Hairs vs. Squares

by Gruver , Ed;

  A five-time All-Star, from 1971 to 1975, Murcer joined Mets ace Tom Seaver as one of New York’s baseball icons. The two represented their respective teams in the 1971, ’72, and ’73 Midsummer Classics but didn’t face each other. Two decades before regular-season interleague games, confrontations between New York’s baseball clubs were largely limited to the Mayor’s Trophy Game.

  Played once a year every season from 1963 to 1979 and again in 1982–83, the Mets-Yankees Mayor’s Trophy Game was an annual in-season exhibition that alternated between Shea Stadium and Yankee Stadium and benefited sandlot ball in New York City. From 1946 to 1955 it had been a three-cornered series among the Yankees, Mets, and Dodgers, and the Yanks and Dodgers would meet one final time in ’57 before the Dodgers moved west.

  When the Mayor’s Trophy Game resumed in 1963, a crowd of 50,742 was on hand in the Bronx as former Yankees skipper Casey Stengel, now managing the Mets, returned to the scene of his greatest triumphs. Even if the Mayor’s Trophy Game was an exhibition, New York fans took their hardball seriously. Whether they were hopping on the F Train at 15th Street, riding it to the Roosevelt Avenue–Jackson Heights station and transferring to the 7 to Willets Point in Queens, or taking the F to West 4th and the D train to 161st and River Avenue in the Bronx, they crammed into Shea Stadium and Yankee Stadium for the one-game Subway Series. It was the rare occasion they could see Murcer and Seaver on the same field or Ed Kranepool shaking hands with Horace Clarke. The game’s outcome would settle, for that summer at least, the endless comparisons made by Mets and Yankees fans: Agee or Murcer, Grote or Munson, Jones or White, McGraw or Lyle.

  On August 24, 1972, 52,308 were in Yankee Stadium to see Yankees rookie Doc Medich beat the Mets 2–1. John Ellis, who in 1973 would become the first designated hitter in Cleveland Indians history, slugged the game-winning homer in the sixth inning off Bob Rauch. The victory marked the Bombers’ third straight over the Amazin’s.

  The Yankees’ drive to the playoffs was eventually ended by key members of the Tribe who would be future teammates in the glory years from 1976 to 1978—Chris Chambliss, Graig Nettles, and AL rookie and Pitcher of the Year Dick Tidrow. And by Perry, whose 1972 season has been called by baseball historian Bill James the best by an American League pitcher since Lefty Grove’s 1931 season. Perry provided sensational pitching for a Cleveland club that was struggling both on the field and financially. Prior to the season the Indians, seeking greener pastures, had proposed to play half their home games in New Orleans. But new owner Nick Mileti outbid, among others, Cleveland shipping magnate George Steinbrenner, and after purchasing the team on March 22, 1972, for $9 million kept the club in Municipal Stadium.

  The Yankees’ failure to win the division didn’t diminish the solid summers enjoyed by Murcer, Peterson, Steve Kline, and in particular Lyle. Lyle was given the pinstriped Datsun that had been delivering him curbside all season. The little car, a sportswriter in the press box cracked, must have twenty thousand miles on it. Lyle, Murcer, and Munson were the pride of the new Yankees, and in 1972 they gave baseball fans in the South Bronx solid reason to believe better times were ahead.

  By the close of the regular season, Red Sox right-hander Luis Tiant was sporting some serious mileage as well. In August and September the venerable Cuban veteran won 11 of 12 games and sparked the Red Sox’ rapid surge from fourth place to first. At age thirty-one and having already traveled a long and winding road, he would finish 15-6, post the best winning percentage (.714) among Boston’s starting pitchers, lead the league with a 1.91 ERA, author one of the great comeback stories of his era, and be the Comeback of the Year in the American League.

  Born in 1940 in Marianao, Cuba, Tiant broke into professional baseball in 1959 with the Mexico City Tigers. Over the next seven years he made stops in Jacksonville, Charleston, Burlington, and Portland before getting called up by the Cleveland Indians. He earned double-digit wins over the next four seasons and in that memorable pitcher’s season of 1968 won 21 games and led the league in ERA (1.60) and shutouts (9).

  Tiant had also set career-highs to that point in games started, complete games, and innings pitched. Changes in the strike zone and to the mound played a role in Tiant’s losing 20 games in 1969 and seeing his complete-games total drop from 19 to 9. Traded to Minnesota in December 1969 in a six-player swap that brought Nettles and Dean Chance to Cleveland, Tiant was diagnosed during the season to have a crack in a bone in his right shoulder. His injuries mounted. In the spring of ’71 he pulled a muscle in his rib cage and was released by the Twins on March 31. He bounced to the Atlanta Braves’ Triple-A farm team in Richmond. When Richmond failed to promote him following a thirty-day trial, Tiant signed with Boston’s Triple-A affiliate in Louisville.

  Brought to Boston on June 3, Tiant went 1-7 with a 4.88 ERA in ’71. Following one loss, Boston Globe baseball writer Cliff Keane began his game story with, “Enough is enough.”

  Titan’s father, Luis Eleuterio Tiant, was a legendary left-hander who had starred in the Cuban and Negro Leagues. Giants great Monte Irvin once opined that Luis Sr. would have been a “great star” had he been able to pitch in the majors. Nicknamed “El Tiante” as a tribute to his Cuban roots, Luis bridged the gap between great Cuban pitchers past and future—El Maestro Martin Dihigo, a twelve-year veteran of the Negro Leagues, and El Duque Orlando Hernandez, who helped anchor the dynastic Yankee staffs of 1998–2004.

  By 1972, however, Luis Jr. had the look of a journeyman. Many were surprised to see him at the Red Sox’s spring camp in Winter Haven prior to the season. But the trade of Lyle to the Yankees likely saved Tiant’s career in Boston. Tiant had seen time as a reliever in ’71, and with Lyle gone to New York, manager Eddie Kasko figured he could bring Tiant in from the pen.

  Tiant was used in a variety of roles—spot start, long relief, and short relief. But when Boston’s “twin aces,” Sonny Siebert and Ray Culp, struggled with inconsistency and injury respectively, Kasko turned to Tiant. Inserted into the rotation following the All-Star Game, Tiant earned a complete-game victory over the Orioles in Fenway Park on August 5 and then twirled a three-hitter against the Birds one week later. Following an August 12 win in Baltimore, Kasko announced Tiant was in the rotation to stay.

  Luis Sr. was known for his variety of pitches and pirouette delivery, and Luis Jr. followed suit. Wiggling his glove prior to his elaborate delivery, El Tiante whirled and twirled atop the mound, delivering a myriad of pitches from a multitude of angles. Reggie Jackson, reacting to Tiant’s gyrations, referred to him as the “Fred Astaire of baseball.” As Tiant turned his back on hitters during his delivery, Curt Gowdy said Luis’s head went one way and his body another. Tony Kubek added that a hitter seeing Luis look down at the ground, up in the air, and then out toward center field while pitching had to be wondering, “Where’s he going to throw it, behind me?”

  Tiant said he came up with the idea for his unique delivery in 1972. The first time he did it was against Cleveland. When he had pitched for the Indians, he had thrown 98 m.p.h., but he couldn’t throw that hard any more, so he started using his body better.

  El Tiante succeeded in lifting the Red Sox from fourth place into a ferocious four-team struggle for the lead. He also succeeded in raising the hopes of the Fenway faithful, who crowded into their little gem of a park. Gowdy broadcast there for fifteen years and said a game was never over at Fenway because of the left-field wall, “the Green Monster,” which Gowdy likened to a “giant handball court” because of the many different caroms a ball took off it. Fans were right on top of the action; they could almost reach out and touch the players. “They’re a part of the game,” Gowdy said of the faithful.

  There was no parking at Fenway, but fans love their little ballpark as much as they love their “Sawx.” Gowdy described Fenway as “a little jewel set right in the heart of Back Bay, a lovely region downtown.” For years the only sign owner Tom Yawkey allowed in Fenway advertised the Jimmy Fund. Fans send money to the Jimmy Fund, and t
he donations are used for research to help children with cancer. The fund started in the late 1940s for a little boy named Jimmy, an alias to protect the privacy of twelve-year-old Einar Gustafson. He was under the care of Dr. Sidney Farber, a father of modern chemotherapy and founder of the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Gustafson’s cancer went into remission, and he lived to age sixty-five. He died January 21, 2001, of a stroke.

  When the Red Sox won the pennant in 1967, they voted a share of their World Series money to the Jimmy Fund. Ted Williams worked for years behind the scenes for the Jimmy Fund, and the late Cardinal Cushing called the Jimmy Fund the “little people’s charity.” During Gowdy’s years broadcasting Red Sox games he would get sacks of money sent to him for the Jimmy Fund.

  Teddy Ballgame and the Jimmy Fund were at the center of one of the most celebrated—and least remembered—moments of the Red Sox ’72 season. On August 25 Fenway Park was filled with an overflow crowd—33,551, 172 above capacity—for a game with the Texas Rangers. The pregame festivities focused on a hitting contest to raise money for the Jimmy Fund. Former players and local media types took part, but one notable absentee was Williams, who was the Rangers’ manager. Ted was five days short of his fifty-fourth birthday, and the former Splendid Splinter was wearing a warmup jacket to hide his expanding waistline. Fenway fans knew Williams was in the visitors’ dugout and began to chant, “We want Ted!” and added to the uproar by slamming their wooden seats up and down. Williams, reluctantly it seemed, headed to the Rangers’ bat rack and pulled out a piece of lumber belonging to Tom Grieve. The bat—a W183 model—was familiar to Williams. The “W” stood for Williams and had been his preferred bat.

  On the mound was Red Sox pitching coach and former major league hurler Lee “Stinger” Stange. The Stinger lobbed a couple of pitches, and Williams growled to put some heat on them. Stange obliged, and Williams proceeded to lash fifteen line drives on fifteen swings. One drive just missed clearing the wall in right field.

  It had been twelve years since Williams retired, twelve years since Teddy Ballgame had stood in the batter’s box on the left side of the plate at the Fens and twisted his body into that familiar and iconic swing—a barber’s pole twisting unto itself, someone once observed; twelve years since Red Sox fan John Updike had penned his classic short story—“Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu”—about Williams’s final swing in Fenway, a drive that resulted in a home run. It was a moving tribute to a hero in twilight. On that day, the Kid, as Williams was known, had refused fans’ exhortations to come out of the dugout and acknowledge their “We want Ted!” pleadings. Updike understood. “Gods,” he wrote, “do not answer letters.” In ’72 Hub fans had bid the Kid redo, and he responded. Williams, as much a god in Boston as John Kennedy or Paul Revere, had finally answered the letters from the faithful. More than one Fenway fan had tears in their eyes.

  What few realized was that Williams had prepared for the day. According to Grieve, Rangers coach Nellie Fox said Williams had spent the previous six weeks in the batting cage in case he decided to hit. “You didn’t really think he’d go out there and embarrass himself?” Fox asked Grieve.

  Tiant beat Texas 4–0 and was aided by another Luis — Aparicio — the little shortstop hitting what was for him a rare home run. Tiant’s shutout was his second in a startling string of four straight. From August 5 through September 7 Tiant won seven straight. A narrow 3–2 loss in New York stopped his streak but only momentarily. Teaming with young catcher Carlton Fisk, who in 1972 became the American League’s first unanimous choice for Rookie of the Year honors, Tiant won four straight complete games from September 16 to 29.

  Tiant’s September 20 win over the Orioles in the second game of a doubleheader was a night to remember. Boston’s baseball fans had been subjected that summer to what writer Roger Angell described as a “petty and senseless campaign of vilification” against Kasko by local sportswriters and radio broadcasters. Pushing that feud aside, the Fenway faithful fell in love with their mound maestro, filling the fall air with chants of “Loo-eee! Loo-eee!” as he walked to the bullpen to warm up for his duel with Cuellar.

  Red Sox superstar Carl Yastrzemski, who had thrilled the city with a Triple Crown summer five seasons before, said he had never heard anything like it in his life. Forty years later, in June 2012, El Tiante was celebrated at Fenway prior to a game with the Washington Nationals. The chants of “Loo-eee! Loo-eee!” from that long ago September night were replaced by “Louie, Louie,” the Kingsmen cover that had climbed the charts in 1963.

  Tiant’s 4–0 win helped bury the Birds, and nine days later in Baltimore, his 4–2 victory over Palmer, a 21-game winner, ended the Orioles’ reign in the East and kept Boston’s lead over Detroit at a game and a half with five to play. Just as it had in the Impossible Dream season of ’67, revelry rose from the railway bridge and Kenmore Square.

  Yaz’s 2 homers and 4 RBIs provided the difference in Boston’s close—and crucial—late September wins in Baltimore. It was a fast finish following a slow start for the Red Sox star, whose first home run of the season hadn’t come until the afternoon of July 22, when he caught hold of a Catfish Hunter offering at Fenway. Gowdy called Yaz’s home run drought “one of the most confounding statistics of the year.” Yaz hit just 12 homers all season, and his sudden power outage was shared by the rest of the Red Sox. Rico Petrocelli’s May 5 homer was the club’s first of the season and Boston’s first in 220 days. The Red Sox would hit 124 round-trippers in ’72, Fisk leading the way with 22 and Reggie Smith following with 21 and a team-leading 74 RBIs. By season’s end, Fisk owned a team-best .293 batting average and a Gold Glove.

  With Tiant, Smith, and Fisk fronting their charge, the Red Sox took over first place on September 7 and held it for all but one day through October 1. The trading of the 1967 Impossible Dream ace Jim Lonborg to Milwaukee for centerfielder Tommy Harper and starting pitcher Marty Pattin had signaled a transition year in Boston. Sporting the second-worst ERA in the league, the Red Sox could have used Lonborg’s 14 victories, 2.38 ERA, and big-game experience, but a far worse trade had occurred in March, when Lyle was sent to the Yankees. It was one of the most impactful deals ever and likely cost the Red Sox playoff berths in 1972 and ’77 and a world title in ’75 while allowing the Yankees to end their postseason drought in 1976 and world championship drought in ’77.

  Boston didn’t make its move until August but then engaged on the greatest ride the town had seen since Paul Revere—or at least since the 1967 squad. Pattin helped anchor the starting rotation, and Harper set a Red Sox standard for steals that wouldn’t be matched until Jacoby Ellsbury came along four decades later. Along with Fisk, the young talent included Dwight Evans, who debuted in September and would be in the lineup for the crucial season-ending series in Detroit; Ben Oglivie; and Cecil Cooper.

  From September 1 on the division lead was always less than two games. In the division era that began in 1969, the ’72 AL East race ranks with the NL East races in 1973 and ’80 as the wildest and more memorable multi-team races of the pre–wild card years. Boston split its next two games with Baltimore and was just a half-game up heading into Detroit, into the Tigers’ den, for the final three games of the regular season.

  Called “the Corner” because of its location on Michigan and Trumbull Avenues, Tiger Stadium in the last days of the 1972 season was the Hot Corner. Built in 1912 and opened on the same day as Fenway Park in Boston, it was originally called Navin Field for Tigers owner Frank Navin. Following Navin’s death in 1935, the stadium was renamed Briggs Stadium in 1938 after new team owner Walter Briggs. The Detroit Lions took up residence in the stadium, which served as their home field through 1974 and was the site of several championship games as well as the annual Thanksgiving Day classic.

  In 1961 owner John Fetzer renamed the ballpark one final time: Tiger Stadium. In 1972 the American League was known for its antiquated sites—Fenway Park, Yankee Stadium, Comiskey Park, Memorial Stadium in Baltimore, Cleveland’s Municipal St
adium, and Metropolitan Stadium. And Tiger Stadium, with its time-worn facilities, green wooden seats, steel support beams, and obstructed view seats fit into that category. But like its brethren, the Corner was beloved by Detroit fans due largely to its historic feel.

  Ty Cobb had played there, and visitors could point to the area around home plate and recall “Cobb’s Lake,” created on the order of the Georgia Peach, who told groundskeepers to water the dirt so his bunts would die in the mud. The Corner was where Babe Ruth hut his 700th career homer; where Lou Gehrig, the “Iron Horse,” voluntarily ended his Iron Man streak; and where Ted Williams won the 1941 All-Star Game with a dramatic upper-deck homer. Bobby Layne buggy-whipped the Lions to NFL titles there, and Roger Brown, Alex Karras, Joe Schmidt, and Detroit’s defense sacked Green Bay’s Bart Starr eleven times and ruined Vince Lombardi’s perfect season on Thanksgiving Day in ’62.

  With the American League East the only race still undecided, Tiger Stadium was the center of the baseball universe on Monday, October 2. Detroit sent Lolich, its ace and 21-game winner, to the mound for the series opener. The Tigers by this time were minus the services of Bill Freehan, a career eleven-time All-Star catcher who had suffered a hairline fracture of his thumb and would miss the final eleven games of the regular season.

  It was a three-game series reminiscent of prior playoffs to decide the NL title: in 1962 (Giants-Dodgers), ’59 (Dodgers-Braves), ’51 (Giants-Dodgers), and ’46 (Cardinals-Dodgers). Because of the schedule imbalance there was no chance of a one-game playoff such as had occurred between Boston and Cleveland in 1948 and would occur again between the Red Sox and the Yankees in ’78 and Houston and Los Angeles in ’80.

  Much to the delight of the 51,518 customers crammed into Tiger Stadium on October 2, Lolich was immediately staked to a 1–0 lead when Kaline clouted a home run off John Curtis. The Red Sox tied it in the third on Yaz’s RBI double, but a base-running mishap may have cost Boston the title. Harper and Aparicio had lined consecutive singles to left when Yaz dug in against Lolich. A line-drive double to center scored Harper, but Aparicio, storming home, slipped and fell on the wet turf while rounding third. Luis retreated to third only to find Yaz flying toward the bag. Yaz, criticized in some accounts for not looking at third base coach Eddie Popowski, was caught in a rundown, and the strangeness of the play was reflected in the putout (8–6–2–5).