The Tigers of '68 by George Cantor

Author:George Cantor [Cantor, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781589799295
Publisher: Taylor Trade Publishing
Published: 2014-05-03T04:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 19 The Lost Weekend

Songs have been written about the fresh promise of autumn in New York. But no one will ever write anything good about August in New York. The heat seems to rise from the sidewalk. Not a current of air stirs in the midtown canyons. Apartment dwellers climb to the rooftops to find relief. August was also, traditionally, the time when the hopes of countless baseball teams went to die in Yankee Stadium.

By 1968 the Yankees were no longer the Yankees. They had last won a pennant four seasons before and in 1966 had tumbled, shockingly, all the way to last place. They climbed one rung out of the cellar the following year and seemed to be retooling. At least they were respectable again and playing over .500. A few of the old titans remained. Most notably, there was Mickey Mantle, slowed so much that he was exclusively a first baseman. The series hero of six long autumns ago, Tom Tresh, was at short, and Joe Pepitone had traded positions with Mantle and roamed center field. Mel Stottlemyre remained as a starter from the glory days and so did reliever Steve Hamilton. Otherwise, there were only memories to sustain the Yankees.

But the past has its power, and the stadium could still be an intimidating place. Kaline and Cash had stark recollections of coming there in the summer of 1961, after running with the Yankees all season long and losing three in a row to fall abruptly from the race. The Yankees merely toyed with other contenders in those years, leading them to believe that there was some hope of overtaking them. Then they would get them into the stadium sometime in late summer and off-handedly beat their brains out.

On the Tigers schedule, this late August weekend in New York didn’t appear to be an ordeal. A night game on Friday followed by two day games, and then the Tigers were out of there. But a June game had been rained out and rescheduled as part of a twinight doubleheader on Friday. So when the bus pulled away from the Roosevelt Hotel and began the traffic-clogged passage up Madison Avenue to the Bronx, the Tigers realized there was a long weekend ahead of them. They didn’t know the half of it.

This was an unusual weekend in many regards. Life magazine was doing a full-scale profile on McLain, and its reporter followed him around full time. His run for thirty wins now stood at twenty-five. It had become the biggest story of the baseball season. The magnitude of his attempt was becoming clear. Only three pitchers in the live ball era—Jim Bagby in 1920, Lefty Grove in 1931, and Dizzy Dean in 1934—had reached that number of wins. The most recent had been thirty-four years ago. Ted Williams had batted over .400 since then, to cite a comparable achievement. Thirty wins was an incredible accomplishment. The story may not have been quite at the level of Roger Maris’s run

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