Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever (15 page)

Aaron would indeed pass Ruth six years later, on April 8, 1974.

But even on Aaron’s big day in 1968, pitching still managed to also find its way into the headlines. Out of Cincinnati came news that Don Wilson, a right-hander with the Houston Astros, had struck out eighteen in a 6–1 victory. In doing so, Wilson tied two major league records: one for the most strikeouts for a nine-inning game (at the time), and another for striking out eight straight batters.

For all its dominance, the fact remained that pitching didn’t score runs, not even in 1968. To win a game at least some measure of hitting was in order, and to that end, a lot of pitchers would have loved to have Denny McLain’s good fortune in 1968. Everywhere pitchers excelled but few had any runs to work with. In Chicago, White Sox knuckleballer Hoyt Wilhelm appeared in his nine hundred and seventh game as a pitcher, breaking Cy Young’s all-time record. Unfortunately for the old knuckleballer, it was in a losing effort, a 1–0 defeat to the Oakland Athletics.

“I’ve been a knuckleball pitcher, even in high school,” Wilhelm said in an effort to explain his durability. “It’s a pitch I don’t think just anybody can master. I’m not sure I’ve mastered it yet.”

A few weeks after the All-Star Game, Luis Tiant had built an impressive 17–6 record but the Indians’ attack, like much of the offense at the major league level, was being worn down by exceptional opposing pitching. On July 30, the Indians were reminded that in this season for the ages defense wasn’t too shabby, either, as Washington Senators shortstop Ron Hansen completed an unassisted triple play against them. It was only the eighth in major league history and the first since 1927.

In mid-August, the Tigers visited Cleveland Stadium, where Tiant awaited them. The Indians’ ace went seven innings, striking out nine and walking none. That would have made him the winner most days. But Tiant lost the marquee matchup to Lolich and the Tigers 3–0.

“Luis and I would each be fighting for thirty wins if he had our kind of hitting to go with his kind of pitching,” McLain said. “I’ve been getting more than five runs a game to work with. If I just stay close to the other team, I have a 99 percent chance of winning. If he stays close, he’s got a fifty-fifty chance.”

Tigers’ catcher Bill Freehan added, “If Luis played for us, he’d be shooting for forty wins.”

“Maybe they’re right,” Tiant replied. “I don’t know. All I know is that I’m not a Tiger. I’m an Indian. So all I want is twenty wins. That’s what I’m shooting for.”

In seven of Tiant’s losses to that point in the season, the Indians had scored fewer than three runs. In a dozen of his games, his teammates hadn’t scored a run until the sixth inning or later. “I never have an easy inning,” Tiant said. “I must throw hard all the time, and this puts strain on my elbow.”

Others wondered if such arm fatigue was due to his herky-jerky motion, and perhaps even his famed hesitation pitch. After that game in Cleveland, Al Kaline said that Tiant has “got to hurt his arm throwing that way. He won’t have a long career.”

Of course, a lot of things are said after any game, when the players and media can dissect it all with great abandon. Yet for some reason Kaline’s comments seemed to stick with Indians’ manager Alvin Dark. He was the same manager who drove Orlando Cepeda, Juan Marichal, and the Alou brothers to distraction when he managed them in San Francisco from 1961 to 1964.

“Alvin Dark to me was one day the best man in the world,” Marichal wrote in his autobiography, “and the next day, he was the worst. I love the guy, but I saw Alvin Dark do things that hurt me deeply.”

A few weeks later, when Tiant pulled himself from a game due to a sore elbow, Dark picked up on Kaline’s comment and revealed just how much it had resonated with him. He told the press that Tiant’s “extreme motions had put a strain somewhere. I don’t think he needs all those motions. All he has to do is throw hard. He’ll just take years off his career if he keeps throwing this way.”

Tiant couldn’t believe his own manager didn’t have his back. His delivery, his trademark motion and the hesitation pitch, wasn’t to blame he said. It was the lack of run support. The pitcher pointed out that in his last twenty-three innings, the Indians had given him a grand total of two runs to work with. The reason he was sore was because he was throwing so hard, trying every trick in the book, because in 1968 he had no margin for error.

If the clubhouses in Detroit and St. Louis could be held up as model examples for building team chemistry, the situation in Cleveland became a classic example of what
not
to do. Alvin Dark wasn’t the best point man when it came to race relations. In 1964, not long after the U.S. Senate passed the Civil Rights Act (after a fifty-seven-day filibuster), he told
Newsday
that the Giants sometimes struggled because “we have so many Negro and Spanish-speaking players on this team. They are just not able to perform up to the white ballplayers when it comes to mental alertness. You can’t make most Negro and Spanish players have pride in their team that you get from white players.”

While Dark claimed he was misquoted, his tenure in San Francisco soon ended. After two seasons managing in Kansas City, he was in Cleveland for the ’68 season, where he was about to face another showdown with a prominent Latino star.

By the dog days of August, any talk of a full-fledged Olympic boycott had died down to grumbles and whispers. The stars from San Jose State’s “Speed City”—Tommie Smith, John Carlos, and Lee Evans—may have been won over by Harry Edwards’s rhetoric, but they were still heading to Mexico City to run for their country.

But there was a key factor that ABC-TV executive Roone Arledge and the Olympic powers still didn’t fully understand at this point—competing at altitude. While scientists expressed concern about the Summer Games being held 7,400 feet above sea level, few in the running community were really that worried. After all, in 1955, Mexico City had hosted the Pan American Games and race times appeared to balance each other out. In retrospect, though, that was wishful thinking, especially by those calling the shots on the U.S. Olympic team.

“I don’t think there was an American middle or long-distance runner who was as ready as he should have or could have been for his race in Mexico,” Dr. Jack Daniels later wrote in a paper entitled “Science and the Altitude Factor.” “For a non-acclimatized miler to race a mile at altitude would be similar, from a competitive standpoint, to having him race a sea-level two mile for the first time. It’s a different race.”

U.S. Track and Field named Daniels as its official altitude consultant the summer before the ’68 Games. Unfortunately, the organization didn’t give him much funding, nor did they bother to really listen to what he had to say. In the months leading up to the Summer Olympics, Daniels joined forces with Dr. Bruno Balke, a German medical doctor and physiologist specializing in altitude training. Balke had been brought to the United States by the Air Force to help develop the space program. At one point, Balke told the U.S. Olympic Committee, “I should not be coming to you asking for funds to do altitude research. You should be coming to me offering it.” Together, he and Daniels determined that two types of acclimatization—physiological and competitive—needed to take place for even elite athletes to excel at the kind of high altitude they were going to be competing at in Mexico City.

“We should have been having major competitions at altitude for several years prior to the ’68 Olympics,” Daniels said.

Yet neither Daniels nor Balke could convince U.S. officials to hold a significant number of races at altitude. Instead, it fell to the athletes themselves to help foot the bill for such research and try their best to prepare. Jim Ryun, the face of the U.S. track team, went to work at a supermarket in Alamosa, Colorado, at $1.50 an hour, to help defray training costs. For many, it was inconceivable that the world-record holder in the mile would end up in such a situation. One morning, Ryun and Daniels were having breakfast at local diner in Colorado. A teenage girl and her little brother approached the runner.

“My brother thinks you look like Jim Ryun,” the girl said.

“I am,” Ryun replied.

Shaking her head, she said, “No, you’re not.”

“Yes, I am,” Ryun said.

“No, you’re not.”

With that she led her little brother away by the hand.

In August, Curt Flood graced the cover of
Sports Illustrated
, making a leaping catch against the emerald ivy and four-hundred-foot sign at Wrigley Field. The cover line read, “Baseball’s Best Centerfielder.” Left unsaid, but certainly understood by many, was that Flood also played for the best team in baseball. After losing eleven of thirteen games early in the season and falling to fourth place, the Cardinals had responded in dominant fashion, putting together a 54–20 record from Memorial Day into the dog days of August. A ballclub built on pitching and defense with a touch of the unconventional (manager Red Schoendienst won one game by pinch-hitting for MVP Orlando Cepeda), the Cardinals held a fourteen-game lead in the National League as the regular season began to wind down.

Even though St. Louis and Detroit were markedly different ballclubs with varying clubhouse dynamics, they had a common trait. Both could be brutally honest with each other.

“Chemistry means you get in my butt if I’m not doing the job,” the Tigers’ Willie Horton explained years later. “Sure we’ll have good times. But you also know we can criticize each other if one of us isn’t doing the job.

“It’s like having brothers at home. You’ll have fights, but they don’t mean anything. You probably talk more honestly to each other, especially when things are against you, than you would to others. Winning teams have fights in the clubhouse. Because they’re that close. In ’68, we had a lot of scrapping in the clubhouse. But that doesn’t mean tomorrow we’re mad at each other.”

If hanging around the Cardinals sometimes resembled a fashion shoot for GQ magazine, for the Tigers, on the other hand, it could be like stepping onto the set of
Animal House
. The joke was that if anybody ever wanted a team picture just find the nearest bar. Most of the Detroit roster would be found there. When Hall of Fame slugger Eddie Mathews first joined the ballclub in 1967, he initially thought they were a bunch of drunks. Over time, though, he realized that Tigers were a well-knit group that looked out for each other, even Denny McLain, and the off-the-field shenanigans played a key role in team chemistry. Perhaps no prank better demonstrated this than the famed “Plane in the Pool” stunt. On a road trip to Anaheim, the ballplayers became enthralled with a full-sized wooden replica of an antique aircraft in the hotel lobby. It had been erected for a convention of aviation hobbyists, who were sharing the same hotel with the team. Some genius got the bright idea to steal the plane, relocate it next to the hotel’s outdoor swimming pool, and just like that the game was afoot.

Several obstacles, however, lay in the Tigers’ path. First, measurements were taken and it was determined that the plane was too big to go through the door leading out to the pool deck. Somehow, in short order, sufficient tools were found to take it apart. But then there was the matter of getting it out of the lobby without being caught.

The wooden plane was located just around the corner from the front desk. While the night clerk couldn’t see it from his post, any noise would certainly draw his attention. As a solution, reliever John “Ratso” Hiller was sent down to the front desk to chat up the clerk, making sure to talk loud enough so that the rest of the team could get to work. While Hiller’s conversation echoed throughout the lobby, the Tigers quietly took the plane apart and lugged the pieces outside. There they reassembled the plane next to the pool. For most teams that would have been enough. Yet once the Tigers got the plane rebuilt on the pool deck, they couldn’t resist sliding it entirely into water, even though most got wet feet in the process. Despite the fact that the massive model was made of wood, it eventually sank. Afterward, the team reconvened in a room overlooking their handiwork—a pool with a full-sized replica of an antique plane resting beautifully in its deep end. That was certainly one way to have a team-building experience. For many of them, like Mickey Lolich, it “was one of the transcendental moments” of the ’68 season. Deep down, Tigers management must have agreed because Detroit general manager Jim Campbell paid the hotel for damages.

While the Cardinals didn’t go in for such heavy lifting, they could be just as hard on each other when it came to mental miscues. In the clubhouse, they often played a game called “baseball quiz.” Win or lose, they would start shouting questions like, “Who couldn’t advance the runner in the first?” or “Who forgot to slide into second base?”

As in their El Birdos’ cheer, names from Ty Cobb to Babe Ruth to Max Patkin were tossed out until the guilty party, somebody wearing a Cardinals uniform, was identified. If anybody was scoring the ballclub’s baseball quiz during the 1968 season, they would have noticed that Curt Flood’s name was rarely brought up for such derision.

Flood had arrived in St. Louis in a minor trade with the Cincinnati Reds after the 1957 season. He made an immediate impact, allowing the ballclub to move then outfielder Ken Boyer to third base. When Lou Brock came from the Cubs to the Cardinals and became our leadoff hitter, Flood was the perfect guy to bat behind him in the second spot, Tim McCarver said.

“[Flood] was patient at the plate,” McCarver explained, “which gave Brock the opportunity to use his great speed and steal all those bases. Curt could go deep in the count, hit behind the runner, and steal a base, and he was consistently in the .290 to .300 range. Don Drysdale called him the toughest out in the National League.”

Among the Cardinals, Flood became the most involved in the national civil rights movement. His hero was Jackie Robinson, and at Robinson’s invitation Flood attended the NAACP’s (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) regional conference in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1962. There he had been joined by boxing champions Floyd Patterson and Archie Moore. In his biography of Flood,
A Well-Paid Slave
, author Brad Snyder noted how Flood did his best to stay involved with the movement despite his baseball schedule. When Martin Luther King gave his “I Have a Dream” speech in Washington, D.C., Flood was taking the field with the Cardinals in San Francisco. “I should be there instead of here,” Flood later said.