Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever (12 page)

The following day, McLain got his shot, shutting out Boston for the first five innings. Yet he ran into trouble a frame later when the Red Sox tied the game at 3–3, setting the stage for the first set of improbable heroes of the Tigers’ 1968 season.

After winning fifteen games the year before at Rocky Mount, Jon Warden improbably found himself on the mound at Tiger Stadium when McLain was lifted by manager Mayo Smith. Nearly a half-century later, Warden laughed when he recalled how badly his legs were shaking as he made his major-league debut.

“I kept wondering what I was doing out there,” he said. “And how was I going to get out it? I mean I’m facing the Boston Red Sox. The defending American League champs.”

The rookie proceeded to load the bases in the eighth inning but then escaped the jam without a run scoring. The next inning he fanned none other than Yastrzemski, the previous season’s Triple Crown winner, for his first major-league strikeout.

“Carl Yastrzemski,” Warden remembered. “Can you believe that?”

In the bottom of the ninth, with the score still knotted at three apiece, Brown came to the plate. The Gator had struggled in 1967 with a dislocated wrist and late in the season the ballclub obtained Eddie Mathews, one of the game’s all-time home-run leaders, for pinch-hitting duties. The Tigers had been open to dealing Brown, eager to listen to any offer. Yet as the new season began, Brown was still on the roster.

“By the time ’68 came around, [manager] Mayo Smith and I weren’t the best of buddies, if you catch my drift,” Brown said. “He didn’t think I could do the job by then. He tried to trade my ass during the winter, but there weren’t any takers. He wanted Eddie Mathews to be his prime pinch hitter and looking back on Eddie’s career, who could blame him?

“But I’m not the kind of guy to take that kind of thing lying down. All I needed was a chance and I was going to make the most of it, and that’s exactly what I did. Let’s just say that when ’68 began I was plenty pissed off.”

In that second game of the season, Smith had already used Mathews as a pinch hitter. So it was left to Brown to do the job in the ninth inning. He indeed made the most of the opportunity by hitting the first pitch he saw for a game-winning home run off the Red Sox’s John Wyatt.

In what would soon become known as the “Year of the Pitcher,” Brown was one of the few batters who excelled. He would have an American League record eighteen pinch-hits, and six of his first ten pinch-hits would be home runs.

“Being a pinch hitter isn’t easy work,” Brown said, between shaking hands at Comerica Park. “You’re sitting on the bench for what seems to be forever and then you’re up there with the game often on the line, often against a guy looking to strike you out just like that. Like he’s got a car waiting for him outside, ready to hit the town. Everything can speed up in a hurry, so as much as you can, you try to slow things down. Slow it down so you can think. And what’s pretty important, at least it was for me, you can’t be afraid to enjoy the moment.”

Sometimes Brown took that approach to extremes. Once he was called on to pinch-hit earlier than anticipated. Brown hurried up to the plate, drove one of the first pitches he saw into the outfield for a hit, and hustled around the bases, sliding head-first into second. As he stood up, the crowd gasped. The front of his jersey was covered with bright colors and pieces of squashed meat. The explanation was that Brown had been eating hot dogs while on the bench. When Smith called for him to pinch-hit, Brown had quickly jammed the snack down the front of his jersey (food in the dugout was against team rules) only to have it burst into a big mess in his slide to safety. “That’s the only time I ever wished I’d struck out,” he said.

While a few fans bring up that incident on this day at Comerica Park, Brown prefers to steer the conversation back to the ’68 team and the camaraderie of that bunch, how everybody looked out for each other. He recalls how manager Mayo Smith once called Brown’s room after the midnight curfew and Gates’s roommate, Willie Horton, answered. Brown wasn’t there and Horton realized that if he told the manager that piece of news his roommate would be fined for sure. So Horton did his best to stall. He walked around the hotel room, trying to decide what to do, before picking up the phone again.

“ Well,” Horton told the manager, “I couldn’t find him in the bedroom, so I looked in the bathroom, and he wasn’t there. And then I looked in the closet, and he wasn’t there. And then, Skip, I found a note. It says Gates just stepped out to the ice machine and he’ll be right back. Don’t worry, Skip, he’ll be right back.”

With that Horton hung up and Brown somehow wasn’t fined.

When things aren’t going well in baseball, players talk about how it’s only a game. The proverbial, “ We play them one at a time.” Still, memorable victories, say a game-winning homer in the bottom of the ninth, can ripple throughout a team, perhaps even a community.

“I’ll never forget that first victory in ’68,” said Warden, the winning pitcher that day. “Not only was it huge for me, but it was something big for a lot of people. Soon enough our ballclub was on a roll and people really started coming back out to the ballpark again.

“The city of Detroit was still in the worst way. There was no denying that. But we began to feed off each other. Everybody in town began to rally around the team. Soon those of us in uniform began to feel like we were fighting for something bigger than just another ballgame. That somehow an entire city, the future of Detroit, was at stake, too.”

“ Will you stop Godding up those ballplayers?”

That’s the advice sports editor Stanley Woodward once wired to his columnist Red Smith.

Smith later explained, “I’ve tried not to exaggerate the glory of athletes. I’d rather, if I could, preserve a sense of proportion, to write about them as excellent ballplayers, first-rate players.”

Bob Broeg, the legendary sportswriter for the
St. Louis Post-Dispatch,
had similar concerns late in his career, wondering if David Halberstam and others perhaps made the Cardinals of the mid-1960s out to be “too noble.” Yet throughout sports in 1968 even the most jaded scribes couldn’t turn away from what they were watching. And those in Detroit certainly had the opportunity to take a long vacation from the game. The two local newspapers—the
News
and the
Free Press
—went on strike November 18, 1967. The work stoppage would last 267 days—until August 9, 1968. Despite being out of full-time work, Joe Falls, Jerry Green, and George Cantor doggedly continued to follow the team. Like so many, they knew something interesting, perhaps memorable, was going down. The last two would later pen books documenting the season—
Year of the Tiger
and
The Tigers of ’68.

Without a daily newspaper, well before the Internet and ESPN highlights, Detroit fans tuned in to broadcaster Ernie Harwell to keep up with much of the epic season. Born in 1918 in rural Georgia, Harwell suffered from a speech impediment growing up. He took weekly elocution lessons and among the pieces his teacher had him read aloud was a poem called “The House by the Side of the Road.” Years later, it would work into Harwell’s regular play-by-play when he said a batter who struck out had “stood there like the house by the side of the road.”

Harwell began his broadcasting career at the age of twenty-two, as a student at Emory University in Atlanta. During World War II, he called a handful of Crackers’ games while still a Marine and stationed in Atlanta. After the war, he caught the attention of Brooklyn Dodgers’ executive Branch Rickey. Ever the creative thinker, Rickey traded catcher Cliff Dapper to Atlanta for Harwell, perhaps the only broadcaster-player trade in baseball history.

After a season in Brooklyn, Harwell jumped to the crosstown New York Giants. (The Dodgers hired Vin Scully to replace him.) After four seasons with the Giants, Harwell then moved to Baltimore for the Orioles’ inaugural season. By 1960, he was in Detroit, where his Southern voice brought a distinctive flavor to the Tigers’ broadcasts. During home games, he would often say a foul ball had been caught by a fan from Ypsilanti or Muskegon or Traverse City. Of course, Harwell had no idea where the lucky spectator was really from, but his listeners loved such flourishes.

Harwell, perhaps more than many at the time, realized what was at stake in 1968. “In baseball, democracy shines its clearest,” he later wrote. “The only race that matters is the race to the bat. The creed is the rulebook; color merely something to distinguish one team’s uniform from another.”

PART IV

The Fire Down Below

Men imagine that the choices before them are theirs to make. But we are free to act only upon what is given.

—CITIES OF THE PLAIN, CORMAC MCCARTHY

The only way to truly understand Detroit, then and now, is to drive its streets. With that in mind, Willie Horton has given us a road map to follow. Granted it remained a touch vague in spots. After all, streets can change names over the years. We didn’t exactly get the Rand McNally out, although I wished that we had. Instead Horton rattled off a list of landmarks and must-sees off the top of his head. Easy for him to do as he grew up in the Jeffries neighborhood, the housing project that once dominated the city’s western horizon. The worst riots in 1967 erupted nearby, and Horton will be forever remembered as the ballplayer who tried to make a difference at that time.

Soon enough we were on the road, with me riding shotgun and my friend Tom Stanton behind the wheel. Since we met fifteen years ago at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor—both of us on a Knight-Wallace journalism fellowship—Tom has written a half-dozen books, including
The Final Season
, a haunting memoir about the last year in the life of Tiger Stadium.

From Comerica Park, the team’s home since the old ballpark closed in 1999, we passed the refurbished Fox Theatre, where the Chrysler commercial ends with rapper Eminem on stage, and headed up the Midwestern-wide downtown boulevards. We crossed Interstate 75 and angled through the neighborhoods that line the John C. Lodge Freeway. Horton had a paper route in this part of town as a kid. He delivered the
Michigan Chronicle
, which has been reporting on the African American community since 1936. The
Chronicle
was one of the few papers still publishing in ’68, as the
News
and the
Free Press
were on strike for much of the season.

“For the most part, fans had to follow us on the radio back then,” pitcher Mickey Lolich remembered. “They’d get together and listen to Ernie Harwell do the play by play.”

We were bound for Twelfth Street and Clairmont, where the worst of the rioting occurred back in 1967, and where Horton had shown up in full uniform. (He’d only changed out of his cleats.) With the fire and smoke billowing up around him, Horton climbed atop a car and pleaded with the mob to stop, to go home, to cease and desist.

“People knew immediately who I was,” he said. “What I remember today is that they were so concerned for me, that I might get hurt. That’s when they told me to go home. It looked like it was a war out there. I’ve never seen stuff like that—burning buildings, looting, smoke everywhere. They said, ‘Willie, you best go home.’”

As we pulled away from the downtown, the cityscape opened up as if we were ready to barrel across the Great Plains, heading way out west. So much open space stands between the neighborhoods now that it can be difficult to comprehend what has happened to the Motor City. Census figures indicate that Detroit’s population plunged 25 percent to approximately 713,000 people in the years 2001 to 2010. That’s the lowest level since Henry Ford did business in 1910. According to the
Detroit Free Press
, the Motor City lost 238,270 residents during that period, or one every twenty-two minutes.

So many buildings have been deserted and then torn down that only great swaths of empty space remain. To paraphrase Gertrude Stein, that means there really is no there there. The result could be Mayor Dave Bing, who starred for the hometown Pistons basketball team in 1968, trying to convince people to move closer together so such city services as electricity, water, and sewer can be better utilized. Others have suggested more drastic measures extending to bringing farmers back in to plow the empty lots into productive fields.

Driving through Detroit that day, the sight bordered upon the bizarre. It was sort of like viewing a film that breaks off time after time, revealing a giant blank screen where the image should be. We were literally moving through a landscape with built-in pauses, giving anybody plenty of room for reflection and, dare we say, regret.

At Twelfth and Clairmont itself, we found more emptiness than commemoration. Of course, we are much more prone to erect a monument to our cities’ zenith, than to their nadir. Perhaps with that in mind, Tom opted to check out another Motor City landmark. A few blocks away we came upon Boston-Edison, Henry Ford’s old neighborhood. Tom told me that if you wanted to do business with the assembly-line king back in the day, you needed to live here, about four miles north of downtown. The stately homes still stand resolute and immense, a testament to when Detroit ruled the industrial world. Named for the neighborhood’s two main streets, the Boston-Edison’s residents once included labor leader Walter Reuther and Motown Records mogul Berry Gordy Jr. Somehow it survived the riots and white flight to the suburbs. Lately it has been coping less well with the threat of foreclosure. Thieves flock to the area looking to pilfer “doorknobs, light fixtures, doors, radiators (attractive as scrap metal) and especially, copper pipes and wiring” from the homes, according to The
Wall Street Journal
.