Whatever the manager’s opinion of McLain, it quickly became evident that his was going to be no ordinary season. He reeled off five straight wins, all complete games. The fifth one, a 12-1 crushing of Washington on May 10, put the Tigers in first place for keeps. He lasted just two innings in his next start against Baltimore. But in the following thirteen assignments, up to the All-Star Game break on July 7, McLain would go 11-1. His overall record was then 16-2. He was poised to do something absolutely remarkable.
It was also evident that he would not do it quietly. McLain was temperamentally incapable of that. Two years before, for no apparent reason, he tried to talk himself into a feud with Sam McDowell, acknowledged to be the hardest thrower in the league. McLain called him immature, dumb, and incapable of harnessing his abilities. Only when his remarks reached print did it occur to McLain that Sudden Sam might not see the humor in the situation. That he might, in fact, try to enlarge McLain’s ear canal when next they met. So he backed off that story quickly. McDowell’s comment on the whole episode was: “Goo goo, da, da,” which may have been a fairly accurate assessment.
But still McLain would have his say. He always had a surprise or two for inquiring minds. He loved Pepsi, even kept a glass of it on his night table so he could take a swig of it, lukewarm, as soon as he awoke in the morning. He considered himself a serious musician, an organist who happened to play baseball rather than the other way around. He was going to take up flying his own plane, an ambition that won him the nickname “Sky King” among the other Tigers. Understandably, he always drew a cluster of writers around his locker.
In early May, McLain was asked by a wire service reporter to explain why attendance had been so low at Tiger Stadium. “Tiger fans are the biggest front-runners in the world,” McLain said. “If they think we’re stupid for playing this game, how stupid are they for coming out to watch us?” He continued in this vein for several minutes. His remarks went out on the radio wire and led every sportscast in town the next day. The first crowd of over 20,000 since opening day then turned up at McLain’s next start and booed him incessantly from the first pitch. His five-game win streak ended that night. “I only meant some of the fans,” McLain said in clarification. He really didn’t need the papers to be publishing to get into trouble.
While Denny rolled merrily along, Lolich was off to his usual tepid start. His emergency National Guard duty during the April rioting set back his routine, and he still faced the usual two weeks away during his annual summer training in June. By the time McLain had won his eighth game of the year, Lolich had won just twice, the least of any starter. The Tigers had hoped that his heroic finish in 1967 would carry over into the new season. But the Lolich who started the 1968 campaign was the same pitcher who had struggled through most of the previous year.
“Mickey just didn’t have confidence in himself,” says Freehan. “He didn’t think he could make the big pitches late in the game. There was an element lacking. We all knew that when he was on, there was no one with more stuff. But convincing Mickey of that was a little harder.”
Lolich himself seethed silently over McLain. Lolich had reached the majors a few months before Denny in 1963 after a tough, erratic, four-year apprenticeship in the minors. When he finally got to Detroit his professional record was a drab 27-44. Only in his final season, pitching with his hometown team in Portland, Oregon, did he have a winning record. He explained later that the left field fence was so close in that park that he had to concentrate on control. That transformed him into a pitcher. In 1964, his first full year with Detroit, he blossomed, going 18-9, and at twenty-three becoming the top pitcher on the staff.
The coming of McLain altered the equation. Although the two gave the Tigers the best young pitching combination in the game, their relationship cut much deeper than a rivalry. McLain’s cockiness, which readily translated into arrogance, and his Chicago wise-guy demeanor irritated the daylights out of Lolich, with his conservative Oregon upbringing.
While McLain exuded confidence, Lolich searched for the formula and brooded about what he regarded as a lack of respect for his achievements. After all, with McLain among the missing, Lolich had almost pitched Detroit to the 1967 pennant. But as he struggled again, that all seemed to be forgotten by Mayo and the front office.
The game of May 18 was no help to Lolich’s mental state. Frank Howard came into Detroit with the Washington Senators on a home-run binge. He had hit seven in his previous four games, a record, then added one more off Sparma on Friday night. It was Lolich’s turn on Saturday. Howard, the biggest man in the game at six-foot-seven and 255 pounds, looked absolutely terrifying when he went off on one of his tears. No one could hit the ball farther and with more force. He was in the first of three straight forty-home-run seasons, emerging, after several rather ordinary years, as the top slugger in the league.
Howard made it nine homers in six games with a wrong-field shot off Lolich in the third. He came up again two innings later with two runners on base. The ball he hit scraped the edge of the left field roof, directly above the foul pole, as it disappeared from sight and landed in the street beyond. Only one other hitter, Harmon Killebrew, ever had cleared the roof in left. The blast was immediately recognized as one of the longest home runs in stadium history, traveling an estimated three and a half miles. The monumental clout gave Lolich another loss, another fracture in his thinning wall of confidence.
The next day, however, the fans showed up. The first Sunday doubleheader of the year brought in 45,491 of them, the biggest home crowd yet. Sunday was still a traditional doubleheader day in 1968. The players hated playing two and, eventually, their union managed to get them eliminated. But this season there were eight on the schedule. Rainouts and suspended games would account for several more, and they usually drew big crowds. With the average game still played in under two and a half hours, twin bills did not turn into endurance contests for players and spectators alike.
Most teams didn’t start night games until 8:00 P.M. But as the games grew longer throughout the ’70s and ’80s, starting times were gradually moved up by an hour or more in most cities. It was the only way that fans could get home before David Letterman signed off. Baseball was played at a far brisker pace in 1968, with even the most critical games rarely going longer than two hours and forty minutes. The reason? There are dozens of theories. Fewer pitching changes. Fewer at-bats that went deep into the count. The wait between half innings was thirty seconds shorter. No designated hitter, which meant fewer runs being scored. All these later contributed to the lengthening of what was intended as a diversion of a few hours and became instead a lumbering affair of Wagnerian duration.
This was also the final season of the winner-take-all pennant race. Or, as the players refer to it now, the last “real” pennant race. No divisions, no playoffs. At the end of 162 games, the top two teams played, and that was it. In close races, it made September meetings between contenders some of the most memorable and excruciating ball games ever played. Because there were no second chances. It would not happen that way after 1968. With both leagues adding two teams the following year, the only instance in which expansion was so closely coordinated, divisional play had arrived.
One alteration already had been made for this year. The American League didn’t arrive on the West Coast until 1961, three years after the National. Then the Los Angeles Angels were created in the first wave of expansion. This season, there was a second California team. Charlie Finley had moved his As from Kansas City to Oakland. The move was welcomed by the players. It was always tough to adjust their body clocks to the two-hour time difference on a short stay in California. (The West Coast players argued that it was even tougher for them to go the other way because of higher humidity in the East and Midwest during the summer months.) With Oakland in the league, teams would usually have an entire week to get adjusted.
There was also a problem. Ever since the Dodgers and Giants moved to California in 1958, players had complained about the glare during day games. Hitters and outfielders said they couldn’t pick up the ball until much later than they did in other places. Virtually every World Series on the West Coast had featured one important defensive play in which the outcome was influenced by glare. Other teams had warned the Tigers that it was especially bad at the Coliseum, home of the newly minted Oakland As.
In Detroit’s first game there, the problem was just the opposite. A storm hit in the seventh inning, and the game was rained out as a 2-2 tie. Earl Wilson also jammed his foot in a play at first base and would have to miss a few starts. But the next day, the glare hit them right between the eyes. With an awful air of inevitability, the calamity they had hoped to avert was suddenly upon them.
McLain and Lew Krausse were involved in a 0-0 battle. It was a twilight game, and the setting sun seemed to accentuate the brightness in the ballpark. The Tigers had just two hits, one of them by Kaline. He came to bat again with one out in the sixth. A pitch came inside, and Kaline, picking it up too late, reacted slowly. It caught him on the forearm. The pain was excruciating, and at the end of the inning he had to leave the game. After a night of intense discomfort he flew back to Detroit, underwent X-rays, and was diagnosed with a fracture. He would be out for a minimum of a month, possibly longer.
There could be no worse news. Kaline was the soul of the Tigers, their greatest player for the last thirteen years. When he broke his collarbone on a diving catch against the Yankees in 1962, saving a game in the ninth inning, the team immediately nose-dived from contender to also-ran. “We won the game and lost the season,” mourned the winning pitcher, Hank Aguirre. In 1967 Kaline had broken a finger when he accidentally jammed his hand in a bat rack. The injury had taken him out of the lineup for more than a month, and the Tigers struggled to remain in the race. Now their best player was down again, possibly taking the season with him.
No one blamed Krausse, but the team was infuriated by the news. The As and Tigers did not like each other much anyhow. There had been a brawl the previous year. The Tigers were frequently involved in such diversions. There were a lot of big, angry guys on the team, and they did not back down. When Oakland’s Jack Aker, who had been a central figure in the previous year’s brawl, came in to pitch relief the day after Kaline went down, the fuse was lit. Northrup had been elevated to Kaline’s number three spot in the batting order. In the sixth, the same inning in which Kaline had been hit, Northrup got it in the back of the head. He went down, dazed, and when he was able to regain his feet his first move was directly at Aker.
Both teams came racing out of their dugouts. Observers called it one of the nastiest baseball fights they had ever seen. Mathews, a genuinely tough guy, took care of Aker with three right chops to the face. Horton, who had left the game with a minor injury, came running out of the clubhouse whirlpool, half-dressed, to get in on the fun. Mayo tried to tackle Northrup to keep him in the game and was kicked in the ribs for his efforts. As the teams trooped off the field after the fifteen-minute altercation, several Oakland fans seated behind the Detroit dugout began swearing at the Tigers. One of the players grabbed a baseball and fired it into the stands. It struck a middle-aged woman, sitting quietly in the vicinity, above her eye and opened a cut. She later filed a $200,000 lawsuit, and subpoenas were served on several club officials on their next trip into town. No one would say who had thrown the ball. But pitcher Dennis Ribant was discreetly traded, and the Tigers quietly settled the case. Some of the players privately said that it was the hardest pitch Ribant had thrown all year.
Detroit lost the game in extra innings and then did the same thing, by the same 7-6 score, in California the next day. Their lead had shriveled to one-half a game, with three still to play in California before they went home. It seemed as if their brief bubble had burst. A critical injury would turn them into a struggling rabble once more. Instead, the 1968 Tigers were about to soar.