Lakeland - that Florida town where the Tigers have spring trained since World War II. Lakeland - where ballplayers like Tim Corcoran looked like All-Stars, only to have their clocks strike midnight as soon as the team plane crosses north of the Mason-Dixon Line. Lakeland - where reports are filed by the ink-stained wretches, eagerly read by folks up north, their hearts thawing quicker with every sidebar of the year's phenom or how venerable veteran is having a typically rough spring, and just how is the pitching rotation shaping up, anyhow?
There's something about training camps and Detroit teams. Lions summer camp has been full of stories. There was a heart attack there, too - head coach Don McCafferty suffering a fatal one in 1974. If you sneak into Cranbrook at night and be very quiet, you can hear the ghosts of Bobby Layne and Alex Karras and Johnnie Gordy. Always the highjinks were afoot.
I've often said that the four greatest words you can hear in the dead of winter are "pitchers and catchers report." But it's not really spring training until the whole squad makes it to Florida. Then it can become a hoot - if the right manager is at the helm.
The men who have worn the Old English D and commandeered the Tigers are a colorful lot. And nothing has brought out that color more than Florida's sun - for better or for worse.
Spring training in 1966 meant the harbinger of one of the worst seasons in Tigers history - and not because of anything that happened on the field. Manager Charlie Dressen was throwing one of his famous chili parties for his team. The manager would make a vat of chili and help the players enjoy it - a real bonding kind of thing. Only in '66, Chuck Dressen felt a twinge in his chest after the party and it turned out he had a heart attack. Eventually that summer, Dressen would take ill with cancer, too. His replacement, coach Bob Swift, also fell ill. And thus the Tigers became the first - and only - big league team to lose two managers in one season to illness. Sadly, both Dressen and Swift died within weeks of each other. Not a good year, 1966.
When Billy Martin managed the Tigers, he was a tormented soul. Big surprise, I know, but Billy couldn't abide the notion that the frontrunning Baltimore Orioles - in his eyes - seemed to have all the good, young talent, while the Tigers struggled to produce anyone of note from the farm. In 1973's camp, Billy walked out on the Tigers - frustrated with the young players thing and the supposed meddling of GM Jim Campbell. He was back in a day or so, but that was another harbinger. By August of that year, Martin had managed to pull enough nonsense that Campbell had no choice but to fire him. But those seeds were sowed beneath the palm trees in Lakeland, Florida.
Ralph Houk gathered his writers in spring, 1978 and announced that the Tigers would live or die with a couple of kids on either side of second base - Alan Trammell and "Sweet Lou" Whitaker. They came up together for one of those September cups of coffee in 1977, and it didn't take a man with Houk's baseball intellect - which was extensive - to see that something special was brewing inside those cups. 1978 was Houk's fifth and final year as Tigers manager, and he has said that watching Trammell and Whitaker blossom was one of his most gratifying experiences in baseball. But not possible if Ralph Houk hadn't made the leap of faith and granted his two rookies the middle infield in spring training that year.
Houk: He unleashed baseball's
greatest double-play combination
The following year - 1979 - we all tried to figure out who the new Tigers manager was. Oh, we knew his name - Les Moss - and we knew that he had managed in the Tigers farm system. But that was about it. It was determined by GM Campbell that Moss, with his recent history of working with many of the team's younger players, would be a natural follow-up to Ralph Houk's transitional period, which bridged the aging has-beens of 1974 with the team full of potential in spring, 1979. But nobody knew who Les Moss was. He was the accidental manager, perhaps the least-ballyhooed man to skipper the Tigers in franchise history. He looked like your grandfather.
Even by the time Les Moss got the Ziggy - that purely Detroit word for "fired" - in June, 1979 and had been replaced by someone named George "Sparky" Anderson, we still didn't know who he was. In the end, Moss' safe, vanilla personality was his undoing. That, and the fact that he wasn't Anderson. Campbell fired Moss - right after a pretty successful West Coast trip - in order to hire Sparky, a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. So Les Moss left town, and became the answer to a trivia question. And nearly 27 years later, we're still asking, "WHO?"
In 1980, under Lakeland's warm, humid skies, Sparky Anderson made a prediction. It was his first spring as Tigers manager and he thought it would make great copy if he came up with a prediction for his team. Sparky was no dummy; he knew such an utterance would make its way up north, to the Detroit newspapers.
"I don't see why we can't win 90 games," Sparky declared, a hint of blarney on his breath.
The 1980 Tigers rode in with 84 wins and finished fifth in their division. And Sparky told us he was through prognosticating. But he was not, as it turned out, finished serving up baloney to the beat writers in Florida.
"Chris Pittaro is my second baseman," Anderson told them in spring training, 1985. Pittaro was a 23 year-old switch-hitter who had some tools, but he was no Lou Whitaker. Few were, at the time. Yet Sparky said it: Pittaro would move Whitaker to third base. In fact, he practically told everyone to get their stone tablets and chisels out; this was a done deal, in the manager's eyes.
Chris Pittaro would come to bat 62 times as a Tiger, all in 1985. He would manage 15 hits, for a .242 average.
Sparky: He never met an exaggeration he
didn't like
But this was Sparky Anderson - the man who said Kirk Gibson was the "next Mickey Mantle." The one who decided Lance Parrish, a potential All-Star catcher, would look nice as a first baseman, in that fateful 1980 spring. The one who let actor Tom Selleck bat in an actual Grapefruit League game.
Never again would we see such misguided hubris.
Four men have given it a shot in spring training as Tigers manager after Sparky resigned in 1995: Buddy Bell, Larry Parrish, Phil Garner, and Alan Trammell. None of them inspired any memorable moments in Florida. Now we have Jimmy Leyland, who speaks of a sense of urgency and organization and getting the players to "buy into" his message. Will any of it add up to spring training stories worth telling years down the road?
Stay tuned.
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