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

organization drafted him in the fourth round in 1966. Now, after a year in the Florida State League and a year in the Carolina League, he had an outside chance to make the big-league team, in large part because the front office remembered what happened last October when they ran out of arms when it mattered most. “The door was open for me,” Warden said. “I knew it. So did pretty much everybody else in camp that spring. But sometimes that doesn’t make it any easier. If anything it might be tougher when everybody is expecting it from you.”
     
     
    Nobody was more certain about the Tigers’ chances of success in ’68 than right-handed pitcher Denny McLain. Upon arriving in Lakeland, he told the press that Detroit would “win by six to seven games if we get off to a good start and nobody falls off any couch.”
    The last was a tongue-in-cheek reference to how McLain had hurt himself toward the end of the previous season. Somehow he had severely bruised two toes on his left foot. At first he’d claimed that the incident happened at home when he awoke blurry-eyed from a nap on the family couch. “People think there’s something funny about the couch story,” he added.
    In 1967, McLain posted a so-so 17–16 record. What grated on teammates and fans alike was his inability to pitch effectively down the stretch. Exactly how McLain injured his toes remained open to debate in the spring of 1968. At first, McLain stuck to the couch story—that he had fallen asleep while watching television and stubbed his toes after standing up. Subsequently, the star pitcher said he had hurt himself chasing raccoons away from his garbage cans. Teammate Mickey Lolich chimed in by saying he saw McLain kick a water cooler after being yanked from a game. Another account had McLain kicking lockers in the clubhouse after another lackluster outing.
    What wasn’t in dispute was how poorly McLain finished: 0–2, allowing nearly a run an inning his last five starts. (A few years later, Sports Illustrated reported that McLain had contact with the mob during that time. A crime boss had reportedly dislocated McLain’s toes in a disagreement over a horseracing bet—a story that McLain vehemently denied.) Whatever the case, McLain was eager to move on and, besides, there was always plenty to talk about when he was around.
    McLain arrived at the Tigers’ spring camp sporting orange-tinted hair (“I’ve been out in sun a lot,” he said) and no eyeglasses. Instead he was wearing contact lens, detailing to the media how he had gotten used to them while bowling and playing his Hammond X-77 organ. McLain was a scratch bowler, averaging 190 to 200, and he talked about how he had assembled a team that finally beat a squad headed by Lou Boudreau, once a stellar shortstop for the Cleveland Indians, who also happened to be McLain’s father-in-law. McLain explained that he pulled off the victory by employing “a couple of ringers.”
    As adept as McLain was at bowling, he was even better at music. After performing in clubs throughout the Midwest during previous off-seasons, he spent the months before the ’68 season working for Grinnell Brothers, Michigan’s largest musical retailer. He played at Detroit-area shopping centers and promotional events. As with everything he did, McLain dreamed big, really big. Musically, he wanted nothing less than to record an album and be a headliner in Las Vegas. But he knew such aspirations were linked to how well he did on the mound this season.
    While McLain was the American League starter in the 1966 All-Star Game in St. Louis, as well as Detroit’s youngest twenty-game winner since Schoolboy Rowe in 1934, he told anybody who would listen that he was ready to lead Detroit to the World Series. After all, he had added a side-arm delivery and maintained that bowling, of all things, had helped the arm action with this new “out pitch.”
    “I want to be in the position next month to tell the man what I want,”