Review and summary:
Summer of ‘68

It’s an American election year. The president refuses to run for a second term. An assassination attempt is made on a presidential candidate. Cities have been rocked by protests against racism and a controversial war. America’s most popular professional sport, rather than being a respite from the tragedy and strife of the times, becomes a lightning rod for the issues of the day.

2024 has been quite a year, right?

Except I’m talking about 1968. 

History doens’t repeat, it rhymes, and Tim Wendel takes us through the strife of 1968 through the lens of baseball and the Detroit TIgers’ championship in "Summer of '68: The Season That Changed Baseball—and America—Forever."

In a year marred by the murders of Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., when violent protests against racism and the Vietnam War spilled across American cities, baseball sat atop the sports world and 

Read Summer of ‘68 if:

• You are a student of American history. While there are few new ideas or insights about the tumultuous year that was 1968, there is a retelling of key events including the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy. Wendel also gets into the events surrounding the Detroit riots of 1967 and the chaos in Chicago surrounding the 1968 Democratic convention. Finally, he carries a thorughline from the social upheaval and change of the time and how baseball was affected by and reflected the strain of change, even as the NFL positioned itself to usurp MLB as America’s most popular sports league.  
  

• You enjoy baseball history. Pitchers dominated the game in 1968 so thoroughly that changes were soon made to try and even out the pitching advantages -- much like recent times in baseball, except there was no technological or statistical revolution fueling the pitching mastery. 
  

• You are a fan of the Detroit Tigers. Wendel recounts the Tigers’ magical season and some of the disparate personalities on the team: Denny McClain, Mickey Lolich, Willie Horton and others had unique approaches to life and the game, yet came together to claim the first Tiger title since 1945. 

Summing it up 

Summer of ‘68 was an enjoyable summer read and the parallels to 2024 are obvious and numerous (though the Tigers won’t be winning the World Series in 2024.) I was left looking for more new insights and fresh analysis into the events Wendel wrote about, both on the social and sporting side. The book is more a retelling than a fresh perspective. For example, on the sports side — why were pitchers so dominant that summer? They didn’t enjoy the applied techniques provided by today’s science, advanced statistics, and technology. So what was it? We are left wondering. What lessons can we take from the murder of prominent leaders and the social unrest of that time? Wendel does not go there, either.

What Wendel does do well is retell the story of the tragedies and the Tigers, and how sport, politics, and social strife intertwined, in the Summer of ‘68.

Notes and Kindle Highlights from Summer of ‘68

“The basis of intimidation, as I practiced it, was mystery,” Gibson later explained. “I wanted the hitter to know nothing about me—about my wife, my children, my religion, my politics, my hobbies, my tastes, my feelings, nothing. I figured the more they knew about me, the more they knew what I might do in a certain situation. That was why, in large part, I never talked to players on other teams. That was why I never apologized for hitting anybody. That was why I seemed like such an asshole to so many people.”

Mickey Lolich found himself in a similar situation. He was a member of the 191st Michigan National Guard unit, which ran a motor pool based out of Alpena,

After being in uniform with the Tigers one afternoon, he was in combat fatigues that evening, rifle in hand, helping to guard a supply depot and then a radio tower that also served as a police relay station in downtown Detroit.

The Detroit Free Press commandeered an armored vehicle for its reporters to cover the event, while the National Guard established a machine gun nest atop a JCPenney store in suburban Grosse Pointe

What does a town that’s been to hell and back know about the finer things in life? Well, I’ll tell you. More than most. You see, it’s the hottest fires that make the hardest steel. Now we’re from America. But this isn’t New York City. Or the Windy City. Or Sin City. And we’re certainly no one’s Emerald City. . . . This is the Motor City. —”IMPORTED FROM DETROIT,” CHRYSLER COMMERCIAL

Tensions had finally come to a head in the early morning hours of July 23, 1967, when the police raided an illegal bar, also called a “blind pig,” where a celebration for two black servicemen returning home from Vietnam was underway.

Mickey Lolich had reported to active duty with his Guard unit. Meanwhile, Horton, who had lived near the site of the police raid, hurried to that section of town still in his game jersey. There he climbed atop a car and spoke to the crowd, trying to calm them down. But it was no good.

It took five days to restore order in Detroit, and when it was over, forty-three were dead, 7,200 had been arrested, and more than 2,000 buildings had burned,

Brown was one of the few batters who excelled. He would have an American League record eighteen pinch-hits, and six of his first ten pinch-hits would be home runs.

Ever the creative thinker, Rickey traded catcher Cliff Dapper to Atlanta for Harwell, perhaps the only broadcaster-player trade in baseball history.

Census figures indicate that Detroit’s population plunged 25 percent to approximately 713,000 people in the years 2001 to 2010.

In a twist that makes you believe in larger things, they realized that Little League tryouts were about to start. Both of them were invited to swing a bat, field a few grounders. In the end, both boys made the Appalachia Wolves, sponsored by a local furniture store. “Something took ahold of me that day,” Horton said. “God, providence, whatever . . . But something got me walking down that railroad track that day and being able to play ball for the Wolves.”

Mickey Lolich said. “I had some friends in the police. They were in the city and had a good feel for what was going on. They told us to please keep winning—that things were smoldering, like how it is before it starts burning all over again. But if we could keep winning then things may not explode like they had the year before. “In ’67, you’d see four or five guys standing on a street corner, and they’d be looking for trouble. In ’68, you’d see the same kind of guys standing on a street corner, but they’d have a transistor radio and they’d be gathered around, listening to Ernie calling the Tiger game, waiting to see if we could come back and win another ballgame.”

At his insistence, the entire minor-league ballclub in Elmira, New York, had its IQ tested one season. He did it in an effort to better understand one player, fastball phenom Steve Dalkowski. Considered one of the fastest but also most unpredictable pitchers of all time, Dalkowski later became the basis for the character Nuke LaLoosh in the movie Bull Durham.

In Chicago, where the Democrats gathered, talk about Lombardi continued. Miles McMillin of the Capital Times in Madison, Wisconsin, just down the road from Green Bay, maintained that Lombardi’s name came up in discussions of vice presidential short lists.

sports writers like to kid that they work in the “toy department”—fortunate to be caught up in less serious matters. But in ’68, time after time, those lines became blurred.

Action is character. —F. SCOTT FITZGERALD

Looking back over at McLain and all of the attention that enveloped him, Lolich added, “He’s sort of ruined things for everybody around here.”

Sixteen hours after Perry’s feat, Washburn had pitched the second consecutive no-hitter in the same ballpark. It marked the first time in major-league history that back-to-back no-hitters were pitched by the same two teams on consecutive days in the same place. “In Gaylord’s no-hitter, only two balls were hit out of the infield,” Washburn said. “The same thing happened with me.” “They talk about ’68 being the ‘Year of the Pitcher,’” Perry later said. “Those forty-eight hours at Candlestick kind of summed that up, didn’t they?”

America’s Game: The Epic Story of How Pro Football Captured a Nation. “The AFL was hardly an idealistic utopia of racial equality, but the topic was more contemplated, more easily confronted, and better understood than in the NFL.”

“Baseball is a game that was designed to be played on a Sunday afternoon at Wrigley Field in the 1920s,” Roone Arledge told Sports Illustrated, “not on a 21-inch screen. It is a game of sporadic action interspersed with long lulls. Last year we tried re-running plays in slow motion. It was redundant.”

“We have a little saying, it’s called ‘bowing the neck.’ It means getting a little tougher when the situation is tougher. Some pitchers can do it and some can’t. Luis could.”

Days before the World Series opened in St. Louis, Smith announced that Stanley would be in the infield, with Northrup moving from right to center field, opening up a place for Kaline in right. It was anything but a popular tactic. Ernie Harwell, the Tigers’ broadcaster, openly complained that “it was a bad move,”

“As a baseball man, Smith was really ahead of his time,” said Dave Raglin, creator of the society’s Facebook page. “Certainly he was low-key, sometimes overlooked, but he was an innovator throughout his career, and he was exactly what the Tigers needed in ’68.”

McLain started forty-one games and went the distance an impressive twenty-eight times. His relentless drive for celebrity, to constantly be in the spotlight, had helped fuel that fire, along with Pepsi, cortisone, Xylocaine, Contac, and amphetamines. But now it was all visibly taking a toll.

one thing the International Olympic Committee did manage to accomplish was banning the use of steroids on the eve of the Summer Games. While baseball had a similar opportunity to address the use of performance-enhancing drugs in 1968, Eckert opted to pass.

Tigers play-by-play announcer Ernie Harwell invited Jose Feliciano, whose cover of The Doors’ “Light My Fire” was high on the pop charts, to sing the national anthem before Game Five.

“It was a long version of the song and at that point in time, singers weren’t supposed to give their own interpretations,” McLain recalled. “This was the height of the Vietnam War and the protest movement. The National Guard was all over the field in a patriotic display, and here’s this blind Latino supposedly ‘butchering’ the anthem. It was viewed as sacrilegious rather than an impressive artistic interpretation.”

but Tigers’ catcher Bill Freehan somehow threw out Brock trying to steal second base. After that things began to swing in the Tigers’ favor.

“He was telling to me to get that ball in play, just put it out there and see what happens. We had to do better against Gibson than just going up there and striking out all the time.”

most of the Tigers agreed with their manager that Horton throwing out Brock at the plate in Game Five was the point when the Series turned, Cash felt the most decisive moment really occurred before a pitch was ever thrown. He maintained Smith moving Mickey Stanley to shortstop and putting Al Kaline in the everyday lineup was the key to everything. “Without (Stanley) playing shortstop,” Cash said, “Al wouldn’t have been in the Series.”

Kaline hit .379, with two home runs and eight runs batted in, and stood out defensively.

After seven years apart, Senora Tiant had finally been allowed by the Castro government to leave Cuba and visit her only child.

Tiant said, “Everyone remembers different things from that year, ’68. In the end, that’s the time I’ll never forget.”

Series games continued to outpace other sporting events, including Super Bowl II and the NFL championship, holding an overall seven-to-three edge in the TV’s top ten. “From the rankings, it is easy to conclude that the World Series is still America’s No. 1 sports event,” baseball commissioner William Eckert said in a statement.

Maybe the ‘Heidi Game’ underscores that symbolic moment when football became, in the eyes of America, an inalienable right.”

If anything, he becomes just as beloved for running a donut shop in the Detroit suburbs. He eventually sells the business and retires to his homes in Oregon and Michigan.

McLain’s life dissolves into equal parts soap opera and Greek tragedy. After becoming a popular radio talk-show host in Detroit, he’s charged with racketeering, extortion and cocaine trafficking in 1984. Sentenced to twenty-three years in prison, he serves less than three after an appeals court throws out his conviction. The government decides not to retry the case. A decade later, he’s back in prison after he and a business partner purchase the Peet Packing Company in Chesaning, Michigan, and then rob almost $2.5 million from the employee pension fund. They are convicted of embezzlement, money laundering, and mail fraud. McLain does time at a federal prison camp for nonviolent offenders and later performs work release at a 7-Eleven store in Sterling Heights, Michigan.