Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever (14 page)

In the spring of 1961, all Tiant knew for sure was that he wanted to play professional ball and try to follow his father’s footsteps. The old man once starred for the New York Cubans in the old Negro Leagues and was considered one of the top pitchers the island had ever produced. But as writer Rob Ruck documented in
Raceball: How the Major Leagues Colonized the Black and Latin Game,
his father had also never reconciled himself to the racial insults he faced playing in the States. “I didn’t want him to come to America,” the senior Tiant explained years later. “I didn’t want him to be persecuted and spit on and treated like garbage, like I was.”

Still, the major leagues were the showcase for the best players and, in the end, there was no holding back Tiant’s son. On May 25, 1961, Luis Tiant Jr. left Cuba, not knowing when or if he would ever return. He played in the minor leagues—West Virginia, Florida, and North Carolina—before debuting with the Cleveland Indians in 1964.

Four years later, Tiant was merely considered the rotation’s fourth-best pitcher as the 1968 season began. Yet by the close of the “Year of the Pitcher” he would seemingly come out of nowhere to establish himself alongside Bob Gibson, Don Drysdale, Mickey Lolich, and Denny McLain as one of the best hurlers in the game.

While the Senators’ Frank Howard may bemoan the lousy start he got off to early in ’68, a major reason was because he ran into Tiant. On April 28, Tiant pitched a two-hitter against the Washington Senators for a 2–0 victory. The key moment came when he struck out Howard on a hesitation pitch—a throw in which Tiant altered his delivery so radically that for a heartbeat he actually turned completely away from the home plate. All the batter could see was his back before Tiant finally came around with the ball.

“I still have nightmares about that pitch of his,” Howard said. “To me, standing there in the batter’s box, it seemed like he threw everything at me but the ball.”

Tiant maintained that he didn’t go to the hesitation pitch “for show. But to get batters out.”

On that particular day, Tiant told the
Cleveland Press
that he’d given Howard his “shoulder, back, foot and the ball last.”

During his next start on May 3, Tiant recorded another shutout, this time a three-hitter against the visiting Minnesota Twins. Before a crowd of just 5,106, he threw 122 pitches, picking up the 4–0 victory in two hours, twelve minutes. Even though the Cuban was relatively unheralded, he had already proved his durability by averaging nearly nine complete games a season during his first four years in Cleveland. In ’68, he would more than double that total.

Such numbers often seem astounding today with many pitchers hoping to average six innings and pitch counts typically limited to around one hundred. While relief pitchers were certainly utilized in 1968—that year the Chicago White Sox had Wilbur Wood and Hoyt Wilhelm, a pair of knuckleballers—and had been for years by that point, starting pitchers were expected to go the distance, at least strive for nine innings. “You were expected to finish what you started,” Nolan Ryan said. “There was a level of responsibility involved with pitching.”

As the price to sign quality arms escalated, however, ballclubs became more cautious, some would say too conservative, about how long to extend their top-line pitchers. Eventually one hundred pitches became the game limit for most promising arms. “It’s the amount of money they have tied up in these players,” said Dick Bosman. Minor league pitching coordinator for the Tampa Bay Rays, Bosman toed the rubber for the Washington Senators in 1968. “Everybody plays it safe with that much on the line now.”

On May 7, 1968, Tiant shut down the New York Yankees, defeating them in another complete-game shutout. In addition to throwing another 129 pitches, he also cracked a two-run single. Five days later, he went into the Indians’ record book with his fourth consecutive shutout, a 2–0 victory over the Orioles in Baltimore. After the game, the Robinsons, Frank and Brooks, complained about the hesitation pitch.

Now Tiant stood within one shutout of the American League record, set by Chicago’s old Doc White. But in a rematch with the Orioles, this time in Cleveland, Boog Powell cracked a three-run home run off him in a 6–2 Baltimore victory. Although the scoreless streak was history, Tiant was far from finished with his remarkable season.

Six weeks later, on July 3, Tiant went on a strikeout tear against the visiting Twins. Scoreless heading into the tenth inning, Minnesota put runners on first and third with none out. That’s when Tiant struck out John Roseboro, Rich Rollins, and pitcher Jim Merritt, putting him at nineteen strikeouts, which broke Bob Feller’s team record for a single game. “I’ve never seen a fastball thrown so hard for so many innings,” Roseboro told
Baseball Digest
. That was high praise. Once a mainstay with the Dodgers, Roseboro had caught Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax.

“I can’t say enough about that performance,” said home plate umpire Ed Runge. “He’s a great pitcher. Every time I’ve seen him this year he’s been great. Whenever he got into trouble tonight he just reared back and fired. He challenged them all night long.”

In the victory, Tiant equaled Koufax’s record of forty-one strikeouts in three consecutive games, set in 1959. After upping his record to 14–5 a few days later, Tiant was named the American League’s starting pitcher for the All-Star Game in Houston’s Astrodome.

Meanwhile, in Detroit, the Tigers’ Denny McLain wasn’t much interested in attending the Midsummer Classic if he wasn’t the starting pitcher. Frankly, he had better things to do. Such grumbling prompted American League president Joe Cronin to warn the Tigers’ ace, as well as Detroit manager Mayo Smith, that he expected the right-hander to be in Houston. McLain finally agreed to go but not before deciding to swing by Las Vegas first.

In his last start before the All-Star break, McLain won his sixteenth game as the Tigers rallied yet again in the late innings. This time it was Willie Horton lining a home run over the left-field fence off Oakland’s Ed Sprague. The 5–4 victory marked the sixteenth time Detroit came from behind to win so far in 1968. A phenomenon Detroit sportswriter Jerry Green dubbed as another “Last Licks Victory.”

McLain’s victory came in the first game of a doubleheader and afterward the Detroit ace went up to the press box at Tiger Stadium to shoot the breeze with the press. In between innings, he gave the team organist a break and serenaded an unknowing crowd with a version of “Satin Doll.” On the field below, the Tigers demonstrated why they were running away from the rest of the American League. Mickey Lolich, who had struggled in the first half of the season, with a 5–4 record through June, came out of the bullpen to strike out Reggie Jackson as the Tigers held on for the 7–6 victory to sweep the doubleheader. “If we can play .500 the second half, we should be OK ,” said Smith, acknowledging that no league leader had been better off at the All-Star break in decades than the Tigers’ nine-and-a-half-game lead.

Held at Houston’s Astrodome, the 1968 All-Star Game was the first one ever played indoors. The change of venue didn’t help the hitters much as they continued to struggle. The year before, in Anaheim, the two squads had battled for fifteen innings before the National League won, 2–1. Many blamed the twilight conditions (an early start for East Coast television) for the lack of scoring. In Houston, some felt the sightlines were almost too perfect. The Tigers’ Bill Freehan claimed that conditions inside the Astrodome “ruins your depth perception or something.”

Teammate Willie Horton agreed. “[ Juan] Marichal threw me a slider and I saw it so good I said to myself, ‘I’m going to murder this.’ And I swung and that ball hasn’t got to me yet.... It’s nothing I can put my finger on. It is odd.”

For the record, the National League won, 1–0, as Willie Mays scored on a double play in the bottom of the first inning. He reached second base on Tiant’s throwing error and then headed to third when the pitcher and Freehan, the American League’s starting catcher, got their signals crossed. From there the American League couldn’t score against Drysdale, Marichal, Steve Carlton, Tom Seaver, Ron Reed, and finally Jerry Koosman. For being the only one to cross the plate, Mays was named the game’s Most Valuable Player, while Tiant ended up as the losing pitcher despite not allowing an earned run.

Afterward many complained that baseball’s problem had little to do with playing baseball indoors for the first time. Rather, pitching was at fault. This facet of the game had become too good, too dominant. The 1968 All-Star Game was exhibit A—it was the first in history to end with only one run scored.

“No better example of the universal impotence that has gripped baseball in the last two seasons could have been arranged for a television audience throughout the Western Hemisphere estimated to number sixty million, and 48,321 who paid $383,733, a record gross, to attend the game,” wrote Leonard Koppett in the
New York Times
.

“Pitchers Turn All-Star Classic Into a Farce,” read the headline in the next morning’s
Los Angeles Times
.

A few days after the game, Tiant’s mother, Isabel, was able to call from Havana. She had seen the contest. A friend of the family had managed to pick up the signal from Miami and during the innings her only child pitched, Senora Tiant gazed at the flickering screen, tears in her eyes. She didn’t care about the score or that her only son had lost the game.

“I watched you on television,” Isabel later told Tiant in the phone call, “and all the while I watched I cried because I wanted to reach out and touch you and I couldn’t.”

If you believed the odds-makers in Las Vegas, the 1968 regular season was over at the All-Star break. In the National League the St. Louis Cardinals were staked to a ten-game lead. Bob Gibson finished the first half with a 3–0 shutout in San Francisco improving his record to 11–5. His ERA stood at a miniscule 1.06.

At 55–28, the Tigers were two games better than St. Louis and enjoyed a nine-and-a-half game lead in the American League over the Cleveland Indians, with the Baltimore Orioles another game back. Vegas soon made the Cardinals 7–5 favorites to win the World Series, and commissioner William Eckert announced that 1968 would be the last season that the winner of the National League pennant and the winner of the American League pennant would go directly to the Fall Classic. Starting the following year the major leagues would be split into divisional play with more teams included in the postseason hunt.

Yet not everyone was ready to concede the ’68 season to the front-runners. In Baltimore, the third-place Orioles fired manager Hank Bauer, who had been at the helm two years before when Baltimore swept the Dodgers in the World Series. Bauer’s dismissal didn’t surprise anyone, himself included, but the naming of his successor did. Many expected Orioles’ coach Billy Hunter to be promoted to skipper. Instead the job went to thirty-seven-year-old Earl Weaver, who had never played in the majors and only joined the big-league team as a coach in the off-season.

“The Orioles are not winning because they’re not hitting, so I guess I’m to blame,” Bauer said. “But if I could still hit, I’d be playing.”

When it came to Weaver, Bauer grumbled, “I would have named Hunter. He knows the players better.”

That said, Weaver certainly knew the younger players better than anybody else in the organization. Of the eleven Orioles’ farm teams he had managed, all finished in the upper division. Within the Orioles’ front office, he was famous for grading players, trying to get inside their heads. At his insistence, the entire minor-league ballclub in Elmira, New York, had its IQ tested one season. He did it in an effort to better understand one player, fastball phenom Steve Dalkowski. Considered one of the fastest but also most unpredictable pitchers of all time, Dalkowski later became the basis for the character Nuke LaLoosh in the movie
Bull Durham
. Always looking for new methods to analyze and better understand performance, Weaver was one of the first proponents of the radar gun, and he also urged such stars as Brooks and Frank Robinson to study film of themselves at the plate. But most importantly to the immediate future—and to the front office—the new manager believed the Orioles could still make a run at Detroit.

“I still feel we are a pennant contender,” Weaver said. “I don’t think first place is unrealistic even though we are ten and a half games out.”

Few paid much attention to Weaver’s proclamation. With the pennant races considered by many to be a foregone conclusion, attention instead remained upon individual records and pursuits. And there were plenty. In Cleveland, Tiant continued his dominance, stringing together seven consecutive regular-season victories, and winning eleven out of twelve decisions. Meanwhile, in Atlanta, all eyes were on Hank Aaron, who was about to join what used to an be elite club. Like most sluggers, “Hammerin’ Hank” struggled in the first half of the season, hitting just .247 at the break. His choices for the National League All-Star outfield were the Reds’ Pete Rose, the Giants’ Willie Mays, and the Cardinals’ Curt Flood. Surprised to even make the team, Aaron ended up hitting cleanup in the Astrodome. In a way, being a part of the All-Star Game became excellent preparation for Aaron’s next star turn.

On July 14, 1968, Aaron hit his five hundredth career home run, a three-run clout that powered the Braves past the visiting San Francisco Giants. With that dinger, Aaron joined Willie Mays, Eddie Mathews, Mel Ott, Ted Williams, Mickey Mantle, Jimmie Foxx, and Babe Ruth as the only sluggers to reach the five-hundred plateau. In recent years this select club has tripled in size (from eight to twenty-five). In 1968, though, five hundred career homers still meant something.

“In Atlanta, they’re convinced he’s a combination of Mary Poppins and Clark Kent, that when he takes his uniform off, there’s a huge block ‘S’ on the front of his sweatshirt and cape on the back,” wrote
Los Angeles Times
columnist Jim Murray. “Ruth and Aaron were born the same week of the year (Aaron Feb 5, 1934; Ruth, Feb 6, 1895). Ruth had 470 home runs on his 34
^th
birthday. Aaron had 481. Ruth, of course, hit 234 home runs in the last six years of his career. Henry only has to hit 223 to tie what is generally considered the most unreachable record in the books.”