by Tim Wendel
One of the great American beliefs is that everything and everybody deserves representation in the nation’s capital. To that end, it should come as no surprise that on the first Wednesday of every month, at the Hawk’n’ Dove, a few blocks east of the Capitol Dome on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., the Mayo Smith Society convenes its monthly meeting. Hunkered down at one of the tables in the restaurant’s lower level, ideally near a large-screen television to watch the night’s action, the group adeptly protects its turf against the onslaught of interns and lobbyists that populate the Hill like pigs to the trough.
Founded in 1983, the society’s roster goes hundreds deep worldwide. Annual outings include catching the visiting Tigers at Camden Yards in Baltimore and making an annual pilgrimage to Detroit for a weekend series. But such events are gravy, really. The real fun is simply catching up every month, sharing a drink or two, recalling the great games of the Tigers’ past, and reaffirming the genius of one Mayo Smith.
“As a baseball man, Smith was really ahead of his time,” said Dave Raglin, creator of the society’s Facebook page. “Certainly he was low-key, sometimes overlooked, but he was an innovator throughout his career, and he was exactly what the Tigers needed in ’68.”
Smith had managed the Philadelphia Phillies and Cincinnati Reds before taking the Detroit job in October 1966. The Tigers were reeling after previous managers Charlie Dressen and Bob Swift both died during the’66 season. In Philadelphia, Smith had bought the team’s first pitching machine and in Cincinnati he had moved Frank Robinson to first base. Along the way, he targeted Lou Brock for stardom in a Sport magazine piece, two years before his trade to St. Louis. Soon after taking over the Tigers, Smith moved Dick McAuliffe from shortstop to second base. And although shifting Mickey Stanley to the infield before the ’68 Series seemed to come out of the blue, members of the Mayo Smith Society pointed out that the signs were there all along. The year before, Dick Young wrote about the possible ploy in the Sporting News (an insight that likely came from Smith himself), and during the 1968 season the Tigers’ manager hinted that such a move could work nicely with the Detroit lineup.
“Even his own players joked that Smith sometimes seemed asleep at the switch,” Raglin said. “But the man was always thinking and often he was a step ahead of everybody.”
Certainly managers have been playing hunches since the game’s origins. In Game One of the 1929 World Series, the Philadelphia Athletics’ Connie Mack went with Howard Ehmke (7–2) over pitching legend Lefty Grove (20–6) or George Earnshaw (24–8). (Ehmke went the distance, striking out a record thirteen.) In 1950, the Phillies gave closer Jim Konstanty his first start of the season in the opening game of the Fall Classic. Although Konstanty allowed only a single run over eight innings, this time around such a gambit failed to pay off as he lost the contest to the Yankees’ Vic Raschi, who pitched a complete-game shutout. We’ve also seen such strategic innovations as the Boudreau Shift—an infield alignment first devised by the Cleveland Indians against Boston’s Ted Williams and redeployed in the 1946 World Series by the Cardinals—and on the offensive side of things, in recent years St. Louis manager Tony La Russa has batted the pitcher eighth instead of at the end of the batting order. All interesting twists, but they seem to take a backseat to Smith’s bold decision to move his best outfielder to shortstop for the biggest games of the 1968 season.
Since the All-Star break, Tigers scouts had been charting St. Louis games. Nobody read those reports more closely than Mickey Stanley. A major component to the Cardinals’ offense was outfielder Lou Brock. After coming over from the Chicago Cubs in 1964, his speed energized the St. Louis attack. Brock stole sixty-two bases during the ’68 regular season and was in the midst of a run that would see him lead the National League in thefts eight times in nine seasons. His success on the base paths intimidated ballclubs to the point that many gave up trying to make the basic plays.
The Tigers’ scouts, for example, noticed that if Brock was on second base he rarely drew a throw to the plate on a single to the outfield. The mindset of opposing outfielders appeared to be why bother? Brock had the wheels and he would score, throw or no throw. As a result, some in the Detroit clubhouse believed that Brock wasn’t running full out all the time. He rarely slid into home plate, often going in standing up. Perhaps a strong, accurate throw could catch him. Stanley pointed this out to his teammates, especially Horton.
Even though he had plenty of work to put in at his new position at shortstop, with the World Series days away, Stanley once again played the role of teacher. Brock could be thrown out, Stanley told his teammates. But every aspect, from fielding the ball to throwing home to the catcher being ready to snare the catch, had to be automatic and perfect.
“That’s what we started to practice,” Horton said. “From the scouting reports, we knew that Brock sometimes drifted around second base. Same way when going home from second.
“He’d slow a bit going around third base. Of course, he’d brought base-stealing back into [the game], so for a lot of outfielders it was why throw in those situations? He’s going to score anyway.
“As a result, he’d picked up bad habits. The third-base coach picked up bad habits. Even the guy in the on-deck circle picked up bad habits. He wasn’t up there to help Brock by signaling him to slide or pick it up. But we all agreed: The chance would be there, and we’d have maybe one crack at it. Could we throw out the great Lou Brock?”
The Tigers and the sports world would soon find out.
PART VI
The Great Confrontation
There is no loser in the World Series, just two winners, one bigger than the other.
—BOB GIBSON
The regular-season numbers didn’t lie. By the end of the 1968 season, the collective ERA for all twenty major-league teams was just 2.98. Five no-hitters were pitched (by Tom Phoebus, Catfish Hunter, George Culver, Gaylord Perry, and Ray Washburn) and folks were still complaining about the 1–0 final in the All-Star Game, with the only run scoring on a double-play ball. It seemed only appropriate, then, that Game One of the World Series would be a showdown between arguably the two best pitchers in the sport—Bob Gibson and Denny McLain. For their part, both pitchers stayed in character.
Gibson, the St. Louis staff ace, maintained that he found satisfaction in winning the big games because that simply meant more money. But even his own teammates weren’t buying that. “It’s not this easy to always win the big game,” Cardinals’ shortstop Dal Maxvill told Newsday’s Steve Jacobson before Game One. “He says it’s money, money, money.”
With that Maxvill pointed at the left side of his chest. “There’s a big heart in there. Right now there’s so much pride in it that it would fill up that room. He says money. It’s the World Series ring.”
Soon after Detroit and St. Louis clinched the pennant in their respective leagues, McLain put his foot in his mouth, claiming that he didn’t want to just beat the Cardinals. “I want to humiliate them,” he said. Several Cardinals didn’t appreciate the comment, especially Gibson. A newspaper story with the quote was tacked to the bulletin board in the St. Louis clubhouse. “I said it, but I didn’t mean it,” McLain tried to explain. “I was under the influence of champagne and happiness.” Any further brash talk dissipated like tiny bubbles when McLain and Gibson met the afternoon before Game One, a gathering that the press dubbed “The Great Confrontation.”
“It’s not a match between two pitchers,” Gibson said, “ but a game between two teams.”
McLain concurred: “The thing between Gibson and me has been blown all out of proportion.”
With that McLain couldn’t resist a nod to his burgeoning music career, adding that he expected to be more nervous in a few weeks for his opening night in Vegas—which had just been scheduled—than pitching on the road in the World Series. Perhaps with that in mind, the night before Game One McLain strolled into the Gas House Lounge in the Sheraton-Jefferson, the Tigers’ official hotel in St. Louis. The
crowd soon recognized him and without much coaxing McLain played the organ for nearly ninety minutes. At one point, teammate Jim Northrup joined him on stage.
“How many Tiger fans are in here” Northrup asked and most of the room applauded.
“How many Cardinals fans?”
One person yelled out.
“Get him out of here,” McLain joked.
With that Northrup broke into a tune nobody really recognized, closing with the impromptu line, “We didn’t come to St. Looey to sing the blues.”
Northrup went by several nicknames on the ballclub. He was called “The Gray Fox” for his premature silver hair and “Sweet Lips” for his gift of gab. “Lay some sweet words on me, Sweet Lips,” his teammates would often say.
After his attempt to sing along with McLain, Northrup introduced many of his fellow Tigers in the audience—Gates Brown, Willie Horton, Ray Oyler, Joe Sparma, Norm Cash, Mickey Lolich, and Bill Freehan. When the all-star catcher and his wife were singled out, receiving a warm round of applause, Freehan decided to call it a night. Yet most of the Tigers, along with their family and friends, stuck around as McLain serenaded them with such tunes as “One of These Days,” “Restless Wind,” and “Money Is the Game.” A newspaper photographer took McLain’s picture and the hubbub the next morning was how many of the Tigers had broken Mayo Smith’s much-maligned curfew. Not that any curfew was held in high esteem within the Tigers’ ranks. If the Cardinals were the defending champions the fall of ’68, the game’s proud professionals, the Tigers, were still eager to be perceived as equal parts frat brothers and misfits.
October 2, 1968
Game One, Busch Stadium, St. Louis, Missouri
NBC held the television and radio rights to the 1968 World Series, and the network rolled out an impressive team of announcers for their coverage of the Fall Classic. Curt Gowdy held things down as the TV voice, with Harry Caray as his partner for games in St. Louis and George Kell joining him in the booth for games back in Detroit. Jim Simpson and Sandy Koufax headed the pregame show. (On the way to Busch Stadium, Koufax told a St. Louis cabbie that whoever won Game One would take the Series.) On the radio, Joe Garagiola led things off with Pee Wee Reese up in the booth, with help from Jack Buck and later Ernie Harwell. Tony Kubek would be on the field for all games.
Before Game One, Smith watched McLain warm up in the Tigers’ bullpen and didn’t like what he saw. Almost everything his ace threw was high in the zone. Unbeknownst to either of them, the Cardinals planned to take pitches against McLain. After throwing a league-high 336 innings, word had it that he was running on empty. In the ’68 season, McLain started forty-one games and went the distance an impressive twenty-eight times. His relentless drive for celebrity, to constantly be in the spotlight, had helped fuel that fire, along with Pepsi, cortisone, Xylocaine, Contac, and amphetamines. But now it was all visibly taking a toll. In addition, thanks to the fact that any such fatigue had yet to impact the running of his mouth, McLain now also had a lineup of angry Cardinals batters to contend with. Even though he tried to distance himself from his comments about humiliating them nobody in St. Louis had forgotten.
“Our guys were charged up,” Gibson later wrote in a column he penned during the ’68 Series for the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. “The reason might have been McLain’s statement about wanting to humiliate us, if he really made that statement.
“McLain is a good pitcher,” he conceded, before adding, “Whether he’d win thirty-one games in our league, I really couldn’t say.”
If the Cardinals were charged up, so was the sellout crowd at Busch Memorial Stadium. In the afternoon sunshine, Dixieland bands played and Sports Illustrated decided half the crowd was wearing straw hats with either cotton tigers or cardinals stapled to them.
As Game One unfolded, Mickey Stanley was the only Tiger batter to have any early success against Gibson. Although he singled in the first inning, nothing came of it. In the field, Stanley quickly settled into his new post at shortstop, throwing out the Cardinals’ Lou Brock for the first out in the bottom of the first inning. Not bad for a guy who was starting his ninth game at shortstop in the big leagues.
“I hope I can just be adequate,” Stanley said the day before the Series began. “That’s all Mayo wants from me. I know I’ll be tight, but then I’d feel that way in center field for my first Series game.”
With Stanley in the infield, Detroit’s outfield consisted of Kaline in right, former catcher Willie Horton in left, and Jim Northrup in center field. None of them was Stanley’s equal, defensively.
Game One remained scoreless through the first three innings, with Gibson clearly the more impressive pitcher. As Gibson dispatched one Tiger hitter after another (often taking ten seconds or less between pitches), McLain struggled both on and off the mound. In the top of the third inning, he bunted a third strike foul, failing to move Don Wert over. In the bottom of the fourth inning, the Tigers’ starter walked a pair of Cardinals, and Mike Shannon and Julian Javier then singled to bring them around, staking St. Louis to a 3–0 lead.
“We’d never seen McLain,” St. Louis manager Red Schoendienst later said, “but we knew if we’d lay off his high stuff—pitches above the shoulder, up around the neck and eye level—and make him throw strikes, we’d have him.”
Meanwhile, the Tigers’ scouting report on Gibson didn’t do much good. Detroit hitters had been told to be ready for the right-hander’s high heat, but advised that Gibson didn’t have much in his arsenal after his epic fastball. But the St. Louis starter and his batterymate, Tim McCarver, soon realized that the Tigers were too eager to swing at anything that appeared to be a strike. As a result, they began going with breaking stuff. “They were swinging at my curve like it was a fastball,” Gibson said.
In the top of the sixth inning, down 3–0, Detroit pinch-hit for McLain and with that, for this day at least, the “Great Confrontation” was over. The way Gibson was pitching, a three-run lead may as well have been a thirty-run advantage.
McLain later grumbled about his early exit. “Surprised? I was very surprised,” he said. “You don’t pitch 336 innings and get yanked out of a ballgame.... I think this could be the worst I pitched this year—no, I can’t say that. I was making good pitches, but they weren’t going where they were supposed to go.”
When asked about Gibson’s dominating performance, McLain replied, “I know he’s got that 1.12 ERA and he doesn’t give up three runs often, but I don’t give up many runs, either. This is the World Series and it’s different. I won thirty-some games and he won twenty-some, but that’s all wiped out. It doesn’t matter. Not in the World Series.”
McLain bristled when asked about the previous night’s concert at the Gas House Lounge. “It wouldn’t have mattered if we’d been in bed by eight the night before because Gibson was unhittable. Al Kaline and Norm Cash struck out three times and all of us looked like we were in shock.”
Bythe final frames of Game One, the lone constant remained Gibson. He had fanned every Tiger at least once. The only time Detroit really threatened came in the sixth inning, with two outs, when Dick McAuliffe singled and went to third base on Kaline’s two-out double. Then, after a quick meeting on the mound, the Cardinals’ starter proceeded to strike out Cash with a sizzling fastball, ending the threat and closing the inning.
Unfortunately for Cash, he would be on the losing end of another memorable out in the top of the ninth inning, as well. Stanley singled to open the inning, giving Detroit one last measure of hope. Then Gibson struck out Kaline to tie Sandy Koufax’s single-game World Series record of fifteen, which had been set in 1963. With that McCarver hurried to the mound with the ball in his mitt, trying to tell the right-hander what he had done. An exasperated Gibson waved him away, ordering his catcher to get back behind the plate.
“Give me the ball,” Gibson yelled as McCarver pointed at the scoreboard.
McCarver stood his ground, trying to get a word in edgewise.
“Give me the da
mn ball,” Gibson shouted, getting really agitated now.
Finally, McCarver got a chance to explain why the hometown crowd, which included Frank Sinatra and Julie Nixon, daughter of presidential candidate Richard Nixon, was on its feet and raising such a ruckus. Gibson had tied Koufax’s World Series record, and now he had a chance to surpass it. At last, the Cardinals’ ace understood.
“All right, now give me the ball,” Gibson told McCarver.
With that he promptly established a new mark by once again fanning Cash.
Cash didn’t need such reminding that he was the record strikeout. “I read it on the board,” he said, “but I’ve made a lot of history in my life.”
“Who follows Cash?” Gibson then asked.
“What difference does it make?” McCarver shouted back.
Of course, it was poor Willie Horton, who admired Gibson perhaps more than anybody else on the Tigers’ ballclub. Proving that sports has little time for sentimentality, the Detroit left fielder became the seventeenth strikeout victim on a wicked slider. The pitch broke so sharply and Horton swung at it so hard that McCarver later claimed he heard the Tigers’ slugger grunt in resignation.
Bob Gibson’s Game One performance would become one of the most iconic of that period in sports. Images of him in action that afternoon can be placed alongside the famous photographs of Muhammad Ali yelling for Sonny Liston to get off the canvas in 1965, or the moment when sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos raised their gloved fists into the air (which would take place in Mexico City just days after the ’68 World Series concluded). For there is something in the way that Gibson pitched that perhaps wasn’t simply directed at the hitters he faced, but rather at the world in general. It is something that, decades later, still manages to reach out to us through still photographs of him frozen in action—a countenance of determination and perhaps even scorn that crackles with energy and purpose. Gibson unleashed his pitches as if he were a man on fire. He delivered his offerings with such power and conviction that he fell violently off to the first-base side in his followthrough, as if he had difficulty controlling what he conjured up. Seeing images of him captured in this act can be striking, even startling. His frame held motionless at an impossible angle, everything about the action that flung it there screaming in defiance against convention, expectation, what was accepted. Looking at such photos of Gibson, it is at once easy to imagine him springing to life before your eyes and yet nearly impossible to anticipate exactly what will happen next. Which is likely similar to what the Tigers’ lineup must have been feeling that October afternoon in St. Louis.