Wire to Wire

by George Cantor

  When that time came, he had to be prepared for it. That would be his time to defeat the Beast.

  Determined to atone for a poor season in 1983, Gibson was a man on a mission for the duration of the 1984 campaign.

  Few doubt that if Kirk Gibson had chosen pro football as his career, he would have excelled in that sport, maybe even at a higher level than he achieved in baseball. He was drafted by the then–St. Louis Cardinals as a wide receiver, the position at which he had starred with Michigan State. His speed, height, and love of contact would probably have made him an All-Pro selection.

  Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders did manage to combine the two sports with varying degrees of success. Jackson even made an American League All-Star team. Both were far better regarded for their football, though.

  Dave DeBusschere was the best-known Detroit athlete who tried to blend two professional careers. He pitched for the Chicago White Sox in 1962–63 while playing forward for the Pistons, and then went on to two championships with the New York Knicks.

  Ron Reed also played in the forecourt for the Pistons during the sixties, while pitching for the Braves. He decided to concentrate on baseball, instead, and was a bullpen stopper on the 1980 Phillies.

  26. Impious Padres

  Upon reflection, the Tigers realized that they might not exactly have picked out a plum with the Padres. While everyone was distracted by the drama of the Cubs, San Diego had sneaked in beneath the radar.

  They won 92 games and coasted through their division. Tony Gwynn, near the start of his brilliant career, won his first National League batting championship, and leadoff man Alan Wiggins set the table for him with 70 stolen bases.

  The team was anchored by two veterans of many Series: Graig Nettles at third base and Steve Garvey at first. They were not what they had been with the Yankees and Dodgers, but they were still smart and dangerous hitters who knew what big games were all about. Moreover, Nettles had always thrived at Tiger Stadium with its short right field.

  But their starting pitchers did not measure up. The top three—Eric Show, Ed Whitson, and Mark Thurmond—were just 43–25, compared to the 54–27 of Morris, Petry, and Wilcox. Gossage had saved 25 games, but he, too, was not the overpowering figure of his former years.

  Most critically, their middle infield was dangerously weak on defense. Second baseman Wiggins and shortstop Garry Templeton had made 58 errors, compared to 25 by Trammell and Whitaker. That was a critical disparity.

  One of their top hitters, center fielder Kevin McReynolds, had suffered a broken wrist during the playoffs and would miss the entire Series. And for this year, the designated hitter would be used in all games, a huge advantage for the deep Detroit bench.

  The Padres were so thin that they decided to DH a little-used veteran infielder who had hit only .200 for the season. Kurt Bevacqua had played on six different teams, and this was his second haul with San Diego. No one previously had ever confused him for a hitter. In fact, he would bat ninth in the opener, not really where you want your DH to appear in the lineup.

  For all these reasons, most experts were picking the Tigers in five, and some talked of a sweep. But Sparky did not. He knew how good his team was. But he also knew that in the other dugout would be a manager he respected as highly as any in the game: Dick Williams.

  The two had known each other for 30 years and had been teammates in the minors. “I was better,” says Williams.

  They also had faced each other before. Williams had managed the 1972 Oakland A’s when they defeated Sparky’s highly favored Reds. Anderson hadn’t forgotten.

  “Dick Williams out-managed me and won that Series for Oakland,” said Sparky. “I felt naked in front of the Christmas tree.”

  To which Williams replied, “Any team with Sparky as manager has my respect because whatever may happen they will not beat themselves. They will play the game the way it should be played.”

  It was the first time in Series history that two managers who had met before were matched again with two entirely different teams. It was also the third team Williams had taken to the Series. He had gone with the ’67 Red Sox, the team that broke Detroit’s heart, and with the ’72 and ’73 A’s. Only Bill McKechnie had ever done that before.

  As an added attraction, whoever won this Series would be the first ever to manage a winner in both leagues. So a lot of history was looking down on the opener in San Diego.

  While Williams understood his disadvantage he also knew that if he could stretch out the Series anything could happen. All of his three previous trips had gone the full seven games. The deeper you get into it, the less such disparities mattered. Then it came down to experience and nerve. He knew his team had both.

  He sent out Thurmond to oppose Morris in the opener, and the left-hander matched Detroit’s ace. But Herndon’s two-run homer in the fifth gave the Tigers a 3–2 lead and San Diego went to its bullpen.

  Williams was happy with his pitcher’s effort. He couldn’t have known it, but Thurmond’s five innings were the most he would get out of any of his starters. In the next four games, no San Diego starter would make it out of the third.

  Still, the Padres were making a game of it in the opener. They reached Morris for two runs in the first before he shut them down. In the sixth, however, Nettles and Terry Kennedy started off with singles and San Diego had two on and none out.

  The fifty-eight thousand fans at Jack Murphy Stadium came alive. This was the first postseason experience in the franchise’s 16-year history, and they were going to milk every moment from it.

  “The crowd was so loud it was almost like silence,” says Morris. “I couldn’t hear myself think. I had to keep calling Marty Castillo over from third to make sure what play we had on for a bunt, because it was impossible to hear.”

  Morris solved that problem in the most direct manner possible. He struck out the side—Bobby Brown, Carmelo Martinez, and Templeton. The silence was like a roar.

  But in the seventh, the Padres were still clawing at him. The soon-to-be-despised Bevacqua led off and, to the wonderment of all, tore the ball into the right-field corner.

  This play will be debated as long as baseball is played in San Diego. Gibson had had trouble playing a ball hit previously into that area of the stadium. The carom was tricky. Balls could bounce off the visiting bullpen bench while pitchers scattered, and Bevacqua knew that.

  One of baseball’s primary rules is never make the first out of an inning at third base. But Bevacqua turned second and kept right on going. If he had turned it cleanly, he might have made it. But he stumbled slightly on the bag, just enough for him to lose a stride.

  Gibson raced into the corner, fielded the ball, then rifled a perfect throw to the cutoff man, Whitaker. The second baseman turned, never expecting to see Bevacqua breaking the rules. He hesitated for the merest fraction, just long enough for Bevacqua to have made third—if he had been running unhindered.

  But with the best throwing arm of any second baseman in the game, Whitaker recovered, fired to Castillo, and cut him down.

  On those throws of Gibson and Whitaker, the entire Series turned, just as surely as the ’68 Series had turned on Willie Horton’s throw to the plate on Lou Brock in the fifth game.

  San Diego never seriously threatened Morris or the Tigers again. They would beat Petry the next day 5–3 on a three-run homer by the unlikely Bevacqua.

  But they had lost the chance to put the Tigers down. As Toronto had learned during the season, teams that missed their chance didn’t get another one. Instead, the Tigers knew that they now could close it out in Detroit. They would not permit the Padres to escape from Tiger Stadium.

  There was one note to Game 2, however, that placed it forever in the memory bank of Detroit baseball fans. It happened in the fifth inning, when Lopez came in to relieve Petry and the Padres put their first hitter
against him on first.

  “I got the sign for a pitchout and flashed it to Aurelio,” says Lance Parrish, who has told the story many times but still relishes it. “Now his eyesight was not the best, but he nodded as if he saw it. So I set up outside.

  “The pitch came right down the middle, a fastball, and it caught Larry Barnett, the plate umpire, right in the crotch. He doubled over like he’d been shot. He was just wide open, no protection at all.

  “I jumped up and ran out to the mound. Aurelio’s eyes were this wide and he kept saying, ‘I see the sign. I see the sign.’ But the pitch got away from him.

  “I ran back to the plate and apologized to Barnett, telling him it wasn’t intentional. I kept apologizing for the rest of the game, the Series, and the first time I saw him the next spring.

  “He just waved me off. ‘Lance, I do some public speaking in the off- season,’ he told me, ‘and now I can say that it was the only time in my career as an umpire that I ever called a strike and two balls on the same pitch.’”

  Despite being widely regarded as heavy favorites, Parrish and the Tigers knew that Alan Wiggins and the hard-charging Padres wouldn’t lie down.

  The Padres were on no one’s list when predictions for the 1984 pennant were being made. San Diego was, in fact, one of the least successful of the expansion franchises.

  They had been formed in 1969, the same year in which the Montreal, Seattle, and Kansas City teams came into being. All but the Padres had already played in the post- season—Seattle after moving to Milwaukee, and Montreal in the split-season strike year of 1981. Despite playing in what is usually described as the best climate in the continental United States, Padres attendance had never matched that of the two Los Angeles area teams, either.

  San Diego’s most famous attribute was its mascot, the Chicken. It was also the place where owner Ray Kroc got on the public-address system and apologized to the fans for the team’s horrible play, a move that endeared him to the players not at all.

  Alan Trammell had grown up in San Diego and was a big fan of its former slugging star, Nate Colbert. Until the mass influx of free agents came under the control of manager Dick Williams during their 15th season, it had been a long dry spell for the Padres.

  27. Tram

  The office in Comerica Park belongs to him. The desk, the fixtures, the couch. It is five times the size of the manager’s office at Tiger Stadium and even has its own shower, as befits an important executive in a large corporation.

  And yet Alan Trammell still has the sly smile of a kid who sneaked in the door and climbed into the big chair while the grown-ups weren’t looking.

  But when he was named manager of the Tigers, late in 2002, it was seen, correctly, as a restoration of the legitimate line of succession. From the day he joined the organization, a skinny kid from San Diego who could pick up the ball pretty good but maybe couldn’t hit big-league pitching, this is where he was destined to be.

  “I know that I came across to the public as this mild, even-tempered kind of guy,” he says, the smile widening a shade. “Emotions always in control. Never getting upset.

  “But I’m a red-ass. I don’t shy away from using that term. You don’t play 20 years in the big league without being something of a red-ass.

  “Maybe I didn’t show it the way Gibby or Jack Morris did. They couldn’t keep it bottled up. That wasn’t them. But behind the scenes . . . well, I had my moments.

  “When I was a kid I was real bad. I was a helmet-thrower, the whole thing. One of the things Sparky taught me was keeping that under control. But there were times in the heat of battle, when something was building up, that I snapped.

  “When exactly did that happen? Well, I’d have to think about that.”

  You get the idea that this is Dagwood talking about how he is going to punch that Mr. Dithers right in the nose someday. But those who have seen Trammell when the anger got loose don’t forget it.

  “People who don’t know him well may have thought Tram couldn’t be a good manager because he wasn’t tough enough,” says Dave Bergman. “No one who ever played with him felt that way. We had some pretty tough guys in that clubhouse, and Tram would get in the face of any of ’em.”

  All but one. That was Lou Whitaker.

  “I had too much respect for Lou to do that,” he says. “I knew him too well. We were kids together. From the very first day we showed up at development camp in 1976 they put us together and there was just this thing between us.

  “We weren’t close friends. It wasn’t like that. But there was this communication that we developed. We were inside each other’s head.

  “Those early days they worked us. They stayed on top of us all the time. The same plays around the bag over and over again. Even when we got to the majors we kept working at them. That’s the part the public never sees. Just the sheer tedious labor of it.

  “But that’s the preparation. It’s the one thing Sparky drilled into us. A professional is prepared for what he has to do, and that cuts across every line of work there is. If you aren’t prepared, if you aren’t ready to work at it, you will always be disappointed.

  “Lou and I bought it into it when we began experiencing success. The same moves, over and over again. But it got so that I could slide to my right into the hole for a grounder and throw to the bag before I ever actually saw Lou. Because I knew where he was going to be.

  “Double plays are made because of a split second in timing. That was our split second.”

  The two of them were Detroit’s middle infield combination for 19 years, from the day they arrived in the majors together at the end of the 1977 season until Whitaker retired at the end of the 1995 season. No other short-second pairing in baseball history comes close to that record.

  “It’s rare for one player, let alone two, to stay with the same club for that amount of time,” says Trammell. “But I’m proud that I did it. Maybe I’m just old school, but wearing the Old English D for my entire career meant so much to me.”

  “History was my favorite subject in school. I still enjoy it. I know the Yankees have their tradition and I bow to what they have accomplished over the years. But the Detroit Tigers don’t have to take a back seat to anyone when it comes to tradition.”

  At his first spring training, Trammell was told that Whitaker, who lives in Lakeland, seldom came around to visit his old team. Trammell immediately called him up and gave him a direct invitation to come by. The very next day he did.

  “Lou is just a quiet kind of guy and the last thing he would want is to feel like he was intruding,” says Trammell. “I wanted him to know that he could come around every day of the week, and he would always be welcomed by the Tigers. The last day that Sparky came down for his visit, Lou put on the uniform and sat with us on the bench. That was good to see.”

  Trammell went 4-for-9 in the first two games of the Series, played in his hometown. But he was just getting warmed up.

  “That was a special feeling, going back home to play against the team that I had always rooted for as a kid,” he says. “I had never played at Jack Murphy Stadium before and to be on that field for my first World Series . . . isn’t that what you dream of when you’re a kid who loves baseball?”

  The Tigers came home for Game 3 and disposed of the Padres, 5–2, in an almost perfunctory manner. Wilcox struggled in almost every one of his six innings, but managed to hold San Diego off. But Tim Lollar was wild for the Padres, gave up a two-run homer to Castillo in the second, and by the end of that inning the Tigers led 4–0. Three more walks and a hit batter gave Detroit one more in the third and from there they coasted in, with Hernandez closing out the last two and one-third innings.

  Trammell got two more hits in that game. But it was in Game 4, on a shining Saturday afternoon, that he hit his stride.

  He came up against Eric Show i
n the first after Whitaker had reached base on an error. The home run landed in the left-field lower deck.

  In the third, Whitaker singled off Show and Trammell came up again. This time the ball went into the upper deck in left. Two at-bats, two homers, four RBIs. That was sufficient.

  It was 4–1, and with Morris in peak form the game was as good as over. He mowed down 13 Padres in a row at one stretch and went the distance for the 4–2 win.

  “The bottom line is I was swinging the bat well at the right time,” Trammell says. “Like so much of baseball, it was all timing. They named me the MVP, probably because of that one game. The home runs actually meant something. That was all our scoring, so that part was gratifying.

  “But for the whole Series, they could just as easily have picked Kirk or Jack. They had a great Series. All I knew was that I wanted to get it over with because my knee and shoulder were killing me. I had to get them scoped five days after the Series was over.

  “When I was coaching in San Diego, Bruce Bochy, who managed there, kept reminding me that he had been on that team. So was Greg Booker, who was the pitching coach when I was with the Padres.

  “It got to be a routine with us. ‘Alan, you broke our hearts,’ they’d say. And I’d tell them, ‘It was just business, boys. Just business.’”

  That’s a good description of how it went. The 1984 World Series was an almost businesslike assassination. The Tigers methodically jumped off to the lead in every game of the Series, completely frustrating San Diego’s strategy.

  “We were a running team,” says Steve Garvey. “That’s how we won games. Put our first two batters on base and turn ’em loose. But it’s tough to run when you’re always starting from behind.

  “Then you have the tendency to start swinging more freely when you get behind. Against a pitcher like Morris, that’s fatal. That’s just what he wanted.”