Why Didn't He Slide?

It seemed like the world was coming apart in the summer of 1968.  War, assassinations, riots, the whole structure of civilization was in question.  But to Detroiters, still recovering from the previous year's riots, it was also a chance to follow a great baseball team.

That's what Tim Wendel's book Summer Of '68 is about. Not just the Tigers, but baseball in the middle of all that turbulence.  And it was quite a year.  The Year Of The Pitcher.  Denny McClain won 31 games, the batting average against Luis Tiant was .168, and Bob Gibson had an ERA of 1.12! In the American League, Carl Yastrzemski won the batting crown with an average of .301.

It was also the last season where the winner of each league won the pennant and went directly to the World Series.  And what a Series that was.  The two greatest pitchers in baseball, McClain and Gibson, faced off, but it was Mickey Lolich who won three games, all complete.  And Tiger stalwart Al Kaline, who'd missed a lot of the regular season due to an injury, hit .379. (Manager Mayo Smith had four outfielders who could hit, so he moved centerfielders Mickey Stanley into the shortstop position, even though Stanley had never played there before.)

The Cardinals, World Series champs of 1967, won the first game 4-0 with Bob Gibson breaking a record by striking out seventeen Tiger. Soon, the Cardinals had a 3-1 lead in games, and it looked like it was over.  In the fifth game, the Cardinals jumped out to a 3-0 lead in the first inning. In the fifth inning, still leading 3-2, the best runner in baseball, Lou Brock, was thrown out at the plate when outfielder Willie Horton fired a ball directly to catcher Bill Freehan. (It's the photo on the cover of the book, and also the one I'm using.)

It was the Tigers from that point on.  They scored three runs in the seventh inning to take the game and had little trouble handling the Cards in the next two outings even after they returned to St. Louis.

Detroit would have plenty of problems in the futures, but for a short moment, everyone was happy.  Baseball would change too, as Wendel notes, but that's all part of what made the summer of '68 so special.