The entrepreneurial drive, innovation, and investment that had fueled the city’s meteoric growth had stalled in the Great Depression. While a disaster for Americans nationwide, the Depression manifested itself in an especially savage way in Detroit, where hundreds of thousands subsisted meagerly “on relief.” Poor and out-of-work Detroiters were literally starving to death by the early 1930s, providing the impetus for the famous and bloody Ford Hunger March of March 7, 1932. On that day, several thousand demonstrators – many of them unemployed Ford workers –marched on the Rouge Plant in Dearborn, where police and company security personnel opened fire without warning, killing five and wounding more than 50.

Detroit’s population rose from less than 300,000 in 1900, 13th in the US, to almost 1.6 million in 1930. The fourth largest city in the country, Detroit grew by 58 percent in the 1920s. It saw a slight population decline in the early 1930s, but recovered to register a 3.5 percent growth rate in that decade. The suburban migration of the white middle class had already begun, as the population of Detroit’s suburbs grew by almost 20 percent in the 1930s.

Geographically, the city reached its full extent with the large annexations that filled out the Northwest and Northeast quadrants of Detroit from 1921 to 1926, when a change in Michigan law effectively ended the city’s territorial expansion. Housing development in Northeast and Northwest Detroit would have to wait till the late 1940s, however, when the great postwar expansion filled those sections of the city with mile after mile of inexpensive single-family homes.

While there were a handful of other companies making cars, the Big Three that would dominate the auto business for the rest of the century were already in place. General Motors, Ford, and Chrysler were selling almost 90 percent of new cars in the US, and their power and influence in Wayne County and across the state of Michigan cannot be overstated.

Considered a leader in public transportation, Detroit was the first city in the US to own its municipal transit system. Despite its nickname, the Motor City maintained a network of trolleys traversing the city and reaching far into the suburbs. The Detroit Street Railway system peaked at 466 route-miles in 1934; meanwhile, other Michigan cities were retiring their trolleys in favor of buses. Interurban trolleys ran from Detroit to Flint, Ann Arbor, Kalamazoo, Lansing, Grand Rapids, Port Huron, and Toledo.

Detroit’s international connections to the city of Windsor and the province of Ontario across the Detroit River to the south were the same then as now. The recently completed Ambassador Bridge – the longest suspension bridge in the world when it opened – and the Detroit-Windsor vehicle tunnel, plus an older rail tunnel and a ferry, carried commercial and passenger traffic to and from Canada.

Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s election as president in 1932 resulted in a series of new federal programs that partly ameliorated the depressed US economy. The Civilian Conservation Corps began in 1933. The groundbreaking Social Security Act of 1935 established unemployment compensation, aid to dependent children, and maternal and child welfare programs.

The general national recovery was also felt in Michigan in 1935, with personal income up from its 1933 nadir. Car production, which had exceeded 5 million units in 1929 before plunging by about two-thirds by 1932, was quickly ramping back up. In 1937 auto production was three times the depressed level of five years earlier.

Another seminal piece of federal legislation that had a major impact on Detroit was the 1935 Wagner Act, which led to the establishment of powerful industrial trade unions. The formation of the United Auto Workers in August 1935 and the resulting unionization of the auto industry in the late 1930s and early 1940s led to a rise in the standard of living that made Detroit’s middle class the envy of the world in the postwar era.

Along with thousands of ethnic whites from Eastern and Southern Europe and from Appalachia, tens of thousands of African Americans had migrated to Detroit from the rural South to find work in the factories during World War I and the Roaring Twenties. Detroit’s black population surged from about 5,000 in 1910 to about 120,000 in 1930 (approximately 8 percent of the city). Henry Ford gave good-paying jobs to thousands of black men at Ford Motor’s massive Rouge Factory complex in Dearborn, enabling a substantial black middle class to grow in Detroit. A self-contained industrial city of 1,300 acres that could turn raw materials into a finished automobile in 28 hours, “The Rouge” employed almost 100,000 at its peak.

The racial discrimination that would spark major riots in 1943 and 1967 was already deeply rooted in the Detroit area. Some people fought back, as when white and black Hamtramck High School students joined together to protest segregation in school activities in 1935. The Detroit chapter of the NAACP was, then as now, the influential civil rights organization’s largest, and the UAW would quickly become a major progressive force. Tragically, though, it was the legacy of ongoing racial tension that in many ways defined Detroit during the 20th century, epitomized by the 1925 Ossian Sweet murder trial, made famous by the 2004 book Arc of Justice.

The city’s architectural landscape in the 1930s was dotted with skyscrapers well-known to many generations of Detroiters – among them the Penobscot Building, the Union Trust (later Guardian) Building, and the Book Cadillac Hotel – all erected in the 1920s. Along with the Fisher Building, the Guardian and Penobscot remain today as fine examples of Art Deco architecture.

Despite the multitude of skyscrapers erected in Detroit in the 1920s, the city’s downtown was already in decline, both physically and economically. Retailing was dominated by J.L. Hudson’s enormous department store at Woodward and Gratiot, along with Crowley’s and Kern’s department stores one block away. The city’s share of metropolitan-area jobs in the manufacturing sector dropped by 23 percent from 1929 to 1939, and Detroit’s share of area employment in the retail and wholesale sectors was also dropping.

Planning had already begun in the mid-1930s to build the large housing projects that would later become infamous, although all of that public housing was then segregated and mostly reserved for whites. The crowded African-American neighborhoods of Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, where black citizens were ghettoized on the east side of the central business district, were considered slums by the white power structure. Both historic black areas were leveled under the guise of urban renewal after World War II.

The biggest physical difference between 1930s Detroit and the postwar city was the riverfront. Before World War II, valuable riverfront land was not used for civic purposes or for public recreation as later. Instead, the blocks adjacent to the Detroit River were occupied by industry and commerce, plus the railroads and ships needed to move goods to and from the plants.

The “civic center” of prewar Detroit was well north of the river, just south of the retail district. City Hall was an 1871 sandstone structure, a mishmash of Italianate, French, and Georgian elements located on the west side of Woodward Avenue on what would become Kennedy Square in the 1960s and Campus Martius four decades later. County offices were housed in the 1902 baroque Wayne County Building, east of City Hall across Cadillac Square. City Hall moved to the riverfront in the early 1950s; the County Building still stood in 2014 but was empty.

Anchored by General Motors’ massive headquarters and the gilt-topped Fisher Building – both designed by world-famous architect Albert Kahn – the New Center business district along West Grand Boulevard (just west of Woodward) was still new in the early 1930s. Just south of New Center, the twin jewels of Detroit’s Cultural Center – the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) and the Detroit Public Library – were built along Woodward Avenue, directly across from each other, in the 1920s. Diego Rivera’s world-famous murals generated intense local controversy along with worldwide acclaim when unveiled at the DIA in 1932.

Between the downtown business district and New Center, another major player was just getting organized. Over the years, it would become known as Detroit’s Midtown. In 1934 the recently amalgamated Colleges of the City of Detroit were renamed Wayne University. Wayne would add a School of Public Affairs and Social Work in 1935 and gain its Law School two years later. It did not become Wayne State University until 1956.

Detroit’s media scene in the 1930s was dominated by the ink-stained wretches who wrote, printed, and distributed the city’s three major daily newspapers: the conservative News, the liberal Free Press, and the now-defunct, then Hearst-owned Times. The Detroit Tribune, founded in 1933, covered the city’s growing African-American community, competing with the Michigan Chronicle, today’s foremost African-American paper, which began in 1936.

The print medium’s pre-eminence was being challenged by an electronic medium for the first time in the 1930s with radio’s rapid rise in popularity. Only half of Michigan households owned a radio set in 1930, but market penetration was almost universal by the end of that decade. The nationally famous radio drama The Lone Ranger originated from Detroit’s WXYZ, as did other national programs. Three other radio stations were on the air in Motown in 1934: WJR (which upped its broadcast signal to 50,000 watts in 1935), WWJ, and WMBC (later WJLB).

Republican Frank Couzens, son of former Mayor and then US Senator from Michigan James Couzens, was the as mayor of Detroit from 1934 to 1938. The city of Detroit had a mayor-council form of civic government that was dominated by a strong mayor and featured a weak city council. The mayor’s office had been controlled by Republicans since 1912, with only two Democratic mayors interrupting that string. One was popular Democrat Frank Murphy, who defeated former Mayor Charles Bowles after Bowles’ recall in 1930. Bowles was notable mostly for being the candidate of the Ku Klux Klan, which operated openly and counted thousands of members in Detroit in the 1920s and 1930s. Murphy later became governor of Michigan, attorney general of the United States, and an associate justice of the US Supreme Court.

The intense social and political unrest of the 1930s was fanned by Father Charles Coughlin, a radical populist dubbed the Radio Priest. Coughlin was initially a supporter of President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, but later became very conservative and bitterly opposed FDR. Coughlin’s primary forum was his weekly radio show on WJR, the Hour of Power. Previously an unknown parish priest, Coughlin took to the new medium in 1926 to raise money to build the Shrine of the Little Flower in suburban Royal Oak.

At his height in the 1930s, Coughlin’s broadcasts from the Shrine commanded a national audience of 30 million or more listeners. He was initially carried on CBS, then later on a network of stations Coughlin himself put together. Coughlin’s popularity declined in the late 1930s as he became increasingly anti-Semitic and pro-fascist to the point of opposing US entry into World War II.

Sports provided a pleasant diversion from the life-and-death issues of the Great Depression, and baseball was the unchallenged king. “First in the affection of the city comes its baseball team,” concluded a 1940 history of the city, Detroit: Dynamic City. “No matter how seriously Detroiters may be divided among themselves otherwise, 99 percent of them stand solidly behind their beloved Tigers of the American League.”

A decade later, This Is Detroit, a pictorial history that was labeled as an “official publication of Detroit’s 250th birthday festival,” reiterated the status of the national pastime in the Motor City. The book featured only four images of prominent athletes: Charlie Bennett, Ty Cobb, Mickey Cochrane, and Joe Louis. Cobb and Cochrane were called “baseball immortals,” while Louis was unfairly called just a “former heavyweight champion.” The book included images of Recreation Park in 1886, where the National League Detroit Wolverines played, and of Tiger Stadium in 1940. Other sports mentioned included croquet, bicycle racing, boat racing, cricket, and ice skating – there was no mention of football, basketball, or hockey.

The Corktown neighborhood, where Navin Field was built in 1912, was an Irish working-class area. Several local landmarks familiar to later Tigers fans were present in the 1930s, including the Gaelic League on Michigan Avenue, Brooks Lumber on Trumbull, and the massive Beaux Arts Michigan Central railroad station on Vernor, a half-dozen blocks west of the ballpark.

Because of its large and prosperous black population, Detroit was considered a very desirable market by the businessmen who organized and ran the various Negro Leagues. Yet Detroit couldn’t sustain a successful Negro League team after 1931, when the Negro National League’s Detroit Stars had folded, along with the league.

After playing at Mack Park on Detroit’s East Side through 1929, the Stars moved to Hamtramck in 1930, just north of the huge Dodge Main factory complex. Stars owner John Roesink, a major promoter of semipro baseball in Detroit, built Hamtramck Stadium for the team in what is now Veterans Memorial Park. Roesink was a friend of Ty Cobb, and the Georgia Peach showed up to throw out the ceremonial first pitch at Hamtramck Stadium – a gesture that many might otherwise find incongruous. Turkey Stearnes, one of black baseball’s all-time top sluggers as well as the greatest African-American ballplayer in Detroit history, played for the Stars from 1923 through 1931 and in 1937.

The short-lived Negro East-West League and its Detroit Wolves played in Hamtramck in 1932, though both perished before midsummer. In 1933 the advent of the second Negro National League brought a new Detroit Stars club that survived only one season. In 1935 the Nashville Elite Giants were slated to move to Detroit, but were unable to secure a lease to play at Hamtramck Stadium. The Motor City would see one last major Negro League team in 1937, when the new Negro American League debuted with another Stars franchise in Hamtramck that again lasted for only a single summer.

In so-called Organized Baseball, the fading of the legends of the 1920s was also evident. The last legal spitball in the major leagues was thrown in September 1934 by Burleigh Grimes, who retired at the end of the season. Babe Ruth, who revolutionized the national pastime with his home run exploits in the early 1920s, retired at the end of May 1935.

In 1935 Detroit was beginning to awaken from its slumber. The prolonged nightmare of the Great Depression, however, wouldn’t end until the United States began seriously arming for World War II several years later. Malcolm Bingay, the Detroit sportswriter who would serve as managing editor of both the News and Free Press in his career, knew the city better than most and as well as anyone.

Bingay aptly called baseball “Detroit’s Safety Valve.”

Two bits of trivia:

1. On January 8, 1935, future Tigers infielder Reno Bertoia was born in Italy. Bertoia grew up in Windsor, became a bonus baby with the Tigers in 1953 along with Al Kaline, and spent most of his major-league career wearing the Old English D. After retiring, Bertoia was the longtime president of the Tigers players alumni association until his death in Windsor in 2011.

2. On February 3, 1935, future Tigers infielder and coach Dick Tracewski was born in northeastern Pennsylvania. Tracewski served as a utility infielder on the 1968 world championship team and was the first-base coach on Detroit’s 1984 championship squad.

GARY GILLETTE is editor of SABR’s annual “Emerald Guide to Baseball,” a member of Baseball Prospectus’s advisory board, and co-chair of SABR’s Ballparks Committee. Gillette has written, edited, or contributed to dozens of baseball books and websites, including ESPN.com and TotalBaseball.com. He was the editor of the “ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia,” executive editor of the “ESPN Pro Football Encyclopedia,” and a contributor to six editions of “Total Baseball.” As a director of the Tiger Stadium Conservancy since 2007, Gillette fought to save the historic stadium and continues to  ght to save the field at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull in Detroit. As president of the Friends of Historic Hamtramck Stadium, he led the successful effort to place one of the few remaining Negro League ballparks on the National Register of Historic Places. Gillette lives in Detroit’s historic Indian Village, two doors away from the house built for Chalmers Motors president Hugh Chalmers in 1910.

Sources

Books

Babson, Steve, Working Detroit: The Making of a Union Town (New York: Adama Books, 1984).

Bates, Beth Tompkins, The Making of Black Detroit in the Age of Henry Ford (Chapel Hill, North Carolina: University of North Carolina Press, 2012).

Bingay, Malcolm W., Detroit Is My Own Home Town (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill Company, 1946).

Boyle, Kevin, Arc of Justice: A Saga of Race, Civil Rights, and Murder in the Jazz Age (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 2004).

Bryan, Ford R., Rouge: Pictured in Its Prime (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003).

Darden, Joe T., Richard Child Hill, June Thomas, and Richard Thomas, Detroit: Race and Uneven Development (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1987).

Eichorn, George B., Detroit’s Sports Broadcasters On the Air (Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2003).

Farley, Reynolds, Sheldon Danziger, and Harry J. Holzer, Detroit Divided (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2000).

Ferry, W. Hawkins, The Legacy of Albert Kahn (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1987).

Fogelman, Randall, Detroit’s New Center (Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2004).

Gavrilovich, Peter, and Bill McGraw, eds., The Detroit Almanac: 300 Years of Life in the Motor City (Detroit: Detroit Free Press, 2000).

Gay, Cheri Y., Detroit Then and Now (San Diego: Thunder Bay Press, 2001).

Gillette, Gary, and Pete Palmer, The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, fifth edition (New York: Sterling Publishing Co., Inc., 2008).

Kavanaugh, Kelli B., Detroit’s Michigan Central Station (Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2001).

Lester, Larry, Sammy J. Miller, and Dick Clark, Black Baseball in Detroit (Chicago: Arcadia Publishing. 2000).

Linn, Andy, Emily Linn, and Rob Linn, eds., Belle Isle to 8 Mile: An Insider’s Guide to Detroit 2012, no publisher listed)

Meier, August, and Elliott Rudwick, Black Detroit and the Rise of the UAW (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979).

Nowrocki, Alan, and David Clements, Art in Detroit Public Places (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2008).

Pound, Arthur, Detroit: Dynamic City (New York: D. Appleton-Century Company, 1940).

Quaife, M.M. This Is Detroit: 250 Years in Pictures (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1951).

Riley, James A., The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2002).

Savage, Rebecca Binno, and Greg Kowalski, Art Deco in Detroit (Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2004).

Schramm, Kenneth, Detroit’s Street Railways (Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2006).

Sisson, Richard, Christian Zacher, and Andrew Cayton, general editors, The American Midwest: An Interpretive Encyclopedia (Bloomington, Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2007).

Sommers, Lawrence M., ed., Atlas of Michigan (East Lansing, Michigan: Michigan State University Press, 1977).

Thomas, June Manning, Redevelopment and Race: Planning a Finer City in Postwar Detroit (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).

Woodford, Arthur M., ed., The Michigan Companion (Detroit: OmniData, Inc., 2012).

Articles

Cowan, Russell, “Detroit Giants Lose Park,” Philadelphia Tribune, May 16, 1935, 11. Accessed via ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“9,000 See Ty Cobb Throw a Perfect Strike to Open Hamtramck’s New Base Ball Park,” Detroit News, May 12, 1930.

“Michigan School Segregation Plan Is Failure,” Pittsburgh Courier, May 18, 1935, 7. Accessed via ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

“Nashville Giants Transfer Franchise to Detroit,” Philadelphia Tribune, February 21, 1935, 11. Accessed via ProQuest Historical Newspapers.

Online

Baseball-Reference.com

Detroit1701.org

DetroitDataGuru.Wordpress.com

DetroitNAACP.org

ForgottenShow.net

HamtramckStadium.org

HistoricBostonEdison.org

HistoricDetroit.org

IMDB.com

Michigan.gov

Interviews and Communications

Logan, Sam, publisher of Michigan Chronicle, Telephone interview with author, May 18, 2010.

Shea, Stuart, telephone interviews and e-mail messages to author, 2014.

Unpublished sources

Gillette, Lina, “Detroit Is, Because,” Rudolph Steiner School Ann Arbor, 2013.

Shea, Stuart, 24-7 Baseball MLB Club Broadcasting Database.

In the fall of 1933, the Detroit Tigers had just completed a 75-79 season, good for fifth place in the American League, 25 games behind the Washington Senators. The Tigers were still searching for that elusive first world championship; their most recent trip to the World Series having been in 1909. The club hadn’t been in serious contention since 1916, when Ty Cobb, Sam Crawford, and Bobby Veach roamed the outfield in Detroit. With two games left in the 1933 season, manager Bucky Harris had handed in his resignation on September 27. Tiger owner Frank Navin was suddenly in the market for a new skipper for his team.

He knew he needed a strong leader to light a spark under his perennially lethargic club. The Tiger locker room had taken on the atmosphere of a country club in recent years. But in addition to the club’s on-the-field problems, the Depression had caused attendance at Navin Field to drop to a third of what it had been ten years earlier. Navin had contemplated selling the franchise. Ty Cobb was reportedly involved in an effort to purchase the team, but it never came to fruition. So the Tigers boss had three crises to deal with: Finding a manager, improving the team, and boosting attendance.

Navin felt he had the answer to all three problems in the Yankees’ Babe Ruth. The Sultan of Swat, who would be 39 in 1934, was clearly nearing the end of the line as a player, but he still had some pop left in his bat. He had hit .301 with 34 home runs and 104 RBIs for New York in 1933. Good numbers, certainly, for just about anyone not named Ruth. For several years, Ruth had made no bones about his interest in becoming the New York manager. The Yankees owner, Colonel Jacob Ruppert, however, did not reciprocate that interest, and in fact was seeking to be rid of Ruth altogether. Yankees manager Joe McCarthy and star first baseman Lou Gehrig, were barely on speaking terms with the home-run king, so perhaps Ruppert reasoned that dumping Ruth would be addition by subtraction. That’s where Navin saw an opening.

Ruppert gave Navin permission to talk to Ruth about the Detroit managerial job. During the World Series that fall, Navin and Yankees general manager Ed Barrow discussed the framework of an arrangement that would have allowed Ruth to become the Tigers’ player-manager. Navin contacted Ruth by telephone, requesting that he come quickly to Detroit in order to work out the details. Ruth anticipated being offered the job, but nonetheless didn’t appear to be in any hurry to sit down with Navin. The Bambino put the meeting on hold in order to travel to Hawaii with his wife, Claire. Apparently, he had a commitment to play in a golf tournament, along with a few baseball exhibitions. Ruth abruptly ended the telephone call by saying that they could get together when he returned from the trip.

Upon hearing about this, Barrow warned Ruth, “You’re making a mistake. You’d better go see him now.” “There’s plenty of time,” Ruth replied. “The season doesn’t begin for six months. I’ve got these things all set in Hawaii. I’ll call him when I get back.”1 Perhaps Ruth felt that he was a lock for the job, and that he could afford to make Navin wait. If that was the case, Ruth had overplayed his hand. The Tigers owner wanted to get the deal settled, and didn’t appreciate such flippant treatment from a ballplayer.

While in Hawaii, Ruth did get around to corresponding with Navin, but it did not go well. Navin was put off by Ruth’s salary demands, as well as his desire for a percentage of the gate. The Tigers owner suddenly grew cool to the whole idea, and walked away from a deal.

It may have been the best move he never made.

This being the Depression, the Tigers were not the only team facing financial difficulties. In Philadelphia the Athletics were losing money as well. Attendance at Shibe Park had been steadily plummeting, from 839,176 in the World Series-winning pre-Depression year of 1929 to 297,138 in 1933. To stay afloat, Athletics owner/manager Connie Mack was desperately trying to cut expenses. He had already begun by trading slugger Al Simmons and two other players to the Chicago White Sox for $100,000 in 1932. As recently as August of 1933, Navin had asked Mack to “put a price on (Mickey) Cochrane,” the Athletics’ star catcher. “Forget it, Frank,” was Mack’s reply at the time. “I’d never sell him.”2 Navin assumed that was the end of it. After the season, however, Mack made it known to his fellow owners that he was willing to part with Cochrane, as well as ace hurler Lefty Grove, in a package deal for $200,000. He found no takers; such an asking price was too high for any team in that financial climate.

It was at this point that H.G. Salsinger, a Detroit News sportswriter, helped to change the course of baseball in Detroit. Salsinger was somewhat of a confidant of Navin. He told the owner that Cochrane would not only solve the team’s catching problems, but would also be the answer to the vacant managerial position, providing the leadership that was so lacking on the team. Salsinger had bounced the idea off Cochrane and Cochrane had told him, “I’d like nothing better.”3 Based on this information, Navin began pursuing discussions with Mack regarding Cochrane. According to Mack: “I saw this was Mickey’s chance. I owed him something extra for his loyalty, so I just couldn’t stand in his way when he could better himself. That’s the only reason I ever let Mickey leave me.”4 Mack still wanted $100,000 for Cochrane, though, and Navin did not have that type of money on hand. So he borrowed the money from his partner, Walter Briggs, which started the ball rolling.

On December 12, 1933, Mack had a busy day. He sold Grove, leadoff man extraordinaire Max Bishop, and 17-game-winner Rube Walberg, to the Boston Red Sox for $125,000 and two inconsequential players. He also finalized the deal with the Tigers, who acquired Cochrane in exchange for catcher Johnny Pasek and $100,000. Finally, he sent Pasek and former 20-game-winner and World Series hero George Earnshaw to the Chicago White Sox for $20,000 and Charlie Berry, who would remind no one of Cochrane as the Athletics’ new catcher. It was one of the darkest days in Philadelphia baseball history, but one of the brightest for the Detroit Tigers.

An excited Cochrane exclaimed “I’ll be happy to manage the Tigers for Mr. Navin, who impresses me as a great fellow and a man who will help me build. He said he’d give me a chance and his record proves it, as Hughie Jennings was there for many years, Ty Cobb for six years, and Bucky Harris for five. I see no reason why I can’t make the grade as a manager.”5

The addition of Cochrane was the catalyst through which the Tigers’ fortunes drastically improved. Cochrane had played with Philadelphia for nine seasons, including three trips to the World Series, winning in 1929 and 1930. He had been the league’s MVP in 1928. Although his years in Philadelphia had established him as a star player, the time Cochrane spent in Detroit would propel him to near-legendary status in the Motor City and beyond. He spent only four years in Detroit, but his competitive nature and leadership abilities resurrected the Tigers franchise to elite status while they played championship baseball.

In some ways Cochrane was not ready to be a playing manager for the Tigers. He did not like the limelight that the position brought to his life, and the light only got brighter as he began his tenure. From the very beginning, however, Cochrane displayed a winning attitude. After all, that is what he was accustomed to from his time in Philadelphia. He expected the Tigers to have the same attitude from the very beginning, and he wasted no time in trying to instill his way of thinking.

From the day he arrived in Detroit in January of 1934, Cochrane began spreading the word about the Tigers turning the page and becoming a contender again. He made the circuit of luncheons, banquets, social gatherings, and newspaper interviews. Cochrane was confident but not cocky. At a Kiwanis Club luncheon, he asserted, “I played with the Athletics for nine years and in that time we never finished out of the first division and I do not intend to do so now.” At another engagement he remarked, “I’m not foolish enough to expect a pennant the first season and maybe not the second, but I promise you an improved team.”6

Once spring training began, Cochrane didn’t waste any time instilling a new attitude in the Tigers. One of the local headlines read, “Cochrane Cracks Training Whip to Get Tigers into Fighting Trim.” He added 20 minutes of calisthenics to the routine of training camp. He conducted clinics on the fundamentals of sliding and defensive positioning. He imposed a midnight curfew and had a 9:00 A.M. wakeup call for the three-hour morning practices, which started not a minute after 10:30. He even ordered the hotel chef that “no man may order more than one steak a day.”7

One of the changes Cochrane made was a symbolic one. Before the 1930 season, the Tigers had done away with the classic Old English “D” on the front of their home jerseys. The logo had been worn since the club’s early days, including during their pennant-winning run of 1907-09. The new look apparently didn’t do much for Cochrane. He saw to it that the Old English “D” was put back on the uniforms and caps, in hopes that it would restore the Tigers’ champion pedigree. Indeed, there was a new boss in town, and baseball in Detroit was about to undergo a seismic change.

Cochrane’s new attitude quickly rubbed off on the rest of the Tigers. He made the players believe in themselves, and once the summer heated up, so did the team. More and more fans began coming back to Navin Field, as the ballpark became a place where they could watch some exciting baseball and forget about the worries of the Depression for a couple of hours. The Tigers led the American League in attendance in 1934 with 919,161, their highest mark since 1924, and nearly triple their total of 1933.

One of the biggest beneficiaries of Cochrane’s arrival was the young Detroit pitching staff. In particular, Cochrane is credited with turning the 24-year-old Schoolboy Rowe from a thrower into a pitcher. Rowe, in only his second big-league season in 1934, compiled a 24-8 record. Another second-year man, Elden Auker, won 15. Tommy Bridges improved from 14 wins to 22. The staff was one of the biggest keys to the Tigers’ success, as the team finished with a record of 101-53, seven games ahead of the Yankees, to capture the American League pennant.

As for Cochrane in 1934, he averaged .320 and was named the league’s Most Valuable Player for the second time in his career (having also won in 1928). Despite Lou Gehrig’s having won the Triple Crown that season, Cochrane’s success as a player and a manager helped sway the voters in his favor.

After the pennant-winning 1934 season, Packard Motor Car Company president Alvan Macauley chimed in: “The Tigers have been an inspiration not only to this community but to this whole country. It was their never-say-die, refuse to be licked spirit that brought them through and that is the spirit Detroit needs and America needs today.”8 Cochrane said, however, that “Too much of the credit has been given to me. It belongs equally on the shoulders of these stalwart lads. No one man but all of them, playing as a smooth working unit, made this possible, this happy night of celebration possible.”9

The Tigers lost the 1934 World Series to the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games, despite having led three games to two. The loss was a crusher. The Tigers, and the city of Detroit, felt that there was some unfinished business to attend to come spring of 1935. …

JOHN MILNER grew up in Michigan before moving to Texas in 1990. He has been a Tigers fan throughout his life due to the strong in uence of his grandfathers and dad, who instilled a love of the team in him from an early age. He work has appeared in “Sock It To ’Em Tigers: The Incredible Story of the 1968 Detroit Tigers” and “Detroit Tigers 1984: What a Start! What a Finish!” John would like to dedicate his contribution to this book to his grandfathers, John H. Milner and  omas Mullennix, who  lled his head with stories of Schoolboy Rowe, Mickey Cochrane, Hank Greenberg, Goose Goslin, and the rest of the Tigers from this era. While growing up, John listened to Ernie Harwell describing Tigers games on the radio on many humid summer evenings in Michigan. He is currently a high-school counselor in Kerrville, Texas. He and Yvette, his beautiful wife, have two wonderful children, J.T. and Olivia.

Sources

Bevis, Charles, Mickey Cochrane: The Life of a Baseball Hall of Fame Catcher. (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Press, 1998).

Lowe, John, “Mickey Cochrane Tied Historically to Detroit Tigers & Oakland Athletics ALDS,” Detroit Free Press, October 4, 2013.

The Sporting News

Baseball-reference.com

Bevis, Charlie, “Mickey Cochrane,” The Baseball Biography Project. sabr.org/bioproj/person/a80307f0

Klumpp, Jeremy, “The Trade for Mickey Cochrane.” groundruledouble.wordpress.com

Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Player File for Mickey Cochrane.

Notes

In the spring of 1935, a poll of 194 members of the Baseball Writers Association of America indicated that the Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals, pennant winners in 1934, would repeat. The poll, published in The Sporting News, included writers from all major-league cities. It gave the Cardinals a wide margin over the New York Giants, and the Tigers a narrow lead over the Cleveland Indians, who actually received more first-place votes than Detroit.1

How Detroit fared in the poll mattered little to Tigers player-manager Mickey Cochrane. The message it sent, that Detroit would repeat, probably did. Cochrane, veteran of a Philadelphia Athletics team that took three straight pennants in 1929-31, had seen complacency develop on that club and feared the same attitude might overcome the favored Tigers.

The writers’ sentiments were not without foundation. A team that finished first by seven games in 1934 came to spring training virtually unchanged. Detroit had been an offensive juggernaut with a team batting average of .300 and an average of more than six runs scored per game. The infield of Hank Greenberg at first base, Charlie Gehringer at second, Billy Rogell at shortstp, and Marv Owen at third averaged 116 RBIs on the strength of a combined .327 batting average.2

Outfielders Pete Fox, Jo-Jo White, and future Hall of Famer Goose Goslin, as well as backup Gee Walker provided solid defense and a composite .300 average in 1934. Cochrane handled the bulk of the catching chores while chiming in at .320.

Detroit’s pitching staff was anchored by a pair of 20-game winners, Schoolboy Rowe (24-8) and Tommy Bridges (22-11), backed up by veteran Firpo Marberry (15-5) and Elden Auker (15-7), who all combined for 76 of the team’s 101 wins. Midseason acquisition General Crowder went 5-1 for Detroit in 1934; he would be a crucial part of the 1935 staff.

Cleveland was the favored competition, having placed second in the writers’ poll and first in a survey conducted by the Associated Press.3 Manager Walter Johnson’s team featured the likes of Hal Trosky (.330, 35 home runs), Earl Averill (.313, 31 home runs), and Joe Vosmik (.341). Mel Harder (20-12), Monte Pearson (18-13), and Willis Hudlin (15-10) headed the pitching staff. Johnson had taken over a moribund team in mid-1933 and driven them to third in 1934. Cleveland was widely considered an up-and-coming team.

The New York Yankees were not deemed of championship quality; their lineup generated too many unanswered questions. The general feeling was that they would finish third. Although Lou Gehrig had won the Triple Crown in 1934 and Lefty Gomez led the league with a 26-5 record, there was concern over whether veteran second baseman Tony Lazzeri (.267) had seen better days, and whether Jack Saltzgaver could handle third. The big question revolved around the replacement for Babe Ruth. Although his play had deteriorated in 1934 (.288, 22 home runs), he epitomized the Yankees, and his departure for the Boston Braves after the season left a big hole in the lineup, if only symbolically.

Cochrane and most of his players differed with the writers’ negative outlook on New York. Mickey offered, “The New York Yankees will be the club to beat.”4

Cochrane was worried more about his own team than about the competition. Detroit had done well in spring training games. Although he was pleased with the pitching of rookies Clyde Hatter and Joe Sullivan, as well as the hitting of outfielder Chet Morgan, the 1934 Texas League batting champion, Cochrane felt the team had no “pep.” After seeing lackluster effort in several games, he tore into the players, accusing them of loafing and not hustling.

Cochrane singled out Goose Goslin for indifferent play and benched him. Goslin, who had been slowly working himself into shape, was stunned by Cochrane’s outburst – but taking his charges to heart, he promised to give his all. Cochrane’s message to a respected veteran was not lost on the team.5 His concern lessened when Detroit thrashed the Cardinals in an exhibition game, 13-8. The victory over their rivals in the 1934 World Series seemed a good omen.6 As spring training ended, Detroit’s attitude had shifted to one of determination to succeed. Cochrane was satisfied – for a while.

As the teams ended spring training, a “feud” between Detroit and Cleveland came to light in The Sporting News. Allegedly, Cochrane had given an interview during which he disparaged the Indians’ pennant chances.

Cochrane was keenly aware of Giants manager Bill Terry’s question before the start of the previous season: “Is Brooklyn still in the league?” This infuriated the Dodgers, motivating them to knock the Giants out of the pennant race in the last week of the season. Hoping to avoid a similar reaction from the Indians, Cochrane sought to disavow the interview in a letter to Walter Johnson, asking that he post it in Cleveland’s clubhouse.

Johnson destroyed the letter, stating, “Let the boys read of Cochrane’s denial in the daily papers if they wished.” Perhaps Johnson was trying to rile up his ball club, which had lost 16 of 22 games to Detroit in 1934.7

Johnson’s action had the opposite effect. Cochrane’s gesture spurned, a steely resolve came to Detroit’s manager. “All right. If they want to be that way, we can take care of ourselves.” One of the most competitive men ever to play ball had been provoked.8

Beginning with Opening Day, Detroit’s resolution to win was sorely tested. Rowe was pounded for seven runs as the Chicago White Sox, picked to finish last, won 7-6 at Navin Field. The next day Bridges won 5-4 on a bases-loaded walk to Cochrane in the bottom of the ninth. It was a less than impressive way for Detroit to post its first victory of the season. Chicago won the next game, prompting White Sox manager Jimmy Dykes to comment, “You mean they were champions last year?”9

After losing two of three to Chicago, the Tigers proceeded to lose seven of their next nine games. Cochrane, seeking to break the slump, juggled lineups and batting orders to improve the offense. He put rookie Chet Morgan in left field, replacing Walker, who was injured. It did not help. With a record of 2-9, the Tigers found themselves in last place on the morning of April 28, six games behind Cleveland. The hitting was lethargic. Cochrane, Goslin, and Greenberg were not producing, each well under .300.

The chief casualty of the slump was Morgan. Installed in the lineup to improve offense, he made a key error against the White Sox, helping pave the way for a three-game sweep by Chicago. Fox replaced Morgan the following day, and was in turn replaced by a recovered Walker. That change proved beneficial. Walker went on an offensive spree, batting over .400 until mid-May – he was one of the few Tigers at that point who was hitting.10 Morgan was out of the majors within a few weeks.

As a feeling of “What’s wrong with the Tigers?” started to gain momentum among fans and sportswriters alike, a shift of fortune began. After six straight losses, Cochrane decided to shuffle his pitching rotation, giving rookie Joe Sullivan a start. Sullivan, a knuckleball pitcher, had won 25 games for Hollywood in the Pacific Coast League the year before. Facing the league-leading Indians, Sullivan scattered 11 hits to gain his first major-league victory, 5-3. Auspiciously, Greenberg connected for his first home run of the year. The victory proved significant in turning the team around.

Greenberg was crucial to the team’s success. The Tigers’ main run producer, he was their answer to New York’s Lou Gehrig and Cleveland’s Hal Trosky. While the heart of the lineup consisted of “G-Men” Gehringer, Goslin, and Greenberg, Hank was the key to the club’s success.11 His slow start (three RBIs in the first 11 games without a home run) was one of the reasons for Detroit’s subpar performance. Greenberg, driven to succeed, saw RBIs as a symbol of achievement. He would tell Gehringer, batting in front of him, “Just get on base. I’ll knock you in.”12

From Cleveland the Tigers traveled to St. Louis to play the Browns. Detroit demolished them in their first game, 18-0, as Greenberg hit a grand slam, his second home run in two days. The next day Detroit won again, with Greenberg chipping in two RBIs. Beginning with Sullivan’s win at Cleveland, Detroit won five straight to climb out of the cellar.

The team played .500 ball for the next several games and then got hot again. On May 19 Sullivan started against Washington at Griffith Stadium. Gehringer and Greenberg hit triples to highlight a four-run first inning, keying what became a 16-6 pounding of the Senators. Fox and Rogell had four hits apiece, and Ray Hayworth, Cochrane’s backup, drove in four runs. Sullivan won his fourth game of the season, giving Detroit another five game winning streak; the victory evened the team’s record at 13-13, a remarkable achievement given the 2-9 start. Their run brought the the Tigers to fourth place, three games behind the surprising first-place White Sox.

A 5-3 win on May 23 over Boston at Fenway Park capped the five-game winning streak. Greenberg’s eighth home run, a two-run shot, was the big blow.13 His 33 RBIs now led the major leagues. That same day, another event took place that affected the pennant race.

Cleveland, a strong favorite to vie for the pennant, had gotten off to a fast start with an 8-1 record. After Detroit bested the Indians behind Sullivan’s effort, they went into a slump, falling behind Chicago and New York. On May 23 Walter Johnson announced that he had released third baseman Willie Kamm and catcher Glenn Myatt, saying, “They were no longer useful to me as players and I felt they were an antagonizing influence upon the ballclub.” The action reflected dissension and undermined Johnson. Morale had undergone serious damage. Although Cleveland played well for several weeks, hopes for a pennant dwindled. Johnson would not finish out the season, and Cleveland ended well out of the race.14

Over the next several weeks, Detroit played little better than .500 ball, holding on to fourth place behind the Yankees, White Sox, and Indians. During this time, they made one of their few player transactions of the season. Aside from the sale of little-used pitcher Carl Fischer to Chicago in early May, the roster remained unchanged until June 11 when 13-year veteran pitcher Firpo Marberry was released.

Marberry had done stalwart work for Cochrane in 1934 with a 15-5 record as a starter and reliever. Developing a sore arm in 1935, he was ineffective. (Marberry joined the American League umpiring staff less than two weeks after his release.15) His loss was eased by Sullivan’s emergence as a spot starter behind Bridges, Rowe, Auker, and Crowder. These five ultimately accounted for 137 of the team’s 152 starts, and 80 of its 93 wins.16

On June 30 Detroit swept a doubleheader against the last-place Browns, 18-1 and 11-6. Pete Fox (now leading off) homered, scored four runs, and drove in six in the first game. In the midst of a 29-game hitting streak, he scored four runs in the second game on five hits, including a double and another home run. Fox was nonchalant about his hitting improvement: “I believe I hit as many balls solidly last year but more of them were caught. This year they have been falling safe. That’s the difference.”17 Fox batted .409 during the streak, with 29 RBIs and 43 runs scored.

Marberry umpired the St. Louis series, in which the Tigers took four out of five. One wonders the thoughts that went through his mind as his former teammates crushed the Browns.

The doubleheader sweep started a ten-game winning streak. Detroit proceeded to beat Cleveland five straight and St. Louis three in a row to draw within a game of the Yankees at the All-Star break. Chicago and Cleveland were slowly fading out of the picture.

Cochrane explained why he felt his club would catch the Yankees: “We can give our pitchers better batting and fielding support than the Yankees can. We kept in the fight while our pitchers were having trouble and now that they are right, we’ll catch the Yankees and pass ’em. I believe we’ll win the pennant by a wider margin than we did last year.”18

Bridges, Cochrane, Gehringer, and Rowe represented Detroit at the All-Star Game. Greenberg did not make a squad manned by first basemen Gehrig and Philadelphia’s Jimmie Foxx despite his league-leading 103 RBIs, 37 ahead of the runner-up, Athletics outfielder Bob Johnson. Gehringer was the lone Tiger to play in the game, going 2-for-3 in the American League’s 4-1 victory. Reflecting how highly Gehringer was regarded, this was the third straight All-Star Game the second baseman started and finished since the game began in 1933 at Chicago.

On July 11, three days after the All-Star Game, Fox’s 29-game hitting streak ended as he went 0-for-4 in a 7-6 win over the Senators. The win came on submarine-throwing relief pitcher Elon “Chief” Hogsett’s 2⅔ innings of scoreless relief of Rowe, before Hogsett singled in the winning run in the tenth inning. After their ten-game winning streak ended, Detroit leveled off, going 6-5 before coming to New York in late July for a crucial series. New York was just a half-game ahead of the Tigers.

Play against the Yankees came in the midst of Cochrane’s continual efforts to juggle his lineup as players fell into and came out of slumps. In June he benched usually dependable third baseman Marv Owen, whose average had sunk to .201, and inserted reserve infielder Flea Clifton into the lineup. Clifton hit near .300 the next several weeks before Owen got his job back and played effectively the rest of the way. Cochrane juggled Fox, Walker, and White in and out of the lineup all season long as their play blew hot and cold. Even Goslin sat out a few games when he slumped. Cochrane was solid behind the plate, although Hayworth frequently spelled him. Hayworth, appearing mostly against left-handed pitching, played in 51 games and batted .309.

Despite Cochrane’s assurances that “our pitchers were having trouble and now that they are right,” his major concern the entire campaign continued to revolve around pitching.19 Auker, Bridges, and Crowder were steady, but when Marberry was released and Rowe proved inconsistent, Cochrane had a challenge on his hands. Sullivan’s quick start gave the Tigers much needed support early on, but he faded as the season moved along. Rowe took a long time to get back to his level of performance in 1934 when he won 24 games. By the end of July, he owned a mediocre 9-9 record. At the same point a year earlier, Rowe was 14-4. In August he regained his form, going 7-1 for the month, at last giving Cochrane a solid four-man rotation.

There was no depth to the staff, however, as Hogsett and Sullivan were inconsistent, while little-used Vic Sorrell was effective only in spot appearances. Except for Roxie Lawson, called up from Toledo at the end of August when the pennant race was for all practical purposes over, Cochrane operated from mid-July with just a seven-man pitching staff. Lawson did provide late-season relief to the starting rotation. Used in spot starts, he pitched well, going 3-1 as the campaign wound down. His first appearance of the year opened eyes as he bested Red Sox ace Lefty Grove with a five-hit 2-0 shutout.

All the pressure of playing and managing told on Cochrane. “When I was a player I worried only about myself. Good money and easy work. Now I have to worry about everybody,” he said. “I have to see that they’re all in shape and stay in shape. If one of them eats something that makes them sick, it makes me sick.”20

With the pennant race practically tied, Detroit came to New York for a five-game series in late July. The first game was rained out. The next day, July 23, the teams played a doubleheader before a crowd of 62,516.21 The Yankees won the first game, 7-5, despite solo homers by Cochrane, Gehringer, and Greenberg as Johnny Allen bested Rowe. In game two Cochrane countered Yankee Lefty Gomez with Sorrell, who had narrowly avoided going to the minors at the end of spring training.22 The 34-year-old Sorrell, who was one of the first pitchers to wear glasses in the major leagues, outpitched Gomez, 3-1, scattering eight hits.

The Tigers’ win in the second game, keeping them half a game behind New York, reflected the challenges the Yankees faced that summer. During the game, Gehrig walked three times, negating his offensive threat. It was typical of the season. Without Ruth, Gehrig got a league-leading 132 bases on balls, the most ever in his career. His 30 home runs and 119 RBIs in 1935, superlative for any player, were the lowest of his peak seasons between 1927 and 1937. Yankees owner Ed Barrow attributed Gehrig’s less-than-expected performance to an extended barnstorming tour of Japan that wore him down.23

A second and perhaps more revealing indication of the Yankees’ troubles was that the loss dropped Gomez’s record to an uncharacteristic 8-10 record. Although Gomez posted the fourth-lowest ERA in the league, he ended the season at 12-15, victim of an intermittent sore arm. It may have been brought on through overuse by Philadelphia skipper Connie Mack on the same barnstorming tour of Japan that Barrow claimed had worn down Gehrig.24 A mere reversal of Gomez’s performance that year would have made for a much tighter race.

In the fourth game of the series Crowder, the old man on the staff at 36, bested Red Ruffing with a four-hit shutout, winning 4-0. Jo-Jo White, leading off, hit his first home run of the year. A half-hour thundershower interrupted play in the second inning. When the game resumed, Ruffing had trouble regaining his rhythm and lost his effectiveness, allowing several walks and hits, the last a two-run single by Goslin sealing New York’s fate.25 The last game of the series, scheduled the following day, was rained out.

At this point Detroit had played five more games than New York; the Yankees were in first place by percentage points, but a half-game behind Detroit. Leaving New York, the Tigers traveled to Cleveland for a four-game set with the Indians. Cleveland had won five of its last six and, 7½ games out, was hoping to edge back into the pennant race.

Cochrane opened with Auker, his hottest pitcher, who had won eight of his last nine decisions, against Thornton Lee, in his second full season with Cleveland. It proved no contest as Detroit prevailed, 8-2. The Tigers scored a run in the second on Goslin’s double and Billy Rogell’s single. Fox put the game out of reach with a two-run triple in the sixth as Auker improved his record to 10-4.26 Meanwhile the Yankees lost to the seventh-place Senators, 9-3, giving Detroit a 1½-game lead. The Tigers were never headed from then on. Detroit won three of four to knock Cleveland out of the pennant race. Within a week Water Johnson was out as manager, a victim of player injuries, personnel issues, and perhaps his spring dispute with Cochrane.

Elden Auker had his best season as he went 18-7 for a league-leading.720 winning percentage. Auker felt that Cochrane contributed greatly to his winning ways at Detroit. “He was such an inspiration to me when I was pitching,” the pitcher said. “His drive and desire to win was so overwhelming that it would carry me through my troubles. He made me a good pitcher, he gave me confidence and strength, like no other catcher did. I was not the same pitcher without him behind the plate.”27

Detroit built a six-game lead. The Tigers were outstanding in August, going 23-7. The offense averaged more than six runs a game that month, but the pitching staff led the way, delivering 20 complete games, seven shutouts, and an ERA of 2.46. The Tigers simply crushed their opposition.

Early in August Chicago came to Detroit for a four-game series. The surprising White Sox offered the last meaningful challenge of the season to Detroit. A 19-9 run in July pulled them within 3½ games of Detroit. But Crowder, Rowe, Bridges, and Auker threw consecutive complete-game wins, Bridges and Auker giving up just three and four hits respectively, to end Chicago’s challenge. Chicago went on to finish fifth, better than their eighth-place finish in 1934. Rival managers Joe Cronin, Bucky Harris, and Rogers Hornsby conceded the race, Cronin offering, “The Tigers are a cinch.” Virtually alone among his peers, Yankees manager Joe McCarthy still felt there was a chance to overtake Detroit.28

As the team moved toward a second straight pennant, excitement rose in Detroit. The Sporting News described the sense of anticipation: “Civic and fraternal organizations are arranging banquets and celebrations, hotels and railroads are preparing for increased business and the public in general whether the Cardinals, the Cubs or the Giants will oppose the American League champions.”29

Cochrane and team owner Frank Navin suggested that caution be exercised, that expectations were premature, no doubt recalling the New York Giants’ late-season collapse the year before. Their cautionary outlook was ignored.30 As events were to prove, they had reason for their reticence.

Detroit continued its winning ways through early September. After sweeping the A’s 9-7 and 15-1 in a doubleheader on September 7, they were ten games ahead of New York. From then on, a malaise overtook the ream, which won only eight of its last 22 contests. The team seemed to have come full circle to its performance at the beginning of the season. After losing three of four at Boston, Cochrane, thoroughly aroused, ordered batting and fielding practice on September 20, telling one and all that his team had been “fooling around” long enough, that it was time “to get down to business.”31 The players heeded his charge.

The next day, before an overflow crowd of more than 31,000 fans, Bridges threw a seven-hitter to win his 21st game of the season, 6-2, in the first game of a doubleheader against the Browns. Auker, not to be outdone, came back with a six-hit shutout to win his 18th game, 2-0, to clinch the Tigers’ second straight championship, their fifth overall. It was a great way for Auker to celebrate his 25th birthday.

The pennant won, Detroit lost six of its last seven games. The late-season slide reduced the final margin over New York to three games, the Tigers’ slump coming too late for the Yankees to take advantage. The margin did not reflect a race that for all practical purposes had ended in August. Cochrane’s earlier prediction that Detroit would win the pennant by a larger margin than in 1934 was not to be.

Cochrane’s disappointment aside, how did the Tigers take their second straight title?

Although their offense first comes to mind, in truth the Tigers won with solid fielding and pitching as well as offense. The pitching staff threw 87 complete games and 16 shutouts to lead the league, their 3.82 ERA second only to the Yankees. Bridges and Rowe were among the league leaders with 21 and 19 wins respectively. Auker’s 18-7 performance, particularly in midseason as Rowe struggled, was crucial to the team’s success. Crowder showed a creditable 16-10 record, with several pivotal victories in what was his last full season of play.

Detroit led the league with a .979 fielding percentage, driven by a team-low 127 errors. The Tigers completed 154 double plays, second best in the league. Their hitting, while down from their effort the previous season, was substantially better than that of any other team. They scored 919 runs, 96 more than runner-up Washington. A league-leading 628 walks and .435 slugging percentage aided Detroit’s run-scoring ability.

Four starters, Gehringer (.330), Greenberg (.328), Fox (.321), and Cochrane (.319), went over the .300 mark, as did Walker, who hit .301 in 98 games. Cochrane walked 96 times, an impressive total given that he played in only 115 games. Greenberg (170), Goslin (109), and Gehringer (108) each went over 100 RBIs. Greenberg’s league-leading 170 RBIs were especially impressive; they were 51 more than Gehrig’s 119, and 40 more thant National League leader Wally Berger’s 130. No player before or since (as of 2013) led his league, or the majors, by such a margin. It was the first of Greenberg’s four RBI titles. His 36 home runs tied him with the A’s Jimmie Foxx.32 As with RBIs, it was the first of four times Greenberg led the league in home runs. Greenberg was unanimously selected the American League’s Most Valuable Player.

Cochrane surely recognized the components that went into this championship. Asked by a sportswriter whether it was easier to “mastermind” better on the bench or behind the plate, he responded, “Say, this masterminding business is a lot of bunk. What it takes to win ballgames is hitting, pitching, throwing, and fielding – not deep thinking.”33 However victory was achieved, Detroit’s fans fully enjoyed the team’s efforts. A major-league-leading 1,034,929 flocked to Navin Field to root their team on. It was only the second time Detroit’s attendance had climbed over a million.

A talented roster of players allowed Detroit to win two pennants. However, more than talent carried the day. Virtually every description of the Tigers’ efforts begins with one intangible factor: Mickey Cochrane. Detroit sportswriter H.G. Salsinger perhaps described Cochrane best: “As a field leader, Cochrane probably never had an equal. No other playing manager was ever able to lift a team the way Cochrane could. His aggressiveness was contagious. Under his leadership, the Tigers soon developed into a fiercely competitive club. He had the inspirational touch.”34 His relentless energy and resolve to succeed began in spring training when he was concerned with the lack of “pep” on the team. It continued through the latter part of the season when Cochrane drove the league-leading team to achieve even greater heights. Cochrane’s relentless determination had begun soon after he joined the fifth-place Tigers in 1933, when he boldly declared, “We’re going to win.”

Now the Tigers would face the Chicago Cubs in the World Series.

GREG ERION and his wife, Barbara, live in South San Francisco. Retired from the railroad industry, he currently teaches US history part time at Skyline College. Greg has contributed several articles to the SABR Baseball Biography Project and is currently working on a book about the 1959 season.

Notes

The following summer, as the Tigers neared their second straight pennant, the Associated Press reported that throughout Michigan “radios blare out accounts of the game from almost every store front. Merchandise is only barely visible through shop windows covered by the ‘score by innings.’ Fans gather at their radio ‘spots’ every afternoon – whether the Tigers are at home or not. … In cities throughout the state, excitement is at fever heat. Accounts of the games are announced through amplifying systems to crowds which in several cities have reached 3,000.”2

Several Detroit radio stations offered coverage of the Tigers during the 1935 season. Over WJR, announcer Jimmie Stevenson hosted a sports show that gave highlights of each Tigers game. Former first baseman Wally Pipp appeared on WXYZ reporting baseball news three nights a week at 7 P.M. Every night on CKLW, listeners heard highlights of Tigers games summarized by Joe Gentile. (Gentile later became the public address announcer at Tiger Stadium.) But for live descriptions of the games, listeners depended on the daily play-by-play descriptions of Ty Tyson (on WWJ) and Harry Heilmann (on WXYZ and the Michigan network).

Tyson was the pioneer of Detroit sportscasting. He began broadcasting Tigers games over WWJ on April 20, 1927. (At the time of his debut, another Ty Tyson was playing in the outfield for the New York Giants. The broadcaster and the outfielder were reportedly not related to each other.) “I just sat back and described what was in front of me,” Tyson recalled in 1967. “The boys who do play-by-play now like (Ernie) Harwell and George Kell have it much tougher than I did. They have to do those commercials at the half innings.”3 For the first seven seasons that Tyson described the games, they had no commercial sponsor and were broadcast by the radio station as a public service. When White Star Refining Company’s Mobil Gas began sponsoring the games in 1934, the commercial consisted of the brief announcement that “this game is brought to you by Mobil Gas” at the beginning and end of the broadcast.4

Tyson was born Edwin Lloyd Tyson on May 11, 1888, in Phillipsburg, Pennsylvania, to William and Ida (Lloyd) Tyson. The family moved to Tyrone, Pennsylvania, when Tyson was a child. It was there that he reportedly acquired the nickname Ty. Young Tyson was known as the best actor in Tyrone. He and a friend, Bill Holliday, wrote for, produced, and acted in amateur stage productions. Tyson, a first baseman and pitcher for the semipro Tyrone team, was also known as the town’s best baseball player. After graduating from high school, he spent a year studying at Penn State, where he played freshman football.

When World War I broke out, Tyson enlisted in the Army, serving nearly two years in the 103rd Trench Mortar battery. In a poem entitled “The Mortarman’s Moan,” Tyson described his wartime experience in part:

“At last we left the sunny South for service overseas,

We had a pleasant (?) voyage and landed full of fleas.

We spent three days in England, and four or five in France,

In dirty, dusty, foodless dumps called (God knows why) ‘Rest Camps.’

‘Twas from this point we traveled, two days and nights by train,

In side door Pullman sleepers, seeing France thru fog and rain.

Two months more we spent in training; ’twas here we got our guns,

And now we’re camping in some woods, and being ‘bombed’ by Huns.”5

After the war Tyson returned to Tyrone and went to work in a paper mill. His friend Bill Holliday had become general manager of fledgling Detroit radio station WWJ. In early 1922 another Tyrone friend, Fred Waring, was scheduled to bring his newly formed orchestra (the Pennsylvanians) to play at the University of Michigan’s J Hop. Holliday planned to do a special broadcast of Waring’s music from the J-Hop but needed an announcer to introduce the music. Waring suggested that Holliday contact Tyson. “When I got out of the Army I got a job in a paper mill expecting to learn about paper from the ground up and become a salesman,” Tyson recalled in 1967. “But Fred Waring, a young fellow from Tyrone, took his orchestra up to play the J Hop at Ann Arbor at that time and I got sidetracked into radio. I came over just to help a Tyrone pal out of trouble, expecting to return to the paper business after the radio fad wore out. But I spent my whole life at broadcasting with the accent on sports.”6

Joining the staff of WWJ, Tyson pioneered sports broadcasting in Detroit, describing the Gold Cup races on the Detroit River in 1923. The following year, Tyson persuaded University of Michigan football coach Fielding H. Yost to allow him to broadcast Michigan’s game against Wisconsin on an experimental basis. (Yost was afraid that free radio broadcasts of the game would deter fans from buying tickets to see the game.) The broadcast was a success. After the game the University of Michigan was overwhelmed with ticket requests for future football games. Yost became convinced that radio could help increase interest in the game and allowed Tyson to broadcast the games regularly. Three years later, Tyson similarly persuaded Tigers owner Frank Navin to allow him to broadcast Tigers games.

“Good afternoon, boys and girls, this is Ty Tyson speaking to you from Navin Field,” Tyson would greet listeners in his slow, deliberate way of speaking.7 He was known for his dry wit. Some called him droll, though announcer Red Barber remembered him as “more sarcastic than droll.”8 (On a 1934 broadcast, after noting that Yankees right fielder Samuel Byrd had flied out to Jo Jo White in a previous at bat, Tyson quipped, “You would expect Byrd to fly to someone, wouldn’t you all?”)9 Tyson referred to Hank Greenberg as Hancus Pancus10 and High Henry Greenberg.11 During a Greenberg at-bat, Tyson could report, “High Henry calls for order and all the action in the ballpark stops. Now if the pitcher will deliver that American League apple, Henry will try to plant it in Cherry Street.”12 In 1934 Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis barred Tyson from the network World Series broadcasts, claiming that he was too “partial” to report the World Series over NBC. Announcer Red Barber, who would work with Tyson on World Series broadcasts two years later, commented that Tyson “didn’t sound partial to me. He didn’t use enough words between pitches and plays to give you an idea how he felt.”13 After 600,000 Detroit area listeners signed a petition demanding Tyson’s presence on the World Series broadcasts, Landis relented and allowed him to call the games locally on WWJ. Listeners within the sound of WWJ seemed to prefer Tyson’s style to that of the network broadcasters. In Cleveland many listeners reported tuning in to Tyson rather than to the more animated Cleveland announcer Tom Manning, who was doing the games for NBC. Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Robert S. Stephan wrote, “Fans enjoy Tyson’s straight accounts of the games claiming there’s too much hurrah stuff when Manning and others attempt to put pepper into the microphone.”14

Harry Heilmann began describing Tigers games over WXYZ and the Michigan Network (which fed stations in Bay City, Flint, Kalamazoo, Battle Creek, and Jackson) in 1934. Having played right field for Detroit from 1914 to 1929 and a four-time American League batting champion, Heilmann was already beloved by Tigers fans by the time he began his radio career. After finishing his playing days with the Cincinnati Reds in 1932, he formed an independent sandlot team, sold insurance, and made an unsuccessful bid for office as Detroit city treasurer. In 1934 H. Allen Campbell, sales manager for WXYZ, persuaded Tigers owner Frank Navin to allow the station to air games for a $25,000 fee. Knowing that Ty Tyson already had a strong following among radio listeners, Campbell realized he would need to find a “real topflight guy” to compete with WWJ’s broadcasts.15 Campbell found Heilmann working as an undersheriff in the Wayne County sheriff’s office and signed him to do the Tigers broadcasts over the network for $50 a week.

In his “husky, warm voice,”16 Heilmann described the games in a “calm and accurate”17 manner. In between describing the on-field exploits of Charlie Gehringer or Tommy Bridges (whom Heilmann nicknamed “Little T From Tennessee”), he drew upon his lengthy career in baseball, regaling listeners with tales of Ty Cobb, Sam Crawford, Hughie Jennings, and many others from his playing days.18 Despite his impressive statistics, Heilmann was modest when recalling his own efforts on the field, particularly his defense. He would laugh, “We were frightful. We’d bat in seven runs a game – and let in nine.”19 In a 1935 broadcast, he commented that that year’s Tigers outfield was considerably different than the “clown combination of Heilmann, Fothergill, and Wingo.” (A few moments later, Heilmann undoubtedly laughed when he received a telegram from his former teammate Bob Fothergill that simply said, “Speak for yourself, you fathead.”)20 After a spectacular play, Heilmann would turn the microphone toward the crowd noise and say, “Listen … to the voice of baseball.”21 For an entire generation of fans throughout Michigan, Harry Heilmann was the voice of baseball.

When the Tigers met the Cubs in the 1935 World Series, the entire country, it seemed, was tuned into broadcasts of the games. Detroit’s superintendent of schools, Frank Cody, ruled that students could be excused from classes to listen to the radio broadcast in their school’s auditorium. President Franklin D. Roosevelt listened to the games while sailing off the Pacific coast of Mexico. In Uvalde, Texas, Vice President John Nance Garner told reporters that the World Series broadcasts were the only thing that could interrupt his afternoon naps. In Tommy Bridges’ hometown of Gordonsville, Tennessee, all local activities came to a halt as the entire town (including Bridges’ parents and younger sister) listened intently to the radio broadcast of his start in Game Two. Alvin Crowder’s wife, Ruth, reportedly listened to a radio account of his Game Four start as she lay ailing in a Winston-Salem, North Carolina, hospital bed.

World Series fans had a choice of which broadcast to listen to. Exclusive broadcast rights did not yet exist, and for the first time, three national networks carried the fall classic. The newly formed Mutual Broadcasting System featured announcers Red Barber (then a Cincinnati Reds broadcaster over WLW), Bob Elson (White Sox and Cubs announcer for WGN), and Quin Ryan (also of WGN). The broadcast crew covering the games for CBS boasted Cleveland Indians voice Jack Graney, St. Louis Cardinals broadcaster France Laux, and Truman Bradley of Chicago’s WBBM. Ty Tyson, Hal Totten (Chicago baseball broadcaster for WMAQ), and news commentator Boake Carter were the on-air talent for NBC.

With three networks covering the World Series, Barber recalled that the “competition was keen.”22 Listeners and columnists took sides, defending their favorite announcers in print. Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist Robert S. Stephan ranked Laux, Graney, and Totten as the top play-by-play voices but noted that Graney (who was making history as the first former player to broadcast a World Series), “was a bit nervous” and that it “showed in his voice.”23 Portland listener Woody Levey wrote to the Oregonian, “Totten-Tyson-Carter gave us the most picturesque World Series ever announced over the NBC. Before every game Boake Carter gave us a word description of everything that happened up till game time. Then Hal Totten and Ty Tyson gave a marvellus [sic] broadcast of the game.”24 Meanwhile, on the much smaller Mutual network, Quin Ryan stumbled through unprepared pregame and postgame comments, arousing the anger of WLW station manager John Clark. By Game Three, Ryan was off the broadcast, and Barber (who did only three innings of play-by-play in Game One) was evenly splitting play-by-play duties with Elson as well as handling the pregame and postgame commentary. For his work on the World Series, Barber was paid no extra money.

The 1935 World Series broadcasts marked a changing of the guard as the pioneers of radio sportscasting were replaced by a new generation. Making his World Series debut that year, Red Barber was only 27 years old and was in his second season broadcasting Reds games. He would cover a total of 13 World Series over radio and television. Years later he recalled that before Game One in 1935, the broadcasters were brought into a meeting with Commissioner Landis, who ordered them to simply report the action on the field and not to editorialize. Though it wasn’t stated directly by the commissioner, Barber recalled that everyone in the room understood that this warning was prompted by CBS broadcaster Ted Husing, who had second-guessed the umpires during the 1934 World Series. For his editorializing, Husing was barred by Landis from broadcasting the World Series again. It was the first time since 1927 that Husing was not included on the World Series broadcast over CBS. Also conspicuous by his absence on the World Series broadcast was pioneer sportscaster Graham McNamee. He was originally scheduled to be part of the NBC broadcast crew but was dropped at the last minute. McNamee had broadcast every World Series from 1923 to 1934. He never broadcast another. McNamee spent much of the remainder of his career serving as a straight man for comedians like Ed Wynn.

After the World Series, Tyson and Tigers outfielder Goose Goslin made stage appearances at the Fox Theatre in Detroit. After film footage of the World Series was shown, Tyson (referring to Goslin as “the Goose that laid the golden egg”) interviewed the player for the audience.25 The following season, Tyson and Heilmann were back at their microphones, providing play-by-play of Tigers contests. Tyson continued broadcasting the Tigers games through the 1942 season. During the 1945 championship season, he hosted a daily summary of the games over WWJ. On June 3, 1947, Tyson became a pioneer in a new medium as he handled the play-by-play of the Tigers’ first telecast over WWJ-TV. (“He nearly dropped it! Did you see it bobble?” Tyson asked the viewing audience as they watched a difficult catch made during the first telecast.)26 That same year, Tyson celebrated his 25th anniversary with WWJ. Detroit Mayor Edward Jeffries declared a day in Tyson’s honor.

Heilmann continued broadcasting the games over the Michigan network through the remainder of the 1930s and 1940s. By 1950 he had added television to his play-by-play duties. That spring, Haviland F. Reves wrote in Billboard magazine: “Harry Heilmann, ex-Tiger star, knows the game and players like his own skin, and carries the whole audio load with complete competence unassisted. Simulcasting to a special net of some 20 radio stations, he doesn’t let the listener lose a thing, and throws in significant data to aid the casual listener and delight the cognoscenti. He doesn’t need help to do the job.”27

Heilmann collapsed during spring training in 1951 and was unable to continue working on the broadcasts. He was diagnosed with lung cancer. Ty Tyson and broadcaster Paul Williams filled in for him. Though Heilmann came back to broadcast a few innings in early June, he did not survive the summer. On the eve of the All-Star Game at Briggs Stadium, Heilmann died at the age of 56. Tyson commented, “Baseball has lost a great player. Personally, I have lost a long and valued friend. Radio listeners have lost one of the finest announcers in baseball.”28 The following season, Van Patrick became the voice of Tigers baseball.

Ty Tyson retired from WWJ in March 1953 but continued to provide color commentary on University of Michigan football for several years. On Father’s Day 1965 he was invited into the booth by broadcaster Ernie Harwell to provide a few more innings of play-by-play. He returned again on Father’s Day 1967. Tyson died on December 12, 1968, at the age of 80. His legacy lives on through the Detroit Sports Broadcasters Association, which he helped to found in 1948. The association each year presents the Ty Tyson Excellence in Sports Broadcasting Award to a Detroit area sportscaster. Past recipients have included Tigers broadcasters Ernie Harwell, Ray Lane, Josh Lewin, and Dan Dickerson.

MATT BOHN is a native of Hemlock, Michigan. A Tigers fan growing up, he listened to Ernie Harwell and Paul Carey on the radio. (However, Matt’s father always insisted that the greatest Tigers broadcaster of all was Harry Heilmann.) Matt currently follows the Tigers from his home in Milwaukie, Oregon.

Sources

Books

Barber, Red, The Broadcasters (New York: The Dial Press, 1970).

Halberstam, David J., Sports on New York Radio: A Play-by-Play History (Chicago: Masters Press, 1999).

Harwell, Ernie, Tuned to Baseball (South Bend, Indiana: Diamond Communications, 1985).

Osgood, Dick, WYXIE Wonderland (An Unauthorized 50-Year Diary of WXYZ Detroit) (Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1981).

Patterson, Ted, The Golden Voices of Baseball (Champaign, Illinois: Sports Publishing, 2002).

————–, The Golden Voices of Football (Champaign, Illinois: Sports Publishing, 2004).

Smith, Curt, Voices of Summer (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005).

————–, Voices of the Game (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987).

Articles

“Air Lanes,” The Sporting News, March 28, 1951.

Associated Press, “Crowder’s Win Aids Sick Wife,” Boston Herald, October 6, 1935.

——–, “Garner to Appear Before Mikado In Old Cotton Socks,” Richmond Times-Dispatch, October 4, 1935.

——–, “Heilmann’s Voice Stilled By Death,” Toledo Blade, July 9, 1951.

——–, “Home Town Fans Suspend Activity to Cheer Bridges,” Milwaukee Journal, October 4, 1935.

——–, “Roosevelt and Party Listen In to Series,” Omaha World Herald, October 8, 1935.

——–, “World Series Fever Strikes Tigers’ Lair,” Reading Eagle, August 13, 1935.

Associated Press Feature Service, “Heilmann, Once A.L. Batting Leader, Still Makes a Salary From Baseball,” Niagara Falls (New York) Gazette, February 3, 1939.

Basenfelder, Don, “Radio Broadens Baseball Broadcasts,” The Sporting News, April 21, 1938.

Cousins, Fred W., “Television Bows to City at Ball Game,” Detroit News, June 4, 1947.

“Declares Ty Tyson Is Twins on Broadcasting Baseball Games,” Tyrone (Pennsylvania) Daily Herald, June 13, 1938.

DeGange, John, “Ins and Outs of Sports World,” The Day (New London, Connecticut), September 17, 1934.

“Detroit Sportscaster Tyson Honored on His Retirement,” The Sporting News, March 11, 1953.

“Did First Game On The Air: Ty Tyson, Tyrone’s Gift To Baseball Broadcasting,” Tyrone (Pennsylvania) Daily Herald, June 15, 1966.

Flanagan, James B., “Tigers’ Ty Tyson Will Call Plays Again Father’s Day,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 4, 1967.

“Goose Makes Hit On Stage,” Cortland (New York) Standard, October 26, 1935.

“Harry Heilmann, Once One of Baseball’s Greats, Is Still Strong for Tigers,” Buffalo Courier Express, March 31, 1941.

“Heilmann’s Return to Air Welcomed by Tiger Fans,” The Sporting News, June 13, 1951.

La Blonde, Robert, United Press, “Heilmann, Former Batting Champion, Now Broadcasting,” Oshkosh (Wisconsin) Northwestern, June 1, 1936.

Lieb, Frederick G., “Tigers, Minus Their Big Claw, Win and Silence Critics of ’34; Greenberg Injured, Out After Two Games,” The Sporting News, October 10, 1935.

“ ‘Live’ Aircasts for Tiger Road Games Next Season,” The Sporting News, December 5, 1951.

Moyes, William, “Behind The Mike,” The Oregonian (Portland), October 11, 1935.

“Mrs. Ida Lloyd Tyson Dies, Service Wednesday.” Tyrone Daily Herald, March 9, 1953.

“Mrs. Harry Heilmann,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 29, 1960.

“Obituaries,” The Sporting News, December 28, 1968.

Okkonen, Marc, “Harry Heilmann, Voice of the Tigers.” The National Pastime 10 (SABR, 1990), 33-36.

“On the Air Lanes,” The Sporting News, April 26, 1945.

——–, The Sporting News, May 28, 1947.

——–, The Sporting News, August 30, 1934.

——–, The Sporting News, September 20, 1934.

——–, The Sporting News, October 4, 1934.

——–, The Sporting News, April 11, 1935.

——–, The Sporting News, April 18, 1935.

——–, The Sporting News, May 23, 1935.

——–, The Sporting News, October 10, 1935.

Otis, Sam, “No Battle Scars for Bill, But –” Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 8, 1935.

“ ‘Pappy’ Tyson Coming Home After 30 Years In Detroit As WWJ Sports Broadcaster,” Tyrone (Pennsylvania) Daily Herald, March 2, 1953.

“Patrick, New WJR Sports Ace, Paired With Heilmann,” The Sporting News, January 26, 1949.

“Paul With Tyson,” Detroit News, April 27, 1951.

Reves, Haviland F., “WWJ Zooms Coverage With 35 on Sked; Heilmann Gab Wows ’Em,” Billboard, May 20, 1950.

Rothman, Seymour, “I’ve Heard,” Toledo Blade, June 3, 1971.

Salsinger, H.G., “Harry Heilmann Played Out String to the End,” The Sporting News, July 18, 1951.

“Shoots Into Verse; Trench Mortarman Looks Back and Gives Advice,” Tyrone (Pennsylvania) Herald, September 9, 1918.

“Socony, General Mills Sponsor Games on WWJ,” Billboard, March 7, 1942.

Smith, Lyall, “It’s Heilmann Day – At Last,” The Sporting News, September 1, 1948.

Spink, J.G. Taylor, “Broadcasting Awards Won by Allen and Caray,” The Sporting News, October 6, 1948.

Spoelstra, Watson, “Hank, Mickey Slip Tiger Rivals Double Lefty Dip,” The Sporting News, July 3, 1965.

“Sports Letters and Queries,” Buffalo Courier Herald, October 26, 1939.

Stephan, Robert S., “Chains Cut in on War Broadcast for Baseball,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 3, 1935.

——–, “Orchestra to Let Fans in on Rehearsal,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 6, 1934.

“Ty Tyson Back At ‘Mike’ For Father’s Day Game,” Tyrone (Pennsylvania) Daily Herald, June 15, 1967.

“ ‘Ty’ Tyson, Radio Pioneer In Sports Broadcasting, Taken by Death at Age 80,” Grosse Pointe (Michigan) News, December 19, 1968.

Watson, Loren L., Jr., “Nation’s Sports Notables Join Detroit in Honoring Ty Tyson,” The Sporting News, June 4, 1947.

“W.E. Tyson Died At Cameron Ave. Home; Well Known Tyrone Citizen Ill Since August,” Tyrone (Pennsylvania) Daily Herald, May 27, 1931.

Online

Detroit Sports Broadcasters Association, dsba1.org, accessed October 5, 2013.

OTR Baseball from the 1930s. archive.org/details/OtrBaseballFromThe1930s, accessed September 3, 2013.

Retrosheet, retrosheet.org, accessed September 3, 2013.

Notes

Mickey Cochrane

Cochrane played 13 seasons in the major leagues, appearing in 1,482 games. A two-time All-Star and a two-time MVP, he compiled a .320 career batting average, a .419 on-base percentage, and a .478 slugging percentage. Never a power hitter, he had a single-season high in home runs with 23 in 1932, and had his only 100-RBI season that same year with the Athletics when he drove in 112 runs.

Cochrane first appeared on the National Baseball Hall of Fame ballot in 1936, the first year elections for the Hall were held. The eligibility guidelines used by the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA) were unclear and Cochrane and two other active players, Rogers Hornsby and Lou Gehrig, appeared on the ballot. Cochrane received the votes of 35.4 percent of those who cast ballots. Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, Honus Wagner, Christy Mathewson, and Walter Johnson were voted in as the inaugural class of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.1

Cochrane next appeared on the 1939 ballot, the year after his release as manager of the Tigers, and was named on only 10.2 percent of the ballots in an election that saw George Sisler, Eddie Collins, and Willie Keeler elected. Elections were not held every year during this early period and there was no election in 1940 or 1941. In the 1942 vote, 233 writers cast ballots and Cochrane came up short again, winning votes from 37.8 percent of the balloters. This was the year that Rogers Hornsby was elected.

The BBWAA voted again in 1945 and Cochrane won approval from 50.6 percent of the voters. For the first time, no players on the ballot received the necessary 75 percent approval. A separate Hall of Fame committee selected nine players and one manager whose careers covered the years between 1876 and 1915, leaving Cochrane out of the Hall again.

The following year, 1946, found a repeat of 1945, when no player received votes from the required 75 percent of the writers. Cochrane saw his percentage fall to 39.6 percent, and it appeared his support was waning. This was the first year when a runoff election was held, with the top 20 vote-getters on the ballot. Cochrane fared even worse in the runoff; only 24.7 percent of the writers voted for him.

For the first time since 1942, the BBWAA elected players to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1947, when Cochrane finished third with votes from 79.5 percent of the writers (128 votes out of 161 ballots) in his sixth time on the ballot. Cochrane became the first catcher elected to the Hall of Fame by the baseball writers.

In the early years of voting for the Hall of Fame, the rules seemingly changed every year. In 1947 Dan Daniel wrote, “In some writing circles, there is a feeling that the latest restriction – that no scribe who was not active before 1936, and no player who was active before 1925, can figure in the poll – should not be acceptable to the Baseball Writers’ Association for another canvass of its members. There is a belief that the Writers’ Association should be in the poll as a body or out of it.”2

Did the change in voting rules make it easier for Mickey Cochrane to be elected to the Hall of Fame? It makes for an interesting debate. Cochrane’s percentage of the vote had peaked at 50.6 percent in 1945 and had fallen off to 39.6 percent in 1946 and even further in the 1946 runoff election. A rule change may or may not have affected voting. It eliminated any writer who was not writing before 1936, when Cochrane had his greatest years as a player and as a manager. Perhaps he received an unexpected assist into the Hall of Fame. Regardless, Cochrane remains one of the greatest catchers in baseball and Detroit Tigers history, and his ability as a leader is evidenced by the Tigers’ finishes during his first years with the team.

Cochrane entered the Hall of Fame on July 21, 1947, at the induction ceremony in Cooperstown, New York. Cochrane was not there. The Sporting News wrote that pitcher Ed Walsh was the only inductee to attend and noted, “Walsh saw to it that he got the necessary time off from his job at the Meriden (Conn.) Water Works to attend the unveiling of the plaque dedicated to him, while Cochrane, Grove, Frisch and Hubbell were conspicuous by their absence.”3

Charlie Bevis quoted Mary Cochrane, Mickey’s wife, as saying, “It didn’t seem important to Mike. We were out West at the ranch at the time.” His daughter Sara said, “He never really talked about the Hall of Fame. I think he thought it was the kiss of death to be in the Hall of Fame. A lot of those players fell on hard times after their playing days were over.” She added, “Daddy never wanted the spotlight. The Detroit fans, they wanted too much of their hero.” In the 1950s Cochrane made a trip to Cooperstown with his father, a trip that Bevis believes may have been his way of showing his father he had been a success in baseball.4

Charlie Gehringer

A career .320 hitter, Gehringer drove in over 100 runs seven times and, while not known as a home-run hitter, accumulated 184 home runs over 19 seasons. While he twice led the league in errors at second base, he also frequently led in assists, putouts, and double plays turned. Seven times he led the league’s second basemen in fielding percentage. A look at the record indicates the impact he had on the Tigers as they built their mid-1930s championship team. In addition to being the starting second baseman for the Tigers during the 1934-1935 championship years, he also anchored second base on the 1940 American League champions.5 It was never a question of whether Gehringer would be elected; the question was more “When?” Gehringer first appeared on the ballot for the Baseball Writers Association of America to consider for the 1945 election. He received ten votes.

The following year, Gehringer finished in the top 20 with votes from 21.3 percent of the writers, qualifying him for the runoff election, in which he received only 8.7 percent (This was the first year in which a runoff was part of the process.)..

In 1947 Gehringer got votes from 65.2 percent of the writers, falling short of the required 75 percent for election. With no runoff election in effect in 1947, he finished in sixth place in his second year on the ballot. The top four finishers received enough votes to be elected and became the first players elected by the writers since 1942. This group included Gehringer’s old manager and catcher, Mickey Cochrane.6

If the pattern had held, Gehringer should have been elected in 1948, as historically those who came closest but were not elected would be elected the following year. This held true for Pie Traynor; for Gehringer, though, the voters were not so kind. Herb Pennock jumped from ninth place to first, and Traynor came in second, both with enough votes for election. With no runoff election in place, Gehringer was left to ponder his fourth-place finish with votes from 43 percent of the writers, a 22 percent decline from 1947.

The 1949 election saw a return to the runoff process. In his fifth year on the ballot, Gehringer broke through. He finished on top with 66.7 percent in the first election and 85 percent in the runoff election. No one else was elected by the BBWAA. “That’s the highest honor that can come to any man,” Gehringer said. “I’ve never been so thrilled. It’s a long way from Fowlerville [Michigan] to Cooperstown.”7 Gehringer was the sixth second baseman to enter the Hall of Fame and the fourth to be the only player elected in an election year.8 J.G. Taylor Spink wrote in The Sporting News, “There was never a ball player more effective than Gehringer after he had two strikes on him. That was when he was most dangerous. Other players change their grips, shorten their swings, and so on after the pitchers have two strikes on them, but not Gehringer; two strikes meant nothing to him” – further explanation of Gehringer’s clutch hitting for the Tigers.9

After the accolades faded during the summer of 1949 it was time for the induction ceremony in Cooperstown. Gehringer failed to show up for the June 13 induction ceremony. The Sporting News wrote that he “was forced to cancel his appearance at the last moment.”10 Shirley Povich, longtime writer with the Washington Post, took exception and gave Gehringer a bit of a tongue-lashing for missing the ceremony, writing, “I take no great satisfaction now in having cast one of the votes that might have helped to install Charley (sic) Gehringer in baseball’s Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y. At the dedication ceremonies the other day when they unveiled the plaques in honor of the five new installees, the guy didn’t bother to show up.”11

The next week the truth came out, and it appeared all was forgiven: Gehringer missed the ceremony because he had gone to California to marry Josephine Stillen. “To make the trip to California, Charlie had told Bob Quinn, director of the Hall of Fame, a little white lie,” wrote Watson Spoelstra. “He said he would be detained by a business commitment.” Spoelstra also addressed the disparagement of Gehringer by noting, “There was some open criticism of the former Detroit second baseman for his non-appearance. However, when the wedding bells rang out, Detroiters figured that the former Tiger second base star had a perfect alibi for going West instead of East to the Cooperstown ceremonies.” 12

In 1953 Gehringer became a member of the Hall of Fame Veterans Committee, a position he held until 1990. The Veterans Committee was not without controversy during his tenure. Writer James F. Vail argued that cronyism was at work in the election of many of the Veterans Committee selections, and that Gehringer may have influenced the selections of former teammates Heinie Manush and Goose Goslin.13 In 1994 Bill James wrote, “The Veterans Committee has always been prone to favoritism,”14 but we can never know for sure how much influence Gehringer may have had on their selections.

Of the four member of the ’35 Tigers in the Hall of Fame, Gehringer is the only one originally from Michigan, and was the only one to spend his entire career with the Old English “D” on his uniform and cap. His career was exemplary and Gehringer remains one of the greatest second basemen in the history of baseball.

Hank Greenberg

Hank Greenberg was noted for his power, but he was a good all-around hitter as well. He led the major leagues twice in doubles, once in runs scored, three times in home runs and RBIs, twice in total bases, and once in slugging percentage and walks. Greenberg had a .313 career batting average, 331 home runs, 1,276 RBIs, and a .605 slugging percentage. He played in four All-Star games and was selected MVP twice.

Greenberg first appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot in 1945 when he received three votes. Greenberg was still in the military when the voting took place in January 1945. Election guidelines at this time allowed writers to vote for any player since 1900 with at least one year in the major leagues and who was not active the year before. One sportswriter suggested that some voters “apparently named eight or nine leaders and then cast a “favorite-son” vote.”15 (Given that there was no guarantee that Greenberg would return to the major leagues, this line of reasoning makes sense.)

In 1949 Greenberg got votes from 43.8 percent of the writers and made it into the runoff for the top 20 vote-getters. In the runoff he fell to 23.5 percent.16 The 1950 election saw no one elected by the BBWAA. That year, which did not have a runoff, Greenberg got 38.1 percent in his second year on the ballot, good for tenth place. In 1951 he got 29.6 percent and fell to 12th place.

Greenberg languished outside the top ten in 1952 and 1953, with 32.1 percent (11th) and 30.3 percent (11th) respectively. (To demonstrate just how tough the voters were, Joe DiMaggio earned only 44.3 percent of the vote in 1953, his first year on the ballot.) Then Greenberg gathered more support as the players above him were elected to the Hall of Fame. In 1954 he got votes from 38.5 percent of the writers, moving up to eighth place. The following year he won 62.5 percent, his highest total since his first year on the ballot.

The 1956 BBWAA election brought Greenberg permanent recognition among baseball’s greats. With votes from 85 percent of the writers (he was the leading vote-getter), he entered the Hall. Among first basemen, his 85 percent was the third highest percentage, trailing only Lou Gehrig and George Sisler. “I never dreamed that this would be the final result. I’m deeply grateful and humble,” Greenberg said.17

Unlike Cochrane and Gehringer, Greenberg did show up at the induction ceremony, on July 23, 1956. In his induction speech he expressed his appreciation for what baseball had given him. “It must be a wonderful country when a boy from the Bronx … can win such honors with a baseball bat,” Greenberg said. He said he hadn’t expected to be nervous during his speech, “but I have the same butterflies as when I used to anticipate hitting against Lefty Grove, Lefty Gomez or Red Ruffing with the bases loaded.”18

With Greenberg ensconced in the Hall of Fame it seemed that all of the Tiger greats from 1935 had been honored and the story had come to a close. This turned out to be not quite true.

Goose Goslin

Goslin was a career .316 hitter with extra-base power (500 career doubles, 173 triples, 248 home runs). He twice led the American League in triples when he was a young player with the Senators. He led the American League in batting when he hit .379 during the 1928 season while playing for Washington. Goslin was an RBI machine, driving in over 100 runs 12 times. A member of one All-Star team (1936 with Detroit) and six times appearing in the top 20 voting for the MVP award, but never finishing higher than sixth (twice), Goslin appeared to be a marginal candidate for membership in the Hall of Fame in the estimation of the writers. Yet, he made it.

Goslin was definitely a factor for the 1935 Tigers. He drove in 109 runs (second on the team) with a .292 batting average. The case could be made that without Goose Goslin the Tigers might not have won the pennant.

Lawrence Ritter may have been the first to publicly make a case for Goslin’s election to the Hall of Fame. In his 1966 book, The Glory of Their Times, he noted that several of Goslin’s career statistics surpassed those of 14 Hall of Fame players, including Bill Dickey, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Charlie Gehringer, Harry Heilmann, Tris Speaker, and Rogers Hornsby. Why not the Goose?” Ritter said.19

It is assumed by many that Goslin’s champion for election to the Hall of Fame was former teammate Charlie Gehringer, a member of the Veterans Committee, but it appears that Ritter also weighed in, using the platform of his book to make a case for Goslin. Perhaps the combination of the two resulted in Goslin being elected to the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 1968.

Goslin received votes in nine Hall of Fame elections, ranging from 0.4 percent to 13.5 percent in 1956, one of only two elections in which he was named on more than 10 percent of the ballots. (The other year was 1960, at 11.2 percent.)

Goslin was finally enshrined in 1968, when the Veterans Committee selected him. While Goslin’s election answered Ritter’s question, “Why not the Goose?,” there still remains the question, “Was Goose Goslin Hall of Fame material?” He may not have been. He did lead the league in a few categories in individual seasons, but not on a level with many of the members of the Hall of Fame. Looking at his overall career numbers, and current-day advanced metrics, a stronger case can be made for the outfielder.

Baseball-reference.com includes many recent statistical analyses that were not available to the members of the Veterans Committee, such as WAR or WAR Position Players.20 In the category WAR Position Players, Goslin during most of his Washington career was frequently in the top ten in the American League in this metric. For his career he ranked 89th, with a 66.1 WAR. Goslin is in good company as Hall of Famers Pee Wee Reese, Joe Cronin, and Duke Snider are ranked just above him, while Andre Dawson, Willie McCovey, Dave Winfield, and Billy Williams, all Hall of Famers, are ranked just below him.21 While this is just one way of measuring Goslin’s value to his teams, it does make the point that perhaps the election of Goslin by the Veterans Committee was not cronyism, but rather a good choice based on the information available to the committee.

James F. Vail, in his 2001 book, Outrageous Fortune: What’s Wrong with Hall of Fame Voting and How to Make It Statistically Sound, goes into great detail reviewing Hall of Fame elections. He concludes that Goslin has “relatively unassailable statistical credentials.”22 C.C. Johnson Spink, editor and publisher of The Sporting News, wrote, “As a working baseball writer, we hate to believe there has to be a committee to correct some of our mistakes. It appears that way, though. Goose Goslin and Kiki Cuyler were not named to the Hall of Fame by the BBWAA when the two great outfielders came under the writers’ jurisdiction. But now they have been chosen unanimously by the Veterans’ Committee. If their credentials were good enough for the veterans, why were they turned down by the writers?”23

On July 22, 1968, when Goslin was inducted into the Hall of Fame, he was overcome with emotion. The Sporting News reported Goslin as saying, “I want to thank God, who gave the health, (and) the strength to compete with these great players. I will never forget the honor and will take it with me to the grave.”24 The fourth member of the 1935 world champion Detroit Tigers would have his plaque on the wall beside those of his teammates Cochrane, Gehringer, and Greenberg.

DOUG LEHMAN is the library director at Wittenberg University in Springfield, Ohio, and a lifelong Tigers fan. He grew up in northwestern Ohio listening to Ernie Harwell on the radio at night and dreaming of taking Al Kaline’s place in right field.

Sources

Books

Bevis, Charlie, Mickey Cochrane: The Life of a Baseball Hall of Fame Catcher. (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1998).

Greenberg, Hank, Hank Greenberg: The Story of My Life. (New York: Times Books, 1989).

James, Bill, The Politics of Glory: How Baseball’s Hall of Fame Really Works. (New York: Macmillan, 1994).

McConnell, John, Cooperstown by the Numbers: An Analysis of Baseball Hall of Fame Elections (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2010).

Ritter, Lawrence, The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It. (New York: Macmillan, 1966).

Rosengren, John, Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes. (New York: New American Library, 2013).

Skipper, John C., Charlie Gehringer: A Biography of the Hall of Fame Tigers Second Baseman (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2008).

Vail, James F., Outrageous Fortune: What’s Wrong With Hall of Fame Voting and How to Make It Statistically Sound. (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2001).

Vail, James F., The Road to Cooperstown: A Critical History of Baseball’s Hall of Fame Selection Process. (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2001).

Newspapers

Conners, Dick, “Many Notables Join Cooperstown Pilgrimage: New Plaques Dedicated at Hall of Fame,” The Sporting News, June 22, 1949.

Connors, Dick, “Medwick, Goslin, Cuyler Enter Hall of Fame,” The Sporting News, August 3, 1968.

Daniel, Dan, “Four Voted in Hall of Fame by Less Than Half of BBWA,” The Sporting News, January 29, 1947.

Flynn, Arthur, “94 Nominated, None Gains Hall of Fame,” The Sporting News, February 1, 1945.

Miller, Lou, “Greenberg, Cronin Voice Gratitude to Game,” The Sporting News, August 1, 1956.

Povich, Shirley, “‘Business Pressure’ Kept Gehringer Away,” The Sporting News, June 22, 1949.

Smith, Ken, “Gehringer Only Player to Be Elected to Diamond Shrine in ’49 Run-Off Vote,” The Sporting News, May 11, 1949.

Spink, C.C. Johnson, “We Believe: Who Belongs in Shrine?” The Sporting News, February 10, 1968.

Spink, J.G. Taylor, “Hall of Fame Gehringer Called ‘Perfect Player’: ‘Mechanical Man’ Made Difficult Plays Look Easy,” The Sporting News, May 11, 1949.

Spoelstra, Watson, “‘Never So Thrilled,’ Charlie’s Comment,” The Sporting News, May 11, 1949.

Spoelstra, Watson, ”Why Gehringer Passed Up Cooperstown – Charlie Went to Coast to Be Married,” The Sporting News, June 29, 1949.

“Hank, Grateful and Humble, Tosses Orchids at Joe Cronin,” The Sporting News, February 1, 1956.

“What Do Stars Owe The Game,” The Sporting News, August 6, 1947.

Online

Baseball-reference.com

Notes

The Tigers had been around since the turn of the 20th century and had been playing baseball in the same location at Michigan Avenue and Trumbull Street for more than 30 years. It was really the Tigers’ World Series championship, along with the rise of boxer Joe Louis, which was at the center of the claim as City of Champions. The Tigers had Hank Greenberg, who was a source of pride for Detroit’s Jewish community. Louis was gaining notoriety throughout the nation, particularly among African Americans living in Detroit. Both men faced their share of bigotry on the road against opponents. In Detroit, however, a city with an ailing economy and a strong need to pull together behind a common fandom, the Tigers and Joe Louis created a wide sense of belonging. Tiger manager Mickey Cochrane feigned sparring with Joe Louis in a memorable photo from 1937. Detroit was fighting through the Depression, but its citizens pulled for all of their athletes to do well.

The Detroit fans and players knew that Cochrane was the missing ingredient when his contract was acquired in December of 1933. Charlie Gehringer said of him, “Mickey Cochrane was the second hardest loser I ever saw (Cobb was the first), and the smartest manager. When he managed from the bench, he never made a mistake, never! And he was tough behind the plate. He’d throw the ball back to Schoolboy Rowe harder than Rowe threw it to him. Schoolie would get a little lazy out there but Cochrane would wake him up every time.”1 In 1934 the Tigers won the American League pennant, but lost in the World Series, to the St. Louis Cardinals. The Tigers won the World Series the following year, defeating the Chicago Cubs.

Joe Louis himself was a huge baseball fan. The Tigers were the inspiration for many of Detroit’s successful athletes of 1935. In boxing promoter Mike Jacobs’ New Jersey office, there was a conversation among his staff: “(Joe) Louis is nuts about the Tigers. He plays catch out at (boxing) camp every chance he gets. Gerald Walker is his favorite Tiger. He’s postponing his honeymoon so he can see the Tigers in the World Series.”2 Jacobs heard this conversation and ordered Louis’s handlers to put a stop to this threat to his payday, a coming fight with Max Baer. The fight with Baer in late September was one of Louis’s two huge fights that were received by telegraph from Yankee Stadium in staccato fashion, and tapped out by reporters in Detroit. Like a Hollywood movie, the newspaper came off the presses and was folded, stacked, bundled, and loaded onto trucks. “Extra! Extra! Read all about it!” was the newsboy cry heard all around Detroit the next morning as the papers were sold to workers throughout the city. Mass transit was still employed to move the workers. Street cars gave way to trolley buses that could provide curbside pickup and negotiate traffic in the increasingly congested Motor City.

Louis’s other Yankee Stadium victory had been in June against Primo Carnera. As the world’s heavyweight boxing champion for a record 12 years (1937-1949), Joe Louis was more universally admired than any African American man before him. Known as the Brown Bomber, he dominated prizefighting and forced America to re-examine its segregationist policies and attitudes. His fists destroyed the myth of white supremacy and his quiet dignity and exemplary patriotism opened the door for the wave of black athletes who followed.

Joe Louis Barrow, the son of an Alabama sharecropper, came to Detroit in 1926 at the age of 12. At 20 he quit his assembly-line job and became a professional fighter. During a 17-year career he compiled a 68-3 record, with 57 knockouts.

Some of Louis’s most famous bouts carried political overtones in the years before World War II. As Hitler and Mussolini seized power in Europe, Joe Louis destroyed their “master race” theories by defeating Italian giant Primo Carnera and German “superman” Max Schmeling. Columnist Jimmy Cannon immortalized Louis as “a credit to his race – the human race.”3

So to make the claim City of Champions, Detroit had to have champions in the most popular sports of the age, baseball and boxing, as well as champions in other sports that were just coming to Detroit. Football was well established at the University of Michigan, which was recognized as national champion in both 1932 and 1933. However, before 1934 there was no well-established professional football team in Detroit. Detroit’s National Football League franchise, after moving from Portsmouth, Ohio, as the Spartans, took the nickname Lions, in counterpoint with the Tigers, acknowledging that Detroit was “baseball crazy” for the other big cats. George Richards, owner of radio station WJR, led the effort to get an NFL team in Detroit. The Lions hosted their first Turkey Bowl at the University of Detroit Stadium. WJR radio broadcast the “clash of the titans” between the Lions and the Chicago Bears coast to coast. In 1935 WJR broadcast from “the golden tower of the Fisher Building” and become a 50-kilowatt station. This power level allowed the station’s signal to be heard all over the state of Michigan. Much like cable and satellite television today, radio brought fans to the sports teams and heroes of Detroit like never before. Earl “Dutch” Clark, the Lions’ first quarterback, led them to the NFL championship in 1935. After losing against the Green Bay Packers, 31-7, in their eighth game, the Lions found themselves in last place in the Western Division. The next week at home in Detroit, they beat the same Packers 20-10 with Clark leading the way as passer, punt returner, and kicker. The next two weeks saw the Lions tie the Bears in Chicago, and beat them convincingly on Thanksgiving Day in Detroit. The Lions finished their championship run against the New York Giants on December 15 with a 26-7 victory. The players were rewarded with Honolulu Blue parkas and a trip to Hawaii. However, they had to play publicity games in Denver and against all-star teams on their way to the islands. Calendar year 1935 was nearly over, but Detroit sports champions were still to be crowned.

The Detroit Red Wings were also crowned champions at this time. Detroit hockey teams first came to Detroit and played in Olympia Stadium in 1927 as the Cougars, then the Falcons, and finally the Red Wings, when the iconic winged-wheel logo was adopted in 1932. James Norris bought the team and stabilized its finances by limiting player salaries, and recognizing the hard-working and loyal hockey fans of Detroit in quelling any salary protests. Olympia remained the hockey venue until the opening of Joe Louis Arena in 1979.

The sport of hockey was a Canadian import of Charlie Hughes, a 1902 graduate of the University of Michigan and a sportswriter for the Detroit Tribune. He helped create the Detroit Athletic Club, and in 1926 he persuaded the club to pay the $100,000 franchise fee that started professional hockey in Detroit. In their first year, the National Hockey League’s Detroit Cougars lost $84,000 and finished with only 12 wins out of 44 games. Hughes decided to hire Jack Adams as general manager and coach. Adams remained GM until 1962.

The first few years were rough for the teams assembled by Adams because the majority of the fans attending the game in Olympia Stadium came over from Windsor, Ontario, and they had the bad habit of cheering for the Canadian visiting teams. In 1932 James Norris bought the team, the arena, and the club’s minor-league team, the Olympics, for the same $100,000 original entry fee. He renamed the Cougars the Red Wings, and designed the iconic winged wheel logo, in order to identify them as the “Motor City’s team.” The shrewd business sense of Norris and the eye for talent of Adams firmly established the Detroit hockey franchise as one of the strongest in professional sports. Ebbie Goodfellow was the Wings’ first superstar. He joined Detroit in 1929 and played for 14 seasons, and Jack Adams said of Ebbie, “He was Gordie Howe before there was a Gordie Howe.”4

The Red Wings won their first Stanley Cup at the conclusion of the 1935-36 season. When they clinched the Stanley Cup in Toronto, a heroes’ welcome awaited them at the Windsor train station, Michigan Central Station, and a procession to Olympia Stadium. To top it off, the Detroit Olympics won the International Hockey League Championship in October 1936, making the Tigers, Lions, and Red Wings hat-trick a grand slam of Detroit sports team victories.

A semipro sport that provided another champion to Detroit was bowling. Like Little Caesars Pizza founder (and future Tiger owner) Mike Ilitch’s softball team in the 1970s, in the ’30s the breweries sponsored bowling teams and leagues. The citizens and patrons of the beer industry treated the move of a good bowler from one sponsor to another as just as important news as a new beer or a new player for the Tigers. In 1933 Detroit’s Stroh Brewery, which provided beer at the Tigers games, backed a bowling team with Phil Bauman, John Crimmins, Cass Grygier, Walter Reppenhagen, and owner Joe Norris. The five had between them bowled 47 perfect games. Stroh’s team won the ABC National tournament in 1934 and the first five World Match Game titles in the 1930s. Beer and pizza are important to all sports fans, but especially Detroit.

Although Joe Louis was by far the most famous of the individual Detroit champions, he was by no means the first. Other emerging boxers from Detroit were Al Nettlow, the AAU 126-pound champ, and Dave Clark, the AAU 160-pound champion.

“Gar Wood is to the speedboat what Lindbergh is to the airplane,” said Bob Murphy of the Detroit Times.5 Wood had won the coveted Harmsworth Trophy five times over 15 years and pushed the world record for speed on water from 61 miles per hour in 1920 to 124 mph in 1932. He financed his dominance in the sport by profits from his mechanical inventions.

Detroit was home to legend of golf Walter Hagen, who captained the American Ryder Cup team to a victory over the British in 1935. Hagen won 11 major championships between 1914 and 1929, which as of 2014 still places him third behind Jack Nicklaus and Tiger Woods. In 1935, however, he was the greatest in history.

Detroit Cass Tech high-school graduate Eddie Tolan won the 100-meter and 200-meter sprints at the 1932 Los Angeles Olympics. Tolan was the first black athlete to win two Olympic Gold Medals, preparing as a member of the University of Michigan track team. In nearby Ann Arbor, Jesse Owens set three world records and tied another as a sophomore at the 1935 Big Ten Conference Championships held at the University of Michigan’s facility. Tolan won his Olympic Gold before Hitler’s 1936 Berlin games that made Owens so famous.

On April 18, 1936, a City of Champions Testimonial Dinner was held at Detroit’s Masonic Temple and was hosted by the Detroit Times. The cost of a ticket was $3. Letters of congratulations from the City Council and from the governor of Michigan declared it a Day of Champions for the 600 who attended.

Invited to the honors were many locally-based champions of their respective sports and games. Stanley Kratkowski was already the national middleweight lifting champion. The roll call of champions continued. Constance O’Donovan and Esther Politzer, national doubles tennis champions, and Katherine Hughes-Hallett, the Michigan and Midwest fencing champion, were present. Jake Ankom, the national amateur three-cushion billiards champion, and Newell Banks, who won the World’s Match Checker Championship, were both parlor-game champions who were recognized. Tom Haynie, the national medley swim champion, and the AAU national swimming champions from the Detroit Athletic Club were also there. Dick Degener of the University of Michigan was considered the top diver in the world and would win a Gold Medal in the three-meter springboard competition at the 1936 Olympic Games. Walter Kramer was the number-one badminton player in the United States in 1935 and would win the singles championship in 1938. Bill Bonthrom, who held the world record for the Olympic 1,500 meters, joined fellow track star Eddie “The Midnight Express” Tolan. Harry Joy, the national 20-gauge shotgun skeet shooting champion, and Tommy Milton, a two-time winner of the Indy 500, took bows. Another speedboat champion, Herbert Mendleson of Detroit, joined Gar Wood and his legendary mechanic Orlin Johnson at the testimonial.

Over the course of the evening, Potsy Clark, coach of the Lions, called his 1935 squad the greatest team ever assembled in football. Mickey Cochrane promised to fight for another championship, and Jack Adams introduced the Wings with a similar vow. The Wings actually delivered on another repeat championship, against the New York Rangers in 1937.

Finally, all the athletes praised the extraordinary fans of Detroit, who supported them despite the challenges of the Depression. Detroit fans have taken a strong sense of pride from their sports teams, and in return the athletes received that extra boost when playing at home.

LARRY and ROB HILLIARD were first told about Detroit being the City of Champions by their dad, Frank Hilliard, who was 24 years old in 1935. Detroit sports teams were an important part of their relationship growing up as brothers. Larry has great memories of the 1968 and 1984 Tigers teams, of Dave Bing (before he became the mayor of Detroit), of Thomas “Hit Man” Hearns, and of throwing the octopus onto the ice at old Olympia Stadium. These days Larry roots for the Tigers, Red Wings, Pistons, and Lions (especially OT Corey Hilliard) from his home in Maryland. He works at NASA as an electrical engineer. Rob, a retired welder in the auto industry, lives in Garden City, Michigan. His Detroit sports era featured Gordie Howe and Terry Sawchuck for the Red Wings, and Bobby Layne and Terry Barr for the Lions. While the Tigers were his favorite baseball team, his all-time favorite ballplayer is Ted Williams. The Detroit boxer that Rob admired was Sugar Ray Robinson.

Sources

Dyrson, Mark, and J.A, Mangan, eds., Sport and American Society (New York: Routledge, 2007).

Macdonnell, Leo, “Wings Rookie Scores After 176 Minutes,” Detroit Times, March 25, 1936.

Shaver, Bud, “Birth of a Fight Extra,” Detroit Times, June 26, 1935.

Guest, Conrad J., “When Detroit Was Known as the City of Champions,” Detroit Athletic Co., blog.detroitathletic.com/2012/12/20/when-detroit-was-the-city-of-champions/, accessed February 4, 2014.

“How the Great Depression Changed Detroit,” Detroit News, blogs.detroitnews.com/history/1999/03/03/how-the-great-depression-changed-detroit/, accessed September 14, 2013.

Windsor Daily Star

Aaregistry.org

Detroithistorical.org

Mgoblue.com

Notes

Cubs owner P.K. Wrigley and first baseman Charley Grimm pose in 1934 with … a goat. If only they had known. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY, COOPERSTOWN, N.Y.)

In 1935 the Chicago Cubs celebrated their 20th season playing in Wrigley Field (so named since 1927) by winning 21 consecutive pressure-packed games in September to capture an unlikely pennant in the last week of the season. The Cubs of this era were accustomed to good baseball. They had won the pennant in 1929 and 1932, and by the end of 1935 had strung together ten consecutive winning seasons (they collected another pennant in 1938 and extended their streak of winning seasons to 14 the following year). The losses in the 1929 and 1932 World Series, respectively to the Philadelphia Athletics and New York Yankees, were painful memories for fans, many of whom could still remember their team’s titles in 1907 and 1908; however, the 1935 team, with the best record in the big leagues (100-54), offered renewed hope.

The Context

The city of Chicago and the Cubs were vastly different in 1935 than they were in 1929. Just weeks after the Cubs’ loss in the World Series, the economic crash on Wall Street ushered in the Great Depression. Seemingly endless economic opportunity transformed into unimagined hardship, and by 1935 unemployment stood at over 20 percent nationally and even worse in Chicago. The famous mob wars of Al Capone and other gangsters of the 1920s and early 1930s had gradually dissipated even before the repeal of the Volstead Act (Prohibition) in 1933. William Wrigley, the Cubs’ innovative majority owner since 1921, died in January 1932. He was succeeded by his son, Philip K. Wrigley, a recluse and dispassionate baseball fan who, according to baseball historian Glenn Stout, lacked “creativity, self-confidence, initiative, vision, and other qualities often assigned to leadership.”1 The North Siders’ visionary general manager, Bill Veeck, Sr., who orchestrated the team’s rise to national prominence in the late 1920s, passed away in 1933. Veeck was replaced by Charles “Boots” Weber, but his footprint was still evident on the team. Stars from the 1929 club, like home-run-slugging Hack Wilson, arguably the NL’s biggest draw at the time, and ornery Rogers Hornsby, the league’s most feared hitter, seemed as though they were from a different era when the ball had more pop to it. Following the “Year of the Hitter” in 1930, the National League adopted a new ball with a thicker cover and raised stitching. Pitchers were able to grip the ball better; and the ball did not carry as well. Baseball had indeed changed.

Few sportswriters thought the Cubs had a chance to dethrone the reigning World Series champion St. Louis Cardinals in 1935. In a preseason poll, only 10 of 194 members of the Baseball Writers Association of America surveyed picked the Cubs to win the pennant; 126 of them chose the Cardinals.2 Cubs beat reporter Edward Burns spared no punches in his scathing evaluation of the team, coming off two consecutive third-place finishes. The Cubs are a “sluggish ball club, a team with an inadequate pitching staff, in addition to a lack of alertness,” he wrote as the team left its utopian spring-training camp on Catalina Island and traveled back east.3 The Cubs’ chances for a pennant, he argued, were nothing but a dream.

The Players

The Cubs fielded the NL’s youngest team in 1935, with productive veterans sprinkled in. Their unequivocal leader was 34-year-old catcher Gabby Hartnett. In his 14th season with the club, “Old Tomato Face” led the team with 91 runs batted in and a .344 batting average while donning the tools of ignorance in 110 games. He became the third Cubs player to win the NL Most Valuable Player Award, joining outfielder Frank Schulte in 1911 and Hornsby in 1929. Player-manager Charlie Grimm, affable skipper of the team since midseason of 1932, relinquished his ten-year hold on first base after the first two games of the season to 18-year-old Phil Cavarretta. In one of the most prolific seasons in big-league history for a teenager, Cavarretta batted. 275 in 589 at-bats and led the team with 12 triples. “The 1935 club, in all the years I worked with the Cubs, that was the best team I ever played on,” said “Phillabuck Phil,” who was with the Cubs through 1953. “That was the best infield I ever played with.”4

Twenty-five-year-old All-Star and future Hall of Famer Billy Herman anchored arguably the best infield in the National League. The fourth-year starter led the league with 227 hits and 57 doubles en route to 113 runs scored and a .341 batting average. He was supported by sure-handed 27-year-old Billy Jurges, also in his fourth year as a starter. Jurges, perhaps most noted for being shot twice by showgirl Violet Valli in July 1932, led NL shortstops in double plays (99). Stan Hack, 25, took over duties at third base on May 23, replacing offseason acquisition Freddie Lindstrom. “Smiling Stan” led all National League third sackers with a .311 batting average.

Considered to be its strength prior to the season, the Cubs’ outfield proved to be less consistent than anticipated. Twenty-three-year-old Augie Galan, a converted infielder who had never played the outfield before 1935, started all 154 games in left field. One of the surprise players of the year, Galan led the majors with 133 runs scored and batted .314 with 64 of his 203 hits going for extra bases. Kiki Cuyler, at age 36 and coming off an exceptional season in 1934 (.338 batting average) was slated for center field. He struggled (.268) and was ultimately placed on waivers, paving the way for 25-year-old Frank Demaree, who had belted 45 home runs and batted .383 the previous year with the Los Angeles Angels to earn the Most Valuable Player award for the Cubs’ affiliate in the Pacific Coast League. Former Philadelphia Phillies left-handed slugger Chuck Klein occupied right field for most of the season. Widely expected to be the team’s fearsome slugger when the Cubs acquired him before the 1934 season, the former Triple Crown winner failed to duplicate his success playing home games in the Baker Bowl, with its forgiving, 280-foot right-field wall (though his 21 home runs in 1935 led the Cubs). In the heat of the pennant race, Grimm shook up the outfield lineup on September 7 with just 20 games remaining, and the team trailing the Cardinals by 2½ games. He moved the hot-hitting Demaree (.319) from center field to right to replace the slumping Klein, and inserted veteran leader Lindstrom in center field. Lindstrom excelled after the switch, batting .337.

The Cubs’ biggest question mark going into the 1935 season was pitching. In the offseason they had broken up one of the big leagues’ most productive hurling trios, Guy Bush, Pat Malone, and Charlie Root, who had won a combined 336 games during their seven years together (1928-1934). Soon after the 1934 campaign, the Cubs sent Bush, Babe Herman, and Jim Weaver to the Pittsburgh Pirates for Lindstrom and left-hander Larry French. They also traded the disgruntled Malone to the Cardinals in exchange for catcher Ken O’Dea, who served as Hartnett’s principal understudy.

For the season, “Jolly Cholly” Grimm counted on six pitchers who combined to win 96 of the club’s 100 games while losing only 50, and logged 1,275 innings (91.4 percent of all innings). The staff ace was 26-year-old Lon Warneke (20-13), who won at least 20 games for the third time in four seasons. He was joined by second-year man Bill Lee, whom the Cubs had acquired from the Cardinals prior to the 1934 season in a rare mistake by Branch Rickey. Lee won 20 and lost just six to lead the NL with a .769 winning percentage. Rubber-armed French, coming off a disappointing 12-18 season with the Pirates, rebounded with a 17-10 record, tied Lee for the best ERA on the staff (2.96), and tied for the league lead with four shutouts. French was an overlooked dependable workhorse of the era, finishing with a 197-171 record and logging in excess of 3,100 innings in 14 seasons. While Warneke, Lee, and French got the bulk of the starts (92), Tex Carleton, Roy Henshaw, and Root picked up 58 of the other 62.

The Cubs acquired Carleton (11-8), a brooding right-hander, in the offseason from the St. Louis Cardinals, where he fought with teammates and resented the attention Dizzy and Paul Dean received. The 23-year-old Henshaw, who had spent the entire 1934 season with the Los Angeles Angels, was an invaluable spot starter and reliever and won a career-high 13 games. Arguably the biggest surprise of the season was 36-year-old Root, whom papers called the “grandpappy” of the staff.5 After appearing washed up, struggling with his weight, and winning just four times in 1934, Root started regularly in the second half of the 1935 season en route to a 15-8 record, and logged in excess of 200 innings for the ninth and final time in his 17-year big-league career.

“We won the pennant because of our complete team, especially our regulars … and our pitching staff,” said Cavarretta.6 The Cubs were indeed a complete team. Offensively, they led the circuit in runs scored, batting average, and on-base-percentage. Defensively, they recorded the most double plays in the league (163) and finished third in fielding percentage. The pitching staff led the NL in ERA (3.26) for the first time since their last World Series appearance, and also recorded the most complete games (81). Above all, the club was remarkably healthy.

The Season

The Cubs’ dramatic 1935 campaign can best be described as a tale of two seasons. The North Siders struggled to stay above .500 through July 5, when they lost their fourth consecutive game to fall to 38-32, a season-worst 10½ games behind the front-running New York Giants. Then they were a completely different team for the remainder of the season. Beginning on July 6, the Cubs went 62-22 to win the pennant by four games over the highly favored Cardinals. “Maybe the Cardinals had a better team,” said Cavarretta, “[but] we were young and we were hungry. We wanted to win more than the Cardinals.”7

On a cold day with temperatures on the 30s, Chicago Mayor Edward Joseph Kelly threw out the ceremonial first pitch at Wrigley Field to inaugurate Opening Day on April 16. The game served as a microcosm for the Cubs’ season: good pitching, timely hitting, and a little luck. In perhaps an omen for the Cubs, they knocked out the Cardinals’ reigning 30-game winner and World Series hero, Dizzy Dean, in the first inning when Lindstrom’s screeching liner back to the mound struck him and forced Dean to leave the game. Hartnett stroked a double in the bottom of the eighth to drive in Lindstrom for the game-winning run, 4-3.

The game drew 15,500 fans to Wrigley Field, down from 46,000 and 45,000 respectively for Opening Days in 1929 and 1931. The Cubs had led the NL in attendance every year from 1926 to 1932, including a major-league record 1,485,166 in 1929 (a figure they did not exceed until 1969). But the North Siders, like the rest of baseball, experienced deep declines in attendance as the effects of the Great Depression worsened in subsequent years.

After plodding along through almost three months of the season, the Cubs – suddenly and without warning – turned it around. Facing the Pittsburgh Pirates at Forbes Field on July 6, the Cubs squandered a six-run lead in the bottom of the ninth to send the game into extra innings. In the 13th inning, Cavarretta singled home the deciding run to give the Cubs a psychological boost and commence a stretch of 24 wins in 27 games. Edward Burns, apparently eating crow after his preseason predictions, described the Cubs’ explosive batting and strong pitching as “brutal and effervescent” as they rolled over their opponents to post a 26-8 record in July and finish the month a half-game out of first place.8

The final day of July proved to be a costly one. In the first game of a doubleheader against the Pirates at Forbes Field, Hartnett injured his ankle sliding into home in the fifth inning. He remained in the game, but an examination afterward “found the ankle bone sheared off and the ligaments separated.”9 In those days, a broken ankle was not necessarily a season-ending injury; and Dr. J.J. Schill, the team physician, expected the catcher back in ten days.

As if on cue, Hartnett returned on August 11 in the Cubs’ victory over the Cincinnati Reds, which marked only the team’s fifth win in 13 games since the catcher’s injury. In second place, 2½ games behind the Giants and a half-game in front of the Cardinals, the Cubs began a 19-game Eastern swing from August 14 to September 1. During the middle of it, they took three out of four games from the Giants at the Polo Grounds, losing only to Carl Hubbell, and concluded their road trip with an impressive 11-8 record. They returned to the friendly confines of Wrigley Field in third place, with just 1½ games separating them from the first-place Cardinals, and Giants.

The Cubs began the fateful month of September with a 20-game homestand. After a loss in the second game of their Labor Day doubleheader, the Cubs won their final 18 games at home. Friday the 13th of September was anything but unlucky as French tossed a complete game to defeat the Brooklyn Dodgers, 4-1, and move the Cubs into a tie for first place. The North Siders took the lead the next day with another victory over the Dodgers with the football-like score of 18-14.

Schedule makers could not have made the season any more exciting as the Cubs and their archrival Cardinals concluded the season with a pennant-determining five-game series at Sportsman’s Park. Despite the Cubs’ streak, they arrived in St. Louis holding only a three-game lead over the Redbirds. While the Giants faded in September, the Cardinals were on their own roll, having posted a 39-16 record since August 1, which was even better than that of the Cubs (35-16). Warneke shut out the Cardinals, 1-0, in the first game of the series, on September 25, to notch his 20th victory of the season. Cavarretta supplied the game’s only run with a home run in the second inning. A rainout forced a doubleheader on September 27. Big Bill Lee’s strong performance and the Cubs’ relentless pounding of 28-game-winner Dizzy Dean ended the drama in the first game. The Cubs overcame a 2-0 deficit by scoring six unanswered runs in a 6-2 victory to capture the pennant with their 20th consecutive win. The victory, wrote sportswriter Irving Vaughan, “climax[es] one of baseball’s most spectacular drives of all time.”10 The Cubs won the second game of the doubleheader before losing the last two inconsequential games of the season.

The Cubs’ 21-game winning streak is the second longest in major-league history, trailing only the New York Giants’ 26 games in 1916. However, the Giants’ streak comes with an asterisk as they accomplished the feat in 27 games, which included a tie with the Pirates in the 13th game. (The Chicago White Stockings, the precursors to the Cubs and one of the inaugural teams in the National League, won 21 consecutive contests in 1880).

The Cubs lacked the star power of their opponents in the World Series, the Detroit Tigers. No Cubs player approached the national prominence of Detroit’s player-manager, catcher Mickey Cochrane; good-looking first baseman Hank Greenberg; or wildly popular pitcher Schoolboy Rowe. Nonetheless Chicago was a nominal favorite in the World Series. In a poll conducted by the Associated Press, 30 of 57 writers surveyed predicted Chicago to be victorious.11 The majority, much like Edward Burns prior to the season, would be proved wrong.

GREGORY H. WOLF was born in Pittsburgh and is a lifelong Pirates fan. After turning his back on the Smoky City, he now resides in the Windy City area with his wife, Margaret, and daughter, Gabriela. A professor of German and holder of the Dennis and Jean Bauman endowed chair of the humanities at North Central College in Naperville, Illinois, he recently served as editor of the SABR books on the 1957 Milwaukee Braves, 1929 Chicago Cubs, and the 1965 Minnesota Twins.

Notes

Cochrane wasn’t alone in his views. In fact, a poll of members of the Baseball Writers Association of America found that a majority believed Detroit would prevail. Among the reasons given were that the Tigers, who had come up short against St. Louis in the ’34 Series, were a more experienced club than Chicago. Even though the Cubs were only three years removed from a Series loss to the New York Yankees, several players from that Chicago team were gone, while many new faces had arrived. These current Cubs had captured the senior circuit in ’35 by virtue of an incredible 21-game September winning streak. Many writers felt that the intensity of such a streak had taken a lot out of the Cubs, and that they risked coming out flat once the Series commenced.

Cubs manager Charlie Grimm wasn’t buying it. “Certainly I think we will win,” he stated matter-of-factly. “I have a fast, hustling, confident team. However, I do not think we will win in four straight games. The Tigers are too good a team for that. I think the series will go five or six games, but I will be surprised if it goes seven.”2

Among the ink-stained wretches, William J. Briordy of the New York Times asserted, “Despite the brilliant late rush of the plucky Cubs … Cochrane will lead his Detroit team to victory over Charley Grimm’s lads. …”3 Dan Daniel of the New York World-Telegram opined that “(Hank) Greenberg will give the Tigers a big edge in the Series.”4 The Chicago Tribune’s Harvey Woodruff felt compelled to give the Cubs some hometown love, picking them to win it all.

John Lardner, who wrote for the North American Newspaper Alliance syndicate, predicted that Chicago would be “inexperienced and nervous. … I doubt if anything but a miracle of inspiration … can win for the Cubs.”5 The Boston Transcript’s Harold Kaese put it bluntly: “Greenberg, (Goose) Goslin, Cochrane and (Charlie) Gehringer hit too hard. … Detroit has the old college spirit.”6 J.G. Taylor Spink of The Sporting News believed the Cubs would come out on top, “because they are red-hot.”7

Joe Williams of the New York World-Telegram viewed the Series through a mathematical prism: “The law of averages favors Detroit. The town has never won a World’s Series. This can’t go on forever.”8 Art West, of the Philadelphia Record, was more dismissive of the Tigers: “They haven’t been playing ‘fighting baseball.”9 “Detroit is a better ball club than a year ago,” chimed in Tom Meany of the New York World-Telegram, “with more punch and steadier.”10 W.R. King of the Associated Press asserted that “the only American League player the Cubs ever feared was Babe Ruth. Not even Mickey (Cochrane) himself is an acceptable Ruthian understudy. Therefore, the Cubs in six games.”11

The chief concern among Tigers fans was whether young Greenberg’s September swoon was going to carry over to the Series. The slugger batted only .253 with 2 home runs and 13 RBIs in the summer’s final month. When asked by reporters about his recent struggles at the plate, Greenberg tried his best to exude confidence: “That was just one of those things that occur in the life of every ballplayer. A half a hundred guys have told me to do this or do that in order to get out of the slump. But I am not going to take their advice, even though I know it was well meant. If I go up there and try to remember what Joe Potatoes or Sam Zilch told me to do, I’ll begin to press.”12

Game One: Wednesday, October 2, 1935

In preparation for the Series, and to handle the large crowds that were expected, temporary stands were built in both Navin Field in Detroit and Wrigley Field in Chicago, bringing the seating capacity to approximately 50,000 in both venues. This was a boon to the players, who were to share in the receipts of the first four games, in addition to a pool of $100,000. The latter was made possible through the sponsorship of radio broadcasts.

Tickets were a hot item in Detroit; owner Frank Navin claimed that his club had to reject more requests for reservations than they were able to fill. The night before Game One, hardy fans lined up along Trumbull Avenue outside Navin Field, hoping to buy bleacher tickets when the box office opened the next morning at 9. To fend off the frigid nighttime air, they built bonfires and wrapped themselves with thick blankets. Entrepreneurial hot-dog and hamburger sellers made a brisk business.

The afternoon brought cloudy skies to the city of Detroit, with temperatures in the high 50s. Navin Field was looking better than ever, having been given a fresh layer of infield sod earlier in the week, while the main stands had undergone a thorough scrubbing. Ticket scalpers assembled outside the ballpark, along the east side of Trumbull. Some wanted as much as “$25 for the $6.60 and the $5.50 tickets, and $15 for the $3.30 tickets,” according to one newspaper.13

By order of Frank Cody, Detroit school superintendent, schoolchildren were permitted to hear all games of the World Series. “In schools with radio receiving sets, pupils were excused from classes at game time to hear the reports in the auditorium.”14

The baseball writers began showing up for work around 11:30. “Spotted by portable typewriters they carried,” noted one paper, “scribes were given a big hand (by the crowd).”15

Like peanuts and Cracker Jack, fashionably-late fans were a staple at ballparks then as now. “Box seat holders were, as usual, lackadaisical about arriving,” reported the Detroit Evening Times. “At 12 o’clock only a score were in stalls and these looked like stand-ins for big shots.”16 Soon, however, a pregame buzz in the stands was created when Babe Ruth and his wife and daughter put in an appearance near the dugouts. Photographers flocked to the Bambino to snap his picture. In addition to the usual dignitaries such as Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis and American League President Will Harridge, notable spectators included FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover, tire manufacturer Harvey Firestone, Jr., and auto magnate Henry Ford, who came accompanied by his wife, and son Edsel. Hollywood actors George Raft and William Frawley were also among the swells. “George M. Cohan, the well-known Broadwayite, pulled a Greta Garbo by showing up in smoked glasses.”17

The owner of a garage across Trumbull Avenue announced that, unlike during last year’s World Series, he would not allow spectators to sit on his roof to watch the game, having decided that it was too dangerous.

Game One featured a matchup of Lon Warneke for Chicago and Schoolboy Rowe for Detroit. “Boy, I’m tickled skinny because Mickey named me to pitch the opener,” Rowe gushed.18 Sportswriter Paul Gallico described the sights, sounds, and smells of the Tiger clubhouse before the opening bell:

It is exciting to go into the clubhouse locker rooms … and just stand around, look and listen. The air you breathe is good, close, man’s air, a little thick and sweaty, tinged with rubdown and woolen garments and wet towels. The big rooms are full of real men. I never knew of a ball player that was a sissy. They bang and stomp and clatter around and talk strong. … The athletes were standing around in their skins, pulling on or drawing off nice, dirty, woolen shirts, tamping their feet into spiked shoes, weighing bats in their hands, chatting with newspapermen or, if preparing themselves for the practice field, stuffing their cheeks with chewing tobacco until their faces were pouched like squirrels. …19

If the Cubs were feeling any pregame jitters, writer Grantland Rice didn’t notice it. “Gabby Hartnett’s loud guffaw was rocking the spider-covered window panes. Young (Augie) Galan, one of the season’s stars, looked as loose as ashes.”20

A capacity crowd of 47,391 saw a tight pitching duel. The Bengals managed only four hits off Warneke. Schoolboy Rowe pitched well enough to win on most days, giving up only two earned runs while striking out eight in a complete-game effort, but wound up on the losing end of a 3-0 score. Frank Demaree’s solo home run in the ninth capped the scoring for Chicago.

Game Two: Thursday, October 3, 1935

Game Two was payback time for Detroit. Despite the cold weather (it had hailed in the morning and arctic breezes blew in from the north), the Tigers teed off on Cubs starter Charlie Root, scoring four runs in the bottom of the first before an out had been recorded. Greenberg, who just two days earlier had been named the American League’s Most Valuable Player, delivered the big blow, a two-run homer into the teeth of a strong wind blowing in from left field. Root was sent to the showers.

It was all the scoring Detroit needed. Tommy Bridges, “Little Tee From Tennessee,” was the pitching star, going the distance to get an 8-3 win. Both of the first two games of the Series had finished in just under two hours.

It was a costly victory for the Tigers, however. In the seventh inning Greenberg was on first and Gehringer on second when Pete Fox singled back through the box. Gehringer scored easily. According to Greenberg, “I rounded third on the hit, and when the ball was thrown to second base I decided to try to score. I slid into home plate. Gabby Hartnett had the plate blocked, and as he fell on me, my left wrist curled up against my body, and when I fell I snapped it back.”21 Greenberg was called out to end the inning. Despite favoring his wrist, he was able to finish the contest. Swelling persisted after the game, and the pain got worse. X-rays, however, proved negative, and the Tigers boarded the train for Chicago fully confident that their slugger would start Game Three in Wrigley Field.22

By 6 o’clock in the evening, the Tigers were on a special train bound for the Windy City, with more than 5,000 well-wishers seeing them off. In Chicago the team stayed at the Edgewater Beach Hotel, near Wrigley Field. In a welcoming gesture, the hotel staff had placed a huge stuffed tiger in the lobby.

Game Three: Friday, October 4, 1935

By the morning of Game Three, the Tigers’ worst fears had been realized. Greenberg’s painful wrist and elbow remained badly swollen. He begged Cochrane to put him into the lineup, but the Detroit manager elected to sit his star. Marv Owen, the club’s third baseman, was shifted to first in place of Greenberg, while little-used Flea Clifton took Owen’s place at third.

Taking in Game Three at Wrigley Field were National League President Ford Frick, along with heavyweight boxing champion Jimmy Braddock, and the Brown Bomber from Detroit, Joe Louis. The Sporting News commented: “No park ever looked more spic and span for a World’s Series than Wrigley Field. It appeared as though it had just been newly-painted and that the well-drilled ushers had just been liveried by Michigan boulevard tailors (sic).”23 It was a cold day in Chicago, as well, which may have partly explained the less-than-capacity crowd of 45,532.

To the mound, the Cubs sent 20-game winner Bill Lee. The Tigers countered with submariner Elden Auker. The home team opened the scoring in the second, when Demaree slammed his second home run of the Series. Another Chicago tally in the bottom of the fifth made it 3-0, but in the sixth Pete Fox tripled home Goose Goslin for the Tigers’ first run of the afternoon.

Detroit tied the game in the top of the eighth, on a two-run single by Goslin, who later scored the go-ahead run courtesy of a Billy Rogell single.

Going into the bottom of the ninth, the Tigers were hanging on to a 5-3 lead. But Chicago tied the game off reliever Schoolboy Rowe on three straight singles by Stan Hack, Chuck Klein, and Ken O’Dea (the latter two being pinch hits). But in the top of the 11th, Jo-Jo White singled home Marv Owen to give Detroit a 6-5 lead, and Rowe retired the Cubs in order in the bottom half of the inning. Having stolen a game in the Cubs’ own backyard, the Tigers led the Series two games to one.

Cochrane was gleeful after the grueling game. “They threw everything they had at us and it wasn’t enough,” he said. Greenberg, his wrist still in pain, congratulated Rowe on the win. “Schoolboy, you sure bore down in there, but I had the jitters in the ninth when those pinch-hitters came through and tied the score. But boy, I’m tickled to death you showed ’em.”24

Game Four: Saturday, October 5, 1935

A crowd of 49,350 shoehorned their way into the ballpark at Clark and Addison for Game Four. Game-time temperatures were in the 40s. A bevy of bundled policemen were assigned to the frigid, windy rooftops of the houses along Waveland and Sheffield Avenues, to make sure that no spongers tried to sneak a peek at the game from those lofty vantage points.

The contest was a pitching duel between General Crowder and Tex Carleton. The General threw nine innings, giving up only one run on five hits, while striking out five. Greenberg again did not play, but Detroit came out on top, scoring single tallies in the third and sixth inning, the latter an unearned run on an error by shortstop Billy Jurges. The Cubs’ lone score came on a second-inning home run by Hartnett. They threatened in the bottom of the ninth, with back-to-back singles by Demaree and Cavarretta, but Stan Hack bounced into a 6-4-3 double play to end it. Final score: Detroit 2, Chicago 1. The Tigers were now one win away from their first-ever World Series title.

Game Five: Sunday, October 6, 1935

The Tigers mustered only a single run on seven hits. Chuck Klein’s third-inning two-run home run gave the Cubs a lead they would never relinquish. Rowe took the tough-luck loss, his second of the Series, while Warneke won his second. The Tigers had a chance to win it all in the top of the ninth. With the score 3-0, Gehringer and Goslin opened the frame with back-to-back singles. Fox singled to left-center, scoring Gehringer, with Goslin holding at second. After Billy Rogell flied to center, pinch-hitter Gee Walker grounded out second to first, advancing both Fox and Goslin. With two out and runners on second and third, Flea Clifton popped out to first to end the game. Final score: Chicago 3, Detroit 1. The contest was played in a snappy one hour and 49 minutes, in front of 49,237 spectators.

Despite the loss, the Tigers had to be satisfied with having won two out of three in the Windy City. They were now headed back to Detroit with a three games to two lead in the Series.

Game Six: Monday, October 7, 1935

The Tigers had gotten this far without the injured Greenberg, and they would not have him this day, either. He never played after the second game, finishing the Series with only one hit in six at-bats (the home run in Game Two). Tommy Bridges took the mound for Detroit, while Grimm countered with Larry French. It was standing room only at Navin Field, as 48,420 fans filled every square foot of the ballpark, eager to see their Tigers win it all.

Pete Fox put the Tigers on the scoreboard in the first inning, when his double drove in Cochrane.

The Cubs got to Bridges in the top of the third. A leadoff single by Jurges was followed by a strikeout of French. Galan singled, and Jurges landed at third. Billy Herman singled to right, scoring Jurges to tie the score. Galan tried to stretch it to third, but was called out. He put up a vehement argument with the umpire, but got nowhere. It was a pivotal moment in the game. Instead of having runners on first and third with only one out, the Cubs now had only a runner on first with two outs. Bridges bore down and got Klein to hit a fly ball to deep right field, backing Walker to the fence, to end the frame.

The Tigers scored their second run in the bottom of the fourth, but Herman hit a two-out, two-run home run in the top of the fifth. Bridges took one look over his right shoulder as the ball headed toward the stands, and hung his head in dejection. It was now 3-2 Chicago.

Controversy erupted in the visiting half of the sixth. After two quick groundouts, Bridges suddenly got into trouble when Hack doubled to right. Jurges hit a grounder to third baseman Clifton, who quickly made a lunging swipe at Hack as he headed for third. Umpire (and former Tiger) George Moriarty claimed that Hack had run out of the baseline to elude the tag, and called him out. Hack and a crowd of Cubs swarmed around the ump, arguing their cause. It was the second debatable call at third for Chicago in the game.

In the bottom half of the inning, Marv Owen, who had been held hitless in the Series, laced a single to score Rogell, tying the game.

It continued into the top of the ninth. By the time he’d finished his 16-year career in Detroit in 1946, Tommy Bridges had won 194 games, with three 20-win seasons, twice leading the league in strikeouts. But the ninth inning in Game Six of this 1935 World Series was his finest hour. If there were ever any doubts that Bridges had ice in his veins, his gutsy performance put them to rest and cemented his name forever in Detroit Tigers lore.

Stan Hack led off the inning by stroking a long triple over the head of Gee Walker in center. Up came Jurges, who just wanted to put the ball in play. Instead, Bridges made him swing and miss three times, for out number one. Jurges flipped his bat in disgust as he headed back to the dugout.

The next batter for Chicago was the pitcher, Larry French, who quickly swung and missed at two slow curves. Ahead in the count, Bridges induced French to hit an easy roller back to the mound. Bridges bluffed Hack back to third, then threw the ball to Owen at first for the second out.

Hack remained standing alone at third base, and it was now up to Galan to drive him in. The Navin Field crowd was in a frenzy, urging Bridges on with every pitch. Galan took a called strike one, then swung futilely at strike two. The crowd wanted a strikeout. Bridges bounced his next pitch two feet in front of the plate, but catcher Cochrane got down on his knees and blocked it – barely. It was a crucial play, preventing the potential winning run from scoring on what would have been a wild pitch. On the next offering from Bridges, Galan swung and hit a high popup into short left field. Rogell, Clifton, and Goslin all converged on it, while Hack raced for home. It was Goslin who made the catch, dashing toward the infield. The crowd went delirious. No runs, one hit, no errors. Improbably, the score remained tied, 3-3.

Navin considered Cochrane’s stop of the errant pitch “the most important play of the Series.25 Years later, Billy Herman would still lament the play: “When I think back to the 1935 World Series, all I can see is Hack standing on third base, waiting for somebody to drive him in. Seems he stood there for hours and hours.”26

Charles P. Ward wrote in the next day’s Detroit Free Press, “Those who saw defeat staring the Tigers in the face failed to remember that Bridges is one of the gamest little men that ever came out of the hills of Tennessee. He was sent into the game by Cochrane because Mickey wanted to have somebody on the mound who would show the Cubs plenty of gameness even if he didn’t have much on the ball.”27

Finally, the titanic battle came to an end in the bottom of the ninth. Goose Goslin blooped a single into right field, scoring Cochrane from second with the game winner, and the Detroit Tigers were world champions for the first time in their history. Navin Field erupted into pandemonium.

“They will remember the manner in which the base ball (sic) championship of 1935 was won as long as they remember the team that won it,” wrote H.G. Salsinger the next day in the Detroit News. “There have been better teams than Detroit in the past but no team ever won a World Series more spectacularly than Detroit won the one that ended with two out in the ninth inning at Navin Field yesterday.”28

“The greatest exhibition of pitching in the clutch I have ever seen,” exclaimed a jubilant Cochrane in the postgame celebration. “I told those Cubs that we’d throw 150 pounds of heart at them out there today, and I guess they realize now that Little Tommy is all of that – after that ninth inning. Pitching! He threw the six greatest curves I ever caught to lick them. …That Bridges. What a thrill he gave me. That little guy has the heart of a lion. … What a pitcher, what a heart. Just 150 pounds of grit and courage. That’s what he is.”29

Longtime Tigers owner Frank Navin made his way through the clubhouse, congratulating all the players individually. When he approached Cochrane, the normally stoic Navin beamed a broad smile that seemed to be the culmination of what was for him a 30-year wait. “Mike,” he said, “I waited a long time for this, but it’s the greatest thrill of my life. That ninth inning was a corker. I’ll never forget, and I could have leaped right out of my chair when you came racing in from third with the winning run. It was a long time to wait, but it was worth it.”30

Gabby Hartnett entered the room to congratulate the victors. “You fellows beat us with a better ballclub today,” he shouted. “But we’ll be back to get another crack at you next year.”31

Downtown, euphoric crowds jammed the streets, dancing and celebrating throughout the afternoon and into the evening. Automobiles jammed the length of Woodward, and pedestrians were forced to flow around, through, and over the cars. A carnival spirit spread everywhere in the city. Thus wrote Fred Lieb: “Crowds were still tooting, banging on dishpans, and ringing gongs as they snakedanced through Cadillac Square and Grand Circus Park well past midnight, while the bars at the Book Cadillac, Detroit A.C., Fort Shelby, Detroit Leland, Statler, and other spots kept open house until the sun rose out of the east the next morning. Detroit had a terrible hangover, but gosh, it was worth it.”32

The Detroit Free Press put it down for posterity the next day:

Police said the crowd was bigger than the Armistice Day crowd of 1918. Even in that glorious moment no such crowds had choked Detroit streets; no such paralysis of transportation had ensued; no such heights of pandemonium had been reached.

Detroit, through the baseball team that is a symbol and the incarnation of its fighting spirit, had won the baseball championship of the world, and the world was to know it.

It was Detroit’s salute to America.

Detroit had the dynamite; Mickey Cochrane and his Tigers provided the spark.

Detroit celebrated because it had won the world championship.

It celebrated because it was the city that had led the nation back to recovery.

It celebrated because it was the city that wouldn’t stay licked; the city that couldn’t be licked.

It was Detroit the unconquerable, ready to tell the world when the moment arrived.

The moment had arrived, and the world was told.

“There’s no doubt,” Police Inspector William Maloney said, “that it’s the biggest crowd in downtown Detroit in my memory.” And, he added, he has a very long memory.33

Meanwhile, back in the celebratory clubhouse, Cochrane managed to locate Goslin and Bridges among the mayhem. Grasping them both around their necks, he planted a kiss on each of them while flashbulbs popped.

“What a thrill! What a game to win! What a heart that Bridges has! What a money player that Goslin is! What a team the whole damned gang is! I’ve had many big moments in my life, but none to equal the thrill of crossing the plate with the winning run. Boy, that was great. I thought I never would get there.”34

SCOTT FERKOVICH is the leader of the SABR Baseball Ballpark Project. His articles have appeared in numerous SABR publications. He is a contributing editor to the annual “Emerald Guide to Baseball,” and blogs about Detroit Tigers history for Detroit Athletic Co. He also writes about baseball for Seamheads.com, TheNationalPastimeMuseum.com, and Spitball magazine. Scott is a graduate of Columbia College in Chicago. He lives in Michigan with his wife, Cindy, daughter, Zoey, and their golden retriever, Spenser.

Sources

Bevis, Charles. Mickey Cochrane: The Life of a Baseball Hall of Fame Catcher (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1998).

Davidson, Mike, “The 1935 World Series.” YouTube video, 14:56. Uploaded September 21, 2011. youtube.com/watch?v=M_I_SV0-qgY

Greenberg, Hank and Ira Berkow. Hank Greenberg: The Story of My Life (Chicago, Illinois: Ivan R. Dee, 2009).

Lieb, Fred. The Detroit Tigers (Kent, Ohio: Kent State University Press, 2008).

Rosengren, John. Hank Greenberg: The Hero of Heroes (New York: New American Library, 2013).

Baseball-Reference.com

Detroit Evening Times

Detroit Free Press

Detroit News

The Sporting News

Notes