Running late. Gotta catch up. No time.
They had shut down a freeway on him in Detroit, and Bill Freehan was an hour late for his appointment. He was inspecting a factory he had invested in, trying to get back into the swing of the business world after six years off chasing a dream.
His company, Freehan-Bocci, was renting second-floor space above a beauty salon in Birmingham, a wealthy suburb of Detroit. Only temporary, he said. Only until he got himself organized again. Baseball memorabilia is the primary decor, but little about the setting is permanent.
At fifty-five, beneath the conservative businessman’s suit and striped tie, he still has the athlete’s walk. The drive that turned him into the best catcher in the American League for almost a decade still ticks away inside him, guided in other paths. He is seated behind a bare desk in a cubicle of an office defined by low, movable walls. He keeps his voice down to retain some privacy.
“The analogies between baseball and the business world are so apparent that they almost go without saying,” he says. “When a team goes bad it’s because people are trying to find fault, blaming somebody else, undermining the total effort. You have to learn what it’s like to win, and that’s true whether you’re running a corporation or a ball club. And when you learn, you have to do everything you can to reinforce the lessons.”
If Freehan sounds a little like the primary speaker at a motivational sales meeting, that was always part of the package. The first person he learned to motivate was himself. He had been thrust into a leadership role on a major league team before reaching his twenty-fifth birthday. He was given the job of calling pitches for some of the most talented and quirkiest individuals in the game. It had been more of a sales job than most observers ever guessed, a constant process of building up his own confidence, talking himself into success. But if you had to predict which of the ’68 Tigers would do well after his career was over, top choice on most ballots would have been Freehan.
And yet, right in the middle of a successful career as a manufacturer’s rep, with his finances assured and future clear, he tossed it aside for the chance to become baseball coach at the University of Michigan. Then six years later, just as abruptly, he quit.
“I’d never worked in an institutional setting before,” he shrugs. “It was an adjustment I never got used to. But maybe it was something I had to get out of my system. I always wondered if I’d missed something, walking away from baseball when I did. I retired in 1976 and left the game completely—went right into business. So maybe the Michigan job was a chance to see how much I really missed it.
“I did in some ways. But you forget a lot of the negatives. That feeling of walking out of a ballpark after midnight, when every-one else has gone home and the only people left are the ones cleaning out the concession stands. I used to hate that feeling. There’s nothing as lonely as an empty ballpark at night.
“After I made my decision at Michigan, it crossed my mind that maybe I should call the Tigers and see what was available. I knew they were going through some major reorganization and that there might be a place for me. I never made the call. It dawned on me that I was afraid they’d say yes. That image of walking out of the empty stadium—is that what I still wanted to be doing when I was fifty-five years old? I guess it was just time to make the final decision about what it is I want to do when I grow up.”
That was the same phrase he had used to describe his situation during an interview conducted more than twenty years before, as he was preparing to retire from the Tigers. Growing up. Moving on. Easier to say than to complete.
Freehan started growing up only about three miles from this office, in the suburb of Royal Oak. He remembers clutching the money he earned on his paper route and taking the long bus ride to see games at Tiger Stadium. He was a Little League standout. In one All-Star game when a runner came in a little too hard at the plate, the two of them wound up rolling around in the dirt, flailing away at each other. The runner was Willie Horton.
Freehan’s family moved to Florida just before Bill Freehan entered high school. He enrolled in a Catholic school in St. Petersburg and was a star in both baseball and football, with his choice of college scholarships. He wanted Notre Dame, but they told him he had to pick one sport or the other. So he settled on Western Michigan, then changed his mind at the last minute and went, instead, to Michigan.
“I went to a small high school in Florida,” he explains, “and we were always getting beaten by the numbers. I wanted to be on the other side for a change.”
At Michigan, Freehan was a starter at end as a sophomore football player. But it was in baseball that he excelled, hitting over .500 as a catcher during the 1961 Big 10 season. He signed a bonus contract with the Tigers and within two years was the regular catcher in Detroit.
Just before the end of spring training in 1968 he sat beside the pool of the Holiday Inn. It was a balmy April night, a soft breeze barely rustling the palms in the motel courtyard. The veterans always moved there for the last week of training, sending their families back to Detroit. It was a symbolic drawing-together before the start of the season, a gathering of strength by the team for the season ahead. Freehan understood, however, that this year was different. Of all the Tigers, he was the most bitter about the previous year’s defeat. He had puzzled over it all winter, trying to understand what had happened.
“We got into the habit of thinking it was going to be automatic,” he said. “Shoot, we knew we were the best. We thought we’d win easily. Maybe you have to learn that nothing comes to you. You have to take it.
“If it was just one game . . . hey, no problem. Anybody can get up for that. I did it as a football player all the time. But this is different. This is day after day after day. You can’t get too high or you’ll run yourself into the ground. But you’ve got to stay focused. Maybe it’s because I’m a Detroit kid and I know what a pennant would have meant to this city. Maybe that’s why it hurt as much as it did.”
He was already balding in 1968, which made him look older. But there was an elfish twinkle, too, almost incongruous on a man of his size, like a leprechaun on steroids. He was the agitator, the back-of-the-bus wise guy, calling out, “Hey, Bussie, you’ve got it surrounded,” when the driver keeps circling the wrong block in search of the team hotel. To a teammate wearing a white suit, he’d chortle, “Hey, two Fudgicles over here.” But Freehan, more than any other single player, took 1968 on his shoulders as a personal mission.
“I always believed in competition rather than confrontation,” he says in his tiny office. “I still do. I believe you build relationships to get the most out of people. That’s the way I was as a catcher. I look at these computers and pitching charts they have in the dugouts now, and I have to laugh. The computer says pitch a guy this way so that’s what you’re supposed to do. But it’s not that way. Can’t be. You’ve got to understand everyone in the equation as an individual. Hitters adjust all the time, and you have to know what’s going on inside your pitcher’s head.
“You’re always asking yourself questions about the pitcher. ‘What do I do now? Is this the time to be blunt with this guy or to kid him along? What kind of stuff does he have? Is he losing it? Does it correspond to the book on this hitter?’ What computer is going to tell you all that? That’s absurd.
“It’s all in the relationships. When Earl Wilson came over from Boston he was used to having Dick Radatz in the bull pen. He got into the habit of looking for help in the late innings. We didn’t have any Radatz in Detroit. I had to get him to want to finish his games. With Lolich, it was a matter of confidence. He had one bad game and he was ready to change his whole style of pitching. His attitude changed entirely after the World Series. But before that he didn’t have enough confidence in himself to get through trouble in the late innings. Afterwards, no problem. And Denny was Denny. We all believed in each other that season. Maybe Denny believed in himself a little bit more than anybody else.
“Now all the pitchers want raises if they have so many quality starts. Quality starts. When we played that meant you couldn’t finish. It wasn’t a stat you especially wanted to keep track of. Management would hammer you with it at negotiating time.
“I will say this about Mayo that season,” Freehan says. “He gave me the authority to call the game I wanted. He wasn’t big on signals from the dugout. We both had our ideas about things, and we’d go over them. But he’d listen to what I had to say. He wasn’t trying to impose a viewpoint. Not every manager I played for was that way. Charlie Dressen always had to be in control, but I was just breaking in when I played for him. Billy Martin ran hot and cold. It dawned on me that it was all theatrics with Billy, all for effect.
“I remember once he brought in Hiller to pitch to Mike Epstein when he was with the As. Billy said he wanted nothing but curveballs. John threw a lousy curveball, and Epstein hit it into the seats to beat us. I’m at the locker after the game and reporters come up to me and starting asking me why I changed the sign. I looked up and said, ‘Excuse me?’ Billy had told them that I called for the curve and changed the pitching plan. I went into his office and shut the door and asked him what the hell was going on. ‘They misunderstood what I was saying,’ he said. Yeah, sure. But that’s the kind of manager he was.
“Back then we were all bulletproof and going to live forever. We acted as if nothing could ever hurt us. Now the technology is so much better. The kids are prepared better than we were. They’re bigger and stronger. But the motivation has changed. You didn’t play to become a millionaire then. You think that’s why Al Kaline and Eddie Mathews played the game? But I was an eyewitness to the start of the change. I was the player rep, one of the guys who was in on the decision to bring in Marvin Miller to be the attorney for the players’ association. The key to the whole thing was that our attorney was twice as good as theirs.
“Now it’s all different. Maybe it’s because I’m on the other side, in business, but I think it’s swung too far. I wonder sometimes why anyone would want to buy a big league franchise. Mike Ilitch spent $90 million to buy the Tigers and his annual return is something like one percent. That makes no sense at all. No one lays out that kind of money for that return.”
Freehan still lives in the same home he bought as a player, in an area with some of the highest real estate values in Detroit. When his former teammate, the late Hank Aguirre, got the idea to start his company, Mexican Industries, to go after minority manufacturing contracts, Freehan was an investor. It was one of the firm’s six factories that Freehan had just been looking over. The company is thriving. Life is good.
“What do I want to do when I grow up and get big?” he asks. It makes you wonder if the leprechaun lurking in his eyes will ever be entirely subdued by the white-shirted businessman with the accountant’s mind. In an empty ballpark at night, you can still hear the roar of the past.