Motor City Champs

by Scott Ferkovich

  By now, the late-afternoon shadows had engulfed the entire infield, making it hard for hitters to pick up the ball out of the pitcher’s hand. The Cubs, knowing that Goslin was primarily a pull hitter, shifted second baseman Herman slightly to his left and well beyond the infield dirt. “Herman was actually playing as a second right fielder,” wrote Iffy the Dopester. “He was halfway out to the position of Klein.”8 On the first pitch, Goslin took a vicious cut, launching a drive high and far down the right-field line that brought the crowd to its feet—but it was clearly foul. At just before 3:30, French hurled his next offering toward the outside corner. Goslin shortened his swing this time, a one-handed poke that pulled the ball on an arc over Herman’s outstretched glove into right-center field. Cochrane tore past third and scampered across home plate with the run that gave the Detroit Tigers their first World Series championship. Navin Field erupted in joy as Cochrane’s men mobbed him. “A scene of indescribable confusion followed,” wrote the Detroit Times’ Bud Shaver.9

  It was a wild, raucous picture moments later in the victorious clubhouse. The whooping and hollering Tigers tore into Goslin, pulling off his shirt and hauling him around the cramped quarters. “Hell—what a Series,” shouted Cochrane. He threw himself into his office chair and shouted for a cigarette. “We beat a great ball club. I’m glad it’s all over.”10

  Commissioner Landis and National League president Ford Frick squeezed their way through the mayhem to congratulate the new champions. “I never saw a greater World Series game,” Landis boasted.11 In the thrill of the moment, nobody was likely to disagree with him.

  Even Frank Navin, who rarely stepped foot inside the Tigers’ clubhouse, felt compelled to pop his head in and offer words of praise. One by one, he thanked every Tiger. He then buttonholed American League president William Harridge. “Will,” he whispered, “I’m a sober man. But I have an almost irresistible inclination to get intoxicated tonight.”12 The two left the ballpark arm in arm, bound for the nearest Corktown watering hole.

  “We did our best, so what the hell?” Charlie Grimm hollered to his men as they slouched in front of their lockers. “We still are National League champions and that’s more than anybody expected. We are not world champions, but nobody can say we were badly beaten. It just wasn’t in the books for us to win, so forget it and have a good time during the winter.”13 The Cubs’ 21-game winning streak was their zenith; since then, they had lost six of eight.

  Outside the ballpark, the party surged to the downtown area. Within two hours, an estimated 500,000 revelers were parading through the streets of Detroit, tossing streamers, blowing horns, banging trashcan lids, and hugging complete strangers. Office workers filled sacks with water and dropped them from upper-story windows onto the pavement below. Traffic came to a standstill along the main arteries, as countless vehicles clogged Woodward Avenue from Eliot to Jefferson. Scattered bonfires sprung up, prompting the city’s fire fighters to rush to the scenes, their shrieking sirens adding to the general cacophony. Near Grand Circus Park, one group of rioters tried to tip over a streetcar. “After waiting 48 years,” penned Grantland Rice, “the Detroit Tigers are at last baseball champions of the world. Nothing else matters in this mad, delirious city.”14

  It was a mob scene outside the entrance of the Book-Cadillac Hotel, the Series headquarters for the assorted league and team officials, as well as the press and visiting players. Mounted police tried desperately to restrain the crowds eager for a glimpse of any VIPs returning there for a party. A taxi carrying Goose Goslin, who stayed at the posh hotel, pulled up at the curb. The man of the hour, however, could not open his back-seat door for the press of people. He quickly directed his driver to whisk him away to an unknown location.

  George W. Stark penned the postscript in the next day’s Detroit News:

  It was the Goose who laid the Golden Egg. Goslin the Prophet, in the ninth inning of Monday’s World Series base ball game between the Tigers and the Cubs, fired the shot heard round the world. Well, heard round that part of the world dedicated to the Game.

  He fired the shot that set a city on fire, that catapulted Detroit’s first base ball title in almost half a century into its lap, that released a shower of gold into the pockets of his delirious teammates.

  And Detroit, most base ball-minded metropolis of the universe, staged a celebration the old town will never forget.

  Detroit the Dynamic was living up to its name and its reputation for ascending the grand scale.

  In the years to come, when the myriad fans assembled there are in their easy chairs before the fire, they will tell this story to their children. They will tell the story not only of the galloping Goose, who fired the shot, but they will sing the saga of Tommy Bridges. Tommy who took a leaf out of good old General Crowder’s manual of arms and pitched with a courage the amazed spectators never believed could reside in so small a frame.15

  The citywide celebration continued long into the night. Never before had the Motor City seen such a torrent of joy among its citizenry. Not to be outdone by the rival News as a civic booster, the Detroit Free Press added its own paean praising Detroit and its Tigers:

  It was an outburst of carnival spirit that gave the lie to the gloom-sayers of a few years ago who said that Detroit the Dynamic had become Detroit the Doomed.

  Detroit, through the baseball team that is the symbol and the incarnation of its fighting spirit, had won the baseball championship of the world, and the world was to know it.

  It was Detroit’s salute to America.

  Detroit had the dynamite. Mickey Cochrane and his Tigers provided the spark.

  Detroit celebrated because it had won the world championship.

  It celebrated because it was the city that had led the nation back to recovery.

  It celebrated because it was the city that wouldn’t stay licked; the city that couldn’t stay licked.

  It was Detroit the Unconquerable, ready to tell the world when the moment arrived.

  The moment had arrived, and the world was told.16

  Epilogue

  With a World Series victory came the inevitable financial windfall. Each member of the Tigers took home a winner’s share of $6,554 (about $115,000 in 2016 dollars). It marked the highest figure in history up to that time, not surpassed until the 1948 Series. Salary records for the 1935 Tigers are incomplete, but we do know that Cochrane was the best paid at $20,000, which is understandable given his dual role as manager and player. Stars like Gehringer, Greenberg, Goslin, and Rogell all earned around $10,000. For nearly all the rest of the players, however, their World Series cut was more than their season’s salary; indeed, it represented nearly five times what an average American worker made in a year.

  Other Detroit teams quickly joined the Tigers in the championship ranks. On December 15, the National Football League’s Lions beat the New York Giants for their first-ever title. The Red Wings of the National Hockey League captured their first Stanley Cup in April of 1936. The Associated Press honored undefeated heavyweight boxer Joe Louis with its “Athlete of the Year” Award in 1935. The sporting world hailed Detroit as the “City of Champions.”

  Tragedy quickly cast a pall over the Tigers’ October euphoria, however. On November 13, Frank Navin died of a heart attack while riding his cherished horse, Masquerader, at the Detroit Riding and Hunt Club on Belle Isle. An experienced equestrian, he had taken the steed out nearly every morning for the previous 15 years. News of Navin’s death at age 64 travelled swiftly, blindsiding the baseball world. His physicians had been warning him for years that the stress and excitement of owning a major league baseball team was taking a toll on his health. They had urged him to sell the franchise if he wanted to live a longer life. But the Tigers were Navin’s pride and joy, never more so than at the very end.

  Goose Goslin’s winning hit in Game Six of the 1935 World Series, however, proved to be the final hurrah for the two-time American League champions. In December, Cochrane finally got his wish when th
e club purchased slugging outfielder Al Simmons from the White Sox. It looked to be the move that would keep the Tigers on top in 1936. The New York Yankees, however, made an even bigger splash. They promoted a promising 21-year-old from Martinez, California, named Joseph Paul DiMaggio, effectively altering the American League’s competitive landscape for the next 15 years. In his first regular-season game in the Bronx on May 3, he banged out three hits, including a triple, as the Yanks pounded the St. Louis Browns, 14–5. DiMaggio went on to hit .323 with 29 home runs and 125 RBI, as New York rolled to the American League pennant. The Tigers, with a record of 83–71, finished a distant second, 19½ lengths behind. Babe Ruth was long gone, but DiMaggio became the next Yankees immortal, leading the team to ten World Series titles in his 13 years as a player. Bridging the gap between two of the most dominant players in Yankees history, the Tigers’ 1935 world championship was a kind of shooting star, a case of the right team taking advantage of the opportunity that history handed to them.

  The Tigers starting lineup poses in front of the Navin Field grandstand before a 1935 game (left to right: Jo-Jo White, Mickey Cochrane, Charlie Gehringer, Hank Greenberg, Goose Goslin, Billy Rogell, Gee Walker, Marv Owen, Schoolboy Rowe) (courtesy Ernie Harwell Sports Collection, Detroit Public Library).

  Mickey Cochrane took on the added duties of general manager in 1936. Ever since joining the Tigers, he had operated at a frenetic pace that would have worn lesser men ragged. He lived or died by every victory or loss, and his intensity slowly took a toll on his physical and psychological well-being. The pressures and responsibilities only mounted once he also became the GM. The workload, coupled with his relentless drive, proved to be too much. On June 4, at Shibe Park in Philadelphia, Cochrane hit a bases-loaded, inside-the-park home run. After reaching home plate without a slide, he immediately ran toward the Tigers’ dugout, where he collapsed. The Athletics’ team physician, who treated him for over an hour, blamed it on strain, combined with the excitement of running out the home run. “I don’t know what happened,” Cochrane said after the game. “I started to go to bat but was suddenly seized by a dizzy feeling. Then my heart started beating at a rapid rate, and I thought I was going to die.”1 He revealed that he had had several fainting spells during the last month.

  Doctors determined that Black Mike had suffered a nervous breakdown. He took time off from the team to convalesce at a ranch in Wyoming. He saw action in only five more games that season. He got off to a good start in 1937 before tragedy struck. On May 25 at Yankee Stadium, he blasted a third-inning home run off New York right-hander Bump Hadley. Two innings later, Hadley threw him a 3–1 fastball, up and in. Cochrane was unable to get out of the way, and the pitch fractured his skull. It was long before the days of batting helmets. While he never played again, he tried to return as manager in 1938, but the magic was gone. The team struggled, and he was finally fired in August, ending his days in the major leagues. Cochrane’s legacy as a great catcher and field general endured, and in 1947, he became the first backstop elected by the Baseball Writers Association of America to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.2

  After his wrist injury in Game Two, Hank Greenberg never played another inning of that 1935 World Series, making the Tigers’ victory even more remarkable. Greenberg grew into one of the most prolific sluggers of his day, driving in 184 runs in 1937 and swatting 58 home runs the next year. He missed nearly 4½ years due to service in World War II during the prime of his youth. He returned in 1945, and his ninth-inning grand slam on the final day of that season gave Detroit the American League pennant. He gained election to the Hall of Fame in 1956.

  The Mechanical Man, Charlie Gehringer, retired following the 1942 season, having amassed 2,839 lifetime hits with a .320 batting average. He finished with a career WAR of 80.6. Among Tigers, only Ty Cobb (144.7) and Al Kaline (92.5) have a higher figure. Voted into the Hall of Fame in 1949, he was Detroit’s general manager for a little over two seasons beginning in August of 1951. He did not particularly care for the job, taking it on mostly as a favor to owner Walter Briggs. It was during that short tenure, however, that he signed Kaline, who at the time was an 18-year-old kid from Baltimore.

  Goslin, the final part of the 1935 Tigers’ Hall of Fame quartet, had one productive year left in 1936; the next October, Detroit released him. He played 38 games for the Senators in 1938, batting .158. After a multi-year stint as player-manager with the Trenton Senators of the Interstate League, he called it a career. The man they called Goose racked up 2,735 lifetime hits, with 500 doubles and 1,612 RBI. He retired to his farm, where he spent the remainder of his days on Delaware Bay hunting, fishing, and running his boat rental business.

  Billy Rogell was a regular for only three more years in Detroit and wound up finishing his career as a backup with the Cubs in 1940. After retiring, he chose to remain in The Motor City, and began a nearly 40-year run on the Detroit city council. Just as tenacious in his second career as he had been as a ballplayer, Rogell took pride in developing a baseball school program for Detroit youth. It peaked in the mid–1950s with over 800 teams. On July 24, 2001, the wheelchair-bound Rogell threw out the first pitch before a Great Lakes Summer Collegiate League contest, the last baseball game ever played at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull. On Rogell’s death at age 98 in 2003, longtime Tigers broadcaster Ernie Harwell said, “He was a feisty maverick. He was a good guy in baseball and politics.”3

  Marv Owen had a solid year in 1936, driving in 105 runs. In December 1937, the Tigers traded him along with Gee Walker to the Chicago White Sox. After his major league days were over, Owen was a player-manager for several seasons with the Portland Beavers of the PCL. He also skippered in the California League and the Georgia-Florida League. Later, as a scout, his most notable signing was future White Sox knuckleballer Wilbur Wood.

  Jo-Jo White’s playing time was reduced significantly in 1936 with the acquisition of Al Simmons. By 1939, he drifted back to the minors, but in the war years of 1943 and 1944 he returned to “The Show” with the roster-challenged Phillies and Reds. When hostilities ended, White’s time in the big leagues was numbered. He went on to have some excellent years in the PCL, retiring from the Hollywood Stars at age 40 before embarking on a long coaching and managerial career. In 1967, he skippered the Dallas-Fort Worth Spurs, a team that featured a 28-year-old outfielder named Mike, who also happened to be Jo-Jo’s son. Mike White had played in the major leagues with the Houston Colt .45s and Astros from 1963–1965.

  Mickey Cochrane often called Pete Fox the club’s most underrated player. One of the better outfielders of his era, he hit .302 in eight years as a Tiger before the Red Sox purchased him after the 1940 campaign. He retired in 1945 after a 13-year career in which he batted .298. He managed in the minors after hanging up his spikes, and scouted for the Tigers as well.

  A lethal hitter, Gee Walker had a breakout campaign in 1936, hitting .353 with a .924 OPS. He suited up for five teams in his 15 years in the majors, finishing with a .294 lifetime average and 1,991 hits. Walker was one of the most popular Tigers ever to wear the Old English D. Fans howled long and loud when the team traded him to the White Sox in December 1937; some vowed never to attend another Tigers game. Walker also played for the Reds, Senators, and Indians. He managed for five years in the minors before becoming a Detroit-based representative for a distillery.

  Hub Walker, Gee’s kid brother, played a couple of seasons for the Cincinnati Reds after 1935 and then disappeared into the minor leagues, seemingly never to be heard from again. In 1945, however, at age 38, he made an unlikely comeback with the Tigers, appearing in 28 games and going 3-for-23. He also banged out a pinch-hit double in that year’s World Series, which Detroit won in seven games over the Cubs. Having reached the mountaintop, Walker promptly retired to a life of selling automobiles in suburban Detroit.

  The consummate backup catcher, Ray Hayworth appeared in one game as a defensive replacement in the 1934 World Series and sat on the bench the entire 1935 fall cla
ssic. After his final season in Detroit in 1938, he shuffled around from Brooklyn to the New York Giants to the St. Louis Browns, and finally back to Brooklyn. He played in the majors until age 41 before briefly managing in the minors. He died at age 98 in 2002.

  Forever remembered as the man who replaced Hank Greenberg in the 1935 Series, Flea Clifton played only two more years in the big leagues, averaging .200 for his career. He later suited up in the minors for Toledo, Oklahoma City, Fort Worth, and Minneapolis before leaving the game at age 34 to become a life insurance salesman.

  Possessor of one of the best curveballs of his generation, Tommy Bridges topped the 20-win plateau three times with the Tigers. He also pitched in the 1940 and 1945 World Series for Detroit, and was finally released at age 39 after the 1946 campaign. He finished with 194 wins, every one of them in a Tigers uniform, and a career WAR of 52.5. In 1947, he caught on with the PCL’s Portland Beavers, tossing a no-hitter in his first game. He pitched in the minors until 1950. The last two decades of his life were a difficult battle with alcohol, and Bridges died of liver cancer in April 1968.