If the game was close, the rumbling would start in about the eighth inning. This was the Tigers’ time throughout the 1968 season. This was when they were especially dangerous. In a season when pitchers dominated, Detroit sent up a lineup in which almost every batter could hit a home run. Eight of them were in double figures. No other team in baseball came close to that kind of sustained power. When low-run games were the norm, the Tigers could score in quick bunches. About four of every ten wins came on their last time at bat. One mistake could get them back into a game.
But one man seemed to do it better than anybody else. When he got off his seat in the dugout and moved toward the bat rack, the rumbling in the stands would begin to grow louder. When his stocky form mounted the steps onto the field and headed toward the on-deck circle, it turned to a roar. And when Gates Brown started walking to the plate it built to a frenzy, a release of anticipation that had been growing for two hours. From the second game of the season, when his ninth-inning homer beat Boston, it had started. This was the moment fans had waited for. When the game was on the line, it was Gates’s hour.
But as he looks back now, he feels that his hour never really struck.
“That was never my dream,” says Brown. “Being a pinch hitter. Sitting on the bench for the whole game and then getting one swing. Who would want that? I wanted to play. Everyone who ever dreams of getting to the major leagues wants to be a star. No one sees themselves spending a career sitting on the bench.
“But they made up their minds, and there wasn’t anything I could do to change it. I couldn’t play in the field. That was it. Can you remember any time when they put me in the outfield and lost a game because of it?”
His listener says that he can’t.
“Thank you,” says Gates.
The lunch hour is almost over at Carl’s Chop House, a venerable Detroit restaurant that specializes in meat and plenty of it. When he arrived for his appointment, Gates immediately requested a switch to the smoking area of the restaurant. “Can’t get through a meal without a smoke,” he said. He only picked at his steak and eventually wrapped up half of it to take home. As he spoke about the past, his anger crowded out his appetite.
“I pleaded with them to trade me,” he says. “I’d go in to Jim Campbell’s office and tell him I heard that Cleveland was interested in me and please, please make a trade. He told me that no one wanted me. I was just the twenty-fifth man on the roster.
“Racism pervaded that organization. They’d tell you jokes with the N-word in them while they were instructing you. You never opened your mouth. When they went to pass out the series tickets, the black fans somehow got shut out. I don’t know how they did it. Must have looked at the postmark and tossed the Detroit envelopes out.”
This accusation was made at that time because of the small number of black faces in the stands during the series. The Tigers heatedly denied it. The real explanation is probably less conspiratorial than that. Series ticket sales are controlled by such a small group of individuals and businesses that the average fan must, inevitably, have some kind of inside connection to get a seat in any city. Very few black people in Detroit were well connected in corporate or political life in 1968.
“You know,” says Gates, “that the only ones with series rings from both 1968 and 1984 are me and Dick Tracewski. We both played in one and coached in the other. I’m proud of that. But after we won in ’84, when I was the hitting coach, and money was flowing all over the place, you know what they offered me as a raise? Twenty-eight hundred dollars. Players are making millions, and they were still treating me like their boy. I turned ’em down and walked away from it. Because if I took that kind of raise they’d have been right. And I ain’t nobody’s boy.
“They never gave me the credit. When Lou Whitaker and Alan Trammell came up to the Tigers they were both slap hitters. They didn’t know how to turn on the ball. The Tigers were happy with their five homers a year. But they both became big hitters. They could drive twenty homers regularly. Now who was the hitting coach when that was going on?”
You were, says his companion.
“Thank you,” says Gates.
Memory is deceiving. Gates pinch-hit just thirty-nine times during the 1968 season and came to bat a mere ninety-two times. Pitcher Earl Wilson batted fewer times, drove in more runs, and hit more homers. Yet Gates is a shining symbol of that year. When the Standard Club, an organization of Jewish businessmen, chose someone to honor in 1968 with the presentation of a new car, it picked Gates. He represented, they said, the highest aspiration of athletics, the man who came through when it was all on the line. Moreover, his personal triumph—being scouted and signed by the Tigers out of the Ohio State Penitentiary after being convicted of a youthful crime—was an inspiration to the entire city.
The stats tell just part of the story. When he did pinch-hit, he batted .462. Half of his eighteen pinch hits were for extra bases, and three of them were homers. Only once did he strike out. When he delivered, he did it with flair.
The August 11 doubleheader against Boston was Gates’s apotheosis, the day that belonged to him alone. Boston had battered Wilson with a four-run first inning in the opener. But slowly, laboriously the Tigers struggled back into it. Wayne Comer drove starter Jim Lonborg out of the game in the seventh with his only home run of the year, and then Don Wert tied it in the eighth with a triple. Meanwhile, five Detroit relievers blanked the Red Sox.
The game went into extra innings, beyond the four-hour mark. After Wert tied it, Detroit could get only one more baserunner. Sparky Lyle and Lee Stange stopped the Tigers cold. Stange got the first two men in the fourteenth with Lolich as the next hitter. Mayo had used six pitchers the day before. The bull pen was exhausted. There was no fresh arm to bring in. It was time for Gates. He had to end it now. He pulled Stange into the upper deck in right. Game over.
After the debilitating opener, Mayo decided to give Gates a rare start in left field for the second game. This one went into the ninth tied 2-2. Then Boston rallied for three against Wyatt and Warden, and the fans started shuffling out. It had been a very long day, and they were satisfied with the split and the drama of the opener. But in the bottom of the ninth it started again. With one out after a leadoff walk, the Tigers ran off five straight singles. The Red Sox changed pitchers four times to try to stop the onslaught. Those fans who were departing stopped where they were to watch the denouement.
Kaline tied it with a single, and then Lyle came in to face Brown. Lyle was one of the top relievers of the era, just the sort of tough left-hander whom Brown wasn’t supposed to hit. But he drove the ball through the right side for the winning single. Game two over. Tigers win, 6-5. Both games of the double-header end on hits by Brown.
“That was my job,” he shrugs. “That’s what they paid me for. I don’t give a damn about batting average. Show me how the man hits with a runner on second. That’s how you measure. How do you hit when the game is riding on what you do? But I was on a mission that year. I’d missed a lot of ’67 with a bad wrist. I knew that one pinch hit could have made the differenee, the way that race went. After spring training they tell me that I just made the team. That it had come down to me or Lenny Green. Nothing against Lenny, but I thought they were crazy. I was an angry man. I was going to show ’em once and for all how wrong they were about me. After the season, Campbell doubled my pay. I went from $18,000 a year to $36,000.1 played seven more seasons and never got to forty. I was stuck. I guess I wasn’t the only one. How do you think it made Cash feel, after all those years with the club, when they sat him down in the stretch in ’67? Or poor Ray Oyler. Sit him down for the World Series for an outfielder. How did that make him feel?
“They told me that the designated hitter rule was coming in and that it was made for me. It worked for one year. I was the DH in 1973, hit twelve homers, drove in fifty runs, got the most times at bat since I was breaking in. Then the next year Kaline was going for 3,000 hits, and he couldn’t run anymore. So it didn’t take any genius to figure out who the DH would be. Good old Gates would sit down again. After that, it was too late. I was thirty-six years old, it was over for me. I never got that chance.”
Brown still lives in the same Detroit house (“I’m happy in the ghetto”) he bought as a player. He has not worked since leaving the Tigers after the 1984 season. A plastics company he invested in went bankrupt. Still, none of the aura has faded. During the course of lunch, a steady stream of diners stopped by the table. They just wanted to shake Gates’s hand, say hello, tell him that they remember.
“It’s funny the things that bother me now,” he says. “I always prided myself on being ready whenever they called on me. Except that when Billy Martin managed that team there was never any telling what he would do. He’d play Hitler if he could win a ball game for him. He sent me up to hit for Willie [Horton] in the 1972 playoffs, and I never expected it. For Willie? Come on. One of the best clutch hitters in the game? I never saw it coming, and I wasn’t focused. I popped up and killed a rally. We lost the playoffs and a chance to get back to the series by one run. That haunts me. I failed.
“In the later years, you know, Campbell used to call me about once a week from Florida. After he was retired. He must have really been bored if he wanted to talk to me. I guess you could call our relationship kind of a love-hate sort of thing. We had our moments. After he died, they told me that he’d left me a little something and that he’d wanted me to be a pallbearer. Only four players showed up for his funeral—me, Freehan, Wilson, and Kaline [who gave a eulogy]. I guess that tells you what they thought of him. If he hadn’t asked for me I don’t know if I’d have gone.”
Somehow, it doesn’t square. It seems a shame that a man who once was chosen as a symbol of character should be left with such bitter memories of those times. His luncheon companion tells him that upon parting. He would always remember Brown, he says, as a kind, considerate man who would go out of his way to help someone with a problem.
“Thank you,” says Gates.