Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever

by Tim Wendel

  “You could see that the pitching was going to be something that season,” Gates Brown said. “Anybody with eyes knew that even as early as the first weeks of spring training. My God, the arms that were out there. As that ’68 season began all I was thinking was put the damn ball in play and see what happens. That’s about all a man could do some days.”

  In the Pirates’ fourth game of the season, Jim Bunning picked up his first win with the Pittsburgh Pirates, a 3–0 victory at Dodgers Stadium. The shutout was the fortieth of his career and included his one-thousandth strikeout in the National League. That made him the first pitcher since Cy Young with one thousand in each league.

  A day later, the Houston Astros defeated the New York Mets, 1–0, in twenty-four innings. The game lasted six hours and six minutes.

  Of course, one could rationalize Bunning’s star turn was the culmination of a Hall of Fame career, and indeed, the no-nonsense right-hander was inducted into Cooperstown in 1996. As for the marathon in the Astrodome? Just a fluke, right? Maybe, maybe not.

  The following week, on April 19, Nolan Ryan, in his season debut for the New York Mets, struck out eleven, including three batters on ten pitches in the first inning. Afterward, announcer Ralph Kiner compared the soft-spoken Texan with Bob Feller when it came to sheer velocity. But as was Ryan’s luck during his years with the Mets, things didn’t turn out well. The Texan lost 3–2 when Rocky Colavito, who was a last-minute addition to the Dodgers’ lineup, drove in the winning run. Jim Fairey was supposed to start in the Los Angeles outfield, but mistakenly thought the game was a night affair and overslept. That put Colavito in the starting lineup and his single in the eighth inning decided it.

  “Strikeouts weren’t the problem for me back then,” Ryan said. “Getting wins was another matter.”

  By the time the Orioles’ Tom Phoebus no-hit the Boston Red Sox on April 27 in Baltimore little doubt remained that a trend was apparent. Brooks Robinson not only drove in three runs but saved the no-no with a diving grab, to rob Rico Petrocelli of a hit in the eighth inning.

  “The evidence mounted quickly,” said William Mead, author of Two Spectacular Seasons, “that this was going to be a great time for the pitchers.”

  On May 8, 1968, Catfish Hunter of the Oakland Athletics hurled a perfect game against the visiting Minnesota Twins. It was the A’s first year in Oakland, after moving to town from Kansas City. Only 6,298 fans were in the stands that evening for what was just the eleventh game ever played at the new Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum. But what the privileged few in the stands witnessed was the first regular-season perfect game—no hits, no walks, no errors—in the American League since 1922.

  For baseball insiders, Hunter’s “perfecto” came down to a precious moment or two. In the seventh inning, the twenty-two-year-old faced Twins slugger Harmon Killebrew. The count ran to 3–2, and just about everyone, including Killebrew, figured the baby-faced right-hander would throw a fastball. But Hunter crossed up the future Hall of Famer, going with a changeup that Killebrew swung at and missed.

  From there, things quickly moved to the game’s final batter, Rich Reese. The Twins’ pinch hitter fouled off four pitches with a 3–2 count before a called third strike. “For a while there I thought I was never going to get him out,” Hunter said afterward. “That boy kept on fouling off everything I threw up there. I sure was glad to see him strike out.”

  At the time of Hunter’s perfect game, the chances of a no-hitter were calculated at 1,300 to 1. The chances of a perfect game stood at 28,000 to 1. In the Oakland clubhouse, Hunter told representatives of the Hall of Fame they were welcome to anything they wanted, uniform, cap, even the bat he used to help his own effort by driving in three runs, everything except the ball that struck out Reese. “That last one belongs to me,” the pitcher said. “I’ll keep it as long as I live because it sure took me a long time to get that final out.”

  Afterward, Athletics’ owner Charlie Finley promised Hunter a $5,000 raise—a princely sum in these days before free agency—in honor of the accomplishment. When Hunter called his father back in North Carolina, the old man cautioned his son, “Tell me all about that five thousand when you get it.” After all, Finley already had the reputation for being a notorious skinflint. In the end, though, Hunter got his money. Perhaps because of all the great players the Athletics owner employed over the years, this pitcher was his favorite.

  In high school, Hunter pitched five no-hitters, including a perfect game. But before signing a professional contract, he was involved in a hunting accident, which blew off a toe and left thirty shotgun pellets in his right foot. He was winged by his older brother, who stumbled, the gun accidentally going off, while the two were duck hunting. Upon seeing Hunter’s bleeding foot, the brother promptly fainted, leaving the wounded pitching prospect on his own.

  Hunter crawled on his belly to a nearby creek, where he soaked his sweater in the cool running water. Then he scrambled back, wringing the garment over his brother’s face. Thankfully that was enough to revive the sibling and soon Hunter was in the bed of the family pickup truck, hightailing it to the local hospital. There doctors told him that he would never play baseball or football again.

  “I could see he was handicapped,” said Finley, who visited the Hunter family’s sharecropper shack in Hertford, North Carolina. “Yet he still played baseball. His determination grabbed me, and after I heard the story of his accident, I was convinced that I wanted him.”

  Other teams hadn’t gone above $50,000 for Hunter’s services, due to the damaged foot. But Finley made a preemptive bid of $75,000 “ because the Catfish had character.”

  Early on, Hunter needed a good foot more than an admirable character. An operation to remove the shotgun pellets slowed his progress and many in the A’s organization urged Finley to drop him from the roster. Yet four years after the signing, Finley’s gamble paid off as Hunter was carried off the field on his teammates’ shoulders. In pitching the first perfect game in the American League since Don Larsen’s in the 1956 World Series, Hunter threw just 107 pitches, and only four balls were well hit. Left fielder Joe Rudi, making his first start in left field after being called up from Vancouver of the Pacific Coast League, tracked down two of them, including Rod Carew ’s line drive in the seventh inning. Afterward, Hunter said the latter was the only one that really concerned him.

  “He probably threw no more than five curves all night,” said A’s catcher Jim Pagliaroni, who had caught Bill Monbouquette’s no-hitter in 1962. “He shook off only two of my signs. He made my job easy.”

  With Hunter’s perfect game, it was apparent to sports fans that—to paraphrase the Buffalo Springfield hit song of the time—something was happening here. Pitchers, young and old, had the fever, and looking back on it, Hunter’s perfect game ushered in a season of excellence that we may never witness again. “It was the times,” said Jon Warden, a rookie reliever with the Tigers in ’68. “Everybody knew it. We were witnessing one of the great eras in pitching, and I, like anybody who threw a baseball back then, wanted to be a part of it in the worst way.”

  Ken (Hawk) Harrelson, who would go on to lead the American League with 109 RBI, remembered Hunter’s perfecto as a sign of what was to come. “There were a lot of amazing pitchers in that season and folks will ask me, ‘Who was the best?’” Harrelson said. “And I’ll ask them, are we talking about best stuff or best pitcher? If we’re talking stuff, it would have to be somebody like Luis Tiant or ‘Sudden’ Sam McDowell. I mean nobody had four pitches as good as McDowell in his prime.

  “But if we’re talking best pitcher, I’d go with Catfish Hunter. He didn’t have the stuff of the guys we’re talking about and I’d had glimpses of Bob Gibson or Juan Marichal or Don Drysdale, too. We’d go up against those NL guys in spring training and I’d faced Gibson in the ’67 World Series.

  “Catfish didn’t have that kind of stuff. His fastball was kind of sneaky and he had a spinner of a breaking ball. Maybe not much. But what he
did have was the biggest heart and more balls than anybody I ever faced. I mean the man was a competitor. If you’re asking me who’s the guy to win me a game when my family’s lives are at stake, I’m going with Catfish.”

  No landmark event or epic confrontation caused the United States to go to war in Vietnam. No Pearl Harbor. No September 11th. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 pales in comparison. Yet by the spring of 1968, United States troop levels were at their highest, with more than 536,000 troops committed to the venture in Southeast Asia.

  Early in the year, U.S. forces were rocked by the Tet offensive, a wide-ranging series of attacks by the Vietcong. To better assess the war effort and the United States’ expectations for eventual success, CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite traveled to Vietnam for a series of special reports. The culmination was an analysis he gave at the end of his nightly network broadcast on February 27, 1968: “ We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds,” Cronkite told his audience of 100 million or more—a stunning number that underscores how powerful network television was before the advent of cable and satellite TV. Cronkite declared that the United States was “mired in stalemate . . . and with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.” He closed his commentary by saying, “it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”

  Cronkite’s speech to the American people, which was very much out of character for what he felt a nightly news broadcast should be, resonated throughout America. Already polls showed that a majority of Americans thought the war was a mistake. In large part that was due to the fact that so many citizens were directly impacted by Vietnam. The draft fueled the military machine. Even for those who were never sent to Vietnam, who had made other arrangements, the war was often on their minds.

  During this period, one way to gauge a team’s chances, which was rarely even mentioned in any annual previews or scouting reports, was to determine how many players a ballclub had serving in the military reserve. While being in the National Guard or a similar organization kept a player out of the draft and away from the front lines in Vietnam, it played havoc with one’s professional career and personal life. Reservists usually left the team to be with their military unit for one weekend a month throughout the year and often were required to put in another two weeks of continuous service for training exercises during the season. Nolan Ryan was one of the players whose baseball development was severely hampered during ’68.

  “I experienced so much frustration that particular season,” said Ryan, who was then with the New York Mets, “in large part because I couldn’t focus on my game. I was juggling two worlds, two commitments, all the time.”

  For a time, Ryan needed to fly back to Houston several weekends a month to be with his reserve unit. Its specialty was constructing landing strips, and for a time Ryan thought his unit would actually have to go to Southeast Asia. Yet after the Tet offensive any such plans were ratcheted down.

  On the Detroit Tigers, left-hander Mickey Lolich found himself in a similar situation. He was a member of the 191st Michigan National Guard unit, which ran a motor pool based out of Alpena, Michigan, about 200 miles north of Detroit. Unlike Ryan, he was close enough to often head down to Tiger Stadium to be with the team, even pitch in a game, before returning to his unit. What drove him to distraction, though, was the lack of quality training partners. Away from the team, Lolich contacted local high school coaches and threw to whoever was game enough to play catch with his lively stuff. Once his batterymate was a local priest who said, “Heavens to mercy, I never saw a ball move so much.” In that particular training session, Lolich’s offerings ricocheted off the man of the cloth’s shin guards and chest protector, with a curveball finally bouncing off the priest’s toe. “Let’s just say it wasn’t the best of circumstances,” Lolich said.

  In the spring of ’68, Lolich worked out for a week at the Tigers’ camp in Lakeland, Florida, before heading on to Savannah for fifteen days of active training. It could have been worse. The season before, during the Detroit riots, the left-hander had been thrust into the action due to his role with the reserve. After being in uniform with the Tigers one afternoon, he was in combat fatigues that evening, rifle in hand, helping to guard a supply depot and then a radio tower that also served as a police relay station in downtown Detroit.

  As the city burned around him, the situation pinwheeled between the tragic and the comical. The Detroit Free Press commandeered an armored vehicle for its reporters to cover the event, while the National Guard established a machine gun nest atop a JCPenney store in suburban Grosse Pointe until more rational minds realized such firepower was better served six miles west in Detroit proper.

  “People hit the streets, looking for anything they could grab—a side of beef, something out of the freezer at the supermarket,” said William Mead, who was bureau chief for United Press International at the time. “What aggravated the situation was that the parts of Detroit that rioted were mostly black and the troops they sent in to settle things down were mostly white guys.”

  One of Lolich’s assignments was to accompany the ranking commander through the city, which was by now under curfew and on fire in several areas. Despite the danger, Lolich tried to stay upbeat. When the ranking major stopped at a red light, the Tigers’ pitcher asked, “Sir, why are we stopping?”

  “It’s a red light,” the major replied.

  “But, sir, we’re the only truck in downtown Detroit tonight,” Lolich said. “We’re not going to get a ticket if we go through that red light.”

  The major pondered this for a moment before stomping on the accelerator.

  The rioting that spread throughout the city and caused Detroit to burn in 1967 would prove to be a harbinger of things to come. As the new year began a number of U.S. cities, including the nation’s capital, were poised to explode. “There was no getting around it,” recalled Frank Howard, the top slugger on the Washington Senators. “Everywhere you went, you sensed it. The whole thing could go up at any minute.”

  With tension and turmoil spreading increasingly throughout the nation, the start of the ’68 baseball season was marked not by celebration, but by a somber note of tragedy, delayed by a day of mourning for Dr. Martin Luther King. Afterward, Howard struggled as much as anybody with a bat in his hand. Yet Howard had always been a streak hitter and he told himself to hang in. At six foot seven, Howard towered over nearly everybody else in the game. He had played basketball at Ohio State University and anyone could see that he had loads of athletic potential, regardless of the sport. In 1958 he signed with the Dodgers for the princely sum of $75,000. The organization promptly hailed him as the next Babe Ruth.

  “To me, Frank Howard was the hitter’s version of [the Indians’ Sam] McDowell,” Bob Gibson said in a conversation with Reggie Jackson in Sixty Feet, Six Inches: A Hall of Fame Pitcher & A Hall of Fame Hitter Talk About How the Game Is Played. “He was a big, strong guy who swung hard, and every once in a while he was going to hit one eighteen miles. But he wasn’t a good hitter in the way that the really good hitters were.”

  Despite the occasional long ball, Howard never hit better than .300 and, more importantly, cracked the thirty-home run plateau only once in his first five full seasons in the majors. Word had it he would be better off as a platoon player. Before the 1965 season, the Dodgers traded him as part of multiplayer deal to Washington. While Howard knew he wouldn’t come close to winning a championship in the nation’s capital (the ballclub was rarely any good), he did secure a regular spot in the Senators’ lineup. Along with the playing time, Howard arguably received better coaching in D.C., as well. There coaches urged him to open up his batting stance and cut down on his stride length. His large step towa
rd the pitcher caused the big man to bob his head and lose sight of the ball as it was traveling to the plate. In the spring of ’68, Washington manager Jim Lemon told Howard to move closer to the plate. That way the big man could crush the outside curveballs and sliders that had sometimes bedeviled him. Other than that Howard’s approach remained pretty basic. “I just go up to the plate and try to get my three rips,” he once told the Washington Post. “I try not to take too many good pitches or swing at too many bad ones.”

  A few weeks into the ’68 season, however, Howard had a revelation. When he had two strikes on him, he realized most pitchers would invariably throw him a fastball. A few others might try a changeup and most of them often tipped that pitch anyway. Despite the pitching excellence that ran throughout the game, only a few hurlers had full confidence in their curve, slider, or other breaking stuff. Hence, with two strikes in the count, he decided to keep an eye peeled for the fastball.

  “That’s as true then as it’s ever been,” Howard said years later. “But nobody really ever explained it to me. So when I discovered that I was able to lock in better at the plate. It was a real jump forward for me.”

  Sure enough Howard began to pummel the ball. In late April and into early May, most of his hard knocks went for doubles instead of home runs. That was about to change in hurry, though.

  On Sunday, May 12, 1968, Howard hit two home runs against the visiting Detroit Tigers at D.C. Stadium. The first was “a routine one” off Mickey Lolich—part of a bad stretch for the Tigers’ southpaw that would soon land him in the bullpen. The second was off Fred Lasher and soared well into the upper deck.