by Tim Wendel
“Some would say we were grasping at straws,” Horton said. “But we still talked about those scouting reports. How (Brock) would drift and slow down a bit going around third base. How he didn’t slide.
“In the Series, we were still practicing our relays, making good throws because that’s the only chance we knew we’d have against him. Everything may have been against us, but we had to find something to believe in.”
While the Cardinals were the consummate pros, a rainbow coalition of understanding and discussion, the Tigers, even with their backs against the wall, remained a gang of misfits, an irreverent band of brothers. In the hometown clubhouse, catcher Bill Freehan squinted through the gun sight of a new Winchester rifle that he stowed in his locker. “That is how we’re going to stop Lou Brock,” shouted Mickey Lolich from across the room.
If anything, the Tigers realized that they had already endured their trial by fire the season before. In losing the pennant on the final day, in playing on in a city literally going up flames, they had learned that they could rely upon their teammates. “We looked out for each other,” said Lolich, Detroit’s starting pitcher for Game Five. “Always have, always did. Sometimes that’s the only thing you can do, the only thing you have left in the world. The guy on either side of you.”
Tigers play-by-play announcer Ernie Harwell invited Jose Feliciano, whose cover of The Doors’ “Light My Fire” was high on the pop charts, to sing the national anthem before Game Five. The rendition soon ignited the kind of public-relations firestorm that could seemingly only take place in 1968.
“It was a long version of the song and at that point in time, singers weren’t supposed to give their own interpretations,” McLain recalled. “This was the height of the Vietnam War and the protest movement. The National Guard was all over the field in a patriotic display, and here’s this blind Latino supposedly ‘butchering’ the anthem. It was viewed as sacrilegious rather than an impressive artistic interpretation.”
As Feliciano finished his soulful version, angry fans were already calling NBC affiliates and local newspapers nationwide. More importantly, in terms of the game at hand, the artistic interpretation derailed Lolich’s pregame routine. Usually the Tigers’ left-hander took about twelve minutes to warm up. That tired his arm a touch, allowing his deliveries to sink, just like pitching coach Gerry Staley back in Portland had taught him. Yet before Game Five, “[They] played it early,” Lolich said. “It took the guy three minutes to sing. Then the umps came out and started the game. I decided to rear back and throw as hard as I could. When I do that the ball comes in straight.”
The Cardinals wasted no time in capitalizing on Lolich’s mistakes. For the second game in a row, lead-off hitter Lou Brock smoked the second pitch he saw, this time doubling to left field. He came around on Curt Flood’s single. Flood then stole second base and he, too, scored when Orlando Cepeda hit a home run into the left-field stands. In roughly the amount of time it took Feliciano to finish his much-maligned anthem, the Cardinals had struck what many believed would be the closing notes of the World Series.
“I thought we would wrap it up, the whole Series, when I hit that homer,” Cepeda said. “I definitely thought so. But Lolich got tough after that.”
St. Louis manager Red Schoendienst considered starting left-hander Steve Carlton for Game Five. In ’68, however, Carlton was still years away from the Hall of Fame numbers he would put up for the Philadelphia Phillies, when he would lead the National League in victories four times. This was only Carlton’s second full season in the majors, during which he posted a respectable but unremarkable 13–11 record and 2.99 ERA. In the end, Schoendienst decided the pitcher nicknamed “Lefty” better served the team out of the bullpen, and instead he gave Nellie Briles, who had gone 19–11 during the regular season, the opportunity to redeem his losing Game Two performance and close out the Series. Early on, after St. Louis raced out to that 3–0 lead, it appeared Schoendienst had made the right decision. Briles was in charge and shutting the Tigers down.
“There are stretches as a pitcher when you feel you can do no wrong,” Briles later said. “The first [few] innings of that game, I was in control. I thought I was going to be the one to bring the championship back to St. Louis.”
Briles nearly benefited from another run in the third, but Tigers’ catcher Bill Freehan somehow threw out Brock trying to steal second base. After that things began to swing in the Tigers’ favor.
In the fourth inning, Detroit’s Mickey Stanley tripled down the right-field line off Briles. At first base, Cepeda claimed that Stanley hadn’t touched the bag but the umpires didn’t buy it. For a moment, it appeared that Briles would escape the inning unscathed as he induced a grounder from Al Kaline, holding Stanley at third base. Yet Stanley scored on a Norm Cash sacrifice fly, Horton then tripled and came in to score on Jim Northrup’s single. That sliced St. Louis’s lead to 3–2 through four innings, but the Cardinals were still just five innings away from capturing the World Series for the second consecutive season and for the third time in the last five years.
In the top of the fifth inning, Brock was back at it, doubling off Lolich with one out. Just like that the Tigers’ pitcher was back in hot water. “We’d just made it a ballgame, with the two runs in the bottom of the fourth, and here I was about to give ’em more in the next inning,” Lolich remembered. “Let’s just say it wasn’t the game plan.”
Out in left field, Horton told himself to be ready. Julian Javier was at the plate for St. Louis and Horton knew that Brock would try to score on any hit to the outfield. As if on cue, Javier singled sharply to Horton in left field. In a play that the Tigers’ players and their fans would still picture clearly in their minds decades later, Horton fielded the ball about waist high. Without any hesitation he threw a bullet to home plate—just like his teammate Mickey Stanley had taught him.
In previous games, the Cardinals had noticed that Horton’s arm was better than advertised. In fact, some were amused when Detroit Tigers manager Mayo Smith took him out for a late-inning replacement.
“He’s not Carl Yastrzemski or Reggie Jackson,” Tigers’ coach Tony Cuccinello later said in Doug Feldman’s El Birdos: The 1967 and 1968 St. Louis Cardinals, “ but he’s a little better than average. He fools a lot of people.”
On that afternoon, Horton’s throw to the plate was right on target, with plenty on it. At home plate, Freehan straddled the plate and didn’t say a word. That was the signal to third baseman Don Wert to let the throw go through rather than cutting off Horton’s effort. The Tigers would try for a play at the plate.
In a decision that Lou Brock would try to live down for years to come, the St. Louis speedster decided not to slide just as the ball arrived, on one hop, into Freehan’s glove. Instead he stretched his left leg toward the plate, attempting to angle his foot between Freehan’s legs. The Detroit catcher stood his ground, blocking the dish.
Several of the Cardinals were shocked that their top base runner didn’t slide. In fact, years later, at banquets and public appearances Bob Gibson would sometimes introduce his good friend as the guy who forgot to slide in the biggest play of the 1968 World Series. Yet Horton, who had made the throw, maintained Brock had no choice but to go in standing up. “It’s a good thing that he didn’t slide,” Horton said. “ [Brock] would have broken his leg with Bill Freehan standing in there like he did. The only one I ever saw cover the plate like Bill, from back in our day, was Phil Roof from Kansas City.”
“I was safe,” Brock later insisted. “If I slide, he could come down on my knee and I wouldn’t reach the plate. I tried to run through him.”
Yet even Brock’s own manager didn’t buy that reasoning. “I don’t know why Brock didn’t slide,” Schoendienst said.
In a bang-bang play, home-plate umpire Doug Harvey called Brock out. As the Cardinals’ dugout roared in protest, Harvey gestured to Brock’s spike marks in the dirt, seemingly inches in front of home plate.
“The umpire sai
d Brock didn’t touch the plate,” Freehan said. “There is no way I could see whether he did or not, it all happened so fast.... [Harvey] said he probably would have been safe if he had slid.”
On television, NBC replayed the collision at the plate. While largely inconclusive, the replays began debates in living rooms across the country. The score remained St. Louis 3, Detroit 2. Yet just like that the World Series became the main topic of conversation again in the sports world.
“I give the umpire credit,” St. Louis sportswriter Bob Broeg said. “He didn’t prejudge it. He didn’t automatically assume (Brock) was safe.”
In fact, Broeg would become so intrigued with the play that he made a special trip to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, and watched tape of the play over and over again. “The film at Cooperstown bears it out,” Broeg said. “It was the right call.”
The play at the plate had been studied from as many angles as NBC’s cameras allowed by the time Lolich stepped up to the plate in the bottom of the seventh inning. Even though the Tigers still trailed by a run, 3–2, Mayo Smith allowed his pitcher to swing away, perhaps thinking back to Lolich’s unlikely homer back in Game Two. In any event, Lolich responded with a looping single to right field. “The writers have done such a good job of managing my ballclub, I decided to go against the consensus,” Smith said afterward. “I should have called the press box and found out whether you boys thought I should have used a pinch hitter.”
With Lolich aboard, the Cardinals brought in Joe Hoerner, their top reliever, to face Dick McAuliffe. The Tigers’ gritty second baseman hung in against the tough left-hander, smacking a ground ball through the right side of the infield for a single. Mickey Stanley then followed with a walk to load the bases. As they had done all year, the Tigers began to mount a comeback in the late innings. The only difference was this time the entire season was on the line.
Fittingly, Al Kaline, who had waited sixteen seasons to appear in his first World Series, was next up. His single to right field drove in Lolich and McAuliffe, putting the Tigers ahead, 4–3. The next batter, Norm Cash, also singled to score Stanley, padding Detroit’s lead to two runs.
Despite Willie Horton’s epic throw to the plate back in the fifth inning, Smith still lifted him for a defensive replacement after the Tigers took the lead. “Some superstitions die hard, I guess,” Horton said. “Mayo had won some games that way and maybe he got to believing it was the only way it could happen.”
Once again Ray Oyler entered the game to play short, with Stanley returning to the outfield. Even though the Cardinals threatened in the eighth and ninth innings, Lolich hung in, going the distance with eight scoreless innings following the three-run first, striking out eight along the way.
After the game, Feliciano’s rendition of the national anthem garnered almost as much attention as Brock’s play at the plate.
“I picked him because he’s one of the outstanding singers in America today,” Ernie Harwell told the Detroit Free Press. “I had heard from people in music whose opinion I respect that he had an interesting version of the national anthem. I feel a fellow has a right to sing any way he can sing it.”
For his part, Feliciano tried to explain his soulful, sometimes meandering performance. “I wanted to contribute something to this country, to express my gratification for what it has done for me,” said Feliciano, who had flown in from Las Vegas. “I love this country. When anyone knocks it, I’m the first to defend it.”
Amid the uproar, the Tigers focused on what they had accomplished during the game, itself. They had done what they set out to do, winning in front of their hometown fans and avoiding elimination. The Series was headed back to St. Louis for Game Six.
FINAL SCORE: TIGERS 5, CARDINALS 3
St. Louis leads the Series, 3–2
A few weeks before the World Series opened, Hawaii Five-0 debuted on CBS, where it would become the longest-running crime show in television history until it was eventually surpassed by Law & Order. Veteran newsman Walter Cronkite had advocated for a longer news show and that same week CBS rolled out the initial broadcast of 60 Minutes. It would air twice monthly before soon settling in as a weekly show that remains on the air today.
In the years ahead, such programming and advancements in technology (cable, satellite, large-screen TVs) would have a profound effect on how fans followed their teams and sports in general. But of course much had also changed over the course of the previous twenty-three years—since Detroit last won a World Series title—as well.
“What had made this wait so acute for Detroit’s fans was that they had never watched their team win on TV,” George Cantor wrote. “The revolution in communications since 1945 had skipped right over the Tigers. Watching the team you root for play on network TV, seen by the entire nation, seemed to validate your experience as a fan. Television brought an immediacy to sports unlike anything that had gone before.... The wait of twenty-three years seemed longer than it actually was because in that span every one of the other original teams, except the Cubs and A’s, had taken their turn on the tube.”
Perhaps that’s what Al Kaline was trying to address when he said he wanted his Tigers to at least put on a good show. After all, so many more people were watching now. Still, the experts expected the Cardinals to ultimately win it all. After all, they had two cracks at it, with Bob Gibson ready to go again.
October 9, 1968
Game Six, Busch Stadium, St. Louis, Missouri
Denny McLain’s shoulder felt markedly better on the eve of Game Six. Perhaps it was the day of rest, as the teams traveled back to St. Louis for the remainder of the Series. More than likely it was the assortment of painkillers he had taken. In Detroit, McLain had received another cortisone shot. The Tigers’ doctors had convinced him to submit to it in hopes that Detroit could prolong the Series with Mickey Lolich on the mound. Lolich did his job and McLain now literally took another one for the team.
“What Denny has is an inflamed shoulder,” said Dr. Harry Wright, the team’s physician. “Up to now we’ve been manipulating the muscle, attempting to work the soreness out. But it wasn’t enough anymore.”
At the time, McLain told the press that the cortisone shot was his first of the season. Years later, though, he confirmed to historian William Mead that “late 1965 was the first time I had a cortisone shot, and it just multiplied from there. In 1968, I probably got a dozen.”
In his memoir, McLain added that by the time he was playing in the World Series that season, “I had guys coming at me with needles from all directions.... By ’68, there was never a time I pitched without some pain.”
An hour before Game Six, McLain received another shot, this one of Xylocaine, in his aching shoulder. While the drug can prolong the cortisone’s pain-killing power, one of Xylocaine’s side effects is that it will temporarily deaden the immediate area where the injection is made. On past occasions with Xylocaine, McLain said his shoulder felt “ like a dead weight the first thirty minutes before it springs back to life.” This time, though, the shot hit “the right spot.” As he prepared for Game Six he felt no lag time or much pain at all.
“I think I had a letdown myself after I won thirty and we won the pennant,” McLain told reporters beforehand. “To tell you the truth, I don’t think I’ve gotten up for the Series yet.... I think the only thing that has been damaged has been my pride. I think I have enough pride to overcome that.”
Manager Mayo Smith again watched McLain warm up in the bullpen. This time around, the ball was down in the strike zone, with plenty of zip, and the manager confirmed what everybody expected: McLain would start on two days’ rest over Earl Wilson, Pat Dobson, and Joe Sparma.
Following a more conventional national anthem presentation, sung by Miss Lydia Hunter of the Washington University music department, the Tigers’ right-hander began to show the Cardinals’ crowd why he was the American League’s counterpart to St Louis’s Bob Gibson. Why he was the game’s first thirty-game
winner since the Cardinals’ Dizzy Dean in 1934. A pitcher who knew no bounds in 1968.
“The rules for Denny just don’t seem to be the same as for the rest of us,” catcher Bill Freehan wrote in his memoir. “Most of us have to be at the park at least two and a half hours before game time. Denny sometimes shows up five or ten minutes before a game. People used to say, before night games, that the best thing about baseball was that you couldn’t beat the hours. In Denny’s case, anyway, that’s still true.”
Gates Brown said he and teammates learned to steer clear of the various get-rich schemes McLain masterminded over the years. “Denny was one of those guys who could look you in the face and lie and lie some more,” Brown said. “But he was such an outgoing, funny guy that you didn’t mind the money flying out of your pocket … Plus, the SOB knew how to win ballgames.”
Through it all in 1968, the Tigers put runs on the scoreboard for McLain, and he usually responded with scoreless innings. Thus far in the Series things had been different, but in Game Six it was back to old times. In the second inning, Detroit scored two runs off Cardinals’ starter Ray Washburn, who looked nothing like the pitcher who won Game Three or pitched the second of two no-hitters at Candlestick Park back in September. Despite averaging just two walks per nine innings during the ’68 regular season Washburn walked Norm Cash in the second inning and Willie Horton got the Tigers off and running, stroking a double to the left-centerfield wall scoring him. Bill Freehan soon followed by breaking out of a five-game hitless string, his single bringing in Horton. After two innings Detroit held a 2–0 lead, with plenty more to come.
