Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever (24 page)

For hitters, their season-long struggles and futility in the face of the “Year of the Pitcher” was written on the wall. Boston’s Carl Yastrzemski went 0-for-5 on the final day of the regular season, dropping his average to .3005, which was good enough to take the batting crown in the American League. Washington’s Frank Howard finished with forty-four home runs to lead baseball, while the Red Sox’s Ken Harrelson had a league-best 109 RBI. The National League offered a bit more offense, especially in Cincinnati. There Pete Rose and Alex Johnson hit better than .300.

“I never said I would lead the National League in hitting in 1968, but I would not trade places with anyone,” said Rose, who was twenty-seven years old at the time and playing his third position since joining Cincinnati five years before. (He went from second base to left field and now right in ’68.) Looking ahead Rose said he didn’t care where he played, but he shared the same financial goal as Detroit’s Denny McLain—he also thought $100,000 annually sounded like a beautiful figure.

The Tigers and Cardinals had plenty of time to get their World Series rotations in order, with Roger Maris warning his St. Louis teammates that Mickey Lolich, rather than Denny McLain, was the guy to be concerned about. Certainly Detroit manager Mayo Smith had confidence in the left-hander as well. He decided Lolich would pitch the second game of the World Series—an impressive ascension, especially considering he had spent part of the ’68 season in the bullpen.

The headlines, however, were all about McLain versus Bob Gibson. Both pitchers would win the Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards in their respective leagues. Already the World Series was being billed as the greatest pitching matchup of all time.

Behind the scenes, Tigers’ manager Mayo Smith worried about his team’s everyday lineup and decided to make a major gamble. Up to that point, Detroit had won many of its games without the help of “Mr. Tiger” himself, Al Kaline, who had missed significant time with a broken arm. Now he was healthy and Smith desperately wanted to get Kaline’s bat back in the offense for the Series. Understandably, part of his motivation had to do with Kaline’s standing in the organization. In 1955, he had won the American League batting championship at the age of twenty—one day younger than Ty Cobb, who accomplished the feat in 1907—and over the course of his career he had become one of the most popular and recognized Tigers of all-time. Still, Kaline was an aging star, with his best power days pretty much behind him. By 1968 some wondered if the ballclub still needed him on a full-time basis. The Tigers’ outfield of Willie Horton, Jim Northrup, and Mickey Stanley combined to hit sixty-eight home runs and played solid defense without him. Would wedging Kaline into the outfield mix disrupt team chemistry? But Kaline was still Kaline and Smith couldn’t resist trying to get him on the field full time.

On September 17, Kaline pinch-hit for Norm Cash and ended up scoring the winning run as the Tigers clinched the pennant. After the game, Kaline told Smith that he didn’t deserve to be a regular in the World Series. The kids had done the job and they were the ones who should play. Yet Smith wasn’t buying it. In the World Series, on the biggest stage in the game, the Tigers’ manager wanted his best-known player out there. The rub was how to do it.

With the adoption of the designated hitter rule five years away, Smith was seemingly left with little choice: either break up his outfield and bench one of its starters or face Bob Gibson and the rest of the St. Louis pitching staff without Kaline’s bat. But as the regular season wound to a close, Smith proved to be resourceful and full of surprises. He tweaked and experimented with his players’ lineup and positions, searching for other viable options. What turned heads was when the Tigers’ manager moved Stanley in from center field to play shortstop for several games. He even let Horton manage the team for a game. Days before the World Series opened in St. Louis, Smith announced that Stanley would be in the infield, with Northrup moving from right to center field, opening up a place for Kaline in right. It was anything but a popular tactic. Ernie Harwell, the Tigers’ broadcaster, openly complained that “it was a bad move,” and went as far as to ask twenty-five so-called experts what they thought about Stanley at short. They all agreed it was a misuse of personnel.

Several Tigers didn’t agree with the move, either. On a team with plenty of jokesters and free spirits, Stanley was one of the few straight arrows, a self-proclaimed workaholic. Horton and Bill Freehan, who had known Stanley since youth ball, wondered if the added pressure of playing a position he wasn’t used to would be too much for their friend. After all, Stanley had been credited with a perfect fielding percentage playing the outfield in 1968 and would win his first Gold Glove. During one game earlier in the season he had raced some sixty yards to make a diving grab against the White Sox. Afterward Smith had told Jerry Green that it had been the best catch he’d ever seen. Although Stanley often took infield practice and occasionally spelled Norm Cash at first base, shifting positions for the Fall Classic was another matter. Could he hold up under all the scrutiny? The manager countered that Stanley had accrued some experience at shortstop and second base during McAuliffe’s suspension. Of course that hadn’t resulted in any Tigers’ victories. Was Smith putting the team’s World Series in jeopardy?

One of the great American beliefs is that everything and everybody deserves representation in the nation’s capital. To that end, it should come as no surprise that on the first Wednesday of every month, at the Hawk’n’ Dove, a few blocks east of the Capitol Dome on Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, D.C., the Mayo Smith Society convenes its monthly meeting. Hunkered down at one of the tables in the restaurant’s lower level, ideally near a large-screen television to watch the night’s action, the group adeptly protects its turf against the onslaught of interns and lobbyists that populate the Hill like pigs to the trough.

Founded in 1983, the society’s roster goes hundreds deep worldwide. Annual outings include catching the visiting Tigers at Camden Yards in Baltimore and making an annual pilgrimage to Detroit for a weekend series. But such events are gravy, really. The real fun is simply catching up every month, sharing a drink or two, recalling the great games of the Tigers’ past, and reaffirming the genius of one Mayo Smith.

“As a baseball man, Smith was really ahead of his time,” said Dave Raglin, creator of the society’s Facebook page. “Certainly he was low-key, sometimes overlooked, but he was an innovator throughout his career, and he was exactly what the Tigers needed in ’68.”

Smith had managed the Philadelphia Phillies and Cincinnati Reds before taking the Detroit job in October 1966. The Tigers were reeling after previous managers Charlie Dressen and Bob Swift both died during the’66 season. In Philadelphia, Smith had bought the team’s first pitching machine and in Cincinnati he had moved Frank Robinson to first base. Along the way, he targeted Lou Brock for stardom in a
Sport
magazine piece, two years before his trade to St. Louis. Soon after taking over the Tigers, Smith moved Dick McAuliffe from shortstop to second base. And although shifting Mickey Stanley to the infield before the ’68 Series seemed to come out of the blue, members of the Mayo Smith Society pointed out that the signs were there all along. The year before, Dick Young wrote about the possible ploy in the
Sporting News
(an insight that likely came from Smith himself), and during the 1968 season the Tigers’ manager hinted that such a move could work nicely with the Detroit lineup.

“Even his own players joked that Smith sometimes seemed asleep at the switch,” Raglin said. “But the man was always thinking and often he was a step ahead of everybody.”

Certainly managers have been playing hunches since the game’s origins. In Game One of the 1929 World Series, the Philadelphia Athletics’ Connie Mack went with Howard Ehmke (7–2) over pitching legend Lefty Grove (20–6) or George Earnshaw (24–8). (Ehmke went the distance, striking out a record thirteen.) In 1950, the Phillies gave closer Jim Konstanty his first start of the season in the opening game of the Fall Classic. Although Konstanty allowed only a single run over eight innings, this time around such a gambit failed to pay off as he lost the contest to the Yankees’ Vic Raschi, who pitched a complete-game shutout. We’ve also seen such strategic innovations as the Boudreau Shift—an infield alignment first devised by the Cleveland Indians against Boston’s Ted Williams and redeployed in the 1946 World Series by the Cardinals—and on the offensive side of things, in recent years St. Louis manager Tony La Russa has batted the pitcher eighth instead of at the end of the batting order. All interesting twists, but they seem to take a backseat to Smith’s bold decision to move his best outfielder to shortstop for the biggest games of the 1968 season.

Since the All-Star break, Tigers scouts had been charting St. Louis games. Nobody read those reports more closely than Mickey Stanley. A major component to the Cardinals’ offense was outfielder Lou Brock. After coming over from the Chicago Cubs in 1964, his speed energized the St. Louis attack. Brock stole sixty-two bases during the ’68 regular season and was in the midst of a run that would see him lead the National League in thefts eight times in nine seasons. His success on the base paths intimidated ballclubs to the point that many gave up trying to make the basic plays.

The Tigers’ scouts, for example, noticed that if Brock was on second base he rarely drew a throw to the plate on a single to the outfield. The mindset of opposing outfielders appeared to be why bother? Brock had the wheels and he would score, throw or no throw. As a result, some in the Detroit clubhouse believed that Brock wasn’t running full out all the time. He rarely slid into home plate, often going in standing up. Perhaps a strong, accurate throw could catch him. Stanley pointed this out to his teammates, especially Horton.

Even though he had plenty of work to put in at his new position at shortstop, with the World Series days away, Stanley once again played the role of teacher. Brock could be thrown out, Stanley told his teammates. But every aspect, from fielding the ball to throwing home to the catcher being ready to snare the catch, had to be automatic and perfect.

“That’s what we started to practice,” Horton said. “From the scouting reports, we knew that Brock sometimes drifted around second base. Same way when going home from second.

“He’d slow a bit going around third base. Of course, he’d brought base-stealing back into [the game], so for a lot of outfielders it was why throw in those situations? He’s going to score anyway.

“As a result, he’d picked up bad habits. The third-base coach picked up bad habits. Even the guy in the on-deck circle picked up bad habits. He wasn’t up there to help Brock by signaling him to slide or pick it up. But we all agreed: The chance would be there, and we’d have maybe one crack at it. Could we throw out the great Lou Brock?”

The Tigers and the sports world would soon find out.

PART VI

The Great Confrontation

There is no loser in the World Series, just two winners, one bigger than the other.

—BOB GIBSON

The regular-season numbers didn’t lie. By the end of the 1968 season, the collective ERA for all twenty major-league teams was just 2.98. Five no-hitters were pitched (by Tom Phoebus, Catfish Hunter, George Culver, Gaylord Perry, and Ray Washburn) and folks were still complaining about the 1–0 final in the All-Star Game, with the only run scoring on a double-play ball. It seemed only appropriate, then, that Game One of the World Series would be a showdown between arguably the two best pitchers in the sport—Bob Gibson and Denny McLain. For their part, both pitchers stayed in character.

Gibson, the St. Louis staff ace, maintained that he found satisfaction in winning the big games because that simply meant more money. But even his own teammates weren’t buying that. “It’s not this easy to always win the big game,” Cardinals’ shortstop Dal Maxvill told
Newsday
’s Steve Jacobson before Game One. “He says it’s money, money, money.”

With that Maxvill pointed at the left side of his chest. “There’s a big heart in there. Right now there’s so much pride in it that it would fill up that room. He says money. It’s the World Series ring.”

Soon after Detroit and St. Louis clinched the pennant in their respective leagues, McLain put his foot in his mouth, claiming that he didn’t want to just beat the Cardinals. “I want to humiliate them,” he said. Several Cardinals didn’t appreciate the comment, especially Gibson. A newspaper story with the quote was tacked to the bulletin board in the St. Louis clubhouse. “I said it, but I didn’t mean it,” McLain tried to explain. “I was under the influence of champagne and happiness.” Any further brash talk dissipated like tiny bubbles when McLain and Gibson met the afternoon before Game One, a gathering that the press dubbed “The Great Confrontation.”

“It’s not a match between two pitchers,” Gibson said, “ but a game between two teams.”

McLain concurred: “The thing between Gibson and me has been blown all out of proportion.”

With that McLain couldn’t resist a nod to his burgeoning music career, adding that he expected to be more nervous in a few weeks for his opening night in Vegas—which had just been scheduled—than pitching on the road in the World Series. Perhaps with that in mind, the night before Game One McLain strolled into the Gas House Lounge in the Sheraton-Jefferson, the Tigers’ official hotel in St. Louis. The crowd soon recognized him and without much coaxing McLain played the organ for nearly ninety minutes. At one point, teammate Jim Northrup joined him on stage.

“How many Tiger fans are in here” Northrup asked and most of the room applauded.