Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever (9 page)

The strange way in which the world sometimes worked wasn’t lost on Gibson. It had taken a controversial call to preserve Drysdale’s streak. Now another controversial call had ended his attempt to surpass it.

Gibson tried his best to have the last laugh—defeating Drysdale 5–1 that evening for his seventh consecutive victory. In addition, it was his 135th career win, moving him past Dizzy Dean on St. Louis’s all-time list.

Still, this one stung—plenty. Afterward, in the visiting clubhouse, the press asked Gibson about the only run he had allowed.

“You saw it,” the winning pitcher replied. “[He] missed the ball.”

The room grew quiet until Gibson added, “Hey, that’s the way it goes.”

PART III

Eager for a Second Chance

What does a town that’s been to hell and back know
about the finer things in life? Well, I’ll tell you. More
than most. You see, it’s the hottest fires that make the
hardest steel. Now we’re from America. But this isn’t
New York City. Or the Windy City. Or Sin City. And
we’re certainly no one’s Emerald City. . . . This is the
Motor City.

—“IMPORTED FROM DETROIT,”
CHRYSLER COMMERCIAL

To a man, the Detroit Tigers arrived in Lakeland, Florida, in the spring of 1968, believing they had been robbed the season before.

“We had a strong belief, shared by just about everyone on that ballclub, that we should have won the pennant in 1967,” second baseman Dick McAuliffe recalled. “Not doing it when it’s right there for you, to have it slip away is something you never forget.”

The previous season had ended with four teams—the Boston Red Sox, Minnesota Twins, Chicago White Sox, and the Tigers—in contention for the American League pennant entering the final days. On October 1, 1967, the last day of the regular season, the Red Sox and Twins played each other at Fenway Park, with the winner clinching at least a tie for the title. The Tigers were a half-game back, needing a doubleheader sweep of the visiting California Angels to force a one-game play-off for the right to advance to the World Series.

The Red Sox edged the Twins 5–3 that day with Carl Yastrzemski going four for four and staff ace Jim Lonborg on the mound. In Detroit, the Tigers took the first game 6–4, thanks to seven strong innings by Joe Sparma. But with the season on the line, Detroit’s pitching, considered by many to be the strength of the team, didn’t come through. Due to rain-outs earlier in the week, the Tigers and Angels had played a doubleheader the day before, too, splitting that affair. Now for its fourth game in two days, Detroit went with its would-be ace, Denny McLain.

Early on, the Tigers held a 3–1 lead in the second inning. But McLain, who would go 0–2 in five starts in September, was tagged for three runs and was soon out of the game. The Tigers’ starter gone, the Angels proceeded to hang crooked numbers on the scoreboard, building an 8–5 lead heading into the bottom of the ninth. Despite the deep hole, the Tigers fought back, putting two men on with none out. That brought up catcher Jim Price, the potential tying run, to the plate. But he flied out to left field. Dick McAuliffe followed him, setting up one of the cruel ironies sports often display. To that point in the ’67 season, the Tigers’ second baseman had hit into only one double play. Now with the crowd on its feet, the season on the line, McAuliffe laced a grounder to his counterpoint, the Angels’ Bobby Knoop. While the two were among the best fielders at their position in the American League, Knoop won more Gold Gloves—something that still annoys McAuliffe to this day.

Knoop snared the grounder, beginning the double play that ended the game and the Tigers’ season. The “Impossible Dream” Red Sox, a squad that finished second to last in 1966, edged the Tigers and Twins by one game and the White Sox by three to advance to the World Series against the powerful St. Louis Cardinals. The memory of coming up short was still fresh in the minds of the Tigers four months later as they arrived in Lakeland, their spring training home.

“In ’67, we were really hurting for pitchers, especially guys coming out of the bullpen, in the final week,” McAuliffe said. “Playing back-to-back doubleheaders didn’t help us any. Our general manager, Jim Campbell, didn’t swing a trade to help us. Even without the pitching, we still felt we’d win it and we didn’t.”

As camp opened, Tigers’ manager Mayo Smith told the press, “I don’t see anything to make me believe we won’t have a strong team. I can’t promise we’ll win the pennant. But losing it last year on the last day has done something to this team. The team really grew up last year.”

Lakeland, a sleepy and, for the most part, still racially segregated town located about fifty miles east of Tampa, appeared to be a curious place to start down the road to redemption. There was a black side of town and a white side of town, with the Tigers running a shuttle bus to and from the new Holiday Inn, where many of the players and their families made their home in February and March. Still, the locale, which had been the Tigers’ spring home since 1934, oddly fit the organization. The Tigers, along with the Red Sox and Yankees, had been one of the last big-league teams to integrate. Of course, those days were over with Willie Horton, Earl Wilson, and Gates Brown now on the Detroit roster. But perhaps being off the beaten track in Florida, in a place that reminded them of how things used to be, helped the team come together. Of the twenty-five players on the 1968 ballclub, fifteen had spent time in Tiger Town. Many in that group had gone on to play Triple-A ball in Syracuse, with most reaching the big leagues within a season or two of each other. Overall, the Tigers were a focused veteran ballclub in 1968, almost loyal to a fault, whose pride had been stung by how the previous pennant drive played out. The core group was intent upon making amends.

As the 1968 season began, the consensus was that the bullpen had let the team down the season before. That opened the door for a few new faces to make the team. Among them was a hard-throwing left-hander from southwest Ohio—Jonathan Edgar Warden.

Raised by a single mom, Warden had starred in baseball, football, and basketball at Pleasant View High School in Grove City, Ohio, outside of Columbus. He had attended the University of Georgia, pitching a no-hitter and several shutouts, and drawing the Tigers’ attention. The organization drafted him in the fourth round in 1966. Now, after a year in the Florida State League and a year in the Carolina League, he had an outside chance to make the big-league team, in large part because the front office remembered what happened last October when they ran out of arms when it mattered most. “The door was open for me,” Warden said. “I knew it. So did pretty much everybody else in camp that spring. But sometimes that doesn’t make it any easier. If anything it might be tougher when everybody is expecting it from you.”

Nobody was more certain about the Tigers’ chances of success in ’68 than right-handed pitcher Denny McLain. Upon arriving in Lakeland, he told the press that Detroit would “win by six to seven games if we get off to a good start and nobody falls off any couch.”

The last was a tongue-in-cheek reference to how McLain had hurt himself toward the end of the previous season. Somehow he had severely bruised two toes on his left foot. At first he’d claimed that the incident happened at home when he awoke blurry-eyed from a nap on the family couch. “People think there’s something funny about the couch story,” he added.

In 1967, McLain posted a so-so 17–16 record. What grated on teammates and fans alike was his inability to pitch effectively down the stretch. Exactly how McLain injured his toes remained open to debate in the spring of 1968. At first, McLain stuck to the couch story—that he had fallen asleep while watching television and stubbed his toes after standing up. Subsequently, the star pitcher said he had hurt himself chasing raccoons away from his garbage cans. Teammate Mickey Lolich chimed in by saying he saw McLain kick a water cooler after being yanked from a game. Another account had McLain kicking lockers in the clubhouse after another lackluster outing.

What wasn’t in dispute was how poorly McLain finished: 0–2, allowing nearly a run an inning his last five starts. (A few years later,
Sports Illustrated
reported that McLain had contact with the mob during that time. A crime boss had reportedly dislocated McLain’s toes in a disagreement over a horseracing bet—a story that McLain vehemently denied.) Whatever the case, McLain was eager to move on and, besides, there was always plenty to talk about when he was around.

McLain arrived at the Tigers’ spring camp sporting orange-tinted hair (“I’ve been out in sun a lot,” he said) and no eyeglasses. Instead he was wearing contact lens, detailing to the media how he had gotten used to them while bowling and playing his Hammond X-77 organ. McLain was a scratch bowler, averaging 190 to 200, and he talked about how he had assembled a team that finally beat a squad headed by Lou Boudreau, once a stellar shortstop for the Cleveland Indians, who also happened to be McLain’s father-in-law. McLain explained that he pulled off the victory by employing “a couple of ringers.”

As adept as McLain was at bowling, he was even better at music. After performing in clubs throughout the Midwest during previous off-seasons, he spent the months before the ’68 season working for Grinnell Brothers, Michigan’s largest musical retailer. He played at Detroit-area shopping centers and promotional events. As with everything he did, McLain dreamed big, really big. Musically, he wanted nothing less than to record an album and be a headliner in Las Vegas. But he knew such aspirations were linked to how well he did on the mound this season.

While McLain was the American League starter in the 1966 All-Star Game in St. Louis, as well as Detroit’s youngest twenty-game winner since Schoolboy Rowe in 1934, he told anybody who would listen that he was ready to lead Detroit to the World Series. After all, he had added a side-arm delivery and maintained that bowling, of all things, had helped the arm action with this new “out pitch.”

“I want to be in the position next month to tell the man what I want,” said McLain, who was entering the last year of his contract.

Asked about a possible salary figure for his next deal, McLain replied, “I think $100,000 is a beautiful figure, but I’m not halfway there yet.”

Heading into the ’68 season, McLain’s goals could be listed as follows: win plenty of ballgames, score a six-figure contract, land a gig performing his music in Las Vegas, and appear on the
Tonight Show
with Johnny Carson—and not necessarily in that order.

“Me? Revel in the media? Damn right,” he later wrote in his memoir,
I Told You I Wasn’t Perfect
. “Baseball was all show biz and that’s why there were writers covering it in the first place. And nobody, including [Detroit columnist] Joe Falls, can imagine how much I craved the attention. Put me, a kid whose sense of worth came from playing baseball, in front of a bunch of attentive jock-sniffing men with pens and microphones, and you’ve got all the elements you need for headline-making quotes....

“I wanted the attention of the writers so badly that I’d get depressed between starts because they weren’t in front of my locker. I wanted to talk about anything and everything in grand fashion and be the center of attention.

“I’ve been in situations where a writer’s pen ran out of ink and I’ve given the one out of my pocket.”

Despite the hype, much of it self-inflicted, McLain remained a gamer between the lines. He played through pain, taking cortisone shots to ease up his right shoulder, and when he was on, few in the American League were better. But in addition to batters, on the mound (and perhaps even more so off of it) McLain also had his own demons to contend with. After all, his relationship with the game was forever clouded by his relationship with the man who introduced him to it—his deceased father. A no-nonsense guy who liked to drink, Tom McLain had often beaten his son. Spare the rod and spoil the child could have been rule number one in that household. The old man was an insurance adjuster who moonlighted as a music instructor. Growing up, Denny was fascinated with his father’s ability to play the organ. “He came to love music the way he came to love sports,” McLain’s mother, Betty, told the
Chicago Tribune
. Tom McLain also single-handedly brought Little League baseball to Markham, Illinois, the working-class suburb of Chicago where McLain grew up. He did it so his son could play.

“I loved baseball and felt safe around my dad when we practiced and played,” McLain later wrote. “Baseball was my refuge, where I could avoid the fear and crushing discipline that was enforced at home. It was only on the ball field that my dad and I could truly enjoy each other’s company. We embraced the competition and loved winning. Playing baseball—and to a somewhat lesser degree, playing piano—were the only ways I got approval and a sense of importance.

“Dad wasn’t a cheerleader. He’d never jump up and down or shower me with superlatives. I never remember getting a hug, a kiss, or even a handshake. But for him to just come up to me after the game and say, ‘Nice goin’, good game’ meant the world. I lived for that.”

On May 5, 1959, Tom McLain was driving to one of his son’s games for Mount Carmel High School in Chicago when he had a heart attack that killed him. “It was only two days after Tom’s thirty-seventh birthday,” Betty McLain said. “He was on Thirty-Fifth Street, right within the shadows of White Sox park, when he had the attack. He died right there.”

As important as Denny McLain was to the Tigers’ chances in 1968, everyone on the ballclub knew they weren’t going anywhere without a good season from another starting pitcher, Mickey Lolich. McLain and Lolich couldn’t have been more different in personality. McLain was the kind of guy who sucked the oxygen out of room, while Lolich was the kind who often hung back in a crowd. If the two had been blood brothers, McLain would have been the oldest—the one who enjoyed the spotlight and demanded the lion’s share of attention. Lolich was like the little brother in so many families, rarely earning the applause despite trying so hard.