Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever (32 page)

“I remain grateful to Schoendienst for sticking with me,” Gibson wrote. “The obvious thing would have been to pinch-hit for me in the eighth inning, and Red’s decision to leave me in the game had more to do with consideration than strategy, which is a rare thing in baseball.”

Lou Brock followed with a walk but was left stranded when Julian Javier grounded out. With one inning left in Game Seven, the visiting Tigers led, 3–0.

Although Lolich didn’t really need the support, the Tigers gave him another run in the top of the ninth inning. Willie Horton, Jim Northrup, and Don Wert each singled off Gibson to make it 4–0. One last time Detroit manager Mayo Smith went with his late-inning alignment, what St. Louis writers now sarcastically called his Maginot Line. Horton exited the game, Stanley moved to center field, and Ray Oyler once again manned shortstop. Even though the bullpen was loose and ready, Lolich took the mound for the bottom of the ninth, determined to end it.

“I didn’t know how long I could go,” Lolich said. “After the fifth inning, Mayo looked at me every inning and I would tell him I was OK. Then, when [they] got me some runs in the seventh, I told Mayo I would finish it.”

When Oyler snared Curt Flood’s liner for the first out (making Smith look like a genius) and Orlando Cepeda popped out in foul territory, it appeared the Cardinals would go gently into the night. But suddenly Shannon woke the hometown crowd and sent the Tigers’ bullpen scrambling again when he homered into the left-field stands. The dinger assured that Shannon homered in the three World Series he played in (1964, 1967, and 1968). “The team’s frustration from the past few days was manifested in one swing,” wrote Doug Feldmann in
El Birdos
. “Since the first inning of Game Five, St. Louis had been shut out by the Tigers in twenty-four of the last twenty-six innings.”

With that kind of history working against them, any rally for the ages simply wasn’t to be. When Lolich got the next batter, McCarver, to pop out to Freehan, Game Seven was over. The contest had taken two hours, seven minutes to play, and when the ball dropped into Freehan’s mitt, the Detroit Tigers were the 1968 World Series champions.

Lolich came off the mound and jumped into Freehan’s arms. (He later said he did so to assure that Freehan didn’t jump into his arms. “I couldn’t have taken that,” the pitcher said.) With his three complete game victories, Lolich was named the series MVP, and he received a new Dodge Charger for his efforts. “I hope it has a stick shift,” he said. (It did.)

In the winning clubhouse, the Tigers were asked about Lolich’s remarkable turnaround. In midseason, he had been banished to the bullpen, with a 7–7 record. He battled back to go 17–9 and became only the twelfth pitcher in major league history to win three games in the World Series. Cash claimed that the weeks working in relief helped Lolich. As a result, he threw only 220 innings in ’68, compared to Gibson’s nearly 305 innings and McLain’s 336 for the same campaign.

“I guess I’m an unlikely hero,” Lolich told the press. “Potbelly, big ears . . . just a steady guy who shows up every day and gets the job done as best he knows how.”

Then in a dig at McLain and a nod to the crowds that were already forming at Detroit Metro Airport to welcome back their heroes, he added, “There’s always somebody else making a big deal out of things, getting the ink, making the moves. But you know what? I knew all along I could do it. And I’m so thrilled that all those people are down there waiting for us. It’s the biggest day of my life....

“Mickey Lolich has never been a hero with the Tigers. Mickey Lolich has always been a number on a roster. Finally, somebody knows who I am.”

While most of the Tigers agreed with their manager that Horton throwing out Brock at the plate in Game Five was the point when the Series turned, Cash felt the most decisive moment really occurred before a pitch was ever thrown. He maintained Smith moving Mickey Stanley to shortstop and putting Al Kaline in the everyday lineup was the key to everything. “Without (Stanley) playing shortstop,” Cash said, “Al wouldn’t have been in the Series.”

And what a Fall Classic the sixteen-year veteran enjoyed. Kaline hit .379, with two home runs and eight runs batted in, and stood out defensively. In the victorious clubhouse, he cradled his own bottle of champagne to his chest. “I’d seen my other World Series in the country club, watching TV,” Kaline said. “I considered people lucky to be in the Series. I knew all along I’d get into the Series someday, maybe as a pinch hitter. I never expected to have this good a Series. I was one of the lucky ones.”

Even in victory, though, many of the Tigers reflected on the team and the pitcher they had just beaten.

“Gibson is the greatest pitcher I’ve ever faced,” Kaline said at the time. It was an assessment he would repeat frequently in the years to come. “To beat him and win the World Series all in one game is really great. We just wanted to get into the seventh game real bad—for our pride after the way we played the first two games in Detroit.”

In the home clubhouse, discussion centered on Flood’s misplay of Northrup’s line drive in the seventh inning, the triple to the wall that broke the game open. While Gibson told reporters that he thought his friend would catch the ball, he emphasized that he didn’t think Flood should have caught the ball. “If Curt Flood can’t catch that ball, nobody can,” Gibson added. “I’m certainly not going to stand here and blame the best center fielder in the business. Why couldn’t we score any runs off that left-hander? That’s the reason we lost.”

Waves of reporters stopped by Flood’s locker, many of them asking the same questions.

When asked if he had lost the ball in the crowd, where so many were wearing white shirts, Flood simply replied, “Yes.”

When asked if the field was sub-par, causing him to slip, the record-holder of 226 consecutive errorless games in the National League replied, “ Yes.”

When asked if he thought he could have made the play on a dry field, Flood said, “I think so. Look I don’t want to make alibis. I should have made the play . . . but I didn’t and that’s all there is to it.”

He added, “A ball hit right at me is the toughest play for me in this park. If the ball was up higher—over the edge of grandstand, I might have seen it in time.”

Back in Detroit, the celebration began precisely at 4:06 p.m., moments after Freehan caught Tim McCarver’s foul popup. Once again the populace crowded the Motor City’s streets downtown and near Tiger Stadium, but this time nothing went up in smoke. “It was a great exuberant crowd,” Detroit police commissioner told the
Sporting News
. “There were some opportunists, but no real looters.”

People waded into the Kennedy Square pool downtown, several holding aloft beer bottles. Telephone books and IBM cards were shredded into confetti and thrown out the windows of the city’s tallest buildings. The ticker tape rained down on the revelers below and many fans gathered up the celebratory fodder and tossed it again up into the air. While Detroit mayor Jerome Cavanaugh ordered fire and civil defense to be on alert, they weren’t needed as more than 150,000 peacefully crowded the downtown sector. West of town, 35,000 fans swarmed the landing field at Detroit’s Metropolitan Airport—so many of them in fact that the Tigers’ charter from St. Louis couldn’t land there. Thirteen departing flights and thirty-five other arrivals were delayed, and the ballclub’s flight was diverted to nearby Willow Run Airport, where an estimated 1,500 more fans cheered the team’s arrival.

“I was going home,” Tigers reserve infielder Dick Tracewski said after the charter landed. “But I’m glad the baggage wasn’t going to be taken to Tiger Stadium until tomorrow because I wouldn’t miss this for the world.”

A week or so after the Fall Classic concluded an old lady approached Gibson at the airport in St. Louis. The pitcher assumed she was going to ask for an autograph, perhaps congratulate him on another fine season, even his World Series record. Instead she stunned him by asking if he still spoke to Curt Flood.

“Lady, how can you ask that?” he replied.

In Detroit, senior baseball writer Joe Falls perhaps best summed up what the championship meant to his audience: “My town, as you know, had the worst riot in our nation’s history in the summer of 1967, and it left scars which may never fully heal,” he wrote. “And so, as 1968 dawned and we all started thinking ahead to the hot summer nights in Detroit, the mood of our city was taut. It was apprehensive.... But then something started happening in the middle of 1968. You could pull up to a light at the corner of Clairmount and 12th, which was the hub of last year’s riot, and the guy in the next car would have his radio turned up: ‘ . . . McLain looks in for the sign, he’s set—here’s the pitch’ . . . . It was a year when an entire community, an entire city, was caught up in a wild, wonderful frenzy.”

FINAL SCORE: TIGERS 4, CARDINALS 1
Detroit wins the ’68 World Series, four games to three.

PART VII

“Never the Same Again”

Official histories, news stories surround us daily, but the events of art reach us too late, travel languorously like messages in a bottle. Only the best art can order the chaotic tumble of events. Only the best can realign chaos to suggest both the chaos and order it will become.

—MICHAEL ONDAATJE

Unable to pitch winterball, ordered to stay home and rest his arm for next season by the Cleveland Indians, Luis Tiant did watch television, first the World Series and then the Olympics. He saw Mickey Lolich jump into Bill Freehan’s arms after the final out in Game Seven, daydreaming of what it would be like to play in the World Series one day.

On October 14, 1968, Tiant’s daughter, Isabel, turned one year old. The family planned a party for that evening at their home in Mexico City, and Tiant spent the afternoon watching the men’s one-hundred meter Olympic trials with a friend. In a few days, U.S. sprinters Tommie Smith and John Carlos would raise black-gloved fists to the heavens, a demonstration that the
New York Times
’s columnist Robert Lipsyte would call “the mildest, most civil demonstration of the year,” and one that would reverberate throughout sports for years to come.

Soon, however, Tiant’s TV viewing was interrupted by his sister-in-law lugging a battered suitcase into the family living room.

“Hey,” she asked, “do you remember this?”

Tiant glanced at the old valise and shook his head.

“You sure?” Tiant’s sister-in-law Concepcion said.

Irritated by the interruption, Tiant got out of his chair and went over to better inspect the suitcase. That’s when he saw his mother standing in the front hallway. After seven years apart, Senora Tiant had finally been allowed by the Castro government to leave Cuba and visit her only child.

Tiant took his mother in his arms—tears running down his cheeks. “Why are you crying?” she chided him. “I’m the one who should cry.”

Years later Tiant said, “Everyone remembers different things from that year, ’68. In the end, that’s the time I’ll never forget.”

Only a few miles away from that joyful reunion, Jim Ryun prepared to run the most difficult race of his life. Just about everyone recognized Ryun once he reached Mexico City. After all, he was the favorite in the 1,500 meters. But the American miler had run only one real race at altitude—the final Olympic trial at Lake Tahoe, California—before arriving at the Games. He had worked hard in training, but would it be enough?

Such doubts only grew after Australian Ron Clarke’s collapse in the 10,000 meters. A bronze medalist in the same event in 1964, Clarke set seventeen world records during his storied career. Yet in the thin air of Mexico City, he never had a chance.

Six runners in the 10,000 meters’ thirty-six field dropped out that day, one after only two laps. Three others fell unconscious as the race soon whittled itself down to a small group, most of them from higher elevations, including Naftali Temu from Kenya and Mamo Wolde of Ethiopia. Clarke did his best to hang with the leaders. But the math didn’t add up. As Richard Hoffer later explained in
Something in the Air: American Passion and Defiance in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics
, high altitude can destroy the best of athletes. “Runners at shorter distances burn up ready glycogen and can repay the debt later at their leisure,” he wrote. “Long-distance racers must use oxygen from the air they’re breathing during the race to break down sugar, financing the debt as they go.”

Clarke became the first favorite who couldn’t pay the debt that Mexico City’s altitude required. Even though the winning time in the 10,000 meters was 29:27.4, the slowest time for a winner in the event since 1948, the Aussie veteran keeled over at the line, finishing a distant sixth. Afterward he underwent electrocardiograms and eventually it was determined that his heart suffered permanent damage in the race. For the rest of his life, he took daily medication for a heart murmur.