It should never have come to this. The Tigers knew it. On the last, cold October evening of the 1967 season, with the home crowd pleading for one more rally, just one more big hit, they stood three outs from oblivion. If they lost, the race was over. Boston would conclude an incredible comeback season by winning its first pennant in twenty-one years. If they won, Boston would have to fly to Detroit for a playoff game, winner take all, the next day. The Red Sox sat in their Fenway Park clubhouse, seven hundred miles away, listening to Detroit radio announcer Ernie Harwell’s voice piping in the transmission over a Boston station.
The California Angels held an 8-5 lead in the ninth. But it never should have come to this. Two weeks before, the Tigers had been tied for first place with Boston and Minnesota, and Chicago was just 1½ games behind. It was going to be the tightest finish in American League history. This is what the Tigers had waited for. They had claimed all along that their talent would be the decisive factor down the stretch. But four times in the next eleven games they blew leads in the eighth inning or later. Their bull pen failed. They made mistakes, horrible mental blunders. McLain turned up with a mysterious foot injury and fell out of the starting rotation. Manager Mayo Smith benched slumping first baseman Norm Cash, who was booed unmercifully by unforgiving Tiger Stadium crowds. He was replaced by fading National League star Eddie Mathews, picked up from Houston in an August waiver deal.
Then, just as in Baltimore during the riots, even the weather failed the Tigers. The closing four-game series against California had been scheduled over four days. But on Thursday and Friday, drenching early autumn rains fell on Detroit without a break. The games were rained out and had to be made up as two consecutive doubleheaders on the weekend. The Tigers would have to win three of the four games to tie for the league lead.
The delay enabled the rejuvenated Lolich to pitch the first game Saturday. He threw a shutout, his second straight whitewash and ninth win in ten decisions since the day of the riots ten weeks before. But the bull pen blew a four-run lead in the second game. Now there was no more margin. One more loss and it was over.
There were 15,000 empty seats at the ballpark for the deciding games Sunday. Attendance had fallen off sharply after the riots. The team would draw only 1.4 million people for the season. In 1961, when the Tigers stayed in the race until early September, 1.6 million had come to the ballpark. The attendance difference between those two years was the fear factor.
Detroit was a wounded, suspicious city. Many streets were still in ruins, the bumed-out husks of stores and houses dotting block after block. Suburbanites stopped coming into the city. The fastest growing plant in Detroit that summer was a “For Sale” sign on the front lawn. What had been a slow, steady out migration to the suburbs turned into a stampede after July 23. With images of the riots burned into their memories, thousands of Detroiters decided they’d had enough. They took whatever price they could get for their homes and fled. Accusations flew across a widening racial divide. An understanding that civic leaders thought had been well crafted between the races turned out to be made of hot air, with neither value nor meaning.
Still, the city hung on the fate of the Tigers. Sparma stopped California in Sunday’s opener. Then McLain, who hadn’t pitched in thirteen days, walked to the mound for game two. He had fallen asleep on his living room couch one night while watching TV, he said, when he was awakened by the rattle of a trash can. He thought it was a raccoon. When he tried to leap from the couch to investigate, he said, his foot was asleep and wouldn’t support his weight. He fell and twisted his ankle, he said. It was a good story, typically McLain in its bizarre sequence of events. Not until two years later would a darker version emerge.
McLain had not won a game since August 29 and was 17-16 for the year. The Tigers had expected much more after his twenty-win season in 1966. His appearance was brief this time out. The Angels drove him out in the third while taking a 4-3 lead. They continued the assault on every pitcher Detroit put in, running the margin to 8-3. Dick McAuliffe chopped two runs off the lead with a hit in the seventh. But now it was the ninth, with just three outs to go and extinction staring right at them.
It had turned ugly. While pursuing a pop foul, Mathews nearly stumbled over a news photographer. Photographers were allowed to work on the field then, and when the photographer lost sight of the ball he did what he was supposed to do—stay in a crouch and allow the players to get around him. But Mathews, not used to the ground rules in Detroit, nearly dropped the ball as he dodged to avoid the photographer. Then Mathews stopped and hurled the ball right at the feet of the photographer, as the crowd booed.
By the ninth, there was no more booing. The crowd was begging its team to fight back into it. When Freehan led off with a double and Don Wert drew a walk to put the tying run at bat, hope lurched convulsively back into the ballpark. The Angels brought in George Brunet, a left-handed journeyman who beat the Tigers with disturbing regularity as a starter. He got pinch hitter Jim Price on an infield fly. That brought up McAuliffe. As he left the on-deck circle, a fan leaped to the roof of the Detroit dugout and bowed in an attitude of prayer. He appeared to be a drunk, out of control. But those sitting closest to him could see that he was sobbing.
McAuliffe, the most relentless competitor on the team, had enjoyed a good season after being switched from shortstop to second base. Second was a far more comfortable position for him on defense, and the improvement was apparent on offense, as well. He had, in fact, hit into just one double play all year long. He now did it for a second time—a hard grounder directly at the second baseman. And just like that, the long season was over.
In Boston, the Red Sox leaped from their seats in the club-house, hugging each other, spewing champagne around the room, dancing in wild celebration. Manager Dick Williams, who had brought his young son with him to wait out the score in Detroit, embraced the boy. “Don’t ever forget this,” he murmured to him. “Don’t ever forget this.”
In Detroit, the lights were going out all over the stadium. In the tunnel from the dugout, Green turned and fired a baseball at a TV crew filming the Tigers’ retreat from the field. Mayo Smith ran into his old friend, California manager Bill Rigney, in the cold stadium corridor outside the clubhouse. The two men hugged. “I’m sorry, Mayo,” said Rigney. “Naah,” said the Detroit manager. “I’m proud of you. You fought us all the way.” When the Tigers clubhouse doors finally opened, most players were still seated at their lockers, heads slumped in numbed resignation. Many of them had been crying. “All summer long it was, Oh, well, we’ll get ’em tomorrow,’” said Freehan, his big frame sagging in weary defeat. “Now there’s no more tomorrow. I can’t believe it.” They were convinced that the best team had not won. They would now have four and half months to think about that.