Looking over his roster in December, Cochrane planned to bat himself third, with Goslin in the cleanup slot. Goslin, Pete Fox (7 home runs, 58 runs batted in, and a .288 batting average in 1933), and Gerald “Gee” Walker (9, 63, .280) were the established outfielders. Players like Frank Doljack, Bill Lawrence, and Ivey Shiver were spare parts with scant experience. Cochrane reportedly felt highly of Walker’s potential. A fleet runner, he led the Tigers with 26 stolen bases in 1932, only one behind the Yankees’ Ben Chapman, who topped the majors.
Cochrane expected to catch roughly 120 games a year (he averaged 130 games per season while with the Athletics). Ray Hayworth, Detroit’s first-string catcher for the past couple seasons, would be relegated to backup. The infield consisted of Greenberg at first, Gehringer at second, Billy Rogell at short, and Marv Owen at third. Cochrane had tried to make a deal for the Yankees’ Tony Lazzeri, one of the hardest-hitting second basemen in the game, but to no avail. He heaped great praise on Greenberg, the 23-year-old kid from the Bronx who was coming off his first full big league campaign. Cochrane gushed, “He had a great season for a recruit. He has power at the plate, is a fine hustler and should be even better next year.” He added, “As to Gehringer, there is nothing to be said. He is the class of the American League. Rogell was as good a shortstop as any, except Joe Cronin, and Owen should improve.”6
Arriving on the scene in 1934, Mickey Cochrane transformed the culture of the Detroit Tigers (courtesy Ernie Harwell Sports Collection, Detroit Public Library).
The budding strength of the Tigers, however, was the pitching staff, and Cochrane, being a catcher, was delighted at the prospect of helping to develop its youngsters. He went so far as to say that Detroit could have the best mound corps in the league, now that the Athletics had traded away the great Lefty Grove. Firpo Marberry, who won 16 games in 1933, was the dean of the staff at age 34. Along with 26-year-old Tommy Bridges, winner of 14, Detroit was solid at the top of the rotation. After that, however, a lot depended on a couple of kids named Schoolboy Rowe (23 years old) and Elden Auker (22). “If Schoolboy’s arm is all right again,” Cochrane pointed out, “he will be one of the best pitchers in the business.” Rowe had suffered a shoulder injury that kept him out for most of the second half of the 1933 season. Cochrane added, “I believe we can look to Vic Frasier for winning service, too, and I am sure of Marberry.” His faith in Frasier may have been a case of misdirected optimism; in three seasons with the Chicago White Sox and Tigers, he went 22–34 with a 5.56 earned run average. “Of course, we could use another pitcher. Who couldn’t? I tried to get Ted Lyons from the White Sox, but [manager] Lew Fonseca wanted too much.”7
The Tigers, in fact, were planning on bringing a sizable contingent of other pitchers to spring training, including veterans Carl Fischer, Vic Sorrell, and Elon “Chief” Hogsett, believed by many to be Native American because of his swarthy complexion and jet black hair. “Am I really Indian? Well, I’m one-thirty-second Cherokee on my mother’s side. Maybe more, but whoever figured that out quit checking. Probably afraid of what they might find.”8 Among the youngsters vying for roster spots were names like Orlin Collier, Isidore Goldstein, Luke Hamlin, Roxie Lawson, Charles K. “Buck” Marrow, Truett Sewell, Steve Larkin, and Joe Sullivan.
Before the calendar year was out, Cochrane had signed a new two-year contract (terms were not divulged). Del Baker, the interim manager for the final two games in 1933, was retained as a coach. Cochrane also brought on Cy Perkins, his former backup catcher in Philadelphia, to join his coaching staff.
In early January, Cochrane headed to Detroit to confer with Navin about plans for the upcoming season. To no one’s surprise, Cochrane threw himself wholeheartedly into his new job, accomplishing much in those first frigid days in the Motor City.
His initial order of business was a sartorial one. Not only did he request that the team’s uniforms be lighter in weight, he also oversaw the return of the Tigers’ Old English “D” logo. It had been used, with slight esthetic variations and infrequent lapses, since the late 1800s. One of the first known references to the team’s classic font appeared in the Detroit Free Press on February 29, 1896, when the Tigers were still a minor league team: “[The Tigers] will use the old blue uniforms for games abroad and will have white uniforms with black trimmings for the home games. Instead of the word Detroit on the shirt front there will be a German letter ‘D’ on one side.”9 Less than a month later, the same newspaper swapped the lettering’s provenance, dubbing it an English “D.” Whether German or English, it quickly became iconic.
The Tigers, however, removed the logo from jerseys following the 1929 season in favor of a blue script “Detroit” (pinstripes were even added the following year). In 1931, the Old English “D” was taken off the caps as well, in favor of a plain block “D.” The block lettering was not a particularly noxious look, but Cochrane preferred a Tigers uniform that hearkened back to the team’s glory days. Thus, the pinstripes and script lettering were ditched, the Old English “D” was brought back to both the home jerseys and the caps, and it has remained there, with the egregious exception of 1960, ever since. Along with the Yankees’ interlocking “NY,” it remains a masterpiece of design, simple yet elegant, and impervious to the fickle winds of fashion, even across a sometimes gusty century.
Cochrane got together with Gehringer and Rogell to assess the strengths and weaknesses of the Tigers’ roster. He asked Navin to bring Schoolboy Rowe up from his home in Arkansas so that physicians could see if his injury had healed. The new manager also went on a kind of media blitz, giving newspaper and radio interviews and talking baseball with fans wherever he went. Between it all, he found time to go house hunting with his wife, Mary. The couple took in a Red Wings hockey game at Olympia Stadium one evening. A photographer, spotting them in their box seats, asked permission to snap a picture, and this quickly drew a crowd. An ovation ensued, and Cochrane stood to acknowledge the cheering.
Unlike his predecessor Harris, Cochrane had an outgoing nature, and public speaking came easy to him. Overcoming the fan apathy that had become entrenched after so many years of mediocre baseball was no easy task, but by constantly putting his face before the public and extolling the virtues of his team, Cochrane succeeded at getting fans excited about 1934. “I do not mind telling you,” he intimated to guests at a dinner reception, “that in the last five or six years there has been very little color on the so-called Tigers. They have been more like pussycats that had been out all night in a downpour. It will be my job to inject color, dash and spirit into the club.”10
A special night was planned in honor of Cochrane at the Statler Hotel on January 16. Organized by the Kiwanis Club, it hosted members of the Tigers’ front office and baseball dignitaries from around the American League. Previously, Cochrane had hedged his bets when asked where he thought the Tigers would finish. But that evening was the closest he came all winter to making a prediction. “I played with the Athletics for nine years,” he said in a speech, “and in that time we never finished out of the first division and I do not intend to start now.”11 Before 900 members of the Detroit Yacht Club, he qualified this bold statement by urging fans to “expect no miracles at Navin Field,” but promised that Detroit would display “as much fighting spirit as any college football team you ever saw.” Gone were the days when the Tigers could be accused of not laying it all out on the diamond. “We’ll have a hustling, colorful club if nothing else.”12
If Cochrane was careful to refrain from making a bolder prognostication, Goose Goslin was not. From his home in Salem, New Jersey, he predicted to a reporter that the Tigers would finish no lower than third. Not stopping there, he went on: “And I wouldn’t be a bit surprised if we won the pennant. I look for a three-cornered race, with Washington, New York and Detroit battling for the top all the way.” As for his hitting, he noted, “I always liked to hit at Navin Field, and am happy over the chance of playing half my games there. I’ll get my share of base hits. Don’t worr
y about me.”13
It was the beginning of a new era of Tigers baseball in another respect: Spring training, scheduled to begin March 4, would be in a different locale. After a peripatetic existence in springs past, enduring inadequate facilities and unreliable schedules, the team was looking forward to its move to the tiny Florida town of Lakeland, just outside of Tampa. For that, they could thank Al Lang, a promoter and visionary who had spent years touting the benefits of Florida as a spring training site.
Lang was a transplanted Pittsburgher born in 1870. While still a young man, he received the bad news one day that he had cancer of the stomach. Told by his doctor that he could hope for only six more months to live and that he should enjoy them in a climate better suited to his condition than the Steel City, Lang made the fateful decision to heed the advice. He sold his laundry business, and he and his wife made their way south to Florida, settling in St. Petersburg. Lang had a robust constitution to begin with, and the sun did wonders for his health. With his tall, bony physique and shock of white hair, he looked like a cross between Connie Mack and baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.14
He fell in love with his adopted town and wound up serving two terms as mayor. One fine spring afternoon, Lang was sitting in front of Budd’s drugstore in downtown St. Pete, reading over the latest news about his beloved Pittsburgh Pirates. He came across a dispatch indicating that the team, which at the time was training in Hot Springs, Arkansas, had had their practice rained out for the third consecutive day. This was a mystifying turn of events to Lang, who recalled that he hadn’t seen rain that lasted more than ten minutes since he’d stepped foot in Florida.15
It was at that moment that he first got the notion of luring major league teams to train in the Sunshine State. With his boundless energy, he set to work pumping up Florida’s benefits to any teams that would listen. In 1914, the Yankees laid out a rudimentary spring training camp in St. Pete, and, one by one, more teams followed in other towns.16 Lang was a booster at heart; to him, spring training in Florida meant more money in city and state coffers. The plan was that players and the press (and their wives and kids) would stay in the state’s hotels, eats in its restaurants, and play on its beaches. For a month or so every year, it would be a steady income, giving the economy an injection of tourists as well, perhaps. Lang played the promoter for numerous towns throughout the state.
The Tigers believed in Lang’s dream and set their sights on Lakeland. It is no mystery how the town got its name, with 13 natural lakes in the area. Dotting the landscape were numerous other lakes, which were really only abandoned phosphate mines filled with water. Lakeland was famous for its large population of white swans, who graced its waters and lent the town its tranquil flavor. What more idyllic place, thought Lang and the Tigers, for a team to prepare for a baseball season?
Negotiations between the Tigers and the city began in November 1933, and when a team representative toured Henley Field, he was impressed with what he saw. The park was overhauled (including a complete re-sodding), and the city forked over $1,500 to the Tigers as an inducement.17 How long the club would continue to train there, however, was anybody’s guess. As writer Sam Greene of the Detroit News noted at the time, “It’s getting to be a habit for the Tigers to change camps every season.”18 The club arranged for the players to stay at the Terrace Hotel in downtown Lakeland. Near the end of January, Cochrane made a stop in the Quaker City before heading down to Florida a few weeks later.
It was a bitterly cold day in Moscow when Kliment Voroshilov, the Soviet Commissar of War, took to the podium at the All-Union Communist Party Congress on February 3. The central issue of his strident address was Japanese saber rattling. Despite Soviet diplomatic efforts, the land of the rising sun appeared unconvinced that peace was better than the prospect of war. From now on, Voroshilov insisted, it would be ridiculous to ignore Japan’s preparations for invasion. Interrupted frequently by thundering applause, the Commissar boasted that the Red Army was readying defenses on the U.S.S.R.’s eastern border.
Three days later, news from the streets of Paris was not any better. Furious mobs, revolting against the French government, engaged in open battle with police and troops into the morning hours. Rioters tossed torches through the first-floor windows of the historic Ministry of Marine building, setting it ablaze. Machine gun fire raked the front of the American Embassy. Fifteen demonstrators were shot and killed, while hundreds more were injured. Later that month in Austria, socialists who opposed Fascist threats in the government sparked fighting in the country’s five-day civil war. Hundreds died and thousands were wounded. In the peak of the turmoil, Great Britain, France, and Italy all warned Hitler that Nazi Germany must not meddle in the situation.
Back home, Labor unrest was roiling America. That same week, nearly a thousand striking New York City taxi drivers descended on Times Square “just as after-theatre crowds were at their height in the mid-town section.” Among their demands was the formation of a taxi drivers union and a minimum wage. “Disorder on a widespread scale flared last night…. Bands of the striking drivers paraded the streets, halting cabs, ousting the passengers, breaking doors and windshields, slashing tires and in some cases wrecking the machines…. In most cases the passengers were told with rough good humor to use the subways.”19
In Detroit, there were signs that things were improving. The Associated Press reported that the number of men at work in Detroit factories of any type had doubled in just over three months. The report called it a “comeback” for a city that “was literally ‘flat broke’ 10 months ago.”20 Meanwhile, 20,000 production employees at Ford Motor Company’s Rouge Plant received pay raises.
If nothing else, 1934 promised to be more pleasant in one respect: The same day as Voroshilov’s address in Moscow, saloons in Detroit resumed the legal sale of liquor by the glass, after nearly 16 years of Prohibition. Beginning at precisely six o’clock that evening, bartenders were free to open the taps and pop the bottles. The manager of the cocktail lounge at the Book-Cadillac Hotel confirmed that Martinis were the most popular drink that night, followed closely by the Manhattan and the Old Fashioned. For the average working class stiff who could not afford the prices at the Book, Detroit had plenty of neighborhood bars. Some of the more popular ones were the Moesta Tavern at Jefferson and East Grand Boulevard, the J. B. Cocktail and Liquor Bar on Bates Street, and the Dolph Saloon. Baseball fans could drop in at Nemo’s Bar on Michigan Avenue for a cold beer on the way home after a game.
While Detroiters imbibed at their favorite watering holes, another long-awaited piece of progress was very much in doubt. Early in March, the State Public Works Administration Board all but put the kibosh on a proposed $87,000,000 subway project for the city, citing it as a financial pie in the sky. Harold Ickes, Secretary of the Interior, also denounced the plan as unsound. With everything that was going on around the globe, however, the most sensational news in America was the breakout of notorious gangster John Dillinger from a supposedly escape-proof county jail in Crown Point, Indiana. Brandishing a wooden pistol he had whittled in his cell, the desperado made his way past the guards and fled to an unknown locale somewhere outside of Chicago, setting off a massive manhunt.
Against this backdrop, Tigers pitchers and catchers arrived in Lakeland, with position players streaming in over the course of the next two weeks. There had been rumors that Goose Goslin would be a potential holdout, but he arrived on time with the ink barely dry on his new contract. As per the Tigers’ policy, terms were not disclosed, but Goslin himself put it thus, “Mr. Navin treated me fine. I hope I can hit .400 for him.”21
Chapter Three
“The tumult and the shouting start”
Cochrane immediately began the process of distancing himself from Bucky Harris. He implemented a far more strenuous and exacting regimen than the Tigers were accustomed to. Sliding pits were brought in. He placed an emphasis on calisthenics, apparently a novel concept to the team. Cochrane believed such activi
ty to be essential for ballplayers who needed to remain supple in order to withstand the grind of a 154-game season.
Off the field, he established a midnight curfew, and players had to be out of bed and ready to go by nine o’clock in the morning. He even went so far as to consult the hotel chef regarding the players’ menu. Cochrane’s biggest culinary bombshell bade that no man be permitted more than one steak per day. Practice sessions began at 10:30 a.m. sharp and lasted for three hours, including a 20-minute calisthenics warm-up session. Drills ran the full gamut of fundamentals, from sliding, to bunting, to baserunning, to holding runners on. Fielders practiced situational plays repeatedly until they became second nature. Cochrane wanted the Tigers to play a more aggressive, heads-up brand of baseball, and players were coached on the basics of the double steal and suicide squeeze. In essence, Cochrane instilled a fresh attitude into his Tigers. Instead of waiting around for the opposition to make mistakes, the Tigers would now force the issue, putting pressure on the other team in order to create their own luck. Spring training of 1934 was a kind of baseball laboratory for the young Bengals. Physical and technical improvements were attained by experimentation, with the result that every player could realize his full capabilities on the diamond. The excitement over the new season had rubbed off on Frank Navin, who made his first trip down to training camp in four years. Walter Briggs also put in an appearance and immediately gave his stamp of approval to Cochrane’s new workouts.
Motor City Champs Page 4