Tigers stand just four wins away from the Holy Grail of baseball
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By Jim Hawkins
Columnist
The Oakland Press
Saturday, October 21, 2006
theoaklandpress.com
DETROIT - Nobody gave them any respect. Nobody gave them a chance. Nobody gave them the time of day.
The Tigers, just three years removed from those infamous 119 beatings, were coming off 12 losing summers in a row. Their two offseason free-agent acquisitions were a combined 78 years old. Their new manager - their sixth skipper in nine seasons, in case you were keeping score - was 61 years old and had been away from the game for six years.
Nobody outside of Detroit noticed. Nobody outside of Detroit cared.
Three years ago, the Tigers were baseball's laughingstocks.
Today, the Team That Mike Ilitch Bought and Dave Dombrowski Built and Jim Leyland Bossed - and, until this season, Just About Everybody Booed - is America's Team.
The Blue Collar Guys Who Could, the ultimate underdogs, are now, miraculously, just four wins away from the pinnacle of their profession and our national pastime.
"The World Series is Christmas and prom night and wedding day and New Year's Eve, all wrapped into one," Sparky Anderson, his voice hoarse from hours of shouting, told his triumphant champagnesoaked Tigers in 1984, even as all hell was breaking loose outside on the corner of Michigan and Trumbull.
Beginning tonight, Magglio Ordonez, Brandon Inge, Justin Verlander and the rest of the remarkable, renaissance 2006 Tigers will find that out, first-hand, at jam-packed, emotionally-charged Comerica Park - where, by the way, the hometown heroes are 4-0 in this postseason.
This is their season, their dream, their chance to shine on baseball's biggest stage. The city of Detroit hosting the Super Bowl and the World Series - the two biggest happenings in all of sports - in the same year! What are the odds against that? Late in that fabulous, now long ago summer of '84, after yet another victory in their uninterrupted march to the world championship, several of the Tigers were gathered in the clubhouse, watching the 11 o'clock news, when the talking head on TV made repeated references to the 1968 Tigers. "The hell with the '68 Tigers!" one offended player screamed at the screen. "We're the '84 Tigers!" His teammates, bursting with a newly-discovered swagger and confidence, shouted out their seconds to that motion. Today, the 2006 Tigers have earned the right to say the same thing about '84. Players come and go. Stars rise and fall. But the grand ol' game goes on.
No Tiger fan will ever forget what happened in 1984, or in '68. But no one should soon forget the miracle the 2006 Tigers have performed, either.
Someday, future generations will gaze back upon this season the same way we today treasure the memories of '84 and '68.
Someday, the names of Kenny Rogers, Verlander, Pudge Rodriguez, Brandon Inge, Jeremy Bonderman, Nate Robertson, Ordonez and Placido Polanco will rest in the same pantheon alongside those of Trammell, Whitaker, Gibson, Morris, Kaline, Horton, Stanley and Lolich.
"Don't ever forget this moment," Anderson, admonished his troops in their finest hour back in 1984.
But who, back in those halcyon days of '84, could have imagined it would take the team of Cobb, Greenberg, Gehringer and Kaline 22 long years to get back to the World Series again?
These Tigers were supposedly little more than cannon fodder when they faced the millionaire Yankees in the first round of the playoffs - the freshman against the varsity, their manager, Jim Leyland called it. They were not even informed that the Game 2 had been postponed, then they were forced to find a new hotel in New York in the middle of the night. They were stripped of the homefield advantage that they had worked all season to earn when they staggered down the stretch and inexcusably faltered against the inept Royals. They were forced to face the Oakland A's with 23 men against 25 because of injuries to Sean Casey and Joel Zumaya.
There was no end to the indignities they endured.
Yet the Tigers have overcome every adversity in this postseason.
"Nobody could have envisioned the transformation in such a short period of time for this organization," admitted Rogers, one of the heroes of the Tigers' triumphs over both the Yankees and the Athletics.
The Tigers had dearly hoped to finally climb above .500 this season. To show people they were improved. To stop the years of snickering.
Instead, they have achieved the impossible: The Tigers are in the World Series.
And the parallels with their last trip, in 1984, are positively surreal:
Anderson came to Detroit in 1979 determined to prove the Cincinnati Reds had been wrong in firing him.
Leyland emerged from his self-imposed six-year retirement this season, determined to remove the sour taste left in his mouth over the way he had departed the game in 1999, beaten and burned-out.
Two weeks after Anderson took over the Tigers, he exploded in the clubhouse.
"You're a bunch of frauds!" Sparky shouted at his shocked players. "You walk through the clubhouse door and pretend you're major leaguers. You go to your lockers and put on a major league uniform, but you're really a bunch of frauds."
Two weeks into the current season, Leyland also blew up over the way his team had sleep-walked through a 10-2 loss to the Cleveland Indians.
"We stunk!" he declared. "Period stunk! I'm talking team, myself, the coaches, everybody. They weren't ready to play. They were ready to get on the plane and go to Oakland. It's been going on here before and it's not going to happen."
The '84 Tigers relied on solid pitching and timely hitting. Ditto this 2006 team.
In '84, the Tigers had "Senor Smoke," Aurelio Lopez, and left-handed screwball specialist Willie Hernandez, who for one summer was virtually untouchable.
Today's Tigers have Joel "Zoom" Zumaya, Fernando Rodney and the "Roller Coaster," Todd Jones.
Both teams were bolstered by shrewd offseason trades and signings - Hernandez and Dave Bergman in '84, Jones and Kenny Rogers in '06.
Both teams benefited from veteran leadership in the locker room - Darrell Evans in '84, Rogers, Jones and Pudge Rodriguez this year.
Both managers made crazy moves that somehow always seemed to pan out.
Anderson, the master manipulator, astounded his own coaches with some of his starting lineups, cleverly deploying Rusty Kuntz and Marty Castillo in an effort to keep the entire team focused and fresh.
Leyland has done the same lately, by necessity, with Alexis Gomez, Omar Infante and Ramon Santiago.
The 1984 Tigers won the World Series.
The 2006 Tigers intend to do the same. |
