1967
It's been a magical baseball season in Detroit.
What started out as a one-in-500 chance to make the playoffs in early August has taken this team into the playoffs.
As is often the case, the story of the 2024 Tigers is one of determination, grit, focus, confidence, using every tool you have, with everyone contributing.
When this mix works, it can be very exciting to watch. 31 games won out of 43 to get into the playoffs. Sweeping the favored Houston Astros off the field. And now deadlocked with the Guardians.
However this season ends, the Tigers have made their mark.
I was 12 in 1968 when the Tigers won the American League Pennant -- their first since 1945 -- and went on to win the World Series that year. While we remember the joy of that year, it's also the year of two killings -- Martin Luther King, Jr. in April and Bobby Kennedy in June.
So while there was mourning in Memphis and Los Angeles, at least in Detroit we could celebrate.
After all, we'd done quite a bit of mourning the previous year.
1967.
This was the middle of a period of civil unrest, sometimes called race riots, sometimes ghetto riots. In well over a hundred cities across the country, in a period stretching from 1964 to 1969, black Americans rioted against the hopelessness of their situation.
It's easy to forget, nearly sixty years later, that recent movements like Black Lives Matter -- and their counterparts, such as Blue or All -- are struggles along this long arc that certainly didn't stop in the 1960s and that show no sign of resolution today.
So why 1967?
Because I remember baseball that summer as well. And a Detroit Tigers team.
1967 was a tough summer for Detroit. I was eleven, living in an all-white suburb, unaware of what was brewing downtown. My sister had moved to the Wayne State campus area the previous year.
Two things would bring an eleven-year-old kid to Detroit. One was to visit my Grampa and Gramma on Mom's side. They lived on Smart Street, near McGraw and Lonyo. (The house has since been torn down.) While Mom and Dad busied themselves with mom's parents, my brother Jim and I would sit on the wide porch, Vernors ginger ales in hand, in the big Adirondack chairs Gramps had built, the radio between us and the ballgame on. Ernie Harwell was the broadcaster in those days, and of course we didn't know he'd go on to be enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The second thing that brought me downtown was when Dad, Jim and I would go to a Tigers game. My dad would park on Michigan Avenue, and we would walk several blocks down Michigan until we got to Michigan and Trumbull, where Tiger Stadium towered over us.
I wrote about all this in a fictionalized account, a story I never published because of concerns I had over a certain racial slur that appears in it. I was exploring how that word could creep into a kid's vocabulary and take up its ugly residence there. And even though the story also dealt with how a kid becomes a liar in order to survive in an abusive household, it was the use of that one word that held me back. A common word. We all know it.
I don't remember much of those 1967 games any more. We certainly went to more games in 1968, the Pennant year. But 1967 goes down in the national psyche as the year Detroit exploded. The 1967 riot began on July 23, and when it ended some five days later, 43 people had died, nearly 1200 had been injured, and over 400 buildings were destroyed. You had to go back to the Civil War draft riots of 1863 for a comparable tragedy. It took the National Guard and the 101st Airborne and 82nd Infantry to restore order. It was a summer of snipers.
So why the 1967 Tigers?
Nobody remembers them.
They were essentially the same team that, one year later, would win it all. In 1968, the Tigers won the Pennant comfortably and squeaked by the favored St. Louis Cardinals to win the World Series.
In 1967 they came in second. But it's the manner in which the season ended that makes the difference.
This city was literally smoldering. Shells of buildings. People picking up the pieces. How could anyone think of baseball?
Still, they had a season of games to finish. This despite death threats. It was a summer of snipers. But the Tigers had a chance to win the Pennant, this 1967 Pennant.
So on they played, this team, whose highest-paid player (Al Kaline) made $54,000 that year. Most names are lost to history -- unless, of course, you were eleven years old at the time.
It wouldn’t end until the very last game of the season -- indeed, the very last out of that game.
The Tigers had been in a four-way-tie for first place, along with the Minnesota Twins, the Chicago White Sox, and the Boston Red Sox. With two days to go, the White Sox were out. Boston and Minnesota were playing each other. Minnesota was favored to win the Pennant, but they lost both games to Boston and lost the Pennant as well.
That left Detroit, who was playing the California Angels at home. If they could win, they would play Boston in a sudden-death playoff.
Down 8-5 in the bottom of the ninth, the Tigers put two baserunners on with nobody out. The tying run at the plate. Jim Price pops out. One out. Dick McAuliffe at the plate. Here's how I told the story:
"The Tigers kept us all going, bringing Pennant fever to a city scratching its way out of violent headlines. But in the last game of the year, with the season riding on a fat pitch, Dick McAuliffe did the unthinkable and grounded into a double play for only the second time in over a hundred games, and with that sharp slap of ball against earth and then glove and glove again, the Tigers went from first to either second or third, depending on your sportswriter, but to all us kids and everyone else who wanted something better for Detroit it seemed as though God had forsaken our city once and for all."
Baseball. Sports.
Just a game, of course. But when a city is aching, wounded, and all but written off, sometimes it's a sports team that brings things together. As the Tigers would, of course. There was, in 1967, next year.
Still, those 1967 Tigers started a healing process. 1968 would not have been possible without the hunger and heartache of the prior year.
So often the case, with sports teams. So, too, with cities. Even nations.
So for the 2024 Tigers, doing the all-but-impossible, already etched in the history books of the sport, I hold up a mirror from nearly sixty years ago. Detroit is a long way from where it was in 1967. Like many cities, it has risen over and over from its hard times. It will go through them again, and rise yet again.
Even though you, a young team, may not be playing your hearts out against the backdrop of a burned out city, still you are providing hope, and joy, and a sense of what can be accomplished by scraping together everything you have, playing with focus, playing for the love of the game.
That's a big thing in a time when political and social divisions seem sharper than ever, if only because those divisions are before us, are here and now, and not softened by the distance of years.
In Cleveland, you face an equally scrappy team borne of an equally storied city, who has often had its own hard times displayed in the harsh light of public opinion. And Cleveland has its own fans, some of whom might also remember a time when they were kids, and things were tough, and the hometown team gave them something to cheer about. I don't know. I'm not them. But I suspect it's true.
So may the best team win, as they say. Even if seasons can end on one swing, one ball fair by inches, or the other way around. That's the game. Both you and your opponents are the best playing the best. One team will go on, one will go home. But for all, the joy is in the playing:
"Do you know what my favorite part of the game is? The opportunity to play." -- Mike Singletary
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For those interested in the atmosphere of old Tiger Stadium, some excerpts from my deliberately unpublished "SummerDance." (Purists will note my poetic license — the Tigers are playing the Red Sox in the snips below — true history would have them playing the Yankees on July 21):
…So many people surrounded me, I could barely make out the white mass rising at last out of the earth, Michigan and Trumbull, sacred ground that Dad remembered as Navin Field and then Briggs Stadium. For Ed and me it had always been Tiger Stadium, big black gothic D’s matching the letters on the caps of millions of kids. Above its high walls rose the light towers, spotlights laced into huge grids, maybe a hundred lights per grid, all trained on the field. All that electric power meant that the game could be played after the scorching heat of a long summer day had yielded to the relative coolness of the evening. If it weren’t for night games, dads like my dad couldn’t take their kids, unless it was a weekend, because of work.
Sounds of footsteps wound beneath all the other noises, and my nose wrinkled at the sharp smell of cigarettes combining with heavy acrid sweat, as bodies washed and unwashed glued to form the lines that squeezed like toothpaste through the clanking turnstiles, and Dad and Ed and I now shuffling on the concrete, street calls giving way to echoes scrambling along the passageway, sunlight conceding to incandescent bulbs that glared but couldn’t fully reach all the corners of that angled place, the guts of the joint under the lower deck. Already the ceiling thundered, the sound of thousands of upper deck seats above it being slammed by excited kids for whom the game couldn’t start too soon…
…There it was, the field at eye-level, tall players rising out of the earth like giants. Warmup balls flashed in wide white arcs between them before impossibly supple gloves nabbed them, gloves that appeared to be sewn to the players’ arms. You could hear the snap when the ball hit the mitt…
…We settled into the hard green seats and got our bearings, looking down now on the enemy, the Boston Red Sox, and even at this point in the season you knew the deadly conflict was on, Boston, Chicago, Minnesota and our own Tigers jockeying for the Pennant.
…I scanned the field and the stands, the 340 foul-line almost dead ahead but so far away it was a yellow thread on the left-field wall. The broad field swept past the fence-mounted scoreboard, no green monster like Fenway but a hitter’s park anyway, Dad said. The salmon-colored warning track arced past the left power alley, 365, and the 440 flagpole in dead center field, the right power alley at 375 and around to the short right fence, 325. I traced the yellow foul pole up past the second deck to the green wood facing of the third, where Baltimore's Boog Powell once hit a home run so hard it sailed up and clobbered the wood, still going up…
…we had the seventh inning stretch, the lights blazing in their high towers against the late evening sky, and now it got serious, because the Sox had managed to knock Wilson out with a three-run rally in the top of the eighth that gave them a 4-2 lead. Even at this point in the season these games were big ones, two strong teams chokeholding each other like driven dogs, and we had to win. We just had to.
They knew it on the field, too, knew what to deliver to this big and brawly hometown crowd. They answered, and it was one of those odd things that sometimes happens in baseball, where the rally itself consumes both teams, one team stinging the other into an answer, as though the rally itself calls the dance and the teams simply execute the steps. By the time we all had risen to our feet, roaring, Wert had managed to get on base, a single, and Oyler sacrificed him to second, and we were going all out because big Gates Brown was pinch-hitting for Gladding, our closer, which meant a new relief pitcher in the ninth. I knew what was happening, and so did forty thousand others: there’d be no bottom of the ninth for us. We’d get it done right now.
And Gates did, a liner up the gap between right and center, all the way to the wall, Wert scoring under the deafening crowd, and if Gates hadn’t been so ponderous on the base paths he’d have managed to get beyond first. But then he had to move, because the leadoff man, McAuliffe, snapped out of his weird backwards-leaning stance and drove the ball almost to the exact same spot, and by the time we’d all stopped screaming Gates huffed like a beached whale on third and McAuliffe crouched on second.
The conference on the mound between Lonberg and his catcher Ryan quieted us only a little. “Stay in the dugout, Dickie!” a man behind us yelled, and I knew he was urging Dick Williams, the manager, not to pull his pitcher, we’d rather face a tired and rattled Lonberg than a fresh reliever.
When Ryan crouched behind the plate we all stood again, the noise opening out of us as though we were a huge accordion. Big Norm Cash was up, the third leftie Lonberg had had to face and dangerous as hell. Norm would do it for us.
Instead, he swung hard and popped it up about as high as a mortal man can send a ball. George Kell’s voice rattled in my skull: “And a hi-igh popup! Oh, he hit it a ton, but straight up in the air!” and by the time Ryan stopped circling under it and put it away in foul territory, despite thousands of kids’ instructions to drop it, we were thinking ahead. This rally couldn’t fizzle, not even with two outs, we had Freehan up and crowding the plate, his dinger left elbow inviting itself to be hit by a pitch, and if he didn’t manage to send them both home there was Kaline behind him in the cleanup spot. I grabbed my Freehan glove and wished him all the luck there ever was, twisting and twisting the leather knots.
On the 2-1 pitch he shot the crowd over the edge with a soft liner just over Andrews’s leaping glove and into right center, Gates thundering home with Dick McAuliffe damn near on his back, and it was 5-4 for us…
…That was July 21. Two days later, when Mom, Ed and I returned home from Sunday morning mass, Dad met us at the door, face stern and hard, and said, “Get in, and stay in, and keep the kids in. They’re rioting downtown.”
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References:
https://rarehistoricalphotos.com/detroit-riot-in-pictures-1967/
https://time.com/3638378/detroit-burning-photos-from-the-12th-street-riot-1967/?iid=sr-link5
https://sabr.org/journal/article/felled-by-the-impossible-the-1967-minnesota-twins/
Mike Singletary's quote is in here -- but so many of these are worth keeping:
https://www.keepinspiring.me/100-most-inspirational-sports-quotes-of-all-time/
