"I’ma workaholic,” he confesses cheerfully. It’s only 8:00 A.M., but Mickey Stanley has already cleared off a day’s work from his desk in his little office near Brighton, at the very edge of suburban Detroit’s outward growth. Now he will get down to the real labor at hand, running a backhoe to clear a property he is developing a few miles away.
“I’ve got two new subdivisions starting up just north of here, and we’re running behind,” he says. “I’ve never minded getting my hands a little dirty.
“It started when I got out of baseball, I guess. I got nervous. I had $15,000 in the bank and a family to support. I had my fun, and now it was time to get serious about life. I’ve been pretty much out of the public eye ever since. I see some of the other guys turning up on television or radio. Not me. Maybe I overdo it a little on work. But I can’t turn off the machine.”
With his clean-cut, blond good looks, Stanley among the Tigers always looked a bit like Jack Armstrong thrown in with a gang of pirates. He was the best athlete on the team, in a sport where the best athletes do not always win. He loved everything about being a ballplayer. The conditioning, the warm-ups that others found onerous, to Stanley were a joy. Running sprints, catching fungoes, taking infield—he loved it all. That, eventually, proved the Tigers’ salvation and his undoing.
“The shortstop thing just hit me right out of the blue, though,” he says. “I didn’t have any inkling that this was going to happen. It must have been Cash. He always saw me fielding grounders out there during infield drill. But I was fooling around. I loved being on the field. I was just a big kid. I lived to play ball. Sure, Mayo had played me there a few times before. But to me it was like practice, to fill in in an emergency or something. But I think that Cash put a bug in his ear.
“We all knew something had to give about getting Kaline in the lineup. We’d heard maybe third base. The Cards had already announced that they would throw nothing but right-handers at us, so platooning him at first wasn’t going to work. We were in Baltimore on the last Monday of the season and Mayo called me up to his room at the hotel. He told me that he was going to play me the last six games at shortstop and if it worked out that I would start there in the series.
“I wasn’t afraid to do it. In fact, it was kind of flattering. If the ball club had that much confidence in me, it must have meant something good. And if I screwed up in the last six games, who cared? I decided to just see what happened. So I go out there that night against the Orioles, and they don’t like us much anyhow. McLain walks Don Buford, the leadoff man. The next guy hits one down to Cash, and he throws to me for the force. And Buford just comes in and knocks me right on my ass. ‘Hmm,’ I told myself, ‘this is going to be interesting.’
“I throw the ball away for an error. My first play in the big experiment, and already I have an error. This was not going so well.”
Stanley muffed a grounder later in the same game. But over the last five games, his fielding was flawless. Mayo, however, refused to give a definite answer. His remarks to the press after the last game of the season were couched in such noncommittal terms that one of the Detroit papers came out the next day with a story that Stanley definitely would be the series shortstop—and the other paper declared that he would not.
“I knew it was going to happen,” says Stanley. “That’s when it started to get to me. I was so comfortable in center field. I knew in my mind that when I was out there nothing was going to hit the green. I was familiar with every situation. It all clicked in my mind. Gold Glove. I played all year out there and never made an error. That tied a record. To be taken out of that situation and put at shortstop. It was like landing in alien territory.”
Strangely enough, most of the Tigers had complete confidence in Stanley. They felt about him much as the contemporary Detroit Lions felt about their star comerback, future Hall of Famer Lem Barney. The nickname for Barney was The Supernatural because he could do anything on a football field. Similarly, Stanley’s teammates felt that he could play anywhere on the diamond.
He had come out of Grand Rapids, one of the top high school athletes in the city’s history, and signed a baseball contract at the age of eighteen. But whereas defense came easily to him, hitting was a struggle. He advanced through the Tigers system, one rung at a time, taking a year longer to get to the big club than most of the others in his class. This season had been a breakthrough year for him as a hitter, and he was elevated to the number-two slot in the lineup. But it was on defense, with his uncanny ability to get a jump on a ball, that he shone. Whereas other center fielders excelled on sheer speed, Stanley seemed to be operating on clairvoyance, getting to many balls simply on anticipation.
“I think it was Frank Carswell, the manager at Knoxville, at Double A, who shook me up,” he says. “They sent me back down there for a second year after I couldn’t hit at Triple A. Frank took me aside when I got there and told me: ‘Look, either you start taking advantage of your abilities, Stanley, or you’re not going to make enough money to buy a warm-up jacket for a pissant.’ I hit .300 for him that year, and after that it started coming to me.
“But when I walked on the field for that first series game in St. Louis, it all kind of hit me. Norm Cash told me that I was so tight they couldn’t have pulled a pin out of my ass with a tractor. It was horrible. I might have never let on what I was going through at the time, but, believe me, it was a terrible experience. I couldn’t sleep at all. I always felt that I got cheated out of my series. It was no fun for me at all.
“Brock was the first man up for the Cardinals, and he was so damn smart. I could see that he was trying to inside-out the ball, going out of the way to hit it to me. He did it, and I threw him out. At least my knees stopped shaking after that. I got the jitterbugs out. But that nervous feeling never really left me. It was always pretty hairy. I wasn’t afraid of the spikes or anything like that, and I knew where I was supposed to be on the plays. I just understood that Mayo had really stuck his neck out a mile and it was up to me that he didn’t get it chopped off.
“I ended up making two errors. I kicked away a ball that Julian Javier hit in the hole. And I backhanded one ball, and my throw pulled McAuliffe off the bag on the force. So two bad plays and no runs scored on either one. That was pretty good, huh?
“Of course, what happened afterwards wasn’t so good. Mayo told me to start working out at short the next spring. I was feeling pretty cocky, and I started cutting loose on my throws without really getting ready. I hurt my arm, and I never really got it back to full strength for the rest of my career. I played a bunch of games there in 1969, but then we got Eddie Brinkman two years later, and there was no need for anyone else to play shortstop.
“The thing that stays in my mind was how great Ray Oyler took it all. He was just a first-class guy. We were pretty good friends, and I knew this just had to be killing him. To get into the series and then have some guy moved entirely out of position to take your place. But he acted like there was no problem. He’d take me out there during workouts and tried to give me a crash course in shortstop. He was such a great competitor. He played hurt, he played hungover. He never complained. We all loved that guy.
“But that’s how it was with that team. We all were confident in each other, we trusted each other’s abilities. Everyone contributed.
“After I left baseball, I did pretty well in the business world. I’ve tried to take care of my family and be a good Christian. Maybe baseball left me a little bit naive. But I know that there’s always somebody out here trying to screw you. A lot of us came off that team and did very well in life. We had enough savvy to succeed in more than baseball. And I know to this day that I’d trust every one of them. No question in my mind. That’s the kind of people they were.”