Tigers Bring Back Another Icon From The Glory Days, Willie Hernandez

By Alan Halberstadt

I am hopelessly nostalgic when it comes to baseball and the Detroit Tigers.

That is why I have loved covering Tiger home openers the last three years. On each occasion they have trotted out living legends to throw out the first ceremonial pitch.

Two years ago it was now 61-year-old Kirk Gibson who was asked to do the honours, and it was almost coincidental to him discovering that he had Parkinson’s disease. Gibson soldiers on. He was at Comerica Park again yesterday, as one of the telecast commentators, in a 5-4 win over Kansas City

Last year it was then 80-year old Mickey Lolich, who won three games in the 1964 World Series to topple the St. Louis Cardinals. In the maiden game of 2019 he was escorted to the mound in a wheel chair pushed by 1964 batterymate Jim Price.

Lolich leaned on a cane to get out of the chair to throw the first pitch. It turned out he was rehabbing from close together surgeries on his back and knee.

This year it was Willie (Call Me Guillermo) Hernandez, in his 65th year, who had a heath story to tell after bouncing the first pitch up to Tiger manager Ron Gardenhire.

Hernandez has fought many health issues in his later years, but was delighted when the Tigers called his Florida home with the first pitch invite. He believes he is living a charmed life.

In 2007, he swears he came back from the dead in a Boston hospital while undergoing surgery to attach a pacemaker in his heart.

The whole interview was sprinkled with references to the Almighty. He credited God with giving him the heart of Jesus to pull him through. “God’s got my heart,” he emoted. “No-one is going to touch my heart.”

It was no surprise that Hernandez identified 1984 as the zenith of his baseball career. The Tigers started that championship season with a 35-5 record, thanks in no small measure to a bullpen populated by Hernandez and Aurelio (Senor Smoke) Lopez.

“He would save one game and I would save the next game,” Hernandez said, recalling how Lopez then went on the injured list after hurting himself throwing one of his split finger pitches.

“After that I became the closer,” he reminisced, noting that the late manager Sparky Anderson bragged terribly that season that he was the best manager in the world.

“I asked Sparky why he was talking like that, and he said it was because ‘I have you in the bullpen.’” chortled Willie.

Hernandez became one of a select few pitchers to win the Cy Young Award for best pitcher, the Most Valuable Player and a World Series ring in the same year. The others were Sandy Koufax and Tiger Denny McLain.

Gibson was a teammate in 1984 and blasted a critical World Series home run off San Diego’s Goose Gossage in the fifth and final game at old Tiger Stadium. Willie collected a two-inning save in that game, and was on the mound when left fielder Larry Herndon hauled in a fly ball off the bat of hall of famer Tony Gyyn for the final out.

That set off a wild celebration on the pitcher’s mound, pounding Hernandez, who had also been on the hill when the Tigers clinched the division pennant plus and American League championship series.

I asked Hernandez what he thought about today’s baseball players getting contracts like the $330 million,13-year deal Bryce Harper recently signed with the Philadelphia Phillies. “God bless them . .. God bless them,” he retorted, before informing me that he received $19,000 a year when he started his career with the Chicago Cubs in 1977.

Willie, now in his 65th year, had a poor upbringing in Aguada , Puerto Rico, and was thankful for that amount of money. He reportedly went on to own a cattle ranch in his native country.

From Chicago Hernandez was was traded to the Phillies, and then to the Tigers in March of 1984. Dave Bergman was dealt with him for Glenn Wilson and John Wockenfuss.

The lefthander with a baffling screwball blossomed in Detroit in 1984, saving 33 games in 34 opportunities, posting a 9-3 win-loss record and a 1.92 earned run average.

Hernandez pitched for the Tigers until 1989, although he was never able to parallel his 1984 heroics. Frustrated fans used to poke fun of him after it was reported that he wanted to be called Guillermo.

I remember my friends and I used to refer to him as Willie (Call Me Guillermo) Hernandez when he had a bad outing. So 30 years later I asked him Thursday at Comerico Park what name he prefers now.

“That was overrated,” he snapped. “I don’t care. You can call me the son of God. It’s better.”

The post Tigers Bring Back Another Icon, Willie Hernandez appeared first on In Play! magazine.

Photo: Tiger great Mickey Lolich throwing out the first pitch at the Detroit Tigers home opener Friday, March 30, 2018. Photo: John Barnes – In Play! magazine

Tiger Idol Mickey Lolich Has Stood The Test Of Time

By Alan Halberststadt

I was genuinely startled when I saw Detroit Tiger royalty Mickey Lolich being wheeled out to the mound to throw the ceremonial first pitch on the opening day of the 2018 Major League baseball season at Comerica Park on Friday.

Mickey got to his feet briefly with the help of a cane and his 76-year-old former catcher Jim Price to toss the ball. But he soon retreated to his wheel chair. Episodes like that are unsettling when you get older and question your own mortality.

Lolich went down in baseball lore by registering three complete game victories and securing the Most Valuable Player award in the 1968 World Series. The crowning glory was a clinching 4-1 seventh game triumph over St. Louis Cardinals hall of famer Bob Gibson in St. Louis.

I was in attendance at the fifth game of that series at Tiger Stadium on October 6, 1968, won 5-3 by Lolich and the Tigers courtesy of a go ahead seventh inning single by another Tiger legend Al Kaline.

The Tigers are making a big deal of the 1968 series, since it happened 50 years ago. I was 21 and Mickey was 28, an absolute iron man with a rubber arm in an era when pitchers were not paid anywhere near the sinful amounts bestowed on the coddled arms of today.

Modern pitchers have four days rest between starts and are almost canonized for lasting seven innings. Nine inning complete games are a rarity as managers and bullpen coaches stew when one of the pampered ones goes over 100 pitches.

“I was just getting loose at that point,” Lolich told a small media gathering, noting that he threw 195 complete games in his 15 year career, most of it with Detroit.

Lolich, a left-hander who hurled the final World Series game on only two days rest, said counting pitches was not even in vogue when he played. He estimated he would throw 135-145 pitches over nine innings.

During the regular season he would get the ball every fourth day. “I used to tell my catchers, Bill Freehan and Jim Price, that I would never tell the manager I was tired and wanted to come out of the game. I told him to check with the catcher, and Bill would often say I was better when I was tired because my pitches would sink.”

Asked why the culture has changed in the modern day, Lolich was succinct. “Money,” he said, explaining that the huge, guaranteed, six or seven-year contracts of today prompts teams to over-protect star pitchers against ligament damage, or career-shortening wear and tear.

Ironically, for all his mound brilliance in the series half a century ago, people tend to forget the home run Lolich hit in the second game, a 8-1 Detroit victory. “I credit (Cardinal pitcher) Nelson Briles for hitting my bat,” he quipped.

People also tend to forget that designated hitters for pitchers had not yet been introduced in the American League. That happened in 1973, the year Lolich retired.

Some historians swear that the Tigers winning the World Series in ’68 actually saved the City of Detroit, coming as I did on the heels of “Black Day In July” race riots the previous summer. Lolich, who still lives just north of Detroit, doesn’t dispute it.

“The players used to cut through a room staffed by police to get to their dressing rooms. The policemen would point to three guys lurking on the street corner looking for trouble in 1967. In 1968, when the Tigers clinched the American League pennant on September 16^th, the same cops would point to the three loiterers who were not looking to loot anymore but were listening to the Tigers on their transistor radios.

By rights, the Tigers should have won the pennant in 1967 if not for a quirk in the weather and schedule, which forced them to play back-to-back doubleheaders against the Los Angeles Angels to finish the season.

“It’s like kissing you sister,” Lolich said. “The odds are you are going to split the four games.” And that’s what happened. Had they won three of the four, they would have been in the World Series instead of the Boston Red Sox.

The Cards beat the Red Sox in 1967, and coasted to another National League pennant in 1968.

“When we got to the World Series the people of St. Louis were convinced that the Tigers were no match for their team. I met Bob Gibson at an autograph signing function years later and he told me that as far as St. Louis was concerned, the 1968 World Series never happened.”

Lolich didn’t want to give too many of those kind of tales away. He cut the interview session short and pointed to Bob Gage, a former Tiger beat writer who was sitting at the back of the room.

“If you want to know anything more read my book,” said Mickey. “I’ve got things to do and people to see.”

I approached Gage in the press box after Mickey was gone and he advised me that the name of the book is Joy In Tigertown, The 1968 World Series, Mickey Lolich with Tom Gage. It’s available on June 1, and can be pre-ordered now through Amazon and Barnes and Noble.

Detriot baseball fans will get an opportunity to soak up more nostalgia when the Cardinals and Tigers play three interlocking games in Comerica Park on September 7, 8 and 9.

I am happy to report that Mickey Lolich should be getting around a lot better by then. Gage told me that his co-author is currently disabled because of close-together surgeries on his back and knee, which have stalled his rehab schedule.

Maybe by then someone might have mounted a campaign to get Lolich in the Hall of Fame, similar to what happened to former Tigers Alan Trammell and Jack Morris this year in a new sub-category format. There is a case to be made for Lolich based on his career statistics.

In addition to his post-season heroics, and 195 complete games, compared to 175 for Morris, he made the all-star team three times, was named King Tiger in 1974 and is the team leader in all-time games started (459), all-time shutouts (39) and all-time strikeouts (2,679). He was the Tigers opening day pitcher seven times.

And here’s a topper that provides optimism for the success of his current rehabilitation. Mickey is actually right handed. Note his homer off Briles was from the right side of the plate. He learned to throw left-handed after suffering a broken collarbone and damage to his right arm as a child.

The post Tiger Idol Mickey Lolich Has Stood The Test Of Time appeared first on In Play! magazine.

Kirk Gibson Conjures Up Precious Memories of Tiger Stadium

The idea popped into my head the moment I heard that Kirk Gibson would be throwing out the ceremonial first pitch at the Detroit Tigers 2016 home opener at Comerica Park Friday.

The most famous photograph in Detroit sports history has a hatless Kirk Gibson prancing around the bases, arms above his head in triumph, after drilling a three-run, eighth inning home run off San Diego Padres closer Goose Gossage to seal the 1984 World Series – the last world championship the Tigers have won.

Gossage, like Kirk Gibson, is still around. A few weeks ago the hall of fame reliever made headlines by calling out Jose Bautista for his defiant “bat flip”, executed as he watched his home run carry the fence at the Rogers Centre to give the Toronto Blue Jays a ticket to the American League Championship series last October.

So it seemed natural for me to ask Gibson’s take on Gossage labelling Bautista “an f-ing disgrace to the game” for allegedly taunting the opposition, in this case the Texas Rangers, with the bat flip seen around the baseball world.

I put it to Kirk prior to the Tigers’ 4-0 shutout of the New York Yankees, the Detroiters’ third win in a row. He acknowledged he had heard about the Gossage/Bautista controversy, but he wanted none of it.

“I don’t get involved in that kind of negative stuff,” he said politely, noting that his focus is on the positives in life and baseball. Gibson, at 58, and saddled with Parkinson’s disease, is a shadow of the great physical specimen who bested Gossage 32 years ago. But he carries bravely on.

I quickly dropped the Gossage-Bautista issue and asked him about the questionable Tiger base-running. Detroit manager Brad Ausmus asked him to do some coaching in spring training, and Gibson worked with young players such as Anthony Gose and Jose Iglesias, two guys with speed who are underachieving as major league base stealers and, like veteran Ian Kinsler, sometimes prone to attention lapses on the basepaths.

“It’s a process,” Gibby said. “You don’t learn the game overnight.” He went on to spin a tale of his own learning process after he joined the Tigers as a rookie in 1979. Manager Sparky Anderson told him to get a glove and go out to right field.

“I told him I had never played right field in my life, and he told me to get out there (and shag some flies),” Gibson chuckled. Right field was the sun field at old Tiger Stadium with a quirky third-deck overhang.

“I lost the first fly ball in the sun and it bounced off my head,” said Gibson. “The second one bounced off my shoulder.”

The Fledgling quickly decided to speak to “hall of famer Al Kaline, who mastered Tiger Stadium’s right field in the 50s and 60s. “I didn’t know how to use sun glasses, so Mr. Kaline gave me a pair with no glare.”

Suffice to say that Gibson learned how to play a serviceable right field.

It was Gibson, manager of the Arizona Diamondbacks for four years (2010-2014), who provided some sage counsel to Ausmus last year when the Tiger manager was on the bubble as his team collapsed and plummeted to a last place finish in the Central Division.

Brad powered through the negatives in his second year at the helm in Detroit and was able to retain the support of his players, said Gibson. The third-year manager needs to keep in mind that “even great managers like Jim Leland and Joe Torre faced criticism” (in their successful tenures) as big league skippers.

I spoke to Gibson on the field, as did other media, at about 10:30 a.m. Friday, almost three hours before he delivered the ceremonial pitch, significantly to former catcher Ausmus. Gibby was awake that morning at 4:15 a.m., nervous about the prospect of getting the ball up to the plate with his left throwing arm that has been weakened by the deterioration caused by his disease.

He was diagnosed with the debilitating disease shortly after opening day last year. “A guy in the press box looked at me and said: ‘what’s wrong Gibby, you look like a ghost.’”

Gibson took that as a cue to see a doctor the next day and his fate was soon determined. “I try to do my part in fighting the disease,” he said, admitting to feelings of despair when he first learned of his lifetime affliction. “You have to pick yourself up off the ground.”

While baseball is only a game, that is what the 3-0 Tigers are trying to do in 2016. The key, says Gibson, is to learn last year’s lessons and not peak too early. The part-time Fox 2 Sports broadcaster sees the positives in this year’s team. “They have a good owner, good players and good leadership,” he said.

Just after 1 p.m. on a frigid and blustery Friday afternoon, Gibson walked resolutely to the mound and without a windup threw a feeble one hopper to Ausmus, who greeted him in front of home plate, gave him the souvenir ball, and more poignantly, a hug.

Feature photo b Tim Jarrold

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