The sense of deja vu thickened in the season’s second game. With Lolich on National Guard duty because of lingering unrest after the King assassination, McLain was given the start. He had the Red Sox shut out, 3-0, on three hits into the sixth. Then a single and consecutive home runs tied the score. This came the day after Yaz had hit two out of the park in the opener. The Tigers had seen this script before and hadn’t liked it the first time around.
But Warden, the rookie left-hander who made the roster on the last day of spring training, stopped Boston over the last two innings. He was scheduled to be the first hitter in the last of the ninth. Mayo sent up Gates Brown instead.
It was Brown’s first appearance of the season. He had disiocated his wrist the previous year and got to bat just ninety-one times, hitting a wretched .187. It was far and away his worst season in the majors. Detroit reportedly had tried to deal him off during the winter only to find no interest. He made the roster only by the slimmest of margins. Mayo did not care much for his defensive skills (“There are times you wonder if the guy can throw the ball across the street,” he said on one occasion). If he couldn’t hit, the manager felt, he was useless. Brown was the last left-handed batter remaining on the bench when he got the call from Mayo.
Gates was facing John Wyatt, Boston’s top reliever a closer before anyone ever thought to use that word. Wyatt was suspected of throwing a Vaseline ball, loading it up with dabs of petroleum jelly hidden somewhere on his person. The stuff made his fastball collapse downward in a nasty and illegal manner just as it reached the plate. Wyatt encouraged speculation about this secret weapon. When he joined the Tigers later in the summer, a jar of Vaseline was displayed like a trophy in a place of honor in his locker.
But whatever jelly Wyatt was spreading in this game, Gates used it for a sandwich. He rifled Wyatt’s delivery into the right field upper deck. The Tigers were winners for the first time that year.
Chicago came in and lost twice. Then the Tigers went to Fenway, where they ruined Boston’s home opener with a win. Then back home to beat Cleveland twice and finally on to Chicago, where they won three more from the White Sox. It was nine in a row for Detroit since the opening day loss. On April 21, after the first game in Chicago, they went into first place alone. They would be out of it only six days the rest of the season.
The interesting thing about this spurt was that five of the nine wins were accumulated by the bull pen, with Warden getting three of them. It seemed that Mayo’s prescription for strengthening the relief staff had worked. Moreover, four of the games, including the one Gates ended, rolled home on the last time at bat. The most dramatic was Horton’s two-out, two-run shot in the tenth that beat Cleveland, 4-3. The two top pitchers from the previous season, Wilson and Sparma, were also off to good starts. Wilson won twice, while Sparma fired a shutout at the Indians. During the streak, the Tigers staff gave up only eighteen runs.
McLain finally got on the win list in his third start, notching the ninth game in the streak with a workmanlike 4-2 stifling of the White Sox. Denny took special delight in beating Chicago. It was his hometown team. He had signed with Chicago at eighteen, right out of prep school at Mt. Carmel High, where he was a 38-7 sensation during his career. But the Sox were overstocked with young right-handers in the spring of 1963. Their top prospect was Dave DeBusschere, a six-foot-six intimidator who would soon decide that banging away as a power forward with the Detroit Pistons suited him better than pitching. McLain was matched against the third prospect, Bruce Howard, in an intrasquad game. When Howard won, McLain was cut from the big league roster. The Tigers quickly snapped him up in the first-year draft. He went 18-6 in the minors and by the end of that season was pitching for Detroit.
Mayo was busily experimenting. He was still intrigued by the idea of getting Stanley into the infield. So whenever the Tigers faced a left-hander he sat down Cash, who had edged out Mathews in the battle for first base, and played Stanley there, with Northrup moving to center. Cash was deeply annoyed. But he was getting used to it.
Northrup recalls, “Every year they would bring in some hotshot who was going to move Norman to the bench. It got to be funny. Here was a guy who hit twenty-five to thirty homers and knocked in eighty-five runs season after season, and they were always getting ready to move him out. Norman used to say the dumbest thing he ever did was hit .361 that one season early in his career. Everyone was always waiting for him to hit like that again, and he just wasn’t that kind of hitter. That was 1961, an expansion season. The pitching was down all over the league, and he had Kaline and Rocky Colavito, both having tremendous seasons, hitting around him. It wasn’t going to happen like that for him again.”
Cash was another ex-member of the White Sox. He had been a utility man on the 1959 pennant winners and then was traded to Cleveland as a throw-in on a major deal. Detroit picked him up at the end of spring training in 1960 for a minor league infielder—a deal that ranked as one of the biggest steals in franchise history. A few days later, the two teams swung a real stunner as Detroit landed home run champ Colavito in exchange for the previous year’s batting leader, Harvey Kuenn. Cash and Colavito would combine for 263 home runs over the next four seasons with Detroit.
Cash’s failure to repeat his big year disappointed not only his bosses. But it also made him the top target for the frustrations of Detroit’s fans. He was booed throughout his career at Tiger Stadium. Cash could look very inadequate against some left-handers. He was also a streak hitter, and when he was going bad, pulling his head off the ball in an effort to reach the cozy right field stands in Detroit, it seemed he couldn’t hit anybody. During 1967, as the booing hit new crescendos, he pulled off his cap on one occasion and waved it mockingly at the crowd as he went back to the dugout. It was a rare lapse for a man who seemed to find humor in any situation.
In one game, upon realizing that he had been picked off first base, he raised his hands and signaled hopefully for a time-out. When play was suspended during a rainstorm another time, Cash was on second base. But when the game resumed, he trotted out to third. “What are you doing over there?” he was asked by the umpire. “I stole third,” he replied. “When did that happen?” asked the ump, earnestly puzzled. “During the rain,” said Norman.
When flamboyant umpire Emmett Ashford ran out to his position, arms outspread, at the start of a game, Cash came running right after him, taking a flying dive off the pitcher’s mound with his arms flapping, as if trying to gain altitude. But his most famous exploit was when he tried to come to bat against Nolan Ryan, in the midst of a no-hitter, using a table leg as a bat. “I couldn’t hit him with a regular bat so I thought I’d try this,” he explained.
Cash was easily the most popular man on the team. He knew where all the best watering holes—the places where people were eager to buy drinks for big league stars—were located in every American League city. A night out with Norman could easily stretch into positions on the clock that for most people only came once a day. It was part of Tigers lore that he could show up at the ballpark looking as haggard and woebegone as Texas roadkill. Then he would miraculously recover somehow and get two hits. The other players admired him as a warrior, a man who would play despite injury, hangover, rain, sleet, and dark of night. He was a throwback to a long line of ballplayers. The Gas House Gang, Paul Waner, Babe Ruth—players who never let their love of liquid refreshment get in the way of a ball game.
Later in the season, when an injury to Kaline necessitated a permanent return to the outfield for Stanley, Mayo still stuck to his platooning plan. He started Freehan at first base against left-handers. Cash ended up playing in just 127 games, his lowest total since his first season in Detroit. While he grumbled about the play, he kept it low key. He was too good a soldier to complain loudly when the team was winning. Just once, when Mayo told him to go in as a late defensive replacement, did he balk, snapping that he wasn’t anybody’s caddy. Mayo sent Mathews in, instead, and nothing more was said. Whatever other flaws Mayo may have had, he seemed to know when pushing too hard might damage the cohesiveness that his ball club had created.
Besides, strange things were happening. “We didn’t win games like these last year,” mused Mayo as the winning streak lengthened. One of the reasons might have been that the Tigers didn’t have Warden before. In the first eight games he ever spent on a big league roster, the twenty-one-year-old rookie won three of them.