In his own way, Brent Musberger is as responsible for this book as anyone else. The veteran sportscaster was then baseball writer for Chicago’s American, and he was lined up to be hired for the same job at the Detroit Free Press in early 1966. But he backed out, and the paper, to my utter astonishment, picked me.
The opening in Detroit developed when Joe Falls, the longtime beat writer, was given a column. Most newsmen understood that the American was not likely to survive, and Brent seemed delighted at the chance to get out. But two weeks before spring training, he changed his mind, deciding that broadcasting might offer him a better escape hatch from the coming shipwreck.
It was a great choice. But it left the Free Press with no one to go to Florida with the Tigers. No one but me, a desperation choice. I had all of three years professional experience as a journalist, none as a sportswriter. I had just been moved to days on the news desk and was starting to get good assignments. But knowing of my interest (well, let’s be honest—my absorption in baseball), a few senior editors suggested my name for the job. When the chance came, I grabbed it. And without the slightest idea of what I was doing, I boarded a plane for Florida and became a baseball writer.
I was so out of it that I wore a suit and tie to the first workout. At the age of twenty-four, I was the youngest beat writer with a big league team. Most of the players were my contemporaries in age, though, and my paycheck was about as large as most of theirs. We traveled on the same planes and buses, stayed in the same hotels. There was an easy intimacy and an access between writers and athletes that vanished from all sports long ago.
I worked the baseball beat for four seasons, and it was the turning point of my career. While holding the best job in the world, I learned to be a newspaperman. I learned how to write under pressure, how to develop stories on a beat, how to get information from individuals who were not always happy to talk to me. Most journalists must learn these things in police stations or courthouses. My training ground was a ballpark.
And as a bonus I got to cover a world championship, watch the ballclub I had rooted for since childhood win the World Series. When Jim Northrup’s triple cleared Curt Flood’s head in the seventh inning of the seventh game, it took all the journalistic restraint I had in my body to keep from jumping up and screaming—as I knew my brother and father were doing in the family room back in Detroit. Instead, I simply said quietly, Oh, my God,” and began thinking of a lead for the biggest story I had ever written.
The 1968 Tigers never repeated. Over the years, their achievements have slipped into a memory hole between the exploits of the 1967 Red Sox of the Impossible Dream and the 1969 Miracle Mets. These were the darlings of the East Coast media and a Detroit team just couldn’t compare. But in Michigan, and wherever Tigers fans are scattered, the memory lives on, as fresh as yesterday’s box score. This was a team that wrapped itself around their souls and never left. Even today, when you talk with them about some of the events of that year, they are sometimes moved to tears.
Ten members of that team settled permanently in the Detroit area, and so in a very real sense they never left the scene of their triumph. But it’s more than that. It is the way they won, the times in which they won, the personalities who did the winning. Like the hook from a Smokey Robinson hit, they bring back the emotions of a specific time and place with a clarity that gladdens the heart.
But they were really not part of those times, at all. When I returned to writing news in 1970, I felt that I had stepped out of a spacecraft, landed on another planet. One of the first assignments given to me was to interview a young man who had dodged the draft and was seeking sanctuary in a Detroit church. He told me that his needs had been taken care of by “The Movement.” I had no idea what he was talking about. The world had undergone a change almost beyond my comprehension. Pot was passed around routinely at parties. Women were asserting their equality. The negroes who existed before I went into the baseball job had vanished, replaced by blacks, and a lot of them were pissed. But baseball had gone on as always. It may have been the 70s on the calendar, but back in the ballpark it felt eternally like 1938, with Gehrig waiting on deck.
This book is an attempt to put the summer of 1968 into a historical perspective. To talk to the middle-aged men who once were heroes and ask about their lives and what that season meant to them. For them, as well as for me, it was probably the best summer of their lives. For baseball, overwhelmed by change, most of it not for the better, it may well have been the last good season.