Wire to Wire

by George Cantor

  To make it worse, he had been playing for a manager who never made it a secret that he didn’t care for Evans’ game. He got the message when the 1983 Giants calendar came out and there was no picture of him in it. Not for any month.

  “They had two pictures of pigeons but none of me,” he says. “But I’d been slighted so many times, I kind of took it in stride. They made a TV show about the team’s future and didn’t mention me, either. You didn’t have to be a genius to figure it out.

  “So this was going to be the most critical decision of my career, the last chance I had. No room for mistakes anymore.”

  Evans had made the same mistake that haunted Norm Cash throughout his career in Detroit. He had been too good too soon.

  In 1973, just his second season as a regular, Evans had hit 41 homers with the Braves, drove in 104 runs, and hit .281. He never came close to those marks again, just as Cash had never approached the stats of his spectacular 1961 season.

  Evans became a reliable power hitter, averaging 19 homers and almost 70 RBIs since then. But he was never the dominant guy in the middle of the lineup, the place his promise had reserved for him.

  Evans was also that rarity among sluggers: a hitter who walked more than he struck out. San Francisco manager Frank Robinson thought this was reprehensible.

  “He is the worst so-called good hitter I’ve seen,” he said. “Good hitters put the ball in play in clutch situations. They don’t settle for walks.”

  Robinson had taken away his place as captain, an honor his teammates had voted Evans in recognition of his quiet, assertive leadership. The manager said he didn’t believe in captains. But when the team acquired Joe Morgan, he was named captain.

  Evans, a thoughtful and analytical man, was deeply hurt. He went into the ’83 season knowing he was as gone as a wild goose in winter.

  He resolved to get into the best shape of his life and rid himself of all distractions. The result was 30 homers, 82 RBIs, and a .277 average. These stats were his best since the big season of 10 years before. Now came the payoff.

  “My agent told me the Dodgers were interested, and that was tempting because I grew up in southern California,” he says. “So were the New York teams. But there was also an offer from Detroit, and he said I should consider it carefully, because that could be exactly the situation I was looking for.

  “To tell you the truth, we were a little surprised. The Tigers didn’t have a reputation for going after free agents.”

  That was something of an understatement. To the Tigers, free agents were a poison pill, a disruptive force that would upset the salary structure of the team and the financial future of the ballclub.

  When a low-rent bargain came along, Detroit sometimes grabbed hold on a short-term basis. But never the big name, never the star who would make a difference.

  Things had changed in Detroit, though, for a few reasons. Campbell and general manager Bill Lajoie always insisted that when conditions were right the team would consider jumping into the deep end of the pool. If it were ever a matter of getting the one player who could put them over the top, they would do it.

  The skeptics had snickered. But the organization believed that day had come. They were one big bat away. There was good power from the right-hand side of the plate, but only Whitaker and Gibson hit from the left side. And as for Gibson . . . well, after ’83 who knew about Gibby?

  More than that, there was the new man at the top.

  Monaghan had said that he was very conscious of image. “Walt Disney and Reader’s Digest,” he said. “That’s the image I want. I won’t sacrifice my principles to win.”

  Ah, but for $2.25 million. What if that’s all it took to get the pennant for Detroit? Would he sacrifice that?

  “I flew into Detroit to meet with Lajoie and he asked me if there was anything in particular I wanted to do while I was in town,” Evans recalls. “I told him that I was a big hockey fan and I’d like to see the Red Wings play.

  “So we went to Joe Louis Arena. Even though the Wings weren’t doing so well back then, you could sense the enthusiasm the crowd had for them. Then the public address announcer said that I was in the building and asked me to stand up.

  “Everybody in the place got up to applaud. It just blew me away. I wasn’t that big a deal, just a guy who was thinking about coming to play for their baseball team. I’d never experienced anything like that in my life.

  “And I said to myself that if that’s the way they reacted to the possibility of my playing in Detroit, what would they do if I actually accomplished something here?

  “The Dodgers offered me more money. But I couldn’t get that hockey game out of my mind. That cinched it for me.”

  On December 16, 1983—67 days after Monaghan bought the Tigers—the era of baseball free agency arrived in Detroit.

  “I was so excited I could hardly wait to get to spring training,” he says. “I’d never felt that way before. I knew this was a young team, kinda hungry, and I knew that any team Sparky Anderson managed would do things right.

  “The moment I walked in that front door in Lakeland I could feel it. You know, spring training is usually a relaxed deal, but nobody was relaxing down there. It was intense from the first day. But everyone was open, acting like they were really excited to see me. And I started to feel pretty good about myself. I fed off it like I never had before.

  “There were no false notes. I could see these guys knew how to play the game, not just one or two of them but everybody. There were no cliques, no caste system like you have on most ballclubs. Everyone could speak up when they saw something was wrong. If you could bottle that and pass it around, winning a championship would be easy.

  “You know, Howard Cosell called me before I’d made up my mind where to go. He said something like, ‘Darrell, you have the chance to come to the Mecca of baseball.’ But that’s exactly why I didn’t go there. You play in New York and there are all sorts of pressures that have nothing to do with playing baseball. I didn’t need that.

  “Instead, I kept thinking about those cheers at the Joe Louis Arena and how playing in Detroit would mean that you were going to be part of a community.”

  Evans had shared first base with Dave Bergman in San Francisco in 1983. Bergman had been traded to Philadelphia, and then came over to the Tigers in another trade the same day in the last week of spring training.

  “I walked in the door, Darrell greeted me and called me aside,” says Bergman. “He wasn’t a real excitable guy, but I could tell that he was up. He was wired. ‘Something special is going on here,’ he told me. ‘You landed in a good place.’”

  Darrell Evans (left), shown celebrating with Trammell after defeating Kansas City in the ALCS, knew he had become part of something special when he arrived from San Francisco at the start of the 1984 season.

  5. Yesterday’s Heroes

  If there was something special brewing in the spring of 1984, the Tigers were doing a great job of keeping it quiet. It may have been apparent in the clubhouse, but in the stands there didn’t seem to be any particular reason to get excited.

  The team lost a lot more than it won in the exhibitions, finishing at 11–17. It was their worst Florida record in 15 years.

  Sometimes that is the mark of a really bad team. But it can also be the sign of a set team, with a proven commodity at every position, the only reason for being there to get in shape for the season. In fact, the last Tigers team to have done that poorly in the exhibitions was in 1969, the year after their last championship.

  Oh, yes. The 1968 champions.

  These Tigers had heard quite enough about them, thank you very much. No other professional team in the city had won since. Not the Wings or the Lions; their last championships had been in the fifties. Certainly not the Pistons, who had never won anything in Detroit—although the pulse w
as starting to quicken there.

  Michigan State had won the NCAA basketball title in 1979, but that success only pissed off about half of the state. Michigan seemed to go to the Rose Bowl every other year and usually lost in the process.

  So in 1984, the air was stale with fading memories in Detroit. No memory burned brighter than the semi-legendary ’68 Tigers. To Rozema, who grew up in Michigan, there was an understanding of what they meant to the city.

  “When I was a kid, those guys were my life,” he says.

  “Even to be on the field wearing the same Old English D they’d had on their uniform—what more was there?”

  But to some of the others, it was time to give it up.

  “I don’t want to sound callous, but a lot of us were tired of hearing about ’68,” says Dan Petry, whose boyhood was spent in southern California.

  “But we understood that the only way to do that was to make some history of our own. I think that was really part of the incentive that year.”

  The tributes went on and on. There had been a big one, saluting both the 15th anniversary of the ’68 team and Al Kaline, a Tigers broadcaster since his retirement, over the winter. It was televised by a local station and packed a banquet hall. Everyone loved Kaline, and his association with that team only enhanced its reputation. But the only member of the ’83 Tigers who attended the affair was Rick Leach, who had grown up in Flint.

  A local clothing rep, Jerry Lewis, organized the first Tigers fantasy camp that winter, in partnership with Jim Price, the backup catcher on the ’68 team. Price had used his connections with former teammates to get them to the camp, and it sold out in a matter of weeks. There were other Tigers from other years, but the chance to share the field with the heroes of ’68 was the main lure, more than enough to convince sensible professionals and businessmen to shell out a few thousand bucks for the privilege.

  It was more than just a baseball team; it had become part of local folklore. It was understood that those Tigers, like their predecessors in 1935, had rescued the city.

  Detroit was savaged more terribly than any other American city by the Great Depression. The automotive boom had transformed the place from a comfortable, easygoing Midwestern community into the engine that moved the American economy, an industrial giant, the fourth largest city in the United States. But it all came crashing down with the onset of hard times.

  Looking back at the economic statistics we now realize that the worst was over by 1935. But the people who lived through it had no way of knowing that. So when the Tigers, after 25 years of flailing, suddenly turned into winners, the effect was electric.

  For a few hours each summer afternoon, Detroit could forget about its crippled auto plants and thrill to the exploits of the G-men—Gehringer, Greenberg, and Goslin. Schoolboy and Black Mike and the Battalion of Death. And slowly a defeated city learned to hope again.

  Thirty-three years later it happened again. Torn apart the previous summer by the deadliest urban riots in American history, Detroit was a city of fear and sullen suspicion in 1968.

  Once more, its baseball team became the focus of dreams. Winning one game after another with improbable late-inning rallies, a swashbuckling, dirty-uniformed bunch of Tigers brought about a healing even more unlikely than their frequent come-from-behind heroics.

  It didn’t last, and it is easy to overstate its significance. But for one summer, at least, Detroiters came together—to holler, “Go get ’em, Tigers,” and cheer on Denny and Mickey, Willie and Gates.

  A decade and a half later Detroit was once again on the beach. The city’s rock-solid economic foundation had been shattered by overseas competition. Japanese cars were pouring into the United States, and the Big Three automakers appeared to be pathetic giants, helpless to compete against the onslaught. The Hondas and Toyotas and Datsuns seemed to be better made, more fuel efficient, and had fewer factory and design flaws.

  A bitter commentator observed that Japan, devastated in World War II, had achieved the ruin of Detroit without ever dropping a bomb. Just as in the Depression, there was genuine fear in the city; fear that the hometown industry would not recover, that the city could never regain the prosperity it had known.

  “Last one out of Detroit turn out the lights,” went the joke. Nobody laughed. Instead, as unemployment mounted to 15 percent—almost double the national average—there was a growing sense of betrayal among those whose jobs had disappeared.

  How could the high-paid executives at GM and Ford and Chrysler let this happen? How could other Americans turn their backs on American-made cars? How could the Japanese be eating our lunch?

  In the midst of this seething resentment, Vincent Chin went out with some buddies for a celebration before his upcoming wedding. On a June night in 1982 they walked into a place called Fancy Pants, a strip bar in Highland Park, a suburb that was then the home of Chrysler.

  Chin and his friends were sitting across the runway from a couple of unemployed autoworkers, a father and son-in-law. An argument started and one of them snarled at Chin, “It’s because of you little fuckers that we’re out of work.”

  Chin was, in fact, Chinese-American and worked for an engineering firm that contracted with American automotive companies, but none of that mattered. All the ugliness that had been building up in Detroit came pouring out as the music blared and the strippers did their thing.

  There were words, ethnic insults, and one of the unemployed workers ran out to his car. He returned to the bar brandishing a baseball bat and went after Chin. The young man ducked away and went running out the door with the two assailants in pursuit.

  They caught him a few blocks away, and in the middle of the main intersection of Highland Park, Chin was beaten to death with four blows to the head from a Louisville Slugger.

  The killing was national news. Asian-American groups adopted Chin’s cause as evidence of the growing racial hatred being directed at them. To the rest of the country, it was Detroit getting down in the gutter again. The brutal, shameful, and deadly racist stigma that the city had been trying to live down since 1967 had suddenly flared up again.

  What made things worse was the trial the following year. The two accused killers were let off with probation, with the trial judge and prosecutors accusing each other of bungling the case.

  There was going to be another trial in the summer of 1984. The federal government had stepped in and indicted the two men accused of the crime on a civil rights violation. It was a weapon federal prosecutors had used in the South during the civil rights era when the government could not obtain a criminal conviction in a state court. Now it was being used in Detroit. The city knew that in 1984 it would have to relive the horrible incident all over again, making it appear once more as a place that bred barbarism.

  Even the year itself seemed edged in black. It was the title of George Orwell’s most famous novel, a chilling description of a totalitarian state that had extinguished all personal freedom. The book had been published in 1949, and since then “1984” had been a shorthand method of referring to a future in which state hegemony would be absolute.

  Now 1984 had actually come. While a few die-hard Democrats insisted that the fact Ronald Reagan was sitting in the White House fulfilled Orwell’s vision, most rational people felt things weren’t turning out quite that badly. Maybe there was even some reason to feel mildly optimistic about the world, including baseball.

  “I got a feeling,” Sparky told the team’s public relations man, Dan Ewald, as the team left Florida. “Something tremendous is gonna happen.”

  But in the wildest dreams of their most ardent fans nothing could have matched what awaited this team.

  Constant reminders of and comparisons to the 1968 Tigers helped to further unite the 1984 club.

  One of the main reasons the 1968 champions remained such a strong presence in the Detroit area 16 ye
ars later was that so many of the players from that team continued to make their homes there.

  Al Kaline was featured as a commentator on televised games, while Gates Brown and Dick Tracewski were coaches with the ballclub.

  Bill Freehan, Jim Northrup, Mickey Stanley, and Willie Horton—all of whom had grown up in Michigan and had given the 1968 squad the aura of an old-fashioned hometown team—continued to live in the area.

  Jim Price was a familiar figure as a local sportscaster. Earl Wilson, Norm Cash, and Mickey Lolich, who grew up in other places, went into various businesses and stayed there. Even Denny McLain came back to take up a career in talk radio.

  So it could be said that the thrill of 1968 was never really far from the minds of Tigers fans. By contrast, the only players from the 1984 team who remained in the Detroit area were Kirk Gibson, Dave Rozema, Dan Petry, Milt Wilcox, and Dave Bergman.

  6. Sparky’s Way

  The team that left Florida was Sparky’s team. At last. Out of the roster he had inherited in June of 1979, only seven players remained.

  There was the up-the-middle core of Trammell, Whitaker, and Parrish. There were the three starting pitchers—Morris, Petry, and Wilcox. And there was the bullpen mainstay, Aurelio Lopez. Everyone else had been Sparky’s choice.

  There were rough edges on that team, most of them supplied by Jack Morris and Kirk Gibson, two of the most disputatious individuals ever to play in Detroit. Their battles with local journalists were neither couth nor ruly. But they were Sparky’s kind of people.

  “I like ornery bastards,” he says. “I was an ornery little bastard when I played. Someone else might have come into that clubhouse and saw that there was lots of yelling and cursing going on in there, and they’d turn around and say, ‘Well, my goodness, this is terrible.’ To me that was a sign that they were into it. Never bothered me at all.