Wire to Wire

by George Cantor

  And the Tigers continued to roll on.

  The inevitable end came on September 18, in the 151st game of the season. The Tigers defeated Milwaukee 3–0 and went 13 games ahead with 11 to play. The race was officially over.

  An expectant crowd of 48,810 was in the park on that Tuesday night. The pennant was a conclusion so foregone that Sparky was already resting his starters and pitching kids just up from Evansville.

  It was one of them, Randy O’Neal, just a few weeks past his 24th birthday, who won the game. It was his first major league victory. And Hernandez, of course, got the save, his 30th of the year.

  It was the first time in 57 years, since the legendary 1927 Yankees, the Murderers Row of Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, that a ballclub had been in first place from the first day of the season to the last. Since the ’27 Yankees were usually acknowledged as the greatest team in history, that was pretty exalted company.

  The crowd celebrated boisterously. Sparky generously called it bigger than anything he had seen in Cincinnati. There was also merriment in the clubhouse, with Parrish and Gibson giving the manager the ritual champagne bath. They didn’t have enough practice at it, however, and got the bottle a bit too close to his skull, opening a nasty little wound atop Sparky’s gray-haired pate.

  The players cheered while the cops watched closely on the streets outside. But the celebration stayed well within acceptable bounds. The players knew there was still work to do. As for the fans . . . well, that was still to come.

  Sparky waves to the Detroit crowd after defeating the Yankees on September 23 for the Tigers’ 100th win of the season.

  22. Tower of Strength

  Alan Trammell was an agitator. His boyish demeanor masked a powerful will, and when someone was not performing or thinking up to his standards Trammell would not hesitate to let him know about it.

  And sometimes he agitated just for the sheer hell of it.

  Sparky called him Huck Finn and watched with amusement. But there were times he also felt a little concern.

  “He’d start pulling that stuff with Parrish and I’d say to myself, ‘Better watch out, Huck. He can wring your neck with one hand.’ But Alan could get away with it because he was Alan.”

  Parrish raised that sort of caution with people. If Jack Morris was the volcano that frequently threatened to erupt, Parrish was the mountain that just smoldered.

  If there were personality equivalents between the ’84 Tigers and the ’68 Tigers, Parrish would have been this team’s Willie Horton.

  The teammates of both stood in awe of their strength. If it ever came to a fight, these the were guys you wanted at your back. Willie had been a boxer in his youth and Parrish a bodyguard with the Ike and Tina Turner organization.

  And yet in their personal lives they were gentle individuals, as only those with perfect confidence in their own might can be. Even a decade after his active career as an athlete has ended, Parrish still has the body builder’s physique and the warm, confident smile.

  “Being the catcher for that pitching staff was a dream,” he says. “There wasn’t any of them I wasn’t comfortable with. Even Willie Hernandez. I didn’t know anything about him when he came over.

  “But a good catcher has to learn what each pitcher’s comfort zone is. What does he feel good about throwing in every situation? That’s your responsibility. Once you get that straight, there shouldn’t be a problem.

  “People talk about Willie’s great screwball. But the thing was he could throw it from different arm angles. No two consecutive pitches ever looked the same. So even though the ball was breaking in to a left-handed hitter, there was no way he could get comfortable with it.

  “Great pitching is a lot like selling real estate. Location, location, location. For one season, Willie had any location he wanted. He was lights out.

  “But the one guy I thought didn’t get all the credit he deserved that year was Berenguer. I never caught anyone with a better arm. He didn’t need finesse. This was one guy who could just let it fly, and he came up big for us.

  “Maybe I had a few run-ins with Jack. Nothing too serious, though. He just had a hard time controlling his emotions sometimes and needed to be calmed down. I understood that. I even admired it.”

  Parrish is seated in a chair in the lobby of the Tigers’ spring training hotel in Lakeland. He is wearing a Red Wings sweatshirt. While he still makes his home in Orange County, where he grew up, he feels a deep affinity for Detroit.

  In fact, he calls his choice to leave the Tigers “the biggest mistake I ever made.” Afterward, he was never again the offensive force he had been in Detroit.

  He was an old soul of 28 when the season began, in the middle of a three-year run as the league’s Gold Glove catcher, in command of every aspect of the job on the field. No throwing arm in the league was more feared and the Detroit pitchers knew that when their favorite toy, the split-fingered fastball, came up short with runners on base Parrish would be able to make the saving block.

  He was also the consistent cleanup man. His average would dip to .237, its lowest figure since his first full season in the majors. But with 33 home runs and 98 RBIs, he led the team.

  “The most rewarding part of my career was growing up with the Tigers and watching the pieces slowly fit together,” he says. “For me personally the big addition was Darrell Evans.

  “This was a man who knew so much about hitting. I loved sitting there and being able to pick his brain. He was so generous about sharing his wisdom. His contribution to that team was huge. It went beyond the hits he got.

  “I mean, we were a bunch of hungry guys and we could smell blood in the water. But Darrell would talk about attitude, how you go about playing the game, the mental aspects of learning to win.

  “Maybe we were expected to have a letdown during that season. It seems strange to say, considering we were never out of first place from the day the season began, but maybe we were underestimated all along.

  “After the great start, I think Toronto really believed that we would cool down and they would catch us. Then because we kind of coasted in at the end and Kansas City had a dogfight in their division, they thought we wouldn’t be able to get up for them in the playoffs. At least, that’s the way they were talking.

  “But that wasn’t a problem. Mentally we were ready, all the way through. There were so many guys who stepped up and took a leadership role that there was no chance of a letdown. We understood the challenge and that the fulfillment came from meeting it.”

  There was another similarity to the ’68 Tigers that most members of this team remark upon. The nucleus was made up entirely of products of the farm system. They all had advanced as a group, a generational cohort.

  “A lot of the reward about winning was that these were the guys you had grown up with. Jack and Kirk, Petry and Tram and Lou. There was a bond. These were your best friends. It was also a tribute to the terrific scouting system and minor league structure the Tigers had then.

  “In those days, when you started out with the Tigers it was instilled in you from the start that you were part of a great history. That it was up to you to live up to the legacy.

  “There aren’t many places where you can still find that. You go over to Dodgertown at Vero Beach and it’s there. Those kids are taught that it is a very special thing to be a Dodger.”

  The rain pelted down on this winter Sunday in Florida, and Parrish let the last sentence hang in the empty hotel lobby.

  “Good organizations don’t let their heroes die,” he said.

  Catcher Lance Parrish, celebrating with Gibson while winning the ALCS against Kansas City, led the Tigers’ potent lineup with 33 homers and 98 RBIs.

  23. Royal Brush-Off

  Kansas City could be forgiven if, as Parrish pointed out, it felt some glimmering of hope.
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br />   On paper the Royals were no competition. Their final record of 84–78 was exactly 20 games worse than Detroit’s. If they had been playing in the league’s Eastern Division, they would have finished sixth.

  They had beaten out California and Minnesota by just three games, but for most of the year it seemed that any one of those teams could just as easily win the division as finish below .500.

  The Tigers had led the league in most of the important offensive and pitching categories; the Royals had not.

  But Kansas City manager Dick Howser kept reminding everyone that on the first weekend of August his team had come into Detroit and busted the Tigers’ chops. They had swept a four-game series, even though they were playing well below .500 at the time. The sweep had, in fact, helped propel the team to the title.

  They weren’t exactly a bunch of patsies in Kansas City. The Royals dominated the Western Division, winning in five of the last nine years. The nucleus of the team had gone to the World Series in 1980 and would win it all in 1985.

  Third baseman George Brett was a certain Hall of Famer. Outfielder Willie Wilson, second baseman Frank White, and designated hitter Hal McRae were legitimate stars. Dan Quisenberry was established as the best relief pitcher in the league. Although Hernandez was certainly challenging that title this year, by some statistical measures Quisenberry and his 44 saves had an even better year.

  The starting staff was a bit thin. Rookie Bret Saberhagen had stopped Detroit’s initial nine-game streak back in April and beaten them again in August. Otherwise, the pitching was shaky.

  “I haven’t talked to each player about what that sweep of Detroit meant to self-confidence,” said Howser. “But I have to think it meant a whole lot.”

  And there was also the fact that it had been months since the Tigers had played a meaningful game. In fact, most Detroit fans looked on the playoffs as a given. They were focused on whom the Tigers would play in the Series.

  Almost unanimously, the choice was the Cubs.

  There is a natural rivalry between Detroit and Chicago. The Lions vs. Da Bears. Red Wings vs. Black Hawks. Michael Jordan had just arrived in Chicago, and in a few years Pistons vs. Bulls would become the nastiest rivalry of them all.

  But Tigers vs. Cubs went back almost to the roots of baseball. The two cities had battled each other 100 years before, in the 1880s, when both were pennant contenders in the National League. They met four times in the World Series. The Cubs had embarrassed Ty Cobb’s Tigers in 1907 and 1908, and then Detroit came back to beat them in 1935 and 1945.

  Now the Cubs were going into their first postseason play in 39 long and painful years since that ’45 Series. They won 96 games, beating out their hated rivals, the Mets, by six games. After disposing of San Diego in the playoffs, the way would be clear to grapple with their traditional foes in Detroit.

  Both cities wanted the matchup. Two great franchises playing in two historic ballparks. How could you beat it?

  “These are two real cities,” said Chicago’s famed urban chronicler and columnist Mike Royko. “What glory is there beating the California Angels? Of course, everybody here wants to play Detroit.”

  So the Royals could justifiably hope that they might sneak up on the Tigers while they were gazing towards Chicago.

  But hope doesn’t match up well with hunger. And the Tigers knew that they hadn’t done anything yet. Sparky wouldn’t let them forget it. Nor would Gibson, who came blazing into the postseason.

  “We had something to prove,” he says. “We didn’t have to hear what the Royals were saying about not playing a big game for so long. We knew.

  “We kept talking among ourselves. That we were still underappreciated, and the 35–5 thing was yesterday’s news. No way was anybody gonna set a bear trap for us.”

  Gibson ended up as the MVP for the playoffs, an almost diffident three-game brush-off of the Royals. Morris was at his best in the opener, a tidy five-hitter in an 8–1 slaughter that quickly silenced Royals Stadium. Trammell, Parrish, and Herndon hit home runs and Hernandez pitched two innings just to stay sharp.

  The next day it got tougher. Again the Tigers went off to a quick lead, this time against Saberhagen. Back-to-back doubles by Gibson and Parrish in the first and a Gibson home run in the third gave Petry a 3–0 cushion.

  He gave one back in the fourth and another in the seventh, on a two-out flare by Dane Iorg (“I can still see that dinky pop-up fall behind the infield”), and suddenly it was 3–2.

  Not to worry. Hernandez was ready to come in again.

  But this time the magic failed. A single by former Tiger Lynn Jones, a double by McRae, and Kansas City had come all the way back to tie in the eighth. Now Hernandez was out of the game, and their relief ace, Quisenberry, was on the mound, dealing his submarine pitches.

  Once more, the team’s incredible depth rescued it. Lopez came in, and as the game entered extra innings he was at his smokiest, ahead of the hitters and throwing bullets. He escaped a two-on jam in the tenth and Detroit came up again.

  John Grubb was another one of those spare parts for whom Sparky somehow managed to find a role. The acquisition of Ruppert Jones in June had cut down on Grubb’s playing time. He was also a left-handed hitter, but with less power and defensive range than Jones. Nonetheless, the manager got him 176 at-bats and his home run ratio was one of the highest on the team.

  Sparky had done a little shuffling. Saberhagen had devoured his right- handed hitters in earlier games, so the manager moved Evans to third base, started Jones in left field, and made Grubb his designated hitter.

  As with every other maneuver this season, it paid off big. With two on and one out in the eleventh, it was Grubb who came up against Quisenberry.

  He was one of the quietest of the Tigers. In a clubhouse full of shouters he was barely a murmur. But he managed to transform that attribute into a deadly sort of patience as a pinch-hitter.

  “He never complained about his role with the ballclub,” says Sparky. “Instead, he worked on the things he had to do. And you don’t hit .280 in the big leagues by accident.”

  Grubb leaned into a Quisenberry sub and sent it bouncing off the center field wall. Two runs in. Tigers win 5–3, sweeping the games on the road and coming home to Detroit for the kill.

  It came with the pain-ridden Wilcox, the secret cortisone shot easing the anguish in his throbbing right shoulder, pitching the game of his life. The Tigers got him a run in the second when Lemon came in on a fielder’s choice. And that was it.

  Inning after inning he turned the Royals away, their only hit a fourth-inning single by Brett. But Charlie Leibrandt matched him, shutting down the Tigers completely with no hits after the second. Wilcox had not pitched a complete game all year. On most occasions, he was out after six or seven. But this time Sparky kept him in as the eighth inning began. Hernandez already had pitched in both games and the manager wanted to squeeze just one more inning out of his starter.

  The Royals finally got their second hit, a one-out single by Don Slaught. Wilcox got the dangerous Iorg on a fly ball, and that brought Willie Wilson to bat.

  Wilson may have been the fastest man in the league—a blur going down the first base line. Which made the actions of Evans, playing first base in this game, rather inexplicable.

  “I like to remember that play,” he says. “Sometimes adrenaline just takes over. The ball comes to you and you just react before you even think.”

  Wilson’s grounder was fielded by Evans far off the bag. But with Wilson streaking down the line, and Wilcox breaking desperately to cover, Evans pivoted and began moving to the base, too.

  At first it looked absurdly unequal. The racehorse against the pack mule.

  “I don’t know where the burst of speed came from but I got there ahead of Willie,” says Evans. “Not by much. But enough.”

  Threa
t over, Hernandez in for the ninth, and this time he didn’t fail. At a few ticks past 11:00 p.m., Darryl Motley hit a pop foul to third base. Marty Castillo grabbed it, Hernandez leaped straight in the air, and the pennant race was over.

  There were fifty-two thousand people in the park, but the celebration was tame, far more subdued than it had been for the division clincher with Milwaukee.

  “We want the Cubs,” the crowd chanted throughout the ninth. “We want the Cubs.”

  But a funny thing happened on the way to the Series. After annihilating San Diego in the two games at Wrigley, the Cubs headed west and disintegrated.

  Three losses in a row, two of them on late inning rallies by the Padres, and the dream Series died on the vine.

  Royko wrote sorrowfully about going down to his basement after the last game in San Diego and banging his head slowly and deliberately against the wall. Millions of other Cubs fans did likewise.

  Even the Tigers were disappointed. Wrigley was still without lights in 1984. So, had the Cubs been in the Series, the three middle games would have been played there, even though it was the National League’s turn to get the first and final two. Detroit would have been given an unexpected home field advantage and in a Series that looked to be close, who knows how that could have played out?

  Instead, they were getting on a plane and flying to San Diego to open out there.

  All the preludes were over. It was now time for the Tigers to prove they belonged with the great teams.

  John Grubb delivers the big blow of the ALCS, a game-winning two-run double in the 11th inning that gave the Tigers a 2–0 advantage with the series moving to Detroit.