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  THE TIGERS OF '68

  THE TIGERS OF '68 Baseball’s Last Real Champions

  George Cantor

  TAYLOR TRADE PUBLISHING

  Lanham • Boulder • New York • Toronto • Plymouth, UK

  Dedicated to everyone who, holding tightly to

  their father’s hand, walked into a ballpark for

  the first time and fell hopelessly in love with a

  game and a team for the rest of their lives.

  Published by Taylor Trade Publishing

  An imprint of Rowman & Littlefield

  4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706

  www.rowman.com

  10 Thornbury Road, Plymouth PL6 7PP, United Kingdom

  Distributed by NATIONAL BOOK NETWORK

  Copyright © 1997 by George Cantor

  First Taylor Trade paperback edition 2014

  Photos provided by Richard Bak

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

  British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available

  The hardback edition of this book was previously cataloged by the Library of Congress as follows:

  Cantor, George, 1941-

  The Tigers of ’68 : baseball’s last real champions / George Cantor

  p. cm

  Includes index.

  1. Detroit Tigers (Baseball team)—History. I. Title.

  GV875.D6C35 1997

  796.357’64’O977434—dc2196-29580

  ISBN 978-1-58979-928-8 (pbk.: alk. paper)

  ISBN 978-1-58979-929-5 (electronic)

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Ζ39.48-1992.

  Printed in the United States of America

  Contents

  Preface

  CHAPTER 1 Light My Fire

  CHAPTER 2 A Pennant Squandered

  CHAPTER 3 Springtime in Lakeland

  CHAPTER 4 Selling the Dream

  CHAPTER 5 A Matter of Race

  CHAPTER 6 The Duke of Earl

  CHAPTER 7 April Getaway

  CHAPTER 8 An Easy Kind of Game

  CHAPTER 9 Stop the Presses

  CHAPTER 10 The Shuffleboard King

  CHAPTER 11 The Rivals

  CHAPTER 12 The Fox

  CHAPTER 13 Troubled Times

  CHAPTER 14 The Healer

  CHAPTER 15 Reason to Believe

  CHAPTER 16 The Gater

  CHAPTER 17 Deadline USA

  CHAPTER 18 Mad Dog

  CHAPTER 19 The Lost Weekend

  CHAPTER 20 Ratso

  CHAPTER 21 Laughing All the Way

  CHAPTER 22 Rolling to 30

  CHAPTER 23 End of the Weight

  CHAPTER 24 Six

  CHAPTER 25 The Big Finish

  CHAPTER 26 On Dangerous Ground

  CHAPTER 27 Demolition Derby

  CHAPTER 28 Duel in the Sun

  CHAPTER 29 The Doughnut Man

  CHAPTER 30 The Final Comeback

  CHAPTER 31 Grand Finale

  CHAPTER 32 Celebration

  CHAPTER 33 After the Ball

  Statistics THE 1968 TIGERS—GAME BY GAME

  THE 1968 TIGERS—THE STATS

  Preface

  In his own way, Brent Musberger is as responsible for this book as anyone else. The veteran sportscaster was then baseball writer for Chicago’s American, and he was lined up to be hired for the same job at the Detroit Free Press in early 1966. But he backed out, and the paper, to my utter astonishment, picked me.

  The opening in Detroit developed when Joe Falls, the longtime beat writer, was given a column. Most newsmen understood that the American was not likely to survive, and Brent seemed delighted at the chance to get out. But two weeks before spring training, he changed his mind, deciding that broadcasting might offer him a better escape hatch from the coming shipwreck.

  It was a great choice. But it left the Free Press with no one to go to Florida with the Tigers. No one but me, a desperation choice. I had all of three years professional experience as a journalist, none as a sportswriter. I had just been moved to days on the news desk and was starting to get good assignments. But knowing of my interest (well, let’s be honest—my absorption in baseball), a few senior editors suggested my name for the job. When the chance came, I grabbed it. And without the slightest idea of what I was doing, I boarded a plane for Florida and became a baseball writer.

  I was so out of it that I wore a suit and tie to the first workout. At the age of twenty-four, I was the youngest beat writer with a big league team. Most of the players were my contemporaries in age, though, and my paycheck was about as large as most of theirs. We traveled on the same planes and buses, stayed in the same hotels. There was an easy intimacy and an access between writers and athletes that vanished from all sports long ago.

  I worked the baseball beat for four seasons, and it was the turning point of my career. While holding the best job in the world, I learned to be a newspaperman. I learned how to write under pressure, how to develop stories on a beat, how to get information from individuals who were not always happy to talk to me. Most journalists must learn these things in police stations or courthouses. My training ground was a ballpark.

  And as a bonus I got to cover a world championship, watch the ballclub I had rooted for since childhood win the World Series. When Jim Northrup’s triple cleared Curt Flood’s head in the seventh inning of the seventh game, it took all the journalistic restraint I had in my body to keep from jumping up and screaming—as I knew my brother and father were doing in the family room back in Detroit. Instead, I simply said quietly, Oh, my God,” and began thinking of a lead for the biggest story I had ever written.

  The 1968 Tigers never repeated. Over the years, their achievements have slipped into a memory hole between the exploits of the 1967 Red Sox of the Impossible Dream and the 1969 Miracle Mets. These were the darlings of the East Coast media and a Detroit team just couldn’t compare. But in Michigan, and wherever Tigers fans are scattered, the memory lives on, as fresh as yesterday’s box score. This was a team that wrapped itself around their souls and never left. Even today, when you talk with them about some of the events of that year, they are sometimes moved to tears.

  Ten members of that team settled permanently in the Detroit area, and so in a very real sense they never left the scene of their triumph. But it’s more than that. It is the way they won, the times in which they won, the personalities who did the winning. Like the hook from a Smokey Robinson hit, they bring back the emotions of a specific time and place with a clarity that gladdens the heart.

  But they were really not part of those times, at all. When I returned to writing news in 1970, I felt that I had stepped out of a spacecraft, landed on another planet. One of the first assignments given to me was to interview a young man who had dodged the draft and was seeking sanctuary in a Detroit church. He told me that his needs had been taken care of by “The Movement.” I had no idea what he was talking about. The world had undergone a change almost beyond my comprehension. Pot was passed around routinely at parties. Women were asserting their equality. The negroes who existed before I went into the baseball job had vanished, replaced by blacks, and a lot of them were pissed. But baseball had gone on as always. It may have been the 70s on the calendar, but back in the ballpark it felt eternally like 1938, with Gehrig waiting on deck.

  This book is an attempt to put the summer of 1968 into a historical perspective. To ta
lk to the middle-aged men who once were heroes and ask about their lives and what that season meant to them. For them, as well as for me, it was probably the best summer of their lives. For baseball, overwhelmed by change, most of it not for the better, it may well have been the last good season.

  THE TIGERS OF '68

  CHAPTER 1 Light My Fire

  When Mickey Lolich walked to the mound for his pregame warm-ups, the cloud was barely a smudge, a dirty puff of smoke rising behind the left-field light towers. All through the afternoon it grew wider and higher as it climbed into the clear, summer sky. Only those spectators seated high in the upper deck along the first baseline could see it. Most of the 43,000 spectators who sat through the Tigers-Yankees doubleheader on this muggy July 23, 1967, had no idea what was going on.

  Detroit was burning down.

  About thirteen hours before Lolich threw his first pitch, Detroit police had raided a blind pig, an illegal after-hours gambling establishment, on 12th Street. Within minutes, a crowd gathered at the site, which was in a busy commercial area less than three miles north of the ballpark. When the cops tried to shoulder their way to the police wagons with their collars, they found themselves surrounded by angry black onlookers. It was a sultry night. The crowd refused to move. There was some jostling. Threats were shouted. Then someone threw a rock.

  In that instant, 12th Street exploded. The police retreated before the onslaught. Phones rang in the homes of the city’s police commissioner and mayor within minutes. Many of the small businesses in the area were already in flames, their front windows lying in shattered slivers on the pavement and their stock carried off. A few homes and apartment buildings on the adjacent residential blocks were burning, too. A call was put in to John Conyers, the area’s congressman. He was one of the first black men sent to Washington by Detroit voters and the most popular African-American politician in the city. Conyers hurried to the scene, mounted a flatbed truck, and in reasoned tones appealed for calm. A rock came flying out of the furious crowd, and then another. Conyers leaped from the truck and sped out of the area.

  The mob surged south on 12th Street, driving back a line of police who were trying to form a defensive wall with their shields. A newspaper reporter walking behind police was cut by a shard of flying glass and, with blood streaming from a head wound, was carried to nearby Henry Ford Hospital. William Serrin, who later would cover the labor beat for The New York Times, kept his bloodstained shirt as a souvenir of that morning for years afterward. Detroit’s two dailies were already printing their fat Sunday editions when the riot began. When the papers landed on the doorsteps of more than a million homes that morning, they carried not a word of the disturbance. Radio and television stations, operating with skeleton staffs on a Sunday, were asked to downplay the situation. So when fans and players started driving to Tiger Stadium, almost none of them knew what was happening on 12th Street.

  They did know that the Tigers were in a hell of a pennant race. Five teams were bunched within five games of each other on this July afternoon. Four of them—Detroit, Boston, Chicago, and Minnesota—each had taken turns at the top, and California was driving hard, right behind them. One team would put together a streak, claw a path into first place, and then fall back, sometimes all the way to fourth. The Tigers were now running third. They had fought injuries all season long. Al Kaline was down with a broken finger. Willie Horton had missed a month and a half with a bad Achilles tendon. Jim Northrup was afflicted with the mumps. In addition, Denny McLain was pitching poorly, almost as if distracted by other matters, and Lolich hadn’t won in two months. Still, the Tigers hung on, and the city, without a pennant for twenty-two years, was swept up in the drama of the race. The feeling was that if the Tigers could get healthy before time ran out, they were, far and away, the most talented team in the American League.

  Detroit was known as one of baseball’s best cities. The Tigers were adored in good years and bad. So all through the early summer big crowds jammed the ballpark, sensing that this could be the season when, at last, their wait would be rewarded.

  Lolich, although in the middle of a terrible slump, kept the Tigers in the first game of the doubleheader with New York. But two late errors gave the Yankees a 4-2 win. It was the twenty-six-year-old left-hander’s tenth consecutive loss, a team record. Thoroughly disgusted, he dressed between games and prepared for his long, lonely motorcycle ride home, to the semirural town of Washington in Detroit’s far northeastern suburbs. Almost as soon as he arrived he would be notified to report for duty to his National Guard unit. The pitcher was being mobilized for riot duty in the city.

  Detroit rallied to win the second game, 7-3, behind the relief pitching of John Hiller and Mike Marshall. That’s the way it had gone all season. Win one, lose one. Never good enough to take control of the race, or bad enough to fall out of it. Horton’s third-inning homer put the Tigers ahead for keeps. By that time, the dark cloud in the distance was growing steadily. It now extended all the way behind the center-field stands. The press box knew what was going on a few dozen blocks away, and sportswriters looked apprehensively at the swirling smoke. A New York columnist surveyed the scene. “Maybe they’re just getting the merchandise together for Willie Horton Day,” he said. No one laughed. Detroit was burning down. It would never be the same city again.

  But the games went on that day. It was as if the stadium was wrapped in a cocoon, untouched by the catastrophe that was engulfing the city. This was not the first urban riot of the late ’60s, and it certainly would not be the last. However, with forty-three deaths before order was restored, it was the deadliest. In this year there were antiwar demonstrations through-out the country. The youth of America were in the midst of their long, strange, transforming trip. Drugs permeated every campus. Young people with flowers in their hair and a blankness behind their eyes aimlessly strummed guitars and spent the summer groovin’ in city parks. The culture was in upheaval. The Beatles and Timothy Leary and the Black Panthers. It seemed that revolution was coming in on the next strong gust of wind. In a hundred ways, large and small, the country appeared to be coming apart. “Come on, baby, light my fire,” sang Jim Morrison over every radio.

  Baseball went on, unknowing and untouched. Mickey Mantle still hit third for the Yanks. Willie Mays roamed center for the Giants. Most ballparks did not even permit rock music to be played between innings. At Tiger Stadium, the organist was told that the liveliest music permitted was a polka. A few ballplayers would retreat to a corner of the trainer’s room and pop “greenies,” diet pills that induced a quick energy surge. But beyond that, with the notable exceptions of alcohol and nicotine, drugs were unknown. The Vietnam protests and rallies, love-ins, and acid trips were part of a parallel reality, one that did not intrude on baseball’s space. A player watching TV footage of a campus anti-war rally—attended by students with long hair and flowing robes and Native American regalia—would turn away from the screen, shake his head, and mutter: “Fuckin’ Halloween.” There was no place for this in baseball.

  By the time the last fly ball of the doubleheader settled into the glove of left fielder Lennie Green, it was after 7:00 P.M. Detroit did not observe daylight savings time, so light already was starting to fail. Twilight was made even deeper by billowing columns of smoke that ascended in an unbroken wall north of the ballpark. The public address announcer gave the final totals for the second game. “For Detroit, seven runs, twelve hits, no errors; for New York, three runs, nine hits, and one error. Winning pitcher, Hiller. Losing pitcher, Peterson. The Detroit Baseball Club has been advised that the Grand River, Linwood, and Fenkell bus lines will not be operating this evening. Please drive safely.”

  Not operating! The streets the buses traveled were going up in flame. Smoke was pouring in dense waves across the Lodge Freeway. Homeward-bound drivers had to slow to an anxious crawl to get through. Gunfire was heard throughout the city, and the 10th Precinct was, for all purposes, under siege by snipers. A woman standing at a second floor
window at a motel near the General Motors Building was shot dead by an unknown gunman. Squads of looters were racing out every major artery of the city, randomly breaking into stores and setting some of them afire. As darkness fell, flames illuminated a dozen neighborhoods. The situation was far beyond the control of police and National Guard units. But Michigan’s Governor George Romney hesitated for hours before requesting federal troops because the phone call had to go to his political enemy, President Lyndon B. Johnson. Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, one of the young stars of the Democratic Party, was watching his reputation and ambitions turn to ashes in Detroit’s streets. All this was breaking loose in the world outside baseball’s cocoon. But all that the Tigers saw fit to tell their spectators was that some bus lines weren’t running, as if nothing more was going on than a drivers’ strike or an especially troublesome water main break.

  Motown was burning down.

  By nightfall, Lolich had returned to the city in full combat gear, assigned to guard a public works supply depot on the West Side. He belonged to the 191st Michigan National Guard unit, which ran a motor pool. What exactly his motor pool was sup-posed to do in this supply depot, miles from the scene of any rioting, was never made clear to him. He did know, however, that he was hungry. All he’d had to eat all day had been a snack between games, and because he’d lost again he hadn’t had much of an appetite.

  “All 1 knew was that 1 was starved and so were the other guys,” he said. “We’d all been told to report immediately, and most of us hadn’t been able to grab dinner. So after a while, when it looked like nothing was happening where we were, I decided to try and find someplace open and get some food. The streets were empty, and I was just walking along, with my rifle out in front of me, the way we were taught to patrol. Finally, I found this little hamburger place that had stayed open. The guy was really glad to see me, and he loaded me up with burgers, fries, and shakes. The only problem was I had no way to carry them back. If I slung my rifle over my back I’d be violating military policy. I could be court-martialed or something. So the storeowner sent his kid back with me. He carried the food, and I was his armed escort. If anyone had tried to grab those burgers, man, they’d have been in for the fight of their life. That’s how I spent my first night on duty in the riot.