Wire to Wire

by George Cantor

  “There’s not an individual out there who doesn’t think something ain’t perfect and wants to let you know about it. But on good teams you learn to tolerate each other. No, it goes beyond tolerate. It’s something else. You’re willing to forgive each other. When they talk about chemistry, that’s what they mean. And that team had some chemistry.”

  Sparky is sitting in the backyard of his home in Thousand Oaks, a distant suburb of Los Angeles, just over the Ventura County line. He bought it with money he was able to set aside from his minor league paycheck back in the sixties.

  “It was all country out here then,” he says. “It was like being right at the edge of the desert.”

  The city has come out and surrounded him. But he sets aside every Saturday to tend the garden and mind the pond in his yard. Weekdays he’s up around dawn, takes a brisk walk, and then goes off to the club for a round of golf. Sunday is for church and family. Most nights he checks the baseball scores and is off to bed by 9:00 p.m.

  There are a few more wrinkles around the eyes, but the hair was always gray, even as a young man of 36 when he led the Cincinnati Reds to a pennant in his first season as a manager. So he doesn’t look much different; nor does he sound much different.

  “You hear a lot of talk about leadership in the clubhouse,” he says. “As far as I was concerned there had better be only one leader on a team, and that was me. Otherwise, we were in deep trouble.

  “Every clubhouse has gamers and lawyers and quitters. They don’t have to like each other; they don’t have to like me. Not many of them did. My door wasn’t always open to all of them.

  “They don’t even have to respect me—although they will after a while. My job is to put them in a position where they can succeed and the team can win. If they don’t understand it, that makes it very easy for me. They’re sitting ducks.

  “Lots of young managers don’t understand that. They want to be liked and that’s a very human thing. But when you take someone out for a pinch-hitter, you think they’re going to like you? Take a pitcher out of the rotation and he ain’t gonna be your friend.

  “But the one thing I always insisted on was that my players conduct themselves like professionals. Not only in the clubhouse. Everywhere we went as a team. On the plane. In the hotels. Because it all starts from there. You treat people right and that’s the most important thing there is.

  “Just look at what the Yankees were like before Joe Torre took over there. It was chaos. Torre came in, and pop! It was over. That’s when they started to win.”

  “When Sparky took over this team, I thought there was going to be a mutiny,” says Milt Wilcox. “You know how his attitude was always, ‘My way or the highway.’ Well, he called that first team meeting and let us know he wasn’t kidding. We would do things the way he wanted them done or we wouldn’t be there for long.”

  Sparky was 50 years old in 1984 and had already compiled a record that probably would have taken him to Cooperstown. In nine seasons with Cincinnati, he won five division titles, four pennants, and two world championships: back-to-back in 1975 and ’76.

  He was shocked, almost to the point of sickness, to find himself fired after the 1978 season. He thought his record had given him more slack than that, especially since his last team in Cincinnati had lost the division to the Dodgers by only 21⁄2 games. So when the Tigers called the following June he was eager to seek a piece of vindication.

  Sparky had heard the criticism in Cincinnati. Just a push-button manager, that’s all he was. Who couldn’t win with Pete Rose, Johnny Bench, Joe Morgan, Ken Griffey, Tony Perez, and associates in the starting lineup? It was the Big Red Machine and it ran on automatic.

  But his pitching rotation was always a scramble; in most of the winning years he had no starter who won more than 15 games. He was also among the first managers to perfect the strategy of using a set-up man and a designated closer out of the bullpen.

  His willingness to get the starter out of there if he even got a wild look in his eyes had won him the nickname “Captain Hook.” It also didn’t endear him to most of his starters.

  “That was fine with me,” he says. “I don’t want a guy out there who starts looking over his shoulder for help around the seventh inning. He should want to finish a game. That don’t mean I’m gonna let him, but he should want to.”

  The push-button charge also had been applied to Casey Stengel when he was winning seven championships with the Yankees. But Sparky and Casey shared a secret. The most talented team doesn’t always win. Having talent and knowing how to win are two vastly different things. Not every manager knows how to harness the tools at his disposal.

  While Sparky was rollicking with the Reds, the Tigers had been going in the opposite direction. They held on to the aging heroes of ’68 for too long. The team finally ran out of gas and time following a division title in 1972 and plunged right to the bottom.

  Jim Campbell went against all his instincts and hired Billy Martin as manager in ’71. As soon as he had done it he wanted nothing more than to get rid of him. He didn’t care for Martin’s personality, his in-your-face abrasiveness, his personal conduct. It just wasn’t how the Tigers did things.

  When it became apparent that the team would have to be broken up in 1973, Martin was quickly fired and Ralph Houk was brought in to oversee the thankless task of rebuilding. Houk was known for his patience with young players and the Detroit organization had no shortage of them. Unfortunately, few of them became old players with the Tigers.

  But by 1978 the farm system, always the backbone of the organization during Fetzer’s ownership, finally began to produce. Houk managed them to 86 wins and then decided it was time to turn it over to someone else. That turned out to be Les Moss.

  Moss was a well-respected coach whose entire major league managerial experience consisted of 2 losing games after Eddie Stanky had been fired by the White Sox in 1968, and 34 more later that season after Stanky’s replacement, Al Lopez, underwent an emergency appendectomy. He lost 24 of those 36 games.

  The fatherly Moss was liked by his young players. But by the middle of June, the promising team was only one game over .500 and Campbell learned that Sparky was ready to get back in the saddle. So he did something as uncharacteristic of him in its own way as the hiring of Martin. He fired Moss midway through his first season. Campbell genuinely liked Moss but, as he pointed out, “a Sparky Anderson doesn’t become available every day.”

  “Sparky didn’t much like young players,” says Wilcox. “I found that out my first year in Cincinnati in 1970. Young players could get in his doghouse very easily. He wanted to surround himself with veterans who knew the deal.”

  And if the Tigers had to trade some young talent to get those kinds of players . . . oh, well. That’s how it was going to be. This did not win Sparky friends among some members of the Detroit organization, especially Lajoie, who were committed to winning through the farm system. But under Sparky’s prodding the Tigers pulled off several excellent deals.

  They traded one of their promising young stars, Steve Kemp, to get Chet Lemon from the White Sox in 1982. Kemp had not done the job during Detroit’s run for half a pennant the previous year, and Sparky needed a superior defensive outfielder for Tiger Stadium’s vast expanses in center. The trade also freed Gibson, never more than an average outfielder, to move over to right.

  Larry Herndon came over a few weeks later from San Francisco in a trade for two marginal pitchers. Both deals had worked out well with very little downside.

  But Lajoie saved the best for last. As Sparky sized up what he had in the spring of 1984, two deficiencies were apparent—a left-hander in the bullpen and left-handed hitting depth on the bench.

  Lopez had been the closer for most of his five years with Detroit. While not all of the seasons were stellar, in 1983 he had actually turned in some of his best work. But Sparky like
d the idea of a lefty-righty closer combination. He’d had it in Cincy with his first champions in ’75 in Rawly Eastwick and Will McEnaney. The two had combined to save 37 games for him. It gave him more maneuverability in the ninth inning and he wanted that sort of luxury again.

  With Gibson’s injuries in ’83, the starting right field job had fallen into the lap of second-year player Glenn Wilson. He had done a decent job, but Sparky felt that Gibson now needed to be an everyday player. Right field belonged to him.

  That freed Lajoie’s hand. On March 27, with just days to go before the opener, he made the move: Wilson and veteran utility man John Wockenfuss to the Phillies for Dave Bergman and Willie Hernandez.

  The trade did not cause a great deal of excitement. In fact, it appeared as if the Tigers had given up a promising young hitter to get two mere journeymen, at best. But when they showed up in Lakeland, they actually were bringing the pennant along with them.

  Based on his two World Series championships a decade earlier with the Cincinnati Reds, Sparky Anderson knew how to guide a team to the promised land.

  7. “We’re Gonna Kill Ya”

  How does an avalanche begin? A pebble starts to tumble. It gathers some snow, then a few larger rocks fall, and before you can even grasp what’s happening, the entire hillside is descending in an unstoppable wall.

  So it was with the Detroit avalanche of 1984—as overpowering as it was inexplicable.

  Nine wins in a row, then seven more. At the end of April they were 18–2. Crashing into May, accelerating, flattening everything in their path. Then, just when it seemed to have abated, another nine straight.

  All you have to say is “35 and 5,” and even now everyone in Detroit knows instantly what you mean. To have been a Tigers fan in the first eight weeks of the 1984 season was to have participated in a mass out-of-body experience. Nothing in your past association with this ballclub could have prepared you for it.

  Certainly the ’68 champions were a dominant team, but not like this. Because this simply wasn’t real.

  In the midst of the run, the Robert Redford baseball movie The Natural opened in local theaters. It played to packed, cheering houses bedecked with bunting and Tigers banners. Because here on the screen was the fantasy depiction of what viewers were seeing in reality. It was something that defied a rational explanation, that almost seemed to be touched by the supernatural.

  Later in the year, a local photographer pasted up a poster of Tiger Stadium and called it “Anno Domini 1984.” It showed the ballpark brilliantly illuminated, with the skyline of the city in the background. Through an opening in the night sky, a stream of light, brighter than the moon, poured down from the heavens, as if directed by the hand of God.

  It captured the city’s mood perfectly. This went beyond the hopes of anyone. It was almost as if years of disappointment were being redeemed all at once; a daisy cutter full of dreams had been dropped on Detroit.

  “We went out there after a while and we didn’t care who we were playing or who was pitching,” says Bergman. “Our attitude was, we’re gonna kill ya. You can’t stop us. Everyone felt it.”

  “I had never been a part of anything like that before,” says Dan Petry. “Everybody on that team had the feeling that we were invincible.”

  By May 24 the combined record of the three starting pitchers was 22–2. Lopez won four more when the team rallied from behind in the late innings.

  Attendance in Detroit usually builds slowly, mostly because of the city’s wretched spring climate. Around Memorial Day, when the last vestige of chill had left the corridors of the drafty old ballpark and school vacations started—and if the team was doing well—that’s when the first big crowds started to come.

  The home opener was always a sellout. You could put that in the bank. But after that, Tiger Stadium was usually a quiet zone for seven or eight weeks.

  When the ’68 team went over the 2 million mark in attendance for the first time in franchise history everyone regarded it as an astonishing figure, unlikely ever to be equaled.

  But by the end of April in 1984, even in the bitter cold, the big crowds started rolling in. Twelve games into the season and thirty-five thousand people showed up for a Saturday game. This was unprecedented in Detroit. But so was what they were seeing on the field. There had never been a show like this.

  The schedule had been kind. The opener was up at the Metrodome with the Twins. The Tigers had hammered Minnesota in the recent past. While that organization was slowly putting together a team that would win the Series in just three more years (stomping the Tigers in the playoffs to get there), they weren’t anywhere close to that place yet.

  Morris had beaten them nine straight times, and with little effort he made it 10. It was 8–1, Sparky emptied his bench and, to make it even better, heralded free agent Darrell Evans, who had looked like a major dud during spring training, unloaded a three-run homer to remove all doubt.

  That was one.

  After a day off it was Petry’s turn. At 25, he was just three and a half years younger than Morris, but the gap in age between the two top starters seemed much greater somehow. While Morris seemed to radiate dark hostility, Petry was always approachable, affable, almost cheery. But it gave him the air of a very junior partner in the enterprise.

  He followed up Morris’ initial effort with a five-hitter in a 7–3 Detroit win. The Tigers easily overcame an early two-run deficit behind homers by Trammell and Gibson.

  That was two.

  The team moved on to Chicago, where the White Sox promised to be a far more formidable opponent. They had won their division in 1983 and one of their 20-game winners, Rich Dotson, would start against the Tigers in their home opener. Old Comiskey Park was packed with forty-two thousand fans eager to continue the previous year’s success.

  Wilcox, the number three man in Sparky’s rotation, was Detroit’s choice. This is where the Tigers’ staff looked shaky. Throughout his career with the team, Wilcox had been the paradigm of a .500 pitcher. In the previous six seasons as a starter, his composite record was 73–62, or an annual average of 12–10.

  Every year he won more games than he lost—but only by a small margin. Usually, he was just over the break-even point, and his chronically sore right shoulder could generally be counted on to take him out of the rotation once or twice during the summer.

  In a pattern that would become familiar this season, the Tigers struck early, giving Wilcox a three-run lead in the first inning, and then hung on. He left in the eighth with a 3–2 lead, and for the first time this season Hernandez came in to protect it.

  That was three.

  A 3–0 start was nothing to sneeze at. By the close of the day, the Tigers were tied for the lead in the American League East with Cleveland. Only two other teams in the majors—Oakland and San Diego—had broken from the gate so quickly. All three wins had come on the road, too. So the Tigers already had guaranteed themselves, at the very least, a winning record for the home opener.

  Then came one of those games that seem to define the way a season will go. Not in hindsight, but just as soon as it is over. It becomes apparent that what is going on is not only special but quite possibly historic.

  On the first April Saturday of the 1984 season, Morris walked to the mound in Chicago to face the White Sox for his second start of the season . . . and the Tigers’ liftoff became a moon shot.

  The Tigers were virtually unstoppable wherever they went during those first weeks of the 1984 season. Here Ruppert Jones slides in to score behind Evans as Chet Lemon watches the action.

  8. The Explosive Mr. Morris

  Dan Petry phones his old manager two or three times a year, just to talk about things.

  “Once I asked Sparky if he thought Jack Morris should be in the Hall of Fame. Sparky said that was a close call.

  �
�‘Jack’s earned run average was pretty high for a Hall of Fame pitcher,’ he said.

  “‘But Sparky,’ I told him. ‘A lot of that is your fault. You’d leave Jack in games way past the point where the rest of us would have been gone.’

  “‘To tell you the truth,’ Sparky told me, ‘I was kind of afraid to take him out.’”

  Morris had that effect on people. To describe him as competitive is like describing Popeye as a vegetarian. It just doesn’t get the point across.

  “I like to embarrass the opposition,” he said, “because I know that’s what they’d do to me.”

  His outbursts of rage, some of them made more frightening by their sheer lack of logic, are legendary. Members of the Detroit media nicknamed him Mt. Morris. That’s the name of a rather tranquil community in out-state Michigan, but the description was meant to evoke the volcanic nature of Morris’ angry eruptions. Both in the clubhouse and in the game.

  “I didn’t have to go out to the mound many times that year to talk to a pitcher,” says Lance Parrish. “Only with Jack, and usually that was to tell him to stop acting foolish and embarrassing himself.”

  “You talked to Jack and there never was a game where he got hit hard,” says Sparky. “There was always something else going on. They were never getting to him.”

  “He spent more time in one day feeling abused by the press than Alan Trammell felt in a career,” says longtime Tigers beat reporter Tom Gage of the Detroit News.

  But the man could pitch.

  “You needed a starter for a big game and you just rolled the ball to him,” says Sparky. “And once he was in he didn’t ever want to come out.”

  Sparky, with his characteristic expansiveness, began calling him “the best pitcher in the American League” in the early eighties—long before the description was true. But Morris, unlike many other objects of Anderson’s verbal extravagance, actually grew into the description. By the start of 1984 that was exactly what he was.