The Tigers of '68

by George Cantor

  McLain against Gibson. That was what mattered.

  Never in recent history had a series pitching matchup been so eagerly anticipated. It was built up like a heavyweight championship match—the cool, destructive Joe Louis against the brash, big-mouthed Muhammad Ali. The two pitchers were inter-viewed in a full-blown, presidential-sized press conference on the day before they would finally meet. Both spoke in soft, complimentary terms. No talk of demolition now. They emphasized that all this talk of McLain versus Gibson was getting a little wearisome. More attention should be paid to the matchups of the teams. But no one bothered. This was to be mano у mano, a personal duel in the sun in the middle of the arena.

  This year of the pitcher could have ended no other way. The achievements of Gibson and McLain and a few others had given pitchers the sort of dominance that hadn’t been seen since the dead'ball era in the major leagues. Since 1964, the first time this Cardinals team went to the series, batting averages had dropped eleven points in the National League and seventeen points in the American. Scoring was down by more than 1,000 runs in each league. Carl Yastrzemski’s .301 mark for the American League batting title was the lowest in history.

  The owners were convinced that this was “Bad for Baseball.” Baseball people actually talked like that in 1968. Being described as Bad for Baseball carried a powerful sense of condemnation, as if your patriotism had been found wanting or a copy of Mao’s Little Red Book turned up among your personal belongings. Among other things that were Bad for Baseball were an irreverent attitude, beards and mustaches, rock and soul music, and a lifting of the game’s exemption from federal antitrust regulations. But as a direct result of this season, a lowered pitcher’s mound, a narrowed strike zone, and the designated hitter rule were all adopted. A round of expansion in 1969 also diminished the quality of most pitching staffs. By the early ’70s, the Year of the Pitcher was only a horrible memory to the owners. But in 1968 it was the heart of the story.

  McLain’s motto for this encounter seemed to be: “What? Me worry?” He told reporters that he would be more on edge for his opening in Las Vegas, scheduled for later in the month. He then astonished the crowd in the bar at the Sheraton-Jefferson Hotel the night before the game by sitting down at the organ in the wee hours and giving an impromptu concert.

  The confrontation finally came on a gorgeous Yom Kippur afternoon.

  If the Tigers hadn’t fully understood before, by the end of the third inning they knew they were in deep trouble. Gibson was unhittable, in full command of his entire arsenal. At no time in the American League season had they faced a pitcher like this, someone who threw this hard with this much movement on the ball. He struck out seven of the first ten men he faced. At one point, he mowed down Kaline, Cash, Horton, Northrup, and Freehan—the heart of the Tigers lineup—right in a row. It was a demoralizing display of power pitching.

  “He never wastes a round,” said Horton. “He came out throwing as hard to the number nine hitter as to the number three hitter, as hard in the ninth inning as he did in the first.”

  “He surprised us with the curve,” said Cash. “I kept looking for the high, hard one, and he kept breaking off one hellacious curve after another.”

  “Luis Tiant throws just as hard,” insisted Northrup.

  For the most part, however, the Tigers look scared, as if the first game of the series against a pitcher of this caliber was just a bit more than they could handle. For Kaline, who struck out three times, it was the first series game he had ever seen in person.

  “Someone wrote that I had taken a vow never to see a series game until I got to play in one,” he says. “That’s silly. I never went to a series game because usually I was just too tired when the season ended to go travel somewhere.”

  The Tigers denied that they were anything like shell-shocked after this game. But they did have that look. They knew that they would see Gibson twice more and have to beat him once somehow if they hoped to win. Cash, sizing up the attitude around him, tried to put a light turn on things. “Someone should have warned us that he changed clothes in a phone booth before he got to the park and took off the suit with the big S on it,” he said.

  Gibson obliterated the single-game strikeout record of fifteen, set by Sandy Koufax in 1963. As Koufax watched from the television booth, Gibson tied the record by getting Kaline in the ninth. Then he broke it with Cash and finished up with seventeen strikeouts by ending the game with Horton.

  “Honestly, I wasn’t aware of the record,” says Gibson. “I didn’t even hear the crowd cheering. McCarver came out to the mound with the ball after I got Cash, and I had no idea what he was doing there. I told him to just give me the goddamn baseball and get back to the plate so we can get this finished.

  “They were chasing my slider all day like it was a fastball. But it was what they said in the papers the next day that really stopped me. In the National League we’d never praise an opposing player like that. You didn’t give him that kind of lavish respect. Losers did that.”

  McLain, meanwhile, struggled with his control from the outset, in trouble throughout the early innings. He was working from behind in the count consistently. Finally, in the fourth, he walked Maris and McCarver, then gave up singles to Shannon and Javier. The Cards had a 3-0 lead, and everyone knew that would be plenty. St. Louis added one for good measure on a Brock home run and finished with an emphatic 4-0 win.

  There was no doubt now about who was the top heavyweight in baseball. The winner and still champion was Gibson. The Tigers now had to show that they were capable of dimming the lesser lights of St. Louis.

  The next day it would be Lolich against Briles. This was almost an anticlimax. After all the expectations of the opener, it was regarded as routine. Lolich had finished the year with just seventeen wins and he didn’t play even a harmonica. But Maris had warned his Cardinals teammates that when Lolich had his slider working, he could be enormous trouble. Moreover, the Tigers were sure that once they got the Cardinals back in Detroit, they would have their way with them. That’s where their big advantage in power would come into play. But they had to win one time in St. Louis. Then they could go home all even again.

  CHAPTER 29 The Doughnut Man

  When he was still playing baseball, Mickey Lolich got an offer to go into the food business in Detroit.

  “Guy called me up when he saw my last name was Croatian,” says Lolich. “He told me that he was Macedonian and figured that put us in about the same neighborhood. He wanted to set me up with a pizza outlet. But I couldn’t see it. There didn’t seem to be much of a chance for growth with pizza, so I turned him down. The guy was Mike Hitch, and he made so much money selling pizzas that he bought the ball club. So how smart does that make me?”

  The morning rush has ended at Mickey Lolich’s Doughnut Shop. The proprietor, dressed in suspenders and a plaid flannel shirt, sips coffee at a work counter in the rear of his place in Lake Orion. It’s about a forty-five-minute drive from Tiger Stadium but just down the road from the Palace of Auburn Hills, home of the Detroit Pistons. An excellent location. Lolich has more invested in the place than just his name in the front window. He’s hands-on, at work every morning at the ovens. And not only hands. He had something of a potbelly even as a player. “It’s hereditary,” he would explain. As a doughnut shop owner, this part of his anatomy has expanded exponentially, further proof of his intimate involvement in the workings of his business.

  “I can hardly remember a thing about the rest of the 1968 season,” he says. “I know they sent me out to the bull pen in August, and I won something like four games in a week. Since I only won seventeen games all year, that means I must have been pretty much horseshit the rest of the time. The series, sure. I remember every inning, almost every pitch. But, you know, the years go along, and the seasons start running together. I have to stop and ask myself: ‘Now, wait a minute, was that in ’68, or did it happen in ’72, when we won the division?’ I pitched in a lot of ball games. You rememb
er the people, but the details of the games all kind of blur.

  “I never even expected to pitch in the major leagues. Just signing a minor league contract to me was the greatest thing in my life. I never had a winning season until I got to the Tigers. Things never came easy for me. I was never that kind of guy. I was always blue collar, just going out and doing the best job I could. They had me pigeonholed in the system as another screwy left-hander, and that always irritated me. I’m not really a left-hander. I just throw that way because I got into a motorcycle accident when I was a kid and couldn’t use my right arm for a while. So to keep playing ball, I had to learn how to throw left-handed. But they had me pegged because I went my own way. Screwy left-hander.

  “Even when I first got to Detroit, I didn’t buy a house where the rest of the guys did. I wanted something that was a little more rural, farther away from the city. It took me a little longer to get to the stadium, but that never bothered me. It gave me more time to think, just me and the motorcycle. It clears your mind.”

  When Lolich moved out to the town of Washington, it was remote, barely inside the metropolitan area’s orbit. But three decades later, the city has grown out to him. His doughnut shop, which is not far from his home, is located in a community that was primarily a summer lakeside resort in 1968. Now traffic through Lake Orion is so heavy during rush hours that local police refer to it as the Snake, an endless line of cars twisting off to the far horizon. The doughnut shop has become some-thing of a tourist attraction. Baseball fans from around the country are constantly pulling in to look over the memorabilia displayed there, munch a cruller, and hope for a look at the great man himself.

  Lolich drifted through the Detroit farm system for three years, never quite making it at the AA level. When they promoted him to AAA, he was treated brutally. So the Tigers lent him to the team in Portland, his Oregon hometown, on the supposition that he was no great loss. It was while pitching there, in the summer of 1962, that he put it together.

  “I think it was the left-field fence,” he says. “It was so close in that park that you couldn’t make a mistake. I concentrated more, and my control improved. One year later, I was in Detroit.”

  By 1964, he was an eighteen-game winner and regarded as the young star of the Tigers staff. Then he stalled again. Although he never won fewer than fourteen games in the next three years, he didn’t move on to a higher level, either. And when McLain arrived, he found himself challenged for the preeminent position.

  “I don’t think there was ever any great secret about the way Denny and I felt about each other,” says Lolich. “I didn’t hate him, no. It didn’t bother me that he had become the number one pitcher. I never admitted to myself that I was number two. But I didn’t like the way he made his own rules and got away with it. I came up with the Detroit organization, and you were taught that there was a certain way you conducted yourself. It was fairly well regimented. I didn’t mind that, and neither did the other guys—just as long as the same rules applied to everyone.

  “Denny never wanted to go along with the program. He always seemed to be challenging management, flaunting it, seeing what he could get away with. I remember the time he landed his plane at a little airport, and because he was in a hurry he left it blocking the fuel pumps. Nobody else could gas up. That was how he did things.”

  The antagonism reached the public eye during the 1969 All-Star Game break. McLain gave Lolich and his wife a ride to the game in Washington, D.C., aboard his Cessna. But when the game was delayed by rain, McLain had to return to Detroit early, he said, to keep an urgent dental appointment. He says that Lolich knew of the time constraints and knew that he would have to make other transportation arrangements. Lolich insists, however, that McLain never said a word about an early departure. The first he knew about it was after the game when he went looking for his plane ride home and found it had already flown away.

  For his part, McLain liked Lolich even less.

  “We didn’t need a U.N. peacekeeping force between us,” McLain said in his 1988 autobiography, Strikeout. “We just went our separate ways, did our separate things, and went through the motions of sociability. . . .

  “Lolich had a great arm, but he also had a personality that rubbed people the wrong way, especially me. Lolich was the kind of guy who could say ‘Good morning’ and piss you off. What bothered me was his petty jealousy. He couldn’t stand to see other guys succeed. It seemed to me that Mickey sometimes pulled against the Tigers—and especially the other pitchers. I think that he secretly wished the Tigers would lose every game but the ones he pitched.”

  But McLain would not have been in the running for Mr. Congeniality on this team, either. During the 1969 season, in fact, when the network Game of the Week awarded cash prizes to players of the game (a quaint notion now given the salaries of the ’90s) McLain openly pulled against his hitters in one game so that he could win the award instead. His accusations against Lolich may be what psychiatrists refer to as projection.

  Several of the Tigers mentioned an incident in which McLain was found cheating at cards in one of the ongoing games among the players. One of the other players had to be pulled off him. But that was how McLain operated.

  Lolich, on the other hand, found himself bogged down in a constant search for respect. One local dealer, for example, gave him the use of a new car for the 1968 season. It was a luxury model and carried the dealer’s name modestly displayed on the side. When Lolich was taken out of the rotation and sent to the bull pen, the dealer demanded his car back.

  “I think Mayo took out a lot of his frustrations on me,” Lolich says. “He didn’t dare touch Denny, not with the season he was having. So I became the whipping boy. It was all right. The only thing I ever asked from any manager is that if you had to take me out of a ball game, don’t point to the bull pen before you got to the mound. I thought that was disrespectful.

  “But as for the series, maybe it was the ideal situation. There was no pressure on me. I just went out and pitched. I’d been throwing the ball good from the middle of August on. I just remember feeling very confident, very relaxed. My wife, Joyce, was on the road with me, and she said before the games in St. Louis that I slept like a baby. Maybe I did grind my teeth a little, but I do that anyhow.

  “What really bothered me is that my dad and my uncle came to St. Louis to see me pitch, and they couldn’t get a flight back out to Detroit. So I was trying to talk Jim Campbell into letting them on the team plane. I remember walking out to the mound worried about that. Campbell finally gave the OK. How was he going to turn me down? To me that was one of the greatest rewards of the whole experience, giving my dad and my uncle the chance to share in it. To this day my uncle still talks about it whenever I see him.

  “But the series changed everything for me. It wasn’t only about finally getting recognition. It was like I turned over a new leaf in my mind. I knew I was a good pitcher. But I was more confident about being able to challenge the hitters. I went after everyone.”

  When McLain had gone for his thirtiethth a few weeks before, Lolich had attached a sign shaped like an arrow to his locker, at the entrance to the Detroit clubhouse. “To McLain’s locker,” it read. There was a touch of spite about it. But now Lolich was the man. The crowd stopped at his locker. He went out in game two of the series and shut down the Cards, 8-1, striking out nine hitters on the way. Not quite in Gibson’s league, but a strong game, nonetheless. And to top it off, he hit the first, and what would be the only, home run of his career. It was no gimme, either. It came in the third, with the Tigers ahead only 1-0. So unaccustomed was Lolich to this sort of thing that he missed first base on his first pass around. He had to be yelled back to touch the bag by first base coach Wally Moses. A display in the doughnut shop exhibits a bat with a hitting area about the size of a tennis racket. “The bat Mickey used to hit his series homer,” it reads.

  It didn’t seem that he could improve on that pitching and hitting performance. But he would—and
quickly, too. In just a few more days he would become a national hero and the idol of Michigan.

  “That part of it lasted a minute and a half,” he says. “The Vegas appearances, getting the Sport Magazine award, all the rest. I’ve just been a working stiff the rest of my life. A little overweight. Not real good looking. Just respecting my job and trying my best. It was real nice, but that’s really not who I am.”

  In 1984, when the Tigers got back to the series, Lolich reported that the seats given to him by the club were deep in the upper deck of the outfield. He parked in a downtown lot and rode the shuttle bus to the ballpark with the rest of the fans. Hardly anyone recognized him. Although he had harbored ambitions to be a sports broadcaster after retirement, he didn’t get a call until the spring of 1996. Then a new Michigan minor league franchise, the Lansing Lugnuts, asked him to be the color man on a few of their local telecasts. Why not? From doughnuts to lugnuts isn’t that big a jump.

  We left the doughnut shop through a back door and walked into the parking lot. A man, getting into a car with Florida plates, looked up, saw Lolich, and did a double take. He then walked over to him.