by Gruver , Ed;
The Bucs had built a modern Murderers’ Row along the Monongahela. Blass, who opened the season with an NL-best 9-1 record en route to a 19-8 season, said Pittsburgh’s hitters were so awesome that it frightened him to watch them take batting practice. Reliever Bob Miller called the Pirate lineup deeper than the Pacific Ocean.
Blass fronted a deep and versatile array of arms that boasted double-digit winners in Ellis, Nelson Briles, and Moose, along with the clutch Kison. A staff that ranked second in the league in ERA and saves helped pace the Pirates to a major league-best 96 wins. Pirates general manager Joe Brown thought the 1972 staff the best the Bucs had fielded in his nineteen years with the team to that point.
Kison’s 7–4 win over the Cubs on July 2 allowed Pittsburgh to seize the lead for good. The Bucs became the first team to clinch when they beat the Mets 6–2 on September 21. With a third straight title secured and a chance to defend their world championship guaranteed, the only remaining drama for Steel City fans resided in Clemente’s slashing his way toward the magical three-thousand-hit plateau.
Fittingly the confluence of Clemente and baseball history took place in a Pittsburgh stadium built on the confluence of three rivers. Legendary Pirates announcer Bob Prince, “the Gunner,” provided the historic call as Clemente faced Matlack and the Mets on a steel gray afternoon on September 30: “Everybody’s standing and they want Bobby to get that big Number 3,000. . . . Matlack on the oh-and-one, Bobby hits a drive into the gap in left-center field. . . . There she is!”
As the crowd roared and Clemente raced around first base in his signature style, the Pirates’ great had become just the eleventh player in history to record three thousand career hits.
No one could have known it was the last regular-season hit of Roberto Clemente’s life.
10
Battling Billy Martin never backed away from a fight, on or off the field.
He one-punched Matt Batts, Jim Piersall, Clint Courtney, and Jim Brewer and demolished Dave Boswell with two punches. At the time of their fight in 1969, Boswell was in the midst of a twenty-win season for Martin’s Minnesota Twins, who went on to win the West that season. Upon winning his twentieth, all Boswell did was rush to the dugout and plant a kiss on Billy the Kid’s forehead.
By ’71 the two combatants were reunited in Detroit. One year later the Tigers, having taken on Battling Billy’s persona, were fighting for their playoff lives in a four-way battle with New York, Baltimore, and Boston in the bustling American League East. The ferocious free-for-all for the division flag had fans in each of the four contending cities following Motown giant Marvin Gaye’s lead and asking, “What’s going on?” as the Tigers, Orioles, Yankees, and Red Sox daily fought for position in the fluent standings.
It was Martin’s kind of race, a gut fight in which guile counted as much as skill. Battling Billy could be a brilliant manager but also a study in contrasts. He went to Mass on Sunday mornings, loved to hunt and fish with his then eight-year-old son Billy Joe, and would excuse his wife Gretchen from a night of cooking by taking over the kitchen and preparing veal parmigiana. A sincere man, overly sensitive and thus easily offended, Martin owned a medieval code of honor that he enforced with a murderous right hook. He coached old-school baseball but was forward-thinking when it came to race relations. Half Portuguese and half Italian, Martin had an easy rapport with African American and Latin American players. “I’m a minority too,” he would say.
Like many minorities, Martin scraped and scrapped for everything he got. He grew up in poverty in Berkeley, California, the son of a single mother, Joan “Jenny” Martin. His father, Alfred Martin Sr., deserted the family, and Jenny, not wanting her son to share the same name of the man she referred to as the “jackass,” began calling her son “Billy” upon hearing her mother refer to him as “Bello,” Italian masculine for “beautiful.”
Martin was an undersized eighteen-year-old when Yankees skipper Casey Stengel gave him a tryout. Stengel liked what he saw in the scrawny kid, a middle infielder who attacked the game with a zeal writer Ed Linn once likened to a “holy war on every ball hit down to him.”
Stengel, in time, became a father figure for Billy the Kid. The Ol’ Professor taught Martin to take charge on the field, and it was Stengel who brought him up to the Bronx in 1950 over owner George Weiss’s objections.
Billy the Kid was often called the best .260 hitter in baseball because he delivered so many clutch hits. He batted .333 in twenty-eight World Series games and in 1952 made his famous catch of Jackie Robinson’s infield fly when Brooklyn had the bases loaded in the seventh inning of the seventh game. The following October, Martin’s twelve hits in a six-game Series win over the Dodgers were as much as anyone in history had managed even in a seven-game series. His final hit that fall came in the ninth inning of Game Six and delivered a second-straight Series title to the Bronx Bombers.
Martin spent five full seasons with the Yankees before being traded to Kansas City in June 1957. Feeling abandoned again, he refused to speak to Stengel for the next eight years. Billy the Kid’s sensitivity was punctured again when another paternal figure, Twins boss Calvin Griffith, fired him following the 1969 season. He had taken the reins of a talented but fractured club. The Twins had lost to the Dodgers in seven games in the 1965 Fall Classic and in 1969 boasted future Hall of Famers Harmon Killebrew, Rod Carew, and All-Star Tony Oliva. But the team was being torn apart by racial tension. Martin eased the strife, and his managerial fire and fury fueled Minnesota’s run to its first postseason berth in four years.
Battling Billy was fired at season’s end because of his feuding with other members of the organization—namely, traveling secretary Howard Fox and assistant farm director George Brophy. Martin had been out of baseball for a year before taking over the Tigers. Many questioned the Martin-Motown marriage. Billy the Kid’s brassy brand of ball—hit and run, steal and double-steal, suicide squeeze—seemed ill suited to a Tigers team whose key players were comfortably into their thirties and who had always relied on the long ball.
Detroit had won a World Series three years earlier, and the stars from ’68—Mickey Lolich, Al Kaline, Norm Cash, Bill Freehan, Willie Horton, et al.—were aging. Critics said doddering Detroit wasn’t the kind of young team Martin could mold in his image. Tigers general manager Jim Campbell wasn’t so sure. Mayo Smith had skippered Detroit to a World Series title, but by 1970 the Tigers had been tamed; finishing four games under .500, they bore the demeanor of a demoralized club. If they seemed complacent under the laid-back, laissez-faire style of Smith, Campbell figured Battling Billy was a guy whose fierce temper could wring one final season of splendor from his aging veterans.
“What am I going to do, hire a man for what he is and then try to change him?” Campbell asked at the time. “I think [anger is] definitely one of his assets.”
Prior to the start of his first season, Martin met with his players and laid out his expectations for the team.
Detroit went 91-71 in Martin’s first season and jumped from fourth to second in the division. The summer of ’72 saw the Tigers spend more than half the season in first place. Under Martin they had become a model of consistency, leading by as many as four games and never trailing by more than two and a half, winning as many as five straight and not losing more than four in a row.
Hold those Tigers? No way.
“Billy was a heck of a manager, you couldn’t find any better,” recalled Ike Blessitt, a late-season call-up for the Tigers. “Strategy-wise he was one of the best. Between those white lines he was dynamite.”
A year later, however, Blessitt would have what he described as “an incident”—a fight—with Martin that Blessitt said caused him to be blackballed from baseball. A four-sport star at Hamtramck High in Michigan, Blessitt was a solid prospect when he was drafted as a seventeen-year-old in 1967. He spent the next six years in the U.S. Army Reserve, shortening each season to complete his military duty.
Blessitt remembers his eventual
arrival at Tiger Stadium as “one of the biggest days of my life. It was a great thrill for me. Tiger Stadium was one of the great stadiums to play in. The fans were right on top of you and they were into the game. You would be in the on-deck circle and you could look up in the stands and damn near touch everybody.”
Joining a team with legends like Kaline and Cash, Lolich and Freehan, Blessitt almost had to pinch himself:
Coming up to a team in a pennant race, knowing I’m going to put that uniform on and playing in my hometown in front of my mom and dad, it’s a feeling I can’t express,” he said. “Walking into the clubhouse, it was something to see. Kaline was always a gamer. A pitcher would throw at him and he would get up, dust himself off and hit a line drive back through the box. Lolich would go out [to the mound] time and again and never get a sore arm. All those years in the majors he never missed a start [because of injury] but one. He should be in the Hall of Fame. He never said ‘Billy, I can’t pitch, get some one else.’ You put the ball in his hand and he went out there and threw that damn ball.
The Tigers were close, really close; they grew up in the minor leagues together. That’s where they jelled. They believed in each other. We stuck together and Detroit pulled together.
With Kaline and Cash carrying the offense, Lolich and Joe Coleman keying the mound corps, new additions like slick-fielding infielder Tony Taylor providing additional veteran experience, and Tiger Stadium’s ancient confines crowded with fans—Detroit led the league in attendance—the “Ti-guhs,” as the team’s radio voice Ernie Harwell called them, became a hot ticket.
Campbell’s acquisition of Taylor, the former Phillie, paid big dividends for Detroit. Martin platooned the right-handed hitting Taylor with left-handed hitting Dick McAuliffe, and the thirty-six-year-old Taylor responded by batting .303. He was versatile in the field; able to play second base, third, and first; and as NBC’s Curt Gowdy declared, “a good man to have in a tough pennant race.” Indeed. Taylor was a contact hitter who could move runners along. He was smart and had experienced pennant pressure before.
Every Taylor plate appearance was notable for his making the sign of the cross prior to batting and also for his attire. He was one of two Tigers, Cash being the other, who wore just a cloth cap at the plate. MLB had made batting helmets mandatory in 1971, but the rule had a grandfather clause, meaning that veterans could continue to wear their caps rather than their helmets if they chose. Many, like Pittsburgh catcher Manny Sanguillen, wore their helmets on top of their caps. Taylor teamed with McAuliffe, Gates Brown, Duke Sims, Ike Brown, and big Frank Howard to give the Tigers one of the best benches in the league, and they played a vital role in the knock-down divisional race.
Howard had been a World Series hero in the Dodgers’ sweep of the Yankees in 1963. In Game One at Yankee Stadium he hammered a Whitey Ford fastball some 460 feet to center field. The drive reached the famed monuments and is remembered as the longest double in the Stadium’s forty-one-year history. In Game Four in Dodger Stadium Howard crushed a slow curve from Ford into the upper deck in left field. Dealt to the Senators in December 1964, the 6-foot-7, 255-pound Howard, whose nickname was “Hondo,” also became known as the “Washington Monument” and the “Capital Punisher” for his size and prodigious power. In 1972 the Senators, now relocated to Texas and renamed the Rangers, sold Howard to the Tigers on August 31. He was brought to Detroit to platoon at first base with the thirty-seven-year-old Cash, whom Martin wanted to keep fresh by saving him for the big games. Howard hit .242 in September and provided a big win over Baltimore on September 13 when he homered and drove in four runs to beat Dave McNally 6–5.
The Taylor/McAuliffe tandem teamed with Brinkman to turn the double play beautifully. Brinkman was a tall and willowy shortstop in the manner of Marty Marion (known as “Slats” when he played in St. Louis) and contemporary Mark “the Blade” Belanger of Baltimore. Like the 6-foot-2, 170-pound Marion, who was also known as “the Octopus,” Steady Eddie played his position as if he had suction cups rather than hands. Brinkman paired with third baseman Aurelio Rodriguez to make the left side of the Tigers infield air tight. Rodriguez, like his counterpart in Baltimore, boasted a magnetic mitt.
Detroit fans appreciated defense; their Lions had been fielding great defenses for decades. Joe Schmidt, Night Train Lane, Roger Brown, Alex Karras, Dick LeBeau, and Lem Barney played hardball too and thrilled fans on cold, snowy Thanksgiving Days in Tiger Stadium. The fans’ appreciation extended to the summer game, and they hung banners in Tiger Stadium lauding their “Dynamic Duo” at third and short. Curt Gowdy said the theme for the left side of the Detroit defense was “Thou Shall Not Pass.”
Brinkman had come to Detroit in another of Campbell’s shrewd deals that also brought Coleman to Motown for Denny McLain. Martin could not have been happier. He saw some of his scrappy self in Brinkman and played him regularly. Brinkman was the lone Tiger to play in each of the team’s 156 games in ’72. What Steady Eddie lacked in offense he more than made up for in defense. He set an MLB record for shortstops by going seventy-two consecutive innings without an error, a mark that stood until Cal Ripken Jr. surpassed it. Brinkman’s streak caught the attention of the nation’s fans, including President Richard Nixon. Nixon sent Brinkman a congratulatory message in midsummer, and by summer’s end, Steady Eddie’s .990 fielding percentage had earned him ninth place in the AL MVP voting. The Detroit chapter of the Baseball Writers’ Association of America named Brinkman “Tiger of the Year” over Lolich, Kaline, Cash, and Freehan.
At age thirty-seven, Kaline shared elder statesman status with Cash. Kaline was aging, but he proved more than once how difficult it still was to slip fastballs past a great hitter. Martin knew Kaline had just so many games left in him and used him wisely, playing him in just 106 games to conserve his energy and allow him to be fresh for the big games.
Harwell, a.k.a. “the Voice of Summer,” provided the play-by-play and Ray Lane the color commentary on WJZ. A Hall of Fame broadcaster who was the voice of the Tigers from 1960 to 1991 and from 1993 to 2002, Harwell was a native of Georgia known for his charm, southern accent, and low-key style. He was also known for his classic calls:
That one is looong gone!
Two for the price of one for the Tigers!
Strike! And he stood there like the house by the side of the road and watched it go by!
Harwell was a part of the family for many Tigers fans. Via radio, they took him into their homes, took him, as Harwell would note in his heartfelt farewell broadcast in 2002, “to that cottage up north, to the beach, the picnic, your workplace, and your backyard . . . sneaking your transistor under the pillow as you grew up loving the Tigers.”
And Detroit loved Harwell. Blessitt said Harwell could have run for mayor of Motown. “Everybody loved that man.”
For the second time in four years, pennant fever gripped the city. In 1968 Detroit’s downtown department stores had sold everything from Tiger T-shirts to Tiger milk. As fast as cars rolled off the assembly lines of the “Detroit Big Three”—Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors—it seemed Tigers fans plastered them with bumper stickers that read, “Go Get ’em Tigers!” In 1972 Motown was magical again. Fans took transistor radios to restaurants, movie theaters, and Tiger Stadium to tune in Harwell and Lane.
The Tigers’ whirlwind rise to contending status was set against a backdrop of a city in a downward economic spiral. Detroit’s decline, like its rise, was directly linked to the auto industry. Automobile magnates, Henry Ford among them, had developed an industry that for decades would serve as an engine driving the middle class and bringing boom times to Detroit while helping define American creativity.
During World War II Detroit became the “Arsenal of Democracy” demanded by U.S. President Franklin D. Roosevelt. Yet a race riot in 1943 proved a forecast of postwar problems to come. From the mid-1950s into the late 1960s Detroit lost more than a hundred thousand factory jobs. Many white people fled the city for the suburbs; factories follo
wed suit, abandoning the city’s black neighborhoods.
Tensions exploded in the infamous 1967 Detroit riots. For a frightening five days in July, rioters roamed the city setting fires and looting stores and businesses. Some thirteen hundred buildings were destroyed; forty-three people were killed and more than seven thousand arrested.
The riots accelerated the exodus of people and employers from Detroit. In 1972 Motown, the city’s renowned record label, left for Los Angeles, leaving behind both its ten-story headquarters and the city identified with its enormous success. Crime became commonplace, and Detroit became the homicide capital of the country. The Motor City was now “Murder City.”
Like its Rust Belt compatriot Pittsburgh, Detroit in the 1970s sought reinvention via a Renaissance Center mega-project. Yet while it was supposed to revive the city, the Renaissance Center failed for the same reason it was supposed to succeed. Isolated from downtown Detroit, the center did little for the city and surrounding neighborhoods, both of which continued to decay.
If the Renaissance Center on the outskirts of the city was a monstrous failure, the Oakland Hills Country Club, situated in a suburb northwest of Detroit and the site of the 1972 PGA Championship, was simply a monster. So named during the 1951 U.S. Open, for which it underwent a drastic redesign by Robert Trent Jones Sr., the grueling course was finally conquered on the final day by master shot-maker and strategist Ben Hogan. It took Hogan playing perhaps the greatest round of golf in history—a 3-under 67—to bring down the monster. “I’m glad I brought this course, this monster, to its knees,” said Hogan in what remains the most famous quote in golf’s history. In early August 1972 Gary Player slayed the monster, which had been tamed by another redesign but still had teeth, as evidenced by Player’s winning score of 1-over par 281.