"Mayо wanted to bench me that day,” recalls Jim Northrup. “I wasn’t going too well, and he really was into the righty-lefty thing, so he wanted to sit me down because a left-hander was starting.”
Northrup shifts his frame on the pillows that support his back and permits himself a small smile. Of all the ’68 Tigers, he seems to have changed the least. All gray then, all gray now. Duke Snider had similar hair coloration when he was also in his twenties. So he was called the Silver Fox. Among the Tigers, Northrup’s appellation was shortened to Fox. But there was a vulpine quality to him that went deeper than hair. A sardonic wit that seems to sense instinctively where the vulnerabilities hide. A knowing gaze that sizes things up at a glance. A restless, clever mind. Those also remain undiminished.
The pillows are a new addition, though. He has already had one operation to fuse loosened vertebrae and will probably require another. “Who knows how I got it,” he shrugs. “Sliding. Banging into a wall. It’s unavoidable when you’re an athlete.
“Yeah, Mayo was ready to sit me down. He’d moved me into the number three spot in the order when Kaline went out with the arm injury. The team was in first place, though, and Wally Moses went to him and told him not to break up a winning combination. So he compromised and batted me seventh.”
It was June 24, at Cleveland’s cavernous lakefront stadium. The Tigers had won just two of their last seven and the manager was getting nervous. He was afraid that finally the month-long absence of Kaline was making itself felt. Cleveland had won ·the first three games of this series, with Steve Hargan and Luis Tiant blanking the Tigers on successive days. Dick Tracewski finally pulled them out of the skid with an astonishing three-run homer off Sam McDowell. Now there was a makeup game, on a Monday originally scheduled as an off day. The Tigers, still scrambling for hits, would face Mike Paul, a young left-hander who threw very hard.
And very wild. In the first inning, he walked four men around a single to Freehan. That brought up Northrup with the bases loaded. Paul struck him out.
“On a terrible pitch,” Northrup says. “Around my ankles. I was really overeager and couldn’t lay off.”
Paul struck him out again in the third, this time with one man on base. The pitcher had settled down, the Indians had banged McLain around for a couple of runs, and going into the fifth Detroit’s lead was a narrow 3-2. But when Paul started off by giving up his seventh walk of the game, manager Alvin Dark wanted no more. He brought in Eddie Fisher, a veteran knucklebailer. The Tigers quickly loaded the bases on him, but he came back to strike out Wert, who waved futilely at the dancing knuckler. That gave Northrup a second chance. “I was just trying to get that flutterball somewhere, since I hadn’t hit anything all day,” he says. “Somewhere” turned out to be the empty right-field stands, a grand slam for a 7-2 lead.
By the next inning, Fisher was gone, replaced by Hal Kurtz, who was no improvement. He hit Freehan, Horton doubled, and then he hit Wert. For the third time in the game, Northrup was coming up with every base occupied. Dark went to a gangling left-hander, Billy Rohr. By this time it made no difference to Northrup. He took Rohr deep, too, and for the first time in franchise history, a Tiger had hit two grand slams in the same game.
He hit one again five days later, once more before the season ended, and, finally, his fifth slam of the year in the sixth game of the World Series. After the double whammy, however, radio announcer Ernie Harwell would herald Northrup’s every appearance at the plate with the phrase: “It’s the Slammer himself.” It became one of the tag lines of the season in Detroit and marked Northrup as a man to look to in the clutch.
The homers did more than snap Northrup out of his brief slump. They seemed to be a turning point in his career. Previously, he had hit in the number two position, a place in the lineup where bat control rather than power is essential. For the rest of the season he was a consistent long-ball threat in the three slot. The pressure of replacing the wounded Kaline turned him into a different player. He led the team with ninety RBIs, hit over twenty homers for the first time, and finally fulfilled the promise that he had always shown.
Northrup grew up in the little town of St. Louis, Michigan, a few miles outside of Saginaw. Pursued by many schools, he decided to stay close to home and chose Alma, a small, academically rigorous liberal arts college. As a quarterback, he broke virtually every school record and was invited to training camp by the Chicago Bears and the New York Titans (soon to be the Jets). Instead, he chose baseball. He was already twenty-one when he signed his first pro contract, late for a ballplayer, especially one from a lesser collegiate sports program. By the time Northrup left college, Dick McAuliffe, who is five days younger than Northrup, had already put in four minor league seasons and was playing in Detroit. Northrup became the senior member of the group of prospects who rose through the system together and became the Boys from Syracuse.
“That’s what made 1968 so great for us,” he says, “and maybe it’s something that outsiders don’t understand. But that group all knew each other for ten years. When you accomplish some-thing with your best friends, it makes it that much sweeter. That was the satisfaction, the thing that bonded us so closely.
“And it will never happen again. That’s the sad part. It’s unusual for one guy to stay with an organization for ten years now. For ten guys to do it is impossible. That makes it so much tougher. Because it can be a lonely life. You’re on the road with a lot of time to kill. Yeah, a lot of us drank. Nobody took drugs, but a lot of us drank. You can’t get away from that. But that wasn’t all there was to it. It was a chance to get off among ourselves and talk out our problems. You felt a guy wasn’t going so good or maybe doing some things on the field that were wrong. You got to talk to him over a drink, maybe make a suggestion to help him out. You can do that when you feel at ease with the other guys. You feel that you can say these things to them because you know each other so well. That team really didn’t need a leader because we were just all growing old together.
“The problem is that after their careers were over it didn’t stop for some of the guys. They didn’t have the games to give them a release anymore. Hell, some of them played better because they drank. But we had some people who struggled with alcoholism the rest of their lives. It killed them, eventually. They couldn’t adjust. I feel sorry for some of these young players making the big money now because they don’t know what’s in store for them when it ends. Everyone wants to get married and have kids. If you’re married and get in at 3:00 A.M. on the road, your roommate doesn’t care. But your wife will. Then you have a problem. Everything is at risk. They’ll take away every-thing you have.”
Northrup runs a manufacturer’s rep business out of a small office in the suburb of Southfield. There is an assortment of Tigers tickets on his desk as he tries to allot them to clients. The problem is that the way the team is playing it can be tough finding takers. Northrup himself has been cut off by the Tigers. After several years as an analyst on cable telecasts, he lost his job to former teammate Jim Price.
“I have strong opinions,” he says. “I’ve never been afraid to take on the authorities. The caliber of play in so many of these games is so poor that they’re hard to watch. I know that when I played, every team had three or four starting pitchers as good as the top guy on most staffs today. So maybe there were some people who didn’t like me saying things like that.
“I’ve always been able to take care of myself, though. I remember going in once to negotiate a contract with Jim Campbell. He started in, like I knew he would, on how I couldn’t hit left-handers and why should he pay me more when I could only be a platoon ballplayer. We were $2,500 apart on the con-tract, and I told Jim that I’d bet him that amount that I hit lefties better than righties. He jumped on it and yelled out to his outer office for his secretary, Alice Sloan, to check it out. She’d been listening to us talk, and she yelled right back, ‘I already have and you’re not going to like the answer.’ But you didn’t get one by Campbell too often. Sure, I felt I should have been paid more. Maybe I could have forced a trade. Guys went to the press and did it back then. But what for? You put down roots. For a $5,000 raise, you’d have to pull them up, and after taxes were paid you were left with something like $2,500. Why make an ass out of yourself for $2,500? Money wasn’t the object. Hell, the paperboy cashed my series check for me. A rookie will equal my entire earnings in the majors in two and a half years.”
Still, the old ties remain. A photograph of a roaring tiger hangs on the wall behind his desk, along with an aerial shot of Tiger Stadium. He also served a term as president of the Tigers alumni. Beside the desk he has a small stack of the conservative magazine American Spectator. He is a big fan of Rush Limbaugh and dislikes welfare vociferously.
But at a recent fantasy camp, in which fans get to play the game with retired Tigers, he was asked to give a brief eulogy for Hank Aguirre, whose uniform was being retired by the campers and presented to his son. Northrup, the man whom his team-mates used to call “Sweet Lips” for his sarcastic take on every-thing, broke down halfway through and couldn’t continue.
Likewise his voice turns suddenly tender when he starts to talk about his adopted son, Camille. Northrup and his wife brought him to America from an orphanage in Poland. They were told that his parents were migrant workers who could not care for him because of his medical problems. He was born with an esophagus detached from his stomach. Every meal was a trial because he was unable to keep food down.
“He’s doing a little better all the time,” Northrup says. “We had the operation to correct his condition. He still has to regurgitate what he eats from time to time, but it’s improving. He’s such a cute little guy,” he says and pulls a picture from his wallet.
The Fox beams with fatherly pride. It is another hit for the Slammer himself, by far the finest of his collection.