Miguel Cabrera. Photo/AP
The Detroit Tigers basically win the American League Central every year now.
They won it in 2011. Repeated in 2012. Did it again in 2013. They are the heavy favorites to pace the field again this year. You could slot Kevin Costner in as the fifth starter and the Tigers would still take the flag by at least ten games. It’s almost become a formality.
But simply making the playoffs is no longer a reason to celebrate down on Woodward. It’s championships we crave. Standards have risen to the point where anything but ultimate victory is looked upon as a failure.
Remember, however; it wasn’t very long ago that declaring such lofty expectations would have had you laughed out of the bar and placed in the nearest mental health facility. There was a long period of time in the not too distant past during which the Tigers were not only the worst franchise in baseball, but quite possibly in all of professional sports.
The 119-loss club in 2003 gets a lot of attention, but that was really just the tip of the iceberg. The team had been on life support for a decade leading up to that point.
Arguments nowadays revolve around which Cy Young candidate should start Opening Day or the playoff opener. Scherzer or Verlander? What about Sanchez? 20 years ago you were satisfied if an aging Mike Moore managed to keep his ERA below infinity.
Today, we take a trip down Sad Memory Lane to look at two of the ragtag Tiger groups from that era. So when this year’s squad happens to lose a few games in a row and you feel yourself on the verge of a bitter rant, just relax for a moment and think back to a time when Brad Ausmus wasn’t your young, fresh-minded skipper, but instead your weak-sauce, no-stick starting catcher.
Which is exactly where we’ll start.
1996: Batteries Not Included
Brad Ausmus and John Flaherty. A less inspiring catching platoon I cannot imagine. Not only were neither of these guys very good, but they were practically identically awful in ’96. It’s almost creepy when you take a closer look.
Ausmus: 4 HR, 22 RBI, 12 2B, .248 BA
Flaherty: 4 HR, 23 RBI, 12 2B, .250 BA
Some might glance at those numbers and chalk it up to a statistical anomaly. I don’t think so. I’m convinced they were sharing the same body that summer.
The only “value” they provided was in the form of Flaherty’s walk-up music. The Tigers would play a fuzzy recording of “Johnny B. Goode,” a cute little play on the catcher’s name that was generally good for a minor chuckle. It sure beat the lame “Addams Family” routine (snap, snap) they would dust off when Chris Gomez took his turn at bat.
That 1996 club was underrated in terms of its awfulness. They lost a whopping 109 games, which included four-win months in both May and September.
The Tigers didn’t exactly play up to their competition that year, either. They took the field 12 times against the AL-leading Indians and lost every single one of them. Hey, that’s hard to do!
A sarcastic tip of the cap must also go out to one of the worst same-name pitching duos in league history. The “Gas Can Gregs,” Gohr and Keagle, both posted ERAs north of 7.00 while serving up an array of mid-80s meatballs that were summarily bashed out of stadiums at supersonic trajectories never before seen on a baseball diamond.
Gohr was particularly horrendous, enough so that the Tigers actually dealt him to the Angels prior to a late-season head-to-head meeting just so they too could get some swings in against him. “Everyone else got a whack at the piñata...we want our turn!!”
Sure enough, Gohr’s first appearance donning the Halo cap came at his old launching pad on Michigan and Trumbull. And like any good showman, he didn’t disappoint.
He faced six Tiger hitters, retiring just one. The final blow was delivered by Tony Clark, who sent a 2-2 Gohr heater about 800 feet to right-center for a grand salami. Needless to say, ’96 was the last year of Gohr’s career.
Keagle started six times that year and didn’t win any of them. The last four resulted in the opposition putting up 11, 10, 13, and 10 runs. I don’t know what pitches Ausmus was calling that summer, but they weren’t the right ones.
1999: Serving Up a Rookie to the World Champs
Vin Scully should have won an Oscar for his superb work in the 1999 baseball flick For Love of the Game. When you find yourself watching that movie for the 17th time, it’s not because of Costner’s grit or Kelly Preston’s mood swings or J.K. Simmons’ mustache. It’s because of Scully’s voice, that most perfect of human instruments.
He has many sterling passages throughout the film, but one in particular seemed to actually mirror real life events from that very ‘99 Tigers season. It went like this.
“But never before, in all those years and in all those innings, has he ever had a date with destiny as he has right now. He will make the fateful walk to the loneliest spot in the world, the pitching mound at Yankee Stadium in quest of the pitcher’s dream, the perfect game.”
In 1999, the Tigers began the season on the road. A tough six-game swing through Texas and New York to start the campaign. It just so happened they would catch both teams for their respective home openers.
Now it doesn’t take an ultra-experienced baseball mind like Connie Mack to tell you that the Yankees assignment was going to be an especially difficult one. These were the defending World Series champions, riding high off an 114-win season and 11-2 blitz through the playoffs. (They would go on to win the ’99 Series as well, this time dropping just one postseason game in the process.)
This was one of baseball’s all-time dynasties. Only the cagiest of veterans could possibly be counted upon to toe the slab for this hellish Opening Day in the Bronx.
But Larry Parrish was no Connie Mack. In fact, this was his very first full-time managerial job in the bigs. He had foolishly used his three most trusted arms in the opening series against the Rangers, displaying the foresight of a goldfish. The next game would be in Yankee Stadium against a team of Hall of Famers with 56,000+ screaming maniacs in attendance.
And that is how we arrived at the most glaring mismatch in the 98 year history of the American League; Parrish calling on an anonymous Venezuelan right hander, rookie Beiker Graterol, to make his first ever big league appearance in the hope that he would somehow be able to tame one of the most terrifying lineups in baseball history.
If this were Hollywood, Graterol would have went out and set the Yankees down in order, 27 straight. But alas, Vin Scully was nowhere to be found and Graterol had neither the charisma nor biting fastball of the fictional Billy Chapel.
He actually started out okay, posting a hitless first frame to settle the nerves. Unfortunately, the rules of the game generally require the starting pitcher to go back out for the second inning.
He jumped out of the dugout. He’d have been better off jumping in a cab.
Tino Martinez greeted him with a laser beam to the outfield bleachers. A single and an out later, Scott Brosius did the same. Three to nothing and Graterol was rapidly coming unglued.
He opened the third by walking Derek Jeter on a full count. Ditto for the next hitter, Paul O’Neill. After finally registering an out, Parrish instructed the now completely-frazzled Graterol to intentionally walk the next batter and load the bases for a possible inning-ending double play.
In a perfect world, yes, that does seem like a rational idea. But in this case, with the walls of the historic stadium closing in with each passing minute, maybe it would have been better to just let him pitch, or even remove him from the game altogether.
Graterol proceeded to go to a 2-1 count on the 38-year-old slugger, Chili Davis.
Maybe the kid would wiggle his way out of it. Maybe there would be a Hollywood ending after all. Or maybe not.
The next pitch was a changeup that didn’t fool the well-seasoned Chili one little bit. He whipped his bat through the zone and deposited the ball violently out to right field for a grand slam. Yankees 7, Tigers 0. This was the moment Scully was referring to when he waxed poetically about “the loneliest spot in the world.”
One inning later and Graterol’s afternoon was complete. The box score didn’t lie.
Graterol: 4 IP, 4 H, 7 ER, 4 BB, 2 SO, 3 HR, 15.75 ERA, One Badly Bruised Ego
The press converged on the rattled rookie after the game. This was a pretty unique story, after all. It had been 32 years since a pitcher made his major league debut at the Yanks’ home opener (apparently Parrish never got that memo).
The young hurler somehow managed to stay relatively hopeful and optimistic.
“I felt good at the start. But that is a good team. I just made a couple of mistakes. I will learn from them and I’ll be better next time.”
Unfortunately for Beiker Graterol, next time was only a figment of his imagination. Graterol would be sent to the minors after the outing, never to return. Not for a late season call-up when rosters would expand, not for a spot start in the dog days of August.
He pitched one major league game in the most difficult of circumstances and was never called upon again.
Cherish This Era
These tales of Tigers past help to put the upcoming 2014 campaign in the proper perspective.
Fans can moan and groan about the Doug Fister trade and how it’s unheard of to let go of quality starting pitching. They can grumble about the giant hole that develops annually in left field. And they might very well have some validity to their claims.
But if at all possible, they ought to try and cherish these days of perennial contention and divisional dominance. It was not too long ago that things were quite different.
And a whole lot worse.
