Wire to Wire

by George Cantor

  “Sparky, of course, had his rules about being late, dress code, drinking on the team flights. He said that if you can’t go for a couple of hours on an airplane without a drink, you’ve got some major problems. He wouldn’t bend on that one.

  “Everybody had to be there for infield, too. You missed infield, you didn’t play and it didn’t make any difference who you were. You followed the rules.

  “I had the chance to coach with some remarkable managers. Billy Martin. No one was able to get more out of a team over the short run. And Ralph Houk. He never got the credit he deserved for building that ’84 team.

  “He went through some terrible, terrible years in Detroit—a lot like Trammell is going through now. But it was while he was managing that all the young players who would win that championship started coming up with the team. Alan and Lou, Morris and Parrish.

  “Houk had incredible patience with them and the players responded to that.

  “While we’re on the subject of getting credit, the one guy from ’68 who never got enough in my opinion was Dick McAuliffe. He made that team go. You know, we didn’t hit too well on that team but whenever we needed to get something started Dick found a way to get on base and touch us off.

  “He got on the field and he was a real red-ass. Otherwise, as nice a guy as you’ll ever meet. Quite a ballplayer.

  “But that’s a basic point about those two teams. We probably shouldn’t have won in ’68. That had us down and we were leaking air, but once we got it turned around, the Cardinals couldn’t stop us.

  “In ’84, though, we expected to win all the time. There was such talent, all up and down the lineup. We probably should have swept the playoffs and the Series. We knew going in that we would breeze through.”

  Tracewski’s Dodgers teams of the sixties were not that deep in talent. The old joke was that a Dodgers rally consisted of a walk, a stolen base, a bunt, and a sacrifice fly. But they also had Koufax and Don Drysdale.

  “Koufax gave us an element no one else could match,” says Tracewski. “Drysdale had the same sort of competitive nature that Morris did. And better control, too.

  “Don could place a ball in a teacup. That’s what made his brushback pitch so effective. There was no mistaking the intent and he would not hesitate to knock people down.

  “Jack didn’t do too much of that. But what he had was an unhittable pitch. When he had the split finger working that season, that was it. He was absolutely unhittable.

  “Drysdale may have had more movement on his pitches and a wider assortment, although he never had that one guaranteed-out pitch like Jack. But if there was a game you had to win you just rolled the ball to either one of them and you would be all right.”

  His most embarrassing moment came with his good friend Koufax on the mound at the end of the ’63 Series. With two outs in the ninth, and Los Angeles going for the sweep, Koufax got the hitter on a grounder to Maury Wills at short, who flipped to Tracewski at second for the force.

  Koufax went into his victory dance—and Tracewski dropped the ball.

  No matter. Koufax got the next hitter to do the same thing, and this time it counted. Tracewski always admired consistency.

  Anderson views a Hall of Fame display featuring artifacts from the 1984 Tigers’ World Championship season—namely the jerseys of the men in the middle, Whitaker and Trammell—at the time of his own induction in 2000.

  20. The Unappreciated

  It seems that on every championship team there is a guy like Tom Brookens.

  Not one of the stars. Not someone whose name turns up in the headlines. Most days, in fact, he has to fight to get in the agate type.

  But he acts as an antifriction device in the clubhouse, gives up his body on the field, and earns the respect of players and coaches by his willingness to do whatever is asked. In many cases, fans and even the media covering the team on a regular basis don’t fully appreciate his value.

  Ray Oyler filled that function with the ’68 Tigers, even with a narcoleptic bat. In the wire to wire season, it was Brookens. Nobody sets out on a career path to be a utility infielder. But Brookens understood his role perfectly.

  “The Tigers signed me as a shortstop out of college,” he says. “I thought I was pretty good at it, too, my first year in the minors. But then they signed this guy named Trammell and I found myself moved over to second base. I made the All-Star team there playing Triple A ball. But when the season ended, both Tram and another guy named Whitaker shot right past me to the big club from Double A.

  “So I kind of figured that maybe I’d better see how things worked out at third base if I wanted to play in Detroit.”

  Things worked out all right there. With Aurelio Rodriguez slowing down after a decade of defensive brilliance with the Tigers, the ballclub needed to prepare a successor. Brookens joined the team in 1979 and for the next ten years, more often than not, he was the regular third baseman.

  But there was always the not.

  “Sparky was always looking for a little more power at my position,” he says. “That was all right with me. I knew what Sparky’s job was and it didn’t involve keeping me happy all the time. He had to win ballgames, and I was never a guy who had to be a starter. All he ever asked from me was 100 percent effort, and that came easy for me.

  “He was great to play for because he took so much pressure off his ballplayers with his own personality. We would debate about who was a better manager, Sparky or Tommy Lasorda. We figured it was pretty even and it would all come down to a talk-off, and nobody could beat Sparky at that.

  “He used to call himself Chief Walking Eagle, because he was too full of shit to get off the ground.

  “Besides, it was obvious the man was a genius. Less than one month after he took over as manager of the Tigers, he called me up from the minors.”

  As we talk we are sitting in the lobby of a hotel in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, within a few miles of where Brookens grew up.

  “I have this belief that wherever you’re from, that’s what you like,” he says. “This is kind of a rural area, not very exciting. Just plain and simple. But it’s where my family is and that means everything to me.

  “When my career ended, the Tigers offered me jobs in their system. But it would have meant going on the road, being away for months at a time. I didn’t need that.”

  While Brookens spent most of his career in the infield, the game that most endeared him to Detroit baseball fans was the night in 1985 when, with no preparation whatsoever, he became a catcher.

  “We were playing Texas that night,” he says, a grin spreading over his face. It is a story he still relishes.

  “Lance was hurt and we had just optioned another catcher to Triple A. So we’re down to Bob Melvin and Marty Castillo, who swung between third base and catching. We went into the ninth and tied the game when Sparky pinch hit Marty for Melvin. Then he put me in as a pinch runner for Marty at first base.

  “I looked over at Dick Tracewski in the coach’s box and I said, ‘Hey, Trixie, we’re out of catchers. What happens if we go to extra innings?’ He just smiled back at me and said, ‘What do you think is going to happen?’

  “I just thought to myself, ‘Oh, no. I better score this run and end it right now.’ I made it to third with two outs and I was pulling like I never pulled before for Johnny Grubb to dink one in and get me home. But he hit a fly ball, and when we started the tenth inning they had to start getting the equipment together for me.

  “I had Parrish’s shin guards and Marty’s glove and it seemed like it took 10 minutes before they could get me a helmet and a mask. And then they just shoved me out there.

  “I remember when the crowd saw what was happening they gave me a big ovation. But Ken Kaiser was the ump at home plate and he just glared at me when he saw me walking toward him.

 
“‘What do you think you’re doing?’ he asked me. ‘To tell you the truth, Ken,’ I said, ‘I don’t know. I’ve never caught before.’

  “Kaiser just kept looking at me and finally he said, ‘I don’t feel so good.’ ‘Neither do I,’ I said.

  “Aurelio Lopez was pitching and he had great control that night. All I did was kept calling for fastballs and he was throwing ’em right by the Rangers. That was working fine and then I look out there and he’s shaking me off. I look over to the bench and they’re not telling me anything so I went out to talk to Lopey.

  “‘I’m just trying to confuse them,’ he said. ‘Lopey,’ I told him. ‘All you’re doing is confusing me.’

  “‘That’s all right,’ he said. ‘You signal for anything you want and I’ll just keep throwing fastballs.’

  “I know the Rangers were dying to get some runners on, but Lopey was unhittable. They did get two guys to first base, and they didn’t even bother trying to take a lead. They just lined up like track men and took off.

  “Sparky finally had to bring in Bill Scherrer to pitch. He was a lefty, and a lot harder to catch because his pitches were moving all over the place. I came back to the dugout after the top of the fifteenth and said, ‘That’s it. We better win it now, because I ain’t goin’ back out there again.’

  “Luckily, we scored a run and when I got back to the clubhouse Lance had taken a catcher’s mask and used it to ice down a six-pack of beer and brought it to my locker. ‘You deserve this,’ he said. I think I just sat there and drank down every one of them.”

  Brookens has no complaints about his career in the majors, he says, “because for a long time my abilities never caught up with my enthusiasm.”

  But not starting in the ’84 World Series was undeniably a disappointment.

  “I get asked all the time whether I resented the fact that I didn’t start,” he says. “What they don’t know is that I couldn’t have played. I pulled my hamstring late in August and the thing was so tight that I had no range in the field. Then the day we clinched the pennant I pulled it again.

  “Sparky called me in and said, ‘There’s no way I can start you.’ And I agreed with him. It was hard to accept, sure. But I couldn’t run.

  “I know people were caught off guard when he decided to go with Castillo. Actually, Howard Johnson played the most games at third base that season. He was a switch-hitter but he played mostly against right-handed pitching, and I’d start against lefties.

  “But Sparky just never got comfortable with him. He always felt that HoJo was too nervous out there. So that made Marty the logical choice, and he was a solid guy defensively.

  “He even started Darrell Evans in two games when San Diego pitched right-handers, and he’d played just a handful of games at third all year. But he did get me into three of those games on defense and I got to bat a few times. I always appreciated Sparky doing that.

  “You know, people talk about Sparky’s doghouse. Honestly, I never knew what that was. If you took your job seriously and didn’t break any of his rules, you were fine. Or maybe he just never caught me.

  “But my motto always was, ‘I don’t make waves. I ride ’em.’ We had enough real vocal guys on that team. Jack [Morris] and Gibby. Darrell was a lot quieter about it but he had a lot to say when you asked him. Me, I was just happy to be there. I let the other guys talk.

  “The thing about that 35–5 start when I look back on it, is that most of us took it in stride. Of course, nobody goes 35–5. But we knew how good we were. We went out there every day expecting to win. As soon as we took the field, we thought we had it. That’s what I remember most. It just seemed so natural.”

  Brookens stayed with the Tigers through the 1988 season, usually hitting about .250, getting half a dozen or so homers, doing what he was asked to do.

  “Finally, I went into forced retirement,” he says. “That’s when you call every team in the majors and none of them call back. But I’m more than happy to be back home. I do some volunteer work. Right now I’m on my way to watch my daughter play volleyball.

  “I look back on those years and I know that I wasn’t a star. But I was there, all right. I was there.”

  Tom Brookens was part of a revolving door at third base, but he did whatever he could to help the team—including filling in as a catcher for a few innings late in a game in an emergency situation.

  Darrell Evans was the fourth man in the mix at third base for the 1984 Tigers. Although he played just 19 games there during the season, Sparky started him twice in the World Series.

  There was a strange parallel between the careers of Evans and Eddie Mathews with championship Tigers teams. Both began their careers as power-hitting third basemen with the Braves and were thought to be in decline when they came to Detroit, Mathews arriving by trade late in 1967. Both of them also ended up playing mostly at first base with the Tigers.

  Although neither player had an outstanding year statistically during their championship seasons, both were mentioned repeatedly by teammates as leaders—inspirational figures in the clubhouse and on the bench. They were admired as veterans who had been in tough pennant races before and had a world of knowledge to share with the younger players.

  Evans stayed in Detroit much longer and was a key figure on the 1987 divisional champions. But both men left the same sort of legacy.

  21. Festival at the Corner

  By the middle of July, the Tigers’ lead was consistently in double digits. Whenever they opened the gates at Tiger Stadium almost forty thousand people would pour in. It was automatic.

  At one time in its history, the ballpark could accommodate upward of 58,000 fans. But remodeling in the middle sixties had cut about six thousand seats off that total, and because of obstructed views another four thousand seats were rarely put on sale.

  So a sellout amounted to a bit more than forty-eight thousand tickets. The team was reaching that total for most weekend games throughout the summer, and it was clear that all existing attendance records were going to be shattered. Not merely broken, but eradicated.

  Detroit was always regarded as a great baseball city. Since the end of World War I, there were just two seasons—1963 and 1964—in which the Tigers failed to draw one million people. Only the Dodgers and Cardinals had compiled longer streaks of such seasons.

  Even when the stadium had a larger seating capacity, though, the ballclub had never topped the 2 million mark. Not until 1968. That’s because the Tigers chose to limit the number of night games they played in the late forties and fifties, and midweek day games dragged down the average attendance substantially.

  In ’68, however, the team finished at 2,031,847, which was regarded as the best that could be hoped for. In 1984, that figure was surpassed on August 17.

  Tiger Stadium was a great place to watch a ballgame—if you happened to be in a box, the upper deck bleachers, or the right reserved seat. The boxes that hung over the two base lines, in particular, gave the most intimate view of a major league ballgame in existence.

  But the posts that supported the second deck started much closer to the field than they did at Wrigley Field or Fenway Park—the two classic ballparks to which Tiger Stadium was compared most frequently. As a result, many more seats were at least partially obstructed.

  In many of the newer parks, seats in the same general location had a clear view. Even though they were set farther back from the field, those seats could be sold at box seat prices. The Tigers couldn’t, and it annoyed them deeply. Even with the massive crowds that were turning out, revenues were substantially less than similar attendance figures produced at Chavez Ravine or Busch Stadium.

  In the midst of this record-setting season, that dark cloud was growing.

  Cable television was just in its infancy, though, and the team chose to televise only about 40 games for the entire
season. If you wanted to see the Tigers play ball, you had to buy a ticket.

  The Detroit metropolitan area was steadily sprawling outward, and its center of population was now far from downtown. But the people came in to watch the show.

  And it was a helluva show. Even the grounds crew got into it, and Herbie Redmond had become a beloved figure. As the crew smoothed the infield in the fifth inning of every game, Herbie would do a little strut, wave his cap to the crowd, and smile broadly. The curmudgeonly Campbell tried to tone down his act, but the crowd wouldn’t stand for it. He had become part of the scene, and Campbell had to back down.

  With The Wave and the wins and the music, the ballpark had become quite the summer scene. That had also come to the attention of the Detroit Police Department.

  The summer had passed quietly at the ballpark, but everyone knew that the potential for something bad existed. There had been some violence during the ’68 World Series celebration, but it was scattered and, after what the city had been through in the summer of 1967, dismissed as insignificant. Besides, this time the cops were prepared.

  “There’s no doubt in my mind the Tigers are going to win and the fans are going to celebrate,” said Commander Alfred Bensmiller, who headed the department’s central events section. “If the fans want to celebrate, that’s fine—as long as they don’t become destructive.

  “We are going to be ready to contain things in case there’s a problem.”

  It had been a comparatively tranquil year in Detroit. The automotive industry was showing signs of renewed health. The Vincent Chin trial had ended in convictions for his killers on federal civil rights charges, which seemed to rectify the earlier miscarriage of justice. Still, crime and drugs continued to be serious problems in the city’s neighborhoods. The mayor’s office was being investigated by federal authorities on charges of corruption involving kickbacks on sludge- hauling contracts. The exodus of white residents had slowed because almost all of them were already gone.