Who Says Winter Meetings Are Dull? Tigers Shock With A Blockbuster

(normally I only talk baseball at Johnny Grubb, but sometimes ya just gotta break the rules. This same post appears on Grubber, too)

Twenty-four hours ago, Cameron Maybin was “untouchable.” Andrew Miller was “practically” untouchable. The Tigers’ chances of pulling any sort of deal, much less that of the blockbuster variety, were slim at these Winter Meetings — capitalized because it’s baseball’s. GM Dave Dombrowski said on Monday that the Tigers would be satisfied to go into the 2008 season with the roster they had when the Meetings began.

Something funny happened on the way to status quo.

The Tigers pulled off maybe their biggest and boldest trade since they dealt batting champ Harvey Kuenn for home run champ Rocky Colavito before the 1960 season. A whopping eight-player deal, and the fact that the Tigers are only getting two of those eight players tells you how far they’ve come as a major off-season player.

When you trade six for two, and your front office isn’t brain dead, then you know the two you’re getting are Rolls Royce players, as Dickie Vitale would say. And they are — lefty Dontrelle Willis and 3B Miguel Cabrera come to the Tigers from Florida. These are two huge stars (though Willis is coming off a down year) who are in their mid-20s. Two All-Stars with a World Series title under their belts. The types of players who instantly thrust you ahead of the pack in your division, and maybe in the league. Maybe, in fact, ahead of the other 29 teams in MLB.

But oh, how the Tigers paid to get them.

I was, to put it mildly, shocked when I saw the little chicklet at the bottom of the screen on ESPN News.

BREAKING NEWS: Fla agrees to trade Cabrera, Willis to Tigers

Eyes widened, I waited for the MLB news to flash, after the interminable NBA and NHL scores, and other inconsequential sports drivel.

Marlins agree to trade LHP Dontrelle Willis and 3B Miguel Cabrera to Tigers for six players, including OF Cameron Maybin and LHP Andrew Miller

Oh. My. God.

Despite how gifted Willis and Cabrera are — and they ARE — my first thought went to the Tigers’ rapidly depleting farm system. And to how Maybin was supposedly never going to be traded — no way, no how. All we’d heard since the Tigers drafted him is how he’s a genuine five-tool player who’ll one day make Detroit go crazy. The Tigers all but laughed at the Washington Nationals in 2006 when the Nats wanted Maybin in any deal involving OF Alfonso Soriano. Back to that word, “untouchable.”

Miller was another who you’d figure wouldn’t be going anywhere. The no. 1 pick in 2006, Miller was rushed to the majors after being aggressively signed with the idea that he could be a playoff performer, at the age of 20. That didn’t happen, but you knew the Tigers still had big plans for him in 2008 and beyond. As recently as Monday.

So here the Tigers are, trading their two best prospects — their best prospects in years, according to some — and even though they netted two big fish from the Marlins, the move still makes me squirm a bit. Between the Gary Sheffield trade last year, the Edgar Renteria deal last month, and now this mind-number, the Tigers have SEVERELY cut into their prospects pool. But, on the other hand, your team is now LOADED.

Here’s a possible batting order:

Curtis Granderson CF
Placido Polanco 2B
Gary Sheffield (healthy) DH
Magglio Ordonez RF
Miguel Cabrera 3B
Carlos Guillen 1B
Edgar Renteria SS
Pudge Rodriguez C
Jacque Jones LF

Goodness gracious.

And here’s the rotation:

Justin Verlander RH
Dontrelle Willis LH
Kenny Rogers LH
Jeremy Bonderman RH
Nate Robertson LH

Cripes sakes.

This team could run away with the Central title. It’s that good on parchment, the Indians be damned. Manager Jim Leyland must be beside himself. I bet you he’s already jotted down about a dozen variations of the batting order I took a stab at earlier. I can almost hear him telling the media with typical self-effacing humor, “This team looks good — as long as I don’t screw it up.”

Of course, you gotta perform. But I think the Tigers, having made some major, MAJOR moves since the last out was recorded in 2007, are about as well-equipped as a team can be for a 162-game battle. Yes, the bullpen might still be shaky, but that can be addressed. It’s not like Dombrowski has shown any shyness.

It’s a “win now” mentality, for sure, but with Willis and Cabrera, it can be win now — and later, too. Willis is 24. Cabrera will be 25 in April. That ought to soothe any concerns — including mine — about “mortgaging” the future. Yet the Tigers sure stunned a lot of folks by trading both Maybin AND Miller. At least they’re in the National League now.

Last year I wrote a piece about how the Winter Meetings seemed to lack that excitement and sense of urgency of years past. About how you just didn’t have any real reason to look forward to them, as in the days of yore. Sometimes they occurred and you barely knew that they did.

But mark December 4, 2007 as the day the Tigers turned baseball on its ear with one of its biggest trades in years — both in terms of sheer volume of players and in star power, present and future. Truly a win-win deal – if Maybin and Miller are as good as we keep being told that they are.

Nicely done, DD — but I’m still a little squeamish. Until Opening Day, when I see the Tigers trot out onto the field and I see, for real, what the Tigers GM has wrought.

Masked Men In Suits A Tigers Tradition

The commissioner of baseball himself was staring at the proposed trade, and he looked at the Tigers general manager who was about to jump out of his skin, waiting for the final stamp of approval.

“This is what they agreed to?,” Bowie Kuhn asked Jim Campbell, who was about to add another fleecing to his resume.

“Short agreed to it,” Campbell affirmed. Short was Bob Short, flamboyant owner of the Washington Senators. It was a few days after the 1970 World Series.

Kuhn looked to his underling and, with nothing else to do, nodded his approval.

And so it was announced in short order – no pun intended – that the Detroit Tigers were sending pitchers Dennis McLain and Norm McRae, outfielder Elliott Maddox, and third baseman Don Wert to the Senators for pitchers Joe Coleman and Jim Hannan, shortstop Ed Brinkman, and third baseman Aurelio Rodriguez.

Highway robbery – by a masked man in a business suit!

Denny McLain, Washington Senator (and not happy about it)

Ten years before, the Tigers – general managed by trade-happy Bill DeWitt, held up the Cleveland Indians. Detroit sent bench fodder Steve Demeter to the Tribe for a power-hitting first baseman named Norm Cash. DeWitt didn’t get them all right, but he sure nailed this one. Cash would hit over 300 home runs as a Tiger from 1960-74. Demeter? He played four games with the Indians in 1960. He went 0-for-5. That was the end of his baseball career.

And yet somehow, Bill DeWitt avoided arrest.

End of spring training, 1984. This time the masked man is Tigers GM Bill Lajoie. He’s in his second season in that role, having learned from the thief Campbell himself. Seeing a need and an opportunity – and a willing victim – Lajoie sends outfielder Glenn Wilson and catcher/first baseman Johnny Wockenfuss to the Philadelphia Phillies for reliever Willie Hernandez and first baseman Dave Bergman. Wilson and Wockenfuss are fine players, but Hernandez pitches an almost perfect year as the Tigers closer, Bergman delivers clutch hits and stellar defense, and the Tigers win the World Series. Hernandez is named AL Cy Young and MVP winner.

Phillies fleeced.

Today, the Tigers’ bandit is Dave Dombrowski. Already, in his six years as Tigers president and GM, he’s pulled off some robberies. Perhaps the biggest was his acquisition of Placido Polanco from the Phillies in 2005, for reliever Ugueth Urbina. Urbina sits in a jail somewhere in Central America, guilty of conspiracy to commit murder. It’s usually a good trade when the player you dealt ends up behind bars.

But last week Dombrowski struck again. He brandished a weapon, pulled down his ski mask, and spoke to Atlanta Braves GM Frank Wren. Now, you’d think Dombrowski would show Wren some compassion, having once been Wren’s boss in Florida. Instead, he took his weapon and, masked, stole All-Star shortstop Edgar Renteria from the Braves. The cost was a couple of prospects – pitcher Jair Jurrjens and outfielder Gorkys Hernandez. Yes, they are two of the Tigers’ upper tier prospects. But Renteria is NOW. He’s a five-time All-Star. He’s a marvelous fielder. And he’s a career .292 hitter, topped by his .332 average in 2007. Tigers manager Jim Leyland had him in Florida in 1997, when the Marlins won the World Series.

“I’m thrilled to have him again,” Leyland told the crime, er, baseball reporters. “He’ll fit in perfectly.”

The Tigers were in need of a shortstop after the conversion of Carlos Guillen to a first baseman, announced soon after the season was finished. So they simply went out and got the best one available by trade, the 32-year-old Renteria.

Jurrjens isn’t chopped liver – or a Steve Demeter in waiting. Neither is Hernandez, at least by all accounts. The bluest chip prospect is still outfielder Cameron Maybin, but many folks had Hernandez not far behind Maybin in terms of skill and big league potential.

Yet the trade has the makings of a fleecing, if only because Renteria needs little introduction, and fills a hole with such aplomb that Tigers fans will be tickled pink having him in town.

Someday, somewhere, Jurrjens and/or Hernandez will be bona fide major league ballplayers. Maybe. By that time, the Tigers might have added another World Series championship — or two – to their history. Edgar Renteria, it says here, will be a major part of that, if it materializes.

But back to McLain.

The Runyon-esque pitcher had had a tumultuous 1970 season with the Tigers. He was suspended by the league twice: once for carrying a loaded gun, another time for his suspected consorting with gangsters. Then the Tigers suspended him for dumping a bucket of ice water on some beat reporters. When all was done, McLain – just two years removed from his 31-win season of 1968 – got into only 14 games, going 3-5 with a 4.63 ERA. He had become too much for the Tigers to handle.

Jim Campbell wanted to get rid of Denny McLain very badly.

He found a taker in Senators owner Short, who wanted a marquee name to spruce up his ballclub, managed by the cantankerous Ted Williams. So when Short inquired about McLain, Campbell drooled. The Tigers liked Coleman, who had never lost to them. And they looked at Rodriguez as an upgrade from Wert. McRae and Maddox weren’t in their plans, and in Hannan the Tigers got an extra arm. Plus, there was Brinkman, a sure-handed though light-hitting shortstop.

No wonder Kuhn eyed the trade suspiciously before granting approval.

Coleman, Rodriguez, and Brinkman helped thrust the Tigers into contender status immediately. McLain and Williams didn’t get along at all – and if Bob Short didn’t see that coming, then he deserved what he got.

And what he got was robbed.

Now Dave Dombrowski has done it to his old employee Frank Wren. Most likely, anyway.

Tigers execs have often worn the mask and brandished the gun.Better to do it than to have it done TO you, I say.

Tigers Need Another Leyland Rant

(today, I’m cheating — sort of. Usually baseball posts appear on my other blog, but I’m taking a day off from OOB, so I give you today’s baseball post in this space, too)

Last year, it was all we heard. It was, we were told, one of the turning points of the season — and it had happened the day after Easter. Yet it was supposedly one of the things that helped propel the Tigers to the 2006 playoffs.

“It” was manager Jim Leyland’s tirade against his ballclub, behind closed doors but audible to reporters, after a humdrum loss to the Indians. The Monday game was the last of a four-game set and also “getaway day,” that baseball term for the last game played before traveling. And the Tigers, Leyland felt, were already mentally on the plane to Oakland. After winning two of the first three games of the series, the Tigers sleepwalked against the Tribe. And Leyland let them know it. Big time. Then he held a brief, terse postgame media session before ordering reporters out of his office.

Last year, if you asked any Tiger who was present, you’d have been told that Leyland’s rant was much-needed, and that it resonated for the entire season. You’d have been told that, at that moment, Jim Leyland secured a firm hold on his ballclub.

So where’s the rant this summer? Where’s the outrage?

The Tigers are 16-29 in their last 45 games, a .356 winning percentage. Extrapolated over an entire season, that’s a 58-104 record, which brings back chilling memories of just about any season from 1994-2005.The hitters can’t buy a clutch single, or even a gosh darn sacrifice fly, to save their souls. The bullpen leaks like an old radiator. The starting pitching is Jekyll and Hyde. There’s an overall malaise. Even so-called “big” victories, like the 3:30 a.m. homer to beat the Yankees, don’t seem to have any carryover effect at all. It’s like the Tigers’ momentum is magically erased when they get out of bed the next morning.

It’s probably desperate bleatings from an ink-stained wretch wearing a sour puss, but I’d have liked to have seen another Leyland explosion, somewhere during this horrific 45-game stretch. Maybe he’s already done it, again behind closed doors but just not as loud so as to alert the media guys. Even if he has, fine. Do it again — and make it a little more public this time. Light into these guys a bit. All I hear is how good of a team the Tigers have. As recently as last week, the malaise still dripping over the team, Leyland spoke enthusiastically about the playoffs and about how good of a team he has.

Enough.

Yes, injuries (read: Gary Sheffield) have played a factor into why 2007 ain’t 2006, or anything close to it. But there are still enough big league ballplayers in the Tigers’ clubhouse to make a go of things, if only they’d engage in outpatient surgery to have their noggins removed from their posterior.

We need more of THIS Jim Leyland to rear his head

The endless array of popups and strikeouts with runners in scoring position and less than two outs is mind-boggling, considering we’re talking over a quarter of a season of bad baseball. The inability of the bullpen to hold a lead, or the silly game of “Guess which starting pitcher is showing up today?” the rotation has been playing, is getting real old.

Yet Leyland — and I like the guy, don’t get me wrong — just seems helpless, without any energy or vinegar. Enough is enough. Can’t he kick over a buffet table or toss some equipment around? Heck, when was the last time he even got kicked out of a game?

The Tigers are sinking like a lead balloon, and I wish the skipper would act like he’s offended by what he’s seeing. Then again, it’s probably too late anyway.

I fear he had his chance, but now it’s gone.

It Was Wild When Playoffs Meant Finishing First

The heat of one of the National League’s best pennant races drove Juan Marichal batty – literally. The year before, his baseball team gagging uncontrollably, manager Gene Mauch succumbed to a pennant fever that threatened to send mercury bursting thru the top of the thermometer. A couple years after Marichal’s explosion, Detroit’s Dick McAuliffe broke Tigers fans hearts by grounding into a season-ending double play – the first time he’d done such a thing all year. Five years later, McAuliffe and his teammates whooped and hollered as they plopped manager Billy Martin into an ice-filled whirlpool, enjoying their vengeance over the Red Sox. In 1978, the Yankees demolished the Red Sox in Fenway Park in a four-game sweep called, aptly, The Boston Massacre.

The Tigers and Indians are duking it out in another one of those inaccurately described “pennant races.” It’s a divisional race, to be exact. The pennant can only be raised if you are the only team left standing when the two-tiered playoffs are done. And, with the Wild Card in the mix, even divisional races are diluted. Lose the AL Central, Bunkie? That’s OK; you can still qualify. Just beat out some other team in some other division. Wild stuff.

Regardless, the ballclubs from Detroit and Cleveland, a puddle-jumping flight over Lake Erie away from each other, are playing rock-paper-scissors with a division that, at times, nobody appears to want to win. It used to be that great “pennant races” were between two teams that responded from the other’s blows with one haymaker of their own. Now, it hardly matters if the victorious team has but 84 wins, or 88, or some other unworthy number. As long as it’s close, we proclaim it marvelous baseball theater.

But this isn’t a blow-by-blow race right now, between the Tigers and Indians. Lately, the Tigers lose and stagger – then the Indians respond with some bad baseball of their own. They’re trading blows alright – but both teams are mostly on the receiving end from a third party. The Indians lose, and Tigers fans are relieved, for the Tigers probably lost, too, and thus lost no ground. A two-game set in Cleveland this past week ended, predictably, in a 1-1 draw. Tied going in, tied going out. Nobody is seizing control.

The Tigers went into Yankee Stadium, which, if you listen to the media, might as well add “The Hostile Environment of” in front of its name on the building. Tigers announcers Mario Impemba and Rod Allen, who are actually OK in my book, used that term innumerable times in the first two games of the four-game series. The heralded rookie outfielder Cameron Maybin was summoned all the way from Double A ball just in time to make his MLB debut on Friday night.
“To come here, for your first big league game, and play in this hostile environment … ,” Allen said of Maybin. I don’t remember the rest of the sentence.

The Tigers grand-slammed their way to victory Thursday night. The Indians were idle. The Tigers moved a sliver ahead, by one-half game. Friday night, the Tigers lost. The Indians, no longer idle, beat the Tampa Bay Devil Rays – as well they should. The Indians now hold that sliver of a lead. Only in divisional races in sports can we identify something as being worth one-half game. You gotta love math. Which half, though?

It’s likely to be this close the rest of the way; Indians winning a couple, then losing a couple. Tigers doing the same. Countless nights when both teams lose. Back and forth it will go, and at times we will wonder what is so awful about winning the AL Central that causes the Tigers and Indians to treat it so disrespectfully.

Ah, then there’s the Wild Card. This Tigers series in the Bronx is being bantied about as being big because the Yankees – making another of their classic second half charges – are now leading the second and third place teams in the league for the consolation Wild Card playoff spot. The Tigers, last season, let a sure-thing division crown slip through their fingers, settling for being Kings of the Second Place Finishers – a.k.a. the Wild Card. Of course, they played that card all the way to the World Series. Some, like Pudge Rodriguez’s 2003 Florida Marlins, have played that Wild Card all the way to a world championship. Still doesn’t make it right, though.

There was no Second Place Crown in 1965, which might have gotten to Giants pitcher Marichal, he of our lead sentence. Angered by a ball thrown back to the pitcher by Dodgers catcher Johnny Roseboro – a ball that Marichal, the batter, thought nicked his ear – Marichal took his bat and slammed it down onto Roseboro’s skull. Several times. Battered and with blood running down his chest protector, a dazed Roseboro was aided by, of all people, Giants outfielder Willie Mays, who pulled the Dodgers catcher out of harm’s way. The ’65 Dodgers-Giants race was another in a series of classic season-long duels between the two bitter rivals. But Marichal’s violent act was certainly the most (in)famous incident of all those sprints to the finish line.

Marichal (far left) lets the pennant race heat get to him

Mauch, managing the Phillies in 1964, panicked when his team started to fritter away a six-game lead with 12 to play. He over-relied on his two ace starters, Jim Bunning and Chris Short, sometimes pitching them on two days rest. The Phillies lost 10 in a row, and by the time they won again, they had been eliminated from contention. The Phillies, as a franchise, reached the 10,000 loss mark this summer. They’re the first pro sports franchise to lose that many games. But 9,990 of those losses, combined, weren’t as painful as the ten suffered, in a row, late in the ’64 season.

In ’67, the Tigers, Red Sox, Twins, and White Sox engaged in a wild four-team race for much of the summer. It came down to the final weekend. The Tigers were forced to play doubleheaders on both Saturday and Sunday, due to earlier rainouts. If they could somehow win all four games, they’d be pennant winners, outright. Three-of-four would force a playoff between themselves and the Red Sox. But the Tigers could only manage to beat the visiting California Angels twice, surrendering the pennant to the Red Sox. McAuliffe, who hadn’t hit into a double play all season, accounted for the final two outs by grounding into one.

Five years later, the Tigers got back at the Red Sox, taking two of three from them at Tiger Stadium in the final weekend to win the AL East in the strike-shortened ’72 campaign. That’s when they dunked Martin in the icy whirlpool.

These were, like so many others not mentioned here, terrific races, in their own way. But each had one thing in common: you had to finish in first place to play on in October. How much of their luster would have been cut had finishing in second place also meant a trip to the postseason? They’d be not so wild, I would think.

No Baseball Romance On Radio, TV Without Ernie And George

If anyone can find me an egg timer in the broadcast booth at Comerica Park, or any Major League Baseball playground, for that matter, I’ll buy you a pop. I’ll even spring for Towne Club – if we can find it.

I’m not worried, though. I doubt you’ll find such a gizmo in the quarters where the radio and TV guys hang out. Oh, but so many of them need one!

The speaker was Ernie Harwell, and I stood enraptured as he told me how he knew when to give the score of the ballgame he was broadcasting.

“Red Barber taught me,” Harwell said in that lilt in the “green room” of our cable TV studio in Taylor. It was circa the late 1980s, early 1990s – when I cobbled together an income producing and directing television programs Downriver. “You keep an egg timer in the booth, and every time you flip it over, you give the score.”

The score of a ballgame in three-minute intervals. Imagine that. It’s obvious some of the hacks who blab into microphones nowadays clearly haven’t grasped the concept.

The Tigers are relevant again, which means more and more folks are becoming glued to their TV sets and tuning in the game on the radio. In recent years past, you tried like the dickens to avoid watching or listening to them whenever possible. What was the point, really – when the losses outnumbered the wins by an almost 2-to-1 ratio most of the time? In 2003, the ratio was nearly 3-to-1, for goodness sakes.

I’m swamping the radio dial and stealing the remote quite a bit myself lately. I’ve subjected my wife and daughter to the old, “I just want to check the score” bit – and then end up doing more than that, for as long as I’m allowed.

But as smooth as Mario Impemba and Rod Allen are on Fox Sports Detroit – and Allen is actually one of the game’s best analysts, if you want to know – they’re not George Kell and Al Kaline. And radio’s Dan Dickerson and Jim Price are not Harwell and Paul Carey.

No crime there – and I haven’t told you anything that you (or they) don’t already know.

I’ve been listening to Harwell a lot lately – courtesy of an old tape a former co-worker made for me. It’s an audio cassette recording from the album “Year of the Tiger,” which was put out shortly after the Tigers clinched the 1968 pennant – but before the World Series was played, for whatever reason. The album is a stirring journey through that wonderful, exciting season – told mainly thru the actual game calls of Harwell and Ray Lane, along with their in-studio narration.

“Here’s the set – and the pitch – swing and a base hit to right! And it’s allll over! Kaline scores, Don Wert singles … the Tigers mob Don … and the Tigers have won their first pennant since nineteen-hundred and forty-five. Let’s listen to the bedlam, at Tiger Stadium!”

That’s how the album begins – with Harwell’s call of Wert’s hit in the bottom of the ninth to beat the Yankees and clinch the league championship. Back then, there were no tiers of intraleague playoffs. No divisions. You clinched the pennant in the regular season, and prepped for the World Series in September.

I was too young to recall the drama of the ’68 season, in which the Tigers constantly came from behind to pull games out of the fire. But thanks to the cassette that I have in my car stereo, ready to be popped in at any moment, I can re-live it. And then I realize how much I miss Harwell behind the mike.

It wasn’t just the constant giving of the score, though that was much appreciated – especially by a working kid in college who jumped into his car at night after his shift and wondered how the Tigers were doing. It was comforting to know that you wouldn’t have to sit through two or three batters before the announcer indulged you.

There was just something about Harwell’s voice, lightly coated with Georgia, that screamed baseball. And the more I think about it, the more I remember that voice popping up in various places.

Outside, in the backyard. My father working on something or another, or washing the car in the driveway. And the ballgame on, the sounds accompanying his chores. Maybe Norm Cash would hit one out, and he and I would stop and listen to Harwell call it, before going back to work.

Stuck in traffic on a Sunday afternoon, and we’re not the only ones with the game on – car windows opened as you could hear Ernie from the next vehicle. John Hiller would get a big strikeout, and you’d look over to your neighbor on the road and grin and nod as everyone inched forward.

Grabbing a few things at the party store and Ernie’s there, too – his voice emanating from the store’s back room. You can barely make it out, so you ask what the score is.

Kell (left) and Harwell: The two greatest voices in Tigers history

Or maybe it was Carey in his rich baritone. Paul did the middle three innings with Ernie in my day.

There wasn’t a better baseball play-by-play man on TV than Kell.

His voice was drenched with Arkansas. Lou Whitaker would poke a single to right and his teammate would try to score from second base.

“They’re WAYYYVING him in!,” Kell would go, and there just wasn’t anything as exciting. “There’s gonna be a play at the plate!”

My favorite Kell story happened in the heat of the 1987 divisional race. The Tigers were at Milwaukee, and pitcher Walt Terrell had just made a whale of a play, bare-handing a tapper, off balance, and gunning the batter out by a fraction of a step as Terrell fell to the ground. Naturally, the play was shown many times via replay, from different angles.

Enter Kell. “I’m afraid if they show that play one more time, he’s gonna be safe!”

I still grin.

So, I’m sorry, Mario and Rod. You too, Dan and Jim. Never again will baseball romance me so on the airwaves. But you should still invest in an egg timer.

Fire Gehringer?? That May Have Been The Catcall, Back In The Day

I doubt any marches were staged. I can’t imagine the fans showing up and dressing in the team colors of the opponents. Certainly no sports talk radio back then, so no rabble-rousing would have been going on in that manner. No websites to get the blood boiling. No fans in other cities holding up placards screaming a similar two-word chant.

“Fire Millen!”

But were there “Fire Gehringer” signs in the 1950s in Detroit? Did anyone stop stuffing telephone booths or sitting on flagpoles or put their burger, fries, and malt dinner on hold long enough to get their cardigan in a knot over the abysmal performance of Charlie Gehringer as Tigers GM?

Even a generation later — when I was actually around to see it — I don’t recall much of a movement to kick Dickie Vitale out of town when he was ruining the Pistons. I think that was because it all happened so fast, though — leaving us too stunned to react. Besides, the owner gave him the ziggy with a quick trigger, though not quick enough to stop the hemorrhaging of one franchise and the dynasty-rebuilding of another.

Great players, or loudmouthed college coaches, don’t a good general manager make, necessarily. Obviously. Nor do hotshot sons of GMs, or radio announcers, or PR guys. We’ve had ‘em all in Detroit.

Gehringer, as the MUCH more successful player

Maybe no GM has been allowed to hang around long enough to compile the mind-numbing 24-72 record that Matt Millen has forged with the Lions. It’s all relative. Ninety-six NFL games are like 972 MLB games, or 492 NBA/NHL contests. And none of the above — with the exception of the Boy Wonder Randy Smith (the son of Tal Smith) were in Detroit anywhere near as long as Millen. Even Elgin Baylor, mostly unsuccesful during his interminable run with the Los Angeles Clippers, has tasted the playoffs on occasion.

But Gehringer, the marvelous, Hall of Fame second baseman for the Tigers, was the first in Detroit to display his decidedly non-knack for being an executive when the team hired him on August 10, 1951. But unlike Millen, who was plugged into the NFL as a longtime TV analyst, Gehringer had been out of baseball for about ten years.

“I hated the job,” he recalled years later. “I had been out (of baseball) for ten years. I didn’t know who was and who wasn’t.”

Not that it stopped him from trying trades. Gehringer, like Vitale a quarter-century or so later, ran amok, like a kid with a cache of bubble gum cards in front of a drugstore with his pals.

In ’52, Gehringer shuffled his deck of bubble gum cards fevrishly. He traded George Kell. He picked up Johnny Pesky from the Red Sox. He got Walt Dropo. He sent Dizzy Trout packing, along with Kell. Hoot Evers, too, was dealt. So was Vic Wertz. He fired his manager and gave the job to one of his pitchers, Fred Hutchinson. When the dust settled, the Tigers finished 50-104 and dead last in the league, 14 games out of 7th place.

In 1953, the Tigers won ten more games but that was still only good enough for sixth place, 16 games out of fifth. And again Gehringer tried trading his way out of quicksand. Among those Gehringer picked up that season was Ralph Branca, famous for giving up Bobby Thomson’s home run in the 1951 NL playoff.

After ’53, Gehringer was out — his record in two seasons 110-198. A winning percentage of .357 — awful but still 100 points higher than Millen’s .250 with the Lions.

Fifty years after the Tigers hired Gehringer, the Lions inked Millen.

Matt Millen, it appeared, had all the right stuff to make good decisions about football. He was an outstanding middle linebacker who played in nothing but winning programs: Penn State, the Oakland Raiders, the San Francisco 49ers, the Washington Redskins. He was connected to the league by virtue of his work with Fox Sports. He knew good football people.

Sadly, Millen never surrounded himself with those good people. He never created a football posse and delegated to them key areas of expertise. He could have, from the beginning, hired some of the most brilliant minds in the game — folks who would have leapt at the chance to work for him and Bill Ford Sr. But he tried to do it all himself, and now, Matt Millen is damaged goods. He can’t hope to attract those kinds of people now.

“Fire Gehringer!”

Doesn’t have the same ring to it, does it?

The Power Of Ten

Of the 10,000 losses suffered by the Philadelphia Phillies — and their fans — over the years (making them the first professional sports franchise to lose 10K games), 9,990 of them, combined, probably aren’t as painful as 10 that were endured in 1964.

On September 20, 1964, the Phillies were 90-60. They had a 6-1/2 game lead over the Cincinnati Reds and St. Louis Cardinals. There were 12 games to play. World Series tickets, no doubt, were at the printer (no NLCS in those days). The Phils were about to win their first pennant since the “Whiz Kids” did it in 1950.

The Reds came into Philly on Monday, the 21st, for a three-game set. The Reds swept. The Milwaukee Braves followed the Reds into Philadelphia for a four-game series. The Braves swept. Reeling, the Phillies ventured into St. Louis for a three-game series. The Cardinals swept.

Ten losses in a row. The Phillies were now 90-70, 2-1/2 games out of the lead. They were mathematically eliminated.

Mauch: Why is this man smiling?

Those ten losses will live forever in infamy in Philadelphia — and throughout MLB. They pigeon-holed manager Gene Mauch into being a skipper with the reputation of not being able to win the “big one.” And indeed, Mauch was at the helm when the 1986 Angels blew the pennant on a David Henderson home run off Donnie Moore. Years later, Moore turned a gun on himself and blew his brains out, still hurting from giving up Henderson’s homer. Mauch didn’t resort to such drastic measures. But he still couldn’t shake the rep.

The truth is, Mauch panicked in 1964 — and by his own admission when discussing those horrible ten days in a memoir. He pitched his best hurlers, Jim Bunning and Chris Short, on short rest — sometimes only two days’ worth. He didn’t trust his bullpen, or any other starter. In the ten games, Bunning lost three times, Short twice. They accounted for half the losses — and they were starters. Bunning lost on the 24th, 27th, and 30th of September.

Then, in cruel fashion, the Phillies won their last two meaningless games to finish 92-70.

The Cardinals won the pennant, and nipped the Yankees in the World Series in seven games.

The 1964 Phillies are still known as baseball’s all-time chokers. Even the 1978 Red Sox, who let the Yankees make up a 13-game deficit between July and October, weren’t as bad. Nor were the 1995 Angels, who lost 10 of 11 games late in the season to blow the division to the Mariners. Nor was any other team, in any other year, in any other league. The Phillies had a 6-1/2 game lead with twelve games to play. Their magic number was seven — and there it stayed.

Not until 1980 did the Phillies finally win a world championship. It’s still their only World Series title.

So when is 10 > 9,990? Just ask Phillies fans.

After His Nightmare, Aaron Owes No One Anything

I wonder when Henry Aaron came to the realization that he would trade all of his God-given baseball talent for a life of anonymity.

Was it when the death threats occurred – mailed in, called in, delivered to the Atlanta Braves clubhouse? Was it when the hate mail poured in like a stuck-open spigot? Was it when he heard the chilling shouts during batting practice from “fans” – including words strung together that would make even Archie Bunker blush? Or was it when his daughter had to have Secret Service-like protection at college, due to the kidnapping threats made against her?

Surely one of these had to have put Aaron over the edge while he had the nerve to chase Babe Ruth’s all-time career home run record, in late 1973 and early 1974. Ruth had been retired for nearly 40 years, and Aaron was the first player who was seriously challenging the Bambino. And Hammerin’ Hank’s being black made the lowest form of human life in this country squirm and gnash their teeth.

It was bad enough that Aaron played his 23-year career under the shadows of Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle, and others – players who were constantly revered as being the best in the game, while Aaron, for whatever reason, was overlooked as being a power hitter and not much more. I’ve always been amazed, the same way I am over the fascination with Paris Hilton, that Aaron hasn’t really gotten his due as one of the top five players in baseball history – which he is.

Aaron played the outfield with the same grace and consistency as Mays and Mantle – and Roberto Clemente (another who gets more word play than Aaron), albeit with less flash and panache. And without the good fortune of plying his trade in the Valhalla of baseball affection – New York, as Mays did for the first seven years of his career, and as Mantle did. And Duke Snider. And Gil Hodges.

But the underrated thing is nothing compared to what Aaron had to go through in pursuit of Ruth. I’ve written it before – that the treatment Hank Aaron received in the months and days leading up to his surpassing Ruth should forever be remembered as the days when our country should be most ashamed of itself.

Aaron had no fun chasing Babe Ruth. You could see it in his eyes, even after he hit home run no. 715 on April 8, 1974. The look was mostly of weary relief – not joy or elation. As he rounded second base and headed for third, a couple of fans who had spilled out of the stands at Atlanta’s Fulton County Stadium joined him for the home run trot. They gave him congratulatory pats on the back – obviously less driven by their appreciation of history and more so by their desire to be immortalized on film, no doubt. But it provided a symbolic moment: happy, giddy America and a stoic, reserved Aaron.

After 715 was in the books, Aaron was relieved, not elated

He was also a victim of bad timing. Aaron finished the 1973 season with 713 home runs, one shy of Ruth. So it gave the haters six more months to load up and rain their fusillade on Aaron while the chase was put on pause. Aaron’s home run hitting was stilled by the off-season, but the vitriol continued.

After his playing days, Aaron railed against Major League Baseball’s old boy system of franchise running – namely, wondering where all the black executives were. He hinted that he would like to be commissioner someday. Or a general manager of a team. Or a president. And he wanted others of color to be afforded the same opportunities. Once again the haters came out of the woodwork. It was bad enough, in their eyes, that a black man had knocked the white Ruth off the home run pedestal. Now Aaron wanted more?

Aaron eventually did become a member of the Braves’ front office, in 1989. He’s been a member of it ever since. Few other minorities, though, have followed him. The old boy system is still alive and well.

Now, as Barry Bonds chases Aaron – Bonds has 751 homers to Aaron’s 755 – Hank is in the spotlight again, but not for simply being the chasee. Aaron has publicly announced that he doesn’t plan on being in attendance when Bonds breaks the record. He said it months ago. He established his position – firmly and without wavering – early on, and today, with Bonds knocking on the door, Commissioner Bud Selig has still yet to reveal his intentions on whether he’ll have his fanny in the stadium when Bonds swats no. 756.

Hank Aaron wanted to be commissioner once – and baseball all but laughed at him.

Aaron’s stance has been construed to mean that he doesn’t approve of Bonds’s assault on 755, due to the shroud of mystery surrounding Bonds and the stuff he has rubbed on his body and ingested over the years. Steroids. Performance-enhancing drugs. Banned substances. Pick your poison.

For his part, Aaron says simply that he doesn’t have the time, frankly, to travel all over the country, not knowing when 756 will occur, or where. He says records are meant to be broken, but that he just doesn’t choose to add to the circus atmosphere. It’s a nod, he says, to how he wishes no. 715 had been treated by so many others, back in the day. No animosity toward Bonds. No snubbing.

I don’t care if Aaron is telling the truth when he says those things, or is merely sugar-coating personal beliefs he holds. I wouldn’t even care if he said, “I’m not going to be there because Barry Bonds’s record is paper, and mine is gold.”

He chooses not to be in attendance. Maybe wouldn’t even walk across the street to see his record tumble. Fine.

In addition to the home run record, Aaron holds the MLB records for the the most career runs batted in (2,297), the most career extra base hits (1,477); and the most career total bases (6,856). He is also in the top five for career hits and runs.

For all that, Hank Aaron got death threats, hate mail, his daughter in suspected peril, and the feeling after the ’73 season that he wouldn’t live to see 1974.

The man can do what he wants.

July Forth

It’s part of baseball’s wonderful congruity.

The season, all 162 games of it, is neatly divvied up into six full months: April to September, with October reserved for the three tiers of playoffs. An All-Star game placed almost squarely in the middle, a genuine halfway mark.

And Independence Day close enough to that halfway point. July 4th – George Steinbrenner’s birthday, as well. Insert your own joke.

It’s another of baseball’s many adages that says the teams that are leading their divisions on July 4th are the ones that are likely to be leading them when the curtain falls after game #162. It should be noted that what baseball calls adages, some folks call urban legends. Or myths.

Thanks to the most wonderful website on the planet Earth, Retrosheet.org, I did a little research. And I found myth and truth to both be attributed to the July 4th litmus test.

Starting with 1940, the Tigers have won league and/or divisional titles seven times (1940, 1945, 1968, 1972, 1984, 1987, and 2006). It was a simple matter to look up the July 4th standings for each season.

1940. The Tigers find themselves in second place, a game behind the Cleveland Indians. And the two teams would trade first place all summer, before the Tigers nipped the Tribe at the end by one game.

1945. The Tigers reside in first place on the 4th, three-and-a-half games in front of the vaunted Yankees. They capture the flag by 1 ½ games over the Washington Senators.

1968. There’s no catching Mayo Smith’s boys. A bulging 8 ½ game lead over Cleveland. They roll to the pennant.

1972. A tight, four-team race at the end. On July 4, the Tigers are in second place, one game behind Baltimore. At the end, the Tigers finish one-half game in front of Boston, thanks to a games-played disparity caused by the players’ strike in spring training.

1984. Bless You Boys! A 35-5 start, and the Tigers are a comfy seven games in front of Toronto on the 4th. They win the division by a whopping 15 games.

1987. The team that came back from an 11-19 start. On the 4th the Tigers are in third place, six games behind New York, and Toronto a game ahead of them in second place. The Tigers erase a 3 ½ game deficit in the season’s final week to win the division by two games.

2006. The improbable season finds the Tigers in first place on Independence Day, 1 ½ games ahead of Chicago. The Minnesota Twins are nine games behind. The Twins win the division on the season’s final day. But the Tigers grab the life preserver, a.k.a. the Wild Card.

The final tally? Of the seven flag seasons, four times the Tigers were in first place on the 4th. Twice they were in second. Once they were in third. Four of seven – good enough to win a playoff series, but not good enough to prove the adage. But mediocre enough to lend it myth-like status.

More research would have dug up how many times the Tigers were in first place on July 4, but failed to win the enchilada. More proof against the adage.

In 2007, the Tigers find themselves in what should be a whale of a battle to the wire. The pesky Indians and the ever-dangerous Twins will most likely join the Detroiters in a three-team volley that might have us talking about the “Great Race of 2007” for years. There are still old-timers who would corner you and yap about the four-team mad rush to the AL pennant in 1967. The Tigers lost out to the Red Sox on the final two outs of the season, thanks to Dick McAuliffe’s only grounding-into-double play all season, against the Angels. (The Tigers were in third place on the 4th that year, 3 ½ games behind first-place Chicago, another adage buster).

Friday night, the Twins spanked Justin Verlander and the Tigers all over Comerica Park, 11-1. It was a demolition usually reserved for the Tigers’ opponents. And it served notice – and a ghastly reminder of 2006 – that the Twins are fully expected to be involved in the party until the wee hours of October.

The Tigers might be in first place this July 4th. Or they might not. The Indians have been denizens of first place this season, forging a 4 ½ game lead on June 1. Then the Tigers whittled it down to two games, then one – then they wrestled the lead away from Cleveland like a bully. The Tigers edged ahead by two games. The Indians, in two quick nights last week, caught them. It’s marvelous baseball theater, and it will be here for an extended run. Enjoy it.

I’m not sure what prompted the baseball folks to target July 4th as some sort of watershed moment in any given season. But they did. And for decades, the leader at the “Independence Day Turn” has been foolishly pre-crowned as victor. Yet still the adage lives, though left staggered year after year.

The team that leads the division on the Fourth of July will most likely be the team left standing at the end of the season.

Or something like that.

Back to Steinbrenner. His Yankees, on the boss’s birthday in 1978, were nine games behind the Red Sox. A month prior, the deficit was 14 games. But at the end of the season, the Red Sox were not the team left standing. They were slumped in defeat, losers of a one-game playoff for the division. To the Yankees. Gag.

If the Tigers are in first place come this July 4th, we’ll be happy, because of the adage. If they’re not, we’ll dismiss it as so much bunk. A myth. A baseballian urban legend.

So we cannot be wrong. Only the standings can be, at the end.

Thomas’s 500 Homers Are Pure And Undisputable

Frank Thomas, as far as I can tell, did things the right way.

Never, that I can recall, was Thomas placed under a shroud of suspicion because of his exploits on the baseball diamond. Never do I remember his name being bantied about as a possible user of performance enhancing drugs. I don’t recall seeing him raising his right hand in testimony on Capitol Hill. And I certainly don’t remember him beginning his career with a David Banner-like physique and ending it with that of the Incredible Hulk.

Thomas, who hit his 500th career homerun last night, should breeze through Hall of Fame ballotting, unlike some of his contemporaries, whose numbers and change in body structure have most sensible people looking at them cross-eyed.

Thomas watches #500 fly in the Metrodome

“The Big Hurt,” they call him, and it’s because of the pain he inflicts on opposing pitchers, not on the game itself. Frank Thomas was jobbed of the Comeback Player of the Year Award in 2006 (he won it in 2000), a slight that I still can’t understand. He went from 105 AB (and 12 HR) with the White Sox in 2005 to 39 HR, 114 RBI with the A’s last season, in under 500 AB. His departure from the White Sox was contentious, which was something else I never understood, because all Thomas did was give that franchise 16 glorious seasons — the last two of which were injury-ravaged. He, more than anyone, put the White Sox back on the radar after years of mediocrity in the 1970s and ’80s.

He was, dare I say, the most feared righthanded hitter in the big leagues for most of the 1990s. And even now, at age 39, he’s not someone I relish seeing come to the plate against my team. Yes, last year’s ALCS against the Tigers was brutal for Thomas. And Tigers fans should thank their lucky stars that his slump coincided with that series. But you know what? Even though he struggled mightily against the Tigers last October, I always felt like the next at-bat would be the one where he’d break out of it and make us all pay.

There’s no question that Thomas’s career was lengthened — and even saved — by the designated hitter rule. He will go down with Edgar Martinez as two of the greatest DHs of all time. How much that matters to you is your business. I’m not a DH fan, but if it’s there, you may as well have people who can do it properly.

Funny, but Thomas was ejected in the ninth inning last night, after disputing a called third strike.

“I’m probably the only one to hit his 500th homer and get ejected,” Thomas said afterward.

I can think of hundreds of pitchers who wish they had that power.

Frank Thomas has hit 500 homeruns — and counting. Every one of them, I believe, was smacked and pummeled out of big league ballparks without the benefit of foreign substances introduced into his bloodstream, or spread onto his skin.

“This means a lot to me because I did it the right way and I’ve busted my butt since college. I always worked hard in that weight room to be strong. I’m a big guy and I’ve been blessed with this talent,” Thomas said of his accomplishment.

Hall of Fame, indeed.