The Tigers of '68

by George Cantor

  Northrup recalls, “Every year they would bring in some hotshot who was going to move Norman to the bench. It got to be funny. Here was a guy who hit twenty-five to thirty homers and knocked in eighty-five runs season after season, and they were always getting ready to move him out. Norman used to say the dumbest thing he ever did was hit .361 that one season early in his career. Everyone was always waiting for him to hit like that again, and he just wasn’t that kind of hitter. That was 1961, an expansion season. The pitching was down all over the league, and he had Kaline and Rocky Colavito, both having tremendous seasons, hitting around him. It wasn’t going to happen like that for him again.”

  Cash was another ex-member of the White Sox. He had been a utility man on the 1959 pennant winners and then was traded to Cleveland as a throw-in on a major deal. Detroit picked him up at the end of spring training in 1960 for a minor league infielder—a deal that ranked as one of the biggest steals in franchise history. A few days later, the two teams swung a real stunner as Detroit landed home run champ Colavito in exchange for the previous year’s batting leader, Harvey Kuenn. Cash and Colavito would combine for 263 home runs over the next four seasons with Detroit.

  Cash’s failure to repeat his big year disappointed not only his bosses. But it also made him the top target for the frustrations of Detroit’s fans. He was booed throughout his career at Tiger Stadium. Cash could look very inadequate against some left-handers. He was also a streak hitter, and when he was going bad, pulling his head off the ball in an effort to reach the cozy right field stands in Detroit, it seemed he couldn’t hit anybody. During 1967, as the booing hit new crescendos, he pulled off his cap on one occasion and waved it mockingly at the crowd as he went back to the dugout. It was a rare lapse for a man who seemed to find humor in any situation.

  In one game, upon realizing that he had been picked off first base, he raised his hands and signaled hopefully for a time-out. When play was suspended during a rainstorm another time, Cash was on second base. But when the game resumed, he trotted out to third. “What are you doing over there?” he was asked by the umpire. “I stole third,” he replied. “When did that happen?” asked the ump, earnestly puzzled. “During the rain,” said Norman.

  When flamboyant umpire Emmett Ashford ran out to his position, arms outspread, at the start of a game, Cash came running right after him, taking a flying dive off the pitcher’s mound with his arms flapping, as if trying to gain altitude. But his most famous exploit was when he tried to come to bat against Nolan Ryan, in the midst of a no-hitter, using a table leg as a bat. “I couldn’t hit him with a regular bat so I thought I’d try this,” he explained.

  Cash was easily the most popular man on the team. He knew where all the best watering holes—the places where people were eager to buy drinks for big league stars—were located in every American League city. A night out with Norman could easily stretch into positions on the clock that for most people only came once a day. It was part of Tigers lore that he could show up at the ballpark looking as haggard and woebegone as Texas roadkill. Then he would miraculously recover somehow and get two hits. The other players admired him as a warrior, a man who would play despite injury, hangover, rain, sleet, and dark of night. He was a throwback to a long line of ballplayers. The Gas House Gang, Paul Waner, Babe Ruth—players who never let their love of liquid refreshment get in the way of a ball game.

  Later in the season, when an injury to Kaline necessitated a permanent return to the outfield for Stanley, Mayo still stuck to his platooning plan. He started Freehan at first base against left-handers. Cash ended up playing in just 127 games, his lowest total since his first season in Detroit. While he grumbled about the play, he kept it low key. He was too good a soldier to complain loudly when the team was winning. Just once, when Mayo told him to go in as a late defensive replacement, did he balk, snapping that he wasn’t anybody’s caddy. Mayo sent Mathews in, instead, and nothing more was said. Whatever other flaws Mayo may have had, he seemed to know when pushing too hard might damage the cohesiveness that his ball club had created.

  Besides, strange things were happening. “We didn’t win games like these last year,” mused Mayo as the winning streak lengthened. One of the reasons might have been that the Tigers didn’t have Warden before. In the first eight games he ever spent on a big league roster, the twenty-one-year-old rookie won three of them.

  CHAPTER 8 AnEasy Kind of Game

  His garage may be full of sneakers, but his head is full of memories.

  Almost three decades have passed since sporting goods salesman Jon Warden threw the final pitch of his brief major league career. But the details are as vivid as last summer’s vacation. The sounds, the texture of his single season in the sun, come pouring into the house in suburban Cincinnati.

  “I am a walking trivia answer,” he laughs as he picks his way through the stacked boxes of athletic shoes stored in the garage. No room for the cars. They’re out on the driveway. He is wearing a warm-up suit and baseball cap, which hides the few tufts that remain atop his head.

  “Who was the only Tiger who didn’t get into the 1968 World Series?” Warden raises his hand and guffaws. “That’s who I am.”

  “It all happened so fast. One day, no one knows who I am, fresh up from Double A, and I’m on the roster of the Detroit Tigers, and we’re fighting for a pennant. Next day my arm is gone, and my career is over. But I loved every minute of it. Even while it was happening I knew that it was an experience that would last me the rest of my life. To tell you the truth, I’m just grateful that I got to be a part of it.”

  He was just twenty-one that spring, the last man to make the Tigers roster in Florida. A hard-throwing lefty out of Columbus, Ohio.

  “I was hoping to get sent to Toledo, the Triple A team. That way my folks would have been able to drive up and see me play. The big team, I never thought there was any chance. I mean, they had just missed the pennant by a game. What did they want with some young kid who couldn’t find his butt with both hands? But they were looking for young arms, and I had one of them.

  “They had to cut Hank Aguirre to keep me. Man, that could have been real rough. They could have treated me like dirt. Hank was one of the most popular guys on that team. Everybody loved him. Then one day he’s gone and here I am, fresh out of Rocky Mount, with all of two years of pro ball behind me. But you know what? No one ever said a word to me about that. These guys were so dedicated to winning that year that no matter what it took they would accept it. Animosity kind of fell by the wayside. As long as I could help ’em win the thing, I was welcome.

  “Poor Hank. He never got to the series. He landed with the Cubs in 1969, and it looked like they were going to breeze in. But then they collapsed down the stretch, of course. The Mets caught ’em, and Hank never got in. For years afterwards, whenever there was a Tigers alumni meeting, he’d come running up to me, grab my hand, and say: ‘You sonofabitch, you’ve got my ring.’ He’d laugh about it, but I know sometimes it had to tear him up.”

  Warden had one of the more remarkable debuts in baseball history. Three appearances, three and one-third innings pitched, three wins.

  “Man, I thought this was the easiest game in the world,” he says. “Naw. Not really. My locker was right next to Lolich’s, and he’d keep telling me, ‘Your bubble will break, rookie.’ But it took a while, and I was on cloud nine.

  “The first man I faced in the big leagues was Reggie Smith. My knees were shaking so hard I could barely stand up on the mound. But he sent a grounder right at Ray Oyler at short, and I took a big, deep breath. That was automatic. And then Oyler booted the ball, and I just about died. George Scott got a single and now I’ve got two men on, nobody out, in a tie game. But I got it together and got Joe Foy on a fly ball for the third out with the bases loaded.

  “Then there’s two out in the ninth, and up comes Yastrzemski. Oh, man. I’m shaking all over again. I just turned that ball loose with everything I had, and I struck him out. My first major
league strikeout, and it’s Yaz. I can’t believe it. I’m sitting on the bench, turning that over in my mind, and I look up and Gates Brown hits the ball out of the park. I’m the winning pitcher. This was crazy. Everything was happening at once.

  “Three games later, Mayo brings me in again. It’s the tenth, and Cleveland has just gone ahead of us with one out. I get Jose Vidal on a fly ball and start thinking about Duke Sims when Jose Cardenal tries to steal second, and Freehan throws him out. So I’m out of that pretty easy. We come up, Horton busts a two-run homer, and I win again.

  “All right, I’m really enjoying this. Now we’re in Chicago. We’ve got a 1-0 lead in the ninth, bases loaded, one out, and here comes the signal for me again. Wayne Causey is the hitter, and I couldn’t come anywhere near the plate. I walk him and force in a run, and now Chicago brings up Ken Boyer to bat. By this time he was near the end of his career. But, still. Ken Boyer! I’m waiting for Mayo to make the move and get me out of there. But he never leaves the dugout. I don’t know. We all know Mayo wasn’t some kind of managerial genius. Sometimes he did strange things. I guess this was just one of them.

  “Boyer scorches one. I mean it’s a rocket. But it’s right at Don Wert. He stabs it, steps on third, double play, end of the inning. The guys score three times in the top of the tenth, and I win again.”

  It didn’t end there. Not quite. Warden got into twenty-five more games for the Tigers. He won one, and he lost one. When it came time to pick the series roster it was between him and John Wyatt. Mayo, looking for another lefty, went with Warden, but never used him. He had pitched his last game for the Tigers and, as it turned out, in the majors.

  “Kansas City picked me in the expansion draft that fall,” he says. “That was real funny. It was like a week after the series was over. One day I’m celebrating a world championship, and the next day I’m gone. I’m not a part of it anymore. It wasn’t unexpected but still I kept hoping they’d pick somebody else.

  “It was a great opportunity, being on an expansion team. They told us the first day of spring training that every job was wide open. So I went right out and threw my arm out. Rotator cuff. Even now that’s a tough deal, but in 1969 it was a career-ender. I tried it in the minors for a while, and the Royals did bring me up to the big club at the end of the season. So technically I did get back to the majors, even though I was never in a game. But after the season, I got cut, and that was that.”

  As he spoke, Warden had just returned from a big league alumni golf tournament in Florida. He is active in the group and seldom misses a chance to attend meetings in his area.

  “The first thing we have to instill in the new members is that now it’s different,” he says. “Now we want you to sign autographs. You don’t give fans the brush-off. Man, some of the attitudes these guys have today. You got to give ’em a makeover.

  “I look back on that season, and the thing I remember most is the other guys. Rooming with McLain. Now that was an experience. It was just me and an empty bed most of the time. But the rest of us, we’d be playing cards, talking, go out and have a few beers. I guess most of the guys playing ball today make so much money that they don’t have to have a roommate. They don’t know what they’re missing. Even all these years later, you see one of the guys you roomed with, and it’s, ‘How ya’ doin’, rooms?’ Like no time at all had passed. That was such a big part of the experience.

  “Now that I’m in the alumni, I get to know the guys who were big stars. I remember going up to Ernie Banks the first time and telling him how much I admired him and him holding up my ring and saying, ‘Yeah, but you got one of these.’

  “You know, it doesn’t seem to matter whether you made the Hall of Fame or whether you lasted one season, like me. Once a big leaguer, always a big leaguer. If you put the uniform on, it’s all the same now.”

  CHAPTER 9 Stop the Presses

  Something was wrong. The Tigers were cruising in first place as April ended. But it didn’t feel right. The city was still hesitant to come out and see them. There were 12,000 empty seats at the opener, a game that traditionally is a sellout in Detroit. Although the Tigers never expect big crowds until Memorial Day and the onset of warmer weather in Michigan, the early turnouts for a first-place team were disappointing. Two-game series with Chicago, Cleveland, and Oakland drew fewer than 20,000 fans each. The Tigers came back from a successful road trip and opened a set against Baltimore, always a good draw. But only 18,000 showed up.

  Something was wrong. Only in three seasons since the end of World War II had the Tigers failed to draw one million fans. Attendance peaked in 1950 when the team made a serious run at the Yankees and attracted 1,951,474 customers, the franchise record. In 1961, another contending year, the attendance had been 1.6 million. If not for the riots, that level might have been equalled in 1967. But the final figure was only 1,447,143. With fear still pervasive in the city, some doubted that total attendance would get even that high in 1968, no matter what the team did.

  Detroit was still a great baseball city. But it was a city that had lost its center. Its sense of community lay shattered in the spring of 1968, just as thoroughly as the shop windows on 12th Street. Most of the debris from the July riots had been cleared. There were plans to remake 12th Street into a parklike boulevard, to sweep away any memory of what had happened there. Several committees were put together, made up of the town’s heavy hitters—automotive executives, union officials, prominent black leaders. They gave themselves hopeful names, like Detroit Renaissance, and tried to work out a plan for restoration. They listened to complaints that had long been ignored. But they had trouble coming to terms with what had happened.

  As Earl Wilson had observed on his first visit to Detroit, this was a city with a large, prosperous black middle class. Only Washington, D.C., with its base of government workers, had a higher average income in its black community. Detroit’s wealth came out of the auto plants. Those jobs paid better than any other industrial work in the country, and the United Auto Workers was a leader in promoting equal opportunity for blacks. The restrictive housing covenants that had kept the city’s swelling black community penned up around Paradise Valley, on the East Side, had been struck down after the war. Blacks were now served in downtown restaurants, employed at the huge J. L. Hudson’s department store on Woodward Avenue. Although the farthest reaches of the city, where the best schools were located, were still virtually all-white, a small flow of black families was moving into those neighborhoods.

  Sociologists called it a revolution of rising expectations. People scrambling for the bare necessities of life did not start riots. It was among those who felt that they should be getting more, who had gained a toehold and now wanted the whole leg, that discontent was highest. The city had prided itself on its progressive policies. It had welcomed Martin Luther King to town in 1963. He led a march down Woodward, giving an early version of the “1 have a dream” speech that he would deliver, memorably, later that summer at the Lincoln Memorial. While other cities went up in flames in the ’60s—Cleveland and Los Angeles and Newark—Detroit assured itself smugly that that would never happen there. Now the city could not recover from the shock. Whites behaved as if they had been betrayed, and black rhetoric reached new heights of threats and indignation.

  Rumors swirled everywhere. Reports of new armed insurrections. Riot deaths that the police had concealed. Secret prisons being built for black leaders. You heard the rumors wherever you went in the spring of 1968. There was no reality check on the rumors, either, because both of the city’s daily newspapers were shut down, their employees locked out since the previous November in a labor dispute.

  Even now, it is one of the aspects of the pennant year that many of the Tigers bring up. There were no newspapers, and that took the pressure off. Only later did the players realize that there would also be no stories to clip and paste in scrapbooks to show their grandchildren, no way to build up early fan enthusiasm.

  In the late ’60s, technolog
y did not allow television to give the extensive game coverage that goes on today. No videotape, no minicams. Equipment was bulky, processing was slow. Radio was still predominantly an entertainment medium, with news and sports coverage as an afterthought. All-news radio and talk radio were still a decade away. The wire services covered the team, but their stories ran in papers far away and went unread by the Tigers. Reporters from a few suburban dailies came to home games but never went on the road. There was even a writer from the Polish-language daily assigned to the team. And when the Communist Party decided that Detroit’s masses might welcome some dialectic with their baseball coverage, the communist Daily World also sent a reporter to do spot stories. He didn’t understand much about the game and was inclined to write sentences like “Norm Cash really rattled the old drainpipes last week.” Needless to say, neither the Dzennik Polski nor the Daily World had much of a readership among the players. To them, the newspaper lockout was liberating.

  When compared with the tone of coverage in places like Boston or New York, however, Detroit’s sportswriters were mild. Rarely did they agitate for the sheer hell of it, like the Boston writers who had driven the young Ted Williams wild. Seldom did they resort to ridicule, like the New York writers who called themselves “the Chipmunks.” But the two top sports columnists in Detroit, Joe Falls at the Free Press and Pete Waldmeir at the News, were tough. They were truth-tellers, serious and exceptionally talented reporters. Their writing was consistently sharpedged and irreverent. They did not believe either in leading cheers for the home team or in taunting the opposition.

  Falls, a rather puckish man with the accent of his native Queens evident in every syllable he spoke, had been a baseball writer for more than ten years. His sources within the Tigers organization and throughout the game were superb. One of his more memorable features had run the day after Mickey Mantle hammered a tremendous home run over the right field roof at Tiger Stadium. Under the headline “Detroit’s New Mantle Shift,” Falls’s paper ran a photo of Kaline in fielding position atop the roof. People in the Tigers front office went wild, accusing Falls of endangering the life of their best player. Falls had to reassure them that the photo was a gag, a pasteup of Kaline superimposed on the roof. They still didn’t think it was funny.