Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever (28 page)

Soon after action resumed, Gibson reminded everyone that he was an exceptional athlete, homering off Sparma to lead off the fourth inning. With the contest becoming a rout, the teams struggled in the wet conditions, often at cross-purposes. Detroit started to stall, holding out hope for a postponement. Catcher Bill Freehan repeatedly went to the mound to talk with a long line of relievers—Sparma, Daryl Patterson, Fred Lasher, John Hiller, and Pat Dobson. Meanwhile, the Cardinals tried to hurry things along so the game would become official once five innings were in the book. Hence St. Louis’s Julian Javier trying to steal with Patterson still holding the ball on the mound. At one point the umpires called out both managers and told them to stop such gamesmanship.

“Sure I was trying to stall,” Tigers’ first baseman Norm Cash said, “when I went over to talk to Daryl Patterson in the fourth inning I didn’t have anything to say to him. I wanted to get in an argument with the umpire, which I did.”

Gibson knew as well as anybody what was at stake and, as was his wont, he decided to do something about it. Not only did he homer in the fourth inning, becoming the first pitcher in World Series history to hit two home runs, but he made sure that the game became official—rain or no rain. While the Tigers showed signs of life in the bottom of the fourth, with Jim Northrup homering into the right-field stands, Gibson did his utmost to end things once and for all. After striking the two previous batters he got Mickey Stanley to fly out to end the fifth.

“In rain or shine,” catcher Tim McCarver said afterward in the winning clubhouse, “that Gibson is fine.”

Through it all, commissioner Eckert sat stoically in the rain, alongside Hall of Famer Jackie Robinson. Humphrey never did return. “The Tigers attempted to stall, and the Cardinals attempted to hasten the lopsided game. The World Series had become a farce,” Jerry Green wrote. “The players sloshed around and deliberately attempted to make outs and the rain fell and the nation watched the incredible spectacle in its living rooms.”

Of course, baseball has suffered its share of mediocre commissioners. Ford Frick and Bowie Kuhn come to mind. Yet few reached the level of Eckert’s incompetence. As the rain fell in Detroit, his critics remembered how the commissioner had also failed to cancel all the scheduled games after Robert Kennedy’s assassination. Once again, the national pastime didn’t do right by its fans or its players. In another twist, Eckert could be blamed for at least opening the door to steroid abuse in baseball. Despite being tone-deaf about the demonstrations in Mexico City and complaints from the “Speed City” athletes on the U.S. team, one thing the International Olympic Committee did manage to accomplish was banning the use of steroids on the eve of the Summer Games. While baseball had a similar opportunity to address the use of performance-enhancing drugs in 1968, Eckert opted to pass.

The Cardinals’ Lou Brock rarely let any opportunity slip by. So, in the eighth inning, after his double staked St. Louis to a 10–1 lead, he took off for third base, sliding in safely. The stolen base was Brock’s seventh of the’68 Series, which tied his record from the previous year, and his fourteenth in postseason play, which tied Eddie Collins’s all-time record. “I didn’t know about the record until someone on the bench told me,” he later told the
Sporting News
. “Then I figured I owed it to myself to try it. You don’t get to play in too many World Series in your career.”

As the rain came down, Tigers’ rookie Jon Warden watched the action like any relief pitcher would: wondering if the score would become so lopsided that he might get in the game.

Back in April, when the season began, Warden had been the Tigers’ hottest pitcher. Not only had he won the team’s first victory of the campaign, but his 3–1 record early on had been the best in the American League. Yet as the season progressed, Warden became the forgotten man in the Detroit bullpen. The Tigers’ staff often threw complete games, tossing a dozen in a row at one point during the regular season. Despite Warden’s early success and his impressive fastball, others were soon being called on and eating up any available innings.

On August 25 Warden had thrown three shutout innings at Yankee Stadium and then pitched only one more time in the regular season. Yet as the World Series’ Game Four unfolded, Warden thought he might get another chance. Joe Sparma gave up two runs in one-third of an inning. John Hiller couldn’t record an out as the Cardinals battered him for three earned runs.

“I almost got in,” Warden said. “I was up several times, kind of chomping at the bit. I mean it was a perfect situation. Bring in the kid and let him mop up and we look ahead to another day.

“I hate to say it but sometimes Mayo Smith wasn’t the sharpest manager around. But in a way he was exactly the right kind of guy to manage that team. What I mean by that is he’d let things play out sometimes. Now I don’t know if that’s what he wanted or if he’d just kind of tuned out at times, just went to sleep. But he wasn’t micro-managing everything so you always had a right-hander pitching to a right-handed batter, playing every angle like that. He’d kind of forget. He’d let the players take it over.

“But on that day, Game Four, that kind of managing sure didn’t work in my favor. He let Hiller stay out there and get pounded when I would have loved a chance to have that experience. I mean let me have a chance to get pounded, too. Unlike Denny, I could throw in the rain.”

After the game, Humphrey appeared in the Tigers’ clubhouse. No matter that the hometown team had suffered the most lopsided defeat since the New York Yankees defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates 12–0 in 1960, the candidate was ready to press the flesh.

“ Willie, you’ve had a great year,” he told Horton, shaking the slugger’s hand.

“Who’s that cat?” Mickey Stanley asked as Humphrey headed for the door.

FINAL: CARDINALS 10, TIGERS 1
St. Louis leads the series, 3–1

October 7, 1968

Game Five, Tiger Stadium, Detroit, Michigan

Before the 1968 season, only two teams had rallied from a 3–1 deficit in games to win the World Series (the 1925 Pittsburgh Pirates and the 1958 New York Yankees). After being humiliated in the rain, dominated twice by Bob Gibson and driven to distraction by Lou Brock’s base-running, the Detroit Tigers didn’t appear to have much of a chance. If anything, they just wanted to put together one last good game for their fans at home, something more reminiscent of the regular-season heroics, regardless of how the Series played out.

“A lot of people watching us must think we’re a lousy club,” Al Kaline told the
Detroit News
. “And we aren’t.”

Indeed, lousy clubs often overreach and try to do too much when their backs are against the wall. Good teams, however, ones that believe in themselves, emphasize the everyday routine, the little things that got them to the championship in the first place. That’s why heading into Game Five Willie Horton and Mickey Stanley continued to discuss outfield defensive strategy. No matter that manager Mayo Smith planned to lift Horton if the Tigers ever got the lead in the late innings again. No matter that Stanley remained the starting shortstop rather than the Gold Glove center fielder. The two of them, bringing Kaline, Bill Freehan, and Jim Northrup into the conversation, maintained that Brock could be thrown out. Even though the St. Louis speedster had already tied his World Series record of seven stolen bases set the year before—and in addition had added a triple and home run—he wasn’t perfect. It only seemed that way.

“Some would say we were grasping at straws,” Horton said. “But we still talked about those scouting reports. How (Brock) would drift and slow down a bit going around third base. How he didn’t slide.

“In the Series, we were still practicing our relays, making good throws because that’s the only chance we knew we’d have against him. Everything may have been against us, but we had to find something to believe in.”

While the Cardinals were the consummate pros, a rainbow coalition of understanding and discussion, the Tigers, even with their backs against the wall, remained a gang of misfits, an irreverent band of brothers. In the hometown clubhouse, catcher Bill Freehan squinted through the gun sight of a new Winchester rifle that he stowed in his locker. “That is how we’re going to stop Lou Brock,” shouted Mickey Lolich from across the room.

If anything, the Tigers realized that they had already endured their trial by fire the season before. In losing the pennant on the final day, in playing on in a city literally going up flames, they had learned that they could rely upon their teammates. “We looked out for each other,” said Lolich, Detroit’s starting pitcher for Game Five. “Always have, always did. Sometimes that’s the only thing you can do, the only thing you have left in the world. The guy on either side of you.”

Tigers play-by-play announcer Ernie Harwell invited Jose Feliciano, whose cover of The Doors’ “Light My Fire” was high on the pop charts, to sing the national anthem before Game Five. The rendition soon ignited the kind of public-relations firestorm that could seemingly only take place in 1968.

“It was a long version of the song and at that point in time, singers weren’t supposed to give their own interpretations,” McLain recalled. “This was the height of the Vietnam War and the protest movement. The National Guard was all over the field in a patriotic display, and here’s this blind Latino supposedly ‘butchering’ the anthem. It was viewed as sacrilegious rather than an impressive artistic interpretation.”

As Feliciano finished his soulful version, angry fans were already calling NBC affiliates and local newspapers nationwide. More importantly, in terms of the game at hand, the artistic interpretation derailed Lolich’s pregame routine. Usually the Tigers’ left-hander took about twelve minutes to warm up. That tired his arm a touch, allowing his deliveries to sink, just like pitching coach Gerry Staley back in Portland had taught him. Yet before Game Five, “[They] played it early,” Lolich said. “It took the guy three minutes to sing. Then the umps came out and started the game. I decided to rear back and throw as hard as I could. When I do that the ball comes in straight.”

The Cardinals wasted no time in capitalizing on Lolich’s mistakes. For the second game in a row, lead-off hitter Lou Brock smoked the second pitch he saw, this time doubling to left field. He came around on Curt Flood’s single. Flood then stole second base and he, too, scored when Orlando Cepeda hit a home run into the left-field stands. In roughly the amount of time it took Feliciano to finish his much-maligned anthem, the Cardinals had struck what many believed would be the closing notes of the World Series.

“I thought we would wrap it up, the whole Series, when I hit that homer,” Cepeda said. “I definitely thought so. But Lolich got tough after that.”

St. Louis manager Red Schoendienst considered starting left-hander Steve Carlton for Game Five. In ’68, however, Carlton was still years away from the Hall of Fame numbers he would put up for the Philadelphia Phillies, when he would lead the National League in victories four times. This was only Carlton’s second full season in the majors, during which he posted a respectable but unremarkable 13–11 record and 2.99 ERA. In the end, Schoendienst decided the pitcher nicknamed “Lefty” better served the team out of the bullpen, and instead he gave Nellie Briles, who had gone 19–11 during the regular season, the opportunity to redeem his losing Game Two performance and close out the Series. Early on, after St. Louis raced out to that 3–0 lead, it appeared Schoendienst had made the right decision. Briles was in charge and shutting the Tigers down.

“There are stretches as a pitcher when you feel you can do no wrong,” Briles later said. “The first [few] innings of that game, I was in control. I thought I was going to be the one to bring the championship back to St. Louis.”

Briles nearly benefited from another run in the third, but Tigers’ catcher Bill Freehan somehow threw out Brock trying to steal second base. After that things began to swing in the Tigers’ favor.

In the fourth inning, Detroit’s Mickey Stanley tripled down the right-field line off Briles. At first base, Cepeda claimed that Stanley hadn’t touched the bag but the umpires didn’t buy it. For a moment, it appeared that Briles would escape the inning unscathed as he induced a grounder from Al Kaline, holding Stanley at third base. Yet Stanley scored on a Norm Cash sacrifice fly, Horton then tripled and came in to score on Jim Northrup’s single. That sliced St. Louis’s lead to 3–2 through four innings, but the Cardinals were still just five innings away from capturing the World Series for the second consecutive season and for the third time in the last five years.

In the top of the fifth inning, Brock was back at it, doubling off Lolich with one out. Just like that the Tigers’ pitcher was back in hot water. “We’d just made it a ballgame, with the two runs in the bottom of the fourth, and here I was about to give ’em more in the next inning,” Lolich remembered. “Let’s just say it wasn’t the game plan.”