There had been pennant waits longer than twenty-three years. Much longer. Even in the history of the Detroit franchise, the gap between the pennants of 1909 and 1934 exceeded this gap by two years. Of the original sixteen major league teams, only three—the Yankees, Dodgers, and Reds—would never wait longer between pennants. A few teams would wait more than forty seasons, the Cubs over fifty.
What had made this wait so acute for Detroit’s fans was that they had never watched their team win on TV. The revolution in communications since 1945 had skipped right over the Tigers. Watching the team you root for play on network TV, seen by the entire nation, seemed to validate your experience as a fan. Television brought an immediacy to sports unlike anything that had gone before. It had become the stamp of reality. Just as when McLain took his bow on the Ed Sullivan Show, being on national television was the mark of genuine celebrity. But for Detroit’s postwar generation, who grew up with a TV set as part of the family, it was always somebody else’s team being shown. The wait of twenty-three years seemed longer than it actually was because in that span every one of the other original teams, except the Cubs and As, had taken their turn on the tube.
Then there was the unresolved matter of ’67. It still hung like a thundercloud over the heads of the Tigers and Detroit. The pennant blown and the chance squandered. The fires of July. The memory of the terrible events of the past year still shrouded the city like an evil mist. Although that mist would never entirely dissipate, there is nothing else in sports quite like a pennant race. The day-by-day immersion in its drama, the addition of a new chapter at every sunset, each new twist to the tale. Baseball draws its acolytes in like a soap opera with spikes. While the story continues, other concerns recede. That is how it was in Detroit in the summer of 1968. Some called it a healing, but it was more like a disease had gone into deep remission.
Three days after McLain’s thirtieth, the last number came up for the Tigers. The number was one, the final Detroit win or Baltimore loss needed to reach the Magic Moment. The Free Press had received hundreds of thousands of entries for its promotion. As the hour approached, those who had chosen September 17 as the date gathered around their radios to hear the clock strike.
It was Wilson’s turn in the rotation. But as he warmed up in the left-field bull pen to face the Yankees, something didn’t feel right in his shoulder. He mentioned it to Sain, and Mayo immediately decided to make a switch. Joe Sparma, who hadn’t won a game in almost two months, was told to start throwing.
Since his tiff with the manager in early August, Sparma had been forgotten. He was only 8-10 for the season and deeply wounded in his soul. While his contemporaries, the other Boys from Syracuse, were winning the pennant, Sparma remained outside the baselines, given nothing to do and no promise for the future. Confused and depressed, he watched the season pass as if it were happening to someone else.
This call was a rush job, and he had no chance to let the situation get to him mentally. He was given a few extra minutes to warm up because of the injury to Wilson and then just thrown right into it. He almost washed right out of it, too. He gave up two hits in the first and only a double play got him out of the inning. After that he was untouchable. Through the eighth, he allowed just one more hit and faced the minimum of twenty-one hitters. The only two Yankees to get on were thrown out by Freehan on steal attempts. This was the Sparma the Tigers had seen in their dreams. Ahead in the count, in command of his breaking pitches, unable to be pulled. Moreover, when the Tigers scored a run in the fifth, it was Sparma who cashed it in with a single up the middle.
The crowd of 46,000, the last big one of the regular season, began screaming in anticipation as the ninth began. It had been a fast game. Sparma walked only one man and hadn’t struck out anyone. The Magic Moment looked as if it would strike shortly before 10:00 P.M., Detroit time.
But pinch hitter Charley Smith led off with a single, and two outs later he had advanced to second. With the crowd howling on each pitch, Jake Gibbs lined a single, and the game was suddenly tied. In the ensuing silence, a disgusted Sparma pounded his glove, stomped around on the mound, and then came back to strike out Mantle. Now the Tigers would have to clinch the pennant in their half of the inning.
But they already had. At 9:58 P.M., six hundred miles to the east in Fenway Park, the Red Sox got the last out in a 2-0 win over the Orioles. The race was over. In an odd reversal of the previous year, in which the Red Sox had waited in their clubhouse for the news that the Tigers had lost in Detroit, the Tigers found that they had won by the word out of Boston.
But the word never made it to the Tiger Stadium scoreboard. Campbell feared that posting the result could trigger a demonstration that would make the rest of this game unplayable. So as the twenty-three-year wait ended, the Tigers soldiered on in the dark. Hiller, sitting in the clubhouse because he had pitched the night before, heard the news on television. Racing down the tunnel to the bench he started to yell. “Guys, it’s over. We’ve won.” Mayo practically jumped on top of him, telling him to shut up. He wanted his team to win it on their own. Only a few of the Tigers heard what Hiller had said. They said nothing more about it. Observers could detect no trace of emotion on the bench.
For a while, it looked as if Campbell would have to keep the lid on the news for a long time. Reliever Steve Hamilton got the first two hitters in the ninth easily. Then Kaline was called on to pinch-hit. When he’d left home that morning, he told his wife, Louise, he had the feeling that he was going to do something big in the game. It was not the sort of thing he had ever mentioned before. But sitting on the bench was a baffling, unsettling experience for Kaline. Never in his career had he been relegated to this kind of role. He was unprepared for it and, like Sparma, waited impatiently for a chance at redemption.
Just as he had a few days before, at the start of the rally for McLain’s thirtieth, Kaline drew a walk. Freehan then singled to left, and the Yankees changed pitchers, bringing in Lindy McDaniel to face pinch hitter Price. Mayo responded by calling for Gates Brown, and McDaniel, pitching carefully, walked him to load the bases. That brought up Wert.
The sad-faced little third baseman was not having a good year as a hitter. He had averaged .255 in his first five seasons with the Tigers. But now he was having a hard time staying above .200, although remaining a rock of consistency at third base. Uncomplaining, always laughing quietly at the strange behavior going on all around him, Wert was regarded with deep affection by his teammates. He was “Coyote,” the name Don Demeter had come up with for him several years ago in an effort to draw the shy rookie within the circle of the team. Demeter said that something in Wert’s eyes reminded him of the animals he saw on his Oklahoma ranch.
Now the crowd was up again, pleading for the hit that would win it. Wert swung late and sent a looper toward the right side. In an instant, everyone saw that it would clear Horace Clarke’s glove and land safely in the outfield. Before Kaline could fulfill the prophecy he had made to his wife hours before and score the run that, apparently, would win the pennant, the first wave of spectators came over the top of the stands.
Campbell’s fears had been well founded. As the Tigers hurriedly congratulated each other and then rushed into the clubhouse in a bellowing mob, the fans took over the field, tearing up turf and bases and anything else that could be lifted for a souvenir.
This, too, was not customary behavior in 1968. In the early years of the twentieth century, when spectators were allowed to stand behind ropes in the outfield for big games, crowd control was a bit of a problem. But those days were long gone. Even in the most dramatic victories, crowds refrained from coming onto the playing surface. That was sacred ground. But this was the ’60s, and nothing was sacred. By the mid ’70s, teams routinely had to post police guards, some of them mounted, around the field to stop such celebrations before they got rolling.
Although the Tigers expected some disturbance, they never anticipated this. They had made no arrangements for added security. Instead, they ordered fireworks. The lights were turned off and illuminated bursts were sent soaring high above the center-field scoreboard. Through the rockets’ red glare, you could see the fans methodically tearing up the field, like a pageant reenacting the fall of the Bastille. The revelry didn’t end until the fireworks concluded, with the message “Sock It To ’Em, Tigers” emblazoned across the night sky. Only then did guards finally go onto the field to roust the remaining pockets of joy.
There was also madness in the clubhouse—the traditional champagne-spewing, whirlpool-dunking, cigar-chomping celebration. Mathews and Roy Face, acquired from Pittsburgh in the last two weeks of the season as the final bit of pennant insurance, watched the wildness unfold before them, nudging each other to draw attention to some of the more bizarre antics. They had been through it before. This time they were content to observe.
Many of the Tigers, never slow to accept a glass, were slumped by their lockers, broad grins spreading over their vacant faces. In the entire room, only Wert sat upright in front of his locker. He held a beer in his hand. A small smile was on his face. Surrounded by the massive egos and large personalities around him, he was content to perch all by himself and reflect upon what he had set off with one swing of his bat. A wily Coyote, finally getting the best of a roomful of Roadrunners. But for all of the Tigers, the wait was over, and the weight had finally been lifted from their backs.
In the city, the party spread down Michigan Avenue from the stadium to the streets of downtown. Crowds lined up ten deep in front of the Lindell A.C., trying to get in to toast the moment. Attorney Fred Steinhardt, just out of law school, was one of the lucky few who managed to squeeze inside. “It was the party of the century,” he recalls. “Everybody laughing, singing. At one point, Lolich and McLain wound up behind the bar giving away drinks for free. I still had the feeling that the World Series—who knows? It might all end there. But the pennant was ours. Whatever happened it was ours to keep. So we had to celebrate.”
Thousands of others were content to walk down the avenues, beers in their hands, howling at the sky. Every street was like Mardi Gras that night. It was after 11:00 P.M. on a Tuesday night. But the streets of Detroit, long deserted in the months after the previous July’s riots, were packed again with happy people.
Wells Twombley had just been hired by the Free Press as its pro football writer. He had worked late in the office, putting this monumental edition of the sports page to bed. Then he joined a group of other writers to walk to a nearby bar. For some reason, Twombley was offended by the merriment breaking out all around him. As one reveler walked by, shouting wildly to no one in particular, Twombley shoved him and told him to shut up. The cheerful fan turned around and punched his lights out. Twombley crumpled to the pavement and hit the side of his head on the curb. The incident left him with a permanent hearing impairment. It was, however, one of the few reports of violence that evening.
One other such incident came in the hospitality room at Tiger Stadium. Yankee manager Ralph Houk had been ejected from the game and was not in the best of moods. He also had been angered earlier in the week by an article in The Sporting News that contrasted the success of the Detroit farm system to that of the Yankees. Houk, who had stepped down as general manager, took this as a personal affront. When Houk found that the author of the article, Tom Loomis of the Toledo Blade, was in the room, he sought out Loomis and began to yell at him. Then he went at Loomis and had to be pulled off by his coaches. It was an odd end to the pennant celebration at the ballpark.
There was, however, one last bit of business to attend to before the World Series. It was Denny’s final moment—his last chance to be ringmaster, lion tamer, and acrobat all at once. The game after the pennant clincher was rained out, an act of divine intercession because it was doubtful that enough sober Tigers could have been rounded up to play. Even with McLain starting the next day, fewer than 10,000 fans found their way to the ballpark for the last game with the Yankees.
Once again, McLain was in complete command as he went for win number thirty-one. Cash hit a couple of homers, and going into the eighth McLain was coasting with a 6-1 lead. With one out, Mantle started walking to the plate for what most people assumed would be his final time at bat at Tiger Stadium. It was widely rumored that he would soon announce his retirement. But for reasons of advance ticket sales the Yankees would choose not to let that particular cat out of the bag until the following spring.
In later years, great players would be given farewell tours. Their retirement announced in advance, they would be saluted, presented with gifts, fondly recalled as worthy opponents as they made their last circuit around the league. Kaline would be afforded that kind of hail and farewell in seven more years. But it was unknown in 1968.
Mantle had been the very symbol of the Yankees teams that destroyed so many Detroit hopes during the ’50s and ’60s. He was the biggest attraction on the best team in baseball. Worshipped in New York, he was the one whom people in other cities came out to cheer, to boo, to admire, and to detest. He was now only a shadow of the great athlete who had flashed across the outfield grass in those years, the slugger who put the phrase “tape measure home run” into the language. He limped, his bat was slow. He was not yet thirty-seven but seemed far older.
But as he walked to the plate in Detroit for the last time, the small crowd in Tiger Stadium spontaneously decided to salute the old adversary. Rising to their feet, they cheered for him wildly. If it wasn’t with quite the same emotion that had rung out two nights before for the pennant, it was still with a great deal of respect. The Tigers also got to their feet in the dugout and applauded. They were led by Kaline, who may have been the one other player in the league who could have compared with Mantle in the prime of their careers. When Mantle heard the ovation he stopped in his tracks. He said later he got chills.
He had just sixteen homers for the year. That was Mantle’s lowest total since his rookie year, aside from the 1963 season, when he played in just sixty-five games. He also was tied with Jimmie Foxx with 534 career home runs, which was then the third highest in major league history. Only Babe Ruth and Willie Mays had hit more. But the way Mantle was swinging, it appeared unlikely that he could break the tie.
Mantle settled in, and what happened next has as many versions as the 50,000 people who claim to have been in the park that day. On a one-strike count, McLain made a waist-high motion across his body, indicating that that’s where the next pitch would be. Everyone saw it, but Mantle didn’t quite believe it. He swung early on the perfect fastball and hit it foul down the first baseline. Mantle stepped out and stared out at McLain, then motioned subtly for him to put the ball in the same place. Denny, with perfect control, obliged, and Mantle deposited it in the right-field upper deck.
As he trotted around the bases for the last time in Detroit, the crowd again rose to cheer for him. The home run ball had found its way back to the Detroit dugout, and Kaline held it up to Mantle, then rolled it across the diamond to the Yankees dugout.
Mantle, eventually, did hit another home run before the season ended and finished his career with 536. But no one who saw number 535 will ever forget it, courtesy of that consummate showman, that master of mirth, Dennis Dale McLain.
Strangely enough, with Detroit leading 6-2 the Yankees put two runners on in the ninth with Jake Gibbs coming to bat. If Gibbs had reached base, that would have brought Mantle to bat again, this, time as the tying run. McLain, however, disposed of Gibbs on a fly ball, and that scenario, so rich in ironic possibilities, never developed.
But a far greater irony was taking shape for the Tigers. With the team heading to the World Series, there was no room in the lineup for one of the greatest players in the club’s history. Al Kaline had become the odd man out.