The Tigers of '68

by George Cantor

  The crowds were back, bigger than anything Detroit had experienced in the past. Unusually good weather—not a single early season rainout, which was almost unheard of—and the team’s fast start were finally bringing fans in after the early attendance lull. In 1968, most franchises still measured success by a one million total at the gate. In this era before free agency, a ball club could profit quite handsomely with that attendance. In a few places—Cleveland, Yankee Stadium, Los Angeles—given a big metro area, a big stadium, and a consistent winner, some teams had crashed through the two million mark. But that was highly improbable in the case of Tiger Stadium.

  Although baseball had been played on the site since 1896, the ballpark had existed in its current form for only thirty years. A massive redesign by Walter O. Briggs, which closed in the entire stadium and added a grandstand in right field in 1938, turned it into one of the largest in the majors in seating capacity. Only Cleveland and Yankee Stadium had more than its 52,220. The problem was that a lot of the seats were pretty bad. More of them were in fair territory than in any other park. Many more were obstructed by posts that supported the wrap-around upper deck. These posts were situated much lower in the stands than in similar parks, several rows closer to the field than in stadiums of similar vintage in Chicago and Boston. Whereas a fan in an upper-deck box at Tiger Stadium had one of the finest views in the major leagues, a fan just a dozen rows behind him might catch the game only in glimpses from around massive poles. Moreover, the ticket department functioned as a semi-independent fiefdom. Choice seats were withheld from general sale so that ticket takers could accept payoffs at the windows. The practice annoyed and antagonized the customers, but it was tolerated by the ball club. For all these reasons, it would take an extraordinary attraction for the Tigers to sell out for any game and an unlikely combination of events to produce a season of two million fans.

  On July 19, one such event occurred. Almost 1,000 more fans than the listed capacity jammed into the park. (That was still 5,000 short of the stadium record, however, because a series of remodelings had eliminated several thousand outfield seats.) It was a Friday night game with Baltimore. The Tigers still had a 7-game lead, only 2½ less than their peak. But they had just come off a poor 3-5 western swing. Meanwhile, the Orioles had canned Hank Bauer who had managed them to the 1966 championship. He was replaced by thirty-seven-year-old Earl Weaver, a feisty little veteran of their farm system. The core of the Baltimore team was the same as that of the winners of two years before. Frank and Brooks Robinson, Boog Powell, Jim Palmer, Davey Johnson, Paul Blair. They had enormous talent. But the Orioles were hit by injuries in 1967 and slid out of contention. They had started out the same way this year. But Weaver lit a fire under them. They were closing ground on the Tigers, and it was with a certain sense of unease, a fear of impending disaster that had become part of the local tradition, that the big crowd arrived at the ballpark.

  The opener of the critical four-game series matched Lolich against Wally Bunker. But Lolich was still struggling. The left-hander was 7-5, with only a handful of strong outings. This was not to be one of them. Frank Robinson reached him for a two-run homer in the third, and Lolich was pulled from the game in the sixth in the midst of another two-run rally. The Tigers trailed 4—0. Moreover, Bunker had yet to give up a hit. In the sixth, however, he walked Wert, and then McAuliffe found the stands in right. With their first hit of the game, the Tigers were right back in it, 4-2.

  But Eddie Watt, the top Baltimore reliever, came in and shut the Tigers down again. The lead held up into the ninth. Then Northrup led off with a single, and Kaline, being used as the regular first baseman in place of the slumping Cash, drew a walk. That brought up Cash, who had been inserted into the game a few innings before. Weaver beckoned for left-hander John O’Donoghue to deal with him, and Cash hit into a force-out. With Freehan the next hitter, Weaver went to his other right-handed closer, Мое Drabowsky, to get the last two outs. A journeyman starter for most of his career, Drabowsky, armed with a new and nasty slider, had turned into a top reliever in 1966. His relief job in the first game of the series that year, in which he struck out eleven Dodgers in a bit more than six innings, helped start the Orioles on their upset sweep of Los Angeles. He was especially tough on right-handers. He retired Freehan on another force-out, which scored Northrup from third and closed the Baltimore lead to 4-3. But there were now two outs, and the next hitter was Tom Matchick.

  The Tigers shortstop situation had turned into a three-man carousel with no brass ring. Ray Oyler had stopped hitting completely and by now was pretty much limited to late-inning defensive work. Dick Tracewski played mostly against left-handed pitching. Matchick started fairly regularly against right-handed pitching. But there really was no telling who would turn up there on any given day. Sometimes Mayo matched up against pitchers, and sometimes he seemed to go by phases of the moon. He was desperate to find any kind of punch at the position. Matchick, a rookie, was not as accomplished defensively as the others but was hitting about fifty points higher. Not that this was anything to write home about. He finished the season at only .203. But the other two didn’t hit at all. Oyler, in fact, went hitless for the entire months of August and September. He would never get another hit in a Detroit uniform.

  Matchick had been stuck at the AAA level for three seasons. But after he made the All-Star team with Toledo in 1967, the Tigers could not bring themselves to send him down again. Moreover, he played the game with zest and enthusiasm. He looked like Huck Finn with a fielder’s glove, a red-haired throwback to earlier times. But this Huck was almost twenty-five and running out of time to establish himself in the majors. Even if Mayo had wanted to pinch-hit for him now, the bench was empty. Gates Brown had been used, Cash was already in the game, and Eddie Mathews was on the disabled list. Matchick was it.

  Miles across the city, three generations of the Grossman family had gathered at the home of their father, Harry, to celebrate his seventy-second birthday. As in many homes in Detroit that night, they were keeping one ear to the radio. Ice cream and cake had been served, and as Matchick came to bat, Laura Grossman was preparing a tray of soft drinks for her family in the den.

  Matchick managed to fight Drabowsky to a full count. The big crowd was screaming, imploring the rookie to keep the inning alive. He lifted the next pitch to right field, and the crowd seemed to sag. It was just a routine fly ball to Frank Robinson. But it kept carrying in the humid air, kept drifting toward the overhang less than 325 feet from home plate. The screams turned to dead silence. Everyone in the park on both sides waited in agonizing suspense to see where the ball would land. Robinson had backed up flush against the wall, below the overhang, as the ball descended toward his glove.

  At that moment, Laura Grossman walked into the den with her tray full of drinks. Her family was clustered around a small radio, waiting for Ernie Harwell’s call. Finally, after what seemed like an hour, just as Laura entered the room, they heard Harwell cry out: “Home run. Tigers win.” The entire Grossman family leaped to their feet, waving their arms and screaming. The startled hostess threw up her hands in alarm and horror, fearing that her family had collectively gone mad. Drinks went flying all over the room, splattering against walls, into sofa piilows. The Grossmans collapsed in soggy laughter, trying to calm their mother, yelling in glee at the sheer delight of the moment.

  At Tiger Stadium, no one wanted to go home. The entire crowd was still standing and cheering long after Matchick had circled the bases, was surrounded by his teammates, and pummeled into the dugout. If you ask Tigers fans about their memories of the 1968 season, aside from the World Series, this is the game that most will recall. This is the night, they will tell you, when they truly believed for the first time that this team could not lose.

  What is generally forgotten, however, is that Baltimore turned right around and swept the next three games. Matchick’s homer, in reality, settled nothing. In exactly one week, the teams were at it again, in Baltimore, and the
Orioles had shaved another game and a half off the lead. Now it was Earl Wilson on the spot, starting against Baltimore’s hottest pitcher, Jim Hardin.

  Detroit jumped off to a 2-0 lead, but Wilson had to pitch his way out of trouble in almost every inning. In the sixth, after a single by Mark Belanger and a walk to Frank Robinson, Mayo decided on a change. He went to his young left-hander, Warden, to face Powell. But another single loaded the bases with nobody out. Once again, the team had arrived at a defining moment, a point at which it seemed that the season was in danger of crumbling away. The man called in to hold it together was Daryl Patterson.

  The rookie was partly of Native American ancestry. So the rest of the Tigers called him “Fugawe.” That was a reference to a running gag from Johnny Carson about a tribe who got its name from being constantly lost, and who, when asked its identity, would repeat only: “Where the Fugawe?” With his crew cut and gangly look, Patterson had been the perfect foil for the veterans throughout the season. One of the time-honored Tigers traditions, for example, was to tell rookies on the first evening of a warm-weather visit to Chicago to be sure to show up for the team boat ride at 8:00 P.M. The veterans would then gather in a nearby bar and watch the fun, an urban version of a snipe hunt. The rookies would wait in mounting concern and anxiety as the appointed hour came and went with no boat and no other teammates showing up. Some of them held on for more than an hour before it dawned on them that their boat had already sailed. Patterson had been one of these.

  But on this muggy night on the Chesapeake, he was handed the helm. He was the lone success of Charlie Dressen’s obsession with signing “tough” ex-National Leaguers. Dressen had seen him pitch as a farmhand with the Dodgers and was impressed by his fastball. Even more, he liked him because of his “mean face.” The Tigers drafted him on that recommendation, and for once Dressen’s instincts were right. Patterson was a tough character and did not hesitate to come inside with his hard stuff. He would end the year with seven saves, tops on the Tigers along with Dobson. This save was the most memorable.

  The first man he faced was pinch hitter Fred Valentine, who had just come over in a trade with Washington. After Valentine would be Brooks Robinson and Johnson. Patterson blew them all away. In one of the great displays of power pitching the Tigers had seen all year, he struck out the side, getting each of them on high fastballs. Then he finished out the game by giving up just one hit, and the Tigers coasted home, 4-1. Next day they hit five home runs behind McLain, winning 9-0. Just like that the lead was back in the safety zone, at 7½ games.

  Mayo had been worried about relying too much on his young, untested arms in the bull pen. In June, the team had picked up thirty-three-year-old John Wyatt from Boston. Earlier on this same day, they obtained thirty-eight-year-old Don McMahon from the White Sox. He had been a teammate of Mathews on the championship Braves teams of the late ’50s and could still throw hard. He would get into twenty games for Detroit in the last two months of the season, and Wyatt would appear in twenty-two. But as Patterson demonstrated graphically, when the game was on the line, Detroit would still depend on the young guns—him, Warden, Lasher, Dobson, and Hiller. They would be the ones to bring the Tigers home.

  CHAPTER 16 The Gater

  If the game was close, the rumbling would start in about the eighth inning. This was the Tigers’ time throughout the 1968 season. This was when they were especially dangerous. In a season when pitchers dominated, Detroit sent up a lineup in which almost every batter could hit a home run. Eight of them were in double figures. No other team in baseball came close to that kind of sustained power. When low-run games were the norm, the Tigers could score in quick bunches. About four of every ten wins came on their last time at bat. One mistake could get them back into a game.

  But one man seemed to do it better than anybody else. When he got off his seat in the dugout and moved toward the bat rack, the rumbling in the stands would begin to grow louder. When his stocky form mounted the steps onto the field and headed toward the on-deck circle, it turned to a roar. And when Gates Brown started walking to the plate it built to a frenzy, a release of anticipation that had been growing for two hours. From the second game of the season, when his ninth-inning homer beat Boston, it had started. This was the moment fans had waited for. When the game was on the line, it was Gates’s hour.

  But as he looks back now, he feels that his hour never really struck.

  “That was never my dream,” says Brown. “Being a pinch hitter. Sitting on the bench for the whole game and then getting one swing. Who would want that? I wanted to play. Everyone who ever dreams of getting to the major leagues wants to be a star. No one sees themselves spending a career sitting on the bench.

  “But they made up their minds, and there wasn’t anything I could do to change it. I couldn’t play in the field. That was it. Can you remember any time when they put me in the outfield and lost a game because of it?”

  His listener says that he can’t.

  “Thank you,” says Gates.

  The lunch hour is almost over at Carl’s Chop House, a venerable Detroit restaurant that specializes in meat and plenty of it. When he arrived for his appointment, Gates immediately requested a switch to the smoking area of the restaurant. “Can’t get through a meal without a smoke,” he said. He only picked at his steak and eventually wrapped up half of it to take home. As he spoke about the past, his anger crowded out his appetite.

  “I pleaded with them to trade me,” he says. “I’d go in to Jim Campbell’s office and tell him I heard that Cleveland was interested in me and please, please make a trade. He told me that no one wanted me. I was just the twenty-fifth man on the roster.

  “Racism pervaded that organization. They’d tell you jokes with the N-word in them while they were instructing you. You never opened your mouth. When they went to pass out the series tickets, the black fans somehow got shut out. I don’t know how they did it. Must have looked at the postmark and tossed the Detroit envelopes out.”

  This accusation was made at that time because of the small number of black faces in the stands during the series. The Tigers heatedly denied it. The real explanation is probably less conspiratorial than that. Series ticket sales are controlled by such a small group of individuals and businesses that the average fan must, inevitably, have some kind of inside connection to get a seat in any city. Very few black people in Detroit were well connected in corporate or political life in 1968.

  “You know,” says Gates, “that the only ones with series rings from both 1968 and 1984 are me and Dick Tracewski. We both played in one and coached in the other. I’m proud of that. But after we won in ’84, when I was the hitting coach, and money was flowing all over the place, you know what they offered me as a raise? Twenty-eight hundred dollars. Players are making millions, and they were still treating me like their boy. I turned ’em down and walked away from it. Because if I took that kind of raise they’d have been right. And I ain’t nobody’s boy.

  “They never gave me the credit. When Lou Whitaker and Alan Trammell came up to the Tigers they were both slap hitters. They didn’t know how to turn on the ball. The Tigers were happy with their five homers a year. But they both became big hitters. They could drive twenty homers regularly. Now who was the hitting coach when that was going on?”

  You were, says his companion.

  “Thank you,” says Gates.

  Memory is deceiving. Gates pinch-hit just thirty-nine times during the 1968 season and came to bat a mere ninety-two times. Pitcher Earl Wilson batted fewer times, drove in more runs, and hit more homers. Yet Gates is a shining symbol of that year. When the Standard Club, an organization of Jewish businessmen, chose someone to honor in 1968 with the presentation of a new car, it picked Gates. He represented, they said, the highest aspiration of athletics, the man who came through when it was all on the line. Moreover, his personal triumph—being scouted and signed by the Tigers out of the Ohio State Penitentiary after being convicted of a youthful crime—was an
inspiration to the entire city.

  The stats tell just part of the story. When he did pinch-hit, he batted .462. Half of his eighteen pinch hits were for extra bases, and three of them were homers. Only once did he strike out. When he delivered, he did it with flair.

  The August 11 doubleheader against Boston was Gates’s apotheosis, the day that belonged to him alone. Boston had battered Wilson with a four-run first inning in the opener. But slowly, laboriously the Tigers struggled back into it. Wayne Comer drove starter Jim Lonborg out of the game in the seventh with his only home run of the year, and then Don Wert tied it in the eighth with a triple. Meanwhile, five Detroit relievers blanked the Red Sox.

  The game went into extra innings, beyond the four-hour mark. After Wert tied it, Detroit could get only one more baserunner. Sparky Lyle and Lee Stange stopped the Tigers cold. Stange got the first two men in the fourteenth with Lolich as the next hitter. Mayo had used six pitchers the day before. The bull pen was exhausted. There was no fresh arm to bring in. It was time for Gates. He had to end it now. He pulled Stange into the upper deck in right. Game over.

  After the debilitating opener, Mayo decided to give Gates a rare start in left field for the second game. This one went into the ninth tied 2-2. Then Boston rallied for three against Wyatt and Warden, and the fans started shuffling out. It had been a very long day, and they were satisfied with the split and the drama of the opener. But in the bottom of the ninth it started again. With one out after a leadoff walk, the Tigers ran off five straight singles. The Red Sox changed pitchers four times to try to stop the onslaught. Those fans who were departing stopped where they were to watch the denouement.

  Kaline tied it with a single, and then Lyle came in to face Brown. Lyle was one of the top relievers of the era, just the sort of tough left-hander whom Brown wasn’t supposed to hit. But he drove the ball through the right side for the winning single. Game two over. Tigers win, 6-5. Both games of the double-header end on hits by Brown.