  Frank_c Member Username: Frank_c Post Number: 830 Registered: 10-2003 |
This article can be found on the web at http://www.thenation.com/doc/2 0061106/southpaw ------------------------------ ------------------------------ -------------------- Southpaw by Dave Zirin Baseball in the Ashes [posted online on October 23, 2006] As the Detroit Tigers and St. Louis Cardinals find themselves tied 1-1 in the 2006 World Series, it's worth remembering the last time these two teams battled in the Fall Classic. It was 1968, and the Tigers won in seven games, coming back from a 3-1 deficit behind series MVP Mickey Lolich. But in 1968, there was more going on in the Motor City than baseball. Detroit was simmering in a state of low-frequency insurrection. The summer of '67 saw riots that resulted in forty-three deaths, almost 1,200 injuries and 7,000 arrests. People were putting record players on their windowsills playing "Dancing in the Streets" while combat raged below. As flames licked the Motor City, Tigers star Willie Horton--who was raised in Detroit--rode down to the riot zone and, in full baseball uniform, stood on a car pleading for peace. He wasn't the only Tiger in the riot zone in uniform. Eight thousand troops were brought into the city, including a National Guardsman named Mickey Lolich. The 1968 LBJ-sponsored Kerner Report said of Detroit, "A spirit of carefree nihilism was taking hold. To riot and destroy appeared more and more to become ends in themselves. Late Sunday afternoon it appeared to one observer that the young people were 'dancing amidst the flames.'" The city and state prepared to crush any kind of sequel. As Mark Kurlansky wrote in his book 1968: The Year That Rocked the World, "the police already had five armored vehicles but were stockpiling tear gas and gas masks and were requesting anti-sniper rifles, carbines, shotguns, and 150,000 rounds of ammunition. One Detroit suburb had purchased an army half-track-a quasi tank." As the year progressed, the mayhem seemed prophetic. In April the assassination of Martin Luther King Jr. sparked uprisings around the country. In May the Dodge Revolutionary Union Movement (DRUM), a militant organization of African-American autoworkers, was formed. DRUM led wildcat strikes against racism and factory conditions. As writers Dan Georgakas and Marvin Surkin observed in Detroit: I Do Mind Dying, "No less an authority than the Wall Street Journal took [DRUM] very seriously from the day of the first wildcat, for the Wall Street Journal understood...that the Black revolution of the sixties had finally arrived at one of the most vulnerable links of the American economic system--the point of mass production, the assembly line." The Tigers team--led by Al Kaline, thirty-game winner Denny McLain and prominent African-American players like Horton and Gates Brown--was seen as a force of calm in the Motor City. An entire HBO documentary called A City on Fire was made based on this thesis. Many at the time believed that the success and joy brought by this integrated team would stop the exodus known as "white flight" and revitalize the city. But professional sports doesn't always herald revival. Often it mocks it. Detroit today is not a story of low-level insurrection but immiseration. Unemployment in 2006 was 13.8 percent (three times the national average), and more than one-third of the city's residents live below the poverty line. As the Associated Press recently reported, "Much of the rest of Detroit...is a landscape dotted with burned-out buildings, where liquor stores abound but supermarkets are hard to come by, and where drugs, violence and unemployment are everyday realities." For the Tigers, the main difference between 1968 and today is where they play. In 1968, it was the historic Tiger Stadium. Today it is an amusement center known as Comerica Park. By all accounts, it is a very nice amusement park, complete with Ferris wheels, merry-go-rounds and beer halls. It also is a place decidedly not for the folks left in Detroit. Anita Caref, a teacher in the inner city, was at game one of the World Series, and this was what she wrote me: "I realize that baseball has a preponderance of white fans, and I know that I didn't get a look at all of the 42,000 plus in attendance tonight, but clearly there were hardly any people of color there. What a stark contrast to the city itself, which is 83% African-American and 12% Latino. Frankly, it was hard to believe we were in Detroit. I sat there wondering how many of the folks there actually live in the city, and thinking that Detroit would be a very different place if the majority of them lived in Detroit and contributed their taxes to the well-being of the city. "Secondly, I thought the choice of music played was odd. Of all the songs played during and between innings, only one was a Motown song. Most of the songs were by white rock-and-rollers. I have nothing against rock music, but I thought that given where we were, it would have been fitting to hear the Supremes, Temptations, Aretha Franklin, etc. Finally, during one of the breaks, they showed a video of some of the great Tigers of the past. The most prominent player in the video was Ty Cobb, who was praised by any number of sports journalists and celebrities. Not a word was said about the fact that he was perhaps baseball's most prominent racist. And of course there was the usual militaristic patriotism, including fighter jets flying overhead after Bob Seger sang 'America the Beautiful.'" Not so beautiful, if you live and die in the city of Detroit. After the Tigers recorded the final out last night in game two, the stadium sound system exploded with the soundtrack of the '67 riots, "Dancing in the Streets." The song has been salvaged. The city has not. | ||
Tndetroiter Member Username: Tndetroiter Post Number: 420 Registered: 12-2005 |
Fuck that guy. Is he really trying to say that Detroit is as bad now as it was during the riots? Not so beautiful if you live and die in Detroit? Many people live in Detroit, is it impossible for them to experience beauty if they simply live in Detroit? People have to die sometime as well, if they live in Detroit there's a good possibility that they will die there, many from natural causes. His implied assumption that everybody in Detroit dies from murder or some other tragic circumstance is bullshit. What an ass. | ||
Tndetroiter Member Username: Tndetroiter Post Number: 421 Registered: 12-2005 |
Oh, it'd also be nice if he'd mention that the city was in the (slow) process of being salvaged, but he'd have to take a more in-depth look at the city to ascertian that. Heaven forbid that he actually get off his ass and observe something for himself. | ||
Al_t_publican Member Username: Al_t_publican Post Number: 111 Registered: 06-2004 |
I was in the Real World Series in '68, Yanks vs. Reds. Instead of rain outs, we had rain ons. Any thing hit in to the minefield was a dead ball. My pre-game quip was, "Don't play me, trade me." If it wasn't for the Real World Series throwing off my game, I coulda been coaching first for the Tigers today. | ||
Pam Member Username: Pam Post Number: 582 Registered: 11-2005 |
Did anybody write in to respond to that article? | ||
Lowell Board Administrator Username: Lowell Post Number: 3157 Registered: 10-2003 |
Yawn. Another uninformed hack job that relies on guess work by a third party letter and, like the previously discussed Financial Times article, shows little investigative effort like actually visiting Detroit. Regarding the racial mix of the crowd, I would be willing to bet it was no different than 1968. The determining factor has far more to do with the economic class divide. Coming from the ûber-liberal Nation Magazine, one would have thought that would be his angle – the underlying link between class and racism that leaves out the poor of all colors. To cite demographic statistics about the City of Detroit, as if the team was targeted only for the CofD, is painfully simplistic. It takes no account that the CofD in 2006 is less that 20% of Detroit as opposed to more than half in 68. I would also bet that if the makeup of the crowd at a Pistons game at the Palace were assessed, he would likewise find the crowd makeup unrepresentative of Auburn Hills or the makeup of shoppers at Fairlane unrepresentative of Dearborn. So what? A missed story is that Mickey Lolich was a member of the National Guard and is telling of the humbler wages paid to players in that pre-free agent era. Can anyone imagine someone like him, who today would probably be paid $8-12 million a year, risking his career by being a weekend warrior in the NG or holding any other job? The writer misses the real story. In '68 the city of Detroit was sinking and it wasn't realized. Now it is rising and that isn't realized either. LOL at Al_t in ’68 Nam. You never told us in which round you were drafted and by what team. I never knew the Reds beat the Yanks, although it took seven games. | ||
Frank_c Member Username: Frank_c Post Number: 832 Registered: 10-2003 |
Lowell you state that the racial mix of the game was probably nodifferent than 1968 and that it is more to do with economic class than racial reasons...........you should think a little harder on that one. I think the point of te article is that Detroit is after all of its past, is still the most racialy segregated place in the nation........ | ||
Lowell Board Administrator Username: Lowell Post Number: 3158 Registered: 10-2003 |
That's true Frank and I'd add that we are probably the most economically divided in the nation as a result. The City of Detroit in '68 was just as ghettoized, if not more, than Metro Detroit is today. The point I was making is that the difference in directions of the CofD compared to then is opposite, rising as opposed to collapsing, and is totally missed. This writer and others fail to recognize that and instead paint a picture of continuing decline and "immiseration". IMO, taking an anecdotal story from '67 and annointing "Dancing in the Streets" as the soundtrack of the riots is just spouting old myths to make uninformed points. Together with his using a guesswork letter as a source of his 'research' we get more of the same. | ||
Frank_c Member Username: Frank_c Post Number: 833 Registered: 10-2003 |
Yeah, Detroit is rising from the ashes of the past, hoping it is all inclusive this time around. I think people have to make a bigger effort at this. | ||
Rustic Member Username: Rustic Post Number: 2853 Registered: 10-2003 |
Lowell, I'd figure Lolich was in the NG to avoid getting drafted. Maybe I'm wrong tho ... | ||
Lowell Board Administrator Username: Lowell Post Number: 3166 Registered: 10-2003 |
Good point Rustic. The draft was universal then and NG protected him even though he was 27, beyond the 26 cutoff, by the 1967. It got me looking up to see if he had a marriage out, which I couldn't figure out, but found these stats about his best year '71. "He went 25-14 with a 2.92 ERA and 308 K's in more than 376 innings. He completed 29 of his 45 starts and hurled four shutouts." In this era of zillionaire pitchers and pitch counts, it is incomprehensible to think they would pitch anyone much more that 200 innings or that a pitcher would start 45 games and finish 29! BTW, he still holds the record for the most K's by a leftie in the AL, only 10 ahead of Frank Tanana. | ||
Rustic Member Username: Rustic Post Number: 2859 Registered: 10-2003 |
Yeah Lowell, Lolich was one hell of a pitcher. Lolich was inarguably a top lefty of his era, arguably the best in the AL at the time. (Of course playing at the same time as Seaver, his achievements are overshadowed by an alltime great.) | ||
Nickstone Member Username: Nickstone Post Number: 8 Registered: 02-2006 |
lets just hope !! some of this carries over... we don't have a lions team to cheer for.. | ||
Xd_brklyn Member Username: Xd_brklyn Post Number: 203 Registered: 10-2003 |
After 1968 World Champions returned home.... "Denny McLain, the 31-game-winning organist, put on his white mink coat worth $1,500 and walked out to his opening in the Riveria Hotel in Las Vegas." Lolich had a stint in Las Vegas too with a Detroit combo and also appeared on the Joey Bishop Show. And then..."Mickey Lolich was called to duty with the Air National Guard. But for winning three games in the World Series, Lolich was given one year's grace from KP." ...above from "Year of the Tiger" by Jerry Green Though only seven, definitely remember Bob Gibson and Denny McClain walking out before the television cameras on a major celebrity program like the Ed Sullivan show. Was awestruck a Detroit Tiger pitcher could be prime time material on national TV. Now if they would release a recording of Lolich on the Joey Bishop show--that would be cool. |
