The Tigers of '68

by George Cantor

  Flood said after the game that he had misjudged the ball, that he should have caught it. But in a book written several years later he indicated that he might not have been able to catch up to it even if he had broken back immediately. This is the version Northrup prefers.

  “I know in my heart that ball was past him from the get-go,” Northrup says. “My daughter told me that she read Flood’s book and that it would do me good to get it. But I know what happened. Hit all the way.”

  In Busch Stadium, a gasp of disbelief went through the capacity crowd. This wasn’t how it was supposed to go at all. A bit more than five hundred miles to the northeast, Detroiters came to their feet, also incredulous at what they were seeing on their television screens. With an almost audible whoosh, the tension drained from the day. The city began to breathe again. Now it was almost a matter of counting it down.

  “I was absolutely sure we were going to win that game,” says Gibson. “I knew that Lolich wasn’t exactly what you’d call a finely tuned athlete. He had to be dog-tired coming back on two days’ rest. I was tired, too, but I’d been through this before.

  “McCarver said later that maybe in the back of their minds, the guys let it affect their attitude in games five and six because they knew they had me coming out to pitch the seventh. But it’s dangerous to allow a team to gain momentum in any situation. That’s what we let the Tigers do.

  “When Northrup hit the ball, I was confident Flood would get it. When he came back to the dugout, he apologized, saying it was his fault. But how can you blame the best centerfielder in the business? Curt Flood was the Cardinals. And Northrup hit the damn ball four hundred feet. I would never second guess.”

  A moment later, Freehan, with only his second hit of the series, doubled to the left-field comer for the third run of the inning. Gibson had lost it all at once. Now there were just nine outs for Lolich to get.

  The Tigers added one more run in the ninth, and Lolich kept chugging away, giving up no hits. Three to go. Flood popped to shortstop. Cepeda fouled to Freehan. Then with everyone poised for the ending, Shannon finally reached Lolich for a home run. It was the first run that St. Louis had scored off Lolich in sixteen innings, and only the second that it had managed overall since Cepeda’s blast in the first inning of game five. That now seemed like a very long time ago.

  Then it was McCarver. He lifted a little pop fly to the right of home plate. Freehan flung aside his mask, settled under it, and tucked away Detroit’s third world championship. It was 4:06 P.M. in Detroit. The real Magic Moment had struck.

  CHAPTER 32 Celebration

  As McCarver’s pop fly settled into Freehan’s big mitt, Harry Grossman, watching the game in his Detroit apartment, suddenly began to cry. His wife, Laura, who had spilled the drinks all over the room when Matchick hit his home run in July, watched with concern. “Harry,” she said. “It’s only a game.”

  “You don’t understand,” he replied softly. “You don’t understand.”

  The city erupted within minutes of the final out. Secretaries and lawyers and janitors came streaming out of the downtown skyscrapers, shrieking and laughing and crying all at once. No further work would be done on this day. A man in his late twenties, hair askew and tie removed, shouted at a reporter, “All my life I’ve waited for this day.” Someone had ordered the fire trucks from the station in the city’s financial district into the streets. They sat at the curb, sounding their sirens as shredded paper began to rain from the windows on the upper floors.

  Blanche Chapp watched the ball game end and searched for an appropriate response. As a young girl, she had lost a job because someone had given her a ticket to a 1934 series game and she had gone there instead of to work. She could not let this moment pass. She suddenly remembered that years ago someone had given her a Tiger outfit as a Halloween costume. Blanche rummaged through the closet until she found it, got into the car, and sped to the office where her daughter, Carol, worked. Carol put on the suit and walked out into the streets of downtown, the living embodiment of the Tigers, accepting congratulations and occasional hugs from everyone she passed. “It was a great way to get the feel of the crowd, and vice versa,” she said.

  Fred Steinhardt, who had partied at the Lindell A. C. the night the team won the pennant, watched the game in a private club downtown. “The moment the game ended, the guy standing next to me, who was about my own age, put his hand on my shoulder and said, ‘There will never be another sports experience in our lives that will match this.’ I never forgot that. And after all these years, you know, he was right.”

  The city’s celebration in 1935 was legendary. But the soiree of 1968 soon eclipsed even that swell party. Within half an hour, every street in downtown was clogged with pedestrians. Cars with revelers draped over their hoods inched their way forward in the mob. No one cared. They didn’t want to go anywhere else. Beers were passed from car to car, as were cigarettes of the illegal variety.

  In the suburbs, people who hadn’t been downtown in months jumped into their cars and headed there on the freeways, pulled irresistibly to get in on the party. In the quiet suburb of Birmingham, an elderly widow, living alone, went into her garage and sounded her car horn as her own way of being part of it.

  Many observers noted that the racial suspicions that had clouded life in the city finally seemed to lift in the flow of energy and joy. Free Press reporter Barbara Stanton, sent out to do a story on the mood of the city, found herself walking in step with an elderly black man. He smiled and looked at her. “Everybody,” he said. “Everybody.”

  Cars loaded with young black people from the neighborhoods surrounding downtown soon joined the flow. “Tell the world, Tigers the greatest,” one young man kept yelling at the top of his lungs. “Tell the world.”

  The players were staging their own exercise in hilarity in St. Louis. After the final pop fly, Lolich had leaped into Freehan’s arms, and the catcher, toting his burden, staggered back toward the middle of the diamond. Within a few steps the two were engulfed by the rest of the Tigers, howling and shouting in the eerie quiet that engulfed Busch Stadium.

  It was the third time in a seven-game World Series that a team had come back from a 3-1 deficit. The Pirates had done it in 1925 and the Yankees in 1958—against the Braves of Mathews and McMahon. Now those two men, who had tasted the bitter potion of such a comeback, swigged the champagne of triumph.

  In the clubhouse, McLain stood on a platform put up for TV interviews and sprayed the bubbly at anyone within range. Horton shook his head and kept repeating, “I looked over the left-field roof in that seventh inning, and there was Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. I have never been so happy in my life.”

  “What a nine,” Earl Wilson shouted, marching around the room with his champagne. “What a nine.”

  Even staid John Fetzer, the owner who never intruded, rushed into the clubhouse, grabbed a bottle from the hands of Stanley with a quick “Gimme that,” and proceeded to pour it down his throat. Jim Campbell had come to the game wearing a lucky hat, a yellow fedora. McAuliffe grabbed it from the general manager’s head and put it on his own, and now it, too, was soaked with champagne. “It was when Mickey picked off Brock,” McAuliffe yelled over the tumult. “That was the ball game. We’d talked about it, and Mickey knew he had to make Brock make the first move. He played it perfectly.”

  Mayo Smith smiled and answered questions, but his hands were shaking as he tried to light a cigarette. After all those long and weary years, drifting through the minors, playing for peanuts, getting the chances and failing, washed up—after all that, it had finally come to him. He had climbed to the top of the only mountain he ever wanted to conquer. At fifty-three, it was Mayo’s turn to taste the wine.

  Julio Moreno, who had gone through the season as batting practice pitcher, sat by himself with a small smile on his face. During home games he would dress and leave the park as soon as his job was done. He hadn’t been around for the pennant-clinching bash. Moreno hadn’t vari
ed his routine. He sat there, dressed in his suit and tie, a part of this team, and yet not really. But on this day everyone belonged. Stanley and McAuliffe sneaked up behind him, picked him up, and deposited him fully clothed into the whirlpool as Moreno howled in delight.

  Horton circled the room singing “Jingle Bells.” Sparma and Warden emptied champagne bottles at each other in a squirting match from a distance of twenty paces.

  Stan Musial walked over from the Cards clubhouse and grabbed Mayo in a warm embrace. “You deserve it, you son of a gun,” he said. Mayo started to offer him a cup of champagne and then pulled it back. “Naw, you got plenty of this in your own restaurant,” he said. “Go drink it there.”

  The two men then threw back their heads and laughed. Musial had known this celebration three times as a player and twice as an executive. Now an old friend had joined him on the platform, and the moment was fine.

  Down the hall, the Cardinals were quietly sipping their own champagne. “I never had a bad glass,” said Schoendienst. “Besides, we had a terrific season, and we lost to a good baseball team.” In the streets of St. Louis, office workers who had prepared to shower confetti in celebration tossed it out the windows anyhow. Cleaning trucks moved slowly through the deserted streets after dark, tidying up the mess.

  Detroit had gone way past the confetti stage. As evening approached, thousands of the celebrants, as if drawn by voices that only they could hear, got onto the freeway and started driving to Metro Airport. A crowd of a few hundred had been on hand when the Tigers had returned from St. Louis the first time. This time there would be 100,000.

  Neil and Mark Hertzberg were among those who made the drive. The two brothers, who are now both physicians, decided to make the trip on impulse. “It just seemed like the right thing to do at the time,” says Neil. “Emotions were running so high, you had to do something. Watching them get off the plane was a great idea. I don’t think anyone dreamed that the same idea would occur to everyone else in the city.”

  The Tigers’ plane was due at the United Airlines terminal about four hours after the game ended. Long before then, their welcoming committee brought airport traffic to a complete standstill. All parking lots were full. People simply abandoned their vehicles at the side of the entrance road or the freeway and raced toward the runway. A United flight from Denver landed, and word spread through the crowd that it was the Tigers. The crowd broke down a fence and dashed toward the taxiing plane. “I looked out the window,” one astonished passenger later told a reporter, “and I saw that mob surrounding the plane, and I thought to myself, ‘It’s finally happened. It’s the revolution.’”

  Air traffic controllers finally advised airport administrators that they would have to shut down. The situation was out of control. Word was radioed to the Tigers’ jet, still several minutes out of Detroit, to divert to Willow Run Airport. This facility, on the site of the World War II bomber factory, had been the city’s major airport for years but had been closed to commercial flights two years before. The players landed there in almost total calm and boarded buses for the drive back to the city they had levitated.

  Several Detroit journalists had so much to write after the ball game that it was impossible to make an air connection back to Detroit. They wound up at Tony’s Restaurant in St. Louis for dinner and a quiet celebration. Baltimore manager Earl Weaver, who had pursued the Tigers for most of the season, seemed to be as thrilled as anyone in Detroit about the series. He kept running up with radio reports about what was going on in Detroit.

  “They had to close the airport,” he shouted. “Isn’t that fantastic? God, that’s just great.”

  The Tigers peered from the bus windows as they slowly made their way through the city streets, which were still filled with a party that didn’t want to end. A few players had their eyes closed and snored, overcome with champagne and emotional release. Norm Cash had passed up the homecoming in favor of a quicker return to his own home in Texas. But most of the players looked out the windows, as if trying to engrave the scene on their memory for the rest of their lives.

  There were a few scattered reports of violence during the night. But almost no looting or gunplay. At Wayne State University, however, a fight broke out between two groups of students at dinnertime in the Student Center. The fight, apparently, had been divided along racial lines. A few days later, the student newspaper, The South End, reported on the incident.

  “The fight began,” it said, “when a group of black students objected to the way in which white students were celebrating the defeat of the St. Louis Cardinals, a great black team.”

  Had nothing, finally, been learned?

  CHAPTER 33 After the Ball

  A few days later, Lolich was flown into New York for lunch at Mama Leone’s and the presentation of a new Dodge Charger for being World Series MVP. He, too, was headed for Las Vegas and would perform right down the Strip from McLain and his mellow organ. Lolich worked up an act with local sportscaster and singer Jim Hendricks. In a tux and shiny patent shoes Lolich would get up in the lounge of the Frontier Hotel and, to the tune of “Goin’ to Kansas City,” sing about going to “St. Looee” and getting himself some birdies.

  McLain took the opportunity to remark to his audience at the Riviera Hotel that “I wouldn’t trade twelve Mickey Loliches for one Bob Gibson.” Upon reflection, McLain decided that that hadn’t come out right. So he tried it another way. “What I meant to say was that I wouldn’t trade one Bob Gibson for twelve Mickey Loliches.” Oh, well. On the third try he got it right.

  The rest of the Tigers spent the winter of their content away from the spotlight. Mathews already had announced his retirement, and it pretty much severed his connection with Detroit. He would always be identified as a member of the Braves. He briefly managed that franchise in Atlanta and was in the dugout the night his old teammate, Henry Aaron, broke Babe Ruth’s career home-run record. Although Mathews remains widely admired by his former teammates with the Tigers, he has almost no contact with them and lives quietly outside of San Diego.

  On the day after Lolich accepted his car, Warden and Oyler were selected by Kansas City and Seattle in the American League expansion draft. But the core of the ball club—all five outfielders, Cash, McAuliffe, Freehan, Lolich, and Hiller—would remain to win the 1972 Eastern Division race. They lost to Oakland in a bitter five-game playoff, which they still maintain was stolen from them on a close play at first base because of umpire John Rice’s hatred of Billy Martin. They never won another pennant.

  “Baltimore was just too good in those years,” says Northrup. “They had a little too much of everything for us. The funny thing is I wound up playing with the Orioles. I went into the clubhouse the first day and said real loud, “Clubbie, you gave me the wrong uniform. I wear number five.” Brooks Robinson [whose number that was] never even looked up and said: ‘Not on this team, you don’t.’ We got along real well. I like to think I loosened him up a little. The Orioles were a great team, but I don’t think they had as much fun as we did.”

  Baltimore finished nineteen games ahead of the second-place Tigers in the first season of divisional play in 1969. Detroit dropped all the way to fourth place in 1970, and Mayo Smith was fired right after the season ended.

  “We quit like dogs,” said Northrup.

  “The fans in this city wouldn’t know a ballplayer from a Japanese aviator,” observed Mayo upon departing, a remark that remains as cryptic as it was the day he uttered it.

  McLain won his second consecutive Cy Young Award with a 24-9 season in 1969. But toward the end of the year, Detroit News columnist Pete Waldmier wrote about the mysterious injury that had put McLain out of the 1967 pennant race. According to Waldmier’s version of events, McLain had tried to back out of some gambling debts. A top local Mafioso paid him a visit at home and, to show McLain the error of his ways, stomped him on the foot. It may have been the only time in history a team lost a pennant to the Cosa Nostra. McLain was observed by several reporters p
lacing bets on basketball games over the clubhouse phone in Lakeland during spring training in 1969. Some of them met privately with Jim Campbell to tell him what they had seen. Nothing ever came of it.

  But in February 1970, it was announced that McLain was the target of a gambling investigation. He was suspended by the commissioner’s office for several months, filled the ballpark upon his return that summer, was plagued by a chronic sore shoulder, struggled on the mound, and finally ended his performance by dumping pails of water over the heads of the city’s two baseball writers, Jim Hawkins and Watson Spoelstra. The Tigers suspended McLain for the rest of the year. During the off-season, he was traded to Washington in a brilliant maneuver that gave the Tigers two starting infielders—Eddie Brinkman and Aurelio Rodriguez—and a top pitcher in Joe Coleman. The trade put Detroit in position to win the division two years later.

  The team contended again in 1973 before falling out of the race in September. The end came the following year. McAuliffe was traded to Boston, Northrup was waived to Montreal, and Cash was released. In 1975 they finished last with the worst record in baseball.

  Only one member of the team ever returned to the series as a player. Pat Dobson was traded after the 1969 season and found his way to Baltimore two years later. He was a twenty-game winner with the Orioles in 1971 and started against Pittsburgh in the series.

  Horton also enjoyed a brief success after leaving Detroit. He wound up with Seattle in 1979 and had one of the best years of his career, with 106 RBIs. He was known there as “the Ancient Mariner” and made his home in the Northwest for a few years before returning to Detroit.