became known as the Murder Capital of America. Landmark hotels, restaurants, theaters, stores shut down. By the mid80-’s, almost no commercial presence remained downtown. Although the suburbs prosper, Detroit’s average income is the lowest of any large American city. In many respects, the ’67 riots never ended.

  Even with contending teams, home baseball attendance began to drop in the late 1980s. As fans moved farther and farther away, into newer and ever more distant suburbs, they became reluctant to make the long drive back to see a ball game. It soon became apparent that in order to survive and generate the revenue needed to compete in the world of free agency, Tiger Stadium would have to be replaced. In spite of the history associated with the site, the only one on which the Tigers had ever played, plans were approved for a new stadium. Necessity simply outweighed sentiment. The new ballpark will be closer to downtown and ready before the end of the century. There are hopes that the new ballpark will be the catalyst for a lasting redevelopment of down-town, a true rebirth of the city center.

  Dick Tracewski stayed around as a coach through the end of the 1995 season, the last of the ’68 Tigers to remain in uniform. Kaline and Price are still heard as television broadcasters.

  Campbell, who had devoted his life to the organization, was fired as president of the Tigers in 1992. It was a condition of the sale of the club to pizza magnate Mike Ilitch. Campbell retired to Lakeland, the training base at which he had spent so many springs. But he refused to come out to Tigertown, and he never saw the Tigers play again.

  Those who knew him best said that much of his zest for living left him after his dismissal. He died in December 1995. Gates Brown was a pallbearer at the funeral, and Kaline delivered one of the eulogies. The subject was loyalty. It was a term that had become almost oxymoronic in baseball.

  The bells of Mariners’ Church in downtown Detroit played “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” as the casket was carried to the waiting hearse. It was just the sort of tune Campbell loved to hear at his ballpark. None of your rock and roll or that Jose Feliciano guy.

  But as the old bells tolled, it sounded like a dirge for a vanished game. Hunched against the December cold, the mourners walked off into the wintry, empty streets of Detroit.

  Statistics

  THE 1968 TIGERS—GAME BY GAME

  All-Star Game

  THE 1968 TIGERS—THE STATS