Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball--And America--Forever by Tim Wendel Page A

affair. Now for its fourth game in two days, Detroit went with its would-be ace, Denny McLain.
    Early on, the Tigers held a 3–1 lead in the second inning. But McLain, who would go 0–2 in five starts in September, was tagged for three runs and was soon out of the game. The Tigers’ starter gone, the Angels proceeded to hang crooked numbers on the scoreboard, building an 8–5 lead heading into the bottom of the ninth. Despite the deep hole, the Tigers fought back, putting two men on with none out. That brought up catcher Jim Price, the potential tying run, to the plate. But he flied out to left field. Dick McAuliffe followed him, setting up one of the cruel ironies sports often display. To that point in the ’67 season, the Tigers’ second baseman had hit into only one double play. Now with the crowd on its feet, the season on the line, McAuliffe laced a grounder to his counterpoint, the Angels’ Bobby Knoop. While the two were among the best fielders at their position in the American League, Knoop won more Gold Gloves—something that still annoys McAuliffe to this day.
    Knoop snared the grounder, beginning the double play that ended the game and the Tigers’ season. The “Impossible Dream” Red Sox, a squad that finished second to last in 1966, edged the Tigers and Twins by one game and the White Sox by three to advance to the World Series against the powerful St. Louis Cardinals. The memory of coming up short was still fresh in the minds of the Tigers four months later as they arrived in Lakeland, their spring training home.
    “In ’67, we were really hurting for pitchers, especially guys coming out of the bullpen, in the final week,” McAuliffe said. “Playing back-to-back doubleheaders didn’t help us any. Our general manager, Jim Campbell, didn’t swing a trade to help us. Even without the pitching, we still felt we’d win it and we didn’t.”
    As camp opened, Tigers’ manager Mayo Smith told the press, “I don’t see anything to make me believe we won’t have a strong team. I can’t promise we’ll win the pennant. But losing it last year on the last day has done something to this team. The team really grew up last year.”
    Lakeland, a sleepy and, for the most part, still racially segregated town located about fifty miles east of Tampa, appeared to be a curious place to start down the road to redemption. There was a black side of town and a white side of town, with the Tigers running a shuttle bus to and from the new Holiday Inn, where many of the players and their families made their home in February and March. Still, the locale, which had been the Tigers’ spring home since 1934, oddly fit the organization. The Tigers, along with the Red Sox and Yankees, had been one of the last big-league teams to integrate. Of course, those days were over with Willie Horton, Earl Wilson, and Gates Brown now on the Detroit roster. But perhaps being off the beaten track in Florida, in a place that reminded them of how things used to be, helped the team come together. Of the twenty-five players on the 1968 ballclub, fifteen had spent time in Tiger Town. Many in that group had gone on to play Triple-A ball in Syracuse, with most reaching the big leagues within a season or two of each other. Overall, the Tigers were a focused veteran ballclub in 1968, almost loyal to a fault, whose pride had been stung by how the previous pennant drive played out. The core group was intent upon making amends.
    As the 1968 season began, the consensus was that the bullpen had let the team down the season before. That opened the door for a few new faces to make the team. Among them was a hard-throwing left-hander from southwest Ohio—Jonathan Edgar Warden.
    Raised by a single mom, Warden had starred in baseball, football, and basketball at Pleasant View High School in Grove City, Ohio, outside of Columbus. He had attended the University of Georgia, pitching a no-hitter and several shutouts, and drawing the Tigers’ attention. The