Motor City Champs

by Scott Ferkovich

  The Tigers’ second trip to Yankee Stadium in 1934 did not get off to a good start. On June 16, Bridges was cruising with a 4–2 lead when the wheels fell off in the bottom of the seventh, as the Bronx Bombers scored six runs. Yankees catcher Bill Dickey struck the key blow. Still suffering from flu-like symptoms that forced him to miss the previous game, he came in as a pinch-hitter with two out and a man on board in the seventh. The “wobbly convalescent”6 sent the first pitch high and far into the right-field bleachers for a two-run homer, and the Yankees never looked back. It was their fifth straight win and put them two games up on Cochrane’s cats.

  A raucous Sunday crowd of over 55,000 jammed the House That Ruth Built for a doubleheader on June 17. The Yankees drew first blood, taking the opener by a score of 3–2 behind the splendid pitching of Lefty Gomez, who collected his 11th win. In the nightcap, Detroit righted its ship with a 5–2 victory. Bespectacled Vic Sorrell went the distance for his fifth win, but the highlight of the game came from Babe Ruth. “He didn’t get a homer—didn’t even get a single. But the mighty Ruth gave the crowd its thrill, nevertheless. In the sixth inning, the Bambino made one of the most spectacular catches ever made on a diamond. He raced almost to the right-field bleacher front and, leaping high in the air, with his gloved hand speared Goslin’s drive just as it seemed about to drop into the bleachers.”7

  The fourth game was not for the faint of heart. Lou Gehrig homered, his 17th of the year, to put the Yanks up by three runs in the fifth. Down 5–4 in the ninth and facing the prospect of slipping three games back in the loss column, Detroit snatched the lead on a two-run double by Pete Fox, who entered the game hitting .241. The ninth-inning drama continued in the home half of the inning. With the tying run on first and one down, pinch-hitter Ruth “whiffed ingloriously.”8 A single and a wild pitch put Yankees on second and third, but the rally, and the game, ended with a whimper when Gehrig grounded out weakly to second. “It was one of the most dramatic ninth innings of the year,” wrote H. G. Salsinger.9 Final score: Detroit six, New York five. Marberry, despite failing to dazzle, had notched his ninth win for Detroit.

  “The whole club is on the move now,” writer John Lardner quoted Cochrane after the game. “We got a good ball town and they’ve been drawing ’em in right along all season. I don’t say we’re sure to beat out Washington and the Yanks, but it’s a good chance. You ought to wait till after the party’s over to start handing out those medals. Nobody knows yet.”10

  Perhaps sensing that there had been enough thrills for one series, the weatherman sent a heavy dose of rain, washing out the next day’s tilt. The Tigers were able to beat it out of the Bronx with a split of the four games. The newspapers the next day would show that their record stood at 33 wins and 23 losses, with the Yanks breathing down their necks at 32 and 22. As for Ruth, Tigers pitchers had applied the shackles to the Sultan of Swat, holding him to only a solitary single in 12 at-bats. Although hitting over .300, the greatest star the game had ever seen was clearly reaching the end. Wrote Dan Daniel, “If I cannot blow the bugle about the Babe, I am not going to say anything at all, as I think it is a downright miracle for him to be out there day after day.”11

  To that point in the season, manager Joe Cronin’s Washington Senators had failed to play up to expectations. When Detroit reached the nation’s capital fresh off its exciting series in the Bronx, the Senators were in third place, an uninspiring 32–27. At only two and a half games out, however, Washington was still very much in the hunt. Winners of seven of their last ten, they were poised to make their run.

  Detroit’s hot bats, however, proved to be too much for the Senators’ pitching staff. The Tigers tallied 47 runs in taking four out of the five games, including two extra-inning affairs. “When you can win that kind,” observed Cochrane, “and the kind that we closed with in New York, then you’ve got to conclude that you’ve got a fine chance to do things.”12 Elden Auker won twice, and Hank Greenberg, who had been gaining confidence as the season went along, hit .414 with 20 total bases and 11 runs driven in. Detroit now had five regulars batting .300 or better. Even if they fell behind early in a game, the Tigers refused to concede defeat until the last out.

  By the time the dust settled on June 23, Washington was five and a half games behind first-place Detroit and fading fast. Cronin’s men never recovered. The stunning weekend ultimately proved to be the Senators’ Waterloo: By the All-Star break, they were nearly ten games behind and effectively finished. Despite his team’s thrashing at the hands of Detroit, Cronin was not ready to throw in the towel: “We are not out of the race yet,” he insisted. “We are trailing by plenty, I know, but the deficit can be made up if only somebody will come along and beat those Yankees.”13

  The Tigers won two of three from the Athletics in Shibe Park, and then returned to the Motor City for a single game with the White Sox on June 28. Detroit was in the grip of a scorching heat wave, with the mercury hitting 103 in the late afternoon. Overcoming a late 6–2 deficit, the Tigers sent the game to extras. In the tenth, Gehringer led off with a double, and one out later Greenberg drove him home with a two-bagger of his own. But Detroit was a half-game behind the Yankees, who had been nearly unbeatable since bidding the Tigers bon voyage ten days prior.

  “Music! Laughter! Girls!”

  Thus proclaimed a movie poster in May 1934 for a new 19-minute short. It starred the virtually unknown slapstick trio of Moe Howard, his brother Jerome (also known as Curly), and Larry Fine. Entitled Woman Haters, the film earned the Three Stooges the sum of $1,000 a week (split three ways) for their Columbia Pictures debut.14 That same month, fans of the silver screen fell in love with a five-year-old actress from Santa Monica, California, who made a big splash in the film, Stand Up and Cheer. While not the first movie appearance by Shirley Temple, it was the one that catapulted her to stardom. Benny Goodman, the jazz clarinetist and bandleader, hit the top of the charts for 15 weeks in 1934 with his version of “Moon Glow.” The Major Bowes Amateur Hour made its debut in April on radio station WHN in New York. In time it became one of the most popular programs of its era. James M. Cain, meanwhile, rocked the literary establishment with the publication of his violent, now-classic noir novel, The Postman Always Rings Twice.

  On the political front in 1934, Italian fascist dictator Benito Mussolini gave a thunderous speech in Rome in March. “We prefer to be feared rather than loved, and we care not if we are hated…. In the 21st Century, Italy will have the primacy of the world…. There is only one order: Conquer!”15

  On May 17 in New York, “with Nazi swastikas dominating the scene and 750 policemen on hand to prevent disorders,” a crowd of more than 20,000 descended on Madison Square Garden. Denouncing the “Jewish boycott of Germany,” the throng defended the policies of Adolf Hitler, the Reich Chancellor of Germany. On the other side of town, at a meeting of the American Jewish Conference, one bold speaker declared, “The Nazi outburst has brought out the best in the rest of the world. It has surrounded Germany with peoples intent to resist prejudice and intolerance to the utmost. In that sense, Hitler was a fine thing for the world.”16

  In Toledo, Ohio, roughly 1,300 members of the Ohio National Guard were deployed to quell 6,000 strikers at the Electric Auto-Lite Company. Workers had demanded a ten percent wage increase. The two-month-long “Battle of Toledo” resulted in two fatalities and hundreds of injuries. Meanwhile, striking dockworkers in San Francisco were confronted with the “guns and gas” of the city’s finest, as “open warfare” flared on the waterfront. Further south, in San Diego, strikers attacked two replacement dockworkers, and 15 policemen were called in to halt the violence. Also among the discontented were the 300,000-strong United Textile Workers of America, who called for a general strike rather than accept an order to drop production by 25 percent.17 Louisiana Governor Huey Long, tapping into the simmering labor instability and economic doldrums of the Depression, promulgated his “Share Our Wealth” movement.18 For many Americans, prosperity was something
seemingly beyond their grasp.

  The exploits of gangsters and bank robbers had a certain perverse fascination for many in Depression-era America. Bonnie Parker and Clyde Barrow eluded capture in a crime spree across a half-dozen states and 15,000 miles. They were finally gunned down on May 23 in an ambush near Arcadia, Louisiana. Meanwhile, with John Dillinger still on the run, the Justice Department placed a $25,000 bounty on his head. In one bank robbery, Dillinger made his getaway in a stolen Ford. Feeling the need to thank Henry Ford for manufacturing such a speedy machine, Dillinger penned a letter to the auto magnate, dated May 16, 1934. Ford received it the following day:

  Hello Old Pal,

  Arrived here at 10 AM today. Would like to drop in and see you.

  You have a wonderful car. Been driving it for three weeks. It’s a treat to drive one.

  Your slogan should be Drive a Ford and watch the other cars fall behind you. I can make any other car take a Ford’s dust.

  Bye Bye

  John Dillinger19

  Ford, who likely did not lack for ad men, declined to respond to the roguish testimonial.

  Across the Atlantic, the Nazi Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels, arrived at the University of Warsaw in June. Under Polish police protection due to heavy protests, Goebbels delivered a lecture “on the aims and purposes of the National Socialist Movement.”20 Not everyone in Germany, however, was swayed by the information campaign Goebbels had been waging. Months earlier, Carl von Ossietsky, a German pacifist journalist, was unceremoniously whisked away to the Papenburg-Esterwegen concentration camp for his dissenting views.21 Soon after Goebbels’ Warsaw speech, Vice Chancellor Franz von Papen, in an oration at the University of Marburg, denounced the “revolution,” along with the suppression of speech and the Nazi terror that it had inspired. “It is time,” he passionately implored, “to join together in fraternal friendship and respect for all our fellow countrymen, to avoid disturbing the labors of serious men and to silence fanatics.”22 Soon, Hitler instigated the Night of the Long Knives, a bloody purge of nearly 100 party members he deemed liable to stand in his way.23

  With so much unsettling news around the world and at home, Americans in 1934 looked to the national pastime to give them a temporary tonic from their worries and troubles. That summer, sportswriter Grantland Rice wrote: “[Baseball] means a chance for many millions to lose and forget the drabness of their lives for two hours of an afternoon in the speed, the action and the skill of stars, surrounded by the vocal cataclysm of packed stands watching not only the Hubbells, the Groves, the Ruths, the Foxxes and the Kleins, but also the coming stars from minor circuits who play their part in the drama that runs from April to October.”24

  So far, the American League pennant race was shaping up to be a much-needed cure.

  As the season approached its midpoint, Detroit had surprised many critics by hanging close to first place for most of the year. After winning four of seven in a grueling stretch in St. Louis and Cleveland at the beginning of July, including three doubleheaders in four days, Detroit was a mere game behind the Yankees.

  Both clubs had distanced themselves from Boston and Washington, and it looked increasingly like a two-horse race in the American League. For the first time in recent memory, fans in Detroit were excited about their team’s prospects. Wrote Sam Greene, “The Tigers, leading the league in hitting and exhibiting an aggressive, determined type of ball, are no longer viewed as flowers that bloom in the spring and turn to weeds in mid-summer.”25

  For Cochrane, it was more a case of cautious optimism. He knew Detroit did not stack up favorably with more recent pennant winners, particularly the Athletics of 1929–1931, or the great New York teams of Ruth and Gehrig. But he refused to concede to any rival. If the Tigers could avoid prolonged slumps like the one they had earlier in the year, and if their pitching could continue to improve, he knew they stood an even chance with the Yankees. The biggest issue for the Tigers, in Cochrane’s view, was its bench. If anything should happen to big bats like Goslin, Gehringer, or Greenberg, Detroit could be in big trouble. But as long as he could keep penciling in the same players every day, well … but couldn’t every manager say the same thing?

  Joe McCarthy’s New Yorkers were not without question marks, either. They had two top-flight starters in Lefty Gomez and Red Ruffing. Beyond those studs, however, they would have to make do with their two Johnnies, Broaca and Murphy, who were both untested rookies. They had pitched promisingly so far, but could they be counted on as the summer continued? Starting pitching, Cochrane believed, could prove to be the Yankees’ Achilles heel.

  The Tigers knew that if they were to make their move, July was a golden opportunity. They would play nearly the entire month in the comforts of Navin Field, whereas the schedule makers had McCarthy’s men heading on the road from July 11–29. That played right into Detroit’s favor; the Yankees had not shown themselves to be a good team away from the Bronx, while the Tigers played their best at Michigan and Trumbull.

  While Cochrane had the Tigers hustling more, they were by no means a wild, hell-bent team at the plate and on the bases. A disciplined, controlled aggression would best describe the way they played the game. Cochrane fined players who made careless base-running mistakes. No one, however, gave Cochrane more gray hairs than did a young outfielder named Gerald Holmes “Gee” Walker.

  Gerald Holmes “Gee” Walker was one of the most popular players ever to wear a Tigers uniform (courtesy National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, New York).

  Actually, Walker had given Bucky Harris, his former manager, fits as well. But when Cochrane took over, he was under the misguided impression that he could harness Walker. “I like Walker as a player and like what I have seen of him personally,” Cochrane admitted back in January. “He can hit and he is fast. He can overcome his fielding faults.” He then added, in a classic understatement, “They say he is temperamental and I am inclined to think that is true to some extent.”26

  Like every other unmanageable ballplayer before and after him, Walker’s faults were forgiven as long as he could hit a baseball. And he certainly could do that. Twice he had hit over .370 in the minor leagues, and he led the Tigers with a .323 average in his first full season in the majors in 1932. Tigers fans weren’t completely unfamiliar with the Walker name; Gee’s older brother Hub had played with Detroit in 1931. With speed to burn and his reckless style of play, Gee was in many ways a throwback to Ty Cobb, endearing him to legions of grandstand followers.

  Walker approached baseball with a football mentality. This came as no surprise; he was a star halfback at the University of Mississippi, once earning All-Southern Conference honors. One incident on the gridiron typified his take-no-prisoners attitude. Walker lost a game for Ole Miss when he fumbled while plowing through the goal line for a potentially winning touchdown run. Walker, so the story goes, was more interested in slugging an opposing defender than in holding onto the ball, which subsequently popped out of his grasp.

  In the spring of 1934, the Tigers played an exhibition against the Phillies. Hans Lobert, a notorious bench jockey, tried to rattle the hotheaded Walker by hurling invective his way. Walker responded in kind and topped Lobert by banging the ball around the park in each of his at-bats. “Ho-ho,” Cochrane chuckled after one of Walker’s hits. “That’s what I like to see. They can get him hot under the collar all they please just so long as he talks back to them with his bat.”27

  Cochrane appreciated Walker’s raw ability, but the outfielder had a habit of not obeying orders. There were at-bats in the regular season when Walker chose to swing away even though Cochrane had relayed the bunt sign. In the outfield, he did not always position himself the way he’d been instructed, and for all his athleticism and speed, fly balls could be an adventure. At times, Walker lost focus while on the field. Once he got on base, his over-aggressiveness could be a liability. Tigers historian David Raglin phrased it as Walker’s “risk-averse approach to baserunning.”28 John Kieran wrot
e that Walker was a “hot and cold player. Some days he looks like a combination of Ruth, Cobb and [Tris] Speaker and other days he just looks like a Brooklyn outfielder on roller skates.”29

  Cochrane temporarily benched Walked on May 10 after his batting average bottomed out at .233. The Free Press reported, “[Cochrane] has soured on Walker’s chances to make good. He doubts whether Gerald will hit enough to make up for his fielding lapses and is skeptical about him as a team player.”30 The benching did not last long, however. Walker hit a pinch single late in the game, and the next day went 4-for-5 with a double and two RBI in a 10–5 victory.

  Things came to a head, however, at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis on Saturday, June 30. Needing a victory to tie the Yankees for first place, the Tigers trailed the Browns by a run in the eighth inning. After a leadoff single by Greenberg, Walker hit a chopper to third baseman Harlond Clift, whose low throw to second failed to get the force. That made it two on with nobody out, but Walker was immediately caught strolling too far off first base. During the ensuing rundown, Greenberg bolted for third. He was thrown out, but Walker made it safely to second. To add insult to injury, pitcher Jack Knott then picked Walker off second. Just like that, the Tigers had two down and nobody on, and they went on to lose the game. Wrote Charles P. Ward, “The Tigers could have won had Walker not committed his crack pottery.”31

  Mickey Cochrane shows off the form that made him a lifetime .320 hitter (courtesy Ernie Harwell Sports Collection, Detroit Public Library).

  Cochrane kept his cool, not saying anything to Walker in the clubhouse afterward. Nevertheless, he spent a sleepless night pondering his next move. After hearing a few whispered grumblings from various players the next day about Walker’s sloppiness on the basepaths, Cochrane made the decision to send Walker home. “He cost us the ball game,” Black Mike fumed. “It isn’t his first offense, either. I’ve tried talking to him, but he won’t listen. I’ve been as patient as I could be. I’m tired of arguing with him. I’m not going to let him wreck this ball club. It’s unfair to the other players, who are hustling all the time, straining every nerve to win.”32 Walker took a train back to Detroit. On Monday, two days after the incident, he worked out for about an hour at the ballpark, spoke briefly with Navin, and went home to await the return of the team.