When Eddie Mathews joined the Tigers in August of 1967, one of the first things he saw was a message scrawled on a blackboard outside the clubhouse. “Let’s win this in spite of Mayo,” someone had written. Mathews quickly erased it and sternly lectured his teammates about proper decorum on a contending team. Rule one: You don’t blind-side the manager.
That little incident spoke volumes about Mayo, Mathews, and the meaning of leadership on the 1968 Tigers. Mathews, a longtime star with the Braves, stepped naturally into the role. He was respected by all the players, and especially by his peers, Kaline and Cash. He had been there and done that. Mathews performed brilliantly under the greatest pressure imaginable in the 1957 Series, when the Milwaukee Braves, the team from Bushville, upended the haughty Yankees. Ballplayers respected that. They knew a little history. So even though he was only a shadow of the player he once had been, Mathews quickly became a respected voice in the clubhouse. He knew how to win, and the Tigers were eager to learn.
There were several leaders on this ball club. But Kaline led by example rather than overtly, and Cash was too quick to find the humor in a situation to take himself seriously as a leader. The position fell to the newcomer, Mathews.
This was not a team with a great deal of respect for the man who was its nominal leader. Mayo Smith was named manager after a calamitous 1966 season. He was not regarded as a pick out of left field. That would have been too close. It was more like a pick out of the hospitality room. Mayo carried the nickname “America’s Guest.” He was a fixture in baseball, a familiar figure before and after games in the room where free food and drink were served to club officials and media. A handsome man with a head full of gray hair. A dapper dresser who savored a glass of good bourbon. A man with the knack of making you feel that you were one of the wittiest and most perceptive individuals he had ever met . . . even if he hadn’t quite caught your name or knew what you were talking about.
He was also modest in appraising his own abilities. After the World Series, upon a triumphant return to his home in Lake Worth, Florida, he was given a parade. While walking to his official car, he claimed, he heard two elderly ladies talking about the event. “What’s the big deal?” one of them demanded. “Why, haven’t you heard?” her friend replied. “The shuffleboard king is back in town.”
The announcement that Mayo would manage the Tigers was met with whoops of derision. The city was expecting a firebrand, someone to whip the team into contention. “America’s Guest” wasn’t quite what Tiger fans or media had pictured. But it wasn’t as if he hadn’t paid his dues. He had, three times over. Mayo had played seventeen years in the minor leagues, reaching the bigs only as a wartime fill-in with the 1945 As. He hit .212. That part was all right. Several successful managers never spent a day in the majors. But Mayo’s record was not too good as a manager, either. In parts of five seasons with the Phillies and Reds, he never finished above .500. Moreover, his last managing job had expired in 1959. Fred Hutchinson replaced him, took a team that was in seventh place under Mayo, and in less than two years won a pennant. Had the Tigers gone nuts hiring this guy?
Actually, the hiring of Mayo was the result of deliberate consideration by general manager Jim Campbell and his top advisor, Rick Ferrell. The team had been stunned in 1966 by the deaths of two managers. Charlie Dressen, who had been brought in to mold the young players into a contender, suffered a heart attack in June and died two months later. He was replaced by veteran coach Bob Swift, who developed cancer and passed away in October. The Tigers finished the year under the guidance of another coach, Frank Skaff. It was a demoralizing, tumultuous experience.
Dressen, for all his peculiarities, his mangling of the English language, and his serene conviction that he was a genius, had done his job well. He had brought along the Boys from Syracuse steadily, making sure they had a chance to taste success in equal measure with failure. The veterans liked him. To Willie Horton, who had lost his parents in a car crash on the eve of stardom, Dressen was a surrogate father. The death of Dressen and the subsequent death of Swift were devastating blows to the young team.
What the Tigers needed more than anything else was a calming presence. Enter Mayo Smith. He was so calm that he some-times seemed inert. The players soon started referring to him as “Awww, what the fuck,” because that seemed to be his response to virtually every event, good or bad. McLain, who had been a favorite of Dressen, tried to ingratiate himself with the new manager early in his term by parading around the clubhouse after a late-inning win and saying, “At last we’ve got a manager in here.” Mayo wasn’t buying any of that. “Mickey Mouse makes those moves,” he said privately. It also warned him that some players would bear watching.
He had made one inspired change, shifting McAuliffe from shortstop to second base. In one move he had acquired an outstanding second baseman and lost a mediocre shortstop. He then handed the shortstop job to Oyler, who never dropped anything except his bat. Mayo had blown up at the team just once, over what he regarded as indifferent play at the start of an important series in Boston in 1967. He closed the clubhouse doors and, red-faced, let his players have it full bore. Some Tigers, most notably Freehan, wished he would have done that more often. This was a team that sometimes required a shaking-up. But that wasn’t Mayo’s style.
Eventually, some of the players began to question his decisions, his handling of the bench and the bull pen down the stretch in ’67. Mayo himself did not regard his talents as lying in the realm of tactics.
“Most of the stuff you do on the field is dictated by events,” he said. “That’s not the managing part. It’s the twenty-five guys. Knowing how to handle each one. Who needs a word and who needs a kick in the ass. That’s the part.”
Making his job even more difficult was his pitching coach. John Sain had been hired along with Mayo and was the best in the business. But he had his peculiarities. He insisted on bringing along his own bull pen coach, Hal Naragon. He also insisted on being given free rein with the pitchers. Sain had many theories about pitching. He believed that it was essentially mental. Before attaining success, you had to visualize yourself as successful. That was half the battle. He gave out subscriptions to the magazine Success Unlimited as Christmas presents. He also encouraged his pitchers to be secretive, not to share information with anyone. When McLain did a magazine photo spread on the grips he used to throw various pitches, on Sain’s advice he simply made them up on the spot. He even demonstrated how he gripped pitches he never threw.
Sain liked his pitchers seated in a separate part of the clubhouse, away from the hitting riffraff. He even lived off by himself, in a motel near the airport. But he stopped short of demanding that his pitchers do that, too.
It all seemed to be effective. In two years, the staff earned run average had fallen from the second worst in the league (3.85) to the third best (2.71.) What wasn’t generally noticed at the time was that the league ERA had gone down by 0.46 over the same period to a historic low of 2.98 in 1968. It was a season thoroughly dominated by pitchers. But Sain earned a lot of the credit in Detroit.
Mayo took it all in, seeing more than anyone guessed. He understood the problems that McLain and Sain were causing. He also knew that the team was winning and was willing to let it ride. He had come too far, waited too long to board this train. He wasn’t about to drive it off the tracks.