Wire to Wire

by George Cantor

  Darrell Evans spoke for most of them, however.

  “We enjoyed the moment,” he said. “I never seriously thought we could lose. I just felt we were taking part in something historic, and I was going to let it all sink in while it was happening.”

  Still, there were some doubts. Because after the streak ended in Seattle, the Tigers would go 69–53 for the rest of the season. That’s a percentage of .567, not a pennant-winning clip in most years.

  Jack Morris was 9–1 when the streak ended. For the rest of the year he would go 10–10. Dan Petry would go from 7–1 to 11–7. For Milt Wilcox the figures were 6–0 and 11–8.

  So for the remaining three-quarters of this season, the Tigers were a pretty good team, but not a great one. It was impossible, of course, to have kept up the initial pace. But the cushion that such a streak should have built up did not exist. Toronto was right on their tails.

  This was only the eighth year of the Blue Jays’ existence, and for most of that time they were an expansion team that played like an expansion team.

  But by the second half of 1983, Toronto had started to come together. The Jays had developed some good, young power hitters. First baseman Willie Upshaw and outfielders Lloyd Moseby and George Bell were as good a middle-of-the-lineup as that of any team in the league. Jesse Barfield, who the Jays had refused to trade to Philadelphia for Hernandez, was coming on fast.

  Dave Stieb, regarded by many as nearly the equal of Morris among right-handed starters, anchored a strong staff that included Luis Leal, Jim Clancy, and a tough left-handed rookie, Jimmy Key, in the bullpen.

  The teams hadn’t met yet. Toronto wouldn’t make its first visit to Tiger Stadium until the first week of June. But on Detroit’s lost weekend in Seattle they had chopped three games off the lead just like that. The Blue Jays were still an unknown quantity, which made them appear even more threatening.

  The Tigers could do no better than split the next six games with Oakland and Baltimore. So by the time the two teams finally opened their four-game series, Detroit’s lead was down to 41⁄2 games.

  If there was any single game during the regular season that Tigers fans remember best, it was the opener of that series. A Monday night, on national television, with Howard Cosell, Earl Weaver, and Al Michaels in the booth.

  It was one of those games of which it can be said that if everyone who claims they were there had actually been in the stands, attendance would have been over 200,000. As it was, the count was around 27,000—not bad for a Monday, traditionally the deadest night of the week for baseball.

  It was the Toronto ace, Stieb, going against Detroit’s fourth man, Berenguer. Sparky loved those kinds of matchups. If his team won, it was a tremendous psychological blow to the opposition. And if they lost—oh, well. That was their best shot and we still had ours coming up.

  As it turned out, however, nothing happened as planned; and it was one of the least-known Tigers who changed the course of the season—and his life.

  Milt Wilcox (left) congratulates Morris after Morris’ May 24 four-hitter defeated the Angels for Detroit’s record-tying 17th straight road victory.

  Sparky Anderson was the 30th manager in the history of the Tigers. It was a position that didn’t offer much security, even for a relatively stable organization like Detroit.

  Before Anderson’s stay of 17 years, the average managerial tenure had been a bit more than two and a half seasons. Anderson had already exceeded that by the time 1984 began, and the 377 wins he had accumulated with the Tigers stood sixth on the team’s all-time list.

  By the end of his career with Detroit, he would pass them all. He finished with 1,331 victories—exactly 200 more than Hughie Jennings, who won three pennants with the Tigers but also managed three fewer seasons.

  The reason for Sparky’s longevity was simple. In his first 10 years in Detroit, he never had a losing season. Moreover, he was almost revered by the team’s president, Jim Campbell, who would no sooner have fired Sparky than he would have turned in his Ohio State letter sweater.

  16. Bergman’s Battle

  Dave Bergman is in his office in a suburban Detroit high-rise. The hour is early, and the other desks are empty.

  He is now a partner in an investment counseling firm, and he likes to get there with the sun, to give it that little extra effort. It’s a holdover from a baseball career that ended in 1992. The extra effort was his edge.

  Bergman was mostly a part-time player. He never reached double figures for one season in homers, never drove in more than 44 runs or hit .300. His lifetime average of .258 was nothing to write home about, either.

  His career in finance has been far more successful than anything he achieved on the diamond. But on one night in June of 1984, he came to bat against Toronto and took part in a duel that will never be forgotten by those who saw it.

  “How many careers are remembered for just one thing?” he asks. “Look at Bill Buckner. Great hitter and a good guy. Played more than 20 years in the big leagues. What did he have? Something like 2,700 hits.

  “But the only way he’s remembered is for letting a ball go through his legs in the 1986 World Series. It destroyed him.

  “I had a lunch bucket career. Showed up, did my job, tried to be ready when they needed me.

  “And because of one time at bat . . . well, the Lord has blessed me because of that.”

  He was the throw-in on the deal by which the Tigers acquired Hernandez. It was the second time he had been traded the same day, and whenever that happens a player starts asking himself questions about where his career is headed.

  Bergman had come up with the Yankees, stayed for 12 games, went off to Houston for three years, then to the Giants.

  “I was never an overachiever,” he says. “But I thought I’d done a pretty good job with the Giants in 1983, and I was a little hurt when I got traded to Philadelphia. And then to get sent off to Detroit. Well, I never accepted failure as a player, but I learned to be flexible.

  “So when I walked into the clubhouse at Lakeland that spring, Sparky told me that I would get 250 at-bats that year. ‘I don’t exactly know how,’ he told me, ‘but that’s what you’ll get.’

  “‘Well, if you get me those at-bats, here’s what my numbers will look like,’ I told him. ‘Anything less is a crap shoot.’”

  Bergman got 271, to be exact, more than he’d ever had in the majors. And his numbers were among the best of his career.

  But by June 4, he had yet to hit a home run.

  He’d delivered three hits in a rare start against Cleveland in the midst of the big streak. Most of the time, however, his role was as a late-inning defensive replacement. He understood that.

  “That was the great thing about playing for Sparky,” he says. “You knew where you stood. He was always balanced. Looking back on it, he really didn’t teach me all that much about baseball. He taught me a lot about being a man.”

  Stieb had stifled Detroit into the seventh inning. Upshaw reached Berenguer for a homer in the second, and then Bell hit a two-run shot in the top of the sixth. It was 3–0 Toronto, and stomachs were churning across Michigan. If the Tigers lost the opener of the series, the floor could drop out from underfoot.

  Then with two on and two out in the last of the seventh, Howard Johnson came to bat for the Tigers. Third base was being handled by committee. Sometimes it was Brookens, sometimes Garbey, sometimes Marty Castillo. Tonight it was the 23-year-old HoJo.

  Johnson had the most promise. He was in his third season with the team. He had speed, some pop in his bat, and the one quality that made Sparky nervous—unpredictability. His fielding was erratic and seemed to get worse when he went into a slump.

  The manager described Johnson as standing perpetually at the water’s edge. He hadn’t yet been able to take the step that would allow him to function con
sistently in all aspects of the game.

  On that night, he did. After smashing a long foul into the right-field seats, Johnson took Stieb all the way, a towering fly ball off the foul pole. Suddenly it was 3–3, and the Tigers had Toronto’s best pitcher out of the game.

  Hernandez took over for Berenguer in the top of the seventh and shut down the Blue Jays completely, pitching out of a third-base and no-outs situation in the eighth.

  But Dennis Lamp also stopped the Tigers. The game, three hours old, went into the tenth.

  The Blue Jays had won 19 consecutive one-run games. They prided themselves on that. It was the signature of their ballclub. They felt that they owned extra innings and this game was right where they wanted it to be.

  The rookie reliever Key had come in to quell a Detroit threat in the bottom of the ninth and he was still on the mound as the Tigers came to bat in the tenth.

  Parrish led off with a single, and Toronto manager Bobby Cox allowed Key to stay in to get Darrell Evans on a sacrifice bunt. Then right-hander Roy Lee Jackson came into the game. He got the second out, but then walked Lemon. This brought up Bergman, who already had one hit in the game and was on base when Johnson had connected in the seventh.

  “I played winter ball with Roy Lee and had some idea of what he threw,” says Bergman. “But, you know, it was more than that. There comes a time in every season when a hitter puts all his mechanics together. That night was it for me.”

  He settles back in the office chair. Bergman has told this story so many times, but it never gets old.

  The count went to 2–2. Jackson just missed with his next pitch. The Jays thought he’d caught the corner with it, but plate umpire Dave Phillips called it ball three.

  Then the real battle began.

  With the count full, Jackson threw every pitch in his arsenal, and Bergman kept fouling them off.

  Seven pitches in a row. Fastballs. Curves. Sliders.

  “Buck Martinez was catching for Toronto and after three or four pitches he said, ‘You’re getting some pretty good hacks there.’

  “I was just totally locked in. I knew I was going to drive something hard somewhere. I turned around to Buck and said, ‘Don’t you dare walk me.’

  “Then I fouled off a couple more and he said, ‘Is there a curfew we’ve got to start worrying about?’”

  The Tigers watched in awe as the struggle went on and on.

  “Given the situation and the concentration on both sides, you couldn’t ask for a better at-bat,” says Parrish. “It was unbelievable.”

  “It was that kind of game,” says Gibson. “Everybody was scratching and clawing at each other and then it all came down to this.”

  “I was thinking to myself,” said Sparky, “that when a guy gives you a war like that, even if he makes an out you can’t be disappointed.”

  Up in the broadcast booth, Michaels was calling it the best at-bat of the season. Sparky went farther—he called it the best at-bat he had ever seen.

  “Every pitcher and every hitter have their weaknesses,” says Bergman, “and the longer a situation like that goes on the greater the odds that one guy will find the other’s weakness.”

  Bergman found it first. On the eighth 3–2 pitch, he rifled the ball into the right field upper deck.

  “I don’t have to tell you that it was the biggest thrill of my career,” he says. “I went on the field the next day and Cox tossed a ball that hit me in the back. ‘What are the chances you’ll ever do that again?’ he asked me.

  “And the funny thing is, I kind of did. We went into Toronto in September and I hit another three-run homer in the tenth to beat ’em again. Almost the exact same situation, without all the foul balls. But almost no one remembers it because we had all but won the pennant by then.”

  Bergman had majored in finance at Illinois State University and while he played with Houston he spent the off-season at E. F. Hutton as a stockbroker.

  “It wasn’t until I started working on the pension committee with the Players’ Union that it kind of crystallized,” he says. “That sort of money management was what I really wanted to do. A local group, Sigma Investments, was just starting out in 1988 and they kind of recruited me. That’s where I’ve been ever since.

  “But baseball is never far away. I try to apply the things I learned. I preach team all the time and tell people that they get three strikes. If the last one goes by them, they get escorted out the door.

  “We try to foster a family atmosphere here. That’s what it felt like with the Tigers back then. We had a clubhouse full of leaders and we all felt that we could talk to each other; get in each other’s face, disagree vocally, and it still would be all right. A family will bicker but then pull together when it has to.”

  For the family that was the ’84 Tigers, the one swing of Bergman’s bat was a saver. It was such a dramatic episode that in popular memory it still stands as the seal to this season. But that isn’t quite true.

  There was still business to be taken care of, and it would come just three days later.

  Dave Bergman, here stealing a base against Kansas City in the ALCS, all but knocked the Blue Jays out of the pennant race with his dramatic game-winning homer in early June.

  17. Rusty and Ruppert

  If this season had a subtext it was the wizardry of Sparky. The white-haired manager spent an entire year drawing to inside straights, lining up the slots on the payoff line, never crapping out.

  Every move he made seemed to catch a winner. No matter how some of the Tigers resented his rules (ties and jackets on the road, no beer on the team flights), they learned not to question his decisions. Because for that year, at least, they all turned out right.

  The primary exhibits were Rusty Kuntz and Ruppert Jones, two guys who figured in no one’s plans when the season began, yet became cogs in the machine.

  “As long as we were winning, I made up my mind to play everyone on my roster,” says Sparky. “They all were going to feel that they were part of what was going on.”

  He had cut Rick Leach in spring training, a move that was not especially popular in the state and left the former University of Michigan football star embittered. But in three seasons he had not developed into the player the Tigers had hoped for. The trade for Bergman was made specifically to get a left- handed reserve with a bit more power and defensive skill at first base.

  That, as we have seen, worked well.

  But the Tigers had also traded Glenn Wilson in that deal, which left a vacancy for a right-handed hitting outfielder.

  Enter Russell J. Kuntz.

  He was acquired in a winter deal at the minor league level and had been spending an uneventful spring on the roster of Evansville, Detroit’s Triple A affiliate. With the departure of Wilson, he was suddenly called over from Tigertown, still wearing a generic minor league uniform, without even his name on the back.

  “Just before the team went north, Bill Lajoie called me into his office,” he says. “I knew this was either good news or bad news, and I had been on the bad news side of these meetings enough times in my career.

  “He started off by saying, ‘We have to make some changes, Rusty,’ and I figured, ‘Oh, well, here we go again.’”

  Kuntz was 29 and had been a journeyman with the White Sox and Twins. He was within reach of some incentives in 1983 that would have paid him $20,000 (big money for a utility player at that time) when the Twins benched him. He asked for his release and ended up being traded to Detroit for a minor league pitcher.

  So the gamble hadn’t paid off.

  But wait a minute. Instead of swinging the ax, Lajoie was smiling.

  “Therefore, we’re keeping you on the 25-man roster.”

  Lajoie later described the whoop that Kuntz emitted as “the happiest sound I had ever heard come out of a
ballplayer.”

  Kuntz responded by hitting .400 for the first month of the season in spot assignments and getting a hit in every game he started.

  “I didn’t get the headlines, but that made me a hero in my own mind,” he says. He was also an unfailingly positive presence in the clubhouse, a guy so gleeful about being where he was that the Tigers’ stars couldn’t help but respond.

  Then along came Jones.

  Ruppert Jones had a far more impressive resume than Kuntz. He had made All-Star squads in both Seattle and San Diego and was regarded as a good center fielder with better than average power.

  Somehow he had been caught in a numbers and salary crunch during spring training with Pittsburgh. He was released outright, and at 29 his career had entered the dead zone.

  He described the next three weeks as the longest in his life. He went home to California, tried to stay in condition, and thought a lot about things.

  Then the phone call from Lajoie came through. Would he consider a job with Evansville? “When you’re out of work, you take what’s offered,” he said. If he played up to his capability, he thought, some team somewhere would find him.

  The team turned out to be the Tigers. On June 5, he was brought up and immediately placed in the lineup. The following day he again started in center field and batted seventh.

  Bergman’s tenth-inning home run on that Monday night was not quite the crusher the Tigers had hoped for. In fact, Toronto had shrugged it off, came back, and hammered Detroit twice in a row, 8–4 and 6–3.

  The big lead was down to 31⁄2 games, and the Jays had the chance to slice one more off before they left town. It was Morris against Clancy in a Thursday afternoon game, and almost 41,000 people were in the park.

  It was the sort of game Morris loved to pitch in, and he was on for this one. The teams went into the sixth tied 1–1.

  Over the years, Tiger Stadium had been an accommodating place to left-handed hitters who were brought into town for a new start. A few had been ruined by the proximity of the right-field seats, altering their swings to muscle up. But many more had arrived from other places—Charlie Maxwell, Champ Summers, Gail Harris—and bloomed for a season or two as genuine threats.