A dangerous cigarette dangles from his fingers as he sits at the kitchen table. He knows he shouldn’t be smoking. Not with his medical history.
“Ahhh, I gave it up once for about five years,” says John Hiller. “Then I got a chance to start a game, and I invited a whole bunch of friends to make the bus trip down from Duluth. They scored five runs off me in the first inning, and I was gone. It was humiliating. I was sitting there in the clubhouse, and someone had a pack in the locker next to me. So I grabbed it, and then I had another one, and then I sent the clubhouse boy out to buy me a fresh pack. I’ve quit a few times since, but never for that long.”
Hiller lives in Iron Mountain, Michigan. The town is five hundred miles from Detroit in the state’s Upper Peninsula. But the golf course is just down the street, and the air is fresh. The northern winters may be long, which makes it hard on his leg with the arterial blockage. Still, it is home, and he is happy to be there. A man whom Billy Martin once described as “coming back from the dead,” he’s happy to be anywhere. A heart attack victim at the age of twenty-seven, informed that his career was over at twenty-eight, no, the cigarette is a mark of defiant life.
“I never liked cities much,” he said. “I know a lot of the guys became manufacturer’s reps, things like that. But I was never one for schmoozing. I never could bring the same kind of drive that I gave to baseball into business. I tried selling insurance for a while. I just couldn’t make it go, even though the name got me in a lot of doors. We had a little farm a few miles outside of town. Raised some stock there. But the leg got so bad, y’ know, I just couldn’t work it. So I’m just content to let the world go by.”
Back in ’68 he was Ratso. That was the nickname hung on him by his roomie, Pat Dobson; it was an affectionately sleazy comparison to the Dustin Hoffman character in the film Midnight Cowboy. Dobson, in turn, was named Cobra because his pitching motion resembled a snake regarding its prey and then striking. The Tigers were very big on nicknames, some of them bizarre. Jim Price was the Big Guy, reflecting his position as leader of the scrubs. Jim Northrup was not only the Fox but Sweet Lips because of his ongoing acidic commentaries on the world. Horton was ’Roids because of a recurring affliction in his nether regions.
“When Ed Mathews joined the team, they told me to come up with the right nickname for him,” says Hiller. “You know, we had a lot of respect for Eddie; but we weren’t in awe of him or anything. We knew he was a Hall of Famer and what he had done. But I said, what the hell, let’s call him New Guy. So that’s what he was. Eddie was with us about a week in 1967, and he said: ‘Jeez, you guys aren’t going to win any pennant; you’re just a bunch of drunks.’ That was something coming from him because Eddie never turned down a drink too often. But you know what? Next year he got up and told us, ‘I’ve played baseball for twenty years, and I finally made it to the big leagues.’ Isn’t that something? From Eddie Mathews. He saw how hard we played the game, y’ see. We had our fun, but we knew how to play ball.”
Hiller was the last of the ’68 winners to stay with the Tigers, the only one who bridged the gap from Mayo Smith to Sparky Anderson. In time, he became the top relief pitcher in the league, one of the first to be used exclusively as a stopper. But then he was in his second year with the team: A self-described “wild man,” a kid out of Canada, drinking more than was good for him, running a little amok on the road, and throwing the hell out of the baseball.
“I started, I threw long relief, I pitched short relief,” he says. “Whatever they needed. That’s how it was. You didn’t have the specialists like you do now. A young guy like me got his innings wherever he could. When Mayo decided he couldn’t keep Sparma in the rotation for the last two months, I was the number four starter. I pitched a one-hitter, the low-hit game of the year for us. I had the game with Cleveland where I struck out the first six guys and set a record. I made a contribution. That’s what made what happened later so tough to accept.”
On January 11, 1971, while relaxing at home, he took a deep drag on a cigarette and felt a sharp pain in his chest. An hour later, he lit up again. This time the pain went all around his back. He called his doctor, who said he didn’t like the sound of that and told Hiller to meet him at the hospital. So Hiller went outside, unloaded his snowmobile from the car, and drove himself to the hospital.
“When I got there they told me I’d already had three heart attacks,” he says. “Of course, I couldn’t believe it. I was in my twenties, an athlete. My first thought was that spring training started in about a month, and if the Tigers found out about it they’d be pretty upset. I mean I had no idea what this meant. So I asked everybody to keep it quiet because I thought I’d be ready to go to Lakeland on February 14. Then they told me I had to have surgery. No money in the bank. A family to support. All I knew was baseball. I remember laying in that hospital bed and watching the movie Brian’s Song on television and crying because I figured that was going to be me. They were just starting this new surgery, an intestinal bypass, which had a chance to clear the arteries without touching the heart. So I said, sure, yeah, anything. Then I had to call Jim Campbell and tell him. It was the day before I was supposed to report.
‘Hello, Jim, I guess I won’t be coming down.’
‘Why not?’
‘Because I just had a heart attack.’
‘Yeah, sure, you asshole.’
‘No, Jim, I really did.’
“Oh, man was he pissed. I don’t blame him. But I had the surgery and lost about forty-five pounds. I got a job in a department store to have a little money coming in, but the owners were wonderful and let me work out at the Y, getting my strength back up, as much as I wanted.
“It gave me a chance to think. I hadn’t taken care of myself. I was way overweight. Drinking and smoking. I made excuses. Back in ’68 we always used to joke that you could take a team picture in the hotel bar. You had a bad game, and you had to take a drink to get over the disappointment. And if you had a good game you sure as hell had to have some drinks to celebrate. You had all that time on your hands on the road. I never drank at home. Oh, maybe a gin and tonic when I got home after a game. But not like on the road, where one drink got to be two and then ten.
“But it was more than that. I always pitched scared. Hell, we all did if you weren’t in the starting rotation. You’d pitch over injuries because you didn’t want them to know. You’d start thinking that if you had three or four bad games in a row, they’d send you down. You can’t pitch that way. But after my heart attack I figured: What can they do to me that would be worse than what I went through? What’s there to be afraid of? When a doctor said to me that he doubted I could handle the stress of pitching in the majors again, I told him that wasn’t stress. That’s what I did for a living, throw a baseball. Whatever happened on the field really didn’t mean shit.
“There was this track at the Y in Duluth. Thirty-five laps around was a mile. The first time I tried to run after the surgery I got around twice and fell flat on my face. I always hated running anyhow. But I just went out there and kept looking at the heels of the guy in front of me and pictured myself pitching again, and I forced myself to run.”
After a year, Hiller called Campbell and told him he was ready to go again. Campbell was aghast. Chuck Hughes of the Detroit Lions had died of heart failure on the field during a game at Tiger Stadium the previous fall. Campbell was not eager for a repeat of that. Medical opinion, was mixed. People just did not come back from heart attacks and compete at the highest level of athletics. Hiller went through spring training of 1972 as a minor league pitching coach and batting practice pitcher. At the end of training, Campbell reluctantly offered him a job. Pitching coach for the Class A Lakeland farm club. Salary: $7,500 a year.
“I’d been making twenty grand before I got sick,” says Hiller. “We bought a house based on that salary. In fact, the series check was my down payment. I told Jim I just couldn’t make it on $7,500. He said that’s all he could give me, take it or leave it. But I knew I could make it back to the majors. So I took it.
“Here’s what I did. I sent my entire paycheck home to Duluth. I got myself a mattress and put it on the floor of the clubhouse in Lakeland. And that was home. After the first night I got a night-light and kept it on all night, because if it was completely dark the roaches would come out. I went to the Tigertown commissary before they broke camp. The cook was a friend of mine. He gave me a big slab of cheese and a big slab of ham and some bread. And that’s what I lived on. Ham and cheese sandwiches. It wasn’t so bad when we went on the road because then I got five dollars a day meal money. I’d save as much as I could, and when we got back to Lakeland my big treat was to take seventy-five cents, go over to the nightclub, buy one draft beer, nurse it all night, and watch the show.
“A few times I thought to myself: Wait a minute. I pitched in a World Series. I started for a championship team. This is crazy. What am I doing here living like some bum? But Dr. [Clarence] Livingood, the Tigers team physician, was always in my corner. He used his pull to get me an appointment with this nationally known heart specialist in Atlanta. He was Lyndon Johnson’s own doctor. So two days before my appointment, Johnson has a heart attack, and all his appointments are cancelled. That’s when I thought maybe it’s not meant to be.
“I guess I wasn’t much of a coach while this was happening. I was too concerned about my own career. One day I look up, and there’s Campbell in the stands. He never shows up at Lakeland. I just knew instinctively he was there to fire me. And that would be the end. So I walked up to him and said: ‘Jim, I won’t let you fire me. This isn’t fair. You’re not giving me a chance. I won’t let you do it.’ Then I turned around and walked away.
“Years later, when I was inducted into the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame, Jim got up and spoke and said that I was right. He had come down to release me, but when he saw how determined I was he changed his mind. So by that much I was saved.
“I finally got in to see that heart specialist, and he gave me the exam, and then he just sat back and winked at me. ‘Be patient,’ he said. That was it. Be patient. Well, I figured I couldn’t live like this anymore, so I flew back to Duluth and asked about getting my department store job back. That’s when Campbell called. ‘Get down to Chicago,’ he told me. ‘Let’s see how you can throw.’
“I was throwing the ball harder than I ever had in my life. Losing that weight seemed to make my fastball move better than before. Two of Detroit’s relievers had gotten hurt, and it was between me and Les Cain, who’d been having some arm troubles, as to who would make the team. That’s what Billy Martin decided. We’d go into the bull pen, and whoever threw best got the job. I don’t want to be irreverent or anything, but they could have put Jesus Christ on the mound next to me, and I’d have out-thrown him. After what I’d been through, no way I wouldn’t get that job.
“Next day, they put me in the game. Dick Allen is the hitter. He looks at a fastball. He looks at a curve. Then he looks at me as if to say: ‘OK, is that what you’ve got?’ I throw another curveball, and he puts into the left-field roof at Comiskey Park. Not on the roof. That thing was still rising when it hit the bottom side. It put a dent in the metal. And I say to myself: ‘Holy jeez, this is what I came back for?’ But I came back, threw three more innings with no runs and no walks.
“That’s when Martin tells the clubhouse: ‘What’s the matter with you guys? Here’s Hiller back from the dead, and he can throw strikes. Why can’t you?”’
Hiller went on to pitch twenty-four times for the division champions and threw three innings of shutout relief in the play-offs. In 1973, used entirely as a closer, he saved thirty-eight games, establishing a major league record. In the first five years after his comeback his ERA was never higher than 2.64·
“Billy was throwing me in practically every day,” he says. “Once he made me go sit in the clubhouse instead of going to the bull pen, but he called me out of there and brought me in the game anyhow. Next day he told me to stay at the hotel. He couldn’t get me in the game from there.
“I was the last one from the old bunch. I stayed until 1980, and then I felt I just wasn’t doing the job, and I quit. I mean why should I take the ball club’s salary when I couldn’t earn it anymore? The Tigers didn’t owe me a thing. I gave them everything I had as a player, but I’d have done the same thing if I’d pitched for Boston or Cleveland or anyone. It’s the only way I knew how to play. I always felt maybe they could take more advantage of us from a public relations standpoint. But once I walked out of that clubhouse as a player, that was it. It wasn’t my clubhouse any-more. I never went back.”
Hiller has kept off most of his weight—and most of his hair, too. He’s been a moderate drinker since the heart attack, lives simply. The wild days of ’68 are a long time ago and far, far away.
“They’re always on the phone with me to work autograph shows,” he says. “I can’t do it. Not unless it’s a charitable thing. I tried it once, and I felt like a whore. All these little kids paying to get in so I could give them my autograph. I can’t do that.
“When I was playing, the old-timers would come into the clubhouse and talk about how they don’t play the game like they used to. I always told myself I’d never be like that. But you know the old saying: Money changes everything. It’s all different now. The first little pain, and they’re on the disabled list. I see guys on TV laughing on the bench when they’re ten runs down. God, Billy Martin would’ve killed ’em. Hey, we gave our lives for a paycheck, and it was a good game back then. I just can’t get very interested in it anymore.”
