The Tigers of '68

by George Cantor

  “I was never the most talented guy around,” he says. “I wasn’t even the best player on my neighborhood team. But I worked harder than anybody else. I had some talent, but my strength was that I played the game aggressively. That’s the way we did it in Connecticut.

  “Even the batting stance came about because I was working at it all the time. My first year in the minors I was hitting everything to left. So Wayne Blackburn, the hitting coach, got hold of me and told me to open up and get my hips out of the way. I started hitting to all fields then. The high step just felt comfortable. People said it reminded them of Mel Ott. Well, he did pretty well batting that way. I think it made my bat quicker.

  “If you ask me why we won it in ’68, I’d have to say no mental mistakes. We never beat ourselves. Every one of us was into every game, and if we thought someone’s head wasn’t in the game, he’d be talked to by the rest of us. All winter long I had thought about that double play that ended the 1967 season. It was only the second time I’d hit into one of those all year. I hated double plays. No excuse for a left-handed hitter to do it with the added jump they get towards first. I didn’t hit into a single DP in ’68.1 always liked that stat.”

  McAuliffe now lives full time in Naples, Florida, after selling his coin washing machine business in Connecticut. He is still trim, still dark-haired while coping with diabetes. But the fire in his eyes burns only on the golf course now. He taught himself to swing cross-handed on the theory that left-handed golfers are at too much of a disadvantage. He is probably the best at the game of any of the former Tigers.

  But the fire is far from banked. He appeared at a fantasy camp featuring the ’68 team a few years ago. The camp concludes with a game between the big leaguers and the campers, with the old ballplayers always winning in a rout. By the late innings they are usually making outs deliberately, trying to speed things along. Not McAuliffe. A participant in the game said that McAuliffe wound up going nineteen for twenty, refusing to give up an out or an inch. After all, they were playing baseball. That was Mad Dog’s game.

  CHAPTER 19 The Lost Weekend

  Songs have been written about the fresh promise of autumn in New York. But no one will ever write anything good about August in New York. The heat seems to rise from the sidewalk. Not a current of air stirs in the midtown canyons. Apartment dwellers climb to the rooftops to find relief. August was also, traditionally, the time when the hopes of countless baseball teams went to die in Yankee Stadium.

  By 1968 the Yankees were no longer the Yankees. They had last won a pennant four seasons before and in 1966 had tumbled, shockingly, all the way to last place. They climbed one rung out of the cellar the following year and seemed to be retooling. At least they were respectable again and playing over .500. A few of the old titans remained. Most notably, there was Mickey Mantle, slowed so much that he was exclusively a first baseman. The series hero of six long autumns ago, Tom Tresh, was at short, and Joe Pepitone had traded positions with Mantle and roamed center field. Mel Stottlemyre remained as a starter from the glory days and so did reliever Steve Hamilton. Otherwise, there were only memories to sustain the Yankees.

  But the past has its power, and the stadium could still be an intimidating place. Kaline and Cash had stark recollections of coming there in the summer of 1961, after running with the Yankees all season long and losing three in a row to fall abruptly from the race. The Yankees merely toyed with other contenders in those years, leading them to believe that there was some hope of overtaking them. Then they would get them into the stadium sometime in late summer and off-handedly beat their brains out.

  On the Tigers schedule, this late August weekend in New York didn’t appear to be an ordeal. A night game on Friday followed by two day games, and then the Tigers were out of there. But a June game had been rained out and rescheduled as part of a twinight doubleheader on Friday. So when the bus pulled away from the Roosevelt Hotel and began the traffic-clogged passage up Madison Avenue to the Bronx, the Tigers realized there was a long weekend ahead of them. They didn’t know the half of it.

  This was an unusual weekend in many regards. Life magazine was doing a full-scale profile on McLain, and its reporter followed him around full time. His run for thirty wins now stood at twenty-five. It had become the biggest story of the baseball season. The magnitude of his attempt was becoming clear. Only three pitchers in the live ball era—Jim Bagby in 1920, Lefty Grove in 1931, and Dizzy Dean in 1934—had reached that number of wins. The most recent had been thirty-four years ago. Ted Williams had batted over .400 since then, to cite a comparable achievement. Thirty wins was an incredible accomplishment. The story may not have been quite at the level of Roger Maris’s run at the Babe’s sixty homers in 1961, because it lacked daily drama and the ghost of the game’s greatest player to drive it. But it was still big.

  In 1968, sports coverage was only a shadow of what it would become in the decade ahead. Television technology did not yet permit the sort of ubiquitous presence that would be common by the end of the ’70s. Moreover, baseball was still regarded as a game, not as a marketing strategy. Still, McLain’s locker was surrounded by reporters at every stop in the league. He was an ingratiating interview, a young man full of fascinating eccentricities as well as talent. Organist, pilot, and pitcher. He was even a terrific bowler. Denny may have been “Dolphin” to the Tigers, but to the national media he was as big as a whale. On this visit to the media center of the world, his first since becoming a major celebrity, the carnival was fully aglow.

  The newly returned Detroit newspapers added to the fun. Trying to coax all it could out of the Tigers story, the Free Press assigned a feature writer to accompany the team into New York. That was not unusual. Newspapers did that all the time to give the “human” touch to a big sports story. But the paper was looking for a different angle. The writer assigned this time was a woman.

  Mary Ann Weston was a talented young reporter and also quite attractive—willowy, dark haired, and recently married. In 1968, the idea of a woman writing sports and going on the road with a big league team was groundbreaking. Journalism was still twenty years away from assigning women beat reporters to major teams. Women now have full access to locker rooms, in most cases, and their presence is treated as a matter of course. That was decidedly not the case then.

  “I always save one hour every semester to discuss the experienee with my classes,” says Weston, who is now a journalism professor at Northwestern University. “They look at me as if I’m part of living history, which is kind of funny. I couldn’t go into the clubhouse then, of course. But they also barred me from the press box and the dugout and the field. They told me each time that ‘it was no place for a woman’ and that my presence might ‘inhibit’ some of the players. The whole trip went that way, and it was something that you don’t forget.”

  The Tigers didn’t seem to know how to react to the dawn of the feminist age in their world. Weston was permitted to travel on the chartered flight from Detroit to New York and on the team bus. Airplane trips were always rather rowdy affairs after a night game. The players let off steam, and there was usually beer aboard the plane. Ribaldry was the norm, to phrase it politely. But the players outdid themselves on this trip. Every bawdy ballad and double entendre, every sly sexual innuendo and euphemism that had been laughed at during the season was dusted off and trotted out again for Weston’s hearing on this trip. Like schoolboys in the presence of the homecoming queen, the Tigers chortled, guffawed, and poked each other in the ribs. Weston took it all in and pretended not to hear. Her first report was headlined: “Our Tigers Are Charmers.” The Detroit newspapers were still determined not to rock the boat with readers’ perceptions of their heroes.

  Weston says that McAuliffe and Pat Dobson separately took her aside to explain and apologize for some rude remarks she might have heard. Gates Brown asked her to lunch at the Cattleman, a players’ hangout a few blocks from the hotel, to make amends. “I felt bad for her the same way I would when anyb
ody is being given a hard time,” says Brown. As pioneering experiences go, it was not quite a landmark. But it wasn’t a day at the beach, either.

  The situation on the field was also deteriorating daily. McAuliffe’s suspension was announced by the league office on Friday afternoon. Mayo, already playing with a black hole in his batting order at shortstop, now was faced with the prospect of shifting one of those nonhitters to second base to replace McAuliffe. Moreover, Mayo now had no leadoff man. Stanley, who usually batted second, was elevated to the leadoff spot, and Tracewski was placed at second and hit second. The two of them went 0-for-8 in the first game Friday, and the Tigers lost 2-1 to Stan Bahnsen, their only run coming on a homer by the losing pitcher, Wilson.

  In the nightcap, remembering his experiment in spring training, Mayo tried to juice up the attack. He played Stanley at shortstop and got all his big-hitting outfielders into the starting lineup, too. That didn’t work much better. The Yanks tied the game at 3-3 on a two-run homer by Roy White in the eighth. Then the offense died on both sides in the oppressive evening heat. Between the eighth and sixteenth innings, twenty-two Tigers in a row went down, with veteran Lindy McDaniel pitching seven perfect innings. Then Dooley Womack came in and threw four more shutout innings. It was quite likely that the game could have continued until dawn without the Tigers being able to score. But the Yankees could do no better against Hiller and McMahon, who combined on a twelve-inning shutout.

  Mercifully, the 1:00 A.M. curfew arrived in the middle of the ninteenth inning. The muggy stalemate was finally halted after the Yanks went out in that inning, and it was ruled a suspended game. It would have to be replayed, to the horror of everyone, as part of a newly scheduled doubleheader on Sunday.

  After a very brief night, the teams were back at it Saturday afternoon, with McLain looking for number twenty-six. Instead, he lost, 2-1. It was the first time all year that he had dropped two games in a row. Aside from a two-run, first-inning homer by White, who had become an enormous pest, Denny was never in trouble. But the best that Detroit could do was a solo shot by Horton. Again the team seemed listless without McAuliffe keying the attack from his leadoff spot. It had now scored five runs in thirty-seven innings in New York.

  McLain left the stadium in a foul mood, with his tail from Life magazine right with him. The two of them headed back to Manhattan in the writer’s convertible. At a stoplight they pulled up beside a car with a pretty young woman seated inside. “Hey, honey,” barked Denny. “How’d you like to fuck a five-game loser?” The quote, in laundered form, appeared in Life the following week, adding to the McLain mystique.

  Sunday was the hottest day yet, temperatures over ninety degrees with humidity to match. Instead of playing one and jumping on the jet to Milwaukee, the Tigers knew they had to labor twice. At this point, it seemed that just getting the whole nightmarish weekend over with would be a victory in itself. But the worst was still to come.

  The Tigers ripped starter Steve Barber for a quick 5-0 lead in the opener. With his staff still in shreds from Friday’s marathon and another game coming right up, Yankee manager Ralph Houk made a desperation move. He brought in Rocky Colavito as a mop-up pitcher.

  The Rock was in his last season in the majors. No longer the feared slugger who averaged 121 RBIs between 1958 and 1965, he was just playing out the string. Four of those earlier productive years had been with Detroit. Colavito, teaming with Kaline and Cash, nearly had slugged the Tigers to a pennant in 1961. But after the adulation he had received in Cleveland, he never was quite at home in Detroit. He seemed to resent the reverence in which Kaline was held and the stark fact that he would never be paid as much as the longtime Tigers star. “Who is Kaline, a lit-tie tin god?” he had asked angrily during one contract dispute. Colavito had told the young Horton that when Willie was ready for the big leagues Colavito would be traded. He was absolutely right. But now, five seasons later, in a totally unexpected manner, it was payback time.

  Colavito had one of the strongest arms in the game. He had pitched once with the Indians in 1958 and threw three shutout innings. He was always fooling around during warm-ups—throwing from a windup, breaking off curveballs. Now he’d have his chance.

  He came in with two men on in the fourth, retired his old nemesis, Kaline, and his former admirer, Horton. In the fifth, he walked two, but he kept the Tigers scoreless. In the sixth, Kaline reached him for a double, but Colavito retired Detroit again, striking out Tracewski. Then, in the sixth, the Yankees erupted. They scored five times off Dobson and Patterson and found themselves in front, 6—5. Womack and McDaniel finished up with three shutout innings and—who could believe it—Colavito was the winning pitcher.

  “I feel so funky,” laughed the Rock in a specially arranged between-game interview. The Tigers felt much worse than that. To a man, when asked to recall this season, they named the defeat by Colavito as its absolute low point. The loss in the second game, in which Colavito played right field and hit a homer and Horton lost a ball in the treacherous left-field glare for a two-run single, was just the final coat of misery. The Tigers had lost again, 5-4—their fourth consecutive one-run defeat of the weekend. Yankee Stadium even in its decline seemed to have snared one more late summer victim. Baltimore again was only five games back. The Tigers were hanging at the edge of the abyss.

  When the clubhouse doors were finally opened after the second game, a message had been scrawled on a chalkboard: “If you think the world ended today, you don’t belong here.”

  It was assumed that Freehan, the emotional .former football player, had written the words. But Freehan says that the author was Eddie Mathews. The veteran had injured his back in June and not played since. The injury would force his retirement at the end of the season. But while he was on the disabled list he dressed for every game, at home and on the road. He was held in such high regard that every Detroit opponent approved the arrangement, a necessity for road games. Mathews, eventually, would be ruled eligible for the World Series by the commissioner’s office. It was a gesture based on sentiment more than anything else for a man who would be voted into the Hall of Fame ten years after this season. He was the first member of this team to go into Cooperstown, although Kaline would follow him two years later. During this perigee of the season, he became Detroit’s inspirational leader.

  Moreover, McAuliffe’s suspension was still not over. It had been extended to cover the Tigers’ next two games with Chicago so that there would be no risk of retaliation by the White Sox. The Tigers fumed that the league was trying to pump up interest in a dormant pennant race at their expense. The Tigers bused across the river to Newark and boarded their plane, flying off into the night to a future that suddenly was a lot grimmer than it had been just three days before.

  CHAPTER 20 Ratso

  A dangerous cigarette dangles from his fingers as he sits at the kitchen table. He knows he shouldn’t be smoking. Not with his medical history.

  “Ahhh, I gave it up once for about five years,” says John Hiller. “Then I got a chance to start a game, and I invited a whole bunch of friends to make the bus trip down from Duluth. They scored five runs off me in the first inning, and I was gone. It was humiliating. I was sitting there in the clubhouse, and someone had a pack in the locker next to me. So I grabbed it, and then I had another one, and then I sent the clubhouse boy out to buy me a fresh pack. I’ve quit a few times since, but never for that long.”

  Hiller lives in Iron Mountain, Michigan. The town is five hundred miles from Detroit in the state’s Upper Peninsula. But the golf course is just down the street, and the air is fresh. The northern winters may be long, which makes it hard on his leg with the arterial blockage. Still, it is home, and he is happy to be there. A man whom Billy Martin once described as “coming back from the dead,” he’s happy to be anywhere. A heart attack victim at the age of twenty-seven, informed that his career was over at twenty-eight, no, the cigarette is a mark of defiant life.

  “I never liked cities much,”
he said. “I know a lot of the guys became manufacturer’s reps, things like that. But I was never one for schmoozing. I never could bring the same kind of drive that I gave to baseball into business. I tried selling insurance for a while. I just couldn’t make it go, even though the name got me in a lot of doors. We had a little farm a few miles outside of town. Raised some stock there. But the leg got so bad, y’ know, I just couldn’t work it. So I’m just content to let the world go by.”

  Back in ’68 he was Ratso. That was the nickname hung on him by his roomie, Pat Dobson; it was an affectionately sleazy comparison to the Dustin Hoffman character in the film Midnight Cowboy. Dobson, in turn, was named Cobra because his pitching motion resembled a snake regarding its prey and then striking. The Tigers were very big on nicknames, some of them bizarre. Jim Price was the Big Guy, reflecting his position as leader of the scrubs. Jim Northrup was not only the Fox but Sweet Lips because of his ongoing acidic commentaries on the world. Horton was ’Roids because of a recurring affliction in his nether regions.

  “When Ed Mathews joined the team, they told me to come up with the right nickname for him,” says Hiller. “You know, we had a lot of respect for Eddie; but we weren’t in awe of him or anything. We knew he was a Hall of Famer and what he had done. But I said, what the hell, let’s call him New Guy. So that’s what he was. Eddie was with us about a week in 1967, and he said: ‘Jeez, you guys aren’t going to win any pennant; you’re just a bunch of drunks.’ That was something coming from him because Eddie never turned down a drink too often. But you know what? Next year he got up and told us, ‘I’ve played baseball for twenty years, and I finally made it to the big leagues.’ Isn’t that something? From Eddie Mathews. He saw how hard we played the game, y’ see. We had our fun, but we knew how to play ball.”