The Tigers of '68

by George Cantor

  “I’ve got two new subdivisions starting up just north of here, and we’re running behind,” he says. “I’ve never minded getting my hands a little dirty.

  “It started when I got out of baseball, I guess. I got nervous. I had $15,000 in the bank and a family to support. I had my fun, and now it was time to get serious about life. I’ve been pretty much out of the public eye ever since. I see some of the other guys turning up on television or radio. Not me. Maybe I overdo it a little on work. But I can’t turn off the machine.”

  With his clean-cut, blond good looks, Stanley among the Tigers always looked a bit like Jack Armstrong thrown in with a gang of pirates. He was the best athlete on the team, in a sport where the best athletes do not always win. He loved everything about being a ballplayer. The conditioning, the warm-ups that others found onerous, to Stanley were a joy. Running sprints, catching fungoes, taking infield—he loved it all. That, eventually, proved the Tigers’ salvation and his undoing.

  “The shortstop thing just hit me right out of the blue, though,” he says. “I didn’t have any inkling that this was going to happen. It must have been Cash. He always saw me fielding grounders out there during infield drill. But I was fooling around. I loved being on the field. I was just a big kid. I lived to play ball. Sure, Mayo had played me there a few times before. But to me it was like practice, to fill in in an emergency or something. But I think that Cash put a bug in his ear.

  “We all knew something had to give about getting Kaline in the lineup. We’d heard maybe third base. The Cards had already announced that they would throw nothing but right-handers at us, so platooning him at first wasn’t going to work. We were in Baltimore on the last Monday of the season and Mayo called me up to his room at the hotel. He told me that he was going to play me the last six games at shortstop and if it worked out that I would start there in the series.

  “I wasn’t afraid to do it. In fact, it was kind of flattering. If the ball club had that much confidence in me, it must have meant something good. And if I screwed up in the last six games, who cared? I decided to just see what happened. So I go out there that night against the Orioles, and they don’t like us much anyhow. McLain walks Don Buford, the leadoff man. The next guy hits one down to Cash, and he throws to me for the force. And Buford just comes in and knocks me right on my ass. ‘Hmm,’ I told myself, ‘this is going to be interesting.’

  “I throw the ball away for an error. My first play in the big experiment, and already I have an error. This was not going so well.”

  Stanley muffed a grounder later in the same game. But over the last five games, his fielding was flawless. Mayo, however, refused to give a definite answer. His remarks to the press after the last game of the season were couched in such noncommittal terms that one of the Detroit papers came out the next day with a story that Stanley definitely would be the series shortstop—and the other paper declared that he would not.

  “I knew it was going to happen,” says Stanley. “That’s when it started to get to me. I was so comfortable in center field. I knew in my mind that when I was out there nothing was going to hit the green. I was familiar with every situation. It all clicked in my mind. Gold Glove. I played all year out there and never made an error. That tied a record. To be taken out of that situation and put at shortstop. It was like landing in alien territory.”

  Strangely enough, most of the Tigers had complete confidence in Stanley. They felt about him much as the contemporary Detroit Lions felt about their star comerback, future Hall of Famer Lem Barney. The nickname for Barney was The Supernatural because he could do anything on a football field. Similarly, Stanley’s teammates felt that he could play anywhere on the diamond.

  He had come out of Grand Rapids, one of the top high school athletes in the city’s history, and signed a baseball contract at the age of eighteen. But whereas defense came easily to him, hitting was a struggle. He advanced through the Tigers system, one rung at a time, taking a year longer to get to the big club than most of the others in his class. This season had been a breakthrough year for him as a hitter, and he was elevated to the number-two slot in the lineup. But it was on defense, with his uncanny ability to get a jump on a ball, that he shone. Whereas other center fielders excelled on sheer speed, Stanley seemed to be operating on clairvoyance, getting to many balls simply on anticipation.

  “I think it was Frank Carswell, the manager at Knoxville, at Double A, who shook me up,” he says. “They sent me back down there for a second year after I couldn’t hit at Triple A. Frank took me aside when I got there and told me: ‘Look, either you start taking advantage of your abilities, Stanley, or you’re not going to make enough money to buy a warm-up jacket for a pissant.’ I hit .300 for him that year, and after that it started coming to me.

  “But when I walked on the field for that first series game in St. Louis, it all kind of hit me. Norm Cash told me that I was so tight they couldn’t have pulled a pin out of my ass with a tractor. It was horrible. I might have never let on what I was going through at the time, but, believe me, it was a terrible experience. I couldn’t sleep at all. I always felt that I got cheated out of my series. It was no fun for me at all.

  “Brock was the first man up for the Cardinals, and he was so damn smart. I could see that he was trying to inside-out the ball, going out of the way to hit it to me. He did it, and I threw him out. At least my knees stopped shaking after that. I got the jitterbugs out. But that nervous feeling never really left me. It was always pretty hairy. I wasn’t afraid of the spikes or anything like that, and I knew where I was supposed to be on the plays. I just understood that Mayo had really stuck his neck out a mile and it was up to me that he didn’t get it chopped off.

  “I ended up making two errors. I kicked away a ball that Julian Javier hit in the hole. And I backhanded one ball, and my throw pulled McAuliffe off the bag on the force. So two bad plays and no runs scored on either one. That was pretty good, huh?

  “Of course, what happened afterwards wasn’t so good. Mayo told me to start working out at short the next spring. I was feeling pretty cocky, and I started cutting loose on my throws without really getting ready. I hurt my arm, and I never really got it back to full strength for the rest of my career. I played a bunch of games there in 1969, but then we got Eddie Brinkman two years later, and there was no need for anyone else to play shortstop.

  “The thing that stays in my mind was how great Ray Oyler took it all. He was just a first-class guy. We were pretty good friends, and I knew this just had to be killing him. To get into the series and then have some guy moved entirely out of position to take your place. But he acted like there was no problem. He’d take me out there during workouts and tried to give me a crash course in shortstop. He was such a great competitor. He played hurt, he played hungover. He never complained. We all loved that guy.

  “But that’s how it was with that team. We all were confident in each other, we trusted each other’s abilities. Everyone contributed.

  “After I left baseball, I did pretty well in the business world. I’ve tried to take care of my family and be a good Christian. Maybe baseball left me a little bit naive. But I know that there’s always somebody out here trying to screw you. A lot of us came off that team and did very well in life. We had enough savvy to succeed in more than baseball. And I know to this day that I’d trust every one of them. No question in my mind. That’s the kind of people they were.”

  CHAPTER 27 Demolition Derby

  The last six games of the regular season may have been a hectic experience for Mickey Stanley. But they were a bit of a lull in the life of Denny McLain.

  After the high drama of the thirtieth win and the pennant clincher and the Mantle home run, Denny needed a little some-thing to keep his interest up. So upon being asked his view of the upcoming World Series, he responded: “I’m sick of hearing about what a great team the Cardinals are. I don’t want to just beat them; I want to demolish them.”

  Oh, my.

  In
the trash-talking, in-your-face ’90s, this sort of hype has become commonplace. Even four months later, Joe Namath would cause whole forests of newsprint to be felled to convey the news that he “guaranteed” a Super Bowl for the New York Jets over the heavily favored Baltimore Colts. But McLain beat him to it, and with a far more pronounced sneer on his lips.

  The Cardinals were decided favorites going into this series, although certainly not by the overwhelming margin that the Colts would be. The Tigers were seen as fairly formidable opponents by the oddsmakers. But for the Cards, this was their third series in five years, and they were loaded with money players.

  The core of this Cardinals team had upended the Yankees in 1964 and then come back to defeat Boston in 1967. There had been a fairly extensive makeover of the infield between the two championships. Only second baseman Julian Javier remained at the same position. But Lou Brock and Curt Flood were back in the outfield, and Mike Shannon had moved from right field to third base. Tim McCarver was the catcher on both teams. Although the pitching staff had been overhauled almost entirely, Bob Gibson was the rock on which it was built.

  McLain’s season had been historic. But Gibson’s stats read like something out of the dead-ball era. His 1.12 ERA had not been matched in more than half a century. Thirteen of his twenty-two wins had been shutouts. He finished all but six of his starts. These numbers didn’t have the immediate grab of thirty wins. But to those with a sense of history and a knowledge of how the game had evolved, they were staggering. They had the texture of Walter Johnson in his prime.

  Moreover, Gibson had already proven that he could do it on the field as well as in the scorebook. He had won five series games in a row, beating the Yankees twice and then polishing off the Red Sox three times. In those five games, he had struck out forty-eight men and pitched with the efficiency of a scythe, ruthlessly cutting down everything in his path.

  Gibson was anger turned to grace. A man filled with the fury of racial discrimination, he had managed to channel it more artfully than any player since Jackie Robinson. A complete athlete, he fought the opposition with his arm, his legs, his bat; and you got the idea that if those didn’t work he’d take on the opposition with his fingernails. The Tigers thought they knew a little something about him from the times they had faced him in Florida exhibitions. As it turned out, they didn’t know a thing. They would now encounter a different Gibson, one prepared for mortal combat.

  “I couldn’t ignore what Denny said,” Gibson now recalls. “I’m sure he regretted it as soon as it left his mouth. I had nothing against him personally. In fact, I kind of admired the way he marketed himself. He understood where the bottom line was in this game. I just didn’t think any pitcher could beat me in a World Series. I sure as hell didn’t think Denny McLain could do it.

  “I’m pretty sure I knew more about him than he did about me. I thought he was as much a showman as he was a competitor. That thing about giving up the home run to Mantle. Disgraceful. I would have dropped my pants on the mound before deferring to an opposing player that way. You know what I would have done to show my respect for Mantle? I would have reached back for something extra and tried to blow him away.”

  Much has been made of the fact that on the days that Gibson pitched the Cardinals fielded a team with a majority of blacks and Hispanics in the lineup. There was Brock, Flood, Javier, and first baseman Orlando Cepeda. Writer David Halberstam contrasted them to their 1964 series opponents, the Yankees, and concluded that the Cards, at the peak of the civil rights era, presented a vision of an integrated America. Claiming that as a unique niche for this team, however, is a bit of a stretch. The championship Dodgers ballclub of 1955 could also field five minority starters—Robinson, Jim Gilliam, Roy Campanella, Sandy Amoros, and Don Newcombe. The 1962 San Francisco Giants, who lost the series to the Yankees, would often present a lineup with six minority members.

  If the Cards played a different style of game than the Tigers, that had more to do with the exigencies of their home stadium than with any ethnic or racial background. St. Louis had been one of the first cities to build the all-purpose, circular, cookie-cutter stadium. Although “all-purpose” was the acceptable euphemism, these facilities were usually built to favor a football configuration. Within a generation, they would be regarded as hopelessly obsolete, unsatisfactory for either sport, candidates for the wrecking ball. Baseball, especially, suffered, with seats too far from the field, power alleys too long, artificial surfaces that distorted the speed of the ball. When new ballparks were built in the 1990s they were more likely to borrow features from structures such as Tiger Stadium, ballparks with a sense of place and historic ambience to them. Such places proved wildly popular in many cities, especially Cleveland, Baltimore, Denver, and Arlington, Texas, where attendance records were shattered. But in 1968, the circular park was thought to be the shape of things to come, and the Cards were the team of the era.

  They came at opponents with overwhelming speed and pitching. Cepeda and Shannon were the only consistent power threats in the lineup, and they hit just seventeen and sixteen homers, respectively. Except for Shannon, in fact, everyone in their lineup had dropped off significantly in offense from the previous year. Even Brock, a holy terror in the 1967 series, had finished the season at just .279, with a mere six homers. Roger Maris, who had slammed his sixty-one homers only seven years before, was at the end of the road. He was a smarter hitter but one whose extra-base threat was only a memory. Maris hit just five homers all season.

  Behind Gibson, there was nineteen-game winner Nellie Briles and Ray Washburn, who had won fourteen. These were manager Red Schoendienst’s choices to start the other series games. Detroit’s scouts had reported that neither one would present much of a problem to the Tigers’ power hitters. Schoendienst decided to bypass future Hall of Famer Steve Carlton in his series rotation, using him in long relief. Carlton had been the least of the team’s four starters, with a 13-11 record. Moreover, Detroit had pounded lefties at a .655 pace during the season. Carlton was just twenty-three and not yet the pitcher who would become the best in the National League through the ’70s. Still, he had started in the 1967 series, and the Tigers respected his arm far more than they did that of Washburn or Briles. They thought Schoendienst was doing them a favor.

  So there would be just one-left handed starter for either side in this series. That would be Lolich. He had come on so late and so fast, and was so overshadowed by McLain, that the St. Louis book on him was inconclusive. “Stay close, and you’ll beat him,” was the phrase they used, but the same thing could have been said about any number of pitchers in the majors. Lolich was the X factor in the series. St. Louis, however, didn’t think they would have to get much beyond G in the alphabet. With Gibson starting three times, the Cards were confident that they had the edge in pitching.

  This was a very confident team about most things. From the multicolored ball they used in infield practice (a quirk the Tigers had copied) to the nickname “El Birdos” that they had hung on themselves, it was a club that had its own strong identity. The Cards understood precisely what it took to win. Their final pennant margin of nine games was a bit smaller than Detroit’s. But they had removed all doubt from the race even earlier than the Tigers and coasted in from mid-August on. The previous year they had won by 10½ The Cards knew they were very good and played that way.

  So they were amused rather than seriously angered by McLain’s little diatribe. But they hung it in their locker room at Busch Stadium. Gibson, who was angry most of the time anyhow, knew he would get the starting assignment against McLain. He did not need the diatribe to motivate him.

  The two franchises had met once before in a series, in 1934. Oddly enough, those games involved the last pitcher to have won thirty games, Dizzy Dean. He had combined with his brother, Paul, to win forty-nine for the Cards that year. Before the series, he had flat out proclaimed that “me ’n’ Paul” would win the four games needed to beat the Tigers. As it turned out, he was ri
ght on the money. He didn’t say anything about demolition. But as he himself pointed out on another occasion, “If you can do it, it ain’t braggin’.”

  It remained to be seen whether McLain could do it or not.

  CHAPTER 28 Duel in the Sun

  It was once axiomatic in American politics that no serious presidential campaigning was done until after the World Series. That would leave the candidates about a month to go after each other. In more innocent years, that was regarded as more than ample time. But both politics and baseball have changed. With two rounds of playoffs in effect, the series now doesn’t end until the last few days of October. Under the old time frame, that would result in a presidential campaign of about a week and a half—which would probably suit most voters just fine.

  But even by 1968, when the series still ended before the autumn leaves had fallen, things were different. The campaign was in full cry. Two days before the opener, Vice President Hubert Humphrey promised to stop all bombing operations in North Vietnam, reversing the policy of his boss, Lyndon B. Johnson. Even in Detroit and St. Louis, this was front page news. Humphrey was thought to have scored major points over his opponent, Richard M. Nixon, who was planning to announce the same policy shift.

  The war raged on. By October of 1968, almost 30,000 American soldiers had been killed in Vietnam. This was slightly more than half of the total number who would eventually have their names inscribed on the memorial wall in Washington, D.C. Although sporadic antiwar demonstrations on college campuses and city streets brought the idea of the war home, its reality was quite far away.

  In Detroit’s previous series appearance, in 1945, World War II had been over for about a month. Yet the country was still on a wartime footing. Travel restrictions applied, and the series was allowed to move only once between Detroit and Chicago. The rosters of both teams had been denuded of most stars. Industry still had not shifted back into consumer production. The war affected every aspect of the life of every individual in the country. During the single autumn that the United States was involved in World War I, the regular season ended at Labor Day, and special dispensation had to be granted for the 1918 World Series to proceed. But fifty years later, the war in Asia barely touched baseball and the crowds who would pack Tiger and Busch Stadiums. Aside from the few players who left for two weeks of summer training with their National Guard units, as far as baseball was concerned the war didn’t exist.