The Tigers of '68

by George Cantor

  Although Kaline may not like to dwell on the past, there are some moments that don’t fade away. His ninth-inning catch of Mickey Mantle’s drive at Yankee Stadium, leaping into the right-field seats to take away a game-winning home run, is one of the best.

  “The New York radio crew couldn’t believe I caught the ball,” he says. “They went off the air saying the Yankees had won the game. The clubhouse man was listening and expected us to come off the field all down. Instead, he saw us running down the tunnel, yelling like crazy, and he didn’t know what the heck was going on. Another time I drove in all the runs for Detroit in a game and Mickey did the same for the Yankees. The headline in one of the New York papers read: ‘Kaline 3, Mantle 2.’

  “I always enjoyed competing against Mickey. But, of course, it was never really me against him. Baseball is a game of individuals but within the team framework. One or two players can’t make that much of a difference. You can’t have a Michael Jordan come in and just turn an entire team around. That’s what made ’68 such a unique experience. For once, everything clicked as a team.

  “You know, baseball is a game that you measure in failure. You fail seven times in ten at-bats, and you’re a great player. Where else in life can you fail that often and be a success? I played twenty-two years in Detroit and won only once. That means there were a lot of seasons we came up empty.

  “We were just so confident that year. I never played on a team that went out every day knowing that they were going to win. I can’t tell you why that was. Maybe it was the right mix of veterans and younger guys. Maybe it was a holdover from the previous season when we lost a pennant we all know we should have won. But it was great to be a part of. Although, of course, it was a lit-tie frustrating for me, not playing all the time. I finally had to face the fact that if the team was stronger by my not being there, that’s just how it was.”

  No one really understood what it was like, though. How it must have felt to go from being Six to becoming an occasional starter, scrambling for his at-bats like a utility man. He won an August game with a looping single, not quite the crisp liner that was a Kaline hallmark. Afterward, a writer lightly inquired, “What kind of a hit do you call that?” Kaline bristled in anger. “What kind of question do you call that?” he responded and stalked away. It hurt way too much to laugh.

  “I understood the kind of pressure Mayo was under,” he says. “It seemed that every day in September there was some kind of story speculating on what would happen to me during the series. So after we clinched the pennant, I went into Mayo’s office and told him: ‘Look, don’t feel that you’ve got to play me. I understand the situation. It wouldn’t be right to sit one of the kids, because they’re the ones who won it for you.’ Mayo just looked over and smiled and thanked me. Then he said to start working out at third base. That floored me. I’d played one or two games there for a few innings. But never consistently. So I took some infield there, and then a few days later Mayo called in me with a few of the other veterans—Cash, Mathews, Freehan. He asked us what we thought about moving Mickey Stanley to shortstop. That’s the first any of us guessed what he’d been thinking.

  “I never really felt any added pressure, knowing that the move had been made to get me in. I figured it was done to make us a stronger team, not as any favor to me. If I just stayed under control and played my game, we’d be fine.”

  In 1968, Kaline’s Hall of Fame credentials were still regarded as debatable. He was seven hundred hits shy of 3,000, had not yet had the chance to perform on the national stage. As it turned out, he played long enough to reach 3,000 and breezed into Cooperstown in his first year of eligibility. But it was the World Series that really removed all doubts. It gave the entire country the chance to watch how Six played ball.

  It is late afternoon, long past the lunch hour, and the Men’s Grill is almost empty. One group sits in the far comer, engaged in a game of cards. They look much older than Kaline. Even in his sixties, it wouldn’t seem incongruous to see him in uniform. The face is a bit fuller, the hair a little grayer. But time has been good to him.

  Besides his physical skills, Kaline also had an exceptionally fast mind. He was always aware of situations and personnel, always one step ahead of the next guy. In a game against Minnesota, Tony Oliva cranked one into the upper deck, deep in right center. But Kaline gave it the full fake, racing back to the wall as if he had a chance. He knew that Cesar Tovar, who was on first, was an aggressive baserunner and might tag up on the chance that Kaline would catch the ball and not be in position to throw. Sure enough, Tovar tagged, and Oliva, already into his home run trot, passed him at first base. Oliva was called out, and although Tovar was waved around to score, Kaline had taken a certain run away from the Twins. No one could recall ever seeing a play like it.

  So with that kind of mental agility why did he never become a manager?

  “They never asked me,” he says. “Jim Campbell once mentioned that I’d have to go down to the minors for several years, and that didn’t have much appeal to me. I never saw the sense in it. But it got to the point where I figured that if I had to ask, it wouldn’t have been worth it. And besides, if I had asked and they didn’t want to do it, how were they going to tell me no? It would have been too embarrassing for everyone.

  “But I like to observe. I’ve always studied people. That’s the only way to learn. After a while, you get to see tendencies, and that tells you a lot about a person. I try to bring some of that into the booth as a broadcaster. I don’t run people down, but I try to give my opinion honestly. I’ve reached the point where I’m pretty comfortable with it.”

  In his early years as a broadcaster, Kaline was criticized for grammatical errors and mangled syntax. It stung him deeply. His formal education had ended with high school, but he is an avid reader, deeply interested in political affairs. He worked to polish his performance on the air with the same ethic he had brought to baseball.

  “It’s funny,” he says, “but, you know, Tiger Stadium is the only place I’ve ever worked. I’ve been there since 1953, as a player and a broadcaster. There was never any other place I got a paycheck from. So I have this feeling that I’ll go on working until the Tigers move to a new ballpark. That feels right to me.

  “Come to think of it, maybe there’s another reason I never managed. I know that when I was growing up, ballplayers were bigger than life. You really looked up to them. That’s not true anymore. You watch some of these guys, and there doesn’t seem to be any genuine love for the game or for their team or the city they play in. You want to ask them what they have to be unhappy about. Maybe I’d find that too hard to deal with.”

  Maybe he had just answered his own question, too. Maybe that’s why successful middle-aged men still approach him with the heart of the children they used to be, the same way a generation of New Yorkers felt about Mantle and mourned his death as a terrible personal loss. Six is part of a Detroit generation’s land of lost content. Members of that generation know they can never return. But seeing Six reassures them that something of value remains.

  CHAPTER 25 The Big Finish

  After a pennant is clinched, a ball club usually gets to relax and take a short mental vacation before entering the pressure of the postseason. The remaining games are almost like exhibitions, with major stars rested, rookies inspected, and secondary pitchers given a chance to show what they can do. Detroit had wrapped it up with ten games still to go, which normally would have been an unusually long respite. But the last few games of the 1968 season would be anything but normal. The ball club began an experiment that would turn into one of the most audacious gambles in baseball history. For the final six games of the season, Mickey Stanley would start at shortstop. Mayo and his coaches would then determine whether or not Stanley could play there during the series.

  It is hard now to recapture just how incredible this move was. With Kaline’s performance in the series a part of the historical record, it now seems as if it was the only natural move
to make. But there was nothing in the history of Mayo as a manager, or the Tigers as an organization, that would have indicated a willingness to make a move quite so bold.

  Detroit was one of the most conservative franchises in a game that resisted change with teeth firmly clenched and both heels dug in. Every so often, someone inside baseball would suggest that the sport consider changing with the times. But no one really thought he meant it. Baseball’s response to the hippie-dippie world of 1968, an America going through one of the greatest cultural upheavals in its history, was to ignore it and hope it all went away. Facial hair was still forbidden on the Tigers and most other teams. Hair length was regulated. Ties and jackets were mandatory on planes and in hotel lobbies on the road. In the birthplace of Motown, the sound that was transforming the recording industry, the stadium organist was instructed to play only bouncy tunes from the ’20s and polkas. It sounded like a Rotarian picnic. Another sixteen years and a public outcry would be required before the ball club would permit a tape of Detroit’s unofficial summertime anthem, Martha and the Vandellas singing “Dancing in the Streets,” with its joyful shout of “Can’t forget the Motor City,” to be played at Tiger Stadium.

  The tone was set by general manager and executive vice president Jim Campbell. He was a man with the heart of an outfielder but the soul of an accountant. Campbell had played baseball at Ohio State University, graduated as a business major, and made a commitment to spend a life in baseball. It became his entire life. His marriage collapsed because he could not tear him-self away from the ballpark. There was always another scouting report to read, another financial statement from the minors, another old story to tell in the hospitality room. He worked back-breaking hours, in his office by 9:00 A.M. and at the park one hour beyond the last out of a night game. He expected the rest of his staff to be there, too. When the team went on the road he wanted telephone reports from those traveling with the ball club first thing in the morning.

  He was nothing if not methodical. He lived frugally himself, handling money as if it might explode in his face. Even thirty years later, players recount their contract battles with him like war stories, a war on which they, inevitably, were on the losing side. Those who went on to successful business careers under-stand now what Campbell was trying to do. Even so, most of them still feel they had to fight for every dollar and might have been more handsomely compensated for their achievements by another, more generous organization.

  It is still legendary among the Tigers how Kaline turned down a $100,000 contract because he didn’t feel that he had earned it. To contemporary fans, fed up with the unceasing whining and demands of millionaire players, it sounds like the selfless gesture of a noble spirit. But the rest of the Tigers groaned. Campbell would turn the anecdote upon them repeatedly with the question: “Do you think you’re a better player than Kaline?”

  But Campbell loved the game and everything about it. He understood his limitations as a judge of baseball talent and surrounded himself with knowledgeable former players. Campbell was especially devoted to George Kell and Rick Ferrell and made it a personal mission to see that both of them were elected to Cooperstown. When he traveled, he’d seek out the baseball hangouts, the restaurants run by former players. Those of Al Lopez in Tampa, Stan Musial in St. Louis, Tommy Henrich in Columbus, Ohio. He almost felt a responsibility to patronize these places. It was standing up for baseball. Campbell hated outlandish promotions, too. Occasionally he would grudgingly schedule a giveaway day or, even more rarely, a fireworks display. But he thought of all such marketing tools as crass gimmicks. He felt that the game was good enough to sell on its own merits. Nothing more was needed.

  Campbell himself reflected the personality of the team’s owner, Kalamazoo broadcasting executive John Fetzer. With his inside knowledge of the television industry, Fetzer would structure the first big-money network television package for the game, bringing in money beyond most of the owners’ wildest dreams of avarice. The fact that this bonanza ultimately would lead to the spiraling salaries of free agency is yet another proof of the law of unintended consequences. Fetzer himself was stolid, Midwestern, conservative. After the death of his wife, he would dabble in spiritualism and attempt to make contact with the dead. But in the ’60s he was the very model of old-fashioned values, a hands-off owner who lived 150 miles away and rarely showed up in the clubhouse. He was content to let Campbell run the club as he saw fit.

  Mayo had been the perfect managerial choice for this organization. Whatever else he may have been, he was above all safe and predictable. Many Detroit observers had urged Campbell to pick a manager like Billy Martin, someone to rock the boat and shake things up, someone with new ideas. But new ideas were the last thing the Tigers wanted. Campbell, eventually, did hire Martin. Although Martin won a division title in 1972 the experience was a near-disaster for the organization and frequently reduced Campbell to a sputtering wreck.

  Mayo was hardly a daring tactician. As far as he was concerned, the game pretty much ran itself. He managed by the book, inserting the right player in the game to do what he was supposed to do. If you had the better talent, things would turn out fine. If you didn’t . . . oh, well. Taking a gifted centerfielder and turning him into a shortstop in one week did not quite fall within that style of managing.

  Still, there was one value that was predominant in this organization. That was loyalty. If you produced and kept your mouth shut, you were taken care of. With all that Kaline had meant to the Detroit organization, it would have been unthinkable for Campbell to take away his place in the series. It would have been a denial of who Campbell was and how he defined his ball club. Mayo understood that. It made what he did inevitable.

  The Tigers took enormous pride in being a self-made winner. Of all the starters, only Cash and Wilson had played in the majors for other teams. Campbell did not enjoy making trades, taking an accountant’s very sensible view that if you wanted something of value you also had to give up something of value. He hated when that happened. Cash had been a steal, a lucky guess, with only a minor league infielder forfeited. Wilson had been obtained straight up for Don Demeter, a centerfielder made expendable by the emergence of young players from the farm system. (Oddly enough, both Cash and Wilson had been obtained for players named Demeter. In Cash’s case, it was Steve Demeter. The two Demeters are the only two players of that name ever to appear in the majors.)

  Lasher had pitched briefly with Minnesota, Tracewski put in several years with the Dodgers, and Mathews, Wyatt, and McMahon traveled widely in other climes. Price was drafted out of the Pittsburgh chain. Otherwise, all the Tigers had come through the Detroit system.

  If the team had a major flaw it was lack of speed. The Tigers finished dead last in the majors in stolen bases with twenty-six, or fewer than half as many as Lou Brock swiped all by himself. The strategic revolution that the Dodgers and Maury Wills had wrought in the early ’60s, bringing back the steal as a major offensive weapon, was already having an impact on the game. As teams started moving out of the pre-World War I bandboxes and into the larger, all-purpose stadiums, with formidably deep power alleys, the steal would become even more important. But that was still a few years away, and Tiger Stadium was still regarded as the best hitter’s park in the game. Ever since the introduction of the live ball changed the game in 1920, this was a franchise based on power hitting. Only one pitcher in Detroit history, Hal Newhouser, would be voted into the Hall of Fame. (Jim Bunning went in as a member of the Phillies.) Winning in that ballpark was extraordinarily difficult, which made McLain’s achievement that much more remarkable. The Tigers were always a team that eschewed the steal, preferring to wait for the long ball and score in clusters. In the 1970s, that would put them at a tremendous disadvantage as their farm system kept sending up the same kind of players. But for now that strategy was more than adequate.

  The Tigers did have some runners in Stanley, Northrup, and McAuliffe. But their speed served mostly as a defensive advantage. This was
the best fielding team in the majors by a big margin. It made only 105 errors—with the runner-up committing 119. Detroit did not give away ball games. This again was mandated by the sort of park in which it played. Poor fielding teams could not survive Tiger Stadium because its dimensions did not forgive mistakes.

  This ball club had been crafted deliberately by Campbell and his advisors. To Campbell it all was a gigantic game of chess. He understood the rules thoroughly and had mastered the endgame. When it all began to change with free agency in the late ’70s, Campbell became almost disspirited. The rules were different. In his mind, it had degenerated into a brainless contest to spend the most money. There was no challenge. Moreover, the movement of players destroyed the sense of continuity and the loyalty that he valued so highly. He increasingly withdrew from the daily running of the team and concentrated on the business aspects. It was as if he understood that the game he knew had passed.

  But in 1968 Campbell had put all the pieces into place. On September 28, he received his reward. On this next-to-last home game of the season, the Tigers went over the two million mark in attendance. A mark thought to be unattainable in Detroit, with its unpredictable weather and obstructed-view seats and nervous populace, had been exceeded. The season had been a success in the ledgers as well as on the field. Now the honest accountant was preparing to risk it all with a roll of the dice at shortstop.

  CHAPTER 26 OnDangerous Ground

  "I’ma workaholic,” he confesses cheerfully. It’s only 8:00 A.M., but Mickey Stanley has already cleared off a day’s work from his desk in his little office near Brighton, at the very edge of suburban Detroit’s outward growth. Now he will get down to the real labor at hand, running a backhoe to clear a property he is developing a few miles away.