The Tigers of '68

by George Cantor

  Still, the Tigers franchise remained ambivalent about minorities. Many in the organization felt that three was just about the right number of black players (although a fourth would be added later in the season with relief pitcher John Wyatt). Some executives spoke privately about how Hispanic players wilted under pressure. They made sure that there was no chance of that happening with the Tigers. The only Hispanic on the ball club was Julio Moreno, a sad-visaged Cuban who had pitched briefly with Washington in the early ’50s. He pitched batting practice, a very low-pressure position.

  When Charlie Dressen managed the team he regularly reminded his players that the National League was far tougher. He attributed that to the greater number of blacks in that circuit. Dressen felt they played the game to the hilt and made it faster and meaner. He imported several players from the Dodgers during his tenure in Detroit in an effort to “toughen up” the Tigers. None of them, however, were black.

  The Cardinals, on the other hand, fielded a lineup that was predominantly black and Hispanic on the days when Gibson pitched. The Dodgers had also won championships with teams with a large number of minorities. But baseball overall did not regard the career of Dr. King as having any special resonance. The game, after all, had removed its racial bar twenty-־two years ago, long before King’s entry into the civil rights movement. Black stars were now firmly established. Segregated facilities were a thing of the past. The game had desegregated outposts in Houston and Atlanta. Many baseball men understood the injustice of Jim Crow and King’s campaign against it. Some may have even supported it. It just didn’t seem to have much to do with them.

  On the day after the assassination, Coretta Scott King took her slain husband’s place at the head of a Memphis march. It had been scheduled as a show of support for striking garbage workers, but the assassination turned it into a tribute to King. Following the assassination, riots had broken out in Washington, D.C., Chicago, and one hundred other cities. Detroit, still exhausted from the previous summer’s violence, remained quiet. In Florida, there had been some disturbances a few miles from Al Lang Field in St. Petersburg. But it was decided that the final exhibition games of the spring would go on as scheduled.

  The Cards won the first one, 3-2. Gibson pitched four innings, gave up a run, retired the last eight men in a row, and struck out three. The next day the Tigers won, 4-2. McLain looked unimpressive in three innings. But two rookies, Daryl Patterson and Jon Warden, shut down the St. Louis lineup without a hit for the last three. It was generally supposed that these two teams had a rendezvous in six months to open the World Series at Busch Stadium. So when Kaline crashed a two-run homer in the seventh to win the second game, there was a little bit more enthusiasm in the Detroit dugout than was the standard for a mere exhibition.

  Mayo Smith liked what he saw in Patterson and Warden. He sat down to make his final cuts of the spring that night, and the two rookies were kept on the team. He also did a strange thing in the last exhibition game. He brought in Stanley to play a few innings at third base. The center fielder was regarded as the most talented athlete on the team and frequently took a turn fielding grounders during infield drill. Still, actually playing him in the infield seemed like an odd move. It was simply noted as a curiosity, however, and passed over.

  As the Tigers flew back to Detroit to start the season, President Johnson proclaimed a national day of mourning for King. All openers scheduled for April 9 were postponed in deferenee to the funeral service, which was led by King’s father at Atlanta’s Ebenezer Baptist Church. A mourning nation watched on television as King’s coffin, pulled on a wagon by two Georgia mules, was carried to its resting place. Schools shut down. The New York Stock Exchange closed. The Academy Award presentations were rescheduled.

  The Tigers, however, were unable to watch the service. Although the opener had been cancelled, the ball club scheduled a team practice for that morning. Wilson was furious. He showed up for the mandatory practice but merely went through the motions. Afterward, he angrily berated team management for what he said was a blatant disregard of the mood of its black players. For once, the world outside seemed to have punctured baseball’s cocoon.

  CHAPTER 6 The Duke of Earl

  "Did I seem to be angry? Well, maybe I was. Part of it was, you know, maybe a defensive thing towards the media. But I’d lived through a lot of things to be angry about, too.”

  Earl Wilson pitched his last ball game in 1970, just two years after catching the only winner of his eleven-year big league career. He then walked away from baseball and never looked back. His office in the small auto-supplier factory he owns in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills is devoid of any baseball memorabilia. He prefers it that way.

  “Baseball belongs to another life,” he says in the comfortable reception area outside his private office. “Don’t get me wrong. It was a good life. But there’s no comparison in my mind. There is nothing I experienced in baseball that compares to the excitement of handing out your payroll checks . . . and then driving like hell to the bank to make sure that they’re covered. Now that’s excitement.”

  Wilson laughs heartily as he makes the comparison. In his mid-fifties, he is still a handsome man, only a little thicker around the middle than he was as a player. But he has shed a lot of weight, too—most of it in anger.

  “You sometimes had to walk softly around the Duke,” recalls Gates Brown with a small smile.

  Wilson’s explosions were legendary in the Detroit clubhouse. Teammates and reporters alike could never tell when one was coming. A seemingly innocuous question could prompt a furious, obscene outburst. He might apologize later, throw an arm around your shoulder, and laugh about it. But Wilson’s bursts of anger were awesome to behold.

  On one occasion, an admirer had shipped him some fresh plums and berries. Wilson had eaten some of them and stowed the rest of the package in his locker to be disposed of later. While he was on the field, some prankish Tigers—to this day no one will confess to it—swiped the package and passed out the goodies around the clubhouse. When Wilson returned and found the empty package, he went ballistic. A practical joke suddenly turned into a roaring confrontation as Wilson stalked around the clubhouse, demanding to know who had stolen his plums. To some of the more cinematic Tigers, it was reminiscent of Captain Queeg raging about his stolen strawberries in The Caine Mutiny. But Wilson was a lot bigger and angrier than Humphrey Bogart had been in that role.

  “I’ve got to admit I don’t recall much about that incident,” he says. “Which isn’t to say it didn’t happen. It’s just been a long, long time, and my mind is on so many other things.

  “But, yes, I was an angry man. I was the only African-American on that team who’d grown up in the South. Louisiana. You don’t forget the things you saw when you were a kid. The thing is when I was that age and actually going through it, it didn’t seem so bad to me. Only when 1 got a little older and started looking back did I realize how awful it was. I got to understand there were parts of life that I had never even explored because they were closed to me.

  “My family moved to San Diego when I was a teenager, and I finished growing up out there. But when I signed with the Red Sox, they sent me right back into it. Playing in Montgomery, Alabama, in the late 1950s. No fun.

  “But, you know, black folks are so precious to me. We’d be on these bus trips, and the team would stop for food at some dump on the highway. The black players couldn’t get off the bus and go inside. But the black people who worked in these places always made sure that we got something good. These old ladies would come running out to the bus with a meal thay had fixed special for us. We probably ate better than the white players did. They were inside eating hamburgers, and we were getting some good food back on the bus. And they never let us pay for a thing.

  “Even when I got to the big club, though, it didn’t end. The black players with the Red Sox were routinely refused service in Florida. I even walked into the general manager’s office and demanded a trade to
a team that trained in Arizona. You can’t know how degrading that was. It was baseball’s dirty secret back then.

  “I still remember clearly coming into Detroit for the first time with Boston. It was the first time I had ever been in a city where black people were in the middle class. They had their own homes, new cars, livin’ the life. They took me to this neighborhood of huge old homes, mansions, big trees—Arden Park, I think it was—and told me that most of the houses were owned by blacks. I couldn’t believe it. I fell in love with this city right then. I told myself that this is where I wanted to live when my career was over. I never could have guessed it’d happen the way it did, though.”

  Wilson came to the Tigers in June 1966 in a trade for outfielder Don Demeter—one of the ex-Dodgers whom Dressen had thought would toughen up the team. That hadn’t worked out because Demeter had become a devout Christian, as mild a man as one ever saw in the majors. Dressen was deeply disappointed. But Wilson quickly stepped into the starting rotation, the only member of that group who hadn’t come through the Detroit system. Then in 1967 he won twenty-two games, tying for the league lead in that stat. He also changed mentally. Under Freehan’s constant prodding, Wilson became a finisher. In his previous five years with Boston he completed only twenty-five games. In just two seasons with Detroit, he matched that total. He was the automatic choice to pitch the 1968 season opener against Boston.

  “I remember that workout on the day of Dr. King’s funeral,” Wilson says. “Since I was pitching the next day there wasn’t much I was going to do anyhow. But everyone had to be there. Then they announced that same day about how the entire team had to show up for this charity event for the Capuchin Soup Kitchen. This was one of the Tigers’ favorite charities, an annual thing. Attendance was always mandatory. But this year they announced they were moving it to the suburbs, some big banquet hall out in Southfield. I guess it was the riots or something, and white people still didn’t want to come downtown.

  “I can’t change who I am. If you don’t want to hear what I have to say, don’t ask me. That went from Jim Campbell to the batboy. Don’t tell me how I should be living my life. Did that mean I had a chip on my shoulder? Well, in my mind right’s right and wrong’s wrong. The death of Dr. King was still on my mind. Then when I heard about where they were moving this dinner the first thought I had was that there weren’t going to be any little black kids there. So I went to Willie and to Gates and said, ‘Let’s not go.’ I knew it wouldn’t come out right in the media. And we did have our butts handed to us when the story got out. But you know what? They made sure that there were black kids at that event, and that’s what was important.

  “What I remember about the opener in ’68 was that I didn’t do too well. I was gone by the sixth, and they beat us, 7-3. Carl Yastrzemski hit two home runs, but not off me, and everyone was wondering if it was going to be just like last year, with Yaz killing us. What I do remember was that my first time up I hit a home run. I prided myself on my hitting. To me it was another weapon I had as a pitcher. It infuriated me when they brought in the designated hitter. That came in after I retired, but they started talking about it back then. That penalized pitchers like me who worked on their hitting, who cared enough about it to make themselves good at it. I hit thirty-five home runs in my career. The fans used to love to watch me hit because they knew it wasn’t automatic. I could hit one out anytime. If I pitched for the Tigers today I’d never even come to the plate.

  “I bet you didn’t know I was the first big league player to have an agent. It’s true. I hired Bob Woolf from Boston to do my negotiating. But it was all in secret. They wouldn’t even talk to agents back then. They weren’t allowed in baseball. So when I went in to talk to Campbell, he’d make an offer and I’d get up and excuse myself to go to the bathroom. Then I’d run down the hall and call Woolf on the phone, and he’d tell me what to say. Campbell must have thought my bladder had shrunk or something. I don’t know how much more I made because of Woolf but I think it was a few thousand—not bad money back then. When I told Campbell about it years later he told me: ‘Earl, I suspected something was up because you’re not that goddamned smart.’ But I thought Jim was a fair man. I respected him, and now that I run a company and see it all from the other side. I appreciate what he did, too.”

  Wilson gets up and insists on taking his visitor on a tour of his 60,000-square-foot operation, situated in a sprawling industrial park. It is called Auto-Тек and manufactures the insulation that protects various small parts within a car. The sign at the front office window reads: “Appointments only; 30 minutes maximum time available. E.W.” The business is doing well.

  “Maybe I didn’t achieve as much as I should have as a player,” says Wilson. “And maybe I achieved more than I should have in business. I’ll take that tradeoff. This is like a ball club, though. Give me what I need, and I’ll play you. Sure, I make a special effort to hire minorities here. I feel that’s my obligation. But I tell them, look, I bust my ass for this business to survive, and I expect the same from you. If you can’t give me that, I don’t want you here. Because my first obligation is to my company.”

  The tour is over, and Wilson, smiling and at ease, says his goodbyes.

  “What I remember about that team in 1968,” he says, “is that there were no divisions. We were all like brothers. People don’t ever get comfortable with each other when race gets into it. But for that one year, at least, that wasn’t the case. We were really together.

  “I don’t do the card shows or autograph things. But almost every day someone comes up to me and wants to talk about that season. Little kids who couldn’t have been born until twenty-five years later. They know the legacy. I get grown men who come up to me with a baseball or a scorecard I had signed for them back then, and they tell me how much it meant to them. It’s like I’m revered. Man, I get chills. What did I do? All I did was play a game.”

  CHAPTER 7 April Getaway

  The sense of deja vu thickened in the season’s second game. With Lolich on National Guard duty because of lingering unrest after the King assassination, McLain was given the start. He had the Red Sox shut out, 3-0, on three hits into the sixth. Then a single and consecutive home runs tied the score. This came the day after Yaz had hit two out of the park in the opener. The Tigers had seen this script before and hadn’t liked it the first time around.

  But Warden, the rookie left-hander who made the roster on the last day of spring training, stopped Boston over the last two innings. He was scheduled to be the first hitter in the last of the ninth. Mayo sent up Gates Brown instead.

  It was Brown’s first appearance of the season. He had disiocated his wrist the previous year and got to bat just ninety-one times, hitting a wretched .187. It was far and away his worst season in the majors. Detroit reportedly had tried to deal him off during the winter only to find no interest. He made the roster only by the slimmest of margins. Mayo did not care much for his defensive skills (“There are times you wonder if the guy can throw the ball across the street,” he said on one occasion). If he couldn’t hit, the manager felt, he was useless. Brown was the last left-handed batter remaining on the bench when he got the call from Mayo.

  Gates was facing John Wyatt, Boston’s top reliever a closer before anyone ever thought to use that word. Wyatt was suspected of throwing a Vaseline ball, loading it up with dabs of petroleum jelly hidden somewhere on his person. The stuff made his fastball collapse downward in a nasty and illegal manner just as it reached the plate. Wyatt encouraged speculation about this secret weapon. When he joined the Tigers later in the summer, a jar of Vaseline was displayed like a trophy in a place of honor in his locker.

  But whatever jelly Wyatt was spreading in this game, Gates used it for a sandwich. He rifled Wyatt’s delivery into the right field upper deck. The Tigers were winners for the first time that year.

  Chicago came in and lost twice. Then the Tigers went to Fenway, where they ruined Boston’s home opener with a win. Then back
home to beat Cleveland twice and finally on to Chicago, where they won three more from the White Sox. It was nine in a row for Detroit since the opening day loss. On April 21, after the first game in Chicago, they went into first place alone. They would be out of it only six days the rest of the season.

  The interesting thing about this spurt was that five of the nine wins were accumulated by the bull pen, with Warden getting three of them. It seemed that Mayo’s prescription for strengthening the relief staff had worked. Moreover, four of the games, including the one Gates ended, rolled home on the last time at bat. The most dramatic was Horton’s two-out, two-run shot in the tenth that beat Cleveland, 4-3. The two top pitchers from the previous season, Wilson and Sparma, were also off to good starts. Wilson won twice, while Sparma fired a shutout at the Indians. During the streak, the Tigers staff gave up only eighteen runs.

  McLain finally got on the win list in his third start, notching the ninth game in the streak with a workmanlike 4-2 stifling of the White Sox. Denny took special delight in beating Chicago. It was his hometown team. He had signed with Chicago at eighteen, right out of prep school at Mt. Carmel High, where he was a 38-7 sensation during his career. But the Sox were overstocked with young right-handers in the spring of 1963. Their top prospect was Dave DeBusschere, a six-foot-six intimidator who would soon decide that banging away as a power forward with the Detroit Pistons suited him better than pitching. McLain was matched against the third prospect, Bruce Howard, in an intrasquad game. When Howard won, McLain was cut from the big league roster. The Tigers quickly snapped him up in the first-year draft. He went 18-6 in the minors and by the end of that season was pitching for Detroit.

  Mayo was busily experimenting. He was still intrigued by the idea of getting Stanley into the infield. So whenever the Tigers faced a left-hander he sat down Cash, who had edged out Mathews in the battle for first base, and played Stanley there, with Northrup moving to center. Cash was deeply annoyed. But he was getting used to it.