Motor City Champs

by Scott Ferkovich

  Injuries limited General Crowder to only nine games and a 1.932 WHIP in 1936. A comeback the next season was not out of the question, but he decided to call it quits. He instead focused his energies on helping to establish an independent team for his home town of Winston-Salem. Known as the Twins, they began play in the Piedmont League in 1937. Crowder even took to the mound, but after only two rocky appearances, he exchanged his uniform for a front office position with the team.

  Elden Auker won 130 games in his ten-year career with Detroit, the Red Sox, and the Browns. After baseball, he found great success in the abrasives business and died a wealthy man in 2006 at age 95. He and his wife Mildred had been married 73 years. Auker was the last surviving member of the 1935 world champion Tigers.

  After only three relief appearances with the Tigers in 1936, Chief Hogsett was traded to the St. Louis Browns, where he struggled as a full-time starter. He also pitched briefly for the Washington Senators; later, the American Association’s Minneapolis Millers purchased his contract. After six seasons in the minors, Hogsett had a cup of coffee with the Tigers in 1944, another example of a player benefitting from the shortage of able bodies during World War II. A born storyteller, he dabbled in the sporting goods business before finding his niche as a liquor salesman.

  Joe Sullivan never pitched in the World Series and lasted only one more season in Detroit, posting a 1.895 WHIP in 1936. After stints with the Braves and Pirates, he hung around for nearly a decade in the minors. Sullivan loved the Pacific Northwest and settled there after baseball, attaining the rank of fire chief in Bremerton, Washington.

  After ten years as a steady, if unspectacular, pitcher with the Tigers, Vic Sorrell toiled in the minors for a few years before retiring. He served in the navy at the Wilmington, North Carolina, shipyards during World War II. After scouting for the Tigers, he became the baseball coach at North Carolina State University, a post he held for 20 years.

  One of the most successful relief pitchers of his time, Firpo Marberry threw briefly for the Giants and Senators in 1936. He played in the minors until age 42. A car accident in 1949 cost him his left (non-throwing) arm, but he recovered well enough to play in old-timers’ games.

  Roxie Lawson won as many as 18 games for the Tigers in 1937, but for most of his nine-year career, he was a nondescript spot starter. He later played, managed, and umpired in the minors. After baseball, he became a navy gunner at a base in Michigan. He was also a car salesman and the owner of a restaurant.

  Clyde Hatter’s big-league career consisted of eight games with Detroit. Once a promising prospect, and he won 16 games at Double-A in 1936. At the end of that season, however, he suffered a nervous breakdown. His 1937 campaign was a disaster from the start. His drinking led to disciplinary problems, and the Toledo Mud Hens suspended him for 30 days. An overdose of sleeping pills led to a trip to the emergency room that summer. Following his sudden death in October of 1937, the coroner listed heart disease as the cause.

  Dixie Howell never made it to the majors, although he played eight years in the Pacific Coast League and the American Association.4 During World War II, he saw service in the United States Navy. He had a stint with the Washington Redskins of the National Football League for one season and went on to coach college football for many years. He was inducted into the College Football Hall of Fame in 1970 (as a player). Howell’s Hollywood career never quite panned out, although he had an uncredited role in a 1936 film, The Adventures of Frank Merriwell. His name lives on in American Literature: Dixie Howell is referenced by Scout, the narrator in Harper Lee’s 1960 classic, To Kill a Mockingbird.

  Perhaps no member of the 1934–1935 Tigers experienced as many highs and lows in baseball as Schoolboy Rowe. Plagued by arm problems throughout his career, he never lived up to the greatness predicted of him. After winning 19 games again in 1936, injuries limited him to only two starts the next season. He spent most of 1938 back in the minor leagues with Beaumont, trying to find his way and his health. He had a comeback in 1940, a year the Tigers went to the World Series. Rowe notched 16 wins in 23 starts with a 1.260 WHIP that season, although he lost two games in the Series against the Reds.

  More arm woes ensued. After another stretch in the minor leagues and an unsuccessful comeback with the Brooklyn Dodgers, Rowe had seemingly reached the end at age 32. There was still some life left in his old arm, however. He caught on with the Philadelphia Phillies, who played at Shibe Park, on the same field where his bid for a 17th consecutive victory had failed miserably so long, long ago. In five seasons as the Phils’ grizzled veteran (interrupted by two years in the Navy), he twice won 14 games and made the All-Star team in 1947.

  Schoolboy Rowe’s baseball odyssey continued past age 40. His fastball long gone but his wits still about him, he toiled in minor league outposts like Shreveport, Louisiana, and San Diego, California. He rejoined the Tigers’ organization as a pitcher-manager for Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in the low bushes in 1951. At the time, he was the last member of the 1935 champions still playing professional baseball. He skippered the Triple-A Buffalo Bisons the following year and finally made it all the way back to Detroit, this time as a first-base coach beginning in 1954. After a heart attack in spring training three years later, he returned to baseball in 1958 to manage the Montgomery Rebels, the Tigers’ Class D team.

  His health, however, was failing. He left the everyday grind of the game to take up scouting for Detroit, covering the Louisiana-Mississippi-East Texas area. A second heart attack on January 8, 1961, proved fatal. Schoolboy Rowe would have turned 51 three days later (although some reports erroneously claimed his age was 48). He was survived by his beloved wife Edna, as well as a son and a daughter. His major league oeuvre read 158 wins and 101 losses. “When he died,” said the Detroit Free Press, “a bit of those golden, unforgettable Tiger pennant summers of 1934 and 1935 went with him.”5

  As they sipped their morning coffee while perusing the sports page, Tigers fans in 1930s Detroit had plenty of fine baseball writers to enjoy. The Detroit Free Press boasted Charles P. Ward’s droll metaphors and M. F. Drukenbrod’s straightforward analysis. The paper also featured the astute reportage of Jack Carveth, W. W. Edgar, and Tod Rockwell, the former University of Michigan quarterback turned journalist. Redoubtable scribes Sam Greene and H. G. Salsinger headed a lineup at the Detroit News that also included Jack Weeks, Alan Gould and George W. Stark. The lyrical beat writer Bud Shaver of the Detroit Times may have been the best of the bunch, despite his propensity for hyperbole.

  No local baseball writer had as wide or devoted an audience, however, as Iffy the Dopester of the Detroit Free Press. His periodic musings, alternately quirky and irreverent, erudite and playful, were always entertaining. A well-read man, Iffy the Dopester was as likely to quote Thucydides as Connie Mack. His exact identity was supposedly shrouded in mystery, and readers willingly played along with the charade. Iffy might promise in print to make a public appearance at such-and-such time, and such-and-such place, only to not show up under a flimsy pretense. It was all a running gag; the whole town knew Iffy to be none other than Malcolm W. Bingay, the managing editor of the Free Press.

  Though born in Ontario, Canada, Bingay was raised in Detroit and became one of the city’s most ardent civic boosters. As a young teen, he landed his first job with the Detroit News as a printers’ devil; by age 21, he was named sports editor. He eventually moved on to the Free Press, where he also wrote a daily discourse called “Good Morning.” Needing an outlet with which to expound on his beloved Detroit Tigers, he created Iffy, whose idiosyncratic style soon found a following among readers. The cartoon mug shot atop Iffy’s column portrayed him as a bald, bespectacled, white-bearded geriatric, a kind of crazy old uncle. In Bingay’s view, the crusty character was a response to other newspaper writers, who were forever lamenting about “If the Tigers had only done this,” or, “If the Tigers had only done that.” Thus, Iffy was born, and he quickly became a Free Press staple.

  The D
opester always supported the home team. It was not a blind, naive support, however, nor did he expect such from his readers. Bingay credited Detroit sports fans with having minds of their own. His job was to give the facts and let the public form its own opinions. He applied the term “dopester” to any writer, whether of sports or politics, who insulted his readers’ intelligence.

  These dopesters are well-known journalists and professional politicians. They speak a common language and know the technique of the game as played in the “smoke-filled back room.” They become so indurated to the finesses of the game that they forget the people are not chips of the sport but are sovereign. The people in a democracy have a way of making up their own minds without paying much attention to the dopesters. They follow their instincts, not any set of rules.6

  Iffy the Dopester became Bingay’s doppelganger, a voice of humor and honesty in an increasingly cynical press.

  As Detroit’s World Series celebration raged around him on that late afternoon in October 1935, Iffy the Dopester closed the curtain on a wondrous summer. “When the years have rolled on and this baseball generation is no more, high tales still will be told of that ninth inning finish. And as the tale is told by the troubadours of another time, the baseballic Homers will give their recital a name. They will title it ‘Courage.’”

  Iffy grasped the import of the moment, both for the Tigers’ organization and for the city that it called home. When Stan Hack tripled in the ninth inning, he wrote, it looked like fate had decreed that Detroit was never to have a world championship ballclub. Tommy Bridges, however, displayed more courage than Iffy had seen in all his decades of baseball watching. Mickey and the G-Men, Schoolboy and the gang, had captured the sport’s ultimate prize. “And now, my hearties, the play is over. With heavy heart Old Iffy says farewell to his comrades of the happy summer days.”7

  Chapter Notes

  Preface

  1. A. Bartlett Giamatti, “The Green Fields of the Mind,” Yale Alumni Magazine and Journal, November 1977.

  Chapter One

  1. Sam Greene, “Hint Harris Will Go to Red Sox; Could Have Stayed with Detroit,” Sporting News, September 28, 1933, 1.

  2. Ibid.

  3. Ken Belson, “Apples for a Nickel, and Plenty of Empty Seats,” New York Times, January 26, 2009, B11.

  4. Associated Press, “Babe Ruth Mentioned as Harris’s Successor,” Reading Eagle, September 25, 1933, 11.

  5. “10,000 Fans Greet Ruth in Honolulu,” New York Times, October 20, 1933, 23.

  6. Harry Grayson, “Why Can’t Baseball Find Place for Ruth, Its Foremost Figure?” Evening Independent, February 7, 1945, 14.

  7. Dink Carroll, “Playing the Field,” Montreal Gazette, May 17, 1947, 15.

  8. Wins Above Replacement (WAR) is a statistic that, according to the website Fangraphs, “is an attempt by the sabermetric baseball community to summarize a player’s total contributions to their team in one statistic.” Essentially, a WAR of 5.0 means that a player provided five more wins in a season than a typical Triple-A replacement player. Any number of 5.0 or above is considered all-star quality.

  9. “Cochrane on All-Time Eleven Picked at Boston University,” New York Times, November 29, 1931, 113.

  10. John Kieran, “Sports of the Times,” New York Times, April 22, 1931, 34.

  11. James C. Isaminger, “Philadelphia Gains Both Batting Kings,” Sporting News, October 5, 1933, 3.

  12. Malcolm W. Bingay, “Mickey So Real His Life Scheme Defies Analysis,” Detroit Free Press, August 12, 1934.

  13. One account has the Athletics’ owner offering both Cochrane and ace hurler Lefty Grove for $200,000.

  14. “Rumor of the Sale of Grove Persists,” New York Times, November 1, 1933.

  15. C. William Duncan, “Mickey Cochrane, Always a Fighter, Should Bring Back to Detroit Tigers Scrappy Ways of Ty Cobb,” Sporting News, December 21, 1933, 3.

  16. James C. Isaminger, “Philadelphia Fans Ready for Bad News,” Sporting News, December 7, 1933, 5.

  17. “Cochrane Deal Is Sure Thing,” Detroit News, December 10, 1933.

  18. H. G. Salsinger, “Bank Demands Compel Mack to Wreck Club,” Detroit News, December 11, 1933.

  19. Mack himself had no plans to step down as the Athletics’ skipper. In fact, he would hang on to the job until the conclusion of the 1950 season, giving him a whopping 50 years at the helm of the Athletics. Of course, Mack was also the owner that entire period, and even though Philadelphia was mostly terrible in the 1930s and 1940s, he was never willing, whether due to financial reasons or pride, to fire himself.

  20. “Cochrane ‘Poison’ as Foe, Welcomed to Tigers’ Lair,” Detroit News, December 13, 1933.

  21. Associated Press, “Mack Sells Grove and 4 Other Stars,” New York Times, December 13, 1933.

  22. Associated Press, “Mack Lays Deals to Wage Demands,” New York Times, December 19, 1933.

  23. George Kirksey, “Mack Wrecks A’s in Baseball’s Biggest Deal,” Pittsburgh Press, December 13, 1933, 28. With Cochrane gone, the only star remaining from the Athletics’ glory days was Jimmie Foxx, and he would be traded to the Boston Red Sox after the 1935 season. As for Johnny Pasek, the catcher Mack acquired for Cochrane, he never played a game for the Athletics. He was immediately traded, along with former World Series star George Earnshaw, to the Chicago White Sox for catcher Charlie Berry and $20,000. Berry hit .253 in his four years with Philadelphia until his eventual release. Pasek appeared in all of four games for the White Sox in 1934 before vanishing forever into the minor leagues.

  24. Al Demarr, “Caught Between Imperial and Victorian Rooms at the Palmer House,” Sporting News, December 21, 1933, 5.

  25. “Echoes from the Lobbies at the Majors’ Meetings in Windy City,” Sporting News, December 21, 1933, 6.

  26. “Cochrane Is Insured by Tigers for $100,000,” New York Times, December 16, 1933.

  27. That Senators team featured 36-year-old Walter Johnson, who won 23 games. It was managed by Bucky Harris, Cochrane’s predecessor as Tigers manager. Harris also played second base and batted .268.

  28. Frank Young, “Poor Fielding Nullifies Good Battery,” Washington Post, December 2, 1923.

  29. Lawrence S. Ritter, The Glory of Their Times (New York: Harper Perennial, 2010), 279.

  30. H. G. Salsinger, “Why Cochrane Gave Stone for Goslin,” Detroit News, December 14, 1933.

  31. “Goose to Add More Power to Outer Posts,” Detroit Free Press, December 14, 1933.

  32. Sam Greene, “Cochrane Reaches Terms with Navin,” Sporting News, December 21, 1933, 7.

  Chapter Two

  1. “New York to Detroit: My First Trip to the West—Railroad Reflections—Buffalo—The Great Lakes and the New Steamboats—Safe in Detroit,” New York Daily Times, July 13, 1854, 3. This correspondence was sent from the Biddle House in Detroit. Built in 1851 at the corner of Randolph and Jefferson, it hosted General Ulysses S. Grant in 1865. Once the finest hotel in the city, its best days were numbered when the luxurious Russell House opened in 1857. Today, the land where the Biddle House once stood is occupied by the Renaissance Center Complex, which currently houses the headquarters of General Motors.

  2. It had taken months for Ford to build the prototype quadricycle in his Bagley Avenue shed. When the morning of the trial run arrived, he realized with horror that the contraption would not fit through the door. Wielding an axe, he doubled the size of the opening by banging out a few bricks, and the rest is automotive history.

  3. “Ford’s $28,000 ‘Shoestring’ Now $409,000,000,” Michigan Manufacturer & Financial Record, September 9, 1922, 14.

  4. J. G. Taylor Spink, “Three and One,” Sporting News, February 1, 1934, 4.

  5. “Four Killed in Riot at Main Ford Plant as 3,000 Fight,” New York Times, March 8, 1932, 1.

  6. “Cochrane Reaches Terms with Navin,” Sporting News, December 21, 1933, 7.

  7. Ibid.

  8. Richard Bak, Cobb Would’ve Caught It: The Golden Age of
Baseball in Detroit (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1992).

  9. Detroit Free Press, February 29, 1896.

  10. Sam Greene, “Cochrane Is Big Hit as Resident Leader,” Sporting News, January 18, 1934, 2.

  11. Sam Greene, “Intra-League Games on Tiger Spring List,” Sporting News, January 25, 1934, 3.

  12. Sam Greene, “Rogell to Practice Bunting Technique,” Sporting News, February 1, 1934, 5.

  13. Sam Greene, “Goslin Puts Tigers Among First Three,” Sporting News, February 8, 1934, 6.

  14. Steve Steinberg and Lyle Spatz, The Colonel and Hug: The Partnership That Transformed the New York Yankees (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2015), 222.

  15. Dan Parker, “Al Lang Grows Healthy, Wealthy, Wise in Florida,” Sporting News, February 8, 1934, 5.

  16. Ernie Pyle, “Attending to Baseball Business Keeps Al Lang Busy; Makes Him a Happy Man,” St. Petersburg Times, April 25, 1940, 3.

  17. Cinnamon Bair, “Landing Tigers a 1934 Home Run,” Lakeland Ledger, March 26, 2001, 17.

  18. Rick Rousos, “The Tigers’ Live in Lakeland: A Sweet 60th Anniversary,” Lakeland Ledger, March 1, 1996, 1.

  19. “Taxi Strikers Seize Cabs, Rip Off Doors and Force Theatre Crowds to Walk,” New York Times, February 4, 1934.

  20. “Pay Increases Given 20,000 Ford Workers,” Detroit Free Press, February 7, 1934.