Word got out nevertheless. On November 1, the Associated Press claimed that Cochrane was spotted in Detroit “some weeks ago.”14 Reporters buttonholed Cochrane wherever he went, asking him his opinion on the potential move. “I’ll be happy to manage the Tigers for Mr. Navin,” he told one writer. “[He] impresses me as a great fellow and a man who will help me build. I see no reason why I can’t make the grade as manager.”15
Pundits predicted that the cash-poor Mack would eventually agree to a deal. Cochrane’s trade value was simply too high to ignore, and the Athletics looked to be a team on the decline. It was better for Mack to get something for Cochrane while he could. As for Detroit, they would be getting a catcher who, in the words of sportswriter James C. Isaminger, “overtowers all rivals like the Empire State Building.”16
Even before the meeting in Chicago, Navin was talking as if Cochrane’s acquisition were a foregone conclusion. “I’ll see Connie Mack in Chicago,” he said, “and the chances are, if there are no upsets and things go as planned, Cochrane will be our next manager.”17 Rumors circulated that banks were hounding Mack for repayment of loans of $250,000. He wanted to delay the official announcement of the Cochrane trade, as he was still embroiled in efforts to get relief from his creditors.18 Until his financial options were exhausted, his desire was to hang on to Cochrane.
Navin made his way to the winter meetings in the Windy City. After his arrival at the Palmer House on December 12, he and Mack made official what had been the worst-kept secret in baseball: Mickey Cochrane was headed to the Detroit Tigers. Mack remained reluctant to part with Cochrane up to the very end, and probably would not have done so if he did not feel that it was a great career move for the catcher, who could finally get his chance to manage a team.19 In addition to the money, the Tigers threw Johnny Pasek into the deal. The paperwork would not be officially signed until January 1934. Discussing Cochrane, Navin proclaimed, “I would much rather have him with us than against us. Cochrane has been baseball poison for Detroit ever since he’s been in the league.”20
It was the darkest day in Philadelphia Athletics history, as Mack also traded away future Hall of Fame pitcher Lefty Grove to the Boston Red Sox, along with star second baseman Max Bishop and former 20-game-winner Rube Walberg, receiving little in return. Wrote the New York Times, “[The deal] all but completes a break-up of the famous Athletics who won the world’s championship in 1929 and ’30.”21
As for Mack, he tried his best to put a spin on the trades. “I am not breaking up my ball club,” he emphasized. “In my opinion, anybody who thinks so is all wrong.”22 Mack’s words ultimately were ignored, and the Athletics would plummet to fifth place in 1934.
Cochrane, who was also in Chicago, did not waste any time trying to improve his new club. He wanted Al Simmons of the White Sox to shore up his outfield, but could not work out a deal. He later asked Mack if Pinky Higgins, Philadelphia’s third baseman, was available. Mack, the dynasty-destroyer, replied sheepishly, “Nothing doing. I’m not helping any more ball clubs and that’s final. You’ve been helped enough already.”23 When Cochrane mentioned to Mack that his former boss had not sold him any players, Mack replied, “I sold you a pretty fair catcher, didn’t I?”24
Navin, for his part, was more than pleased with the results of his Chicago sojourn. Before leaving town, the former insurance salesman promptly purchased two policies on Cochrane’s life, totaling $100,000.25 According to the New York Times, “Cochrane appeared in the pink of condition during the insurance physical examinations. He weighs 175 pounds and believes he will catch about 125 games next season.”26
Before heading back home, however, Cochrane made a bold move. The 1933 Tigers were a young, inexperienced team, almost completely lacking in veterans who had battled it out in the post-season trenches. Only two current Tigers had played in a World Series: pitchers George Uhle with Cleveland in 1920, and Firpo Marberry with Washington in 1924 and 1925. Detroit’s position players were the American League’s youngest, with an average age of 26 years and seven months. Cochrane knew the Tigers desperately needed a skilled veteran bat if they were going to compete in 1934.
The man Cochrane set his sights on was Leon Allen “Goose” Goslin. A dynamite hitter for over 12 seasons with the Washington Senators and St. Louis Browns, Goslin had compiled a lifetime .325 batting average. Six times, he had had a WAR of more than 5.0. With his propensity for slashing line drives, he was able to take advantage of the vast expanse of Washington’s Griffith Stadium, banging out 151 triples. The Senators won their first and only World Series championship in 1924, with Goslin slugging three home runs versus the New York Giants in a matchup that went the full seven games.27 He hit three homers again in the Series the following year, but the Senators were denied by the Pittsburgh Pirates. After a brief three-year exile to the lowly Browns, Goslin returned to D.C. in 1933, leading the Senators to yet another World Series. He homered again, but Washington was no match for the Giants of Mel Ott and Carl Hubbell, losing out in five games. With seven home runs in World Series play, he was tied with Lou Gehrig for second place on the all-time list. Goslin’s idol, Babe Ruth, held the mark for most Series homers, with 15.
Goslin was a proven winner and a gamer, a popular player who made it easy for managers and fans to forgive him his fielding follies. (On Goslin’s glove work, Senators skipper Donie Bush once noted that he was “sincerely lacking in that department.”28) Years after Goslin retired, Lawrence Ritter interviewed him for his classic oral history book, The Glory of Their Times. In it, Goslin recalled how much fun he had playing the game. “They didn’t have to pay me. I’d have paid them to let me play. Listen, the truth is it was more than fun. It was heaven.”29
From early on, Goslin emulated Ruth’s all-or-nothing swing, contorting his body into a pretzel when he whiffed. Like Ruth, he was often accused of “breaking training” as a major leaguer, which was baseball code for carousing. Goslin developed his great strength from working on his father’s New Jersey farm as a young boy. It was obvious that he possessed a fair fastball, and the game became his ticket out of a life of manual labor. He landed a gig with DuPont, ostensibly repairing elevators, but the company primarily wanted him to pitch for its industrial league team. He eventually signed a minor league contract with the Columbia (South Carolina) Comers of the South Atlantic League. It did not take long for the club to discover that he could hit the ball a country mile; very soon, the Comers converted him to the outfield. In Goslin’s second year of pro ball, he hit .390, and by the following September, he was playing regularly for the Senators at the tender age of 20.
Now, over 2,100 hits and three World Series appearances later, he was going to be a Detroit Tiger. Like Mack, Senators owner Clark Griffith was struggling to keep his team financially afloat, and could no longer afford to keep Goslin. In a straight-up swap of outfielders, Griffith dealt Goose to Detroit for John Stone. The deal raised more than a few eyebrows; it looked like the shrewd and experienced Griffith had fleeced the novice Cochrane on his first day on the job. Goslin would be 33 by Opening Day, five years older than Stone, and by most indications was on the downside of his career. After all, he hit only .297 with 64 RBI for the Senators in 1933, far below his norms. Stone, on the other hand, looked to be trending upward. He batted .306 in his six years in Detroit and put up good extra-base numbers. In the words of Detroit News sportswriter H. G. Salsinger, however, Stone was “lack-lustre. He is totally void of aggressiveness, and Detroit has too many players who are void of aggressiveness.”30 Another scribe accused Stone of “losing interest” in his work, and asserted that he was at times “downright lazy.”31 He was still considered a player with great potential, however, and Griffith appeared to be the winner in the deal.
Cochrane, however, was confident he had pulled off a coup. “Goslin is the winning type of player, if I ever saw one. He has been on championship and contending clubs. He thinks in terms of victory and will be a big help to our morale, in addition to being able to pa
rk the ball in the right field bleachers now and then.”32 It was also well known that Goslin and Senators manager Joe Cronin did not always see eye-to-eye, having gotten into a heated argument one afternoon in the dugout. Cochrane and Goslin, on the other hand, had been friends for years and occasionally went on hunting excursions. Cochrane figured that getting Goslin out of Cronin’s doghouse might re-invigorate the slugger. Still, many fans were left wondering if the Tigers’ new manager had paid too high a price for a player past his prime.
Chapter Two
City on the Strait
In 1701, Antoine de la Mothe Cadillac landed his canoe at a high bank on a narrow strait connecting Lake Erie to Lake St. Clair. Viewing the uninhabited land with favor, he plunged a stake bearing the flag of France into the soil, claiming the territory in the name of King Louis XIV. Cadillac’s mission was to establish the Fort Pontchartrain du Detroit, named after his benefactor, the Comte de Pontchartrain. Ostensibly, the fort was intended as a haven for displaced Native Americans. The grasping Cadillac’s real motive, however, was to establish a monopoly on the local fur trade. In little over 200 years, the terrain he traversed would be utterly transformed as far as the eye could see.
The fort that Cadillac built took the latter half of its name from the waterway that it overlooked. Le detroit du Lac Erie (meaning “the strait of Lake Erie”) is today known as the Detroit River. French settlers both hardy and industrious were attracted by the free, tillable virgin land that surrounded the fort for miles. In 1760, following the capitulation of Montreal near the conclusion of the French and Indian War, Fort Detroit was handed over to the British. Three years later, an Ottawa chief named Pontiac, having failed to capture it by surprise, laid siege to the fort with a contingent of nearly 900 warriors, leading to the Battle of Bloody Run. Pontiac lived to see another day, but after nearly six months, he lifted the futile siege and went in search of easier conquests.
A British post during the Revolutionary War, Fort Detroit was used primarily as an armory for allied Native American tribes, who led raiding parties on settlers to the south. In 1796, the fort and the village surrounding it were handed over to the United States as part of the Jay Treaty.
A fire in 1805 rapidly reduced nearly the entire settlement of wooden structures to ashes. Its people persevered, building Detroit up from the rubble, officially incorporating the erstwhile village as a city just a year later. Augustus B. Woodward, in his role as Chief Justice of the Michigan Territory, put his stamp on Detroit’s topographical destiny, laying forth a sweeping vision of streets radiating out like spokes on a wheel, with a central axis known as Grand Circus Park. Detroit’s wide avenues would be reminiscent of the beautiful streets of Paris.
Like any city, it had its growing pains. Today, Detroit-bashing is a veritable cottage industry. Here is an early antebellum example, courtesy of a traveler from New York City in 1854:
As we reached the dock in Detroit, we were saluted by a grand peal of Heaven’s artillery, while the clouds poured down their welcome in overwhelming torrents. Detroit as mapped out, and Detroit as we saw it, appear two very different places: the Detroit on paper being, as we doubt not it will be some day, a very large, beautiful and regular city; the Detroit we looked at from our cab appeared one interminably long and wide street, across which it was neither easy nor pleasant for neighbors to communicate. This main artery is, however, healthy, and new veins are fast shooting out on either side. It compares favorably with what it was, and hence those who have grown with the place feel very proud of it. Their Common Council, judging from the condition of the streets, are as derelict as was ever ARCULARIUS, of mud and dirt celebrity in New York. The channels are very unclean, and send up a most unhealthy effluvia in the noonday heat. We were not surprised to hear of a few cases of cholera.1
During the Civil War, Detroit’s relatively easy access into Canada made it a key stop on the Underground Railroad. A disgruntled segment of the city’s white population blamed blacks as the cause of the war. Resentment simmered between the two groups, which boiled over into violent unrest in March 1863. The Michigan Infantry had to be called in to restore a fragile harmony. Before the disturbance was over, fires had destroyed over 30 buildings, an estimated 200 blacks were left homeless, and two people had been killed. It would not be the last time that Detroit would experience deadly race riots.
By the late 1800s, Woodward’s grand plan was taking shape, and Detroit had come to be known affectionately as “The Paris of the West.” With its stately Gilded Age mansions, its grand tree-lined avenues, its green spaces, fountains, and culture, it was certainly an appropriate appellation. Its citizens gloried in their majestic opera house, excellent library, and beautiful art museum. Moneyed lumber barons and their fashionably dressed wives strolled together along the Woodward Avenue shopping district. They might partake of the pleasures of Campus Martius Park, or sample the sweet delights at Fred Sanders’ confectionary, before heading back to their stately brick homes in the Brush Park neighborhood. On weekends, crowds packed Belle Isle, the 982-acre oasis in the middle of the Detroit River.
As the twentieth century approached, the city grew to a population of nearly 300,000. Among them was a young engineer named Henry Ford, who, on a damp, misty morning in 1896, took his quadricycle out for its first test run along Washington Boulevard—only to have the fancy contraption break down.2 In less than ten years, he formed the Ford Motor Company with $28,000 in capital.3 Already an important transportation hub due to its proximity to the Great Lakes, Detroit’s destiny was to become the automobile capital of the world. During the Roaring Twenties, the burgeoning metropolis sprouted skyscrapers rivaling those of New York: The Book-Cadillac Hotel, the Guardian Building, the David Stott, the Fisher Building, the Penobscot, the General Motors Building, and the beaux-arts Michigan Central Depot. All of them bespoke prosperity, high finance, and industrial might. That prosperity did not reach to all, however. As one observer of the city wrote in 1934, “Big skyscrapers [were] next to wooden shacks. No symmetry in anything. Like a fat boy too big for his pants.”4
The Motor City was built on the backs of men like Ford, the Dodge Brothers, the Fisher Brothers, Alfred Sloan, and Walter Chrysler, automotive giants who transformed the sleepy town of the late 1800s into an ever increasing, ever expanding, frenetic, fast-paced urban jungle. Immigrants streamed into its streets, lured by the prospect of steady factory work. The Packard Automotive Plant, completed in 1911 and encompassing 3,500,000 square feet, was considered the most state-of-the-art facility in the world. The Ambassador Bridge, connecting the city to Windsor, Ontario, was the longest suspension bridge in the world when it opened in 1929. Detroit’s population, just below 1,000,000 in 1920, was set to explode by almost 60 percent before the decade was over.
The Big Three automakers were on top of the world, as motor vehicle production ratcheted up to more than 5,300,000 in 1929. Car factories hummed around the clock. Men eager for work descended on the city now known as Detroit the Dynamic. Occupancy rates reached 100 percent, and once-elegant mansions were converted into crammed rooming houses to meet the tight demand. Landlords employed a systematic rotation, renting beds to multiple workers in eight-hour segments, just long enough for one man to get some shuteye while another put in his shift at the plant. The bedsheets barely had time to cool.
The stock market crash of 1929 tapped the brakes on Detroit’s roaring economy. In February 1933, two of Michigan’s largest banks, Union Guardian Trust and First National, failed to meet their obligations. In an effort to stave off a run on other financial institutions, Governor William Comstock instituted an eight-day bank holiday, effectively freezing the assets of nearly 900,000 customers, to the tune of $1.5 billion. Rather than calm markets, panic spread, and hundreds of banks around the country slammed their doors shut. That same year, automobile production plummeted to 1,331,860, a level not seen since 1916. Ford Motor Company’s Detroit plants employed over 128,000 people in 1929; two years later, the number was
only 37,000, and about half of those people worked only three days per week. For thousands, bread lines replaced the assembly lines. The massive unemployment sent a ripple effect throughout the city; approximately one-third of all families owning homes were delinquent in their property tax payments, putting a crimp in city services.
The misery reached a horrifying degree on March 7, 1932, when thousands of demonstrators marched on the Ford Rouge Plant in Dearborn. Comprised mostly of laid-off autoworkers (“with Communists in their midst”5), the crowd carried banners proclaiming GIVE US WORK and WE WANT BREAD NOT CRUMBS. A melee ensued between protestors, police, and Ford security guards. Rocks were thrown, police fired shots, four demonstrators were killed, and 50 others were wounded. Henry Ford’s public image took a beating. At the massive funeral parade for the four dead, a banner read FORD GAVE THEM BULLETS FOR BREAD. The Ford Hunger March was Detroit’s day of infamy.
The team that Mickey Cochrane took over won 75 games and lost 79 in 1933, good for fifth place in the American League, a distant 25 games behind the Senators. Detroit had some promising young pitchers; their team earned run average of 3.95 and 731 runs surrendered were both the third-lowest figures in the junior circuit. Detroit’s big problem, however, was hitting. Lacking home run threats in the lineup (Hank Greenberg and Charlie Gehringer had tied for the team lead with 12), they mustered only 4.66 runs per game, far below the Yankees’ 6.10, which topped the circuit. Goslin, of course, was expected to give a big boost to the offense.
Motor City Champs Page 3