Wire to Wire

by George Cantor

  To the memory of Harold Cantor, who loved the Tigers even in those seasons when they were not worthy of his love.

  Contents

  Foreword by Chet Lemon

  1. A Moment in Time

  2. A Genuine Anger

  3. Changes in Attitude

  4. Darrell’s Dilemma

  5. Yesterday’s Heroes

  6. Sparky’s Way

  7. “We’re Gonna Kill Ya”

  8. The Explosive Mr. Morris

  9. Smoke and Mirrors

  10. Petry’s Lesson

  11. Tidal Wave

  12. Can This Be Real?

  13. The MVP

  14. Bless You, Boys

  15. Last Exit to Wonderland

  16. Bergman’s Battle

  17. Rusty and Ruppert

  18. Gutting It Out

  19. Between Two Champions

  20. The Unappreciated

  21. Festival at the Corner

  22. Tower of Strength

  23. Royal Brush-Off

  24. Tearful Celebration

  25. Gibby

  26. Impious Padres

  27. Tram

  28. Mission Accomplished

  29. Decline and Fall

  30. Rock Bottom

  31. ’68 or ’84?

  Foreword by Chet Lemon

  When I go out to speak to groups, people often ask me what it really means to be a baseball player, and more specifically, to be a member of the 1984 Detroit Tigers.

  I tell them that it means my life to me. And I am serious about that.

  I went into the hospital in 1991 and the doctors didn’t expect me to come out. I had blood clots in the vein between my stomach and my heart. It’s a condition they usually discover only in an autopsy, and they didn’t think I had much of a chance. I was watching ESPN one day and saw my own obituary being broadcast. My wife had to turn off the TV set. You don’t understand what’s happening to you in a situation like that. I was definitely scared. How could this happen to me, an athlete who always took care of himself and was the picture of health?

  I can tell you that when you are facing death, you reflect on what was important in your life, what mattered the most to you. There are certain things you learn from a career in baseball, and I reflected on that.

  First of all, the likelihood of any young man making it to the major leagues is very slim. But when I was growing up I kept telling myself that Willie Mays and Henry Aaron were probably told the same thing, and they still never stopped working towards that goal. So I learned that you never quit—that what seems to be impossible can be attained as long as you never give up on it.

  What I learned from that 1984 season was how to confront fear of failure. Many people don’t understand that baseball is a game of failure. If you bat .300, you fail 70 percent of the time. If a surgeon told you that he fails 70 percent of the time, you’d sprint out of the operating room as fast as you could. But in baseball, that’s the reality.

  After that 35–5 start, the idea of failure was set before us. We started hearing things like: “Well, if we can just win half our games the rest of the way, we’ll still finish 30 games over .500, and that wins a pennant in most years.”

  But Sparky wouldn’t let us think like that. He told us that no one would ever sneak up on us, that the element of surprise would never get the best of us. If we had a bad game, he told us not to dwell on it. The only question in our minds was supposed to be how to win the next one.

  You have to fight through the bad times. If you wanted to play baseball for Sparky Anderson, you got down in the trenches and you fought. You didn’t just play hard when you felt like it, and you didn’t take anything for granted. And if you did have that kind of attitude, you didn’t play for him for long. Every guy on that team had a “oneness” of mind.

  I saw what that attitude accomplished in 1984, so I made up my mind that I would never give in to my illness. I would fight through it no matter how tough it got. That’s what I try to share with the kids I meet in the AAU baseball program, in which I am very active now. God certainly played the most important part in my pulling through. But I really believe that what I learned in baseball also helped me find a way to fight through it.

  I’m still under treatment for my condition, and I can’t really say that I’ll make a full recovery. But I’m much better now and I’ve lived longer than anyone ever thought I would. I tell myself that I learned what it was like to be a champion in 1984 and what it took to accomplish that. No matter what happens, they can never take that knowledge away from me.

  So I love remembering those days and the things we experienced and I look forward to reading about them again.

  They mean my life to me.

  —Chet Lemon

  1. A Moment in Time

  Look around.

  Take a good, long look. Because it will never be like this again.

  Darkness has long since settled over Tiger Stadium. By the eighth inning the temperature has dipped into the low 50s and the lined jackets are coming out in the stands.

  Almost fifty-two thousand people are in the ballpark on this chilly Sunday evening in October, and they begin to stir restlessly as the Tigers come to bat.

  Because the fifth game of this World Series is close. Way too close. That annoying Kurt Bevacqua, San Diego’s most surprising hitter, homered again in the top half of the inning, and the Detroit lead is now only 5–4.

  Yes, Willie Hernandez will be pitching the ninth, and he has been unbeatable in almost every save situation this season. On the other hand, it was Hernandez who had given up Bevacqua’s homer. And Detroit fans know, it is imprinted in their genetic code, that nothing can be counted on, least of all those things that look the most assured.

  Two runs by the Padres in the ninth, a bloop single and a long fly ball into that right field overhang, and the Series could be heading back to San Diego for a sixth or, God forbid, a seventh game. Only a few days before, the Padres had trapped the favored Chicago Cubs in their ballpark and beaten them up three games in a row to win the National League playoffs.

  So there is a certain skittishness, a tension that gnaws at the gut. You can feel it in the stands and in the Detroit dugout, too.

  “We knew if we didn’t win it all, it would have all been for nothing,” says Kirk Gibson.

  “Nobody would have remembered what we had done during the season. The 35–5 start, Willie’s season. It would have been a footnote somewhere.

  “Look at what happened to Seattle in 2001. They broke every record in the book and went down in the playoffs. So no one will remember them. That’s just how the game is.”

  The University of Michigan Marching Band had performed before this game, setting up in front of the 440-foot marker in the deepest part of center field. They played the music to the Wolverines’ “Let’s Go, Blue” cheer. But the fans changed the words. This time at the rhythmic break the entire stadium yelled the phrase, “Bless You, Boys.” It was the motto of the 1984 Tigers, dreamed up in a fit of irony by television sportscaster Al Ackerman and adopted passionately by the entire state.

  The U of M band went on to toot the theme to Ghostbusters, the big movie hit of the summer. “Who ya gonna call?” asked the lyric. Once more, the Detroit fans came up with their own words. Their bellowed response: “Goose Busters.”

  It was their tribute to the menacing figure who is walking to the mound for San Diego. For years Goose Gossage had tormented them and the entire American League. As the closer for the Yankees, Gossage had sa
ved 150 games over the previous six seasons. In two World Series with New York, he had pitched in six games and never given up a run.

  “I never fooled anyone in my life,” says Gossage. “I had to throw it, and they had to hit it. To me that’s what baseball’s about.”

  He can’t bring it quite as hard as he used to with the Yankees, when he regularly threw in the high 90s. But at 33 years old, he is still a presence, one that opens up vistas of constant pain to the Tigers. They had never come close to hitting him.

  Gossage came to the Padres as a free agent before the 1984 season, one of many Yankees who had enjoyed all of George Steinbrenner that he could stand. He is a big reason that San Diego, a reliably hapless organization, is a participant in this Series.

  Gossage stalks to the mound and the noise level rises.

  Look around. Now. Quickly.

  It will never be like this again.

  The ballpark is in its 73rd “official” season. It had been entirely reconfigured in 1912, and that is regarded as its historically correct founding date. But the Tigers had played at no other site since 1901, when the American League was born and it was called Bennett Park. Its dimensions, strange crannies, endless center field, short porch in right—all of it memorized and loved by Tigers fans for generations.

  Now the concrete and steel of the old park seem to be a living thing. Every single fan is in motion, standing up to relieve the tension or squirming in their seats.

  True, Lance Parrish had hit a home run off Gossage in the seventh, on the second pitch he threw in the game. Goose also had looked shaky in getting the subsequent outs.

  “Every once in a while, Goose would fire one into the backstop, just to get your mental processes going,” says Alan Trammell. “He liked to let you know that maybe his control wasn’t all that it should be today.

  “There was a definite fear factor when you faced him. I think all the great relief pitchers have it.”

  But Gossage is struggling for real tonight. He walks Marty Castillo, the surprise choice to start at third base for the Tigers in the Series, to lead off the bottom of the eighth.

  That brings up the top of the order, Lou Whitaker.

  The obvious play here is to bunt Castillo to second and then set up the run that would give the Tigers back their all-important two-run lead. Whitaker gets it down toward third base and Graig Nettles, another former Yankee, charges in. Nettles is an accomplished fielder and he has a relatively slow runner at first.

  But he can’t make the play. Shortstop Garry Templeton is not on the second base bag to take the throw. Castillo slides in safely.

  First and second, none out.

  Now it is Trammell’s turn, and once again Sparky Anderson flashes the sign for the sacrifice. This time Gossage fields the bunt and tosses it to second baseman Alan Wiggins, covering first. Now there are runners and second and third, with one out.

  This brings up Kirk Gibson, with Parrish on deck. Gibson has been playing like a man with his socks on fire. His two-run homer in the first had given Detroit the early lead. After San Diego tied the score, he had roared home from third like a runaway truck on a pop fly to short right field in the fifth. That run is now the difference.

  He had torn the pants of his white uniform as he slid across the plate. With the blond stubble on his chin, it gave him the look of a wild man, a guy who’d just as soon knock you down as look at you. An irresistible force to be tampered with at your peril.

  San Diego manager Dick Williams holds up four fingers and waves his hand to the side—the sign for the intentional pass.

  This is the obvious call. Everyone in the ballpark knows it is coming. Parrish is next up, and even with his home run the previous time at bat, Gossage always handles him well.

  “I was already thinking to myself, ‘OK, you’re not the fastest guy in the world and we’re going to have ’em loaded up with one out,’” says Parrish. “‘Just stay out of the double play.’ That’s all that was running through my mind. Stay out of the double.”

  But Gossage is not buying it. He turns to the first-base dugout and shakes his head at Williams.

  Anderson sees it from across the field. He sees it but he can’t believe it. He had been miked for a film on the Series and the surprise in his voice is evident as he calls to Gibson.

  “He don’t want to walk you.”

  “Dick Williams was a great manager,” says Sparky, “and for him to get talked out of the pass . . . well, Gossage must have done one hell of a sales job on him.”

  “I almost never got a sniff at him,” says Gibson. “He just abused me from the first time I faced him, and I knew that’s what he was telling Williams. That’s what you want in a great pitcher. A guy who knows he can get it done. What he didn’t realize was that he had just presented a challenge to me.”

  “Kirk is a guy who thrives on challenges,” says Darrell Evans. “It’s almost as if he has to create them for himself if they’re not obviously in front of him.”

  Williams heads back to the dugout and Gibson steps in to hit.

  It is just past 7:30 p.m. and there is a slight breeze toward left field. The darkness is complete and the lights are at their brightest. Gibson settles in, and as the fans realize what Gossage has chosen to do a roar washes over the entire ballpark.

  Everyone is standing. The noise seems to be building from within your own head.

  Look at it now. Remember.

  Kirk Gibson’s first-inning home run in Game 5 gave the Tigers an early lead, but the game was on the line when he faced Goose Gossage in the eighth.

  There was a time when Tiger Stadium had the fourth-largest seating capacity in the major leagues. Until the early sixties, it trailed only Cleveland’s cavernous Municipal Stadium, Yankee Stadium, and the Polo Grounds, and could accommodate crowds of 55,000 or more. They even managed to shoehorn a record 58,000 people into the park for a doubleheader with the Yankees in 1947.

  After various reconfigurations and seat widenings, however, absolute capacity for the three home games of the 1984 World Series was 52,000. For regular-season games, when many obstructed-view and third-deck seats were held back from sale, capacity was usually given at 48,000.

  At the stadium’s last Tigers game, in 1999, although it appeared that every seat in the ballpark was taken, the announced attendance was barely 45,000.

  The ideal number of seats for a modern baseball stadium is usually said to be 40,000—large enough to accommodate a high demand, but small enough to lend a sense of urgency so advance ticket sales will be locked in. Comerica Park has approximately 40,000 seats.

  2. A Genuine Anger

  To understand how we arrived at this moment, you have to go back a full year. Because, just as with the 1968 Tigers, the ’84 team felt it had been jobbed out of a pennant the previous season.

  The logic may be a bit hard to follow. Unlike 1967, when the Tigers were beaten out on the last play of the last inning of the last game of the season, the ’83 team finished six full games behind Baltimore. When the opportunity had come to play the Orioles in a September doubleheader at Tiger Stadium, Detroit lost both games.

  But logic isn’t really important when it comes to motivation. Any old flame will do. And the Tigers had managed to talk themselves into an inferno.

  “There wasn’t a doubt in anyone’s mind that we were the best team in the league when that season ended,” says Lance Parrish. “We just ran out of games before we could get there.”

  “When I walked into that clubhouse the next spring I felt more than motivation,” says Darrell Evans. “There was genuine anger. It kind of rocked me. I had never felt anything like that before.”

  Detroit had finished with 92 wins, the best record of any Tigers team since the ’68 champions. It was a significant improvement.

  Since Sparky Ander
son arrived as manager in 1979, there had been little movement. The team’s win total had been stuck in the mid 80s, and the Tigers remained mired right in the middle of the division standings.

  In the peculiar split season of 1981, occasioned by a players’ strike, the Tigers actually made a serious run at the second-half pennant before succumbing to Milwaukee. But then they slid back to the middle of the pack again in 1982.

  Somewhere in the summer of ’83, though, it clicked.

  “There’s a time when a good team feels like it’s ready to win,” says Sparky, “and when that happens there isn’t too much can stop ’em. This was still a very young team in ’81, and winning a pennant in baseball is the hardest thing there is to do.

  “Now you wonder how I can say a thing like that. Isn’t it hard to win in any sport? But it’s the day after day after day. You can’t get up for every single game. No one in the world can do that, and if he says he can, then you can shake his hand because you’re looking at Superman. So in every season, a team hits a wall and when that time comes a young man doesn’t know what he has to do to deal with it.

  “You can talk to him, but until he goes through it himself he just don’t know. This team had to go through it before it was ready to win.”

  Several other things had come together in 1983. The core of the team, Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker, both hit over .300 in unison for the first time. Parrish knocked in 100 runs for the first time. Jack Morris won 20 games for the first time.

  All of them had come up to the majors at the end of 1977. This was their sixth full season together, and they had emerged as the heart and guts of this team.

  Outfielders Chet Lemon and Larry Herndon were both in their second year with the Tigers and were steady, stabilizing forces. Dan Petry had broken through and become a 19-game winner.

  Everything was falling into place. Yes, there were questions at first and third base, and maybe the bullpen could use a little depth, but the consistency of belief that Sparky was looking for, the conviction that this team was there—not almost there, but there—had formed.