"Did I seem to be angry? Well, maybe I was. Part of it was, you know, maybe a defensive thing towards the media. But I’d lived through a lot of things to be angry about, too.”
Earl Wilson pitched his last ball game in 1970, just two years after catching the only winner of his eleven-year big league career. He then walked away from baseball and never looked back. His office in the small auto-supplier factory he owns in the Detroit suburb of Farmington Hills is devoid of any baseball memorabilia. He prefers it that way.
“Baseball belongs to another life,” he says in the comfortable reception area outside his private office. “Don’t get me wrong. It was a good life. But there’s no comparison in my mind. There is nothing I experienced in baseball that compares to the excitement of handing out your payroll checks . . . and then driving like hell to the bank to make sure that they’re covered. Now that’s excitement.”
Wilson laughs heartily as he makes the comparison. In his mid-fifties, he is still a handsome man, only a little thicker around the middle than he was as a player. But he has shed a lot of weight, too—most of it in anger.
“You sometimes had to walk softly around the Duke,” recalls Gates Brown with a small smile.
Wilson’s explosions were legendary in the Detroit clubhouse. Teammates and reporters alike could never tell when one was coming. A seemingly innocuous question could prompt a furious, obscene outburst. He might apologize later, throw an arm around your shoulder, and laugh about it. But Wilson’s bursts of anger were awesome to behold.
On one occasion, an admirer had shipped him some fresh plums and berries. Wilson had eaten some of them and stowed the rest of the package in his locker to be disposed of later. While he was on the field, some prankish Tigers—to this day no one will confess to it—swiped the package and passed out the goodies around the clubhouse. When Wilson returned and found the empty package, he went ballistic. A practical joke suddenly turned into a roaring confrontation as Wilson stalked around the clubhouse, demanding to know who had stolen his plums. To some of the more cinematic Tigers, it was reminiscent of Captain Queeg raging about his stolen strawberries in The Caine Mutiny. But Wilson was a lot bigger and angrier than Humphrey Bogart had been in that role.
“I’ve got to admit I don’t recall much about that incident,” he says. “Which isn’t to say it didn’t happen. It’s just been a long, long time, and my mind is on so many other things.
“But, yes, I was an angry man. I was the only African-American on that team who’d grown up in the South. Louisiana. You don’t forget the things you saw when you were a kid. The thing is when I was that age and actually going through it, it didn’t seem so bad to me. Only when 1 got a little older and started looking back did I realize how awful it was. I got to understand there were parts of life that I had never even explored because they were closed to me.
“My family moved to San Diego when I was a teenager, and I finished growing up out there. But when I signed with the Red Sox, they sent me right back into it. Playing in Montgomery, Alabama, in the late 1950s. No fun.
“But, you know, black folks are so precious to me. We’d be on these bus trips, and the team would stop for food at some dump on the highway. The black players couldn’t get off the bus and go inside. But the black people who worked in these places always made sure that we got something good. These old ladies would come running out to the bus with a meal thay had fixed special for us. We probably ate better than the white players did. They were inside eating hamburgers, and we were getting some good food back on the bus. And they never let us pay for a thing.
“Even when I got to the big club, though, it didn’t end. The black players with the Red Sox were routinely refused service in Florida. I even walked into the general manager’s office and demanded a trade to a team that trained in Arizona. You can’t know how degrading that was. It was baseball’s dirty secret back then.
“I still remember clearly coming into Detroit for the first time with Boston. It was the first time I had ever been in a city where black people were in the middle class. They had their own homes, new cars, livin’ the life. They took me to this neighborhood of huge old homes, mansions, big trees—Arden Park, I think it was—and told me that most of the houses were owned by blacks. I couldn’t believe it. I fell in love with this city right then. I told myself that this is where I wanted to live when my career was over. I never could have guessed it’d happen the way it did, though.”
Wilson came to the Tigers in June 1966 in a trade for outfielder Don Demeter—one of the ex-Dodgers whom Dressen had thought would toughen up the team. That hadn’t worked out because Demeter had become a devout Christian, as mild a man as one ever saw in the majors. Dressen was deeply disappointed. But Wilson quickly stepped into the starting rotation, the only member of that group who hadn’t come through the Detroit system. Then in 1967 he won twenty-two games, tying for the league lead in that stat. He also changed mentally. Under Freehan’s constant prodding, Wilson became a finisher. In his previous five years with Boston he completed only twenty-five games. In just two seasons with Detroit, he matched that total. He was the automatic choice to pitch the 1968 season opener against Boston.
“I remember that workout on the day of Dr. King’s funeral,” Wilson says. “Since I was pitching the next day there wasn’t much I was going to do anyhow. But everyone had to be there. Then they announced that same day about how the entire team had to show up for this charity event for the Capuchin Soup Kitchen. This was one of the Tigers’ favorite charities, an annual thing. Attendance was always mandatory. But this year they announced they were moving it to the suburbs, some big banquet hall out in Southfield. I guess it was the riots or something, and white people still didn’t want to come downtown.
“I can’t change who I am. If you don’t want to hear what I have to say, don’t ask me. That went from Jim Campbell to the batboy. Don’t tell me how I should be living my life. Did that mean I had a chip on my shoulder? Well, in my mind right’s right and wrong’s wrong. The death of Dr. King was still on my mind. Then when I heard about where they were moving this dinner the first thought I had was that there weren’t going to be any little black kids there. So I went to Willie and to Gates and said, ‘Let’s not go.’ I knew it wouldn’t come out right in the media. And we did have our butts handed to us when the story got out. But you know what? They made sure that there were black kids at that event, and that’s what was important.
“What I remember about the opener in ’68 was that I didn’t do too well. I was gone by the sixth, and they beat us, 7-3. Carl Yastrzemski hit two home runs, but not off me, and everyone was wondering if it was going to be just like last year, with Yaz killing us. What I do remember was that my first time up I hit a home run. I prided myself on my hitting. To me it was another weapon I had as a pitcher. It infuriated me when they brought in the designated hitter. That came in after I retired, but they started talking about it back then. That penalized pitchers like me who worked on their hitting, who cared enough about it to make themselves good at it. I hit thirty-five home runs in my career. The fans used to love to watch me hit because they knew it wasn’t automatic. I could hit one out anytime. If I pitched for the Tigers today I’d never even come to the plate.
“I bet you didn’t know I was the first big league player to have an agent. It’s true. I hired Bob Woolf from Boston to do my negotiating. But it was all in secret. They wouldn’t even talk to agents back then. They weren’t allowed in baseball. So when I went in to talk to Campbell, he’d make an offer and I’d get up and excuse myself to go to the bathroom. Then I’d run down the hall and call Woolf on the phone, and he’d tell me what to say. Campbell must have thought my bladder had shrunk or something. I don’t know how much more I made because of Woolf but I think it was a few thousand—not bad money back then. When I told Campbell about it years later he told me: ‘Earl, I suspected something was up because you’re not that goddamned smart.’ But I thought Jim was a fair man. I respected him, and now that I run a company and see it all from the other side. I appreciate what he did, too.”
Wilson gets up and insists on taking his visitor on a tour of his 60,000-square-foot operation, situated in a sprawling industrial park. It is called Auto-Тек and manufactures the insulation that protects various small parts within a car. The sign at the front office window reads: “Appointments only; 30 minutes maximum time available. E.W.” The business is doing well.
“Maybe I didn’t achieve as much as I should have as a player,” says Wilson. “And maybe I achieved more than I should have in business. I’ll take that tradeoff. This is like a ball club, though. Give me what I need, and I’ll play you. Sure, I make a special effort to hire minorities here. I feel that’s my obligation. But I tell them, look, I bust my ass for this business to survive, and I expect the same from you. If you can’t give me that, I don’t want you here. Because my first obligation is to my company.”
The tour is over, and Wilson, smiling and at ease, says his goodbyes.
“What I remember about that team in 1968,” he says, “is that there were no divisions. We were all like brothers. People don’t ever get comfortable with each other when race gets into it. But for that one year, at least, that wasn’t the case. We were really together.
“I don’t do the card shows or autograph things. But almost every day someone comes up to me and wants to talk about that season. Little kids who couldn’t have been born until twenty-five years later. They know the legacy. I get grown men who come up to me with a baseball or a scorecard I had signed for them back then, and they tell me how much it meant to them. It’s like I’m revered. Man, I get chills. What did I do? All I did was play a game.”