The Tigers of '68

by George Cantor

  “You’re Mickey, aren’t you?” said the visitor. “1 was hoping I’d get to see you. I just want to tell you how much I admired you and shake your hand.”

  Lolich obliged, and the man beamed.

  “Today I’ll tell my grandson that I got to shake hands with a hero.”

  There are times when the events of a week can last a whole life through.

  CHAPTER 30 The Final Comeback

  About ten minutes into game five of the series, a wise guy spread the word through the press box that the baseball writers’ chartered flight back to St. Louis had been cancelled. The series was, to all appearances, over. The Cards were about to finish a sweep in Detroit and wrap it up in five.

  This is a sportswriter’s dream. Most of them secretly pray for a five-game series to avoid the trek back to the original city and three more days away from home. It’s the trade’s dirty little secret.

  With Orlando Cepeda putting a Lolich delivery into the left-field seats for a three-run homer in the first, it certainly looked as if their prayers would be answered.

  Even in the Detroit bull pen, players were tallying up their losses.

  “I remember sitting next to Don McMahon,” says Jon Warden, “and he was trying to calculate the loser’s share of the series pool. Maybe he was just trying to cheer me up, but he said it was going to be pretty close to what he got for winning in 1957 .It was a big difference for me, since I was making the minimum. Those few thousand dollars were huge. Guys put down payments on their houses with that difference.”

  Detroit had waited a long time for these games. A huge tiger face had been painted on the pavement at the main downtown intersection of Michigan Avenue and Washington Boulevard. A song called “Go Get ’em, Tigers” blared from every radio. The entire city had decked itself out in flags and bunting, and throughout the weekend an air of carnival had taken hold.

  But now it was the third game in Tiger Stadium, and Detroit had been clubbed twice. Wilson couldn’t get past the fifth inning in game three. Cepeda and McCarver clubbed three-run homers, and the Cards, behind Washburn, had retaken the series lead with a 7-3 win. Then on Sunday had come outright humiliation. Gibson again simply overwhelmed the Tigers. They were catching up to him, though. He struck out only ten this time, and Northrup did manage to get a home run in the 10-1 St. Louis romp. But Gibson also hit a homer, and Brock, who was feasting on the Tigers, drove in four runs.

  Brock had stolen seven bases in just four games, tying his own record set the previous year. But it had taken him seven games to do it then. Freehan could not begin to contain him. Brock was stealing at will, making it look as if he were playing with children. To make it worse, Freehan also had gone hitless in thirteen times at bat.

  “He’s not just doing it to me. It’s the whole team that’s going through this,” said Freehan. “I’m not embarrassed. I wish I were playing better, but at this point I don’t think it’s anything that I have control over.”

  Brock had further annoyed the Tigers by stealing his record seventh base as the Cardinals were nine runs ahead. It was a major breach of the game’s etiquette and vexed Detroit deeply.

  McLain, however, was more than vexed. He announced that he was done. Brock had drilled his second pitch of the game for a home run, and it had gone downhill from there. McLain was gone by the third inning, driven out by an unrelenting St. Louis attack. The thirty-one wins were forgotten now. The Cards had exposed him as a pretender. He told reporters after the game that even if the Tigers managed to extend the series, he could not start a third time. His shoulder was throbbing with pain. His season was over.

  The game itself had turned farcical. It was started in a steady rain. But the Sunday series game always drew the biggest TV audience of the week, even going up against pro football. A postponement was out of the question. In 1968, all series games were still played in the daylight. Baseball harbored the quaint notion that it was important to showcase its biggest event to the widest audience, even including children. The first night game in the series was still three years away. By the end of the ’80s, all games, even those on the weekends, were played at night and often did not end until midnight when all good little boys and girls were fast asleep. And many of their parents, too.

  But the fourth game of this series took place under the lights, anyhow. As the rain intensified with St. Louis holding a huge lead, both teams did everything they could to turn the advantage their way. Two Cardinal baserunners got themselves deliberately thrown out on steal attempts to speed things along and get in a regulation five innings. The Tigers, on the other hand, changed pitchers, held conferences, protested the length of the sleeves on Gibson’s shirt. Anything to force a delay. But no series game in history had ever been cancelled after it had begun. This was to be no exception. Despite a seventy-four-minute halt, it slopped through to its messy conclusion.

  In fact, the most exciting thing that had happened had been the singing of the National Anthem before the game. Jose Feliciano had been the guest soloist. The blind Puerto Rican singer was invited to do the honors by radio announcer Ernie Harwell. Feliciano had a big hit with a blues-tinged rendition of the Doors’ “Light My Fire,” the same song that had been number one in the country during the week of the riots in 1967. Now Feliciano’s version of the anthem reignited the flames.

  Rock and soul and gospel and Native American and klezmer versions of “The Star-Spangled Banner” have since become cliches. It’s impossible to predict how it will come out before any given athletic event. But in 1968 the song was regarded as untouchable. Robert Goulet had been severely criticized a few years before for simply forgetting some of the words when he sang it before a championship fight. Rocking the anthem was unthinkable. You sang it straight. Motown’s Marvin Gaye had delivered it that way when it was his turn to sing.

  But as Feliciano sang the opening bars, it quickly became apparent that this was not going to be the same old anthem. In fact, no one was quite sure what it was. The words were familiar. But the melody had been deconstructed into a seemingly random hodge-podge of chords and vocal gymnastics.

  Feliciano received a rippling of polite applause as he left the field with his leader dog. Most of the crowd sat in silence, not quite knowing what they had just heard. But the television audience knew. It was sacrilege, a deliberate mocking of American values and our fighting men overseas. The telephone lines lit up beyond the capacity of stadium operators to handle the calls. Other outraged viewers called their local TV affiliates or the commissioner’s office or a newspaper. In their minds, the protest movement had invaded the World Series and sullied the flag in full view of millions.

  Feliciano was stunned and a little put out by the reaction. He explained that he had meant no disrespect. It was just his interpretation of the song. He treated it with his musical sensibilities. He even criticized Gaye for not having the courage to perform the anthem out of his own musical background. There would not be such a political flap over a pregame ceremony until a marine unit walked onto the field in Atlanta holding the Canadian flag upside down in 1992.

  When Cepeda connected right away in game five, it looked like the Tigers were as scrambled as Feliciano’s chords. Another drubbing was coming right up. But slowly, laboriously, Detroit crawled back into it. Freehan even managed to throw out Brock on an attempted steal. Triples by Stanley and Horton and a routine Northrup grounder that suddenly took a fluke hop over Javier’s head cut the St. Louis lead to 3-2 in the fourth.

  Brock then started the fifth with his third straight hit of the game, a double against the wall in left. Javier followed with a single, and it seemed that the Cards were on the wing again. Horton had been taken out of game two in the late innings because Mayo had expressed doubts about the strength of his arm. Horton hadn’t liked that and felt that his abilities had been unfairly maligned. Now he charged Javier’s single and attempted the impossible—throwing out Brock at the plate.

  It was Freehan’s call on whether to have Wert
cut off the throw or let it go through. He said nothing, and Horton’s bullet came to him on one hop, just as Brock arrived. But Brock was standing up. Just as the Tigers had noted in their scouting reports, Brock was so used to running unmolested that he never dreamed an attempt would be made on him. A slide would have put him in under any tag. Instead, Freehan’s body bumped the running Brock off the plate. The catcher immediately whirled and tagged Brock, and plate umpire Doug Harvey emphatically called Brock out. The Cards descended on Harvey in a screaming mass, protesting that Brock’s foot had reached the plate. After repeatedly viewing replays from every angle, it is clear that Harvey made the right call. But he did it in a flash, and that decision turned the World Series around.

  Never had a series swung so completely on one play. Before the play on Brock, it had been virtually all St. Louis. Detroit had staggered and stumbled, almost going turtle in a defensive posture. Now the swagger returned.

  Still, into the seventh the Cards clung behind Briles to the 3-2 lead. Wert struck out, and the crowd waited to see who would come up to hit for Lolich. Despite his game-two home run, Lolich was no hitter. His average for the year was .114, and that was fairly close to his career mark. There was no logical reason to let him bat with just eight outs to go until final defeat. Especially with Gates Brown on the bench. In its own way, letting Lolich bat was as unorthodox a move as the shift of Stanley.

  Once more, however, Mayo had guessed right. Lolich sent a weak pop fly to right and it fell safely for a single. The Cards immediately went to their top reliever, left-hander Joe Hoerner. He had saved seventeen games for them during the year and compiled an ERA almost as low as Gibson’s. His job was to get McAuliffe, who usually had big problems with side-arming lefties. But McAuliffe managed to get a bat on the ball and sent it on the ground into right. Stanley then walked. With the bases loaded, Kaline came to bat.

  In Kaline’s long career, this may have been the defining moment. Many of the corporate and VIP fans who had been given tickets for the first two games of the Series had jumped off the boat for this one. The people who loved the game were in the ballpark this Monday, and they screamed for their long-time hero with a passion that could not be contained. This is where it had all been leading, their adulation of him for all these long hopeless seasons. It was all this moment. Kaline could not fail them now.

  If there had been noisy afternoons before in this ballpark’s long history, they were eclipsed by the din that filled it at this moment. The light towers seemed to sway from the sheer volume of it. The big crowd pleaded with him not to fail them now. Hoerner got ahead on the count, and Kaline fouled off one pitch after another on the comers. This was Six, one of the smartest hitters in baseball, fully focused on what had to be done. Hoerner finally made one pitch a little too good. Kaline, who always described himself as “a mistake hitter,” pounced on this mistake. He lined it to right-center. Lolich and McAuliffe came racing home, and the Tigers were ahead.

  If there had been noise before in this game, in this season, it was nothing compared to this. The stands had become a cauldron of hysteria. The Line had come through with everything on the line. The last fifteen years had been redeemed, stamped “paid in full.”

  Cash added another run-scoring single off a flustered Hoerner, and Lolich closed it out for a 5-3 win. The Tigers were still alive, and the games would return to St. Louis.

  CHAPTER 31 Grand Finale

  It turned out that Denny McLain had a slight amendment to make to his pronouncement that his season was over.

  “My shoulder isn’t that bad,” he told sportswriter Wells Twombley after game five. “If Mayo needs me, I’ll be ready to start the sixth game.”

  Then why, Twombley asked McLain, had he given out the bum information about his arm the day before.

  “Oh, that,” said Denny, according to Twombley. “I was just trying to get back at one of the Detroit writers—the little, curly-haired Jew cocksucker.”

  With one important exception, that described me. Dave Nightingale, baseball writer for the Chicago Daily News, reported that McLain had said the same thing to him, without some of the more colorful descriptive phrases.

  My inclination was to let it slide. It sounded like Denny just shooting his mouth off and not meaning anything by it, especially because I hadn’t been the one to whom he had given the story. It all was an ex post facto rationale for being caught telling another whopper.

  But Joe Falls was infuriated. Falls, a practicing Catholic, was often mistaken for being Jewish because of his New York accent and biting, incisive wit. When the story got back to him, he insisted that we both go down to the Detroit clubhouse after the off-day practice between games five and six and confront McLain.

  So in the middle of a World Series in which the Tigers had just won one of the most dramatic games in franchise history, Falls and I found ourselves standing in front of McLain’s locker and accusing him of being a lying anti-Semite. This was great fun.

  McLain heatedly denied that he had said any such thing and flatly refused to offer any apology. Moreover, he said, if he would try to show up anybody it would be Falls. Joe just as adamantly said that he would not tolerate this kind of talk and demanded the apology. Falls was a pretty big guy, and McLain was getting hot, and I was frightened to death that one of them would swing on the other one. If Falls went down I would be honor bound to try to deck McLain . . . and he would have killed me. Even worse, if McLain had hurt his hand swinging at one of us we would have been blamed for blowing the World Series for the Tigers.

  Several of the players, most noticeably Wilson, came rushing up to separate everyone. Mayo had heard the commotion in his office, and he came running out, too. He got between McLain and the press and asked for Falls and me to accompany him into his private office. Then he shut the doors and looked at us.

  “Boys,” he said. “I’m going to tell you something my daddy back in Missouri told me a long time ago. Never get into a pissing match with a skunk.”

  With those words of wisdom ringing in our ears, we boarded the plane for the flight back to St. Louis.

  As it turned out, McLain was more than ready to go out for a third time to get the best of the Cards. Only this time there was no Gibson glowering at him. And the Tigers were fully able to come to his aid.

  Detroit rose up in the third inning and, against four St. Louis pitchers, tied a series record to score 10 times. Northrup capped the scoring off with yet another grand slam, his fifth of the season. The final score was 13—1, and it was, in the words of Curt Flood, “just an old-fashioned butt-kicking.” The margin of victory was the biggest in the series since the Yankees whipped Pittsburgh 16-3 in 1960. But, as many hastened to point out, the Pirates won that series.

  But St. Louis still had one more card to play. Gibson was ready to pitch game seven. His series-winning streak had now grown to a record seven straight. He would be working on a full three days’ rest. Although he said he was a little tired and “would rather not have to pitch,” he would, nonetheless, be there. Lolich was coming back on just two days of rest, and despite two gallant performances, no one thought he could match up against Gibson. Las Vegas made the Cards 8-5 favorites.

  The Busch Stadium crowd rose and gave Gibson an ovation as he walked to the bull pen to start his warm-ups. Confetti had already been prepared in the city’s downtown office buildings for the victory celebration that would surely follow.

  This again was the Gibson the Tigers feared. In the last series game he would ever pitch, he was once more a magnificent figure, fury in red and white. Through six innings, only one Detroit player reached base. Inning after inning, Gibson mowed them down, just as he had in his first two games.

  But this time Lolich stayed with him. Matching Gibson almost pitch for pitch, the lefty had given up just two harmless singles. Then the tormentor, Brock, singled to start the sixth. Everyone knew what would come next. The St. Louis fans were screaming for it, the steal that would break the record, would set
up the winning run, would finally make this persistent Detroit team come apart at the seams. Brock edged farther and farther off the bag, daring Lolich to throw the ball to the plate or to make a try for him. Finally, detecting what he thought was the start of Lolich’s delivery, he took off for second. Instead, Lolich threw to first. Cash rifled a perfect throw to Stanley, who was covering the bag like a veteran. Brock was tagged out.

  Then Flood also singled. He had been only slightly less aggressive than Brock on the bases, stealing three times in the series. He, too, started a mind game with Lolich, trying to force the pitcher out of his rhythm, to divert him into thinking of something besides the hitter. And once more Lolich’s throw went to first. Flood, too, had been picked off. Six innings were complete, and the score remained 0-0.

  In two cities, millions sat in front of their television sets, barely able to speak because of the tension. No seventh game had ever gone this far without a release, without one team grabbing some kind of advantage. (None would until Minnesota’s Jack Morris won the 1991 series with a ten-inning, 1-0 win over Atlanta.) Normal life slowed to a halt on this golden Thursday afternoon in Detroit, St. Louis, and much of the rest of the nation, too. The drama at Busch Stadium was all that mattered.

  Gibson began the seventh by disposing of Stanley and Kaline. Cash then got Detroit’s second hit, a hard single to right. Gibson, mildly annoyed, went to work on Horton. Willie drove the ball past shortstop into left field. Now there were two on and Northrup coming to bat.

  What happened next has been debated endlessly for three decades. There were deep afternoon shadows, and there were white shirts in the stands behind home, both making it hard to pick up a batted ball. The turf also was soft. A pro football game had been played there on Sunday, followed by two days of rain. But when the liner to center left Northrup’s bat, it appeared that Flood, one of the best defensive outfielders in the game, would get to it without much trouble. The ball was hit hard but seemingly right at him and a little behind him. Flood took one quick step in, then tried to pivot, almost dropping to one knee. By then it was too late. The ball was over his head, and Northrup was racing into third with a two-run triple.