The Tigers of '68

by George Cantor

  Hiller was the last of the ’68 winners to stay with the Tigers, the only one who bridged the gap from Mayo Smith to Sparky Anderson. In time, he became the top relief pitcher in the league, one of the first to be used exclusively as a stopper. But then he was in his second year with the team: A self-described “wild man,” a kid out of Canada, drinking more than was good for him, running a little amok on the road, and throwing the hell out of the baseball.

  “I started, I threw long relief, I pitched short relief,” he says. “Whatever they needed. That’s how it was. You didn’t have the specialists like you do now. A young guy like me got his innings wherever he could. When Mayo decided he couldn’t keep Sparma in the rotation for the last two months, I was the number four starter. I pitched a one-hitter, the low-hit game of the year for us. I had the game with Cleveland where I struck out the first six guys and set a record. I made a contribution. That’s what made what happened later so tough to accept.”

  On January 11, 1971, while relaxing at home, he took a deep drag on a cigarette and felt a sharp pain in his chest. An hour later, he lit up again. This time the pain went all around his back. He called his doctor, who said he didn’t like the sound of that and told Hiller to meet him at the hospital. So Hiller went outside, unloaded his snowmobile from the car, and drove himself to the hospital.

  “When I got there they told me I’d already had three heart attacks,” he says. “Of course, I couldn’t believe it. I was in my twenties, an athlete. My first thought was that spring training started in about a month, and if the Tigers found out about it they’d be pretty upset. I mean I had no idea what this meant. So I asked everybody to keep it quiet because I thought I’d be ready to go to Lakeland on February 14. Then they told me I had to have surgery. No money in the bank. A family to support. All I knew was baseball. I remember laying in that hospital bed and watching the movie Brian’s Song on television and crying because I figured that was going to be me. They were just starting this new surgery, an intestinal bypass, which had a chance to clear the arteries without touching the heart. So I said, sure, yeah, anything. Then I had to call Jim Campbell and tell him. It was the day before I was supposed to report.

  ‘Hello, Jim, I guess I won’t be coming down.’

  ‘Why not?’

  ‘Because I just had a heart attack.’

  ‘Yeah, sure, you asshole.’

  ‘No, Jim, I really did.’

  “Oh, man was he pissed. I don’t blame him. But I had the surgery and lost about forty-five pounds. I got a job in a department store to have a little money coming in, but the owners were wonderful and let me work out at the Y, getting my strength back up, as much as I wanted.

  “It gave me a chance to think. I hadn’t taken care of myself. I was way overweight. Drinking and smoking. I made excuses. Back in ’68 we always used to joke that you could take a team picture in the hotel bar. You had a bad game, and you had to take a drink to get over the disappointment. And if you had a good game you sure as hell had to have some drinks to celebrate. You had all that time on your hands on the road. I never drank at home. Oh, maybe a gin and tonic when I got home after a game. But not like on the road, where one drink got to be two and then ten.

  “But it was more than that. I always pitched scared. Hell, we all did if you weren’t in the starting rotation. You’d pitch over injuries because you didn’t want them to know. You’d start thinking that if you had three or four bad games in a row, they’d send you down. You can’t pitch that way. But after my heart attack I figured: What can they do to me that would be worse than what I went through? What’s there to be afraid of? When a doctor said to me that he doubted I could handle the stress of pitching in the majors again, I told him that wasn’t stress. That’s what I did for a living, throw a baseball. Whatever happened on the field really didn’t mean shit.

  “There was this track at the Y in Duluth. Thirty-five laps around was a mile. The first time I tried to run after the surgery I got around twice and fell flat on my face. I always hated running anyhow. But I just went out there and kept looking at the heels of the guy in front of me and pictured myself pitching again, and I forced myself to run.”

  After a year, Hiller called Campbell and told him he was ready to go again. Campbell was aghast. Chuck Hughes of the Detroit Lions had died of heart failure on the field during a game at Tiger Stadium the previous fall. Campbell was not eager for a repeat of that. Medical opinion, was mixed. People just did not come back from heart attacks and compete at the highest level of athletics. Hiller went through spring training of 1972 as a minor league pitching coach and batting practice pitcher. At the end of training, Campbell reluctantly offered him a job. Pitching coach for the Class A Lakeland farm club. Salary: $7,500 a year.

  “I’d been making twenty grand before I got sick,” says Hiller. “We bought a house based on that salary. In fact, the series check was my down payment. I told Jim I just couldn’t make it on $7,500. He said that’s all he could give me, take it or leave it. But I knew I could make it back to the majors. So I took it.

  “Here’s what I did. I sent my entire paycheck home to Duluth. I got myself a mattress and put it on the floor of the clubhouse in Lakeland. And that was home. After the first night I got a night-light and kept it on all night, because if it was completely dark the roaches would come out. I went to the Tigertown commissary before they broke camp. The cook was a friend of mine. He gave me a big slab of cheese and a big slab of ham and some bread. And that’s what I lived on. Ham and cheese sandwiches. It wasn’t so bad when we went on the road because then I got five dollars a day meal money. I’d save as much as I could, and when we got back to Lakeland my big treat was to take seventy-five cents, go over to the nightclub, buy one draft beer, nurse it all night, and watch the show.

  “A few times I thought to myself: Wait a minute. I pitched in a World Series. I started for a championship team. This is crazy. What am I doing here living like some bum? But Dr. [Clarence] Livingood, the Tigers team physician, was always in my corner. He used his pull to get me an appointment with this nationally known heart specialist in Atlanta. He was Lyndon Johnson’s own doctor. So two days before my appointment, Johnson has a heart attack, and all his appointments are cancelled. That’s when I thought maybe it’s not meant to be.

  “I guess I wasn’t much of a coach while this was happening. I was too concerned about my own career. One day I look up, and there’s Campbell in the stands. He never shows up at Lakeland. I just knew instinctively he was there to fire me. And that would be the end. So I walked up to him and said: ‘Jim, I won’t let you fire me. This isn’t fair. You’re not giving me a chance. I won’t let you do it.’ Then I turned around and walked away.

  “Years later, when I was inducted into the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame, Jim got up and spoke and said that I was right. He had come down to release me, but when he saw how determined I was he changed his mind. So by that much I was saved.

  “I finally got in to see that heart specialist, and he gave me the exam, and then he just sat back and winked at me. ‘Be patient,’ he said. That was it. Be patient. Well, I figured I couldn’t live like this anymore, so I flew back to Duluth and asked about getting my department store job back. That’s when Campbell called. ‘Get down to Chicago,’ he told me. ‘Let’s see how you can throw.’

  “I was throwing the ball harder than I ever had in my life. Losing that weight seemed to make my fastball move better than before. Two of Detroit’s relievers had gotten hurt, and it was between me and Les Cain, who’d been having some arm troubles, as to who would make the team. That’s what Billy Martin decided. We’d go into the bull pen, and whoever threw best got the job. I don’t want to be irreverent or anything, but they could have put Jesus Christ on the mound next to me, and I’d have out-thrown him. After what I’d been through, no way I wouldn’t get that job.

  “Next day, they put me in the game. Dick Allen is the hitter. He looks at a fastball. He looks at a curve. Then he looks at
me as if to say: ‘OK, is that what you’ve got?’ I throw another curveball, and he puts into the left-field roof at Comiskey Park. Not on the roof. That thing was still rising when it hit the bottom side. It put a dent in the metal. And I say to myself: ‘Holy jeez, this is what I came back for?’ But I came back, threw three more innings with no runs and no walks.

  “That’s when Martin tells the clubhouse: ‘What’s the matter with you guys? Here’s Hiller back from the dead, and he can throw strikes. Why can’t you?”’

  Hiller went on to pitch twenty-four times for the division champions and threw three innings of shutout relief in the play-offs. In 1973, used entirely as a closer, he saved thirty-eight games, establishing a major league record. In the first five years after his comeback his ERA was never higher than 2.64·

  “Billy was throwing me in practically every day,” he says. “Once he made me go sit in the clubhouse instead of going to the bull pen, but he called me out of there and brought me in the game anyhow. Next day he told me to stay at the hotel. He couldn’t get me in the game from there.

  “I was the last one from the old bunch. I stayed until 1980, and then I felt I just wasn’t doing the job, and I quit. I mean why should I take the ball club’s salary when I couldn’t earn it anymore? The Tigers didn’t owe me a thing. I gave them everything I had as a player, but I’d have done the same thing if I’d pitched for Boston or Cleveland or anyone. It’s the only way I knew how to play. I always felt maybe they could take more advantage of us from a public relations standpoint. But once I walked out of that clubhouse as a player, that was it. It wasn’t my clubhouse any-more. I never went back.”

  Hiller has kept off most of his weight—and most of his hair, too. He’s been a moderate drinker since the heart attack, lives simply. The wild days of ’68 are a long time ago and far, far away.

  “They’re always on the phone with me to work autograph shows,” he says. “I can’t do it. Not unless it’s a charitable thing. I tried it once, and I felt like a whore. All these little kids paying to get in so I could give them my autograph. I can’t do that.

  “When I was playing, the old-timers would come into the clubhouse and talk about how they don’t play the game like they used to. I always told myself I’d never be like that. But you know the old saying: Money changes everything. It’s all different now. The first little pain, and they’re on the disabled list. I see guys on TV laughing on the bench when they’re ten runs down. God, Billy Martin would’ve killed ’em. Hey, we gave our lives for a paycheck, and it was a good game back then. I just can’t get very interested in it anymore.”

  CHAPTER 21 Laughing All the Way

  In the streets of Chicago, the nation seemed to be fighting for its sanity. The Democratic Convention had gathered for the business of nominating Hubert H. Humphrey for president. Antiwar demonstrators, infuriated by what they perceived to be nothing more than a continuation of American policy in Vietnam, turned the city into a gypsy camp and then into a battleground. For three days, city cops were pelted with words, garbage, and abuse. Then, with the blessing of Mayor Richard Daley, police struck back. Young demonstrators were clubbed, gassed, pursued into hotels, and beaten. Senator Abraham Ribicoff stood on the convention podium and berated Daley. The mayor cursed him right back, and it seemed that democracy itself was going to split wide open in a free-for-all.

  The Tigers saw very little of that from the bus. Although Comiskey Park was just a few miles from the site of the convention, it all could have been happening in Prague—where Soviet troops were on the march, stamping out the last faint embers of Czech democracy.

  Never was the distance between the drumbeat of reality and the unchanging rhythm of baseball wider than in these last days of August. The Tigers were too occupied with trying to put their world back together to notice the planet coming apart. They were facing their own private upheaval after the fiasco in New York. As during the riot that took place behind the left-field wall in Detroit one year ago, they could smell the smoke. But the fire never touched them.

  The first game with the White Sox had been switched from Chicago to Milwaukee. The Democrats had booked all the hotel rooms in the Chicago area, and the White Sox had also agreed to play nine home games in the nearby city. Milwaukee had lost its Braves to Atlanta after the 1965 season, and there was some speculation that the Sox would move to the Wisconsin city. At the very least, they were keeping it warm until another ball club arrived. The Detroit game drew almost 43,000 people, the largest Milwaukee crowd of the year.

  The team plane had arrived from New York after midnight, and the Tigers disembarked in relief. The temperature was twenty degrees cooler, the humidity was down. Earl Wilson, scheduled to pitch that night, decided to “do things right” and never went to bed. Then he went out and pitched a six-hit shutout and drove in the first two runs of the 3-0 win. Even though Detroit lost the next night in Chicago, there was a strong feeling among the Tigers that the worst was behind them. They had been through the fire and survived. McAuliffe would be back in the lineup when they got home. McLain would open the series against California, trying once more for victory number twenty-six. Everyone was certain that he would not fail a third time.

  But the operative word was “home.” The 1968 Tigers were Michigan’s team in every sense. Four of their regulars had come out of the state, giving the team an unusually strong identification with its home base. The Yankee dynasty had been over for just four years. It crumbled for many reasons. But one of the most basic was the initiation of the player draft. Teams could no longer sign and stockpile the best talent for any price they chose to pay. The day of the “bonus baby” and the deep farm system stocked with a decade’s worth of talent were over. Now there was equity. Since the collapse of the Yankees, three different teams had won a pennant, and the Tigers would soon make it four. The last time that had happened in the American League was 1943-46, and it took a world war to bring it about. Prior to that you had to go back to 1918-21, at the very dawn of the Yankee era, to find a similar balance.

  But something had also been lost. The draft made it almost impossible for a team to sign the top local players. The era in which players actually had a hometown bond with the area in which they performed had ended. Even the lordly Yankees always seemed to have a Lou Gehrig and a Waite Hoyt, a Phil Rizzuto and a Whitey Ford—kids who had learned the game on the streets of the big city. Now the players came from anywhere.

  But this Detroit team was a vestige of earlier times. Willie Horton, from the city’s sandlots. Bill Freehan, from the suburbs and the University of Michigan. Jim Northrup, from Alma College. Mickey Stanley, from the state’s second city, Grand Rapids. It seemed that everyone in Michigan knew someone who knew them personally. There was an identification with them throughout the state as “our team,” and that would never be duplicated in the future.

  Sparma, Brown, Warden, McLain, Oyler, Lasher, Hiller—all of them came from neighboring states in the same part of the country (or, in Hiller’s case, the adjacent corner of Canada). Tracewski, Matchick, and Price grew up in Pennsylvania industrial towns that weren’t all that different. This geographic coherence produced a profound similarity of outlook, an innate understanding of who each other was. It was a strong unifying influence. Players shared a view of the world and how to have fun in it.

  Maybe the most notorious shared caper of this team was the Plane in the Pool. It has passed into team legend as the epitome of what hard work, teamplay, and a certain degree of strong waters can achieve.

  The Tigers had first seen the wooden replica of an antique air-craft in the lobby of their hotel in Anaheim as they checked in for the start of the series. A convention of aviation enthusiasts was also booked into the hotel. The players always had time on their hands in Anaheim. The hotel was right across the road from Disneyland, but that paled after the first few visits. There was no shopping or movies nearby. Not a lot to do but watch TV, play cards, and think deep thoughts. It turned out that the plane was
on a lot of the Tigers’ minds.

  After night games in Anaheim most of the players would repair to the nightclub on the top floor of the hotel. It was a favorite hangout. The team had welcomed the start of the 1967 season with a gala party there. Oyler had become so gala at this party that he had to be carried out feet first on the eve of his debut as Detroit’s regular shortstop. In spite of this, he still managed to go hitless. The celebration on this occasion was a bit less jolly, and some of the players were looking for a way to liven up things. That’s when the idea of removing the plane from the lobby and taking it to the hotel’s outdoor swimming pool first was suggested.

  An advance scouting party reported back that there were a few problems. The plane was too big to fit through the door to the pool. It would have to be disassembled. Moreover, it was situated uncomfortably close to the front desk. The night clerk couldn’t see it, but he might be able to hear. Precautions would have to be taken. Moreover, this was especially risky business because Campbell was on this road trip. Usually, when reports of misbehavior trickled back to him a few days after the fact, he would angrily erupt, but time and distance usually eased his displeasure. With him right on the scene, there was an added element of danger.

  “I still don’t know where they came up with the tools,” says Lolich, fondly recalling the event like a general of a great war. “But we had some very resourceful guys on that team. When I saw the tools I knew it could be done. I always loved to tinker with stuff when I was a kid, taking things apart and putting them back together. The plane would be a cinch. So we sent Hiller out to the lobby as a diversionary tactic. He got the desk clerk, who was half asleep anyhow, into a conversation about baseball. Hiller was told to talk loud so the rest of us could get to work on the plane.”