So word comes down now that Mickey Lolich has died, and again I think of my father. This is the grand American construct, of course, fathers and sons and baseball. But with us it was different.
Part of this is because of circumstance: My dad was 40 years old and in the hospital recovering from back surgery the day Lolich took the hill on two days rest to face Bob Gibson in Game 7 of the World Series.
The other part is Dad's son was quite possibly the worst baseball player the good Lord ever saw fit to place on this earth.
They say hitting a round ball square is the hardest skill to master in sports, but for me it was quantum physics -- and I was lousy at math, too. My dad would stand in the backyard and lob the ball to me, and I would swing and miss. And swing and miss. And swing and miss.
"Don't try to kill it," Dad would say. "Swing level."
Now, "Don't try to kill it" might have been fatherly advice, or it might have been Dad's idea of a joke. I was, after all, a speck of a kid whose Coke-bottle glasses outweighed him. I'd have been no better than even money in Vegas against a fruit fly, let alone a baseball.
I was, however, obsessed with sports, possibly because of the aforementioned. And in 1968, being servants to geography, Dad and I were rooting for the Detroit Tigers against the mighty St. Louis Cardinals, the defending World Series champs.
Well, it went about as expected. The Tigers got down three-games-to-one, and one day a note arrived for me from my dad in the hospital. Faithless memory blurs the details, but what I remember clearly is the last line, written by a father to his sports-nut son: "They (the Tigers) are really gonna have to hustle to pull this one out of the fire."
Enter Lolich.
He went the distance in Game 2 and struck out nine, and the Tigers won 8-1 to even the Series at a game apiece. The Cardinals won Games 3 and 4, but Lolich won 5-3 in Game 5, again going the distance, to begin the Tigers' comeback.
Denny McLain, who won 31 games that year for Detroit but lost his first two duels against Bob Gibson, came back on two days rest to win Game 6 in St. Louis; the Tigers thoughtfully provided him with 13 runs in a 13-1 rout. That set up Game 7, again in St. Louis, again with the fearsome Gibson on the mound for the home nine.
And for Detroit, here came Lolich again, on two days rest.
He'd already pitched 18 innings in the Series and faced 71 batters. But in Game 7 he surrendered just five hits and one run and struck out four, and Jim Northrup hit the ball over Curt Flood's head, and St. Louis and the great Gibson were vanquished, 4-1. It was the Tigers' first World Series title in 23 years.
Lolich, of course, was the Series MVP. In seven days, he'd pitched 27 innings, faced104 batters and struck out 21 of them. His three complete-game World Series victories remains unmatched to this day; when he retired, no left-handed pitcher in history had more striketouts.
If life were at all fair, he'd have a plaque in Cooperstown, having punched out more batters in his career than Bob Feller, Warren Spahn, Don Drysdale, Christy Mathewson, Cy Young and Whitey Ford. But life isn't fair, and Lolich died, at 85, on the outside looking in.
But on the day he passed, a son read the news and remembered his father. That's something, right?
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