Wire to Wire

by George Cantor

  On his sixth time at bat with Detroit, Jones joined them. He sent a classic Tiger Stadium home run into the right-field upper deck. It came with two runners on and gave Morris a 4–1 lead. At that point in his career, the lead was impregnable.

  “That’s the kind of season it was,” says Jones. “The attitude in the clubhouse was ‘All right, who’s going to step up today?’ There was this expectation of winning. That’s a valuable thing to take away from any experience.”

  The big crowd shouted “Rupe, Rupe, Rupe” as he trotted around the bases, as if he had been a local hero for years. For the remaining four months, Jones was as productive as anyone in the Detroit lineup. He finished with 12 homers and two weeks after his big home run Jones became the 11th man—and the fifth Tiger—in history to clear the right-field roof.

  Just as important, he gave Sparky greater flexibility with his outfield. The manager could now rest Lemon and Herndon, or use them as designated hitters, and lose nothing on defense.

  The lead was back to 41⁄2 games, but with another three-game series to play against the Jays next week in Toronto.

  Morris, stepping momentarily out of character, even said, “I respect the hell out of those guys.” But Cox knew his ballclub had let opportunity slip away. A split wasn’t good enough, not when they could have done much more.

  “I am not particularly satisfied,” he said.

  The words were understated. Toronto would never come any closer to the Tigers for the rest of the season. By the time the teams played again, in fact, Toronto had fallen seven games behind. Even though they won two out of three in that series, they would never close the gap.

  No one realized it yet, but on June 6 the pennant race had ended.

  Rusty Kuntz scores ahead of Boston catcher Rich Gedman’s tag in the second week of the season. Unsure of making the team at spring training, Kuntz wound up having the season of his life.

  18. Gutting It Out

  The large black dog has white paws.

  “I named him Sparky,” says Milt Wilcox, as the retriever bounds up to a visitor at the front door. “When I saw those fringes of white, I kept thinking of the color of Sparky Anderson’s hair. It just seemed to fit.”

  Many members of the ’84 Tigers make the point that what they accomplished was all the more remarkable because none of them had “a career year.” That isn’t exactly true, though. Willie Hernandez had a season unlike any other in his career and was rewarded with all the trophies he could carry away.

  As for Wilcox, the season finally enabled him to escape the tag of “no better than a .500 pitcher.”

  He finished with a 17–8 record, his best by far, and if you include his two huge postseason starts, Wilcox actually finished with 19 wins.

  “I made a conscious choice before the season began,” he says in his suburban Detroit home, as Sparky romps about the living room. “Every other year of my career something happened to my shoulder somewhere along the way and I had to miss some turns or go on the disabled list.

  “I knew what was at stake this year. This was going to be it for me. I de-cided that no matter what happened or how bad it got, I would pitch through it.”

  Sparky (the manager, not the dog) also understood that Wilcox could no longer be a nine-inning pitcher. He didn’t complete a single start all season, but he didn’t miss one, either.

  “I came up with Cincinnati in 1970 and that team went to the World Series,” he says. “I said to myself, ‘Oh, boy. This is great. I wanna do this every year.’ It just doesn’t happen that way. I never had the chance to get back. So I wasn’t going to let this chance get away.”

  The decision cost him a lot. Taking injections, pitching over the pain, he had to finally undergo two surgeries in 1985. He never came back from them. After the World Series, he would get just one more victory in the rest of his career.

  “That was a hard thing to come to terms with,” he says. “It’s tough for any athlete when he has to face up to the fact that his career, the thing he’s done since he was a kid, is over. But I had a sense of drift. I couldn’t find a place [where] I wanted to be.

  “I tried selling insurance, real estate, raising horses for harness racing. I had a sports talk show on cable TV. Then I went through a divorce. That’s what really started me asking hard questions about myself and where I wanted to go.

  “Now I’m in sales, have a good marriage, and take Sparky [the dog, not the manager] to diving competitions.

  “Maybe I should have played it safe when it came to my arm. But you know what? I’d do it again.”

  Wilcox was 34 when the season began and was a much different player than during his first experience with Anderson.

  “Sparky and I had a history going back to my rookie year in Cincinnati,” he says. “He had a lot of virtues, but patience for young players wasn’t one of them. It didn’t take much to get in his doghouse and sometimes it was impossible to get out. I was gone to Cleveland after two years.

  “But I’ll say this. He saw the big picture like no manager I ever played for. He told us there are three things you had to respect: baseball, God, and family. That’s one of the basic Sparkyisms. And you know what? That isn’t a bad way to live.

  “No one could ever take advantage of being a star on one of his teams. Discipline applied to everybody. So we grumbled about a lot of things, but unfair treatment wasn’t one of them.

  “And he could spot the slackers, the guys who weren’t going to fit in. He got rid of them in a hurry, no matter how popular they were with the fans.”

  His fondest memories of that season, however, revolve around pitching coach Roger Craig.

  “I tell young players not to get discouraged if they feel they’re not making any progress,” he says. “I tell them that it took me 14 years in the majors before I finally found a pitching coach who could help me.

  “It wasn’t learning a new pitch or anything like that. It was his overall philosophy, his way of looking at what a pitcher should do. Maybe it’s because he had to struggle in his career. I mean Roger had a long career, and he pitched with some Hall of Famers. But he also played for some real bad teams and nothing ever came easy for him.

  “I had Warren Spahn as a pitching coach and he could never understand why the things he took for granted were impossible for ordinary players to do. The game wasn’t hard for him.

  “But Roger knew the rest of us didn’t have that kind of ability. So he taught us to how to set up hitters, how to think two and three pitches ahead. He taught me how I could control a game as a pitcher.

  “Even the greatest hitters had to be guessing. No one can adjust that fast to the pitch he sees. So the game is not letting them outguess you. I had never thought about it in quite that way before.

  “Once in a while, he’d call a game for some of our younger pitchers. Rozema responded to that. But when I was out there I wanted it to be just me and Lance. Afterward, Roger would talk about it with you.

  “His goal was to foster this sense of togetherness on his pitching staff, build up our own confidence and identity. I can still see Darrell Evans off with the hitters talking about that, and Roger sitting over in the other corner with us.

  “Because the game didn’t end for us when the games were over. I think that was our great strength. We all would talk about what we had just seen for hours afterward.”

  If the World Series had gone back to San Diego for a sixth game, it would have been Wilcox’s turn to pitch. Even today he doesn’t know whether he could have done it.

  “By the end of the season, the pain was starting to get unbearable in the anterior muscle,” he says. “When we were in Kansas City for the playoffs, it was killing me. I was getting cortisone shots, laying off two or three weeks and then getting another one.

  “But I went to Roger and told him we had to
speed up the schedule if I was going to pitch the third game of the playoffs. So they had me fly to Chicago in secret, get the shot at a clinic, and get back to Kansas City by the start of the game. Nobody even knew I was gone.

  “I couldn’t have lifted my shoulder high enough to button my shirt without the shot, but I wasn’t going to miss my turn. So that’s how I was able to win the 1–0 game in the playoffs.

  “The trouble was that the shots were getting less and less effective. I was able to start the third game of the Series, but I didn’t enjoy the rest of it. I was just in too much pain. If it had gone six I would have had to get another shot, and I don’t know if that one would have worked.

  “I was ready to try it. But I was the happiest guy on that team when it turned out I didn’t have to. I got the surgery a week later at the Mayo Clinic. It was experimental at the time and it didn’t turn out right. So I had to go back for a second surgery in May.

  “That pretty much shot the season, and then I got traded to Seattle and never won another game.”

  Sparky is bounding around in earnest now and Wilcox opens the front door to let him out. A neighbor on the block walks by and waves. It’s a community with sidewalks, the sort of place where everybody knows your name.

  “I found a good place to be,” he says.

  Wilcox pitched through pain to notch the best season of his career, highlighted by his two postseason wins—including this gem against the Royals.

  Milt Wilcox won only one more game after his postseason heroics of 1984. But he is far from alone in having a shining moment in the World Series or another critical late-season game be his last.

  The best-known example is Bill Bevens, the Yankees pitcher who came within one out of throwing a no-hitter against the Dodgers in the 1947 Series. After losing the game in the ninth inning, he never won another for the Yankees—or anyone else.

  It was the same thing with outfielder Al Gionfriddo, whose incredible catch of Joe DiMaggio’s long drive to the center-field wall in the same Series is one of the most replayed sound bites in radio history. (“Oh, doctor,” yelled announcer Red Barber.) Gionfriddo, too, never played in the majors again.

  George Whiteman, a minor league journeyman, was called up by the 1918 Red Sox and became a hitting hero in their Series win over the Cubs. He went back to the bush leagues for keeps right afterward.

  The most famous example in Detroit lore was Floyd Giebell, who outpitched Bob Feller in the last week of the 1940 season and nailed down the pennant for the Tigers. He never won another game.

  19. Between Two Champions

  “People ask me to compare those two teams all the time,” says Dick Tracewski.

  “I tell them that the factor most people overlook is defense. Those were two airtight defensive teams, besides all the other things they had going for them. That ’84 team might have been the strongest up the middle I’ve ever seen. They had four guys who just never made a mental mistake.”

  Tracewski brings a unique perspective to the comparison. He played 90 games all over the infield for the 1968 Tigers and then coached on the 1984 team. Gates Brown is the only other man to follow that career path with both championship teams.

  Tracewski had a rather remarkable run of success for a man whose lifetime batting average was .213 in just eight years as a player. (Sparky Anderson’s lifetime average: .218.) He won two championships with the Dodgers, in 1963 and 1965, and then added one more in Detroit.

  Of all the people associated with those Tigers teams, only Jack Morris got to taste the champagne as often. He won three more times in Minnesota and Toronto.

  “When I saw the Hall of Fame votes for Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker, it stuck in my craw,” says Tracewski. He is 69 years old this year so it seems somehow inappropriate to refer to him as Trixie, his nickname throughout his playing and coaching career.

  “Ozzie Smith goes into the Hall on the first ballot and Trammell barely gets a mention? You’ve got to be kidding. If Whitey Herzog had come to the Tigers when Smith was playing for him in St. Louis and offered to trade him for Tram even-up we would have laughed at him.”

  “Alan was his equal defensively and he could even hit cleanup for us. The only thing he couldn’t do was that backflip Ozzie used to make. And I bet if he really wanted to, Alan could have done that, too.

  “But even worse was the way Lou was treated. I never saw another infielder throw out so many runners on a relay. There’s something that never turns up on a stat sheet. But do you have any idea what that meant to us? You’re talking about cutting guys down at third base and home, just taking the heart out of a big inning for the other team.”

  It was a Whitaker relay from Kirk Gibson that cut down Kurt Bevacqua at third base in the seventh inning of the first game of the ’84 World Series, saving the 3–2 win for Morris and the Tigers.

  “Lou was never out of position on a cutoff,” says Tracewski. “Never. And his arm was deadly. The only other infielder I ever saw who compared to him that way was Eddie Brinkman. It just makes me sick that those guys never got the attention they deserved nationally.

  “You add Chet Lemon and Lance Parrish to those two and your defense is going to win ballgames for you.”

  Tracewski’s main coaching responsibilities involved the infield, but not exclusively.

  “Sparky rarely gave his coaches direct instructions on what he wanted them to do,” he says. “You were expected to know what your job was, although we talked all the time about the team.

  “The only firm order I ever got from him was to work out Kirk Gibson in the outfield every day. When he first came to us, Kirk was a pretty raw talent. He wasn’t too sure about what he was supposed to be doing out there, either catching the ball or throwing it. So that was my job. Make sure he got it figured out.

  “All the coaches had input. Sparky eventually did things the way he wanted. But he was always willing to listen.

  “For example, in August of ’84, our pitching was getting pretty beaten up. We lost four straight at home to Kansas City and then we had to go into Boston for five games, including back-to-back doubleheaders.

  “Boston wasn’t all that great that season, but just like any year, when you go into Fenway Park they can really hurt you. All the coaches told Sparky we needed to have another starting pitcher for that series.

  “So he went to the front office and they go to the minors and bring up a kid named Carl Willis. Big right-hander who went on to have a good career as a reliever with the Twins. To make room on the roster, we had to option out Rusty Kuntz, and he’s hitting something like .330.

  “Sparky puts Willis in to start the second game of the first doubleheader, and he doesn’t get out of the first inning. He faces six guys, five of them get hits, and we lose the game 10–2.

  “Sparky sits down with the coaches after the game and says, ‘Thanks a lot. Kuntz has to stay in the minors for 10 days and we still need a pitcher.’

  “But he knew it was a good idea and that we were thinking about the team. That’s all he asked. And we wound up winning two of the five games—which was fine—then went into Kansas City and swept three from them.”

  In 1968, Tracewski was involved tangentially in one of the more bodacious moves in baseball history. He had divided up the shortstop position that year with Ray Oyler and Tommy Matchick. Tracewski hit only .156, but that was 21 points higher than Oyler, who didn’t get a hit after July. Matchick was the strongest batter of the three—he hit all of .203—but didn’t match up on defense.

  Mayo Smith, faced with the necessity of getting Al Kaline into the lineup, moved Mickey Stanley from center field to shortstop for the World Series. It was a remarkable gamble that paid off.

  A similar situation developed in 1984 at third base. Howard Johnson was the regular during the season. Tom Brookens filled in and came in during the late
innings as a defensive replacement. Marty Castillo also played some at third, although he actually saw more playing time as a catcher. Even Barbaro Garbey showed up there in 20 games.

  They all hit about the same, although Johnson clearly had more power, was faster, and was a superior athlete.

  “But he was still a boy at that time,” says Tracewski. “The talent was there but he was immature. I know that worried Sparky. He didn’t like putting young players in high-pressure situations.

  “So he went with Castillo and we ended up trading Howard to the Mets in the off-season. When I look back on it, that was probably the worst personnel decision we made during those years. We got a good pitcher out of it in Walt Terrell and he won 15, 17 games for us in three straight years, but Howard became a superstar in New York.

  “We all knew the potential was there, and, for a time, we thought that maybe the outfield would be a better place for him. But Sparky was never comfortable with him as his third baseman, and that was it. Overall, though, I think we were wrong about Howard.”

  Tracewski had the chance to observe two Hall of Fame managers up close during his career: Sparky and Walter Alston.

  “There were certain similarities,” he says. “They were both strict disciplinarians. They laid down the rules. Alston was quieter about it and Sparky, as we know, was more vocal. But they both wanted things done a certain way and ran a regimented team.

  “Walter had a rule about golf. It was forbidden to play on the day of a game. So I would sneak out with Jim Gilliam when we were at home in Los Angeles at about 6:00 a.m.—and he was a coach.

  “I’m still friends with Sandy Koufax. He visits me in Pennsylvania a couple of times every summer and we play some golf then. Sandy says he couldn’t stand Alston back then but he’s come to appreciate him now. We were all wild men and someone had to keep us in line. And when Walter spoke, believe me, we listened.