The Tigers of '68

by George Cantor

  Waldmeir, who would soon become a top political columnist, had grown up on the city’s East Side and joined the sports staff while still in college. He was the more ascerbic of the two. While interviewing McLain, the pitcher had made a most unlikely statement, then added, “And may God strike me down if that isn’t the truth.” Waldmeir took that and ran with it, constructing a wild scenario about panic-stricken Tigers scampering off in terror whenever McLain stood up to speak. The Tigers didn’t think that was very funny, either.

  At any given moment, a half dozen players were not on speaking terms with either columnist. But that was all right because neither had much to say to the other, either. They disliked one another acutely, an attitude that arose naturally in this hotly competitive newspaper city. The two baseball beat writers rarely spoke to each other, either. When Waldmeir was observed by his paper’s beat writer having breakfast with the rival beat writer, Waldmeir said ruefully: “I think I’d rather have my wife catch me in bed with another woman than what just happened.”

  So the players had some reason to chortle over the writers’ absence. But the lack of newspapers compounded the sense of unease in the city. Detroit was flying blind, and it was regarded as unwise to venture too far from home.

  Diehards still managed to find their way to the city’s premier gathering place for the sports crowd. The Lindell A. C., a tenminute walk from the ballpark along Michigan Avenue, was the undisputed holder of that title. There were no sports bars in 1968, no strategically raised television sets beaming an endless assortment of games from the cable networks or satellite dish. The Lindell was just a place where players and fans could hang out. All four of the city’s professional teams played a short distance away, and fans soon realized that if they went in after a game they might have a chance to share a beer with their heroes. Even the visiting teams knew about it and frequented the Lindell.

  The name of the place was a joke, an excuse a customer had used when the saloon was in a former location. He had phoned his wife and told her that he had stopped in at his athletic club on the way home. But the Lindell achieved everlasting fame in 1963. The star tackle of the Detroit Lions, Alex Karras, then under a year’s suspension for gambling, had signed up for a wrestling match against Dick the Bruiser. The Lindell was a favorite spot for Karras because the owners of the place, the Butsicaris brothers, were also of Greek descent. It was arranged for Karras and the Bruiser to encounter one another there in a scripted meeting to hype the bout. Then someone tossed away the script. The two men were soon flailing away in a genuine chair-throwing, window-smashing brawl that had to be quelled by the quelling squad from the First Precinct. Later on, the Lindell’s pugilistic reputation would be further enhanced. Billy Martin, who was then managing the Twins, chose its parking lot as the place to cold-cock his star pitcher, Dave Boswell, to settle a difference of opinion.

  The Lindell served up enormous burgers and had in its trophy case one of the city’s most cherished exhibits—the jock strap formerly worn by All-Pro Lions linebacker Wayne Walker. Everybody in sports went to the Lindell, except for the lordly Yankees, who preferred a quieter, Manhattanish spot two blocks away called Danny’s Gin Mill. But even at the Lindell the season was starting off slowly, much too quietly for a first-place team. It was as if everyone in Detroit was waiting to see what would happen next. Could they dare to hope again about this team and this city?

  CHAPTER 10 The Shuffleboard King

  When Eddie Mathews joined the Tigers in August of 1967, one of the first things he saw was a message scrawled on a blackboard outside the clubhouse. “Let’s win this in spite of Mayo,” someone had written. Mathews quickly erased it and sternly lectured his teammates about proper decorum on a contending team. Rule one: You don’t blind-side the manager.

  That little incident spoke volumes about Mayo, Mathews, and the meaning of leadership on the 1968 Tigers. Mathews, a longtime star with the Braves, stepped naturally into the role. He was respected by all the players, and especially by his peers, Kaline and Cash. He had been there and done that. Mathews performed brilliantly under the greatest pressure imaginable in the 1957 Series, when the Milwaukee Braves, the team from Bushville, upended the haughty Yankees. Ballplayers respected that. They knew a little history. So even though he was only a shadow of the player he once had been, Mathews quickly became a respected voice in the clubhouse. He knew how to win, and the Tigers were eager to learn.

  There were several leaders on this ball club. But Kaline led by example rather than overtly, and Cash was too quick to find the humor in a situation to take himself seriously as a leader. The position fell to the newcomer, Mathews.

  This was not a team with a great deal of respect for the man who was its nominal leader. Mayo Smith was named manager after a calamitous 1966 season. He was not regarded as a pick out of left field. That would have been too close. It was more like a pick out of the hospitality room. Mayo carried the nickname “America’s Guest.” He was a fixture in baseball, a familiar figure before and after games in the room where free food and drink were served to club officials and media. A handsome man with a head full of gray hair. A dapper dresser who savored a glass of good bourbon. A man with the knack of making you feel that you were one of the wittiest and most perceptive individuals he had ever met . . . even if he hadn’t quite caught your name or knew what you were talking about.

  He was also modest in appraising his own abilities. After the World Series, upon a triumphant return to his home in Lake Worth, Florida, he was given a parade. While walking to his official car, he claimed, he heard two elderly ladies talking about the event. “What’s the big deal?” one of them demanded. “Why, haven’t you heard?” her friend replied. “The shuffleboard king is back in town.”

  The announcement that Mayo would manage the Tigers was met with whoops of derision. The city was expecting a firebrand, someone to whip the team into contention. “America’s Guest” wasn’t quite what Tiger fans or media had pictured. But it wasn’t as if he hadn’t paid his dues. He had, three times over. Mayo had played seventeen years in the minor leagues, reaching the bigs only as a wartime fill-in with the 1945 As. He hit .212. That part was all right. Several successful managers never spent a day in the majors. But Mayo’s record was not too good as a manager, either. In parts of five seasons with the Phillies and Reds, he never finished above .500. Moreover, his last managing job had expired in 1959. Fred Hutchinson replaced him, took a team that was in seventh place under Mayo, and in less than two years won a pennant. Had the Tigers gone nuts hiring this guy?

  Actually, the hiring of Mayo was the result of deliberate consideration by general manager Jim Campbell and his top advisor, Rick Ferrell. The team had been stunned in 1966 by the deaths of two managers. Charlie Dressen, who had been brought in to mold the young players into a contender, suffered a heart attack in June and died two months later. He was replaced by veteran coach Bob Swift, who developed cancer and passed away in October. The Tigers finished the year under the guidance of another coach, Frank Skaff. It was a demoralizing, tumultuous experience.

  Dressen, for all his peculiarities, his mangling of the English language, and his serene conviction that he was a genius, had done his job well. He had brought along the Boys from Syracuse steadily, making sure they had a chance to taste success in equal measure with failure. The veterans liked him. To Willie Horton, who had lost his parents in a car crash on the eve of stardom, Dressen was a surrogate father. The death of Dressen and the subsequent death of Swift were devastating blows to the young team.

  What the Tigers needed more than anything else was a calming presence. Enter Mayo Smith. He was so calm that he some-times seemed inert. The players soon started referring to him as “Awww, what the fuck,” because that seemed to be his response to virtually every event, good or bad. McLain, who had been a favorite of Dressen, tried to ingratiate himself with the new manager early in his term by parading around the clubhouse after a late-inning win and saying, “At last we’ve
got a manager in here.” Mayo wasn’t buying any of that. “Mickey Mouse makes those moves,” he said privately. It also warned him that some players would bear watching.

  He had made one inspired change, shifting McAuliffe from shortstop to second base. In one move he had acquired an outstanding second baseman and lost a mediocre shortstop. He then handed the shortstop job to Oyler, who never dropped anything except his bat. Mayo had blown up at the team just once, over what he regarded as indifferent play at the start of an important series in Boston in 1967. He closed the clubhouse doors and, red-faced, let his players have it full bore. Some Tigers, most notably Freehan, wished he would have done that more often. This was a team that sometimes required a shaking-up. But that wasn’t Mayo’s style.

  Eventually, some of the players began to question his decisions, his handling of the bench and the bull pen down the stretch in ’67. Mayo himself did not regard his talents as lying in the realm of tactics.

  “Most of the stuff you do on the field is dictated by events,” he said. “That’s not the managing part. It’s the twenty-five guys. Knowing how to handle each one. Who needs a word and who needs a kick in the ass. That’s the part.”

  Making his job even more difficult was his pitching coach. John Sain had been hired along with Mayo and was the best in the business. But he had his peculiarities. He insisted on bringing along his own bull pen coach, Hal Naragon. He also insisted on being given free rein with the pitchers. Sain had many theories about pitching. He believed that it was essentially mental. Before attaining success, you had to visualize yourself as successful. That was half the battle. He gave out subscriptions to the magazine Success Unlimited as Christmas presents. He also encouraged his pitchers to be secretive, not to share information with anyone. When McLain did a magazine photo spread on the grips he used to throw various pitches, on Sain’s advice he simply made them up on the spot. He even demonstrated how he gripped pitches he never threw.

  Sain liked his pitchers seated in a separate part of the clubhouse, away from the hitting riffraff. He even lived off by himself, in a motel near the airport. But he stopped short of demanding that his pitchers do that, too.

  It all seemed to be effective. In two years, the staff earned run average had fallen from the second worst in the league (3.85) to the third best (2.71.) What wasn’t generally noticed at the time was that the league ERA had gone down by 0.46 over the same period to a historic low of 2.98 in 1968. It was a season thoroughly dominated by pitchers. But Sain earned a lot of the credit in Detroit.

  Mayo took it all in, seeing more than anyone guessed. He understood the problems that McLain and Sain were causing. He also knew that the team was winning and was willing to let it ride. He had come too far, waited too long to board this train. He wasn’t about to drive it off the tracks.

  CHAPTER 11 The Rivals

  Whatever the manager’s opinion of McLain, it quickly became evident that his was going to be no ordinary season. He reeled off five straight wins, all complete games. The fifth one, a 12-1 crushing of Washington on May 10, put the Tigers in first place for keeps. He lasted just two innings in his next start against Baltimore. But in the following thirteen assignments, up to the All-Star Game break on July 7, McLain would go 11-1. His overall record was then 16-2. He was poised to do something absolutely remarkable.

  It was also evident that he would not do it quietly. McLain was temperamentally incapable of that. Two years before, for no apparent reason, he tried to talk himself into a feud with Sam McDowell, acknowledged to be the hardest thrower in the league. McLain called him immature, dumb, and incapable of harnessing his abilities. Only when his remarks reached print did it occur to McLain that Sudden Sam might not see the humor in the situation. That he might, in fact, try to enlarge McLain’s ear canal when next they met. So he backed off that story quickly. McDowell’s comment on the whole episode was: “Goo goo, da, da,” which may have been a fairly accurate assessment.

  But still McLain would have his say. He always had a surprise or two for inquiring minds. He loved Pepsi, even kept a glass of it on his night table so he could take a swig of it, lukewarm, as soon as he awoke in the morning. He considered himself a serious musician, an organist who happened to play baseball rather than the other way around. He was going to take up flying his own plane, an ambition that won him the nickname “Sky King” among the other Tigers. Understandably, he always drew a cluster of writers around his locker.

  In early May, McLain was asked by a wire service reporter to explain why attendance had been so low at Tiger Stadium. “Tiger fans are the biggest front-runners in the world,” McLain said. “If they think we’re stupid for playing this game, how stupid are they for coming out to watch us?” He continued in this vein for several minutes. His remarks went out on the radio wire and led every sportscast in town the next day. The first crowd of over 20,000 since opening day then turned up at McLain’s next start and booed him incessantly from the first pitch. His five-game win streak ended that night. “I only meant some of the fans,” McLain said in clarification. He really didn’t need the papers to be publishing to get into trouble.

  While Denny rolled merrily along, Lolich was off to his usual tepid start. His emergency National Guard duty during the April rioting set back his routine, and he still faced the usual two weeks away during his annual summer training in June. By the time McLain had won his eighth game of the year, Lolich had won just twice, the least of any starter. The Tigers had hoped that his heroic finish in 1967 would carry over into the new season. But the Lolich who started the 1968 campaign was the same pitcher who had struggled through most of the previous year.

  “Mickey just didn’t have confidence in himself,” says Freehan. “He didn’t think he could make the big pitches late in the game. There was an element lacking. We all knew that when he was on, there was no one with more stuff. But convincing Mickey of that was a little harder.”

  Lolich himself seethed silently over McLain. Lolich had reached the majors a few months before Denny in 1963 after a tough, erratic, four-year apprenticeship in the minors. When he finally got to Detroit his professional record was a drab 27-44. Only in his final season, pitching with his hometown team in Portland, Oregon, did he have a winning record. He explained later that the left field fence was so close in that park that he had to concentrate on control. That transformed him into a pitcher. In 1964, his first full year with Detroit, he blossomed, going 18-9, and at twenty-three becoming the top pitcher on the staff.

  The coming of McLain altered the equation. Although the two gave the Tigers the best young pitching combination in the game, their relationship cut much deeper than a rivalry. McLain’s cockiness, which readily translated into arrogance, and his Chicago wise-guy demeanor irritated the daylights out of Lolich, with his conservative Oregon upbringing.

  While McLain exuded confidence, Lolich searched for the formula and brooded about what he regarded as a lack of respect for his achievements. After all, with McLain among the missing, Lolich had almost pitched Detroit to the 1967 pennant. But as he struggled again, that all seemed to be forgotten by Mayo and the front office.

  The game of May 18 was no help to Lolich’s mental state. Frank Howard came into Detroit with the Washington Senators on a home-run binge. He had hit seven in his previous four games, a record, then added one more off Sparma on Friday night. It was Lolich’s turn on Saturday. Howard, the biggest man in the game at six-foot-seven and 255 pounds, looked absolutely terrifying when he went off on one of his tears. No one could hit the ball farther and with more force. He was in the first of three straight forty-home-run seasons, emerging, after several rather ordinary years, as the top slugger in the league.

  Howard made it nine homers in six games with a wrong-field shot off Lolich in the third. He came up again two innings later with two runners on base. The ball he hit scraped the edge of the left field roof, directly above the foul pole, as it disappeared from sight and landed in the street beyond. Only one other hitte
r, Harmon Killebrew, ever had cleared the roof in left. The blast was immediately recognized as one of the longest home runs in stadium history, traveling an estimated three and a half miles. The monumental clout gave Lolich another loss, another fracture in his thinning wall of confidence.

  The next day, however, the fans showed up. The first Sunday doubleheader of the year brought in 45,491 of them, the biggest home crowd yet. Sunday was still a traditional doubleheader day in 1968. The players hated playing two and, eventually, their union managed to get them eliminated. But this season there were eight on the schedule. Rainouts and suspended games would account for several more, and they usually drew big crowds. With the average game still played in under two and a half hours, twin bills did not turn into endurance contests for players and spectators alike.

  Most teams didn’t start night games until 8:00 P.M. But as the games grew longer throughout the ’70s and ’80s, starting times were gradually moved up by an hour or more in most cities. It was the only way that fans could get home before David Letterman signed off. Baseball was played at a far brisker pace in 1968, with even the most critical games rarely going longer than two hours and forty minutes. The reason? There are dozens of theories. Fewer pitching changes. Fewer at-bats that went deep into the count. The wait between half innings was thirty seconds shorter. No designated hitter, which meant fewer runs being scored. All these later contributed to the lengthening of what was intended as a diversion of a few hours and became instead a lumbering affair of Wagnerian duration.