Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever (3 page)

No landmark event or epic confrontation caused the United States to go to war in Vietnam. No Pearl Harbor. No September 11th. The Gulf of Tonkin Resolution in 1964 pales in comparison. Yet by the spring of 1968, United States troop levels were at their highest, with more than 536,000 troops committed to the venture in Southeast Asia.

Early in the year, U.S. forces were rocked by the Tet offensive, a wide-ranging series of attacks by the Vietcong. To better assess the war effort and the United States’ expectations for eventual success, CBS anchorman Walter Cronkite traveled to Vietnam for a series of special reports. The culmination was an analysis he gave at the end of his nightly network broadcast on February 27, 1968: “ We have been too often disappointed by the optimism of the American leaders, both in Vietnam and Washington, to have faith any longer in the silver linings they find in the darkest clouds,” Cronkite told his audience of 100 million or more—a stunning number that underscores how powerful network television was before the advent of cable and satellite TV. Cronkite declared that the United States was “mired in stalemate . . . and with each escalation, the world comes closer to the brink of cosmic disaster.” He closed his commentary by saying, “it is increasingly clear to this reporter that the only rational way out then will be to negotiate, not as victors, but as an honorable people who lived up to their pledge to defend democracy, and did the best they could.”

Cronkite’s speech to the American people, which was very much out of character for what he felt a nightly news broadcast should be, resonated throughout America. Already polls showed that a majority of Americans thought the war was a mistake. In large part that was due to the fact that so many citizens were directly impacted by Vietnam. The draft fueled the military machine. Even for those who were never sent to Vietnam, who had made other arrangements, the war was often on their minds.

During this period, one way to gauge a team’s chances, which was rarely even mentioned in any annual previews or scouting reports, was to determine how many players a ballclub had serving in the military reserve. While being in the National Guard or a similar organization kept a player out of the draft and away from the front lines in Vietnam, it played havoc with one’s professional career and personal life. Reservists usually left the team to be with their military unit for one weekend a month throughout the year and often were required to put in another two weeks of continuous service for training exercises during the season. Nolan Ryan was one of the players whose baseball development was severely hampered during ’68.

“I experienced so much frustration that particular season,” said Ryan, who was then with the New York Mets, “in large part because I couldn’t focus on my game. I was juggling two worlds, two commitments, all the time.”

For a time, Ryan needed to fly back to Houston several weekends a month to be with his reserve unit. Its specialty was constructing landing strips, and for a time Ryan thought his unit would actually have to go to Southeast Asia. Yet after the Tet offensive any such plans were ratcheted down.

On the Detroit Tigers, left-hander Mickey Lolich found himself in a similar situation. He was a member of the 191st Michigan National Guard unit, which ran a motor pool based out of Alpena, Michigan, about 200 miles north of Detroit. Unlike Ryan, he was close enough to often head down to Tiger Stadium to be with the team, even pitch in a game, before returning to his unit. What drove him to distraction, though, was the lack of quality training partners. Away from the team, Lolich contacted local high school coaches and threw to whoever was game enough to play catch with his lively stuff. Once his batterymate was a local priest who said, “Heavens to mercy, I never saw a ball move so much.” In that particular training session, Lolich’s offerings ricocheted off the man of the cloth’s shin guards and chest protector, with a curveball finally bouncing off the priest’s toe. “Let’s just say it wasn’t the best of circumstances,” Lolich said.

In the spring of ’68, Lolich worked out for a week at the Tigers’ camp in Lakeland, Florida, before heading on to Savannah for fifteen days of active training. It could have been worse. The season before, during the Detroit riots, the left-hander had been thrust into the action due to his role with the reserve. After being in uniform with the Tigers one afternoon, he was in combat fatigues that evening, rifle in hand, helping to guard a supply depot and then a radio tower that also served as a police relay station in downtown Detroit.

As the city burned around him, the situation pinwheeled between the tragic and the comical. The
Detroit Free Press
commandeered an armored vehicle for its reporters to cover the event, while the National Guard established a machine gun nest atop a JCPenney store in suburban Grosse Pointe until more rational minds realized such firepower was better served six miles west in Detroit proper.

“People hit the streets, looking for anything they could grab—a side of beef, something out of the freezer at the supermarket,” said William Mead, who was bureau chief for United Press International at the time. “What aggravated the situation was that the parts of Detroit that rioted were mostly black and the troops they sent in to settle things down were mostly white guys.”

One of Lolich’s assignments was to accompany the ranking commander through the city, which was by now under curfew and on fire in several areas. Despite the danger, Lolich tried to stay upbeat. When the ranking major stopped at a red light, the Tigers’ pitcher asked, “Sir, why are we stopping?”

“It’s a red light,” the major replied.

“But, sir, we’re the only truck in downtown Detroit tonight,” Lolich said. “We’re not going to get a ticket if we go through that red light.”

The major pondered this for a moment before stomping on the accelerator.

The rioting that spread throughout the city and caused Detroit to burn in 1967 would prove to be a harbinger of things to come. As the new year began a number of U.S. cities, including the nation’s capital, were poised to explode. “There was no getting around it,” recalled Frank Howard, the top slugger on the Washington Senators. “Everywhere you went, you sensed it. The whole thing could go up at any minute.”

With tension and turmoil spreading increasingly throughout the nation, the start of the ’68 baseball season was marked not by celebration, but by a somber note of tragedy, delayed by a day of mourning for Dr. Martin Luther King. Afterward, Howard struggled as much as anybody with a bat in his hand. Yet Howard had always been a streak hitter and he told himself to hang in. At six foot seven, Howard towered over nearly everybody else in the game. He had played basketball at Ohio State University and anyone could see that he had loads of athletic potential, regardless of the sport. In 1958 he signed with the Dodgers for the princely sum of $75,000. The organization promptly hailed him as the next Babe Ruth.

“To me, Frank Howard was the hitter’s version of [the Indians’ Sam] McDowell,” Bob Gibson said in a conversation with Reggie Jackson in
Sixty Feet, Six Inches: A Hall of Fame Pitcher & A Hall of Fame Hitter Talk About How the Game Is Played
. “He was a big, strong guy who swung hard, and every once in a while he was going to hit one eighteen miles. But he wasn’t a good hitter in the way that the really good hitters were.”

Despite the occasional long ball, Howard never hit better than .300 and, more importantly, cracked the thirty-home run plateau only once in his first five full seasons in the majors. Word had it he would be better off as a platoon player. Before the 1965 season, the Dodgers traded him as part of multiplayer deal to Washington. While Howard knew he wouldn’t come close to winning a championship in the nation’s capital (the ballclub was rarely any good), he did secure a regular spot in the Senators’ lineup. Along with the playing time, Howard arguably received better coaching in D.C., as well. There coaches urged him to open up his batting stance and cut down on his stride length. His large step toward the pitcher caused the big man to bob his head and lose sight of the ball as it was traveling to the plate. In the spring of ’68, Washington manager Jim Lemon told Howard to move closer to the plate. That way the big man could crush the outside curveballs and sliders that had sometimes bedeviled him. Other than that Howard’s approach remained pretty basic. “I just go up to the plate and try to get my three rips,” he once told the
Washington Post
. “I try not to take too many good pitches or swing at too many bad ones.”

A few weeks into the ’68 season, however, Howard had a revelation. When he had two strikes on him, he realized most pitchers would invariably throw him a fastball. A few others might try a changeup and most of them often tipped that pitch anyway. Despite the pitching excellence that ran throughout the game, only a few hurlers had full confidence in their curve, slider, or other breaking stuff. Hence, with two strikes in the count, he decided to keep an eye peeled for the fastball.

“That’s as true then as it’s ever been,” Howard said years later. “But nobody really ever explained it to me. So when I discovered that I was able to lock in better at the plate. It was a real jump forward for me.”

Sure enough Howard began to pummel the ball. In late April and into early May, most of his hard knocks went for doubles instead of home runs. That was about to change in hurry, though.

On Sunday, May 12, 1968, Howard hit two home runs against the visiting Detroit Tigers at D.C. Stadium. The first was “a routine one” off Mickey Lolich—part of a bad stretch for the Tigers’ southpaw that would soon land him in the bullpen. The second was off Fred Lasher and soared well into the upper deck.

“I’ve always been a streaky hitter and those two homers were enough for me to get locked in,” Howard said. “Now the best hitters ever in the game, guys like Hank Aaron, Ted Williams, Barry Bonds, can really concentrate. They can get in this state of mind for weeks and weeks. I never had that ability. It’s so hard to do. But I could get locked in for a week or so, even in that crazy year.”

In the Senators’ next game, a Tuesday night contest in Boston, Howard hit two more home runs. The first one was a blast into the netting atop the Green Monster. The second was eight rows deep in the centerfield bleachers. During the next game, he hit another, this time off Red Sox ace Jose Santiago. As the
Washington Post
later pointed out, this homer was perhaps the only cheap one of the bunch as it barely made it over the left-field wall and would have been an out in most ballparks.

About this time Howard began to wonder why some pitcher didn’t “flip” him, or in other words, throw at him deliberately. That’s how things were done back in 1968. An Old Testament god still ruled in baseball, where it was very much an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth. But even though Howard would be flipped plenty as the season continued, during his hot streak nobody dared topple the big man.

From Boston, Howard’s traveling home run show headed to the old stadium in Cleveland, where nearly every long ball needed to be legit. Howard did his part by driving one a dozen rows into the left-field stands and a second into the alley between the grandstand and the bleachers. The second dinger came within ten feet of being the first hit into the uncovered seats in Cleveland, sailing nearly 525 feet. By now Howard was one better than Babe Ruth and a few others who had hit seven home runs in five consecutive games. Ruth had done it in 1921, Jim Bottomley in 1929 and Vic Wertz in 1950. Howard blew by them all on a Friday night in Detroit as he hit yet another homer in the ninth inning off the Tigers’ Joe Sparma. That set up a final round of fireworks for Saturday afternoon.

Once again Howard homered twice and once again Lolich was the pitcher. “Don’t talk to me about Mr. Howard,” the Tigers’ southpaw said years later. “That guy wore me out to begin that season.”

Of course, Lolich was the guy on the mound when the streak started the previous Sunday. As was the pattern, Howard’s first home run was “routine,” while the second blast bordered upon the unbelievable. This time, Howard hit one that landed atop the left-field grandstand, which rose ninety feet above the field at Tiger Stadium. The ball then bounced completely out of the ballpark.

Howard didn’t homer in the next day’s doubleheader. Still, his ten home runs in six games was a record. Decades later, Howard said he can remember every long ball from that epic run.

“I was certainly in the zone or whatever you want to call it,” he said. “It was like I’d gone someplace where nobody could touch me, where I could do no wrong.

“In looking back on that time in our country, things were as screwed up as they can ever be. As a ballplayer, you try to protect yourself by wrapping yourself up in the game and paying attention to nothing else. Of course, it rarely works that way. Things worm their way inside you and how that didn’t happen to just about everybody back then I don’t know. My goodness, you think of all the crap that was happening. But for a week or so, I felt like I was safe from all that. For a while, I was somehow flying above it all.”

PART II

On the Brink of a Dynasty

St. Louis is the best baseball town (in America) because fans are as enthusiastic as in other places but are probably more fair-minded. You can get booed here some, but you’re not going to get embarrassed.

—TONY LA RUSSA

When
Sports Illustrated
’s Neil Leifer photographed the St. Louis Cardinals’ starting nine, sitting in front of their individual lockers, the more conventional shot would have been to have each of the 1967 world champions in uniform, ready to take the field for another game. But for the final takes, only manager Red Schoendienst was in uniform, holding his red Cardinals cap loosely in his hand.