For Glenn Abbott, his days in the major leagues were filled with stories and memories and good feelings.

In an interview, the former American League pitcher conjured up a past filled with recollections of warm summer days in big-league cities around the country. And although he played his last major-league game in August 1984 — when the Detroit Tigers cut him after a terrible stretch after the All-Star break — he continued to make his presence felt by coaching up-and-coming young pitching arms.

Abbott’s tale is an interesting one: a leap from being a member of the World Series-winning Oakland A’s of the 1970s to the expansion Seattle Mariners to the impressive Tigers teams of 1983 and ’84.

William Glenn Abbott was born on February 16, 1951, in Little Rock, Arkansas. “When I was a kid, everybody played baseball,” he told an interviewer in 2008. “I always loved it. When I was 14 or 15, we’d ride bicycles over to the baseball fields and would play a little workup or something and then help prepare the field. It’s just what kids did then.

“The Cardinals were big in Little Rock. I can remember when Dick Allen came to Little Rock; he was the first black to play there. I remember Ferguson Jenkins and guys like that who played there. … I’ve always loved it and played the game. This is not a job to me. I really enjoy what I do. It’s my 39th season, and I love it. I like working with the young kids.”1

In his early days with the sport, Abbott played the infield and caught as well as pitched.

That changed when he entered high school. “I realized that I had the chance to go on beyond high-school ball,” he said. “I realized that I had some ability and didn’t want to take a chance of breaking a finger or something like that.”

Abbott played baseball and basketball in high school and had planned to continue with both sports in college. But he was drafted out of high school in the eighth round by the Oakland A’s in June 1969, and signed immediately. He was 18 years old. For a couple of years during the offseason, he attended State College of Arkansas, now called the University of Central Arkansas. He made the big leagues when he was 22.

Starting in the Rookie-classification Northwest League, Abbott quickly worked his way through minor-league ball and made his debut with Oakland on July 29, 1973, when he started against the Texas Rangers. He was taken out in the fourth inning with Oakland leading 4-2, and Texas runners on second and third. (The A’s eventually won, 7-4.)

Though Abbott’s major-league pitching record was just 62-83, with a 4.39 earned-run average, he had his moments. September 28, 1975, the last game of the season, was a good example. Abbott was the second of four pitchers who combined to throw a no-hitter against the California Angels. Abbott pitched one inning and retired the side in order.

Abbott said the A’s were preparing for the playoff series against the Boston Red Sox, and the manager, Alvin Dark, already had decided that Vida Blue would start but pitch no more than five innings. Abbott was slated to pitch the sixth, Paul Lindblad would throw the seventh inning, and Rollie Fingers would wrap things up in the eighth and ninth, regardless of the score.

“When I went out to take the mound in the sixth inning, the home crowd was booing — people were booing,” Abbott said. “But they weren’t booing me. They were booing because Vida Blue came out of the game and he was pitching a no-hitter. I said to myself, ‘Lord, please don’t let me give up a hit.’” And he didn’t.

Abbott pitched for Oakland for four seasons and compiled a 13-16 record with a 4.08 ERA.

His years with the A’s brought a lot of smiles. “I was on a team where you hear all the stuff about how wild they were, with all the fights and stuff. But the players were all-for-one when they were at the ballpark and on the field. They expected to win. In my first year we won the league championship.” Oakland went on to win the World Series as well.

His next stop in an 11-year major-league career was with the Seattle Mariners, when he became the 24th pick in the 1976 expansion draft.

Abbott viewed the change from winning a title in Oakland to moving to an expansion team in Seattle as a positive experience as well.

“I went from a team that expected to win to a team that didn’t have a lot of confidence,” he said. “They thought they could win but weren’t sure. It was a big adjustment. In expansion, you always have a bunch of Triple-A players who never had a chance to play in the majors. It’s a big step to make. If you can play Double-A ball, you can pretty much play Triple-A ball. But they don’t understand the jump to the majors. It’s like daylight and dark. A lot of guys can’t comprehend that.” 

Abbott’s promise was realized in the 1977 campaign, the first of the Mariners’ existence. He compiled a 12-13 record with a 4.45 ERA, fanning 100 batters. He was the longest-serving of the original Mariners players — his last game for Seattle was on August 21, 1983. His record with the Mariners was 44-62 with an ERA that ranged from 3.94 to 5.27.

Abbott missed the 1982 season because of floating bone chips in his elbow. His arm problems were compounded by a serious bout of viral meningitis. He lost 30 pounds, as well as some vision and hearing, and still had repercussions from the illness into June 1983. He was finally able to pitch again in midsummer of 1983.

Abbott was purchased by the Tigers on August 23, 1983, for $100,000, and stayed with Detroit for parts of two seasons.

“Detroit is a good baseball town, and I wanted an opportunity to go to a winning ballclub,” he said during an interview at PGE Park in Portland, Oregon, his baseball home in 2008, where he was the pitching coach for the Portland Beavers, the San Diego Padres’ Triple-A affiliate. “You really appreciate a chance like that. It’s huge to get that opportunity.” 

He was released by the Detroit organization on August 14, 1984, during the height of the championship run to the World Series. Abbott immediately started a coaching career that topped his pitching career for longevity.

Standing 6-feet-6, Abbott had a playing weight of around 200 pounds, and added a few pounds after his coaching career started. To an interviewer, his native Arkansas showed up in his easy drawl: the word “four” became a two-syllable word when it left Abbott’s mouth. 

In talking about the differences between the two leagues, Abbott made a definitive observation about his playing days: “National League umps were far more consistent back then,” he said, though he wouldn’t comment on the current umpiring situation in the major leagues. 

“I wish I could have played in the National League as a pitcher,” he said. “I like the game a lot better. There’s more things going on, more decisions to be made, pitcher having to hit, et cetera. It’s also a better league to pitch in. The designated hitter means that teams like Boston and New York have no weaknesses in the lineup.”

The right-hander’s feelings about his time with the Tigers? “I knew I had a chance to go to a contending ballclub, and you don’t realize how important that is until later. I was very fortunate,” he said. 

He made his Tigers debut on August 27, 1983, pitching seven innings against Toronto and leaving with the scored tied 2-2. His best game for the Tigers that season was a 5-0 shutout of the Cleveland Indians on September 14. His mark with the Tigers in ’83 was 2-1 with a 1.93 ERA in seven starts

“The Tigers made a run in ’83 and came up a game or two short [actually six games behind Baltimore]. I pitched well for them then, with Sparky [Anderson, the manager,] and Roger Craig as the pitching coach. And in ’84, that team started 35-5 and set a record. We set the [American League] record in Anaheim for the most consecutive games won on the road and got a standing ovation. 

“But I was in the bullpen and wasn’t getting a chance to pitch much because the starters were so good. It made it really difficult; it’s difficult to perform at a high level if you don’t get the chance to play. But Jack Morris and Dan Petry and those guys were just dealing.”

Abbott took the second loss of the ’84 season when the Tigers were 16-1 but recalled few details of the 19-inning game in his interview, despite the fact that he committed two errors that contributed to the loss. 

“Two errors? That’s bad. Maybe that’s why I can’t remember,” he said.

During Detroit’s wire-to-wire American League East championship run in 1984, Abbott pitched in 13 games, eight of them starts, with a 3-4 record and a 5.93 ERA before he was cut. His best game that season was a complete-game victory over the Chicago White Sox on July 16, in which he gave up only four hits and one walk.

Abbott had fond recollections of his teammates from that charmed 1984 season, even though it was a truncated one for him.

Of Sparky Anderson, he said: “He didn’t talk to you much. He would say hi, but that’s the way managers were then. I had no problems with Sparky at all. He was a pretty positive guy. He had some good players on the team. It was amazing; those guys came to play. They never even complained about playing charity games against Cincinnati on an offday.”

Roger Craig, the Tigers’ pitching coach during Abbott’s tenure in Detroit, “was one of the most positive people I’ve ever been around. He was always telling you how good you were. You have to be positive with the guys, and Roger was always that way.”

Abbott said Jack Morris, the Tigers’ acknowledged ace throughout the 1980s, “had tremendous confidence. He was probably the best pitcher of that decade — or one of the best, I’ll say that. He was just getting better and better at the time. Jack was a winning-type pitcher. He threw a no-hitter in April in one of the first televised games [of the season] in Chicago. I remember a fan was yelling after every inning, ‘Hey Morris, you got a no-hitter going’ — trying to get him off stride. And about the eighth inning, Jack said back to him, ‘Damn right. Stay right there ’cause you’re gonna see one.’ He was a quality pitcher.”

Dan Petry, considered the number-two man in Detroit’s rotation for most of the 1980s, “didn’t say a lot,” Abbott said, “but he was very consistent. You knew what you were going to get every time you went out there.”

Abbott also had good words for two relievers who not only saved his bacon on more than one occasion in 1984, but that of other Tigers hurlers during the championship season. Guillermo Hernandez, the 1984 AL Cy Young Award winner and Most Valuable Player, “couldn’t do anything wrong,” he recalled. Aurelio “Señor Smoke” Lopez, who notched a 10-1 record and 14 saves in the midst of Hernandez’s spectacular season, “also was very consistent,” Abbott said.

Alan Trammell, Detroit’s shortstop and the World Series MVP in 1984, “was just as solid as they come. He was a ballplayer. He could handle the bat so well. He was underrated at that time. Howard Johnson was coming along at that time, too, playing third base. They were all very professional, and they expected to win. There was a lot of confidence — a good atmosphere to be in.

“Darrell Evans did a good job. It was the end of his career, but he was very consistent and made a tremendous impact on the club. Whitaker and Trammell and Lance Parrish and Kirk Gibson and Dave Rozema — it makes a difference when your players come up together. You’ve got to have talent, but you need chemistry, too, and it all fell together with the Tigers.”

Abbott said he got a ring and a share of the World Series money that year, even though he left the team in August.

“It might have been a three-quarter share; I can’t remember. It just makes you feel good that your teammates appreciate you,” he said.

His time in the majors flew by, but the memories lingered. 

“I had never seen a no-hitter in professional games, and in the first three years I was in the league, I saw one every year, including being involved in the one against the Angels when I was with Oakland. (It was actually four.) The Angels at that time were a bad ballclub, but Vida Blue was on that day. It was just five innings, but he walked through them. 

“I had a chance to play with guys like Catfish Hunter. They made a big impression on me. They were very professional about the way they approached the game.”

One of his greatest thrills was pitching in Yankee Stadium for the first time. “It was really an experience to go see those monuments for the first time. If you love baseball, that is really something. That’s why I hate to see Yankee Stadium moving. It’s one thing that bothers me. There’s so much history. If you think of the people who played there, Yankee Stadium is like hallowed ground. You hate to see that happen, but I understand it when teams have to go to larger parks.

“The dugouts in Tiger Stadium were so small that everybody couldn’t sit down when you came off the field. It was like a bunker in the bullpen.” 

As for Detroit’s fans: “The Tigers have great fans. Everywhere you go you’d hear people talking about the Tigers. Every night they had big crowds. It was really a unique experience. It was really a cool deal there. I really enjoyed that — very much.”

Abbott began a career as a pitching coach with the Little Falls Mets in 1985, the year after the Tigers cut him loose. He spent five years with the Mets’ organization before joining the Athletics. He logged 13 years at various levels with the A’s. Then Abbott was a pitching coach for five years in the San Diego Padres system, and spent four seasons in the Texas Rangers organization. In 2011 he returned to the Mets’ organization, as the pitching coach for the Savannah Sand Gnats of the South Atlantic League. In 2012 he joined the Binghamton Mets of the Double-A Eastern League. As of 2014 he was still with Binghamton.

Abbott was married in 1973. He and his wife, Patti, lived in Arkansas in the offseason, and wherever he was working during the season. The eldest of their three children, Todd, pitched in the Oakland minor-league system from 1995 through 1998 and became a high-school teacher and baseball coach in Bentonville, Arkansas. Their second son, Jeff, also became a teacher, in Bolivar, Missouri. There is also a daughter, Amy.

Sources

The author relied on baseball-reference.com for the statistical data presented in this article.

Notes

1 Clifford Corn interview with Glenn Abbott on April 21, 2008. Unless otherwise indicated, all quotations from Glenn Abbott come from this interview.

On the other hand, who would have thought that this journeyman ballplayer, who played a total of 31 major-league ballgames, would become a longtime color analyst on television?

If Roderick Bernet Allen’s baseball career had not extended beyond the 15 games he played for the 1984 world champion Detroit Tigers — he was awarded a World Series ring and full winner’s money share by the team — that would have been impressive enough. But there’s much more to Allen’s three decades in and around the game.

Allen, born on October 4, 1959, grew up in Santa Monica, California, and was drafted at the age of 17 in 1977 out of Santa Monica High School by the Chicago White Sox. In two weeks, he was on the way to Sarasota, Florida, for Rookie-level ball in the Gulf Coast League, young and scared until he got to know some of his teammates — and hit .307 for the short season. “You were pretty much on your own. It was a real eye opener. You grew up pretty quickly,” said Allen in a 2007 interview.

In 1978, Allen played outfield on a tremendous Appleton team in the Low-A Midwest League, a club that won 81 games, a league one-season record. Against the stronger competition, Allen batted .243, and was promoted in 1979 to Double-A Knoxville of the Southern League, where he hit .267 with 6 home runs. In 1980, he batted .355 in a short stint at Double-A Glens Falls of the Eastern League, and batted .260 at Triple-A Iowa in the American Association. In 1981, the White Sox kept Allen in Triple A, this time at Edmonton of the Pacific Coast League, where he hit.294, with 11 home runs and 52 RBIs. Then, after five seasons working his way up the White Sox organizational ladder, on December 11, 1981, he was dealt with Todd Cruz and Jim Essian to the Seattle Mariners for Tom Paciorek. Seattle sent him right back to the PCL at Salt Lake City, where he hit .323 with 15 homers and 75 RBIs in 1982.

Along the way, Allen played winter ball — in Puerto Rico, in Mexico, in the Dominican Republic. “Baseball was how I had to feed myself,” he told his interviewer in 2007.

In 1983, Allen played 81 games at Salt Lake City, hitting .324 with 12 home runs and 69 RBIs, and made it to the majors for 11 games, playing in the outfield and as a designated hitter for Seattle (2-for-12, one run scored). He became a free agent that winter, and signed with the Detroit Tigers. “I didn’t know much about the Tigers,” said Allen.

As Allen told it, “I was performing well” in minor-league spring training. “Word made its way to Sparky [Anderson, Detroit’s manager] that there was this kid tearing the cover off the ball.” He was asked to come over to the major league camp. “Once I got there, [Tigers coach] Billy Consolo read off the starting lineup. I was in the lineup!”

Allen expressed the belief that his spring-training performance led directly to a vital piece of the puzzle for the ’84 Tigers. Allen made the Tigers out of spring training; he maintains that “Glenn Wilson was considered to be a stud, but because of my hot start, they were willing to trade him.”

In fact, that trade was instrumental in the Tigers’ 1984 success, since it brought them that year’s American League Most Valuable Player and Cy Young winner. Wilson was traded, along with John Wockenfuss, to the Philadelphia Phillies for reliever Willie Hernandez and first baseman Dave Bergman. Hernandez, of course, went on to win the MVP and Cy Young Award that year, while Bergman was an important contributor to the team as well. So, Allen believed, his spring performance contributed meaningfully to the acquisition of key players for the Tigers’ successful ’84 World Series run.

Allen was with Detroit when the regular season began. He made his Tigers debut on April 5, 1984, when he started at designated hitter, going 1-for-3 (singling off Frank Viola in the fourth inning) and scoring a pair of runs as Detroit beat the Twins 7-3 in Minnesota. “I was there for the 35-5 start; I played in Jack Morris’s no-hitter,” he said. Allen was the starting DH in that game, in which Morris no-hit the White Sox that April 7 at Comiskey Park, the fourth game of the season. He struck out twice and grounded out before being lifted for a pinch-hitter. “But that season was one of pain, too,” Allen said; he was sent down to Triple-A Evansville after playing 15 games. His last game with the Tigers was on May 27, when he pinch-hit and singled off Paul Mirabella in the ninth inning of a 6-1 loss to the Mariners in Seattle. For his abbreviated big-league stay, Allen compiled a .296 average in 27 at-bats, with six runs scored, three RBIs, two walks, and a stolen base. Still, Allen took home a ring, plus a bonus. The Tigers “were nice enough to give me a share” of the World Series money.

On April 9, 1985, Allen was traded to the Baltimore Orioles for Luis Rosado. After a season with the Orioles’ Triple-A team at Rochester, he was granted free agency on October 15, but was re-signed by Baltimore on January 8, 1986. Then he was released by Baltimore on April 3. He played some summer ball in the Mexican League, but that did not work out. “I was a newlywed, and my wife stayed behind initially in Salt Lake City,” said Allen. Once his wife arrived in Mexico, they quickly decided to move back to Salt Lake City. Not long afterward, Allen received a call from Cleveland, signed with the Indians May 20, and found himself in Double-A ball in Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1986, but moved up quickly to Triple A with the Indians’ Maine Guides team in the International League. The next year, the Indians moved their Triple-A team to Buffalo of the American Association and there Allen hit .302 with 17 home runs and 92 RBIs. In 1988, the Indians moved their Triple-A team again, to Colorado Springs of the Pacific Coast League, and there Allen hit .324 with personal highs of 23 home runs and 100 RBIs.

Allen’s time in the Indians’ organization included a five-game stint in the majors for Cleveland in 1988, He debuted for the Indians on September 10, when he pinch hit and flied out in the ninth inning of a 6-0 loss to the Red Sox in Boston. His last game for Cleveland — and his last major-league appearance — was on October 2 in Cleveland’s season finale, as they beat the Red Sox 6-5 at Municipal Stadium in Cleveland. Allen entered the game as a pinch-hitter in the fifth inning, hitting a double off Bruce Hurst and eventually scoring a run. He stayed in the game as DH, and had one more at-bat, this time facing Tom Bolton and flying out to end the sixth inning in his last major league at-bat. Allen was released by the Tribe on November 28.

With Allen’s blessing, his contract was sold to the Hiroshima Carp in Japan. “I was finally able to make some money — I made good money in Japan,” he told his interviewer. However, the opportunity was not without its challenges. “My wife was pregnant with our first child together. I left her behind once again. I made more money than I ever made in my life. But it was a tough adjustment. Americans had to learn to check their ego at the airport. After three years with the same teammates, they still referred to me as `gaijin’ [foreigner] rather than use my name.” Still, Allen had success in Japan, spending three years there. He hit four home runs in four consecutive at-bats, setting a record, and hit two home runs for the Carp in the 1991 Japan Series.

Allen came back to the States, just as Cecil Fielder had done after his stint in Japan. Allen tried out with the Mariners in 1992, but did not make the team.

Between seasons, Allen had given private baseball lessons to young players. This led him to a decision to stay in the game as a coach. John Boles Jr., then the vice president of player development for the Marlins, told Allen he could play in Triple A for years or he could pursue coaching. Allen became a hitting instructor for Florida, and managed in the instructional league. Allen was with the Marlins organization from 1992 to 1995.

Allen’s family had moved to Arizona, and when the Arizona Diamondbacks were awarded a National League franchise, Allen expressed interest in joining the organization. He went to spring training as a hitting instructor, but as the team neared its first game, he took a fateful tour of the stadium’s construction site with the Diamondbacks’ director of broadcasting, Thom Brennaman.

Brennaman walked with Allen around the hole in the ground that was to become Bank One Ballpark (later named Chase Field). They talked baseball the whole time, and then Brennaman shocked Allen by asking him to consider becoming an on-air analyst. “Very few guys that are in my position, as a career minor leaguer, are doing major-league broadcasts. I’d never thought about it. But Brennaman did,” Allen said.

Brennaman arranged for Allen to work some Arizona Fall League games, and Allen did some on-air work with the Giants’ Triple-A club in Tucson as well. Allen also spent time with legendary broadcaster Joe Garagiola, whose son, Joe Jr., was the Diamondbacks’ general manager.

Allen spent five seasons with the Diamondbacks as an analyst for radio and television. He also worked as an analyst for the Fox network’s Saturday regional baseball telecasts and the 1997 National League Division Series between the Atlanta Braves and Houston Astros. He worked the Diamondbacks’ radio broadcasts for their 2001 postseason run: the Division Series victory over the St. Louis Cardinals, the Championship Series win over the Atlanta Braves, and the World Series victory over the New York Yankees.

Allen got his second World Series ring with the Diamondbacks. But he saw a dark cloud on the horizon. “I knew when Mark Grace was done playing, he was going to get my job. So I called [Tigers president Dave] Dombrowski.” Dombrowski had been his boss with the Marlins. Soon, Allen was headed to Detroit, and in 2003 he made his debut as color analyst for the Tigers’ FSN Detroit broadcasts, teaming with play-by-play announcer Mario Impemba.

When Allen arrived, the Tigers were struggling, to say the least. But it wasn’t the cold weather or the abysmal team that was the most difficult part of the transition. “The toughest was from a family point of view. I had a son in high school. Not only was the team horrific [a 43-119 season for the 2003 Tigers], but it was a tough adjustment as a man with a family,” Allen recalled. But he stuck it out.

Allen quickly became beloved by the Detroit faithful for his perceptive opinions and colorful, often humorous commentary. He famously picked the Tigers to win the American League Central crown in 2006 after watching Justin Verlander and Joel Zumaya in spring training. The Twins squeaked by to win that title by one game, but the Tigers, claimants of the wild card, went to the World Series.

Allen developed a unique parlance, calling a fastball “cheese”; former Tigers outfielder Craig Monroe “Baby Boy”; Impemba “Padnuh.” “Country strong” hitters “elevated” pitches. Great pitches could be “nasty” or “filthy,” while Detroit starter Jeremy Bonderman’s slider earned the nickname “Mr. Snappy” from Allen. A broken bat “died a hero,” and an inside pitch “got in his [the batter’s] kitchen.”

Allen won two Michigan Emmys for his work. He provided studio and on-location analysis for the Fox network’s postgame coverage during the Tigers’ World Series run in 2006. And he served as an analyst for Fox Saturday Game of the Week regional telecasts for more than a decade.

In September 2018, Allen and Impemba were reportedly involved in a physical altercation off the air; both broadcasters were suspended for the remainder of the season and their contracts were not renewed by the Tigers. In 2022, Allen was hired to work as a television analyst for the Miami Marlins.

Rod married Adrian in 1985, and they had four children: sons Rod Jr. and Andrew, and daughters Rachel and Rhonda. Rod Jr. was a freshman All-American while at Arizona State, then played minor-league ball in the Yankees and White Sox organizations. Andrew played at Central Arizona College and Cal State Los Angeles; he was drafted by the Tigers in 2011 and and played parts of two seasons in the minor leagues.

Four decades in baseball. Playing in the Japan Series. Two World Series rings. High-profile broadcasting jobs. All for this kid from Santa Monica who had just 51 at-bats in the majors. Who woulda thunk it?

Sources

Block, Joe. “Major voice learned in minors.” Available from callofthegame.com. Accessed October 27. 2007.

Kirby, Tim. “Announcer Allen Gets Second Emmy.” Available from http://mlb.mlb.com/news/article.jsp?ymd=20070619&content_id=2036320&vkey=news_det&fext=.jsp&c_id=det. Accessed July 11, 2008.

Parker, Rob. “Allen has the gift of foresight.” Detroit News, April 4, 2007.

http://detroit.tigers.mlb.com/team/broadcasters.jsp?c_id=det

http://www.baseball-reference.com/

http://www.thebaseballcube.com

Vosik, Rick. Interview with Rod Allen, December 26, 2007.

Born in Bridgewater, South Dakota, on February 22, 1934, to LeRoy and Shirley Anderson, George relocated with his family in 1942 to Southern California, where his father and grandparents found wartime work in the shipyards. LeRoy played some semipro baseball and passed his love of the game on his son. Young George became a batboy for the University of Southern California’s Trojans baseball team, coached by Raoul “Rod” Dedeaux, an early influence in Anderson’s baseball life.

During his childhood Anderson played a lot of sandlot ball. In 1951 his American Legion team won a national championship at Briggs Stadium in Detroit (later renamed Tiger Stadium), the place where Anderson later managed the Tigers. His Dorsey High School team won 42 consecutive games, and Anderson was named an all-city player in his junior and senior years. Despite passing up a school closer to home and having to take two buses to get to Dorsey, Anderson chose it for its baseball program.

While still in high school, Anderson worked a summer job loading lumber on boxcars. In the evenings he played with a semipro team. He graduated from Dorsey High in 1953 and Dedeaux offered him a partial baseball scholarship to USC. Anderson never went to college, though, because a Brooklyn Dodgers scout he had met years earlier on the sandlots, Lefty Phillips, offered him $250 a month to play for the Dodgers’ Santa Barbara team in the Class C California League. Anderson’s parents knew and trusted Lefty, who by the time Anderson graduated from high school had moved up from sandlot scouting to scouting for the Dodgers. Anderson called Lefty “the sharpest baseball man I ever met.”

Phillips knew Anderson’s limitations and told him that to make it in baseball he would have to work very hard. Anderson was only 5-feet-9 and weighed just 170 pounds, but his determination and will to win gave him an edge. Anderson’s boyhood friend Billy Consolo signed his first major-league contract that same year, with the Boston Red Sox. Consolo was one of baseball’s bonus babies, with the rule at the time requiring the team providing the bonus to keep him on its major-league roster for two seasons. Anderson’s signing gave him a steady income, even if it wasn’t as a bonus baby, and he bought an engagement ring for his childhood sweetheart, Carol Valle. The two had known each other since the fifth grade and began dating in high school. They married in October 1953, at the end of Anderson’s first minor-league season as shortstop for the Santa Barbara Dodgers. He played in 141 games and hit for a .263 average.

The playing manager at Santa Barbara was George Scherger, a man Anderson would later invite to coach for him in Cincinnati. Anderson described Scherger as a man who wanted to win badly. Whenever the team lost, there would be extra practice the next day. This drive influenced Anderson, who adopted it when he became a manager himself.

Anderson moved around in the Brooklyn minor-league system, playing in Pueblo, Colorado, Fort Worth, Los Angeles in the Pacific Coast League, and Montreal in the International League. In Pueblo he hit .296 in 1954. In 1955 he moved up to Double A with the Texas League’s Fort Worth Cats. Tommy Holmes was the manager. (The team produced several future big-league managers. Anderson; Dick Williams, who was Anderson’s opposing manager in the 1972 and 1984 World Series, managed in the majors for 21 seasons, and joined Anderson in the Hall of Fame in 2008; Danny Ozark, who managed the Philadelphia Phillies and San Francisco Giants; Norm Sherry, who managed the California Angels and coached on several major-league teams; and Maury Wills, who managed two years in Seattle.)

Anderson received his nickname in Fort Worth. A radio announcer dubbed him Sparky because of his feistiness. It was a trait that sometimes got him into trouble. He wanted to win so badly that he could not tolerate anything that got in the way.

In 1958 the Dodgers put Anderson on their 40-man roster. He later remembered, “I had no right to think I could break in with a club that had [Gil] Hodges, [Charlie] Neal, Don Zimmer, Junior Gilliam, Dick Gray, [Carl] Furillo, Duke Snider, Gino Cimoli, Norm Larker, and Johnny Roseboro — and with a pitching staff built around Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, and Johnny Podres. I simply didn’t belong in that kind of company.” Sparky was sent back down to Montreal. Dodgers Manager Walter Alston broke the news of his demotion to him at a time when most managers left this duty to the traveling secretary. This impressed Sparky, who as a manager followed that example. He was told that the Philadelphia Phillies had expressed an interest in him, and since they had an International League farm team in Miami, they would be able to get a look at him.

Sparky played reasonably well in Montreal, batting .269 and stealing 21 bases for the Royals. He even hit two home runs. (“That’s what’s so good about not hitting many. You remember them all,” he said.) He was named the club’s most valuable player and finished second in the running for the league MVP. He did indeed catch the eye of the Phillies, who traded for him and made him their starting second baseman.

Sparky’s first day in the big leagues came on Opening Day of 1959 against Cincinnati at Philadelphia’s Connie Mack Stadium. In the eighth inning, he singled home what became the winning run in a 2-1 game. He received his first media barrage afterward. In his autobiography The Main Spark, he wrote that there was no more media attention for him until August that year. He played in 152 games, but batted only .218 and drove in only 34 runs. It was to be the only year he played in the big leagues.

That year he noticed a difference in the routine compared with the Dodgers’ big-league spring camp. The Dodgers operated on a set schedule, discipline that Sparky would come to value. In Philadelphia no one kept track of when players rolled in for practice, and often there would be no coaches around, according to Sparky’s account. The Phillies that year were a last-place team, as they had been the year before. Sparky said he would never forget the thunderous boos the hometown crowd greeted the Phillies with as they took the field on Opening Day. There was definitely not an attitude of winning in Philadelphia, and Sparky had been raised in an organization with the opposite outlook.

Sparky later said, “I realized you can’t be in a game as a professional unless winning and losing are everything, your whole life.”

During 1960s spring training, when he didn’t make it into many games, Sparky knew he would not stay with the team. He had hoped he would be traded to another major-league team, but instead was sold to Toronto. With one child and another on the way, Sparky was about to quit. Toronto’s owner, Jack Kent Cooke, offered him $10,000 to play, $2,000 more than he had made in Philadelphia. Because he had bills to pay, he accepted. Cooke told him he planned to sell him to a major-league club, but Sparky did not believe it would happen. He called the 1960 season a turning point in his career. He decided to start observing baseball strategies with the idea of one day becoming a manager. After four more years in the minors, all with the Maple Leafs, he landed his first managerial job, in Toronto in 1964. He uttered what would be the beginning of many boasts that he would later regret by saying, “If I can’t win with this club, I ought to be fired.”

Anderson’s temper made him a prophet. He was fired at the end of the season and soon realized that jobs for managers who could not control their emotions during the games were few. By his own admission, he was lucky to get his next job, with the St. Louis Cardinals’ farm club in Rock Hill, South Carolina, in 1965 because the Cardinals were desperate to find a manager just before spring training. Bob Howsam was the Cardinals’ general manager; the association proved to be advantageous a few years later. In 1968, when Howsam was the GM of the Cincinnati Reds, Sparky was hired to manage the Reds’ minor-league club in Asheville, North Carolina.

Anderson could not make ends meet during his minor-league managing career, so he took various odd jobs, including a factory job, a stocking job at Sears, and some offseason gigs selling used cars.

Then, after five years as a minor-league manager, Anderson landed a major-league coaching job with the San Diego Padres in 1969. At the end of the season, he resigned to accept a job coaching with the California Angels under his old mentor Lefty Phillips. But he never took that job.

While the ink was still drying on Anderson’s contact with the Angels, California general manager Dick Walsh received a phone call from Bob Howsam, the Reds’ GM, requesting permission to speak with Sparky about managing in Cincinnati. It was Walsh who broke the news to Sparky.

Sparky’s hiring prompted Cincinnati newspapers to declare: “Sparky Who?” He was only 35 years old and unknown to the public.

One of Anderson’s first moves as Reds manager was to make Pete Rose the team’s captain. Because Willie Mays was so well received in San Francisco as the Giants’ captain, Anderson thought Rose could serve the same role in Cincinnati. Rose was very popular, a hometown boy, and the top player on the team. With Rose delivering the lineup to the umpire before the game, perhaps people would not focus on “Sparky Who?”

Anderson inherited a talented team and remarked to his coach, George Scherger, that it would win the division by 10 games. These types of statements were often seen as exaggerations, and Sparky himself admitted that he was overconfident, but the fact remained that the 1970 Reds were an excellent team. Catcher Johnny Bench was on the verge of a breakout career season. Tommy Helms, Lee May, Tony Perez, Bernie Carbo, and Bobby Tolan joined Rose on that team. The Reds had finished in third place in 1969, winning 89 games, and they were primed to be winners. The 1970 team brought in rookie shortstop Dave Concepcion and pitchers Don Gullett and Pedro Borbon. In July of that year the team moved from aging Crosley Field into the new Riverfront Stadium and began to play on artificial turf.

The Reds won 102 games in Anderson’s major-league managerial debut season, a record that gave them the National League West Division championship over the Los Angeles Dodgers by 14½ games. The Reds swept the Pittsburgh Pirates in the best-of-five National League Championship Series to take the pennant and meet the Baltimore Orioles in the World Series. The Reds fell to the Orioles in five games, but it was a stunning first year for Anderson.

Anderson brought his work ethic with him to Cincinnati, and some players called his spring training a “slave camp.” GM Howsam insisted on a clean-cut look for the team: no facial hair, no long hair, and suit jackets for traveling, which Anderson supported and enforced. He believed that mannerisms and dress carried over into a kind of self-discipline that helped his players work together as a team.

But probably more central to Sparky’s success as a manager was the way he cared about his players. He allowed them to question him, and even encouraged it. He said, “I know there are managers who would never allow themselves to be put on this level with their own ballplayers, but as far as I’m concerned, it’s a form of communication.”

The following season was not a good one; the Reds finished below .500 and in fifth place. The following offseason brought the “Big Deal.” The Reds traded Lee May, Tommy Helms, and utility man Jimmy Stewart to the Houston Astros for Joe Morgan, Denis Menke, Jack Billingham, Cesar Geronimo, and Ed Armbrister. Cincinnati made the trade to gain speed at first and third base, essential for playing on Astroturf.

Besides being known as Sparky, Anderson was called Captain Hook because he never hesitated to pull a pitcher out of the game. The Big Red Machine was not blessed with superior starting pitching, and in an age when complete games were still common, Anderson’s tendency to replace pitchers during a game drew notice. He said, however, that he could always sense when a pitcher was just about to lose his effectiveness. His players realized that while he cared for players as individuals, he would not cater to one man. Second baseman Joe Morgan said, “In his passion for winning, he will not ever put the feelings of any individual above the team.”

The Reds returned as pennant winners in 1972 and faced the Pirates again. This time the NLCS went five games with the Reds coming out on top. The finish was so exciting that before the World Series against the Oakland A’s, Anderson made a statement he later regretted. He told the press that the two best teams in baseball had already played a series (Cincinnati and Pittsburgh) and that the World Series would be anticlimactic. Although he said what he really thought, the statement fired up the Oakland team. After the Reds lost the first two games, Anderson realized how much he had underestimated his opponents. The Reds lost to Oakland in seven games, but the Big Red Machine was building momentum.

In 1973 the Reds again won their division, but lost to the New York Mets in the League Championship Series, three games to two. In 1974, the Reds finished second behind the Los Angeles Dodgers, despite winning 98 games.

The Reds teams of 1975 and ’76 secured the label of dynasty and have been considered two of the best of all time. In 1975 they took first place early in June and never relinquished it. Pitcher Don Gullett was on his way to a remarkable season when he fractured his thumb. Without their star pitcher, the rest of the staff had to pick up the slack. Because the Reds’ bullpen was strong, the Captain Hook strategy was key. And with hitters like Morgan, Rose, George Foster, and Ken Griffey Sr. batting over .300 and Bench and Perez driving in more than 100 runs, the Big Red Machine usually outscored their opponents anyway. The Reds finished the season 20 games ahead of the second-place Dodgers with 108 wins, and swept Pittsburgh in the NLCS.

The 1975 World Series has gone down as one of the greatest ever. As the Series opened, Sparky began feeling the pressure. He was more cautious this time about feeling overconfident. The Boston Red Sox were the American League champs after sweeping the Oakland A’s in the ALCS. The opening game was an eye-opener for the Big Red Machine when they faced the pitching mastery of Luis Tiant and lost 6-0. After winning the next game in a tight match, the Reds won Game Three in extra innings. Tiant pitched the Red Sox to another victory in Game Four, but the Reds came back to win Game Five. When the Series returned to Boston, rain delayed play for 72 hours. Game Six, however, proved to be worth waiting for — the game that many, including Sparky himself, say was the single best game in World Series history.

Captain Hook pulled pitcher Gary Nolan after two innings, trailing 3-0. The Reds got to Tiant this time and evened the score in the fifth. By the eighth inning, leading 6-3, the Reds were thinking the championship was in the bag. After Pedro Borbon put two runners on, he got the hook and was replaced by Rawly Eastwick, who got two batters out. Then Bernie Carbo, a former Red, came in to pinch-hit. Carbo had already had a pinch homer in the Series, and Sparky didn’t figure he had another in him. But on a 2-2 count, Carbo drove the ball over the center-field wall to tie the game. After the Reds were retired in order in the ninth, the Red Sox loaded the bases with nobody out — but were unable to score. In the 10th inning, Red Sox outfielder Dwight Evans made a spectacular catch on a line drive by Morgan, robbing him of a possible home run and then doubling up Griffey off first base. The Reds threatened in the 12th, but didn’t score. In the bottom of the 12th, Pat Darcy, the Reds’ eighth pitcher in the game, came in to face catcher Carlton Fisk, who hit a high fly ball to deep left field. As Fisk ran to first base, he — and everyone else in the park — wondered if the ball would stay fair. Fisk jumped up and down waving his arms toward fair territory in what has become an iconic image. It was a homer, barely, hitting the foul pole. The Red Sox won, sending the Series to a deciding Game Seven. Sparky later said, “How can a manager of a losing team call it the greatest game ever played? Well, winning or losing, a man can’t lie to himself.”

Game Seven was a come-from-behind affair with the Reds finally coming out on top, 4-3, and winning their first world championship under Anderson. Sparky was unprepared for the media blitz that continued to follow him into the next season and the expectation of winning another championship, but he soon learned to make the media his friend and to encourage his players to do so also. Pete Rose said, “He didn’t make an enemy out of the press. He used it. And he taught us how to use it.” Later, Lance Parrish echoed this sentiment in Detroit: “Sparky let us know it wasn’t fair to treat the media any differently that we would treat anyone else. They had a job to do.”

Pete Rose and Joe Morgan led the league in several offensive categories in 1976, and while the Reds had no big winning pitchers, they did have seven pitchers who won at least 11 games each. After their 102-win regular season, the Reds did not lose a postseason game, sweeping the Philadelphia Phillies and then the New York Yankees in the World Series.

During that World Series, a reporter asked Anderson to compare his catcher to Yankees backstop Thurman Munson. Sparky said, “Don’t ever embarrass nobody by comparing him to Johnny Bench.” Sparky meant it as a general statement. When he returned home to California, he wrote Munson a letter of apology.

In 1977 the Reds finished second behind the Dodgers, and although 1978 was a better year, they finished second again. The Big Red Machine was being dismantled. Bob Howsam retired after the season. Winning was expected in Cincinnati, and Anderson was fired late that year. He was upset about how it happened. The Reds had just finished a tour in Japan, and management did not want to fire Sparky before that had been completed. But it was late, and most major-league clubs had already chosen their managers for the coming season. The firing was unpopular with the fans in Cincinnati and with the players. Joe Morgan said, “Sparky’s firing was wrong and to this day, I don’t understand it.” It was a blow that Sparky didn’t see coming.

Anderson was about to sign a long-term contract to manage the Chicago Cubs in 1979 when Detroit Tigers general manager Jim Campbell got wind of the deal. He contacted Sparky, who realized that the team was filled with young players. Anderson had enjoyed mentoring young players in his minor-league days.

At the press conference announcing his hiring, Anderson made another of his infamous predictions, saying the team would win a world championship in five years.

With talent like Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker, Kirk Gibson, Lance Parrish, Jack Morris, and Dan Petry, Sparky was confident. He also realized that discipline and conduct as a professional would have to be taught. Kirk Gibson later said, “He wanted me to learn the game of baseball and learn how to treat people right. It took four to five years to get through to me.”

As he did in Cincinnati, Anderson kept an open-door policy. Players were encouraged to speak their minds, but Sparky had the final say. He called the team “rougher than a three-day beard.” He started with fundamentals, drilling the players until their skills became routine. He insisted on coats and ties for traveling, saying, “If you carry yourself proudly, you look like a pro.”

In 1981 the Tigers surprised the American League by making an East Division pennant run during the second half of the strike-split season. In 1983 the team began to show its potential by winning 92 games. The next season was magical.

The 1984 Tigers led their division wire to wire, starting off by winning nine straight games, and then going an unbelievable 35-5 to leave their opponents in the dust in what became a 104-win season. What Sparky had in Detroit, which he had never had in Cincinnati, was two superior starting pitchers to lead his rotation, Jack Morris, who pitched a no-hitter in April, and Dan Petry. Reliever Guillermo Hernandez, acquired in a trade in March, was an All-Star while winning the American League Cy Young and Most Valuable Player Awards.

But pitching was not the team’s only strength. Trammell led the team in batting with a .314 average. Parrish was an All-Star that year, won the second of three straight Gold Gloves, and hit 33 home runs.

When the team clinched the division championship, Anderson felt vindicated. He remembered thinking, “No one will ever question me again.” No matter what happened in the postseason, the best team, he said, was the one that had won 104 games in the regular season and wore a big “D” on its uniforms.

The Tigers swept the Kansas City Royals in the AL Championship Series. Sparky took a team to the World Series for the fifth time in his career, this time against a National League club, the San Diego Padres. The first game was close, with Detroit winning, 3-2. After the game, Lou Whitaker complimented his manager: “When Sparky came to us from Cincinnati, he brought us back to fundamentals. We had a lot to learn and it’s paying off.” The Tigers lost Game Two, but that was the only game they would lose, and they became world champions before the hometown crowd.

After the Series, Sparky’s wife wanted him to quit. He thought about it. It had been a tough year. He was proud of the team and happy for the city of Detroit, but for five years he had struggled with trying to prove Cincinnati wrong for firing him, and with the success of Detroit that year, the pressure he put on himself became almost unbearable. He had to get back to the business of baseball and to enjoying the game again. He couldn’t do that if he quit.

There would be no back-to-back championships for Anderson in Detroit. In 1985 and again in 1986 the team finished third. The 1987 Tigers were not expected to do much better and early in May were in last place. Anderson chose that time to make another prediction, saying his team would be in the race by the end of the season. The Tigers started putting together some win streaks. Before a season-ending series in Detroit against the Toronto Blue Jays, the Tigers were one game behind Toronto. Detroit finished with a flourish, winning three straight one-run games to clinch the AL East title, although the Tigers lost to Minnesota in five games in a best-of-seven ALCS.

The team that year had no outstanding talent save for Alan Trammell, who finished second in the voting for Most Valuable Player. Anderson said, “We had no business running with the big boys. It was pure determination.” Pitcher Jack Morris said, “In 1984, we probably had the best club I ever played on in Detroit. In ’87 we were less talented but typical overachievers. We didn’t realize we weren’t that good.”

Sparky’s efforts with the team that year won him the American League Manager of the Year award. He said, “When I look back on that year, I still feel a high. The guys on that team can be proud of themselves for the rest of their lives.”

In 1988 the team finished second behind the Red Sox, but 1989 saw the Tigers lose 103 games. For a man who wanted to win more than anything else, it was a horrible year. Anderson was also experiencing personal problems as his daughter was undergoing a painful divorce in California and he felt guilty about his own absence from the family.

Anderson, who believed that because baseball had blessed him he had a responsibility to give back to the community, was always participating in charity events. In May of that year he attended an event at Children’s Hospital and afterward grew so fatigued that Tigers president Jim Campbell sent him home to California to rest. When Sparky left Detroit, he believed he wouldn’t manage again. He blamed himself for Detroit’s terrible year, but with the team he had and the injuries they suffered, even Sparky Anderson could not coax a winner. He was finally able to give up his obsession for winning after spending 17 days away from the team. He said, “My greatest gift today is knowing I have a tomorrow.”

Anderson continued to manage mediocre teams in Detroit through 1995. That season, during spring training, he drew a lot of attention for refusing to manage replacement players during a player strike. But he said later that that was not the whole story. He knew that management would never open the season with replacement players; it was a ruse. “I managed 25 years at that time in the major leagues, and I was no joke. I wasn’t going to be part of a joke. That was the biggest travesty I have ever seen in my career.”

Sparky was granted a leave of absence and returned to manage that year when, as he predicted, the strike was settled and replacement players were dismissed. While rumor said he was forced out of the game, Anderson had been considering retiring for some time. He left as one of baseball’s winningest managers, fifth all-time as of 2010. He was the first manager to win the World Series in both leagues. In 1984 and 1987 he won the American League Manager of the Year award. He was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2000.

Anderson’s return visits to Detroit were not all that frequent in retirement. He stayed away from the final game at Tiger Stadium in 1999. But he turned up in uniform at the Tigers’ spring training home in Lakeland in 2003 to give support to new Detroit manager Alan Trammell, one of his protégés. Sparky also showed up at the 25th anniversary gathering of the 1984 Tigers championship team in Comerica Park in Detroit. Tigers teammates noted Anderson looked frail.

After the 2010 World Series had ended, Anderson’s family said that Sparky was in hospice care as he was suffering from the effects of dementia. On November 4, two days after the family’s announcement, Anderson died at age 76.

An earlier version of this biography appeared in “Detroit Tigers 1984: What A Start! What A Finish!” (SABR, 2012), edited by Mark Pattison and David Raglin and SABR’s “The Great Eight: The 1975 Cincinnati Reds” (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), edited by Mark Armour.

Sources

Anderson, Sparky, with Dan Ewald. They Call Me Sparky. Sleeping Bear Press. 1998.

Anderson, Sparky. Bless You Boys: Diary of the Detroit Tigers’ 1984 Season. Contemporary Books. 1984.

Anderson, Sparky, and Si Burick. The Main Spark: Sparky Anderson and the Cincinnati Reds. Doubleday & Company, Inc. 1978.

Pattison, Mark. “Excerpts From CNS Newsmaker Interview with Sparky Anderson” Catholic News Service, August 29, 1996.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_Detroit_Tigers_season

Yuhasz, Dennis. “Sparky Anderson Biography,” http://baseball-almanac.com.

It was there that Bair established himself as one of the best college pitchers in the country. He pitched a no-hitter against Miami (Ohio) on April 24, 1970, and was named to the second team All-Mid-American Conference. In 1971, Bair’s 120 strikeouts set a conference record, and he was named to the first team All-MAC. On June 8, he was drafted by the Pittsburgh Pirates in the second round of the free agent draft, and signed with the Pirates later that month. Being drafted by Pittsburgh proved to be a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it was nice being part of an organization that would go on to win the World Series in 1971, but on the other hand it was harder to ascend to the big-league roster.

And so began Bair’s odyssey through the minor leagues. He was first sent to the Salem Rebels, the Pirates’ Class A affiliate in the Carolina League, and before the season was over he had progressed to the Double-A Waterbury Pirates in the Eastern League. In 1972, he was back at Salem (with the Rebels now known as the Pirates) and, after compiling a 15-7 record with a 2.85 earned-run average, he was promoted to the Pirates’ top farm club, the Charleston Charlies of the Triple-A International League, where he was 0-1. Bair spent the next four seasons, through 1976, at Charleston. In his first full season there,1973, the Charlies won the league’s South Division championship, but lost to Pawtucket in the playoff finals. While in Charleston, Bair played alongside former and future big leaguers Dave Parker, Kent Tekulve, and Tony La Russa. Bair met Charleston native Connie Lea Taylor and married her on October 22, 1977. One oddity of Bair’s minor-league career was that he was exclusively a starter through 1975, and then exclusively a reliever from 1976 on — a trend that continued in the majors until one 1983 start in Detroit.

Bair finally made his big-league debut for the Pirates on September 13, 1976. Brought up at the end of the season, he pitched 6⅓ innings in four games, giving up four hits ands four runs. In his big-league bow, he pitched two perfect innings, the eighth and ninth frames of a 5-0 loss to the New York Mets. Then, just before the 1977 season opener, he was traded. In what is considered by some as one of the more lopsided trades in major-league history, Bair, Mitchell Page, Tony Armas, Rick Langford, Doc Medich, and Dave Giusti were sent to the Oakland A’s for Chris Batton, Tommy Helms, and Phil Garner. (The Pirates won a World Series in 1979 with Garner in the lineup.) Bair pitched four games in April for Oakland, but before the month was out was dispatched to its Triple-A affiliate, the San Jose Missions in the Pacific Coast League. Bair was recalled in midseason to bolster the A’s relief corps. He did a serviceable job, posting a 3.46 ERA with eight saves in 45 games including his April stint, but was traded once again during spring training in 1978.

This time, Bair was sent to the Cincinnati Reds in exchange for Dave Revering and a cash. It turned out to be an excellent deal for the Reds, for 1978 turned out to be Bair’s annus mirabilis. Under the eye of manager Sparky Anderson, he relieved in 70 games, accounting for 28 saves and posting a sterling 1.97 ERA, along with seven wins. Despite Bair’s efforts, Cincinnati failed to make the playoffs. But in 1979 Bair got his first taste of postseason action, against his old team, the Pirates, after the Reds won the West Division title, with Bair contributing an 11-7 record, all in relief, and 16 saves. But the Reds were swept in three games in the National League Championship Series, with Bair taking the loss in Game Two by giving up the winning run in the tenth inning.

After pitching for a third season for the Reds in 1980, going 3-6 with six saves, Bair could be forgiven if he thought he might not be such a travelin’ man. But as the 1981 season wound down, Bair found himself on the move once again, this time being traded to the St. Louis Cardinals on September 10 for Joe Edelen and Neil Fiala. Both the Cardinals and the Reds were excellent teams that year, with the Reds finishing with the best record in the West Division and the Cardinals compiling the best record in the East. However, neither the Reds nor the Cardinals qualified for postseason play because this was the strike-shortened 1981 season, and Major League Baseball resorted to a split-season format to determine which teams made the playoffs. So it was that Bair (4-2 overall), Edelen, and Fiala came to share the dubious distinction of playing for the teams with the two best records in the National League but not making the playoffs.

That changed change for Bair in 1982, as the Cardinals again compiled the best record in the NL East. In the NL Championship Series, the Cardinals swept the Atlanta Braves in three games. Bair’s only appearance came in Game Two as he relieved starter John Stuper before giving way to Bruce Sutter, who collected the win as the Cardinals came from behind. In the World Series, the Cardinals faced the Milwaukee Brewers in a seesaw battle that went the limit, with the Cardinals finally triumphing, 6-3, in Game Seven at Busch Stadium. Bair took the loss in Game Four, giving up a walk and a single to the only two batters he faced as the Brewers won the game with a six-run seventh inning. He pitched two scoreless innings in Game Two and walked the only batter he faced in Game Three. Manager Whitey Herzog kept him on the bench for the remainder of the Series.

Halfway through the 1983 season, Bair found himself back in the American League, as the Cardinals traded him to the Tigers for a player to be named later, pitcher Dave Rucker. Bair may have had reason to complain about the manner in which he kept getting bounced from team to team, but he certainly couldn’t complain about the quality of the teams he was sent to. After being drafted by the 1971 Pirates, he played on the Reds of the late 1970s, the Cardinals of the early 1980s, and finally the Tigers of the mid-1980s. For the ’83 season, he was 1-1 with one save in 26 games for the Cards, but an impressive 7-3 with four saves in 27 appearances for Detroit.

Reunited with manager Sparky Anderson, Bair found himself once again on a powerhouse team, this time a club that rocketed off to a 35-5 start to begin the 1984 season — a good thing since, as a free agent, he had chosen to re-sign with Detroit for 1984. Throughout the year, much was made of the relative youth of the Tigers, and in his diary from that year, Bless You Boys, Anderson repeatedly refers to his players as “our kids.” At the age of 34, Bair was one of the veterans on the club, and he held the distinction of being the only player on the team who could slip on a World Series ring for special occasions. Milt Wilcox, Dave Bergman, and Willie Hernandez were the only other Tigers players to make it to the 1984 playoffs who had seen postseason action, but none of them had played on a World Series winner as Bair had.

For his part, Anderson was delighted to have Bair on his squad, saying on April 13, “Doug is throwing just like when I first got him at Cincinnati back in 1978. His confidence is back and he has a better slider. He will be very important in long relief to help us get to Lopez and Hernandez later in the game.” In his own diary of the 1984 season, Inside Pitch, pitching coach Roger Craig echoed this sentiment, calling Bair “the unsung hero of my staff” and adding, “I have the best relief staff of any club with Hernandez, Lopez, Bair, and Rozema.” The statistics bear out Bair’s effectiveness early in the season. After Detroit’s first 70 games, Bair was 4-0 with three saves and a 3.14 ERA.

After a fine half-season, however, Bair’s performance fell off. To rest his starters, Anderson gave Bair, with a 2.63 ERA at the time, his only start of the season on July 8, the day before the All-Star break. Bair responded by giving up six runs in 2⅔ innings, and never quite recaptured his early-season form. As Craig lamented in August, “He has fallen into a bad habit of failing to use the fastball — his best pitch — to put away batters. Doug often gets ahead in the count and then tries to finesse batters instead of going after them aggressively.” Anderson echoed this sentiment, saying, “Doug Bair is having a tough time.” Bair pulled a muscle in his right side in September and missed nine days, but came back and got the victory against the Yankees in New York, the Tigers’ 103rd win of the season, which tied the club record for victories in a season.

Bair did not appear in the American League Championship Series, in which the Tigers handily swept the Kansas City Royals in three games. He pitched pitch in only one game of the World Series, Game Two in San Diego. With starter Dan Petry unable to hold the 3-0 lead he was staked to in the first inning, Bair was one of several relievers brought in to hold the Padres at bay. With San Diego ahead 5-3 in the seventh inning, Bair relieved Bill Scherrer with one out and Kurt Bevacqua on first. Bair struck out the only batter he faced, Carmelo Martinez, and Bevacqua was thrown out trying to steal second to end the inning. San Diego wore down the rest of the bullpen in that game, and the Tigers suffered their only loss in the World Series.

Despite picking up his second World Series ring, Bair was soon on the move again. Released by the Tigers on August 22, 1985, Bair was picked up by one of his old teams, the Cardinals, but pitched just two innings for them the rest of the year. Granted free agency after the season, Bair began the 1986 season pitching for the Tacoma Tigers, the Triple-A affiliate of another of his old teams, Oakland, and eventually worked his way back to the big league club, where he was 2-3 with four saves. This became the pattern in his career over the next few years.

Bair began 1987 pitching for the Triple-A Maine Guides of the International League before being called up by the Philadelphia Phillies. In 1988 he started in Triple A with the Syracuse Chiefs before being called up to the Toronto Blue Jays. In 1989 he began again with the Chiefs before being sold to yet another of his old teams, the Pirates, for whom he pitched from mid-June to the end of the campaign (2-3, one save) and again at the start of the 1990 season before being demoted to the Triple-A Buffalo Bisons. Bair was called up to the Pirates in mid-August for what turned out to be his last stint in the major leagues. Having begun his major-league pitching career with the Pirates, he had come full circle to end it with them as well, appearing in his last major-league game on October 3, 1990, the last day of the regular season. But this didn’t mean Doug Bair was done pitching. In 1991 he pitched for Triple-A clubs in the Tigers and Blue Jays organizations, and in 1992 he started six games for the Edmonton Trappers of the Pacific Coast League, the Triple-A affiliate of the California Angels. Those six starts were more than he had compiled in his 15-year major-league career. And was Doug Bair, now 42 years old, finally done pitching? Well, no.

After a childhood, college career, and adulthood spent throwing a ball, Bair was in no mood to stop now. There was still the Men’s Senior Baseball League (otherwise known as the Roy Hobbs League) in Ohio. Anyone who has played professionally has to wait a year before joining the league, but once he was eligible, Bair signed up to play in the replica of Crosley Field that was built in Blue Ash, Ohio. Later, Bair returned to organized baseball as a pitching coach. In 2006 he was the pitching coach for the Billings Mustangs, the Rookie-level minor league affiliate of the Cincinnati Reds. In 2007 and 2008 he was with the Dayton Dragons, the Reds’ low-A affiliate in the Midwest League.

At 6 feet tall and listed at weighing between 170 and 180 pounds, Bair was never an especially intimidating presence on the mound, but he was a hard-throwing right-hander whose best pitch was his fastball. When given a choice, he favored the uniform number 40. He played on some of the best teams of his era and for some of the game’s most legendary managers as well (Whitey Herzog, Sparky Anderson, and Tony La Russa). Despite his 15 seasons in the major leagues (and 14 seasons in the minor leagues) and two World Series titles, it’s unlikely Bair will ever receive a call from Cooperstown. His stellar 1978 season aside, Bair was essentially a journeyman middle reliever who twice was on the right team at the right time. Still, his résumé lists two halls of fame: He was inducted into the Bowling Green State University Hall of Fame in 1978 and the Northeast Indiana Baseball Association Hall of Fame in 2008. As Sparky Anderson enthused, “There’ll never be another bullpen like that of the Tigers of 1984. Never. There couldn’t be.” Doug Bair was an integral part of that bullpen. And many others.

Last revised: August 9, 2021 (zp)

Sources

Anderson, Sparky. Bless You Boys. Chicago: Contemporary Books. 1984.

Craig, Roger. Inside Pitch. Grand Rapids, Michigan: Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co. 1984.

Douglas Lee Baker was born in Fullerton, California, on April 3, 1961, to an athletic family; the Bakers produced two sons who would eventually reach the pinnacle of their sport. Doug’s older brother, Dave, had the proverbial cup of coffee as a 24–year-old third baseman with the Toronto Blue Jays in September 1982.

Doug graduated from Granada Hills (California) High School in 1978 as a fellow alumnus of football great John Elway. Granada Hills High also produced Ryan Braun and Gary Matthews Jr., baseball stars of a later generation.

After graduating, Baker entered Los Angeles Valley Junior College, attending for three years before transferring to a larger school more suitable for his talents on the diamond, Arizona State University. “You have to remember that I was so good when I was a kid that I red-shirted my first year at Los Angeles Valley. A JC redshirt. How many kids today are going to be happy with that … hearing the coach say, ‘We’d love for you to come to our school, but by the way, you’re not good enough to play yet.’ I was just happy to be playing baseball,” Baker told writer David Rawnsley of the Web site perfectgame.com. While still attending LA Valley, Baker developed his talent to the extent that he caught the eye of a scout for the Oakland Athletics, who drafted him at the age of 19 in the January phase of the 1981 amateur draft. Doug elected to continue college and play baseball for Jim Brock at Arizona State that fall rather than sign a professional contract.

In the spring of 1982, the pros came calling again and Baker was selected by the Tigers in the ninth round of the amateur draft. This time he chose to sign. Baker was assigned to the Tigers’ Double-A affiliate in Birmingham, Alabama (Southern League), bypassing the rookie league and Class A. But he struggled, hitting just .225 and committing 14 errors in just 70 games at shortstop.

It was apparent that Baker would need some additional seasoning at the Double-A level, so he returned to Birmingham in the spring of 1983. He adjusted enough to the pitching to nudge his average to .241, while showing some plate discipline with only 51 strikeouts and 65 walks — giving him a respectable .352 on-base percentage in a league-leading 146 contests, split between shortstop and the outfield. His performance that summer earned Baker a spot on the Southern League All-Star squad.

Baker’s improvement at the plate and his fine glove work prompted Tigers management to add him to the list of nonroster invitees to their 1984 major-league camp in Lakeland, Florida. His performance that spring caught the eye of manager Sparky Anderson, but with All-Star Trammell at short and handyman Tom Brookens backing him up, the Tigers had no immediate need for a kid less than two years removed from college. Baker, however, moved another rung up the organizational ladder when he was assigned that spring to the Tigers’ Triple-A affiliate in Evansville, Indiana (American Association). He thrived as the Triplets’ shortstop, hitting .259 and showing some pop with eight home runs in only 243 at-bats. He continued to draw walks with his on-base percentage rising to .377. His defense earned him Baseball America’s recognition as the best defender at shortstop in the American Association, with the best arm of any infielder in the league.

On July 2, 1984, barely two years after signing his first professional contract, Doug Baker received the call. With Alan Trammell experiencing arm soreness, Anderson, remembering “the kid with the good glove” from spring training, called Baker up from Evansville. He was immediately inserted into the lineup, batting ninth against the White Sox and lefty Floyd Bannister.

Baker spelled Trammell off and on until July 12, when Trammell’s arm trouble finally put him on the disabled list. On July 13, in his seventh game and 14th at-bat, Baker picked up his first major-league hit — a sixth-inning single leading off against the Twins’ John Butcher in Minnesota.

A week and a half later, Doug stroked four singles in a 9-5 victory at Cleveland.

After clearing the bases with a triple in the first game of a home doubleheader against the Indians on July 31, Baker, hitting just .157, was sent back to Evansville. “Baker is a good kid who will be a good player, but we need that right-handed hitting because right now, ours stinks,” Anderson wrote in his memoir, Bless You Boys: Diary of the Detroit Tigers’ 1984 Season.

“I’m not jumping up and down about it,” Baker said of his demotion. “Nobody likes to be sent back down, but I expected it sooner or later. The last thing I wanted to do was come up and get in the way of what’s going on up here. If I helped a little, I’m going back pleased.”

Baker’s return to Evansville was short-lived as Trammell’s arm troubles lingered. He returned to the Tigers and started at short on August 11. Three days later, Anderson inserted him into the lineup for both ends of the Tigers’ sixth doubleheader in 19 days. Then, on August 20, he contributed three hits as part of a 20-hit attack as the Tigers overwhelmed Oakland 14-1. This was during a stretch when Baker was filling in at second base for Lou Whitaker, himself ailing with a sore back, with five games in five days, the last four of them starts. Despite his spurts of offensive prowess, Baker ended the season hitting just .185 for the American League East champion Tigers.

Anderson named Baker as a reserve infielder for the American League Championship Series against Kansas City. Baker came in for Trammell at shortstop in the ninth inning of the Tigers’ 8-1 victory in Game One. That was his only postseason appearance as he was left off the World Series roster. Baker, however, stayed with the team throughout its postseason trek to a world championship.

“It’s exactly what you think it would be. There’s nothing better. You’re on top of the world,” Baker told writer Rawnsley about his experience as a role player on a World Series winner, just 28 months after signing his first professional contract.

After arthroscopic surgery on his left knee performed immediately after the World Series, Baker came to spring training physically renewed in 1985 and with the confidence that he had a role as a backup infielder. But in one of the more head-shaking moments in Tigers history, Anderson had the airport-bound bus stop at Tigertown and made Baker get off. Baker found himself optioned to the Nashville Sounds, the Tigers’ new American Association affiliate.

Serving as the primary shortstop for the Sounds for the balance of the summer of 1985, Baker hit just .218 in 107 games. Called up with rosters expanding in September, Doug appeared in 12 games, going 5-for-25 in the waning weeks for the Tigers, spelling Trammell in the late innings and in occasional starts. Coupled with his 0-for-2 performance in three games for Detroit earlier in the season, Baker matched his .185 batting average of 1984.

Baker began 1986 with the Tigers, again used sparingly — appearing in just three games in two weeks — before being optioned to Nashville, where he again served as the Sounds’ regular shortstop and improved his batting average to .274. He was pulled from the bushes with roster expansion in September. He got to start five straight games at shortstop, September 25-30. But he hit just.125 with one of his three hits a double.

A veteran of 71 games with the Tigers in three seasons of secondary duty, Baker came to spring training in 1987 assuming again that as in the prior two seasons, he would accompany the team as it headed north. Manager Sparky Anderson instead elected to save the roster spot, filling the backup shortstop role with Brookens, who had been the primary third baseman before the arrival of Darnell Coles in 1986.

Again the Tigers’ Triple-A shortstop, but this time in Toledo, Baker batted .247 in 117 games for the Mud Hens. Baker was summoned to Detroit in September and appeared defensively in eight games, going hitless in one at-bat.

Doug Baker’s opportunities as a backup to Alan Trammell had diminished a great deal after he logged 43 games in 1984, with just 15 games in 1985, then 13 in 1986, and only eight in September 1987. The reduced role for Baker as a backup infielder for the Tigers ended abruptly. Around the time the full squad was scheduled to join the pitchers and catchers at spring training camp in Lakeland in February 1988, Baker found himself wearing new colors as he was dealt by Detroit to the Minnesota Twins for minor leaguer Julius McDougal.

Joining a new organization carried with it hope of greater opportunity for Baker. Yet incumbent Twins shortstop Greg Gagne proved to be as immovable as Trammell had been. When camp broke, Baker was assigned to Triple-A Portland of the Pacific Coast League, where he hit .245 for the 1988 season with a career-high 17 steals. As in each of the prior four seasons, Baker returned to the American League as a September call-up, appearing in 11 games for Minnesota and going 0-for-7 at the plate.

The following spring, he was again dispatched to Triple-A, but this time he was at Portland for just a month before the Twins called him east to back up Gagne. Returned to Portland just two weeks later, Baker resumed his shortstop duties for the Beavers. Early in July, he found himself back in Minnesota, but this time he contributed offensively, smacking four hits in his first six official at-bats, bunching in a walk, a sacrifice, and a sacrifice fly. He now stood at 6-for-11 for the season, combined with the 2-for-5 performance earlier in the season, and was poised to finally break into the lineup — which he did, starting nine games in next 12 days. He cooled off to a .310 average by the end of July, and by the middle of August, after a few more starts, was returned to Portland still sporting a healthy .293 batting average. Baker remained stellar in the field for Portland though hitting just .237. He appeared in 13 more games for the Twins in September, coming just a hit shy of .300, finishing the year at .295 (23-for-78) — easily his best stint hitting at the big-league level.

His reward for the success of the 1989 season was a trip north with the Twins in the spring of 1990. However, this round-trip lasted just three games and one at-bat – his final swing in the big leagues – resulting in a fly out to left field off Dennis Eckersley in the top of the eighth inning of a 5-3 Twins loss in Oakland on April 10, 1990. Back at Portland, the 29-year-old Baker took on a utility role – playing several games at second, third, and the outfield, and even twice at first base – while patrolling the familiar shortstop post in 43 contests with only four errors. However, a .216 average kept him off the September big-league squad for the first time in seven seasons.

The Twins granted Baker free agency in October 1990. He signed a minor-league contract with the Houston Astros and joined the Triple-A Tucson Toros for the 1991 season. Again playing in mostly a utility role, Baker slumped to .183 in 73 games for the eventual Pacific Coast League champion Toros, his worst mark ever as a regular. With the prospects of returning to the major leagues becoming increasingly dim for an aging minor-league infielder whose skills — at least with the bat – were apparently diminishing, Baker retired after the 1990 season.

Reminiscing to David Rawnsley about his career, Baker talked about playing for Sparky Anderson and the Twins’ Tom Kelly: “For a player like me, Kelly was by far the best manager I could have. You’ve often heard about how a manager ‘gets the most out of his players,’ well, that was Kelly. He cared about the 25th player on the team (usually me) as much as the stars and made sure that you felt you were contributing. If you got some at-bats one day and had a hit or two, he’d make sure that you were out there again the next day just to get your confidence up.

“Sparky, on the other hand, knew who his studs were and with guys like Alan Trammell, Lou Whitaker, Lance Parrish, Kirk Gibson, and Jack Morris, the Tigers obviously had some good ones. He took care of them and the bench guys knew our role was to take care of them, too. Whitaker (a left-handed hitter) tended to have a sore back or flu-like symptoms only when we were facing some nasty left-handed pitcher, so I’d be out there not having seen a live pitch in two weeks and trying to hit off Ron Guidry or Mark Langston or Frank Viola. So hitting .185 (his batting average in 1984) doesn’t seem so bad in retrospect.”

Baker also described the famous double-play combination he occasionally subbed for: “Playing behind Trammell and Whitaker was a treat because they were such talented players, and very different personalities. Trammell is from Southern California and was one of the best teammates I ever had. Super guy who was nice to a fault with everyone.

“Whitaker was an immensely talented player who could do just about anything he wanted on the field. He’d go on these streaks with no explanation where he’d say, ‘I’m going to pull the ball in the air for a few days,’ or ‘I’m going to hit line drives over the shortstop for a few days’ and just do it. Heck, I couldn’t do that in BP. But he was a very different personality, that’s for sure.”

After retiring as a player, Baker served as a minor-league coach for a season before moving on to serve as a scout for the Atlanta Braves for three years and then for the Cleveland Indians organization for eight years.

Doug returned to his roots in Southern California, joining Perfect Game USA, touted on its web site as the “World’s Largest Scouting Report Service” in 2003, assuming the duties of West Coast scouting supervisor shortly thereafter.

In 2009 Baker was assisting in other player development programs either as a guest instructor or on paid staff, in either capacity with such organizations as MVP Baseball, the ABD Academy, and the Katy Sting Academy.

Working at developing young talent in the game he loves, Baker encourages them to “play like it’s fun to play. I know it’s trite but they still call this a ‘game’ and that’s what it should be. I know I grew up like every kid with a glove and cleats thinking that I wanted to be a big leaguer. I was very lucky. But when I went on the field I was just thinking how great it was that I was playing baseball with my friends.”

Acknowledgements

Emily Newhouse, Harrison Newhouse, David Rawnsley, Jeff Samoray

Sources

Publications

Anderson, Sparky. Bless You Boys: Diary of the Detroit Tigers’ 1984 Season. Chicago: Contemporary Books, Inc. 1984.

Paladino, Larry. 1985 Detroit Tigers Official Yearbook. Detroit: Detroit Tigers. 1985.

Paladino, Larry. 1987 Detroit Tigers Official Yearbook. Detroit: Detroit Tigers. 1987.

Articles

Gage, Tom. “Tigers Alter Roster During Twin Bill.” The Sporting News, August 13, 1984.

Rawnsley, David. “PG Supervisor and former Big Leaguer Doug Baker.” www.perfectgame.org. 2005.

Websites

http://www.baseball-reference.com

http://www.retrosheet.org

http://www.thebaseballcube.com

Berenguer was born on November 30, 1954, in Aguadulce, Panama, one of nine children born to Francisco and Bienvenda Berenguer. He played in youth leagues as a third baseman until the age of 16. Noting his rocket arm, Berenguer’s brother Jose convinced his younger sibling that he could be a successful pitcher. Jose’s advice was a turning point in the blossoming career of the younger Berenguer, and led to 15 years in the big leagues.

In 1972, at the age of 18, Berenguer, a right-hander, made the Panamanian National Team, traveling to various locations with his fellow countrymen. While playing a game in Cuba, Berenguer met Tony Oliva and Luis Tiant, Cuban-born players who had made the jump to America and the major leagues. Oliva was then starring with the Minnesota Twins and Tiant with the Boston Red Sox. “They told me to work hard, and that they would soon see me in America,” Berenguer said in an interview in 2009. “I never thought I had a chance to come to America.”

That advice and encouragement from two of the game’s most influential Latinos motivated Berenguer, and three years later, in 1975, a New York Mets scout, former major leaguer Nino Escalera, spotted him in a game in Panama. He saw enough to know that Juan had a major-league arm, and he showed up at the Berenguers’ front door at 6 o’clock the following morning, taking Berenguer’s mother by surprise. Reluctant to wake Juan, she tried to send Escalera away, explaining that Juan was still asleep. Luckily for Juan, brother Jose intervened, woke his kid brother and ushered in Escalera, contract in hand. By 6:45 p.m., Berenguer’s name was on the contract, and he was bound for spring training in St. Petersburg, Florida.

At that camp, Berenguer met Mets pitchers Tom Seaver, already a 146-game winner, and Jerry Koosman, among other players. For a boy making his first trip to America, those names were as foreign as the language. However, the two were gracious veterans, and they told Berenguer to keep working hard.

Berenguer spent the 1975 through 1978 seasons working his way up to the high minors — 5-4 and a 2.94 ERA in 1975 with Wausau in the Class A Midwest League, 10-13 and 3.61 in 1976 with Lynchburg in the Class A Carolina League, and 9-8 and 3.43 in 1977 with Jackson in the Double-A Texas League. He reached a peak in 1978 with Tidewater in the Triple-A International League, winning the league’s Pitcher of the Year Award with a record of 10-7, a 3.67 ERA, eight complete games, and three shutouts. His reward was a call-up to the parent club and making his first big-league start, at the age of 23, on August 17 in front of 9,003 fans at Shea Stadium. The opponent that evening was the San Diego Padres, and Berenguer had to pitch against the legendary Gaylord Perry, then well on his way to 300 victories. The Mets, by comparison, were well on their way to a last-place finish in the National League’s Eastern Division.

“My leg was shaking,” Berenguer recalled. “I was very nervous to go against one of the best players in baseball. But Nino [Escalera] told me to go in and pitch hard.”

The top of the first inning was rocky as he walked the first two batters, which led to a run for the Padres. Berenguer settled down until the third inning, when San Diego plated four runs, two of them on a home run by Tucker Ashford. Berenguer finished the third, but was removed for a pinch-hitter in the bottom of the inning. The line for his first big league start: 3 IP, 4 H, 5 ER, 4 BB, 2K.

After four more appearances, including two additional starts, Berenguer ended his first major-league season with an 0-2 record, an ERA of 8.31, and the knowledge that he needed another pitch to complement his fastball.

Winter ball in Venezuela was the next stop, with the goal of finding the elusive breaking ball. “I had a good fastball,” said Berenguer. “But I needed to find another pitch. The changeup wasn’t it. Every time I used a changeup, someone took me deep. They could see it coming.”

Winter ball and two more stints in Triple-A, although helpful, failed to produce the secondary pitch Berenguer desired, and he made only sporadic late-season appearances for the Mets in 1979 and 1980. He spent the bulk of 1979 on loan to the Tacoma Tugs, Cleveland’s affiliate in the Pacific Coast League, going 8-8 with a 4.88 ERA. It was in that season that Berenguer earned his first big-league win, pitching 7? innings, allowing two earned runs and registering four strikeouts in a Mets victory over the St. Louis Cardinals at Busch Stadium on September 28. Preserving the win for Berenguer was 23-year-old rookie Jeff Reardon, who earned his first save for a player who would be his World Series teammate eight years later, in 1987. The 1980 season found Berenguer at Triple-A Tidewater, where he posted a 9-15 mark with an improved 3.84 ERA.

Late in spring training of 1981, buried on the Mets’ depth chart, Berenguer got word from manager Joe Torre that his Mets days were over, and that he was headed to Kansas City for a fresh start. “Joe told me that I was going someplace where I could pitch in the big leagues,” Berenguer said.

Berenguer was dealt for Marvell Wynne and John Skinner, neither of whom ever played for the Mets. Former minor-league pitching instructor Bill Connors had taken the first of his several major-league pitching coach positions with the Royals a year earlier. And he wanted Juan.

For the first time, Berenguer opened a season with the big club, making his first appearance on April 20. After seven more appearances, including three starts, giving him an 0-4 record and an 8.69 ERA, Berenguer’s 1981 season came to a halt on June 12 as the Major League Baseball Players Association voted to strike in the name of free agency. On August 8, the eve of resumption of play, Berenguer was sold to Toronto to join a young Blue Jays squad that had gone 16-42 before the strike.

As luck would have it, the Royals ended up in the playoffs because of the unique split-season rules necessitated by the strike that year, and Berenguer missed a chance at postseason baseball. However, the trade gave Berenguer an opportunity to throw big innings; he started 11 games for the Blue Jays in the second half of the split season. The highlight of his Toronto tenure was his first American League victory, coming against the Tigers, the club that signed him as a free agent eight months later.

Playing in front of a crowd of 10,526 at Tiger Stadium on August 11, 1981, Berenguer entered the game in the second inning. The Blue Jays were up, 6-3. They had scored six runs in the top of the first against Dan Schatzeder, but the Jays’ Paul Mirabella gave up three in the bottom of the inning. With two on and two out in the second, Berenguer replaced Mirabella, fanned Alan Trammell for his only strikeout of the game, and pitched into the seventh before surrendering the ball to Roy Lee Jackson, who preserved his second career win.

Berenguer won just one more game that season and finished the season with a 2-13 record (0-4 for the Royals, 2-9 for the Blue Jays), with a 5.26 ERA. His career record was now 3-17.

Another year, 1982, brought another spring training disappointment for Berenguer as the Jays released him, less than two weeks before teams headed north.

But in a moment that marks one of the turning points of his career, Berenguer got the call from Detroit and signed as a free agent on April 4. He was to play for Sparky Anderson, a manager about whom he knew two things: Anderson won two World Series as manager of the Cincinnati Reds in 1975 and ’76, and had a reputation for impatience with pitchers.

“Sparky had a reputation as Mr. Hook,” Berenguer recollected. “You know, walk one guy and you’re gone. I thought, ‘We’re going to have trouble. I need to work on my control.’”

Twenty-five players headed north as the Tigers broke camp to begin the season in Kansas City, but Berenguer wasn’t one of them. Instead, Anderson told him to stay behind in Lakeland, then report to Evansville to play for the Triplets, the Tigers’ Triple-A affiliate. Starting 24 games for the Triplets that season, Berenguer logged 11 wins against 10 losses, with an ERA of 4.61.

As had become a familiar routine during his time as a Met, Berenguer was a late-season call-up in 1982, making his Tigers debut at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull in a starting role on September 2. His line was another parallel to his days in New York; he walked five California Angels and departed after three innings — but this time he gave up only three earned runs. Nine days later the story was the same, this time out of the bullpen, as Berenguer struck out five Boston Red Sox but walked four, giving him nine walks in 6? innings.

After another offseason of hard work, Berenguer left Florida with the Tigers in 1983 to begin the season that changed his life as a major leaguer.

“Sparky and Roger Craig saved my career,” Berenguer said. Craig, the Tigers’ pitching coach, “taught me to throw the split-finger, and I learned it in about a week.” That season, Berenguer finished on the plus side of .500 for the first time, going 9-5 with a 3.14 ERA in 157? innings. He appeared in 37 games and made 19 starts.

Berenguer got permission from Anderson to play winter ball to perfect the split-finger pitch. Berenguer knew winter ball would also help him satisfy one of Anderson’s other requirements: weight.

“Sparky would send the players a sheet in December that said what weight to report at,” Berenguer recalled. “I had to keep in shape.”

Berenguer entered the spring of 1984 as he had every other in his career, with the mindset that someone was going to try to take his job. This year, someone almost did, with Berenguer’s wildness nearly costing him a spot in the starting rotation.

After almost three weeks of sitting in the bullpen, with Anderson using Jack Morris, Dan Petry, Milt Wilcox, and Dave Rozema en route to an AL East-leading 11-1 record, Berenguer started on April 22 against the Chicago White Sox at Tiger Stadium. The game-time temperature was frigid, punctuated with periods of sleet, but not cold enough to chill Berenguer’s heater as he pitched a game that was in stark contrast to the majority of his previous big-league appearances. He dominated the White Sox hitters for seven scoreless innings of two-hit ball while striking out seven. But the best number of the afternoon was in the BB stat line, as Berenguer issued only one free pass.

His next start, five days later against the visiting Cleveland Indians, proved that his first outing was no fluke. Berenguer went 7? innings, struck out six and allowed one earned run, but got no decision in an extra-inning affair.

One of the season’s most spectacular moments came on May 12, Berenguer’s fifth start, when Detroit hosted the California Angels in front of more than 38,000 fans. Led by aging veterans Tommy John and Reggie Jackson, the Angels came into the contest one game above .500 to play the red-hot, 26-4 Tigers. After being hit by a pitch in the first inning and striking out in the third, Jackson came to the plate in the fifth inning with a man on first and the Angels trailing 2-0. Berenguer ran the count to 3-2 before Jackson, according to Berenguer, uttered, “Come to papa” from the batter’s box, knowing a fastball was likely from the right-hander. He got it, and — aided by a 20 mph wind — cleared the right-field roof for his 485th home run, a mammoth blast reminiscent of the shot he hit in the 1971 All-Star Game.

The Angels grabbed the lead in the seventh, and Tommy John scattered eight hits in a 4-2 complete-game victory, a line that took a back seat to the Berenguer-Jackson encounter midway through the game.

Berenguer alternated wins and losses for most of the season, with the losses somewhat more frequent, and his record stood at 8-10 in mid-September before a three-game winning streak allowed him to finish above .500 at 11-10 with a respectable ERA of 3.48.

Heading into the American League Championship Series against the Royals, Berenguer knew he was on the outside of the pitching rotation looking in, both as a starter and a reliever. Before the opening game, pitching coach Craig explained to Berenguer his postseason role. “Roger told me before the playoffs, ‘This is the situation. I am going to push my starters into the eighth. You are my innings 4 through 6 guy. Anything later than the sixth and it’ll be [Doug] Bair, [Aurelio] Lopez, and [Willie] Hernandez.’”

Typically, Berenguer accepted his role with ease. “I knew the rule,” he said. “I am a team player. I wanted to win.”

The postseason for the Tigers lasted a scant eight games, with the starters doing the job Craig had envisioned. In the Championship Series, Detroit relievers got only seven innings of work. Jack Morris pitched seven strong innings in Game One, with Hernandez hurling the final two; Dan Petry went seven innings in Game Two, but Hernandez blew the save and the win went to Lopez in extra innings; and Wilcox pitched eight innings in Game Three, with Hernandez saving it.

The World Series featured two complete-game victories by Morris in Games One and Four, and two subpar performances by Petry in Games Two (4? innings) and Five (3? innings). Lopez, Hernandez, Bair, and Bill Scherrer did Detroit’s relief duty in the Series. Berenguer, despite 27 starts and 168? innings for the Tigers during the season, never left the bullpen in the postseason.

According to Berenguer, that inactivity was made easier by the support system he had on the team, mainly Hernandez, Lopez, and utility player Barbaro Garbey. That support, he said, enabled him to succeed during his time in Detroit.

“I talked to everyone on the team,” Berenguer said. “Lopez and Willie would say, ‘You start, then give the ball to me.’ I put that in my head. I knew I didn’t have to go nine innings. I would get to six or seven and let those guys come in.

“I felt like I found a home in Detroit. The crowd made you feel comfortable and everyone supported you. They made you feel good, and I wanted to pitch well for them.”

Berenguer pitched one more season in Detroit, a disappointing season in which his starts declined to 13, his record dipped to 5-6, and his ERA rose to 5.59. On the day after the ’85 season ended, Berenguer left the home he thought he had found and headed west to join the San Francisco Giants. Berenguer, backup catcher Bob Melvin and pitcher Scott Medvin were sent to San Francisco in exchange for catcher Matt Nokes and pitchers Eric King and Dave LaPoint. There, Berenguer would join the man who had tutored him in the art of the split-finger fastball, Roger Craig, the team’s manager.

By the time he joined the Giants, Berenguer had accepted his role as a reliever. However, San Francisco already had a crowded bullpen. As a result, Berenguer joined the Giants starting rotation, at least at the outset of the 1986 season, alongside players like Mike Krukow and Vida Blue.

Berenguer made his first start at Candlestick Park on April 30 in front of just 5,147 attendees, and didn’t last through the third inning. After two more lackluster starts, Berenguer and his 6.00 ERA were sent back to the bullpen. By June 12, his ERA was down to 2.93, and almost a week later, with other relievers injured, Berenguer got the chance to close. Between June 18 and June 22, Berenguer saved three games and won one before returning to middle relief.

With an overstocked bullpen in July, Giants general manager Al Rosen met with Berenguer and asked where he might want to be traded. Rosen asked him to pick one team. Around the same time, his old acquaintance Tony Oliva, then a batting coach for Minnesota, told Berenguer that the Twins were trying to acquire him. So Berenguer told Rosen that he wanted to be traded to Minnesota — a request Rosen declined because, according to Berenguer, “he didn’t want anyone from Minnesota.” So Berenguer stayed with the Giants.

Berenguer finished the 1986 season with a 2.70 ERA in 73? innings of work, a solid year that landed him a spot on his second World Series winner.

He was released by the Giants on December 19, 1986, and signed on the following January 9 with the Twins to be their closer. He finally landed the elusive job at the back end of the bullpen that he was looking for. And it lasted less than a month. On February 3, the Twins traded four players to the Expos to obtain the Terminator, Jeff Reardon, who had 76 saves over the previous two seasons.

Oliva calmed Berenguer’s fears, informing him that, with only two bona fide starters, Bert Blyleven and Frank Viola, a relief pitcher on the Twins would be in high demand during the 1987 season. Oliva’s prediction proved correct, and the result for Juan was 112 innings of work in six starts and 41 relief appearances with a 3.94 ERA. He posted the best strikeout-to-walk ratio of his career, striking out 110 and walking only 47, and finished the season with an 8-1 record. He became known as Señor Smoke.

The Twins finished 85-77 for the year, winning the American League West by two games over the Royals, and were headed to the postseason for the first time since the Harmon Killebrew-led 1970 team.

The only team between the Twins and the pennant was the 98-win Detroit Tigers, winner of the East by two games over the Blue Jays and the owner of the best record in baseball. The Tigers won the division in dramatic fashion, winning the last four games of the season at home against Toronto — which came into the series with the division lead.

On paper and in the standings, the Tigers held the advantage. But after an 8-5 victory by the Twins in Game One at the Metrodome, the regular–season records were quickly forgotten. Berenguer finally broke his postseason pitching drought in Game Two, pitching what could be called the best 1? innings of his 15-year career.

Bert Blyleven started. Leading 6-2 in the eighth inning, he gave up a solo home run to the Tigers’ Lou Whitaker. Enter Señor Smoke; Twins manager Tom Kelly’s plan was that he would get the final two outs of the inning before turning the ball over to Reardon.

Berenguer promptly struck out Kirk Gibson on three pitches, the final one swinging, and got Alan Trammell to ground into a force play at second. Kelly saw something in Berenguer that made him change his plan, and with the Twins holding a three-run lead, he left Berenguer in for the ninth.

Matt Nokes, one of the players the Tigers got for Berenguer, led off the inning. Berenguer struck him out swinging. Next was Chet Lemon, a player Berenguer admired during his time in Detroit for his spectacular defense. Strikeout swinging. The final batter of the game was Pat Sheridan. Another strikeout swinging.

With the nation watching on television and his family in attendance, Berenguer was fired up, pumping his fist after each strikeout in a display of emotion that did not sit well with his former Tigers manager.

“Don’t ever try to embarrass my players,” said a peeved Anderson after the game. “Whatever this is, with the glove coming up and the hand coming down, don’t wake the sleeping dog.”

Berenguer saw it differently. “I was not trying to embarrass anyone,” he said in 2009. “I played with those guys, and respect them all.”

Berenguer pitched a hitless inning in Minnesota’s Game Three win, 2? hitless innings in the Twins’ Game Four victory, and two-thirds of an inning in the deciding Game Five victory — his no-hit, no-run string broken up by a home run by Chet Lemon. The Twins were going to their first World Series in 22 years to face the St. Louis Cardinals.

Berenguer struggled early in the Series, allowing two earned runs in an inning of work in Game Two, and taking the loss after allowing three earned runs in one-third of an inning in Game Three.

After the loss, Berenguer received a tip that he had heard before: He was relying too much on his fastball. In his next appearance, in Game Six, he served a steady dose of sliders and forkballs in three innings of scoreless work as the Twins evened the Series at three victories each. They defeated the Cardinals in Game Seven for Berenguer’s second World Series title in four seasons.

The reliever’s popularity soared after the World Series thanks to “Berenguer Boogie,” a music video that featured Juan dancing to the beat in a trench coat and briefcase. It achieved new life in the 21st century thanks to several Internet video sites.

Berenguer pitched in Minnesota through 1990, with a record of 33-13 in his four years of work as a Twin. After testing free agency, Berenguer signed with the Atlanta Braves, and as had happened with the Twins four years earlier, made another run at a title.

The Braves, 65-97 in 1990, went from worst to first in 1991, with Berenguer, at the age of 36, playing a key role early in the season. He had 17 saves, more than in his previous 13 years combined, when an injury derailed his season. While home wrestling with his children on an off-day, Berenguer broke his pitching arm and missed out on much of the Braves’ run to the National League West title, followed by the pennant and subsequent loss to Berenguer’s former team, the Twins, in Game Seven of the World Series. The winning pitcher for the Twins in that game? Ex-Tigers teammate Jack Morris.

In 1992, Berenguer returned to pitch for Atlanta, going 3-1 with a 5.13 ERA, but was dealt near the interleague trade deadline to the Royals in exchange for another former teammate, Mark Davis. With a 1-4 record and a 5.64 ERA with the Royals, Berenguer’s major-league career came to an end. He hung on until 1997, spending 1993 and 1994 in the Mexican League, part of 1994 with Minneapolis in the independent North Central League, and 1995 through 1997 with Minneapolis and Southern Minny in the independent Prairie League. As ERAs ranging from 0.82 (with Minneapolis in 1995, albeit with a 2-3 mark) to 6.14 (with Saltillo in 1993, with a not-surprising 1-5 record) indicate, his work was inconsistent. The end came in 1997 with an 8-3 slate and 3.09 ERA. At 41, Berenguer retired.

During his 15-year career, the man known by the nicknames Pancho Villa (referring to his facial hair) and the Panama Express registered 67 career wins, the record for a Panamanian-born player until 2008 when Mariano Rivera posted win number 68 with the New York Yankees. Berenguer registered 975 career strikeouts, 32 saves and a 3.90 ERA in 490 games, with 1,205? innings pitched — and two rings.

Berenguer returned to Minnesota, the site of his greatest baseball success, and worked in marketing for a television station. He was married for the second time in 2004. He sons from his first marriage followed in his athletic footsteps: Chris as a defenseman for the Hamline University hockey team in St. Paul, and Andrew following in his dad’s footsteps on the diamond at Mesabi Range Technical College in Virginia, Minnesota.

Sources

Zaret, Eli. ’84 – The Last of the Great Tigers. South Boardman, Mich.: Crofton Creek Press, 2004.

Anderson, Dave. “A Tale of Two Bullpens.” New York Times, October 9, 1987.

Durso, Joseph. “Offseason for Baseball Isn’t What It Used to Be.” New York Times, January 11, 1988.

Goessling, Ben. “Former Twin Enjoys Chaotic, Happy Retirement as Salesman and Father.” Minneapolis Star-Tribune, March 22, 2006.

http://atlanta.braves.mlb.com

http://www.baseball-reference.com

http://www.panama-guide.com

http://www.retrosheet.org

http://www.thebaseballcube.com/pitching/1982/10517.shtm

http://www.wikipedia.org

Lenard, Jason. Juan Berenguer interview. January 14, 2009.

For Bergman, his mental and physical battle on that night with Jackson exemplifies what allowed him to have a 17-year career in the major leagues as a utility role player. He made himself successful by maximizing his skills both physically and mentally. Bergman’s high-school baseball coach characterized him as an overachiever. From hidden-ball tricks to extra batting practice, he constantly strove to do what he needed to improve his game and to contribute to his team. In 1984, Bergman told the Oneonta (New York) Daily Star, “I think the mental part of the game is the biggest difference in my game. I’m not as talented as some of these guys so I have to make up for what I lack in ability by using my head.”

To survive as long as he did in the major leagues as a utility player is a testament to Bergman and his approach to the game. During his 14 full seasons in the majors, he averaged only 189 at-bats per year. He was a career .258 hitter who never had more than seven home runs or 44 runs batted in in a single season. But Bergman accepted his fate as a part-timer early in his major-league career. At each stop along the way, like an apprentice aspiring for a journeyman’s card, he learned what he could from some of the best managers in the game. Bergman prepared himself for whatever the team needed from him, whether it was as a pinch-hitter or a late-inning defensive replacement.

In discussing Bergman in 1991, Sparky Anderson said, “He knows his role and that’s why he stayed in the big leagues a long time. If he thought it was another role, it might have been a short career.” At the end of Bergman’s career, Anderson praised his preparedness: “In all the years I’ve managed Dave, there’s never been one time – not one game – that he didn’t come to the park ready to play.”

David Bruce Bergman was born to Donald Bergman, an electrician, and Gloria Bergman in Evanston, Illinois, on June 6, 1953, the second oldest of five children. Growing up in the near north suburbs of Chicago, Bergman was a Cubs fan in the era of Ernie Banks, Billy Williams, and Ron Santo.

He attended Maine South High School in Park Ridge, Illinois, where in addition to baseball he played football, basketball, and soccer. George Verber, Dave’s high-school baseball coach, in 2007 remembered that Bergman’s “biggest asset was that he was a tremendously hard worker.” Verber added, “He was the first one to practice and the last one to leave. In all the years I coached I never had anyone work harder than Dave.” Bergman wasn’t even considered the best player on his high-school team. That honor belonged to Joe Zdeb, who later played for the Kansas City Royals. The big-league scouts came to see Zdeb play, but were subsequently impressed by Bergman. In 2007 Bergman recalled, “I had no idea I was being scouted and was totally surprised when I was drafted in the 12th round by the Cubs in 1971. My whole life changed for me in 24 hours.”

Bergman turned down his hometown Cubs and elected to attend Illinois State University. Recalling those events in 2001, Bergman said, “It was a tough decision not to sign! I truly felt a college degree was more important.” He went on to play three years for the Illinois State Redbirds with a career .365 average while becoming the school’s first Division I All-American. Bergman was also a batting champion, with a .341 average while playing for Chatham in the Cape Cod League for college players in the summer of 1973.

In June 1974, after his junior year, Bergman was drafted by the New York Yankees in the second round, and turned pro. He adapted well to pro ball playing for Oneonta, where he was the batting champion at .348 and the New York-Penn League Player of the Year. Based upon this impressive debut, in 1975 the Yankees moved him up to Double-A West Haven, but after six weeks he was hitting only .180. In a New York Daily News interview, Bergman said his manager, Pete Ward, told him, “I don’t care if you hit .150, you’re going to be in there every day. I know you can hit.” Bergman responded to this vote of confidence by finishing the season at .311. Once again he was the league batting champion and Player of the Year.

On August 26, 1975, Bergman was called up to the Yankees as a replacement for Alex Johnson in the outfield. After being told only the previous night of his promotion, Dave rushed to New York. Not taking the time to eat, the excited rookie played in that evening’s game on an empty stomach. On a wet field in Shea Stadium (the Yankees’ home field while Yankee Stadium was being reconstructed), he slipped and fell in the second inning fielding a line-drive single by Billy Williams. At the plate he was 0-for-2, including a strikeout in his first big-league at-bat. After the game Bergman told the New York Times, “I can’t believe I’m here. When something happens that you’ve wanted to do ever since you were a kid, it takes a while to set in.” It also took a while for him to get his first major-league hit. It did not happen in 1975 as he went 0-for-17. In 2008 he recalled, “I just couldn’t buy a hit. I tried bunting a couple of times. There is no doubt in my mind that on two of those bunts I was absolutely safe. One of the umpires said, ‘You’re not going to get your first hit on a bunt base hit,’ and I said [to myself], ‘Okay, welcome to the big leagues.’”

After batting .300 in winter ball, Bergman looked forward to spring training in 1976, but soon faced another obstacle to making the Yankees’ roster: his manager, Billy Martin. In 2008 he remembered Martin telling him, “I don’t even know why you are here. You are the worst player I have ever seen in a major-league uniform.” Bergman’s fortunes seemed to turn with Martin after participating in a bench-clearing brawl. “He was pulling me off the pile and I turned around to nail him and that’s when I started playing, after that.” Bergman received a lot of playing time because of injuries to the starters. “I was the most valuable player in spring training. I thought I had made the team and that I was going to start in the outfield.” To his surprise, he was sent to Triple-A Syracuse instead.

In spite of his disappointment at not making the parent club, Bergman enjoyed a successful summer. He hit .295 with 65 RBIs and the Syracuse Chiefs, under the guidance of manager Bobby Cox, won the postseason Governor’s Cup, the championship trophy of the International League. Also during that summer, Bergman married Cathryn Link, whom he had met in college.

His future with the Yankees appeared promising. The team protected him in the November 1976 expansion draft and signed him to a two-year contract. But the following spring, unable to land a roster spot on the talented and eventual world championship 1977 team, he was again sent to Syracuse.

In June Bergman’s career took an abrupt turn when he became “the player to be named later” in a trade with Houston in which the Yankees received Cliff Johnson. Bergman was unable to clear waivers and was the center of a controversy over where he should finish the season. He was officially still the property of the Yankees, but unofficially committed to Houston. The Astros wanted him to report to their farm club in Charleston, West Virginia, but he wanted to remain in Syracuse. His wish was granted, and he remained at Syracuse, finishing the year with a .312 average, 16 home runs, and 29 stolen bases. Still coveted by the Yankees, Dave was a September call-up. He remembered, “Billy Martin told me, ‘You are not going anywhere.’ There was a rumor that Cliff Johnson was damaged goods.” On September 25 in Toronto, Bergman got his first major-league hit, a single off Mike Willis in the ninth inning of a 15-0 Yankees victory after replacing Johnson at first in the seventh inning. The hit broke his 0-for-18 streak dating back to 1975.

For the 1978 season Bergman became a Houston Astro. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn denied a request by the Yankees that the trade be nullified. Bergman told The Sporting News, “I am glad to be with Houston. … I think I’ll get a chance here.” It was at Houston that Bergman realized that his destiny in the majors was to be a utility player and not a regular. Bill Virdon, the Astros’ manager, told him, “You have the potential to play in the big leagues for 15 years if you will channel all of your energies on the job description that I think is going to be with you for a long period of time.” Taking this advice to heart, Bergman indicated that he decided to focus his energies on being “the best utility player I can possibly be. I am going to work twice as hard to make sure my skill set is very solid at first base and the outfield.” That, he said, was “when my career started taking off.”

In 1978 Dave got off to a slow start with the Astros, hitting .143 while playing sparingly at the All-Star break. After the All-Star Game, over a span of 26 games, he was inserted into the starting lineup, almost always as a left fielder against right-handed pitching. Bergman responded well, hitting .313 with 16 walks. He finished the season at .231 with only 186 plate appearances in 104 games. In 1978 he also completed the coursework for his business degree and graduated from Illinois State.

At the end of spring training in 1979 Bergman, who had a remaining option, was sent down to Charleston. “I was very disappointed,” he said. “I still felt at that time I could compete at the major league level.” Jim Beauchamp, the Charleston manager, was supportive of Bergman. “He was determined to work with me and get me back to the big leagues. … It seemed like the harder I worked, the worse I got. I had developed a hitch in my swing from trying to hit the ball to left field in Houston.” Beauchamp brought in a hitting instructor to work with Bergman in the second half of the season and got his batting average up to .280 by the end of the International League season. Houston was in the middle of a pennant race when he rejoined the team that September. Bergman did his part in the stretch drive, going 6-for-15, but the Astros finished a game and a half behind the Reds. On September 26, he hit his first major-league home run, a pinch-hit shot off Phil Niekro, who notched the win and evened his record at 20-20. Phil’s brother Joe took the loss for the Astros, putting him at 20-11.

The following spring Bergman made the Houston roster and at the age of 26 he was in the big leagues to stay for the next 13 seasons. The 1980 season was a memorable one for the Astros franchise. Houston battled for first place all season long. With only three games to play in the last series of the season, against Los Angeles, Houston held a three-game lead over the Dodgers, so needed only to win one game to clinch the National League West Division. They lost all three by one run, but prevailed 7-1 over the Dodgers in a one-game playoff. Bergman appeared in 90 games, often as a late-inning defensive replacement, with only 78 at-bats and a .256 average. He did make his contribution when called upon, including going 10-for-23 (.435) in August and September.

Many consider the playoff series between Houston and Philadelphia to be the best ever. It went the full five games, with the last four going into extra innings. In Game Two, Bergman’s two-run triple off Kevin Saucier highlighted a four-run 10th-inning that sealed the victory for the Astros. He told the Syracuse Herald, “I’m Dave Bergman, so I figured (Saucier) was going to challenge me. He came in with a fastball and I came through this time.” Ultimately the Phils won in the series, winning Game Five, 8-7.

After starting the 1981 campaign with Houston, on April 20 Bergman was traded to San Francisco. “I was very disappointed because we were starting to put together what we thought was going to be a very solid team for a long period of time. They felt they needed to make some changes,” he recalled. Frank Robinson was the new manager of the Giants. Bergman said Robinson “taught me more about baseball than anybody I ever played for. He shared with me the little things about the game that I am not so sure that everybody has had the opportunity to learn at the major-league level. He created a monster in me. At that point in time I really, really became a student of the game.”

In his three seasons at San Francisco Bergman averaged 135 at-bats and 84 games, playing mostly at first base with some time in the outfield as well as pinch-hitting. His batting average improved each year, with his best year being 1983, when he finished at .286. He started slowly that year but warmed up at the plate when he began to play more regularly in August after an injury to Champ Summers. He hit .392 in August and September. On August 30 Bergman had two home runs and five RBIs in a 13-2 win over Montreal. Frank Robinson told The Sporting News, “Bergie is our secret weapon. He’s done a fine job without complaining about his situation. He’s a professional and he’s had a great attitude on this club.” He also had great success as a pinch-hitter in 1983, ranking third in the National League with a .355 average.

Despite his success in 1983, on March 24, 1984, Bergman was traded by the Giants to Philadelphia for Alejandro Sanchez, an outfielder. The Phillies immediately sent Bergman and relief pitcher Willie Hernandez to Detroit for catcher-outfielder John Wockenfuss and outfielder Glenn Wilson.

Bergman told the Detroit Free Press, “The trade to the Tigers didn’t please me at first. I thought I had done a good job with San Francisco last year, and then all of a sudden I’m being traded for a minor leaguer.”

Bergman’s mood changed quickly. Upon his arrival with the team, his former Giants teammate Darrell Evans told him, “You are going to be pleasantly surprised. This is going to be a real good team.” After honing his skills for parts of eight seasons in the majors with three clubs, Bergman was ready to apply all he had learned to help his new team. For the Tigers, 1984 was a magical season, and for Bergman it was one of the best in his career. The Tigers roared off to a record start, going 35-5. Bergman found himself playing more regularly. Manager Sparky Anderson inserted him in the starting lineup on Opening Day. He appeared in 31 of those first 40 games, getting his batting average up to.286 through the first 39 of those contests and making some key contributions. On April 6, his first-inning two-run, two-out single gave the Tigers a three-run lead in what was ultimately a 3-2 win over the Chicago White Sox. On April 24 Bergman had an RBI single and scored the winning run as the Tigers rallied from two runs down in the bottom of the ninth against the Minnesota Twins. On May 11, he had two hits and drove in three runs in an 8-2 victory over California. Against Seattle on May 14, his pinch-hit triple in the eighth inning knocked in the winning run. The triple extended his six-game hitting streak, in which he had gone 11-for-22.

Throughout the season Anderson inserted Bergman in the lineup late in games for defensive purposes at first base. In this role he became an important figure in the late innings of Jack Morris’s no-hitter on April 7. In the seventh inning he snared over his left shoulder the hardest-hit ball of the day, a line drive off the bat of Tom Paciorek. Many have speculated that the right-handed Barbaro Garbey, whom Bergman replaced at first base that inning, would have been unable to make the play. In the eighth inning, Dave went to his knees to knock down Jerry Hairston’s hard-hit line drive, tossing the ball to Morris covering first to preserve the no-hitter.

The circumstances around Bergman’s memorable June 4 home run contributed to the drama. Detroit’s eight-game lead had shrunk to 4½ as second-place Toronto arrived in town. The Tigers had lost six of their last nine while the Blue Jays had won 10 of their last 12. The Tigers overcame a 3-0 deficit to tie the game in the seventh inning. Facing Roy Lee Jackson in the 10th with two out and two runners on base, Dave worked the count to 3-2. He then fouled off seven pitches in a row. Of that at-bat years later, Bergman told writer George Cantor: “There comes a time in every season when a hitter puts all his mechanics together. That night was it for me.” The eighth pitch was a slider six inches off the ground that Bergman hit into the upper deck in right field for a 6-3 victory. “I don’t have to tell you that it was the biggest thrill of my career,” he said.

The Tigers went on to finish in first place by 15 games. They swept Kansas City in the best-of-five American League Championship Series and beat San Diego in five games in the World Series. Bergman appeared in 120 games and hit .273 with career highs of 44 RBIs and seven home runs. He went 1-for-1 in the ALCS but 0-for-5 in the World Series. In 2000 Bergman reflected back on that year: “That was just a collective team effort. We went to the ballpark every day knowing that we were going to win. … We had everyone pulling the cart in the same direction.”

Fortunes changed in 1985. The Tigers finished in third place, 15 games back behind division-winning Toronto. Bergman suffered a torn elbow muscle in spring training. He returned after arthroscopic elbow surgery, playing in only 69 games and hitting just.179.

There was speculation in spring training in 1986 that Bergman was expendable. The Tigers had three left-handed-hitting first basemen on their roster. Nevertheless, Bergman survived the final cuts and in the second game of the season, on April 9, beat Boston with a pinch-single in the bottom of the 10th inning. He finished the year at .231, appearing in 65 games, while Detroit again finished third. One highlight for the season took place on June 17 when Bergman tagged out Alan Wiggins in the third inning of a 6-3 win at Baltimore using the hidden-ball trick.

Again early in 1987 there were rumors that Bergman would be released. Dave told the Detroit Free Press, “I’ve been going through this for ten years. I’ve never had it easy.” Bergman responded to the challenge, hitting .370 in April with three home runs, six RBIs and seven walks with a .486 on-base percentage. The season was a thrilling one. The Tigers battled Toronto for first place at the end of the season with the two teams facing each other seven times in the final 11 days. Detroit prevailed, winning 1-0 in the last game of the season to clinch the AL East title. The Tigers lost the best-of-seven ALCS to Minnesota four games to one. Bergman appeared in 91 games that season, batting .273 with six homers. He said, “That was a team that really overachieved. It was a different type of atmosphere. I think we all knew that we weren’t as good as years past. Everybody strapped it on every day and gave it everything they had. It was a fun, fun team.” (One of Bergman’s teammates that season was Jim Walewander, also a graduate of Bergman’s high school, Maine South.)

The 1988 season was another exciting one for the aging Tigers. They battled for first place all season. On August 21 they held a four-game lead before experiencing injuries to key players. The team faded and finished second, just a game behind Boston. Bergman hit .323 through August, when he suffered a groin injury. After returning in September Dave batted only .203, but finished at a career-high .294. In 116 games that year with 289 plate appearances he hit in all nine spots in the batting order.

In 1989 the Tigers’ performance dropped off dramatically, with the team losing 103 games. But for Bergman, it was an opportunity to play more regularly than at any other time in his career. He appeared in 137 games with career highs in at-bats (385) and hits (103), and a .268 average. He again appeared in all nine spots of the batting order. There were two other memorable moments. On August 5 Bergman caught Ozzie Guillen napping with the hidden-ball trick in the seventh inning of a 7-6 Tigers loss to the White Sox. “I tagged him so hard I think that I stunned him a little bit, that he just laid there.” On August 10 his single with one out in the ninth broke up a bid for a no-hitter by the Texas Rangers’ Nolan Ryan. In 2001 Bergman remembered, “In the late innings, I thought he was getting tired. I looked for a breaking ball and got it!”

At the end of the season the Tigers re-signed Bergman for another two years. On a losing team there was value in having a veteran who remained positive and came to the ballpark every day ready to play. Bergman told the Detroit Free Press, “Win or lose, I’m the same. I keep my mouth shut and play hard.” With Cecil Fielder now playing first base and hitting home runs, Bergman’s playing time in 1990 dropped off. He played in 100 games with 205 at-bats while hitting .278.

In his last two seasons, 1991 and 1992, Bergman played sparingly and hit .237 and .232, respectively. After the 1992 season he debated whether to return for another year. The Tigers indicated they did not have a place for him on the team. There were possible opportunities with Minnesota and Atlanta. Dave consulted with Sparky Anderson on his options. Bergman said Anderson told him, “David, you want to walk away from the game rather than the game throwing you away.” In January 1993, at the age of 39, Bergman announced his retirement.

Looking back at his career in 2000, Bergman said, “I was lucky, very lucky to play as long as I did. … I worked very hard at my trade. Everyone I played for, I think would say something like, ‘He was probably one of the hardest workers on our club and was always ready to play.’ That’s how I want to be remembered.” Regarding his nine years playing for Sparky Anderson, Dave described him as “a great manager, he taught me how to be a man, and was a great role model.”

While with the Tigers, Bergman made the Detroit area his permanent home. In 1989 he began work as a financial adviser for Sigma Investment Counselors. He helped the firm expand from a managed portfolio of $22 million to more than $500 million 19 years later. Dave was also very active in the Grosse Pointe Baseball Organization, sponsoring four teams. He was elected to the Illinois State University Hall of Fame. Approaching the 25-year reunion of the 1984 Tigers, he resided in Grosse Pointe, Michigan, and was the father of three grown children, Troy, born in 1979; Bria, born in 1982; and Erika, born in 1985 – a year after some of her dad’s greatest accomplishment in a uniform.

Bergman died at age 61 on February 2, 2015.

Sources

Publications

Cantor, George. Wire To Wire. Chicago: Triumph Books. 2004. 79-80.

Detroit Tigers 1986 Yearbook. Detroit: Detroit Tigers. 1986.

Articles

Brodsky, Marty. “Bergman Just Doing His Job for Tigers,” Oneonta Daily Star, August 12, 1991. 12.

Brown, Clifton. “Bergman Not Ready To Give Up,” Detroit Free Press, April 18, 1987. 1C.

Chass, Murray. “Yankees Rookie on Cloud 9,” The New York Times, August 28, 1975. 27.

Forman, Ross. “Bergman’s Autograph Collection Includes DiMaggio, Brett, Ryan.” Sports Collectors Digest, February 4, 2000, 106.

Gage, Tom, “Bergman is Tigers’ Mr. Cool in Clutch.” The Sporting News, June 18, 1984. 15.

Guidi, Gene, “Survivor Bergman, 36, Will Return.” Detroit Free Press, September 9, 1989. 1C.

Guidi, Gene. “Bergman Accepts Role.” Detroit Free Press, September 6, 1984. 1D.

Guidi, Gene. “Bergman Seeks Return As Tiger Next Season.” Detroit Free Press, September 29, 1992. 4C.

Pepe, Phil. “Johnson Out, Bergman In As Yanks Look to Future.” New York Daily News, August 27, 1975. C22.

Peters, Nick. “Bench Production A Rare Bright Spot.” The Sporting News, September 12, 1983. 24.

Richmond, Milton. “Houston’s ‘A.A’ Popular … Astros Anonymous.” Syracuse Herald-Journal, October 9, 1990.

Shattuck, Harry. “Ex-Yank Bergman Welcomes Change With Astros.” The Sporting News, February 18, 1978. 62.

Tingley, Ken. “Bergman Reaches Prime,” Oneonta Daily Star, August 8, 1984.

Websites

http://www.astrodaily.com/players/interviews/Bergman_Dave.html

http://www.baseball-reference.com

http://www.retrosheet.org

Other

Nechal, Jerry, Interview with Dave Bergman, May 22, 2008.

Nechal, Jerry, Interview with George Verber, December 29, 2007.

Many refer to Brookens as a fan favorite. One Brookens admirer posted on the baseballfever.com Web site: “The man may not have had the best bat or glove, but you had to love his desire and hustle, the spectacles, and of course, that ’stache.” Brookens, during a 2008 interview, disclosed a belated scoop of sorts. His photo from the 1980 Detroit Tigers Yearbook shows him clean-shaven. How can this be? Blame manager Sparky Anderson: “That was Sparky’s rule, when I first got to Detroit in 1979. Originally Sparky had a rule – no mustaches allowed – and then in 1980 he really let loose. I had a mustache (in the minors) the day I was called up, and shaved the day I got to Tiger Stadium.” Most times since 1980, though, Brookens’ face has borne his trademark whiskers.

As to his nicknames, Brookens said, “They used to call me Brooky. … They didn’t want to call me Brooks because I was certainly no Brooks [Robinson], that’s for sure.” Tigers radio broadcaster Ernie Harwell, combining Brookens’ hitting prowess and birthplace – and mixing in a little musical history – conferred upon him the sobriquet “The Pennsylvania Poker.”

Born Thomas Dale Brookens on August 10, 1953, in Chambersburg, Pennsylvania, he quickly made Fayetteville, a town outside Chambersburg, his home. Brookens married Krista Schoenfelt on New Year’s Eve in 1976. “I knew her in high school and she’s still puttin’ up with me.” Their union produced three daughters.

“In my hometown, Fayetteville, baseball was the thing for kids to do in the summertime. Baseball, it was always baseball,” he said. “My dad was never a professional player but he was a sandlot player, a dairy farmer. I grew up on a farm and my mom worked at the elementary school as a cook.” Baseball was a family affair for the Brookenses. Tom’s identical twin brother, Tim, though drafted by Texas, played in Detroit’s minor-league system. Ike Brookens, a cousin, pitched in the Detroit organization in the early 1970s and got into three games with the Tigers in 1975.

Attracting attention at Mansfield (Pennsylvania) State College (now Mansfield University), Brookens was the Tigers’ first-round pick — fourth overall — in the January 1975, draft. “That’s a little misleading, because everybody says you were a first-round pick, but I was taken in the January supplemental draft,” Brookens said in typical modest fashion. “There might have only been 10 guys drafted in that whole draft, I don’t know.” Actually, future Tigers teammates Dave Rozema (fourth round) and Dave Tobik (first round, second pick overall) were picked in that draft; so too was Tigers teammate Ed Putman, the first-round (third overall) pick of the Chicago Cubs. Rozema was a key clubhouse figure on the 1984 team, with a carefree attitude the near polar opposite of Brookens’ grind-it-out persona. Tobik, after parts of five years in a Detroit uniform, was an opposing pitcher in one of Brookens’ best days as a major leaguer; Tom went 4-for-4 against the Texas Rangers on May 22, 1983, with an eighth-inning home run off Tobik.

But before the majors, Brookens toiled for 4½ seasons in the Detroit farm system. He started in that summer of 1975 in Montgomery, Alabama, appearing in 100 games for the Double-A Rebels, and stayed in Montgomery in 1976 for 137 more games, showing speed on the basepaths, making improvements across the board — batting, runs, RBIs, doubles, triples, homers, walks, and steals — and demonstrating his ability to play any infield position. That earned Brookens a promotion for 1977 to the Triple-A Evansville Triplets, where he showed he belonged, batting a solid .289 in 118 games, scoring 70 runs, and knocking in 52, while stealing 18 bases against better trained pitchers.

Brookens’ path to Detroit was blocked by Tigers third baseman Aurelio Rodriguez, who held down the position capably for the Tigers with his steady glove and rocket arm. Meanwhile, blocking Brookens at the keystone positions were shortstop Alan Trammell and second baseman Lou Whitaker, both promoted in 1977, forming a major-league tandem with the parent club on Opening Day in 1978. Brookens had a shortened campaign in 1978. “I had a sore arm that year and it cut down on some of my playing time,” Brookens said. “I was playing in Venezuela in winter ball and was in a car accident. I wasn’t seriously injured but I dislocated my throwing shoulder in that car accident, and then when I came back to spring training (in ’79) I never had a sore arm after that. So it was a little blessing in disguise.”

Seventy-seven games into the 1979 season, Brookens was hitting .306, with 14 home runs and 46 RBIs, for manager Jim Leyland’s Evansville Triplets. It was this level of performance that paved the way for his promotion to Detroit on July 10, 1979.

Aurelio Rodriguez’s backup, Phil Mankowski, had played with Brookens in Montgomery, but broke a finger and had to be put on the disabled list. That gave Brookens an opening with the Tigers, in large part because of Leyland’s recommendation. The rest of the Detroit brass wanted to go outside the organization and get Jim Morrison of the Philadelphia Phillies — Morrison finally got to Detroit in a mid-1987 trade — but Leyland suggested they give Brookens a shot because of the year he was having at Evansville.

“When I played for [Leyland] at Evansville, I wasn’t the only one who thought [his] next stop would be managing the Tigers.” Brookens said. “I’ve always appreciated [his recommending me]. But frankly, I thought it wouldn’t be long before I was playing for him and we’d both be in Detroit. Then the Sparky [Anderson hiring] happened, and Jim kind of got lost in the shuffle.” Leyland finally got his chance, being hired for 2006 and taking the Tigers to the World Series his first year at the helm.

Leyland wasn’t the only one lost in the shuffle. “I played for Les [Moss in the minors] for four seasons, and I really liked Les Moss as a person and as a manager,” Brookens said. Moss was promoted to manage the parent club for 1979, but was shown the door after 53 games and a 27-26 record to make way for eventual Hall of Fame skipper Anderson. In any case, Tom noted, the situation was out of the players’ control: “I guess we don’t think about it as much as the normal fan does. We just follow orders.”

Brookens’ first major-league game — and base hit — occurred on the night of his call-up, July 10, at Tiger Stadium. His debut single came off Minnesota’s Geoff Zahn to left field in the second inning; then Brookens was the subject of a pickoff attempt but advanced to second on Zahn’s errant throw. Moments later Brookens was caught trying to steal third. Nevertheless, the Tigers won, 6-5. Brookens had a better baserunning experience five days later against the Chicago White Sox, on July 15 at Comiskey Park. In the second inning he hit an RBI single scoring Lance Parrish, stole second, advanced to third on a throwing error by catcher Milt May, and finally stole home with Trammell at the plate.

The San Diego Padres purchased Rodriguez’s contract after the 1979 season, and the Tigers traded Mankowski to the New York Mets along with outfielder Jerry Morales for third baseman Richie Hebner.

In 1980, his first season as a regular, and most frequently batting in the eighth spot, the 26-year- old Brookens hit a career-high .275 with 25 doubles, nine triples and 10 home runs. He drove in 66 runs. His range was very good at third, as it was most of his career, but he made 29 errors. Brookens’ best game came on August 20, 1980. He started a triple play and went 5-for-5 on the road against the Milwaukee Brewers in an 8-6 Detroit win.

Brookens earned the respect of most fans but some — including those in the Detroit brass — never accepted his solid glove and light bat as good enough.

Though the young Tigers team was built around Trammell, Whitaker, and Parrish, Brookens became the closest thing to a regular third baseman that the Tigers had during the 1980s. Still, that didn’t stop Sparky Anderson from trying to find more offense from the hot corner. Among the third basemen Sparky looked to replace Brookens with were Glenn Wilson (in a 1984 spring-training game that made Wilson even more determined to bolt from Detroit), Barbaro Garbey, Howard Johnson, Marty Castillo, Darrell Evans, Darnell Coles, Chris Pittaro, Lou Whitaker (spring 1985, with Anderson-anointed wunderkind Pittaro at second), Enos Cabell, Wayne Krenchicki, Jim Morrison, Ray Knight, and Luis Salazar.

Brookens had a great 4-for-5 day against the Yankees in New York on April 12, 1983, in a 13-2 whipping. On September 22 the Tigers, keyed by two Brookens hits, sent a late season “wait till next year” message to the eventual 1983 world champion Orioles with 5-4 win.

“We didn’t have anything special in spring training, we were just plugging along,” Brookens said of the 1984 Grapefruit League season. “I don’t even know if we had a .500 record in spring training. [It was 11-17.] But then we come out 35-5 and that’s when we realized we got the team right here … and things have a way when you’re going good it just keeps going good, and when you’re struggling, you stay struggling. But we knew we had a good team in ’83.”

Brookens’ most memorable season was with that 1984 Tigers team with its 35-5 start. His personal start wasn’t nearly as good as the team’s. He started the season 0-for-12 in the first seven games he played, all Detroit wins. He got a couple of hits on April 13 at Boston in a 13-9 win, but didn’t get another at-bat until April 18 when he got two more hits to double his season total. But the die had been cast; Sparky would use switch-hitting Howard Johnson for 108 games at third, and Brookens would also share time at the position with Marty Castillo, Barbaro Garbey, and Darrell Evans. Though not a full-time starter, Brookens appeared in 68 games at third and proved an indispensible utilityman for Detroit, appearing in 28 games at shortstop and 26 at second base.

If one game during the Tigers’ incredible start typified Brookens’ team-oriented contributions, it was against the Indians on May 6. Playing in Cleveland’s Municipal Stadium, the Tigers came from four runs down to tie the score in the top of the eighth. Brookens came in as a defensive replacement and was asked to lay down two sacrifice bunts, the second of which put the eventual winning run in scoring position. The Tigers won the game, 6-5, raising their record to 22-4.

As a future manager, Brookens understood the dilemma of needing a certain amount of offensive production out of each position. “I think the reason I fought every year to hold my job was that I was not a great offensive player,” he said. “If I would have been a player that put up 20 home runs and drove in 70, 80, 90 runs, I don’t think Sparky would have been looking for a new third baseman all the time. But I was not that type of offensive player and that’s why I think they continued to search for someone that could give a little more offense on a consistent basis.”

Brookens hit a key two-run triple on June 17, 1984, keying a sweep of the Brewers at home. Five days later he once again victimized Milwaukee. This time he went 2-for-2 with an RBI in the Tigers’ 7-3 win. Brookens opened August with one of his few bad games, making two errors at shortstop and wasting a good effort by Dan Petry in a 4-2 loss to Cleveland. However, Brookens shook off the miscues almost immediately. Two days later he hit a home run against the Kansas City Royals in a loss. On August 6 in the opening tilt of a doubleheader at Boston, Brookens started off with a solo shot and scored two runs in a tight 9-7 Tigers victory. In the second game he got two hits and scored a run off a rookie named Roger Clemens in a 4-2 Tigers loss. (Brookens hit a career .375 off Clemens.) On August 15 Brookens came through for Petry, going 3-for-3 plus a sacrifice bunt with two RBIs in an 8-3 home win against the Angels.

As they had at the beginning of the season, the Tigers got off to a quick start on September 16. Brookens was one of four Tigers who hit homers in a 8-3 victory over the second-place Toronto Blue Jays. “That series was the clinching blow that won it for us,” Brookens said. Detroit had vanquished its closest foes and had come just shy of taking the American League East title in their presence.

But he wasn’t done contributing yet. In the seventh inning of the division-clinching win, against the Brewers on September 18, Brookens hit a solo homer for Detroit’s final run in the 3-0 win. After the Tigers clinched the division, Brookens started only two more games that season, both in the final weekend. Physical woes kept him from starting, but not from getting a spot on the postseason roster. Brookens played in the first two games of the 1984 American League Championship Series against Kansas City and in Games One, Two, and Four of the 1984 World Series.

Brookens’ best friend on that 1984 team was probably Alan Trammell. “Probably him and Jack Morris, those two guys, more than the other guys some. Dave Bergman is a good friend.” As for the season’s catalyst reliever Willie Hernandez, “He seemed to make it all come together when he came in and gave us a stopper. I don’t know what the real missing ingredient was. Darrell Evans came over at that time, too, and became the first baseman. He gave us a veteran player and was kind of a team leader,” Brookens recalled. He and his Tigers teammates continued to keep in touch over the years with the Tigers’ fantasy camp in Lakeland, Florida. The highlight of 1984 “was just being on that club, we didn’t have a single 20-game winner, we didn’t have anybody that drove in 100 runs, and those are earmarks for superstars. That tells you it must’ve been a team effort for us to win. Even guys who were part-time players won games for us.”

Brookens had another big day against a Hall of Fame pitcher in 1985, when Don Sutton started but didn’t stay long, as Brookens went 4-for-5 with an RBI single on May 17 at Oakland in a 10-2 Tigers victory over the A’s. This great day at the plate is also memorable in another respect: In the Tigers’ half of the ninth inning, a Brookens-batted ball hit the umpire and stayed in his coat. On the same date in 1987, Brookens put the hurt on another Hall of Fame pitcher, taking Cleveland’s Steve Carlton deep for a home run.

Brookens again whacked a Carlton pitch over the left-field wall in the first inning of a game on August 18, 1987, when Carlton’s hanging-on tour of the majors was sputtering to a stop and the Tigers were neck-and-neck with Toronto for the American League East flag. On September 23 Brookens keyed a must-win game at Boston with two doubles. The Tigers finally shook off the Blue Jays, sweeping them on the last weekend of the season in Tiger Stadium, but ran up against the eventual world-champion Minnesota Twins in a very loud Metrodome.

“We were disappointed that we ended up getting beat by Minnesota, but they had a nice ballclub too and ended up winning the World Series,” Brookens said. He remembered the Metrodome as “something else, I’m playing third base and hollering at Jack Morris on the mound, and he can’t hear me. That place gets rockin’, and usually not in your favor.” In all, Brookens was hitless in 13 postseason at-bats.

In his final year with the Tigers, 1988, Brookens batted in six Tigers runs on June 14, going 4-for-4 with a double and a second-inning grand slam off the Orioles’ Dickie Noles, who had been a Tigers teammate at the tail end of the ’87 season.

In spring training 1989, Chris “Tin Man” Brown came to Detroit with Keith Moreland from San Diego for pitcher Walt Terrell and was handed the starting third-base job. Before spring training was over, Brookens was dealt to the Yankees; Brown was such a bust that the Tigers released him in mid-May. “Sparky called me in to the office and told me I’d been traded to the Yankees for Charlie Hudson,” he remembered. “[I] spent that season with the Yankees, was released by them at the end of the year. Cleveland signed me to a one-year deal in 1990, and then I retired at the end of that year.” By the time he hung up his spikes, Brookens had played in 1,336 games — all but 130 for Detroit — and hit .246 with 175 doubles, 40 triples, and 71 home runs.

Tom lost his mother to cancer in 1982. “That was a tough go … but my dad is still alive and living in Pennsylvania,” he said in a 2008 interview. Fellow Pennsylvanian Don Wert, the 1968 Tigers’ third baseman, is a mutual acquaintance, as is John Hiller, a teammate of Brookens in 1979 and 1980. Hiller and Wert are fellow Tigers fantasy camp coaches who reunite with Brookens over the years. “They (the 1968 team) had a great team and so did we. Who was better?” Brookens asked aloud. “Let the fans decide that one.”

Brookens was an accomplished darts player as a young man growing up in Pennsylvania, and in his offseasons and retirement years he liked to use guns and a bow to hunt turkey and deer. He also played golf in the warm weather, especially with many of his former teammates while in Lakeland for the Tigers’ fantasy camp.

Brookens was out of the game after his retirement following the 1990 season and was committed to staying close to home while his young daughters grew to college age during the 1990s, but he held out some hope that he could return to the game, and the Tigers called in 2005, hiring him to manage the Oneonta Tigers, their short-season A-ball affiliate in the New York-Penn League. The club earned a playoff spot in 2005. After 2006 the Tigers rewarded Brookens with a promotion to the Class A West Michigan Whitecaps in 2007; the club won the Midwest League title in that year. In 2008 he became manager of his third minor-league team in four years, the Erie SeaWolves of the Double-A Eastern League, landing one playoff appearance in his two seasons there.

“You manage a little bit different as you make some more pitcher moves because you go with a little bit more with match-ups here [in Double-A] where in the lower classifications you’ll just run a pitcher out there and you’re going to pitch this inning no matter what happens and show me what you can do,” Brookens said, explaining his managerial style. “Here you may get another guy up to come in in a right-lefty matchup, that type of situation, because you’re really preparing them -– a little bit more now -– for what they’re going to encounter if they go to Triple-A, or even to Detroit.”

Brookens’ performance in the Tigers’ minor-league system helped him land a position on manager Jim Leyland’s staff as first base, outfield, and baserunning coach for the 2010 season.

Last revised: March 1, 2011

This biography originally appeared in “Detroit Tigers 1984: What A Start! What A Finish!” (SABR, 2012), edited by Mark Pattison and David Raglin.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to the Mayo Smith Society and of course to Tom Brookens for granting us the interview.

Sources

Falls, Joe. Detroit Tigers: An Illustrated History. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1989.

Middlesworth, Hal, ed. Detroit Tigers 1980 Yearbook. Detroit: Detroit Tigers. 1980.

Pattison, Mark, and David Raglin. Detroit Tigers Lists and More: Runs, Hits and Eras. Detroit: Wayne State University Press. 2002.

Borawski, Brian, “Kenny Rogers, Livan Hernandez and Tom Brookens.” November 16, 2007, available online at http://www.tigerblog.net/kenny-rogers-livan-hernandez-and-tom-brookens/

Cassidy, Mike “Erie Sweeps Doubleheader Over Bowie.” April 5, 2008, available online at http://www.tigersminors.com/category/erie-seawolves-april-2008/

Dave’s Blog, 1984 Tigers Tribute Site: Paying Tribute to the Greatest Tiger Team of My Generation, http://www.1984tigers.com/

http://www.baseball-fever.com/showthread.php?referrerid=8503&t=66079

http://en.thinkexist.com/quotes/tom_brookens/2.html

http://www.thebaseballpage.com/players/brookto01.php

http://www.thebaseballcube.com/

http://www.retrosheet.org

Hilliard, Larry, and Pat Kilroy. Interview with Tom Brookens, April 5, 2008, in Bowie, Maryland.

Leonardi, Ron. Interview with Tom Brookens, September 1, 2008, in Erie, Pennsylvania, http://www.erietube.com/kickapps/_Interview-with-Tom-Brookens/audio/190495/3766.html

Once in 1968, Mayo Smith decided to put in his pinch-hitting specialist far earlier in the game than normal. Brown, who usually didn’t come off the bench until a tight spot near the end of the game, was caught off-guard. “I was sitting at the end of the dugout, eating a couple of hot dogs,” he recalled. “It was only the fifth inning (and) I never expected Mayo to call on me to pinch-hit that early.” Since he didn’t want Smith – who often harped on Brown to lose a few pounds – to see him eating during the game, Brown quickly shoved the hot dogs down his shirt before heading to the plate. “That’s the only time I ever wished I’d strike out,” he said. But being the clutch hitter he was, he didn’t get his wish. Instead, he cracked a double and ended up having to slide head-first into second. While Tigers fans roared and cheered, Brown realized he had made quite a mess of himself. “I had mustard and squashed meat all over me,” he laughed, recalling that all his teammates were bent over laughing.1

So despite his success as one of the greatest major-league hitters off the bench, Gates Brown wasn’t a pinch-hitting robot after all. He was simply one of the guys. He played poker with teammates. He snored. He played catch with relievers during games. He was a press favorite. But most importantly, he always supported his teammates – so much so that his first big-league manager, Charlie Dressen, often referred to him as “Governor Brown.” But that was Gates Brown in a nutshell – a team player who always said and did the right things to help his team win.

William James “Gates” Brown was born in Crestline, Ohio, on May 2, 1939 (the same day that Lou Gehrig’s consecutive games streak came to an end). His father, John William Brown, a Georgia native, was a laborer working for the US government’s Depression-fighting WPA. Crestline was a town along the Cleveland, Columbus and Cincinnati Railroad, and by the time of the 1950 census he was listed as “laborer, railroad.” He and Phyllis Brown, a native Ohioan, had six children.

Gates grew to be 5-feet-11 and 220 pounds. He batted left-handed, but threw right-handed and played in 1,051 major-league games, all for the Detroit Tigers.

He was nicknamed Gates by his mother when he was a toddler. He claimed he didn’t know why. “I had it long before I went to school. … Maybe it had something to do with the way I walk – kind of bowlegged, I really don’t know.”2

Crestline, like much of northern Ohio in the 1940s and ’50s, wasn’t the greatest area to grow up in. It was flat, desolate, and poor. Most youngsters from the area got in trouble with the law at some point. A sociologist would say it wasn’t their fault they turned to a life of crime, but was a result of where they grew up.

Brown didn’t make it out of Crestline with a clean record. Even though he was a standout football star at Crestline High School, he got into more than his fair share of trouble growing up. When he turned 18, he was arrested for breaking and entering and was sent to the nearby Mansfield State Reformatory. (The prison was used in the film The Shawshank Redemption.)

Even though Brown had played some baseball in high school, it was in Mansfield that his talents as a ballplayer were developed. At 5-feet-11 and 200-plus pounds of pure muscle, he was encouraged by a prison guard who coached the institution’s baseball team to try out at catcher. In awe of his raw ability with the bat – and encouraged that baseball might lead Brown out of a life of crime – the coach, Chuck Yarman, wrote to several major-league teams, including the Tigers.3

In the fall of 1959, Detroit sent scouts to the prison to see Brown. Impressed, one of them called onetime Tiger Pat Mullin, later the team’s top scout. Mullin made the trek from Detroit to see for himself. After Brown belted a daunting home run in Mullin’s presence, the Tigers decided to help him get paroled a year early. He was signed to a $7,000 bonus pact almost immediately upon his release.

Brown has said that other clubs, including the Cleveland Indians and Chicago White Sox, were interested in springing him. But he stuck with Detroit because “they didn’t have any Negroes at that time and I figured they’d have to have some soon.”4 In fact, Ozzie Virgil, a Puerto Rican, had joined the Tigers in 1958 – becoming the Motor City’s first Black ballplayer. But Brown was right in that the Tigers obviously lacked the integration of most other big-league clubs in the late 1950s.

Before Brown’s first professional season, 1960, Mullin advised him to give up catching and switch to the outfield. More concerned about staying out of trouble than he was about a position change, he was fine with the new position.

Brown – on legal probation from Mansfield during his first season – joined the Tigers’ organization in Duluth that year. He shined almost immediately – especially for someone only a few months out of prison. In 121 games, he hit .293 with 10 homers. He also led the Northern League with 13 triples and was second in stolen bases (30) and runs scored (104). But his real character test wouldn’t come until later.

The following year he headed south to Durham of the Carolina League. It was here that Brown found out firsthand that being Black and an ex-con was fuel for the fire for Southern crowds. “It was tough just being a Negro down there,” he said. “I had to contend with people calling me ‘n—–” and other stuff.”5

Being an ex-con didn’t help as Southern newspapers printed stories about his criminal history, leading to more quips and threats from the crowds. “They called me all the names, ‘Con,’ ‘Jailbird,’ the whole thing. They were pretty vicious,” Brown recalled. But he had to learn to ignore the jeers and to use the negativity as motivation to improve. “Some of the guys wanted to go up into the stands after those people, but I told them to just let it lay. It made me do better. It made me try harder. I decided that they could beat me physically, but no way were they going to beat me mentally. And do you know something, I hit the ball hard that season and led the league in hitting,” topping the circuit in 1961 with a .324 mark. His outstanding play began to win over the same Durham fans who had heckled him earlier in the season. “By the end of the year, they were all on my side,” Brown said, laughing.6

After showing continued success at the minor-league level – including another .300 campaign for Denver in 1962 – it was clear that Brown was on the fast track to join the big club. And with the Tigers’ lack of early-season success in 1963, Brown was called up from Triple-A Syracuse on June 17 – one day before Dressen was named the team’s new manager. It would be Dressen who would call on Brown to take his first major-league hacks.

Brown officially debuted for the Tigers against the Boston Red Sox on June 19 at Fenway Park. With Boston up 4-1 in the fifth inning, Brown entered the game as – what else – a pinch-hitter for pitcher Don Mossi.

With Dressen getting his first look at the young outfielder, the situation was much like when Pat Mullin saw Brown play at Mansfield for the first time. As it happened, Mullin was at Fenway Park that day – having been made Dressen’s first-base coach. Again, as he had during his Mansfield tryout, Brown did not disappoint his onlookers. He hit a 400-foot home run well into the Boston sky, becoming only the third Tiger in history to homer in his first at-bat.

Brown remained with the club for the rest of the season, primarily as a pinch-hitter. Detroit rebounded with him on the team and had a winning record for the rest of the year. Overall, Brown hit .268 with two home runs in his rookie season. He stuck with the Tigers in 1964, primarily as the starting left fielder. Playing alongside Al Kaline in right field and a troika (Bill Bruton, George Thomas, and Don Demeter) in center, Brown hit .272 with 15 home runs and was second on the team with 11 stolen bases.

Despite his solid 1964 season, however, Brown lost his starting job in the outfield in 1965 to the young power hitter Willie Horton. And even though he was disappointed in returning to his role as a pinch-hitter and reserve outfielder, Brown would never let his personal frustration get in the way of the team. He slugged 10 home runs that season in barely half the at-bats he had in 1964. And despite his stocky 225-pound frame, he also stole six bases and was regarded unofficially as the fastest Tiger on the team. Brown didn’t know it then, but he was on his way to becoming the most successful pinch-hitter in American League history.

Despite Brown’s clutch contributions, his reserve status – and a budding mix of young outfielders – made it difficult for him to get raises from his bosses in Detroit. In fact, prior to the 1965 season, Brown had to pass up winter ball for the first time. With a wife and child plus a second on the way, Brown took a second job as a furniture salesman in the offseason.

Brown pressed on, however, and returned in 1966 and had similar success in the same role – batting .325 as a pinch-hitter. Overall he hit .266 with 7 home runs in 169 at-bats. Although he remained quietly disappointed with his role, it was clear that Brown was the Tigers’ best offensive option off the bench.

Tragedy befell Brown and the Tigers that season, however. Charlie Dressen died on August 10. Dressen had been suffering from heart and kidney problems for most of the season.

Brown struggled with injuries in 1967 before finally being shelved with a dislocated wrist. Even when he played, he never could find his swing under new manager Mayo Smith. As a pinch-hitter, he hit only .160 (4-for-25). However, that Tigers team nearly made the World Series before they were beat out by the “Impossible Dream” Red Sox on the final day of the season. Mayo Smith and the rest of the Tigers vowed to return to the 1968 season with a vengeance. But the greatest turn-around of all would come from Brown.

Discouraged by his poor season in 1967, Brown came to spring training on a mission in 1968. He was no longer upset about a lack of playing time, he just wanted to contribute. The Tigers, however, weary of Brown’s poor and injury-filled campaign in 1967, decided to bring back Eddie Mathews as the team’s primary left-handed pinch-hitter. General manager Jim Campbell and Smith even said that they thought about trading Brown, but couldn’t come close to pulling a trade because Brown had packed on a few pounds while waiting for his wrist to heal, a turnoff for prospective trading partners.

Brown got his chance to prove them wrong, however, on the second day of the season; when Smith, having already used Mathews earlier in the game, called on Brown to pinch-hit in the ninth inning in a tie game. Brown grabbed a bat and hit a game-winning home run off John Wyatt of the Boston Red Sox. It was how the 1968 Tigers won their first game of the season.

Brown did everything he could to tarnish the image of what would be known as the Year of the Pitcher. He hammered six hits in his first 10 pinch-hit at-bats on his way to an AL-record 18 pinch hits that season. Tigers fans soon became accustomed to watching him come off the bench and deliver over and over in key situations. But none was more key than during a Sunday doubleheader on August 11 against the defending American League champion Red Sox.

In the lidlifter that day, the Tigers were in an extra-inning struggle with the Red Sox until Mayo Smith finally found a time for Brown to get in the game in the bottom of the 14th inning. Tiger Stadium erupted when he was announced. But their cheers were nothing compared to when Brown smacked the game-winning home run a minute later.

Then in the second game, Brown strode to the plate in a tie game in the bottom of the ninth. With Mickey Stanley creeping off third, he singled to right to drive in the winning run, Giving him an unheard-of two game-ending hits in the same day. Even 16-year vet Kaline admitted he had never heard the Tiger Stadium crowd cheer the way they did for Brown that day.

In fact, Brown hit so unbelievably well in 1968 that Smith even started him in 16 games. Not bad for a guy who was trade bait when the season began. In the end, Brown hit an astounding .370 in 1968 – more than over 100 points higher than his career average, 135 better than the team average, and 140 better than the American League’s collective average. He was the only full-season Tiger to hit above .300 that season. He also averaged an extra-base hit every 6.9 at-bats – a remarkable stat when you consider that the mighty Álex Rodríguez averaged one every 7.2 at-bats in his MVP season of 2007.

Brown was not only clutch with the bat in 1968, he was also clutch as a teammate. One night during the season, he interrupted a melee between Denny McLain and Jim Northrup and made them understand the importance of what the team was trying to accomplish as a whole. During a road trip in the middle of the 1968 season, Brown was playing poker with a bunch of other players, including Northrup and McLain. Halfway through a hand, Northrup caught McLain cheating. Enraged, he flew across the bed and grabbed McLain by the throat. John Hiller, who was seated next to Brown, recalls Northrup screaming, “I’m gonna kill you, you bastard! I’m gonna kill you!” Red-faced and exasperated, Northrup continued to wring McLain’s neck in anger. But he was eventually pulled off from behind by Brown. A shocked Hiller remembered Brown looking Northrup dead in the eye and saying, “You’re not gonna touch him until after we win the pennant. Then he’s all yours.”7

Brown also remained popular with the Detroit writers that season. When asked about his remarkable success in the clutch, he developed a common response to give to reporters: “I’m square as an ice cube, and I’m twice as cool.” Detroit media couldn’t get enough of Gates.

Neither could Tigers fans. When the World Series rolled around and the Tigers lost Game One to St. Louis’s Bob Gibson – who also struck out 17 – Mayo Smith was bombarded by letters to put Brown into the starting lineup. One Tigers fan even wrote Smith asking him to start Brown at shortstop and bat leadoff during the series. “That guy must be nuts,” reacted Brown when told of the letter.8

Brown had only one appearance during the World Series: a pinch-hit fly out to left off Gibson in Game One. But for anyone who remembers how untouchable Gibson was that October day, it’s a miracle any man could come off the bench and even touch the ball.

Throughout the rest of his career, Brown enjoyed continued success as a pinch-hitter – including a .346 pinch-hitting campaign in 1971 – but nothing quite like the 1968 season, although he did enjoy more time in the baseball spotlight by becoming Detroit’s first designated hitter in 1973, a position tailor-made for the game’s Gates Browns.

Moreover, Brown became so beloved that some sportswriters who were adamantly against the DH when it was first implemented eventually said it didn’t bother them as much as they thought it would. One of the reasons: It was great for Tigers fans to see Brown at the plate every day.

The whole country got a chance to see Brown in July 1974 when Joe Garagiola, host of NBC’s pregame show Baseball World of Joe Garagiola, did an unusual two-part story on Brown. Garagiola rarely devoted his weekly show to anyone for two separate shows, but did so for Brown. The shows featured Brown and Garagiola back in Brown’s old stamping grounds at the Ohio State Reformatory in Mansfield. The program consisted of an interview in Brown’s former prison cell, as well as several rap sessions with current inmates.

Brown said he agreed to the interview inside the prison itself because “if I can help a few people who are mixed up by doing this [interview], it will be well worth it.” But he also mentioned that even if you did make the mistake of breaking the law, incarceration didn’t mean the end. “Just because a man has been in jail doesn’t mean it has to be the end of his whole life,” Gates told the inmates.9

After suffering through a 102-loss Tigers season in 1975, Brown decided to hang up his spikes at age 36. However, he loved the game too much to give it up completely. So he became a scout for the club less than three weeks after the season ended. Almost immediately Brown went from sitting in a major-league dugout to scouting teams in Florida, assisting in the free-agent draft; instructing the Tigers’ rookie-league team, and visiting various colleges nationwide to find new talent.

Brown continued his work as a scout until 1978, when he returned to the Tigers to become the new hitting coach under manager Ralph Houk. The Tigers’ team batting average rose from eighth in the American League in 1977 to second overall in Brown’s first season. That year the Tigers also enjoyed their first winning season in five years.

When Sparky Anderson arrived in Detroit in 1979, he kept Brown on. He helped bring along the hitting talents of Kirk Gibson, Alan Trammell, and Lou Whitaker. Brown remained with the Tigers through their World Series championship in 1984. He wanted to continue coaching the Tigers beyond 1984 but couldn’t agree with the team on a contract extension. He quit on November 14, 1984 – almost 25 years after he signed his first professional contract fresh out of Mansfield.

Things weren’t always rosy for Brown in his years since the 1984 championship. In 1991 he was part of a business group that purchased Ben G Industries, a plastics molding company that was relocated from the Detroit suburb of Mount Clemens to Detroit after its purchase. The company was doomed almost from the start. First it was alleged that the previous owners had stolen $458,000 from Ben G before it was sold to Brown’s group. Then the Internal Revenue Service got involved and found that as the company’s president, Brown had failed to oversee the payment of taxes during his first two years of ownership. A civil suit against Brown by the IRS sought more than $61,000.10 However, he never faced criminal charges.

Brown also had to settle another IRS allegation a few months before the Ben G trial began. This time it was at the personal level. Brown and his wife, Norma, were accused of shorting income on their personal taxes and ordered to pay more than $36,000 in back taxes and penalties dating from 1992 to 1997.

Brown was not forgotten by the baseball world, however. He was inducted into the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame in 2002. Beside Brown during his acceptance speech were his former hitting pupil, Lance Parrish, and former big-league pitcher Jim Kaat.11 Many of the voters said that Brown’s amazing story was a huge reason why they chose him.

Brown always liked to revisit and reflect upon that magical season of ’68. He had reached the pinnacle of his profession. He was a World Series champion. His climb from a prison cell to shaking hands with the likes of Bob Hope and Ed Sullivan was a great comeback story. But if you asked Brown, his contribution to the 1968 season was for his parents.

“I can never make up for all the grief I gave them in my life. I can never make up for all the humiliation they suffered, all the torture, when I spent time in (Mansfield),” Brown said. “But I promised them, when I got out of there I would never go back. If I didn’t make it in life, it would not be because I didn’t try. You know, you can do bad things in a big city and nobody ever knows about them. But do something wrong in a small town [Crestline’s population was 6,000] and everybody knows. That’s why I was so happy we won it all. I could finally give them something else to talk about.”12

In 2009 Crestline honored Brown by naming its high school baseball diamond Gates Brown Field. He said, “You dream about something like this, but you don’t ever think it’s going to happen. I didn’t want no fanfare when I was with the Tigers, but this is quite an honor.”13

In his 13 years as a player with Detroit, Brown was a part of nine winning ballclubs. He was part of seven more as a coach. Most Tigers fans will tell you that, despite his reserve role, Brown was a huge part of the successful era in Motown. His ability to come through in the clutch has not been matched in the AL. His .370 average in ’68 was the eighth-best season ever for a pinch-hitter. He had 107 pinch hits in his career, the most ever in the American League. He also still holds the AL records for pinch-hit at-bats (414) and home runs (16). Talking about his records in pinch-hitting, he once told a reporter, “Well, one thing, I didn’t do a lot of playing or I wouldn’t have been pinch-hitting.”14

But it wasn’t just with his bat, but with his attitude, that Brown became so successful on the diamond. He was everyone’s favorite teammate. He was a huge crowd favorite. He was an underdog who went from prisoner to champion.

Brown suffered from diabetes and a bad heart, dying at age 74 on September 27, 2013, at a nursing home in Detroit.15 He and Norma had four children: Pamela, Rebekah, Lindsey, and William.

“It’s just a shame,” former manager Jim Leyland said. “We knew his health wasn’t good. To this day, a lot of people think maybe Gates Brown is maybe the best pinch-hitter of all time. Hopefully Gates is in a better place.”16

Acknowledgments

This biography originally appeared in a SABR publication: Mark Pattison and David Raglin, eds., Sock It to ’Em, Tigers (Hanover, Massachusetts: Maple Street Press, 2008). It has been brought up to date with additional research and writing by Bill Nowlin and David Raglin.

Sources

Brown’s quotes about being hounded by Southern fans while in the minors: Rich Koster article, St. Louis Globe Democrat, October 19, 1968.

Joe Garagiola interview information and quotes: Detroit Tigers press release, July 1, 1974.

Poker story with McLain and Northrup and quotes: Detroit Tigers Encyclopedia, 99.

Reference to Mayo Smith receiving letters to start Gates at shortstop during the World Series: Rich Koster article, St. Louis Globe Democrat, October 19, 1968.

Notes

1 Detroit Tigers press release, August 18, 1978. See Gates Brown player file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. See also Dave Kindred, “Baseball’s Comic Relief,” The Sporting News, April 25. 1994.

2 Associated Press, “‘On Track’ Gates Shows Youngsters Straight Path,” Bakersfield Californian, July 7, 1942: 42.

3 Brown later said, “He was in love with baseball and knew a few scouts, and he paved the way for them to come in and see me. … Other than that, I don’t know where I’d be today.” George Sipple, “Ex-Tiger Brown to Be Inducted, Twice.” Detroit Free Press, November 1, 2009, found in Brown’s Hall of Fame player file.

4 Rich Koster, “Gates Brown – Hero in Detroit,” The Sporting News, October 19, 1968: 8.

5 Associated Press, “Gates Brown Not Forgetting Past,” High Point (North Carolina) Enterprise, July 7, 1974: 42.

6 Joe Falls, “Gates Brown’s Life an Example for LeFlore,” The Sporting News, March 22, 1975: 18.

7 Detroit Tigers Encyclopedia, 99.

8 Rich Koster, “Gates Brown – Hero in Detroit.”

9Jim Hawkins, “Gates Picking Up Rust as Tiger Spot Swinger,” The Sporting News, July 27, 1974: 23.

10 David Shepardson, “Trial Begins for Former Tiger,” Detroit News, undated article in Brown’s Hall of Fame player file.

11 Mike Brudenell, “Parrish, Six Others Enter Hall of Fame,” Detroit Free Press, April 18, 2002.

12 Joe Falls column, The Sporting News, March 22, 1969: 2.

13 Jon Spencer, “Crestline Goes to Bat for Brown,” Mansfield (Ohio) News-Journal, March 17, 2009: 9.

14 William Yardley, “Gates Brown, Tigers’ Clutch Pinch-Hitter, Is Dead at 74,” New York Times, September 28, 2013.

15 Terry Foster, “Tigers Family Mourns Pinch-Hitting Legend Gates Brown,” Detroit News, September 27, 2013.

16 Brendan Savage, “The Complicated Story of Gates Brown, the MOST CLUTCH HITTER on the 1968 Tigers,” MLive, August 2, 2018. https://www.mlive.com/tigers/2018/08/not_all_memories_were_good_one.html. Accessed August 6, 2024.

Paul Carey was born in 1928 in Mount Pleasant, Michigan, to Joseph P. and Ida (Brugge) Carey. His father was a professor of geography at Central Michigan University in Mount Pleasant and later was chair of the geography department. Paul’s interest in Tigers baseball dates back to the Mickey Cochrane era. “In 1934, I was just a little too young,” he recalled in 2008. “I was 6 years old — too young to appreciate baseball, I think. In 1935 … that’s when I started listening to the Tigers and started becoming a Tiger fan.” Carey finally witnessed his first Tigers game at Navin Field. New York Yankees pitcher Red Ruffing beat Tigers hurler Tommy Bridges in that contest. “I think I may have cried all the way home that day,” he remembered. (It was likely a 7-4 win by the Bronx Bombers on August 29, 1937.)

Growing up listening to Tigers broadcaster Harry Heilmann describing the games on radio, Carey knew at an early age that he wanted to be a sportscaster. “It probably started out about in the sixth grade,” he recalled. “I would hang a little bicycle horn from the ceiling on a string and it looked like it was like a microphone. And I had football and baseball games with spinners, or dice, and I’d play them and I’d announce them as we went along.” As a teen during World War II, Carey hitchhiked to Detroit with a friend and watched Heilmann do a re-creation of a Tigers road game. Standing on the sidewalk, Carey watched Heilmann describe the play-by-play from ticker-tape reports as he sat in a booth in front of the Telenews Theater on Woodward Avenue.

Graduating from Mount Pleasant High School in 1946, Carey placed among the top ten in his class. He enrolled first at Central Michigan University in his home town, and transferred to Michigan State University two years later. “Central, at that time, didn’t have any radio facilities at all and Michigan State had a longstanding radio station,” Carey said. “So I transferred to Michigan State.”

While still a student at Michigan State, Carey landed his first job in radio at WCEN, a start-up station in Mount Pleasant. There he had his first experience with baseball play-by-play. “The very first baseball play-by-play I did was my first week in radio,” Carey recalled. “We went on the air on August 8, 1949, and in that first week, we tried to do a lot of things to get the people listening to us, and one of the things we did at the end of that first week was a Sunday afternoon game at Island Park in Mount Pleasant.” Setting up a microphone on a card table at ground level behind the backstop, Carey broadcast a game between the Mount Pleasant town team and a team from a nearby town. “So that was my first taste of doing baseball. But I didn’t do any baseball again, frankly, until I started doing the Tigers,” he said.

Carey also covered the football and basketball games of Mount Pleasant High School and Central Michigan University on WCEN. Because the station stayed on the air only during daytime hours, Carey had to record Friday night games and air the recording on Saturday. Transportation to his job at WCEN was also a challenge. “I was hitchhiking back and forth from Michigan State my senior year at college to work weekends in Mount Pleasant,” Carey recalled. “Going back and forth and relying on the kindness of people to pick you up to take you 70 miles north to Mount Pleasant. … it’s amazing that we were able to do that.”

After graduating from Michigan State in 1950, Carey continued to work at WCEN until he was drafted during the Korean War. After serving in the infantry with the Army for two years, he returned to Mount Pleasant and went right back to work at WCEN, providing play-by-play for high-school and college football games just days after returning from the service.

In the spring of 1953, Carey moved to WKNX radio and WKNX-TV in Saginaw, Michigan, where he gained some experience in television. Carey remembered, “I wound up being the afternoon disc jockey at WKNX for three years and three months. And I was program director of the radio station for two years. And I did a lot of commercial work on television and it got so that I got the feel of it.” Working at WKNX, Carey did little sports play-by-play, though he did cover the Thanksgiving Day games between Saginaw High and Arthur Hill High School in Saginaw.

Hired as a staff announcer by Detroit AM radio powerhouse WJR in June 1956, Carey began a scoreboard show on the station that fall. His experience doing that show led to his being assigned to handle the Tigers’ pregame shows from Briggs Stadium on the handful of home night games that WJR covered in 1958. Carey recalled being nervous about the assignment: “I was kind of out of my depth. I’m nervous and never enjoyed interviewing anyway.” He credited Mel Ott, the Hall of Famer who was then a member of the Tigers’ broadcast crew, with helping him get through the season. “One of the finest people I have ever known in my life,” Carey said of Ott. “I think he sensed that I was nervous and needed help. And Mel went on with me three or four times by himself. Or he would help me find somebody. He was just the biggest help to me and just a wonderful person.” Carey continued doing the pregame shows through the 1959 season. When the format changed in 1960, Ernie Harwell took over Carey’s pregame show. “I was just as happy not to do it,” he said.

In 1964, Carey became the producer of the Tigers’ radio network. When broadcaster Ray Lane announced that he was leaving the Tigers radio crew in 1973 to focus more on TV work, a friend persuaded Carey to send in an audition tape and apply for Lane’s job. “And I didn’t have any tape,” he recalled. “I had never done a game. So I didn’t have anything to call on. So I manufactured a game. I kind of wrote a script and I got a crowd noise record and I may even have had a wind noise record. I made a mock broadcast of a game from Arlington Stadium between the Texas Rangers and the Tigers.” Figuring he would not have a chance to get the job, Carey was surprised and thrilled when he beat out 150 other applicants to be hired as Ernie Harwell’s partner on radio. Summing up why he believed he got the job, Carey said, “I think without question the fact that I did the Tiger network for eight years … but more importantly, I had been working at WJR since 1956 and WJR owned the rights to the Tiger games and I was one of their sportscasters. I think that was the thing that got me the job more than anything else — not my ability to do baseball because I hadn’t done it.” Not to that point, anyway.

Working alongside Harwell, Carey was part of a broadcast team that was remembered fondly — particularly by the Tigers broadcasters who followed them. Tigers radio voice Dan Dickerson first listened to the duo while in his teens and he recalled, “There was such a smooth transition from Ernie to Paul: different styles, different voices but both were just so good. I don’t think there’s any question that’s why I became such a loyal radio listener. I listened through thick and thin, I’m telling you. They lost 19 straight in ’75, I’d listen to most games just because I liked it. I don’t think there’s any question those two helped me get hooked on baseball.”

Television broadcaster Mario Impemba echoed Dickerson’s feelings. “Growing up in Detroit, the Ernie Harwell-Paul Carey team greatly influenced the way I broadcast a game today,” Impemba said. “No one could really match Paul’s thunderous pipes, but his style is what caught my attention as a young listener. Paul was outstanding at letting the ballpark sounds fill a broadcast. His style was straightforward and easy on the ears. I think he had a tremendous respect for the game. The story was always the game and not the announcer. Too many announcers today try to become the show and overshadow the game. Paul knew his job was to report what was happening on the field, nothing more, nothing less. He let the game breathe which allowed his listeners to use their imagination.”

Carey also provided play-by-play for Detroit Pistons basketball in three different stints (1969-73, 1975-76, and 1981-82). Carey found basketball an easier sport to do than baseball. “I always figured basketball was probably the sport I could do better than anything,” he said. He found baseball more difficult because of the slower pace of the game. “You have periods of time where there is very little going on. That’s when someone like Ernie would excel because he had these stories and memories, and that’s how Harry Heilmann excelled. He had these wonderful stories of his days in baseball and the people he knew. I didn’t have that background. So I had to scrounge and do a lot of research and a lot of study.”

In 1975, WJR, seeking to save money, told Carey that he would have to take on added duties; not only would he have to provide play-by-play, but he would have to be the engineer for the baseball broadcasts. “I was faced that winter with the proposition of no longer being a Tiger announcer or taking on the engineering job as well as being an announcer. And I wanted to continue to be a Tiger announcer,” he recalled. “I was told in 1975 that it was the coming thing — that others would be following suit shortly. Well, to this date, 2008, there’s no major-league announcer who has also been his own engineer. I’m the only one who’s ever done it.” For 16 seasons, Carey handled engineer duties as well as providing play-by-play. “After a while I got very accustomed to it but I never did really like it,” he said of his dual role.

Having broadcast many subpar Tigers teams for several years, Carey had a different feeling about the team coming into the 1984 season. During spring training in Lakeland, Florida, a reporter from the Lakeland Ledger asked him to predict where the Tigers would finish. Carey remembered, “I was a pessimist anyway, and I picked them to finish third.” When he walked into the Tigers’ clubhouse the day his prediction hit the paper, “Kirk Gibson and Lance Parrish just jumped all over my case because I picked them to finish third. ‘Don’t you know better, Carey?! We’re going to win it all!’ And they knew then they were going to win it all. There was no question.”

When the Tigers did make it to the World Series in 1984, Carey’s joy for his team’s success was overshadowed by the illness of Patti, his wife of 23 years. Ernie Harwell recalled in his book Tuned To Baseball, “To me, the gutsiest performance of the World Series didn’t happen on the diamond. It happened in our radio booth. It was the performance of Paul Carey who worked under tension and pressure which would have been unbearable for a lesser man. He broadcast most of the Series knowing that his wife, Patti, had been stricken with a malignant brain tumor.” Carey learned just before Game Three of the World Series that his wife’s condition was terminal. “Here he was in the happiest time for the Tigers,” Harwell wrote. “But for Paul, it was the saddest time of his life.” Carey remembered the prognosis: “Optimistically they gave me nine to fifteen months. She lasted five. That was a very tough time in my life.”

Though busy with covering the Tigers and with studio work, Carey still found the time to help a young broadcaster looking for advice. Tigers announcer Dan Dickerson recalled that in 1984 he was working at a radio station in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and was struggling with scant success to gain some notice in the Detroit market. He contacted Carey. “I just asked if I could come in and see how he did his job and kind of shadow him for a Sunday afternoon. He said ‘Sure.’ So I went down to [the station] … and he sat with me and told me what he did and how he did it. I was just trying to pick his brain a little bit but he spent hours with me on a Sunday afternoon, which obviously are busy days in the fall. … But I’ll never forget that he gave me the time of day when nobody else did.”

By 1990, Carey was ready to retire. He was thinking about retiring after the 1990 season, but reconsidered when he learned that he would no longer have to do engineer duties in 1991. “I wanted to experience being just an announcer again,” he said. Telling WJR station manager Jim Long in November 1990 of his intention to retire, Carey was shocked when he learned just a few weeks later that Harwell had been fired. Remembering the 1991 season as “bittersweet,” he said, “I was not looking forward to not doing the games. But I was looking forward to traveling and having the time from mid-February until October on my own. I was ready to retire.” After an emotional goodbye to Ernie and the fans, Carey retired at the end of the year.

Carey married the former Nancy Wackerly in 1987. They began to spend their winters in the Pensacola, Florida, area, and in Rochester, Michigan, the rest of the year. He was still keeping up with baseball every day, though he didn’t go to many games at Comerica Park. In the spring of 2008, Carey underwent surgery to remove a blockage in his right carotid artery. The day before the surgery, he got a phone call from a close friend: Ernie Harwell. “The day before, he prayed with me on the telephone. I think that’s really special.”

He died at age 88 on April 12, 2016, at his Rochester home of complications from chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and heart disease.

A version of this biography originally appeared in “Detroit Tigers 1984: What A Start! What A Finish!” (SABR, 2012), edited by Mark Pattison and David Raglin.

Sources

Publications

Castiglione, Joe, and Douglas B. Lyons. Broadcast Rites and Sites: I Saw It on the Radio With the Boston Red Sox. Lanham, Md.: Taylor Trade Publishing, 2004.

Eichorn, George B. Detroit’s Sports Broadcasters on the Air. Charleston, S.C.: Arcadia Publishing, 2003.

Harwell, Ernie. Tuned to Baseball. South Bend, Ind.: Diamond Communications, 1985.

Keegan, Tom. Ernie Harwell: My Sixty Years in Baseball. Chicago: Triumph Books, 2002.

Articles

Associated Press. “Carey Joins Harwell On Tiger Radio.” Saginaw News, February 2, 1973. B6.

Atkins, Harry. “Ernie wanted to continue beyond 1991, but told ‘no.’” Saginaw News, December 20, 1990. D1, D5.

Crowe, Steve. “Carey leaving on own, gets ‘misty’ over Ernie.” Detroit Free Press, December 20, 1990. 6G.

Crowe, Steve. “Ernie, Paul finally at loss for words.” Detroit Free Press, October 5, 1991. 1B.

“Departing.” Saginaw News, June 23, 1956, TV & Radio Section. 2.

Dow, Bill. “Seasons of George Blaha, 30.” Detroit Free Press, January, 18, 2006. 1E.

Hardy, Dick. “Ernie added color to game.” Bay City Times, October 6, 1991. 8F.

Harwell, Ernie. “Catching up with the Tiger family” Detroit Free Press, June 23, 2008. 2B.

“High School Graduation Activities for 86 Seniors Is Underway This Week.” Isabella County Times-News, May 30, 1946. 1, 4.

“Joseph P. Carey, Outstanding M.P. Citizen, Dies.” Mount Pleasant Daily Times, August 30, 1968. 1.

Kornacki, Steve. “Harwell’s streak ends.” Detroit Free Press, April 25, 1989. 5D.

Mariotti, Jay. “A minor adjustment: Tiger broadcasters get a taste of the farm life.” Detroit News, June 22, 1981. 4D.

Rubin, Neal. “The Tigers’ Utility Voice: Second banana Paul Carey, glad to skip the fame game, gets top marks on his own.” Detroit Free Press, June 24, 1990. 1G, 3G.

“Obituaries: Ida M. Carey.” Mount Pleasant Morning Sun, November 9, 1979. 2.

Tuschak, Beth. “Harwell, Carey turn work to play.” Detroit News, April 8, 1989. 6C.

Vincent, Charlie. “Strictly Professional: Ernie and Paul — cool and calm in broadcast clincher.” Detroit Free Press, September 19, 1984. 3D.

White, Sue. “Thanks for the memories: WKNX-AM, a pioneer of radio’s golden age, bids its final farewell to mid-Michigan.” Saginaw News, August 1, 2004. C1, C4.

Other

Bohn, Matt. Phone interview with Paul Carey, June 25, 2008.

Bohn, Matt. Phone interview with Dan Dickerson, June 29, 2008.

Impemba, Mario. E-mail messages to the author.