When I was 17, it was a very good year for baseball in Detroit.
It was 1968. The Tigers won the World Series. They won it during an afternoon game in St. Louis. But the victory touched off a party in downtown Detroit, which 44 years ago was still the center of commerce and fun in southeast Michigan.
More than a hundred thousand hell-bent-for-a-hangover fans showed up. By nightfall, the booze had kicked in. Teenagers who did not know each other kissed in front of J.L. Hudson’s, and people paraded their cars up and down Woodward Avenue, like a slow-motion Dream Cruise. They honked costantly, and “Go Get ‘Em, Tigers” blared from AM radios. The noise was deafening. A drunk guy with a long plastic horn waded through the pool in Kennedy Square. Some people threw beer cans at him.
That was my introduction to the World Series, Detroit style.
And Detroit has a certain World Series style. There is drama. Iconic moments. Music. Ninety-year-old nuns praying the rosary as they listen to games. Couples getting married in the leftfield stands. Critics calling Ernie Harwell a “traitor” for inviting Jose Feliciano to sing the National Anthem. Vibrant crowds that sometimes transform into mobs.
“Spikes and Bottles Fly as Cards Win Series in 11-0 Rampage,” screamed the Free Press headline after Detroiters disrupted the seventh game in 1934. “Bleacher Fans Stage Most Tumultuous Riot Ever Seen in a World Series Game.”
The World Series is a fine and rare thing. This will be the 11th series in Detroit since the National League began playing the American League for the major league championship in 1903. That works out to about one series a decade. The Tigers have won only four: 1935, 1945, 1968 and 1984.
“I’m a happy man tonight,” Louis Dorsey, a 43-year-old Detroiter who works as a security guard in a downtown building, said Thursday night as fans celebrated the Tigers’ sweep of the Yankees.
“It’s nice when the Red Wings win the Stanley Cup. I’ve seen the Pistons win championships. But there is something special about baseball.”
Baseball in October messes with the region’s head. It changes the conversation. It monopolizes attention. The city always seems on edge when the series come to town, so October baseball can be a balm on the civic wounds.
In 1935, Mickey Cochrane, Goose Goslin and Tommy Bridges distracted Detroit's attention from the Great Depression by beating the Chicago Cubs. Five weeks after the last out, team owner Frank Navin died of a heart attack while riding a horse on Belle Isle. Industrialist Walter O. Briggs bought the team from Navin’s widow.
In the 1945 series, World War II had been over for only a few weeks, and many of the players were still in the armed forces. Hank Greenberg had mustered out, though. His two home runs and seven RBI’s helped the Tigers defeat the Cubs again, and helped Detroit forget about the disruption of war and the race riot that had broken out two years earlier. Thirty four people died.
In 1968, when the Tigers beat the Cardinals, that generation’s riot had taken place one year before. A memorable moment in the series came when Willie Horton threw out Lou Brock at home plate, and some of the people on the roofs and hoods of the cars tooling along Woodward yelled, “Willie Horton, unite our city.”
In 1984, the region was stuck in an economic crisis so deep that Germans the year before had sent care packages to the city after they saw media reports of needy people filling Detroit's soup kitchens and unemployment lines. The Tigers' 35-5 start and their season-long victory lap served as a welcome antidote.
This time the riot was related to the World Series. It took place not long after Kirk Gibson hit a home run off of future Hall-of-Famer Goose Gossage, and Gibson danced around the bases pumping his fists and blowing kisses to the delirious crowd. The postgame disturbance left one person dead, scores injured, three women raped, a police car torched, eight vehicles damaged and two buses attacked.
The 1984 series captures both the joy and dread of a Detroit World Series. Game Five started at mid-afternoon on a warm, hazy Sunday. Inside the stadium, a breathtaking buzz built gradually throughout the game. Outside, a crowd of mainly young people stood around, drinking, listening to the play-by-play and giving off an ominous vibe.
I covered the game, and after spending time in the blissful Tiger clubhouse, I filed my story. I walked out a door of the third-deck press box and onto the Tiger Stadium roof. It was raining. Down on the street, at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, were the singed cop car and cab. The crowd, including 17-year-old Kenneth (Bubba) Helms, the mayhem’s chief jester, had moved away, but you could hear sirens, shouts and cherry bombs. The scene looked – and sounded -- like the aftermath of a battle. It was difficult to process the sight of overturned vehicles with the image of Gibson blowing kisses.
The photo of Helms, above, zipped around the world, becoming the image baseball fans and others associated with the Tigers' win. A subsequent profile in the Free Press increased his infamy, and it was not unusual to see people dressed as Bubba at Halloween parties that year. After a sad life that was riven with drug abuse and mental health issues, Helms died in 2001 after swallowing a bottle of pain pills.
In 2006, things were much more peaceful, but the Tigers lost to the Cards in five games. One superb moment was the appearance of former manager Sparky Anderson in the press room under the Comerica Park stands for a Q and A. Sparky looked old and fragile, but he entertained the media with his good humor and loopy answers. He bowed to the Japanese journalists, and paid tribute to Detroit, calling its fans generous but never hesitant about booing. “Those things happen,” he said. When he was done, the reporters did something they never do – they gave him a standing ovation.
At Thursday’s post-game ceremony, Mike Ilitch looked old and fragile. He is the smart Detroit street guy who played in the Tigers’ farm system before he had the brilliant idea to franchise pizza joints. Like Sparky, he paid tribute to Detroit fans. He mentioned the Red Wings. But he added: “The Tigers are something special.”
Mr. I is 83, and he has lived through seven Detroit World Series. He has often said how he would like to win just one.
