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

by Tim Wendel

  So many buildings have been deserted and then torn down that only great swaths of empty space remain. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, that means there really is no there there. The result could be Mayor Dave Bing, who starred for the hometown Pistons basketball team in 1968, trying to convince people to move closer together so such city services as electricity, water, and sewer can be better utilized. Others have suggested more drastic measures extending to bringing farmers back in to plow the empty lots into productive fields.

  Driving through Detroit that day, the sight bordered upon the bizarre. It was sort of like viewing a film that breaks off time after time, revealing a giant blank screen where the image should be. We were literally moving through a landscape with built-in pauses, giving anybody plenty of room for reflection and, dare we say, regret.

  At Twelfth and Clairmont itself, we found more emptiness than commemoration. Of course, we are much more prone to erect a monument to our cities’ zenith, than to their nadir. Perhaps with that in mind, Tom opted to check out another Motor City landmark. A few blocks away we came upon Boston-Edison, Henry Ford’s old neighborhood. Tom told me that if you wanted to do business with the assembly-line king back in the day, you needed to live here, about four miles north of downtown. The stately homes still stand resolute and immense, a testament to when Detroit ruled the industrial world. Named for the neighborhood’s two main streets, the Boston-Edison’s residents once included labor leader Walter Reuther and Motown Records mogul Berry Gordy Jr. Somehow it survived the riots and white flight to the suburbs. Lately it has been coping less well with the threat of foreclosure. Thieves flock to the area looking to pilfer “doorknobs, light fixtures, doors, radiators (attractive as scrap metal) and especially, copper pipes and wiring” from the homes, according to The Wall Street Journal.

  Gazing upon it all, I understood why Horton risked his life that evening the riots flared up. In Detroit, one can easily picture the best and worst of times. Often they stand within a few blocks of each other.

  From Boston-Edison, we turned south, returning to the downtown sector. After a while, Tom pulled over and asked, “Know where you are?”

  Not really. Even though I pride myself on having a good sense of direction, by then my head was spinning. Out the right window lay another empty lot, bigger than most that we’d seen on our tour.

  I craned my neck to read the street sign and it dawned on me—the corner of Michigan and Trumbull.

  “This is where the old Tiger Stadium was?”

  “That’s right,” Tom replied. “They’ve fenced it off because too many people were playing pickup games on the old site. See the sign?”

  Somebody had hung a piece of cardboard with handwritten letters on the chain-link fence that surrounds this piece of property, shielding it from what? Itself? The memory of 1968? City officials have remained adamant that even though Tiger Stadium itself is long gone, nobody can play ball on the land where it once stood.

  The homemade sign read, Ernie Harwell Field.

  Without a word, we looked out on the open field. The site of the hometown team’s biggest accomplishment. Then the light at the corner changed, and we pulled away.

  So what kind of ballplayer can string together a series of civic landmarks, some still standing, others leveled by the wrecking ball, right off the top of his head? Perhaps a guy who will always consider Detroit home. After all, Willie Horton worked as a clubhouse kid at the old ballpark. Still, when you get right down to it, he can feel at home just about anywhere.

  Some mornings Horton parks on Woolworth Avenue, talking with folks as he walks the remaining blocks to his office at Comerica Park. Once at the ballpark, he often starts at the top level on game days, looping around the main concourse, where his statue is one of the six immortalized Tigers, saying hello to the ushers and the concession workers. It seems everybody knows Willie Horton.

  “I never really felt any pressure when I played here in Detroit,” he said. “Some of the people I’ll see going to the game I’ve known since Little League. When they were in the stands, I felt like I’d been playing for them all my life. Those faces are familiar, so why get so worked up about the pressure or whatever? I know a lot of them and they know me.”

  When Horton played, he went out of his way to meet fans and make good friends in every American League city. He often broke bread with them after the ballgames and even today there are major league towns where he doesn’t know at least somebody. To hear him explain it, this philosophy, this way of doing things, really took root in 1968.

  “As a player you like to insulate yourself from the rest of the world,” he said. “Just ignore it all and simply go about your job. But back then it was next to impossible to do that, so everybody coped in different ways.”

  Bob Gibson was so angry with the world around him that each start became an opportunity to rage against the injustice of what was going on in that world. Denny McLain fell in love with celebrity and all its trappings. In 1968, Willie Horton decided that he never wanted to leave home. That’s how crazy everything had become.

  When he first told me this, I didn’t fully understand what he was saying. How can a ballplayer, in a profession that puts him on the road for eight to nine months out of the year, stay close to home?

  “I had to do some thinking about it all, that’s for sure,” Horton said, smiling. “Be a little creative.”

  The way Horton managed it was by going out of his way to make friends, close friends, everywhere the team played. “When we came back to that town, I wanted to know there was somebody I could call, somebody I could talk to,” he explained. “What I was doing was making sure that I had a home everywhere I went playing ball. In 1968 especially, that’s how I got by.”

  Making every port of call home. In a way, Horton has been doing that his entire life. In 1962, soon after signing with Detroit, Horton arrived in Lakeland, Florida, for the first time. He found that he already knew some of the Tigers’ other top-flight prospects there—Mickey Stanley, Jim Northrup, Bill Freehan. Horton and Freehan had played on the same youth team, winning the national championship in Altoona, Pennsylvania, where they beat a team from Ohio that had Boston Celtics legend John Havlicek on its roster. Of course, we’re talking about the era of the three-sport letterman when a future Hall of Fame basketball player like Havlicek wasn’t locked into one sport year-round.

  Horton was eager to get to Tiger Town and begin his professional career. But nothing prepared him for the rude welcome at the local bus depot. After gathering up his luggage, which consisted of a duffel bag and not much else, Horton went to hail a cab. The town had Yellow and Checkered cabs. But none stopped for him. A local told him he needed to call Riggs Taxi. As the local put it, that was the wheels for the colored folk. At first, Horton thought “it was a rookie joke. Something they pull on the newcomers. They said I had to call Riggs. I said that sounds like a barbecue place to me.”

  Instead, Horton threw his duffel bag over his shoulder and walked to Tiger Town. Along the way, he realized this was perhaps similar to what Jackie Robinson, Larry Doby, and other baseball pioneers had done to clear the way for players like himself. Along that long walk to the team’s spring training home, he decided one of his jobs had to be to make things better for people who came after him. And maybe the best place to start was right there in Lakeland.

  This wasn’t the first time Horton had chosen to confront his circumstances by carrying himself forward on his own two feet. Before moving to Detroit, the Horton family had lived in Arno and then Stonega—coal-mining towns in southwest Virginia near the Kentucky border. By the age of eight, young Willie excelled on the ball diamond. But the field in Stonega was dug up and dusty, with the games pickup affairs at best. Word had it that Appalachia, a bigger town six miles away, had a legitimate field, and Willie began to wonder what it would be like to set foot on a ball diamond like that, perhaps even dare to run the bases. So, on a spring day in 1950, he began to walk along the railroad tracks conne
cting the two locales.

  Along the way, he met another kid, a white boy about his age. Willie asked if he’d like to accompany him to Appalachia, to run the bases on a real ballfield. Larry Munsey thought Horton was crazy and told him so, but he soon fell into step alongside and the two of them walked the rest of the way together.

  The small ballpark in Appalachia was everything Horton had imagined it would be: bona fide baselines and a well-manicured outfield. As the two boys came upon the place, rising like a vision out of the rolling hills, they saw that something was going on. In a twist that makes you believe in larger things, they realized that Little League tryouts were about to start. Both of them were invited to swing a bat, field a few grounders. In the end, both boys made the Appalachia Wolves, sponsored by a local furniture store.

  “Something took ahold of me that day,” Horton said. “God, providence, whatever... But something got me walking down that railroad track that day and being able to play ball for the Wolves.”

  Years later, in Lakeland, Horton once again determined to put one foot in front of the other and walk the walk. He made the big-league club in Detroit for good in 1965. Along the way his efforts in the team’s spring training home helped integrate the local theater and parks. Jim Campbell, the Tigers’ general manager, often asked Horton what he was trying to accomplish down in Lakeland. “I don’t know,” Horton replied, “but I think I should do it.”

  Even though Denny McLain didn’t win his first game until almost two weeks into the season, soon everything fell into line for him. He had good stuff. Cortisone shots often allowed to him take his regular turn on the mound, and McLain had a team behind him that could hit and exhibited a genuine zeal for late-game rallies.

  McLain had made it clear he loved an audience. The bigger the hubbub the better he felt about things. But his behavior also made him a bit of a sorcerer’s apprentice: sometimes he orchestrated too big a storm for anybody’s good. Even with Detroit in the midst of a newspaper strike, McLain could still find ways to create a stir. Even if that meant sounding off to the wire-service reporters and out-of-town writers. Such was the case when the pitcher blasted his own fans.

  Certainly there were some bad apples in the thousands that regularly attended games at Tiger Stadium. The year before, when the ballclub gave away the pennant on the final day, spectators had stormed the field afterward. Management turned on the sprinklers in an attempt to scatter the hordes, and inside the Tigers’ clubhouse the sound of bottles, thrown from the upper deck, could be heard breaking on the main concourse. Perhaps that’s what was on McLain’s mind when he was asked about the fans booing the team despite a 13–5 record a few weeks into the ’68 season. Inevitably, the loquacious McLain, the guy who would loan a reporter a pen to make sure his every word was taken down, bit, and responded by calling Tigers followers “the biggest front-running fans in the world.”

  And he didn’t stop there. After explaining how the abuse made life difficult for Norm Cash and Al Kaline, McLain couldn’t resist closing with a zinger: “Detroit is a great town. I like it. I’ve bought a house and have roots. But the fans in this town are the worst in the league.”

  Mayo Smith dressed down his ace in a closed-door meeting after the comments were published. McLain went on broadcaster Ernie Harwell’s pregame show, trying to take back the criticism, saying he had been misquoted. But it didn’t do much good. McLain was booed when he lost to the Baltimore Orioles in his next home start.

  “Sometimes with the stuff he said,” Gates Brown said, shaking his head, “you’d wonder what he was thinking. But that was Denny McLain. Too often the mouth ran ahead of the man.”

  If anything, though, the catcalls only seemed to energize McLain—after all, it was still attention and he was back in the spotlight—and it soon became evident something was clicking. The home loss to Baltimore would be his only losing effort in May. He won six of seven games during that month, pitching complete games in each of the wins including a ten-inning affair against the Twins. Then in June he won six of seven again. The following month he did one better, winning seven of eight decisions in July. By midsummer it was clear that on the mound, at least, he could do no wrong and the sports world was beginning to follow his every move.

  Soon after the All-Star Game, Detroit was down 4–2 in the bottom of the ninth inning against the Baltimore Orioles. Once again the scene was set for late-inning heroics, as the Tigers won that game on rookie shortstop Tom Matchick’s homer—a long fly that Baltimore outfielder Frank Robinson thought he had before the breeze carried the ball just into the second deck overhang at the Tiger Stadium. “If you weren’t so ugly,” Dick McAuliffe told Matchick afterward, “I’d kiss you.”

  With the city’s two major newspapers—the News and Free Press—on strike for much of the season, fans instead listened to Tigers’ announcer Ernie Harwell on the radio, calling the games in his sweet Georgia lilt. “In’68, there were still plenty of people who thought the city was going to burn to the ground. That it was all going to fire up again,” Mickey Lolich said. “I had some friends in the police. They were in the city and had a good feel for what was going on. They told us to please keep winning—that things were smoldering, like how it is before it starts burning all over again. But if we could keep winning then things may not explode like they had the year before.

  “In ’67, you’d see four or five guys standing on a street corner, and they’d be looking for trouble. In ’68, you’d see the same kind of guys standing on a street corner, but they’d have a transistor radio and they’d be gathered around, listening to Ernie calling the Tiger game, waiting to see if we could come back and win another ballgame.”

  Freehan felt having the newspapers on strike kept the Tigers focused during these difficult times. “I swear it helped the club,” he wrote in his autobiography Behind the Mask. “ We didn’t have any of this ridiculous divisive gossip floating around. Sure, baseball writers want to write inside stories, and sometimes they do, but they can get as sloppy with their facts as we can ever get on the field.”

  The newspaper strike was close to being settled when the Tigers traveled to the East Coast for three games in Washington and then Baltimore starting July 23. Despite almost 46,000 rooting against him at Memorial Stadium, McLain pitched a shutout four days later, with his teammates hitting five home runs for him in the 9–0 victory. During the “Year of the Pitcher” some pitchers that season didn’t see that kind of support in a month.

  At 20–3, McLain was the quickest to reach the twenty-win plateau since Rube Marquard in 1912. Few in the visiting clubhouse were sure who old Rube was. But there was no doubt that McLain was flying high above the clouds—safe for now.

  Luis Tiant holds court just inside the front doors of the ESPN Zone in downtown Washington. On this muggy July evening in the nation’s capital, the crowd has walked over from the E Street Cinema, a few blocks away, where they have just watched the ESPN movie The Lost Son of Havana , in which Tiant stars.

  “If it had been up to my father, I would have stayed in Havana,” Tiant tells those gathered around him. “He said to me that there was no place in the major leagues back then for a black man. I listened to him. I understood what he was telling me. But I still came to America.”

  He pauses to look about the crowded room.

  “If I’d listened,” Tiant adds, “all of this and so much more wouldn’t have happened.”

  Tiant first left Cuba in 1959 to play in the Mexican League, and for a short time he enjoyed the best of both worlds. He played baseball professionally and returned home to Cuba in the off-season, where he would usually play some more ball. Yet by his third year with the Mexico Blues, the political situation in Havana had changed markedly. Fidel Castro, the nation’s new leader and an inspired ballplayer in his own youth, declared that Cuba would no longer accept the pro game on its own shores. In other words, those who lived on the island could play as amateurs only. Thus began a sea change that saw Cuba soon fade as the
top exporter of talent to the major leagues, and such countries as the Dominican Republic and later Venezuela pick up the slack.

  In the spring of 1961, all Tiant knew for sure was that he wanted to play professional ball and try to follow his father’s footsteps. The old man once starred for the New York Cubans in the old Negro Leagues and was considered one of the top pitchers the island had ever produced. But as writer Rob Ruck documented in Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game, his father had also never reconciled himself to the racial insults he faced playing in the States. “I didn’t want him to come to America,” the senior Tiant explained years later. “I didn’t want him to be persecuted and spit on and treated like garbage, like I was.”

  Still, the major leagues were the showcase for the best players and, in the end, there was no holding back Tiant’s son. On May 25, 1961, Luis Tiant Jr. left Cuba, not knowing when or if he would ever return. He played in the minor leagues—West Virginia, Florida, and North Carolina—before debuting with the Cleveland Indians in 1964.

  Four years later, Tiant was merely considered the rotation’s fourth-best pitcher as the 1968 season began. Yet by the close of the “Year of the Pitcher” he would seemingly come out of nowhere to establish himself alongside Bob Gibson, Don Drysdale, Mickey Lolich, and Denny McLain as one of the best hurlers in the game.

  While the Senators’ Frank Howard may bemoan the lousy start he got off to early in ’68, a major reason was because he ran into Tiant. On April 28, Tiant pitched a two-hitter against the Washington Senators for a 2–0 victory. The key moment came when he struck out Howard on a hesitation pitch—a throw in which Tiant altered his delivery so radically that for a heartbeat he actually turned completely away from the home plate. All the batter could see was his back before Tiant finally came around with the ball.