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

by Tim Wendel

  Unfortunately, the Harrelson incident was far from the exception that season.

  “Has the whole world gone crazy?” asked Bill Rohr, a relief pitcher for the Cleveland Indians, after so much debris rained down from the second deck in Detroit that he was unable to warm up. “In the stands there were a couple of guys standing together, slugging . . . really hitting each other. There were a couple of people beating up an old man. It is nuts.”

  Mickey Lolich added, “A guy doesn’t need (military) basic training. Just play the outfield in Detroit.”

  Such flashpoints were possible omens—precursors to what was to happen later that summer in Chicago, where the Democratic National Convention was scheduled to begin. City officials there, in an effort to discourage demonstrations, refused to issue permits for any marches or overnight stays in the parks. No matter that the Boy Scouts routinely camped in Lincoln Park, an impressive swath of urban openness that hugged the west shore of Lake Michigan. The hippies and Abbie Hoffman’s Yippies and anybody else in town to protest the political powers were required to vacate the park by 11 p.m. Chicago’s finest were charged with enforcing the curfew, and for consecutive nights they aggressively did so, while television cameras rolled in the background. During the day the youthful protesters and city police could actually be seen playing catch, but inevitably each night by 11 p.m.—in time to be featured on the late evening news—the violence escalated to fever pitch yet again. Police clubbed many of those in their way. Cars with Eugene McCarthy bumper stickers had their tires slashed. Across the country the public was transfixed as more than 16 million tuned in on television.

  The Tigers were supposed to be in Chicago, too. But all the rooms in the city were booked due to the convention, so the first game of their series with the White Sox was switched to Milwaukee. In hindsight, it would be a fortunate substitution. Other ballclubs weren’t as lucky.

  By August 28, demonstrations made their way closer to downtown Chicago. Plans were made to march on the Amphitheatre, where Hubert Humphrey was about to accept the nomination and the party was expected to take a position of supporting the ongoing war in Vietnam. The protesters gathered in Grant Park, a smaller venue opposite the Conrad Hilton Hotel, where many delegates were staying. Protesters listened to the convention’s proceedings on transistor radios, and when the prowar plank passed many decided to march.

  “After everything that had happened this year,” Mark Kurlansky wrote in 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, “after Tet, Johnson’s resignation, McCarthy’s campaign, Martin Luther King’s death, Bobby Kennedy’s campaign and death, and four months of futile Paris peace talks—after all that, both parties were to have pro-war stances.”

  That’s when Chicago law enforcement, which now numbered more than twenty-five thousand, moved in, again with billy clubs swinging.

  Most of the time sport exists in a different orbit from the real news of the day. Even sports writers like to kid that they work in the “toy department”—fortunate to be caught up in less serious matters. But in ’68, time after time, those lines became blurred.

  That evening in Chicago, Larry Dierker, a young pitcher with the Houston Astros, checked into the Conrad Hilton with the ballclub. He was pitching well in 1968, with one of his victories coming against Bob Gibson, a triumph he would always treasure. In September, he would turn twenty-two, and after spending the winter pitching in the Dominican Republic, Dierker was thrilled to be part of a big-league rotation. He was holding his own, feeling good about himself. Despite his age it was actually his fourth full year in the major leagues, but nothing he had experienced up to that point had prepared him for what was about to unfold before him.

  “We flew into Chicago while those riots were going on,” he recalled decades later. “When the team bus came to the Conrad Hilton, we couldn’t pull up in front of the hotel. Instead we had to enter through the back entrance—through the kitchen to get into the lobby.

  “When we got into the lobby, you could smell the smoke and tear gas. It wasn’t like our eyes were watering or anything, but you could tell it was an unusual scene. You could hear the sirens and you could hear the bullhorns. Once we got up to our room, our room was facing the park. That was back when you could still open windows in a hotel. We ordered up some beer and sandwiches and opened the windows. We sat out there and watched what was going on down below.”

  From eight stories above the fray, Dierker and his roommate, Jim Ray, witnessed the police and National Guardsmen wade into the crowd. Their wrath on that night knew no bounds. As Kurlansky notes, the authorities beat “children and elderly people and those who watched behind police lines.... They dragged women through the streets. A crowd was pressed so hard against the windows of a hotel restaurant—middle-aged women and children, according to The New York Times—that the windows caved in and the crowd escaped inside. The police pursued them through the windows, clubbing anyone they could find, even in the hotel lobby.”

  Although the police seemingly went out of their way to smash cameras, perhaps to keep images off the network feed, additional television cameras had been mounted above the hotel entrance, offering roughly the same angle Dierker and his teammates had. The mayhem went on for seventeen minutes—a bloodbath that can now be viewed on YouTube. Many who witnessed it firsthand were changed forever.

  “Jim and I were just amazed by what was going on down below,” Dierker said. “I was in the same age group as the people who were upset about the war. Certainly protesting not only what was going on in Vietnam and Chicago, but what was going on in a cultural way with the music and fashion.

  “I knew I was a part of that generation that was boiling up down below. At the time, I was more selfishly concerned with my own life and career. I didn’t feel a great kinship with the ones protesting. But once you see something like that, you don’t forget it so easily. Looking back on it, that night changed me . . .

  “I wasn’t worried that they would call up my Guard unit and send me to Vietnam. I was somewhat insulated from the potential dangers that a lot of guys my age felt that they were in. I don’t consider myself unpatriotic, but if I had a chance to say whether I’d like to go to Vietnam and fight for my country or I’d like to stay home and have someone else do it, my choice was not to go, to play major league ball, and let someone else do it. That night I wasn’t proud of that.”

  The Tigers’ Dick McAuliffe averaged .247 during his sixteen-year career. He never hit above .274 in a season and his high-water marks in home runs and runs batted in were twenty-four and sixty-six respectively, both in the 1964 season. To the average fan, he wasn’t anything special, just a guy who could play second base and shortstop. But his teammates knew better.

  Today they still use words like aggressive, determined, and fiery to describe a player they nicknamed “Mad Dog.” Several remember a four-hit game when he singled each time and ended up on second due to his daring-do on the base paths. “He was the guy who made us go in ’68,” Gates Brown said. “Dick McAuliffe was the kind of player you could always count on and you know will cover your back. It’s hard to picture that’68 team without him.”

  In late August, as things were about to erupt in Chicago, the Tigers and their fans were about to be reminded how valuable McAuliffe was. Born into an Irish-Italian family in Hartford, McAuliffe learned early on never to back down from anybody. In high school, he had batted against the legendary fireballer Steve Dalkowski. When he and McAuliffe confronted each other, Dalkowski was as fast and wild as ever. His fastball hit McAuliffe square in the back.

  “That was as hard as I’ve ever been hit by a ball,” McAuliffe said. “I didn’t think I was going to breathe again.”

  Despite being hunched over at the waist, McAuliffe made his way to first base that day. His teammates decided he must have really been hurting because he wasn’t able to shout out anything in Dalkowski’s direction.

  That wasn’t the case on August 22, 1968. The White Sox were in town to play the Tigers, an
d there was no love lost between the two ballclubs. Over the past two seasons, former White Sox manager Eddie Stanky (who had been fired in July after a disappointing first half) had questioned Detroit’s makeup. He agreed that the Tigers certainly had the talent, but wondered aloud if they have the fortitude to win it all? McAuliffe was among those who remembered such slights.

  Early on the storyline that day appeared to be Mickey Lolich’s return to the rotation. After weeks in bullpen purgatory, winning four games in the process, the enigmatic left-hander was back in the rotation and pitching well. He had made a half-dozen appearances out of the bullpen and recalled struggling not only with his control but also in regaining the quality sinking action on his pitches. “They just sat there,” Lolich said, “and people hit them. Simple as that.” Certainly McAuliffe was doing his best to make him a winner in his return. With his distinctive batting style—bat held high, kicking his front leg toward the mound as the pitch arrived—McAuliffe led off the first inning with a single and scored the Tigers’ first run of the game.

  In the third inning, McAuliffe was back at the plate, again facing White Sox starter Tommy John. The second pitch was a little chin music and McAuliffe turned to talk with home plate umpire Al Salerno. “If he hits me in the head, I’m dead,” McAuliffe said.

  When the count ran to three and two, John came inside again, spilling McAuliffe face-first to the ground. As he started toward first base, he and John began to jaw at each other. About thirty feet up the line, McAuliffe suddenly made a beeline for the mound, where John waited for him. As McAuliffe charged, John dropped down, ready to throw a shoulder block. The two of them cracked together, with McAuliffe sprawling over the top. John’s left shoulder, his pitching arm, took the major force of the impact.

  As far as baseball fights go, this one was over quickly. Nothing compared to the Cardinals-Reds brawl. In fact, McLain missed the whole thing because he was back in the clubhouse eating a hot dog. McAuliffe was ejected by Salerno and order was soon restored. That’s when everybody noticed John holding his left arm. Afterward, it would be determined that he had suffered torn ligaments in his pitching shoulder.

  The Tigers went on to record a 4–2 victory. In his return to the rotation, Lolich was the winner, even though he failed to finish the game after beating out an infield single and later coming around to score. “He ran out of gas,” manager Mayo Smith told Jerry Green. “He didn’t even have a tiger in his tank.”

  After the game, umpire Salerno said that he was required to send a report to American League president Joe Cronin about the McAuliffe-John altercation. In it he would say that McAuliffe was the aggressor. “I doubt he’ll be suspended, though,” Salerno said. “I don’t think John was throwing at him on a three-two pitch. But John did cuss him.”

  With that the incident appeared to be over. But the following day, with the Tigers in New York to play the Yankees, word came down that McAuliffe was suspended for five days. With a doubleheader thrown in, he would miss the next six of Detroit’s games.

  At the time, the Tigers held a relatively comfortable seven-and-a-half-game lead over second-place Baltimore, but they were about to find out the difference one player can make. McAuliffe’s suspension exposed a key weakness with the Tigers’ roster.

  In the first game without McAuliffe, Detroit lost 2–1 to the Yankees. The second game of the doubleheader went into extra innings, tied at 3–3. Just past one in the morning, it was called due to curfew—slated to be made up as a brand-new ballgame.

  The next day not even McLain could stop the bleeding. He lost to the Yankees 2–1 on Roy White’s two-run homer. It was the first time all season McLain had lost two games in a row. From there things continued to snowball downhill for Detroit. At first, it looked as though the Tigers would take the first game of Sunday’s doubleheader easily, staking themselves to a 5–1 lead. But when Yankees manager Ralph Houk brought in outfielder Rocky Colavito to pitch in order to avoid depleting his bullpen in a losing effort, incredibly “The Rock” shut down the Detroit bats and the Yankees rallied for a 6–5 victory, with Colavito the game’s winner.

  The victory couldn’t have been sweeter for The Rock. He had previously played for the Tigers, an integral member of the 1961 ballclub that had given the New York Yankees a run for their money. But Colavito never felt at home in the Motor City and often seemed to resent the adoration that Al Kaline in particular received. Colavito was no stranger to the mound, having pitched for the Indians in 1958, and he loved to mess around with throwing changeups and curveballs during warm-ups. “I feel so funky,” he said after his victory.

  In comparison, the Tigers weren’t feeling very funky at all, especially after Lolich walked seven batters and the Yankees completed the four-game sweep, winning 5–4 in the day’s second game. With the losses, Detroit’s lead had been shaved to five games over Baltimore, with the Orioles coming to Detroit the following week for a three-game showdown. In the cramped visitors’ clubhouse at Yankee Stadium stood a blackboard. On it, someone had written, ANYBODY WHO THINKS THE WORLD ENDED TODAY DOESN’T BELONG HERE.

  To this day, nobody is sure who the author was. Catcher Bill Freehan often receives credit, while others insist it had to be Eddie Mathews. Whoever the author was the Tigers were about to be tested after coasting for so long.

  On September 4, 1968, bothered by a sore arm, Luis Tiant took the mound in Anaheim. Even though he lasted only five and two-thirds innings, allowing four earned runs, the Indians hitters did the job this time around and he was credited with the win. Five days later, on the road against the Twins, Tiant went the distance, giving up only one run, and at last secured his twentieth victory. But while he led the American League and ERA, the season had taken its toll and the damage was done. His next start was at home, against Baltimore. Before the contest, his arm throbbed so badly that second-year pitcher Steve Bailey was called on to take his place. After the Orioles beat the last-minute substitute, Alvin Dark questioned his top pitcher in the press. The next morning’s paper quoted Dark as being “surprised” that Tiant had quit. The quote prompted a confrontation later recounted in Tiant’s autobiography.

  Storming into Dark’s office, Tiant flung the morning paper across the desk, hitting the manager in the chest.

  “I never come in here with excuses,” Tiant said. “You should know that better than I do. The rest of these guys are always getting dizzy or having colds or not feeling good, but you never say anything in the papers about them. Why did you have to say this about me?”

  “You’re taking it the wrong way,” Dark replied.

  “I don’t care how I’m taking it,” Tiant answered. “ You’re not supposed to say those things about your players in the papers. I do my job for you and for this ballclub, so I should be respected. You never hear any excuses from me, but I’ve been pitching with a sore elbow and you know it.”

  Dark tried to get a word in edgewise, but Tiant cut him off.

  “From now on, if I don’t feel good, I don’t pitch,” the staff ace said. “I don’t care if you get mad, or if you trade me, or whatever else happens. If I’m not one hundred percent, I don’t pitch.”

  Moments later, Tiant walked out of his manager’s office. Many of his teammates thought his impressive 1968 campaign was history.

  The city of Detroit burned during the summer of 1967 in one of the deadliest riots in U.S. history. As the new baseball season began, many in the city and on the hometown team feared such protests would break out again.

  The Detroit News Archives

  Willie Horton, left, shown here in the Tigers’ clubhouse with his good friend and Tigers teammate Gates Brown, risked his life trying to stop the ’67 riots. Many on the ballclub lived year-round in the Detroit area. They knew how far a winning ballclub could go in healing a divided city.

  The Detroit News Archives

  Just after 6 p.m. on April 4, 1968, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot in Memphis, Tennessee. He was standing on the balcony outside his ro
om at the Lorraine Hotel, about to leave for dinner at his friend Billy Kyles’ house. Afterward, members of his party pointed in the direction where the shots were fired.

  Getty Images

  Entering the ’68 season, the St. Louis Cardinals were poised to win their third World Series championship in five years. Ahead of their time, the Cardinals’ lineup was made up of blacks, whites, and Latinos.

  National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, N.Y.

  Tim McCarver, like any good catcher, knew how to earn a pitcher’s trust. During his twenty-one years in the majors, he called the signals for such Hall of Fame pitchers as Bob Gibson and Steve Carlton. McCarver went on to a successful second career in the broadcast booth.

  National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, N.Y.

  Orlando Cepeda was heartbroken when he was dealt from the San Francisco Giants to the Cardinals early in the 1966 season. But the Puerto Rican star soon realized he had joined a team built to win titles.

  National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, N.Y.

  Mike Shannon helped supply the power for a Cardinals’ team built on pitching, speed and defense. He also became a popular broadcaster after retiring as a player.

  National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, N.Y.

  No one was more eloquent than presidential candidate Robert Kennedy in the hours after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination. Speaking from the heart and from few notes, he urged a crowd in Indianapolis, shown here, “to tame the savageness of man and make gentle the life of this world.” When he was finished, many rushed the platform to reach out to him.

  Associated Press

  Robert Kennedy was assassinated eight weeks after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. was shot. Maury Wills, then playing for the Pittsburgh Pirates, refused to play the day after Kennedy’s murder. Instead Wills stayed in the training room, reading Kennedy’s book To Seek a Newer World.