When Mickey Lolich walked to the mound for his pregame warm-ups, the cloud was barely a smudge, a dirty puff of smoke rising behind the left-field light towers. All through the afternoon it grew wider and higher as it climbed into the clear, summer sky. Only those spectators seated high in the upper deck along the first baseline could see it. Most of the 43,000 spectators who sat through the Tigers-Yankees doubleheader on this muggy July 23, 1967, had no idea what was going on.
Detroit was burning down.
About thirteen hours before Lolich threw his first pitch, Detroit police had raided a blind pig, an illegal after-hours gambling establishment, on 12th Street. Within minutes, a crowd gathered at the site, which was in a busy commercial area less than three miles north of the ballpark. When the cops tried to shoulder their way to the police wagons with their collars, they found themselves surrounded by angry black onlookers. It was a sultry night. The crowd refused to move. There was some jostling. Threats were shouted. Then someone threw a rock.
In that instant, 12th Street exploded. The police retreated before the onslaught. Phones rang in the homes of the city’s police commissioner and mayor within minutes. Many of the small businesses in the area were already in flames, their front windows lying in shattered slivers on the pavement and their stock carried off. A few homes and apartment buildings on the adjacent residential blocks were burning, too. A call was put in to John Conyers, the area’s congressman. He was one of the first black men sent to Washington by Detroit voters and the most popular African-American politician in the city. Conyers hurried to the scene, mounted a flatbed truck, and in reasoned tones appealed for calm. A rock came flying out of the furious crowd, and then another. Conyers leaped from the truck and sped out of the area.
The mob surged south on 12th Street, driving back a line of police who were trying to form a defensive wall with their shields. A newspaper reporter walking behind police was cut by a shard of flying glass and, with blood streaming from a head wound, was carried to nearby Henry Ford Hospital. William Serrin, who later would cover the labor beat for The New York Times, kept his bloodstained shirt as a souvenir of that morning for years afterward. Detroit’s two dailies were already printing their fat Sunday editions when the riot began. When the papers landed on the doorsteps of more than a million homes that morning, they carried not a word of the disturbance. Radio and television stations, operating with skeleton staffs on a Sunday, were asked to downplay the situation. So when fans and players started driving to Tiger Stadium, almost none of them knew what was happening on 12th Street.
They did know that the Tigers were in a hell of a pennant race. Five teams were bunched within five games of each other on this July afternoon. Four of them—Detroit, Boston, Chicago, and Minnesota—each had taken turns at the top, and California was driving hard, right behind them. One team would put together a streak, claw a path into first place, and then fall back, sometimes all the way to fourth. The Tigers were now running third. They had fought injuries all season long. Al Kaline was down with a broken finger. Willie Horton had missed a month and a half with a bad Achilles tendon. Jim Northrup was afflicted with the mumps. In addition, Denny McLain was pitching poorly, almost as if distracted by other matters, and Lolich hadn’t won in two months. Still, the Tigers hung on, and the city, without a pennant for twenty-two years, was swept up in the drama of the race. The feeling was that if the Tigers could get healthy before time ran out, they were, far and away, the most talented team in the American League.
Detroit was known as one of baseball’s best cities. The Tigers were adored in good years and bad. So all through the early summer big crowds jammed the ballpark, sensing that this could be the season when, at last, their wait would be rewarded.
Lolich, although in the middle of a terrible slump, kept the Tigers in the first game of the doubleheader with New York. But two late errors gave the Yankees a 4-2 win. It was the twenty-six-year-old left-hander’s tenth consecutive loss, a team record. Thoroughly disgusted, he dressed between games and prepared for his long, lonely motorcycle ride home, to the semirural town of Washington in Detroit’s far northeastern suburbs. Almost as soon as he arrived he would be notified to report for duty to his National Guard unit. The pitcher was being mobilized for riot duty in the city.
Detroit rallied to win the second game, 7-3, behind the relief pitching of John Hiller and Mike Marshall. That’s the way it had gone all season. Win one, lose one. Never good enough to take control of the race, or bad enough to fall out of it. Horton’s third-inning homer put the Tigers ahead for keeps. By that time, the dark cloud in the distance was growing steadily. It now extended all the way behind the center-field stands. The press box knew what was going on a few dozen blocks away, and sportswriters looked apprehensively at the swirling smoke. A New York columnist surveyed the scene. “Maybe they’re just getting the merchandise together for Willie Horton Day,” he said. No one laughed. Detroit was burning down. It would never be the same city again.
But the games went on that day. It was as if the stadium was wrapped in a cocoon, untouched by the catastrophe that was engulfing the city. This was not the first urban riot of the late ’60s, and it certainly would not be the last. However, with forty-three deaths before order was restored, it was the deadliest. In this year there were antiwar demonstrations through-out the country. The youth of America were in the midst of their long, strange, transforming trip. Drugs permeated every campus. Young people with flowers in their hair and a blankness behind their eyes aimlessly strummed guitars and spent the summer groovin’ in city parks. The culture was in upheaval. The Beatles and Timothy Leary and the Black Panthers. It seemed that revolution was coming in on the next strong gust of wind. In a hundred ways, large and small, the country appeared to be coming apart. “Come on, baby, light my fire,” sang Jim Morrison over every radio.
Baseball went on, unknowing and untouched. Mickey Mantle still hit third for the Yanks. Willie Mays roamed center for the Giants. Most ballparks did not even permit rock music to be played between innings. At Tiger Stadium, the organist was told that the liveliest music permitted was a polka. A few ballplayers would retreat to a corner of the trainer’s room and pop “greenies,” diet pills that induced a quick energy surge. But beyond that, with the notable exceptions of alcohol and nicotine, drugs were unknown. The Vietnam protests and rallies, love-ins, and acid trips were part of a parallel reality, one that did not intrude on baseball’s space. A player watching TV footage of a campus anti-war rally—attended by students with long hair and flowing robes and Native American regalia—would turn away from the screen, shake his head, and mutter: “Fuckin’ Halloween.” There was no place for this in baseball.
By the time the last fly ball of the doubleheader settled into the glove of left fielder Lennie Green, it was after 7:00 P.M. Detroit did not observe daylight savings time, so light already was starting to fail. Twilight was made even deeper by billowing columns of smoke that ascended in an unbroken wall north of the ballpark. The public address announcer gave the final totals for the second game. “For Detroit, seven runs, twelve hits, no errors; for New York, three runs, nine hits, and one error. Winning pitcher, Hiller. Losing pitcher, Peterson. The Detroit Baseball Club has been advised that the Grand River, Linwood, and Fenkell bus lines will not be operating this evening. Please drive safely.”
Not operating! The streets the buses traveled were going up in flame. Smoke was pouring in dense waves across the Lodge Freeway. Homeward-bound drivers had to slow to an anxious crawl to get through. Gunfire was heard throughout the city, and the 10th Precinct was, for all purposes, under siege by snipers. A woman standing at a second floor window at a motel near the General Motors Building was shot dead by an unknown gunman. Squads of looters were racing out every major artery of the city, randomly breaking into stores and setting some of them afire. As darkness fell, flames illuminated a dozen neighborhoods. The situation was far beyond the control of police and National Guard units. But Michigan’s Governor George Romney hesitated for hours before requesting federal troops because the phone call had to go to his political enemy, President Lyndon B. Johnson. Mayor Jerome Cavanagh, one of the young stars of the Democratic Party, was watching his reputation and ambitions turn to ashes in Detroit’s streets. All this was breaking loose in the world outside baseball’s cocoon. But all that the Tigers saw fit to tell their spectators was that some bus lines weren’t running, as if nothing more was going on than a drivers’ strike or an especially troublesome water main break.
Motown was burning down.
By nightfall, Lolich had returned to the city in full combat gear, assigned to guard a public works supply depot on the West Side. He belonged to the 191st Michigan National Guard unit, which ran a motor pool. What exactly his motor pool was sup-posed to do in this supply depot, miles from the scene of any rioting, was never made clear to him. He did know, however, that he was hungry. All he’d had to eat all day had been a snack between games, and because he’d lost again he hadn’t had much of an appetite.
“All 1 knew was that 1 was starved and so were the other guys,” he said. “We’d all been told to report immediately, and most of us hadn’t been able to grab dinner. So after a while, when it looked like nothing was happening where we were, I decided to try and find someplace open and get some food. The streets were empty, and I was just walking along, with my rifle out in front of me, the way we were taught to patrol. Finally, I found this little hamburger place that had stayed open. The guy was really glad to see me, and he loaded me up with burgers, fries, and shakes. The only problem was I had no way to carry them back. If I slung my rifle over my back I’d be violating military policy. I could be court-martialed or something. So the storeowner sent his kid back with me. He carried the food, and I was his armed escort. If anyone had tried to grab those burgers, man, they’d have been in for the fight of their life. That’s how I spent my first night on duty in the riot.
“Later on, they transferred me to police headquarters in down-town Detroit. Now that was a little scary, watching those wagons come in and unload the prisoners, one right after the other. Some of them were in really bad shape. The major in my unit decided that me and him should go out and patrol the surrounding streets. Nothing was moving downtown. It was a ghost town. Since I was the top-rated marksman in the unit, I suggested he drive while I rode shotgun. And wouldn’t you know he stopped at the red lights! There’s no other car on the street for miles, snipers are all over the place, and this guy is stopping on the red. ‘Ahhh, sir,’ I told him. ‘Don’t you think it would be better if we just kept moving?’ Oh, sure. Right, Mickey,’ he said and floored it. But that was about as nervous as it got for me.”
By this time, the Baltimore Orioles, who were scheduled to start a three-game series in Detroit on Monday, had been told to stay home. Instead, the Tigers and city officials had come up with a wonderful plan. They would save the city with baseball. The games would be switched to Baltimore and put on television. Everyone would be so caught up in the pennant race that they would stop looting and watch the games on TV. It was brilliant in its simplicity. After all, what American didn’t prefer baseball to rioting any day?
The sad part was that this plan was regarded as realistic. There was absolutely no understanding of what caused the riots or of the depth of passions that they had unleashed. Baseball was still convinced that it had the power to douse the flames and rescue Detroit.
The Tigers flew to Baltimore on Tuesday and took the field for a night game as Detroit reeled through its third straight day of gunfire and death. TV cameras beamed the pictures from Memorial Stadium back to Michigan. The teams battled to a 0-0 tie into the second inning. The Tigers put two men on base with Joe Sparma coming to bat. Then it started to rain.
The grounds crew reacted as if rain on a July night in Baltimore was an absolute meteorological stunner. While the playing field turned into a dismal pool of goo, crew members hesitated, stumbled, slipped, ran into each other, and appeared to be auditioning for The Keystone Cops Go to the Вallgame.
The Detroit television crew, mindful of the critical role it was playing in this great social drama, desperately looked for some-one to put on the air before viewers got it into their heads to start rioting again. The crew settled on Eddie Stanky, the manager of the White Sox. It was not a fortuitous choice. Stanky’s team was spending an off day in Washington, so he had driven over to watch his rivals from Detroit. He was a small, excitable man, easily roused to a towering fury by imagined slights. The previous weekend, the Detroit Free Press had carried an extended question-and-answer interview with him. Usually, bad grammar and malapropisms are cleaned up in such an interview. But Stanky had been so abrasive that the two interviewers, Joe Falls and I, decided to let it run just as he said it. So the text contained gems like: “He couldn’t hit the sidewalk with a bag of beets.” and “The word ‘defeat’ is not in my category.”
Stanky was furious. As he started his TV interview, he spotted me observing the proceedings. That did it. He instantly went off on a tirade, blasting me and Falls and even the baseball writer for the Detroit News, who had nothing whatsoever to do with the story. He said we were malicious rascals, lying troublemakers. He said we were bad for baseball. Stanky went on and on, growing more agitated by the minute. The TV producer instinctively understood that this was not the right sort of thing to broadcast to an already overheated populace. He got Stanky off the air as fast as he could and focused the cameras instead on the rain pouring down on the tarp, which hadn’t quite made it all the way to the first baseline. The field was now an unplayable swamp, and the game was called off after an hour. The great rescue mission had failed, a victim of recalcitrant weather. The rioting in Detroit went on, eventually winding down of its own accord. And the 1967 season spun itself out to its own sad conclusion in a cruelly wounded city.