Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever (10 page)

Lolich grew up in Portland, Oregon, the son of the city’s parks director and a batboy for the hometown team, the Beavers. Despite hailing from the Pacific Northwest, Lolich was a Yankees fan as a kid, with another left-hander, Whitey Ford, as his boyhood hero. Through high school, Lolich wore number sixteen, the same as Ford. Yet when Lolich blossomed into a top prospect, taking his Babe Ruth team to the national championship (where he was co-MVP with New Jersey’s Al Downing), he turned his back on the Yankees at the eleventh hour. Instead, Lolich signed with Detroit because the Tigers’ offer was higher—$30,000 over three years—and he had learned that the Tigers “didn’t have a lot of good left-handers in their system.”

Early on, Lolich won only a handful of games, pitching for Durham and Knoxville, two of Detroit’s lower-rung farm teams. Still, his stuff remained impressive and he started the first game of the 1962 season with the Denver Bears, Detroit’s Triple-A affiliate. The first batter he faced that season was Louisville’s Bobby Boyd, who was nicknamed “The Rope” because of the line drives he regularly hit. True to form, Boyd roped Lolich’s first pitch of the season right back at the mound, where it struck the pitcher near the left eye. The ball hit Lolich with such force that it bounced into the right-field corner for a triple.

“I was clobbered pretty good,” Lolich remembered years later. “Something like that takes it out of you, no matter how many people are telling you to forget about it, to just move on.”

Indeed, his eye swelled shut and he later lost several teeth due to the blow. While no bones were broken, Lolich wasn’t in any hurry to pitch again. Fearful that he would become another Herb Score, a once promising fireballer for the Cleveland Indians who was never the same after being struck by a batted ball, the Tigers pushed Lolich to return to the mound—the sooner the better. Lolich would pitch four games for Denver and his heart obviously wasn’t in it. He lasted just twelve innings, giving up twenty-four runs. When Jim Campbell, then the team’s farm director, issued him a plane ticket for Single-A Knoxville, Lolich cashed it in for a flight home to Portland. Once he was there, he told the Tigers that he was quitting the game. At the age of twenty-two, he had retired.

In Portland word soon spread that Lolich was back in town. A semipro team in Portland’s City League, Archer Blower, invited him to work with its pitchers, to be on the bench and advise them. In Lolich’s first game as unpaid coach, Archer Blower got off to 7–0 lead, only to see the opposing team rally in the middle innings. That’s when the manager asked Lolich’s father, who was in the stands, if his son would be interested in pitching. Initially, Lolich said he would only play first base. But his father, somewhat uncharacteristically, persisted. “Son, why don’t you pitch?” he asked.

Decades later, Lolich still finds that discussion so out of character for his father. “He never really pushed me to do much of anything,” Lolich said. “He pretty much left me alone. But on that day, for some reason, he did. He really wanted me to try and pitch again.”

The left-hander entered the game and he struck out all twelve batters he faced. A story in the next day’s
Oregonian
read that Lolich had joined Archer “after severing ties with Denver of the American Association. He is the property of the Detroit Tigers.”

The next morning Campbell called Lolich. Thrilled by the southpaw ’s performance, he urged Lolich to finally travel to Knoxville, and once again Lolich refused. Soon afterward the Detroit front office worked out an arrangement in which Lolich would remain under contract with the Tigers but could play the 1962 season for the Portland Beavers. There he fell under the wing of Gerry Staley, a former major leaguer, who was the Beavers’ pitching coach.

“He asked if I’d give him ten days to let him try and turn me into a pitcher,” Lolich said. “All I was then was a thrower really. I’d stand out there and throw it as hard as I could.”

After a week or so, Lolich caught on to what Staley was trying to teach him. How it was better to be a sinker-ball pitcher, with control, than a kid trying to throw one hundred miles per hour on every pitch. The new goal was to keep the ball low, often away from the hitter, consistently hitting the outside corner. “Gerry Staley changed my whole life,” Lolich said. “It’s as simple as that.”

In 1968, few outside of the ballclub realized how complete a pitcher Lolich could be. Instead it was more fun to focus on the lefty’s idiosyncrasies. On days he pitched, Lolich often drove one of his five Kawasaki motorcycles to the ballpark. The high speed and wind in his face helped him unwind, he said. Besides, his home didn’t have air-conditioning, so a motorcycle ride allowed him to cool off. Often after the game, Lolich and his wife, Joyce, loaded the Kawasaki onto a trailer and rode the forty miles back home together. All in all, it seemed a curious hobby considering that as a two-year-old Lolich had in fact driven his tricycle off the curb outside the family home in Portland and plowed it right into a parked motorcycle. The rig fell atop him, pinning Lolich to the ground. After his mother couldn’t free him, a passerby helped roll the motorcycle away. Lolich was left with a broken collarbone. While the right arm was in a sling, he began to throw left-handed. After he healed, Lolich returned to doing almost everything else right-handed again—eating, writing, batting—but with a ball in his hand he was forever a southpaw. And he often loved to carry on like one.

“Sometimes when I lean too far to the left on the mound,” he said, “I find myself thinking sideways.”

The Detroit press considered him a good quote, yet on a deep pitching staff and a colorful team Lolich was sometimes overlooked.

“Denny McLain was Denny McLain,” McAuliffe explained. “Larger than life and well-spoken. Everybody got a daily report of what was on his mind and what he was doing. But we knew Mickey was as important to our ballclub that season as anybody. He had led the league with six shutouts in ’67. We knew weren’t going anywhere without him.”

That’s why McAuliffe and others were reassured when the first pitches from Lolich in Lakeland that spring of 1968 had plenty of zip, with the great sinking movement he was known for. Even though the portly left-hander was often a slow starter, dating back to his days in the minor leagues, this time Lolich appeared ready. “We smiled when we saw how well he was throwing that spring,” McAuliffe said. “A lot of us believed that it was finally going to be our time.”

When ballclubs report to spring training in today’s world, one of the major topics of conversation is invariably the recent Super Bowl. The sports seasons overlap to such a degree now that the big game is sometimes played only weeks before pitchers and catchers report. Of course, nothing stands taller on the sports landscape than the Super Bowl, one of today’s cultural icons. It’s a game now watched as much for the commercials as for the teams that play in it.

Yet in 1968, football was still going through plenty of growing pains. The year before, Super Bowl I had been played at the Los Angeles Coliseum, where there were 30,000 empty seats. “Nobody cared,” Green Bay Packers receiver Max McGee later told HBO.

As part of the merger agreement between the National Football League and its upstart rival, the American Football League, Commissioner Pete Rozelle had only a month to put the event together. The stitch marks sure showed. NFL and AFL owners mixed about as well as oil and water at a pregame cocktail party, with their wives on a verge of a catfight.

When Kansas City Chiefs’ owner Lamar Hunt called the event the Super Bowl (after a popular toy at the time) instead of its official name, the AFL-NFL World Championship Game, the nickname stuck. When CBS, which carried the NFL games, and NBC, which had the AFL contests, each claimed first dibs to the inaugural Super Bowl, Rozelle let both of them broadcast it. Back then a sixty-second commercial for Super Bowl I cost $85,000. (Four decades later, that price tag would balloon to $2.5 million for thirty seconds of airtime.)

Super Bowl I proved to be competitive for almost two quarters. After halftime, Vince Lombardi’s Packers took control and trounced the Kansas City Chiefs, 35–10. No network footage of Super Bowl I exists today. Legend has it that the game, at the network level, was taped over for a soap opera. During that era tape units were as big as refrigerators, and one of the few who owned such a rig was
Playboy
’s Hugh Hefner. But even though Hefner said he’s been “hooked on football” since his college days at the University of Illinois, he didn’t bother to tape the early Super Bowls.

The outcome of Super Bowl II, held early in 1968, was remarkably similar—once again demonstrating that Green Bay was the best team in the land. This time the contest was played at Miami’s Orange Bowl, and the Packers opened up an early 13–0 lead. Their AFL opponent, the Oakland Raiders, did trim the lead to 13–7. But in the second half Green Bay took a 26–7 lead and cornerback Herb Adderley sealed the victory with a sixty-yard interception return.

The game drew the first $3 million gate in football history and marked the last time Lombardi would coach the Packers. During his nine-year reign in Green Bay, the legendary coach won six division championships, five NFL championships, and two Super Bowls. Despite the record gate, however, serious questions remained about the Super Bowl’s long-term success in 1968. Sports commentator Haywood Hale Broun dubbed the event “too predictable to be memorable.” Especially when most experts and even fans considered the AFL inferior to the more established NFL.

Through it all, Rozelle was determined to turn his championship into the world’s biggest sports event. “He consciously positioned it as bigger, grander, more concentrated event than baseball’s World Series,” says Michael MacCambridge, author of
America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation
.

But to do so, Rozelle knew he needed a few breaks to come his way. Most notably he needed the AFL teams to show a lot more spunk, to be more competitive in the Super Bowl itself. After Lombardi’s teams handily defeated the AFL teams in the first two championships, serious discussion began about employing tournament bracketing and play-in games. This could result in two teams from the older league, the NFL, playing in the Super Bowl. Early in 1968, many wondered if the AFL, despite its high-powered offenses led by such quarterbacks as the Oakland Raiders’ Daryle Lamonica and the New York Jets’ Joe Namath could compete against the more established league.

In the spring of ’68, the St. Louis Cardinals were favored to repeat as National League champions and return to the World Series. Over in the junior circuit, the Detroit Tigers were determined not to be caught short again in the bullpen as they invited twenty-five pitchers to camp. As the weeks went by and that total was whittled down to the ten-man pitching staff expected to travel north for the regular season, rookie Jon Warden noticed that manager Mayo Smith often informed the next player to be released or sent down to the minors during batting practice. The Tigers’ skipper walked around the outfield, a fungo bat in hand. Acting nonchalant, Smith would sidle up alongside the next poor soul and give him the bad news. That’s when Warden decided to stay as far away as he could from the manager.

When Warden survived the first round of cuts, a week or so into camp, he moved into the main clubhouse, alongside such stars as Lolich, McAuliffe, Al Kaline, Willie Horton, and Norm Cash. He fought the temptation to ask them for their autographs. Instead he kept his mouth shut, to the point that he became known as the quiet kid.

“Warden, we couldn’t get you to say a thing in ’68,” Kaline told the pitcher decades later. “Now we can’t get you to shut up.”

In 1968, players came to camp to actually work themselves into shape. Playing professional ball wasn’t a year-round job and most players couldn’t afford to work out at a local club or at home. Many needed a second job to make ends meet. That was especially true for a newcomer like Warden, who helped unload produce trucks at the local supermarket back home in Ohio. In the 1960s, ballplayers had only a short period of time to get up to game-speed and perform, and if they didn’t they were often sent packing.

On March 31, Warden got his chance—and he made the most of it. Against the St. Louis Cardinals, the defending World Series champions, the rookie was brought into a tie game in the ninth inning. Warden proceeded to shut down the Cards for four innings—the ninth, tenth, eleventh, and twelfth. He struck out six and walked just one.

That evening Warden ran into Wally Moses, one of the Tigers’ coaches, in the Holiday Inn lobby at Lakeland. “You didn’t hear it from me,” Moses told the rookie, “ but you just made the ballclub today.”

Warden ran up to his room and called his mother collect. At first she didn’t realize what he was trying to tell her: that her son had leaped past Triple-A and the lower rungs of the minor leagues and would open the’68 season with the big-league club. But soon enough the two of them were laughing and crying, yelling and screaming over the phone.

“That’s the greatest feeling that a twenty-one-year-old pitcher could ever have,” Warden said. “That I was heading north with a ballclub that had only lost the pennant the year before by a single game in the final game of the season. Everybody in baseball knew they were the favorites to win it all in the American League. That they were that good and somehow I was now a part of it all.”

A few days later, the Detroit team bus pulled up to the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, the site of old Tiger Stadium. It was Monday, April 8, 1968—a mild spring evening in the Motor City. Despite the pleasant weather, the city streets were already deserted by six o’clock at night—a scene that Warden found disappointing, even a bit disturbing.

After pitching for Class A Rocky Mount in the Carolina League, following the Tigers’ pennant chase from afar, Warden had made the most of his opportunities during spring training. Always a hard-thrower, he had gained some control, even the ability to pitch out of jams on occasion. Yet making the big-league club had come as such a surprise he still needed to buy a blazer or suit jacket for road trips and team functions.