Wire to Wire

by George Cantor

  “But I went on some of those out-state bus tours the Tigers held during the winter. I saw all that snow, the pine trees, the lakes in the winter sun. It was wonderful. So there was no question in my mind that I was going to live here.”

  He is in sales, paper products mostly. But he remains bonded to baseball, coaching a summer league team of high school athletes, trying to get them to realize the most of their abilities.

  “I try to apply what Sparky taught me,” he says. “A lot of what he was saying back then I didn’t understand at the time. It took me years until I really saw what he was getting at. It wasn’t just about baseball. It was lessons in life, about the real world.

  “You’re this strong, young buck and you think it’s going to go on forever. And Sparky was telling you that what really makes a difference is how you treat people. What you can take away from a relationship. That’s what will come back to you in later life.

  “Carrying a positive outlook into what you’re doing. To me that’s what leadership is all about. Not being loud and boisterous all the time. That’s a crock. A leader is someone who sets an example you want to emulate, who makes you feel better about yourself.

  “On that team we had a clubhouse full of leaders. That was its real strength.”

  There are those who earnestly believe that ultimate truth in baseball can be revealed through numbers. There seem to be more of them than ever before; yet another example of the mixed blessing of computers. With instant access to more and more data, stat-loving pundits and fans spin marvelous statistical webs that are supposed to trap the essence of winning for leisurely examination.

  It is almost a cult. Anyone who visits a major league press box today will be inundated with sheets of stats, meant to be studied the way religious scholars pore over the mystic symbolism of the Kabala.

  In most cases, however, the truth is much simpler. It sometimes is just a guy who can raise the confidence level of the people around him.

  “Trammell to me was the great example of that kind of leader,” says Petry. “He was my guy.

  “We’d be in the clubhouse after a game and he’d say something like ‘Who’s pitching tomorrow? Petry? Oh, good.’

  “I don’t even know if he was aware that I was within earshot. But do you know how that made me feel? I wanted to play hard for him. He had confidence in me and I didn’t want to let him down.

  “Roger Craig was another one, a master at quietly building your confidence. He’d start talking to you the second day after a start. Just quietly going over your mistakes and some of the things you did right. He wanted you to take some time on your own and come to your own conclusions, too.

  “Then he’d watch you warm up before your next start and he’d say something like, ‘You’ve got shutout stuff today.’ And you’d start thinking to yourself, ‘Wow, no way these guys can hit me.’

  “Of course, his job with Morris was a little bit different. Roger would always have to settle him down a little before a start.”

  Petry’s slider was probably the best in the American League, made even more effective because it came off a fastball with excellent movement. In ’84, he also learned how to throw the split-fingered fastball.

  By his 25th birthday he had won 60 games.

  So Craig had a little ability to pump up his pitchers with confidence.

  “The thing I remember most clearly when I think about that year was after the games in the clubhouse,” he says. “Darrell Evans would be with a little group of hitters talking about what they’d seen. The pitchers would be together. Two of our coaches, Gates Brown and Dick Tracewski, had been with the ’68 team and we saw their rings and respected what they had done.

  “You shouldn’t think that we all hung out together after the game. Even during the off-season. Trammell and I both lived in southern California in the winter then and I considered him a friend. But maybe we’d talk once or twice over the phone and that was it.

  “It was on the field that we all came together. That’s what Sparky was always preaching. We didn’t have to get along. We didn’t have to like everybody else. But we had to play as a team. And it worked.”

  A 19-game winner in 1983 and an 18-game winner in 1984, Dan Petry was as good a number two starter as there was in the American League.

  11. Tidal Wave

  There was no need to worry. The loss to Kansas City didn’t even amount to an anthill in the Tigers’ path.

  Next day they were at it again, beating Chicago in the last of the ninth, 3–2, on a two-out single by Parrish. That was the fifth home game, and on a frosty April evening more than thirty-three thousand people were in the stands, an unprecedented turnout for that time of year.

  It was a fast game, mercifully; only a few ticks over two-and-a-half hours. But it was very cold out there.

  So they started The Wave.

  There is a good deal of debate over where this form of audience participation began. It was employed by University of Michigan football fans at the Big House in Ann Arbor during the 1983 season, where it was called the A-Maizing Wave (for Maize and Blue, naturally).

  But counterclaims came in from the University of Washington, where irate Huskies fans claimed the Wolverines had stolen it from them. It had also been used, in somewhat truncated form, at the Oakland Coliseum during the 1983 baseball season.

  It was at Tiger Stadium, however, that The Wave was brought to its fullest flower, its greatest realization, and so became forever ingrained at sporting events around the country.

  Tiger Stadium was double-decked around its entire perimeter. Its most prominent feature was the bleachers in dead center. These were the cheapest seats in the house, and those who spent their formative years watching ballgames from this vantage point would argue that they were also the best.

  One sat among the cognoscenti, those who were drawn by sheer love of the game and didn’t care where they sat as long as they were in the ballpark. But the view was spectacular. High above the center field wall, behind the flagpole, with the entire playing field spread out clearly before you. No hidden corners, no obstructions. Just a broad, green meadow.

  The strike zone was not altogether discernible, but one developed a sense for where the pitches came in. The benches were hard and offered no support for the back. But who cares about such trivialities when you’re young? And the bleachers were overwhelmingly young.

  This was the spawning ground of The Wave.

  In order to generate itself, The Wave required a crowd that went all the way around the upper deck. It usually would start with a few dozen revelers in the bleachers and then proceed in a counterclockwise direction, first to the left-field seats and then all the way around to right and back to its inception.

  If the upper deck turnout was sparse, The Wave couldn’t sustain itself and would die a feeble death somewhere over the left-field bullpen. A crowd of thirty-three thousand was, however, more than adequate to carry it all the way around.

  If the April nights had been a bit warmer, The Wave might never have started to roll, either. But it was cold out there. People needed to move around a little. Jumping up and shouting with your arms lifted high was the perfect exercise.

  So it was that on April 20 The Wave debuted at Tiger Stadium. It would continue to encircle the ballpark all summer long.

  As weeks went by, variations on the basic movement were installed. There was a hyped-up Wave that flashed around the park in quick time. There was a slow-motion Wave. There were attempts to start a Wave going one way in the upper deck and another heading in the opposite direction in the lower deck. Local columnists came out, observed, and wrote their own interpretation of what they were seeing. It was imaginative. No, it was stupid. No, it was a visual manifestation of Detroit’s desperate search for a sense of community. No, it was proof that baseball was a boring game that requi
red extra activities to keep the fans engaged.

  At first, even the ballplayers appeared fascinated by it, coming to the top step of the dugout to watch it roar around the park. But soon it became routine and even, when it began in a critical part of the game, slightly disruptive.

  The good thing was, the way the Tigers were playing there weren’t many games that reached a critical part. They polished off the White Sox again on Saturday, 4–1, ending Lamarr Hoyt’s 15-game winning streak over the last two seasons. Then on Easter Sunday they made it 9–1 and six in a row over Chicago.

  And suddenly it was 12–1 for the year.

  Even doubleheaders couldn’t stop the carnival. When Monday’s game with Minnesota was rained out, they played two on Tuesday and the Tigers won two more. They scored three in the ninth to take the opener, 6–5, and then Lopez pitched three more dazzling innings of long relief to take the second game, 4–3.

  It was getting monotonous.

  The theme song for that season was the old Martha and the Vandellas hit, “Dancing in the Streets.” It had been 20 years since it emerged from Motown Studios, a couple miles north of the ballpark, and topped the record charts.

  To many it was the perfect evocation of summertime in the city. Its call of “Can’t forget the Motor City” always brought forth a roar from Detroit fans.

  But the song had been a topic of controversy earlier in the eighties. There were those who thought its lyrics contained an encoded incitement to riot, and that the “dancing” it called for was the kind that went on in the Detroit of 1967. There would be no encouraging of that at Tiger Stadium.

  Besides, Jim Campbell had been burned before by rock and roll music. He could not forget the fifth game of the 1968 World Series when José Feliciano performed his soulful version of the National Anthem and brought a firestorm of outrage upon this conservative organization.

  So when young fans adopted the song as a baseball theme, Campbell wanted no part of it. He refused to allow it to be played over the ballpark’s public address system. He preferred organ music. No one ever rioted after hearing an organ solo.

  His stand was ridiculed throughout Detroit. Some disc jockeys produced a satiric version of the song called “Dancin’ in the Seats.” His attitude was described as the typical Tigers stodginess that turned off the very fans the ballclub needed for the future.

  Campbell finally relented, and the voice of Martha Reeves soared through every game as part of the joy of baseball in ’84.

  Next it was on to Texas for two more wins—an easy one for Wilcox, 9–4, on a three-run dinger by Parrish, and then a tough 7–5 decision that featured 42⁄3 innings of shutout relief by Bair and Lopez.

  That game went almost three hours, another hour was lost on the time change during the flight home, and the team didn’t get back to Detroit until 4:00 a.m. The following night’s game against Cleveland then went 19 innings, almost six hours.

  Lopez was brilliant with 42⁄3 more innings of shutout long relief. But in the nineteenth, the Tigers imploded through sheer exhaustion: three errors, including a dropped fly ball by Gibson, and the Indians scored four times to put it away.

  It was just the sort of draining loss that would have sapped the energy from less confident teams in other years.

  No chance of that in ’84. Morris came back the next day for a three-hitter and a 6–2 win, and on Sunday Petry carried his no-hitter into the eighth, giving the Tigers a 6–1 win.

  April had ended. The Tigers were a stunning 18–2, and people were starting to notice.

  Trammell waves to an appreciative Detroit crowd—who had developed a significant Wave of their own in the spring of 1984.

  12. Can This Be Real?

  Sparky had told Dan Ewald, the Tigers’ public relations director, that he had a feeling “something tremendous” was going to happen.

  But Ewald, a veteran newsman and publicist, wasn’t prepared for what that meant.

  “It all happened so suddenly,” he says. “It was like a lightning bolt. No one could prepare for something like that. It was beyond my experience and my imagination.

  “I had volunteered to work p.r. at the World Series for several years, so I knew all about handling big-time media and large numbers of reporters. At least, I thought I did. But the Tigers had become the freak show at the circus. Everybody wanted a little slice of what was going on.

  “Sportswriters and broadcasters. National magazines. Good Morning, America. The Late Show. We were besieged. Everybody was demanding interviews or some kind of access.

  “And this was May! This never happens in May. This is for the end of the pennant race, the playoffs. But we were 16–2 and we were the biggest story in sports.”

  Even 20 years later, Ewald can’t quite believe what it was like to be at the focus of the media swarm in full cry.

  “I would get out to the ballpark hours early when we were on the road, because sitting alone in the press box was really the only chance I had to do my work,” he says. “I was in Anaheim one evening and there was Gene Mauch, a manager I really respected.

  “He sat down next to me, and he said in that real low voice of his, ‘Better get ready.’ It took me a minute or two to understand what he was telling me. He was saying that we’d better get ready for the World Series. And this was in May!

  “I’d never been on a ride this wild. We left one of those ballparks after a three-game sweep and Sparky had this look in his eyes. He said to me, ‘Maybe we should tell the driver to take us straight to Las Vegas.’”

  As astonishing as it all was to Tigers insiders, their fans found it slightly unfathomable.

  “I’d get to work early to beat the traffic,” recalls retired investment executive Jerry Broad, “and there was always just this one other guy in the office. We’d sit down, get out the sports pages, read about the last night’s game, and just shake our heads. Day after day, all morning long—not only in our office but all over the city. There was nothing else to talk about.”

  “It went against everything I had ever believed about what it meant to be a Tigers fan,” says TV producer Tom DeLisle. “This never happens to us. We’re the team that had four .300 hitters and two 20-game winners and still finished in fifth place. We’re the team that always lost at the last possible moment in the worst possible way.

  “The typical Tigers year was ’67. I still don’t understand what happened in ’84. For years afterward I expected somebody to get up and make an announcement that it was all a mistake, and they’d have to replay the whole season.”

  “I don’t think it even sank in until a year later,” says Barry Bershad, who coached youth basketball in the Detroit area for years. “I’d always been taught that what you looked for was how many games over .500 a team was playing. That was an indication of how good they were. The Tigers had played 40 games and they were 30 over .500. That was just off the charts.”

  Other teams had gone through comparable winning streaks in the past. But they were embedded in the middle of a season, not at its start. They didn’t have the same impact as opening the newspaper, looking at the standings and seeing 35–5.

  Wherever their fans went this spring, there was no other topic of conversation. Age didn’t especially matter, either.

  “I was eight years old that summer,” says Michael Ben, now a corporate attorney in New York City, “and I begged my parents to pay up so I could join the official Tigers Fan Club. I got a bumper sticker, a “Bless You, Boys” T-shirt, two tickets to a game, and a signed letter from one of the players.

  “I also got an ear-to-ear smile that lasted all summer. These were my heroes and nobody could beat them. I really felt like I was part of the team, in a way that maybe only little kids can understand.”

  In Jerusalem, after a day of wandering through the narrow streets and souks of the Old City, and f
eeling farther from home than he ever had before, a Detroit newspaper columnist on assignment saw to his shock a sea of blue baseball caps with the Old English D on the front advancing toward him across the cobblestones.

  It was a tour group from a Detroit-area synagogue, and when some of its members recognized the writer they called out, “Eighteen and two. Can you believe it?’”

  Even in Israel.

  Boston came in, and for a while it appeared as if the balloon had finally popped. On May 2 and 3, the Tigers doubled their loss total. Two defeats in a row, and both by one run. The second was especially debilitating. Morris pitched a five-hitter, struck out eight, went the distance . . . and lost 1–0.

  And all over Michigan, they grimaced and said to themselves, “Here it comes.”

  Instead, the Tigers went for a weekend series in Cleveland and won three more in a row. The Sunday game was the capper, with Detroit rallying for four runs in the eighth to tie, and then Whitaker winning it in the twelfth with a base hit.

  But the real turning point—if a streak like this can properly be said to have a turning point—came in the Friday night game. Petry started and was far from his best. In five innings, he gave up six hits and six walks. Every inning was a struggle, and even though the Tigers had a 5–2 lead, Sparky had seen enough.

  He brought Hernandez in from the bullpen.

  In hindsight, that season belonged to Willie. Most Valuable Player. Cy Young Award. But that was all in the future, unknowable on May 4. With one-seventh of the season already played, the late-spring trade that brought him over from the Phillies looked like a wash.

  Lopez was again assuming the dominant role in the bullpen. He had already won two and saved two more.

  Hernandez seemed to be bumbling along. He had two saves, but for the most part his appearances were marked by their ineffectiveness and brevity. He had pitched fewer than 18 innings and his earned run average was up to 4.50. When he did pitch, he gave up runs more often than not.