Mad Dog Goes Yard
by Tom McGohey
The Tigers’ Bill Madlock was an unlikely candidate to become the 12th Major Leaguer to hit four home runs in one game, joining the likes of Hall of Famers Lou Gehrig, Willie Mays, and Mike Schmidt (Gehrig and Schmidt in consecutive at-bats). He was a four-time National League batting champ, but in his 15-year career he hit a modest 163 homers, with a career-high of 19 in 1982. Though he had “some pop,” as announcers like to say about players with middling power, he was not the kind of belter that made opposing teams pitch around him.
But against the Orioles on June 28, 1987, “Mad Dog,” as he was known for a rabid temper that was as much bite as bark, was lofting home runs into the left field seats at Tiger Stadium like he was playing “HORSE” using paper wads and a wastebasket. A power surge all the more shocking considering that when the Dodgers, his fifth team in 14 seasons, released him on May 29, he was batting an embarrassing .180 and had played in only 21 games. It seemed the Mad Dog, 36, had become a toothless, mangy mutt only four months in baseball-years short of euthanasia. But Tigers’ manager Sparky Anderson, remembering Madlock’s smart approach to batting from his days running the Cincinnati Reds, embraced GM Bill Lajoie’s plan to add a veteran right-handed bat to a team that was sputtering along at two games over .500, 5 ½ games behind the Yankees in the American League East Division. And though the core of the 1984 World Series Champs was still in place, the odds of reprising that brilliant season were looking murkier than stale water in the concession hot dog steamers.
Twenty-five years earlier, when I was 10, my father took my brother and me to our first major league baseball game, Tigers vs. White Sox. The Tigers won on an RBI double by Jake Wood, (a once promising infielder who slipped into mediocrity and out of baseball after a half dozen seasons, his career preserved only in the franchise stat books and the memory of a fan prone to nostalgia even at the age of ten.) It was a hot, humid day, and I ate so much peanuts, Cracker Jacks, cotton candy, hotdogs, and soft-serve ice cream that after the game I threw up on the sidewalk of what is now Kaline Drive. (My apologies, Al.)
Now I was returning the favor, treating the old man to what I anticipated at the time could possibly be our final outing at the old ball park at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull. In a few weeks, I was moving to North Carolina to attend graduate school, and my father, widowed the previous year by my mother’s death from cancer, had recently announced his engagement to a lady from Toronto, a recent widow herself, and that they would be starting their new life together by resettling in a place new for both of them.
At the time, Madlock’s signing did not inspire much excitement in me. That old guy? I thought. What’s he got left? But as the stand-in for the quiet, polite Jake Wood in this reprise father-son ritual, Mad Dog and his reputation for fisticuffs — he was known to punch his own teammates, as well as opponents who crossed him — did lend an air of celebrity scandal to his arrival.
Nonetheless, his former All-Star fielding skills diminished by age and portly physique, Madlock still had potential as a part-time DH on a team looking to jump-start a lineup still loaded with talented if slumping hitters, and he rewarded their faith immediately with eight hits, including a homer, in a four-game series with Boston, and with four hits in a game against Milwaukee. Explaining this torrid resurgence, Madlock said at the time, “They seem to throw more breaking balls for strikes over here [in the American League]. And when you make a mistake with a breaking ball, it’s usually up. In the National League, they throw more forkballs and a mistake with a forkball is usually in the dirt. And batting average doesn’t mean as much over here. Here, we’re talking home runs and RBIs. I’ve messed myself up a few times already, swinging for the fences. I’ve been up and down because of it.”
A down streak included an 0-21 slump that got him benched for two games before returning to the lineup against the Orioles June 28, as the DH, batting second. Why Sparky decided to reinsert Madlock for this particular game, who knows? Maybe just a gut move based on experience: .304 career-hitters generally figure things out on their own.
Whatever the reason, the move paid off in the 1st inning, with Madlock hitting a two-run homer to left, which probably surprised Orioles’ starter Eric Bell as much as it revived the Sunday afternoon crowd of 31,606 fans, who didn’t have to wait long to recover from the three-run homer by O’s Fred Lynn, off Jeff Robinson, in the top half of the inning. Unfortunately, Madlock’s quick-strike counter blow didn’t do much for Robinson’s stuff; he gave up three more earned runs in the 4th inning, when he was relieved by Mark Thurmond, who promptly gave up another run, in the 5th, leaving the Tigers in a five-run hole. Madlock, as if deciding it was up to him to keep the Tigers from getting blown out, responded with another homer, a solo shot off Jeff Habyn, again to left, in the bottom of the inning. The Tigers added a run in the 8th on a Chet Lemon single, scoring Kirk Gibson from second base. In the meantime, Eric King, the Tigers’ third pitcher, had shut down the O’s through the 9th, and the Tigers came to bat still trailing by three.
Fanatical numerologists with a spiritual bent might have ascribed the Tigers’ ninth to a miraculous trinity of divine power: a three-run deficit erased by three consecutive homers, the first by pinch-hitter Johnny Grubb, a former All-Star limping through a final season that would end with anemic stat line of 2/13/.202; the second by catcher Matt Nokes, who would finish the season with a career-high 32 homers; and the third, by our snarling hero, Mad Dog, the crowning blow of a hat trick that even the most faithful of sporting prophets or statisticians never would have bet on. (Alas, for stat-heads seeking record confluences of streaks, no matter how arcane, Madlock’s tercet did not come in consecutive at-bats: he flied out to short stop in the 2nd.) So improbable was this power surge for a hitter better-known for stinging singles and frozen-rope doubles that my father and I could only shake our heads and laugh in wonderment at what we had just witnessed.
No matter the outcome, I was gratified that this game, more than likely our final one together at Tiger Stadium, had provided so much drama in such an unexpected fashion. Of course, I wanted the Tigers to win, but to expect more seemed almost greedy. What could possibly top that 9th inning? Certainly Madlock had used up his allotment of swan-song heroics usually reserved for Hall of Famers like Ted Williams. That he had granted my father and me extra innings in a farewell outing 25 years after our first game at Tiger Stadium should have been more than any grateful son could expect. But I was greedy. You always want more — more thrills, more odds-defying feats from aging players summoning powers unimagined even in their prime — even when a part of you recognizes that such unrealistic thinking more often than not leads to bitter disappointment.
At that point, I was just hoping Madlock would get another at-bat. The odds of that happening looked bad in the top of 10th when the Orioles put men on first and third with two outs, Cal Ripken at the plate. The future Hall-of-Famer was having another All-Star season, with 17 homers and 51 RBI by midseason. And worse, after four innings of shut-out relief, the O’s appeared to be catching up to Eric King’s fastball. The unpredictable skills that had produced a 4.02 ERA, lamentable for a part-time starter, depressing for a reliever, were resurfacing. I think everyone in the stands, myself included, expected Ripken to do something dramatic. He struck out.
The Tigers, facing Doug Corbett, went down in order in their half of the 10th. Still, regardless of what Orioles did next inning, Madlock would get to bat in the Tigers’ half. Willie Hernandez, MVP and Cy Young winner from the 1984 championship season, faced three potentially tough outs in Eddie Murray, Fred Lynn, and Ray Knight, and put them away in order, but not before a couple of fly balls by Murray and Lynn made me squirm more than they should have. Even in a proverbial bandbox like Tiger Stadium, they were not close to clearing the fences.
Nokes led off the bottom of 11th with a single. That brought Madlock to the plate. Of course, everyone in the stadium, myself included, was hoping for a fourth homer, and chants of “Maad- daawg, maad-daawg,” like cheers for a rabid pit bull in an illegal dog fight, swelled and circled the stands. I wasn’t a chanter, too shy and reserved for that, especially in front of my father, but as each refrain grew louder, my heart rate pumped faster. Who wouldn’t want him to swing for the fences in that spot? My father, that’s who. He was old-school, as they say, grew up rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers, and valued good old-fashioned, conventional wisdom-percentage baseball strategy. And the conventional wisdom here was obvious: move the runner over. Beneath the cheering, more like a high-pitched ecstatic pleading, and the chanting, and the simultaneous slapping of plastic seats, I could hear my father mutter in a dry, sarcastic tone, as if he were a crusty old manager with decades of experience and dismissive of the fans’ emotional demands, “Move the runner over.”
And of course, that was the smart call. Put the runner into scoring position, and a single brings him home. Walk-off homers were for perennial bombers like Gehrig, Mays, and Schmidt; they were for majestic mastiffs, not for scrappy, rabid — figurative or real, and the verdict in this case was 50/50 — Mad Dogs. After all, what were the odds of Madlock hitting a fourth homer? Sabermetric gurus filling front offices today would scoff at the possibility. Future generations of fans looking up such a stat and finding Madlock’s name would, with good reason, think it was a misprint. Or at best, the name might register with the same blankness that I felt when seeing names of batting champs from the 1880s. Walk-off singles — does the term even exist? — just doesn’t ring like walk-off homer. Moving the runner over required one thing from Madlock: a sacrifice bunt. Could he make the mental downshift from adrenaline-fueled aggression of swinging for the fences to the cool calculations of laying down a good bunt? Remember that Madlock himself, recognizing the difference between small-ball and long-ball approaches to batting in the Senior and Junior loops, had confessed that he had “messed myself up” trying to hit homers when he returned to the American League. Keep in mind also that Sparky Anderson, despite winning two World Series with a Cincinnati lineup that featured some legitimate bashers like Johnny Bench, Tony Perez, and George Foster, had acquired his managerial chops in a small-ball league that disdained adopting the DH, and played percentages so faithfully that he earned the nickname “Captain Hook” for changing pitchers at the first sign of trouble.
Sparky liked to talk. Sparky loved to talk. Talking was like breathing for him, and he never required a respirator to support his entertaining if inflated soliloquies with reporters. With so much verbiage on the record, he was bound to contradict himself now and then. For example, he once said that “Players have two things to do. Play and keep their mouths shut.” But in Cincinnati, he was also known for having two sets of rules for stars and role players. Madlock may have been the star this day, but as part-time DH at the end of his career, he had a clearly defined role: shut up and follow orders.
Would Sparky give Madlock the green light to swing for immortality or make the conventional call for a bunt? You’d have to be a naïve romantic to hope for the former. The pragmatist in me accepted that Madlock would be bunting; the romantic was silently begging for him to hit a homer. Such an improbable ending would elevate what had already been a memorable game to the status of an immortal one. If this did prove to be the last game my father and I attended, I could not imagine a better ending to a shared passion that had started 25 years earlier with my first sighting of the luminous lime green grass of the playing field at Tiger Stadium, and other images that for some odd reason became indelible in the memory of a 10-year-old kid: Rocky Colavito’s five o’clock shadow, already a dark blue-gray for a Sunday matinee game, and the chaw-stuffed cheek of White Sox veteran Nellie Fox, which seemed to swell with each swing in the batting cage.
So it came down to this — would the Mad Dog defy his master and attempt to go yard, knowing that if he failed he’d likely be sentenced to Sparky’s dog house for eternity (which would end with his being waived), or would one of the game’s most volatile yappers shut up and follow orders? For me, it came down to another question: should I honor my father’s time-honored wisdom and stale if savvy percentage-based practicality by issuing vibes to chill any impetuous cravings for immortality twitching in the Mad Dog’s feverish brain and calloused hands, or assert my own independence by openly joining the rest of the chanting mob around us in howling for the intoxicating reward of a risky, selfish act that was more likely to end in failure, and possibly defeat for the greater good of the team?
Madlock ended the suspense on the first pitch, laying down a bunt on the third base line. A charging Ray Knight fielded the ball cleanly, but not in time to make a play on Nokes at second. Madlock was thrown out easily, but he had done his job. He moved the runner into scoring position. As he trotted back to the dugout, the crowd reacted with cheers just a shade deflated by disappointment at being denied a fourth homer.
Or maybe I’m imagining that, projecting my own mixed feelings. In my mind the perfect scenario would have had him swinging away until he either connected or got two strikes, ratcheting up the suspense and stoking the crowd to a hysterical pitch, and then laying down the perfect bunt. But that would have been a foolish strategy, if not outright stupid. He might have struck out or, worse, hit into a double-play, leaving the Tigers with two outs and no men on base. He did the right thing, whether on Sparky’s orders or not, and clearly he’d been following orders. And I suspect that even if he’d been given the green light, a fantastical possibility, Madlock still would have been bunting all the way. He may have had a volatile temperament, but he was still a pro, an aging veteran who understood that a greater, if unspoken and lesser celebrated, glory came with doing the simple, fundamental things in the game correctly. That appeared to be my father’s reaction, anyway. He just looked at me, smiled, and nodded his head.
The next batter, Kirk Gibson, was intentionally walked, bringing Alan Trammell to the plate. He hit a single up the middle, scoring Nokes. Game over. Tigers won 8-7.
After acquiring Madlock, the Tigers played .649 ball, going 71-39. They entered the final week of the regular season trailing Toronto by 3 ½ games, and swept the Blue Jays in a four-game series at Tiger Stadium, clinching the Divisional title on the last day of the season on a home run by Larry Herndon. (Emotionally spent after that tense finish, they lost the ALCS to the Twins in five games.) By that point, though, I had moved to Greensboro, North Carolina, for graduate school, where I watched that miraculous sweep in a local laundromat-bar called “Suds and Duds,” wearing my newly purchased Tigers’ North Star starter’s jacket, despite the 90-degree-plus degree weather.
Shortstop Alan Trammell was the star of that team, hitting a career-best .343, 28 homers, 105 RBIs and placing second in AL MVP vote. In what proved to be his final season, Madlock contributed a solid but underestimated stat line of .279 / 14 homers / 50 RBI, all the more impressive considering that he appeared in only 87 games. In one of those endless musing of ‘what if” scenarios so popular in sports, especially baseball, I liked to think that extra-inning win over the O’s three months earlier was the difference in the Tigers winning the division and going home. There was no Wild Card in those days. What if Madlock hadn’t laid down that lovely bunt? What if, following my impetuous yearning for the splashy, history-making play instead of my father’s calm, rational demand for the smart play, he’d swung for the fences and missed?
It turns out that game was the final time my father and I sat in the stands at Tiger Stadium. He’s 90 now, and still a rabid sports fan, still rooting for the Dodgers — the “Doyers,” as he calls them, in some strange patois of Brooklynese he’s never explained — partly out of loyalty to octogenarian announcer Vin Scully, more so out of loyalty to the National League for disdaining the DH, a stubborn refusal that, so the argument goes, allows managers to show off their strategy and guts by lifting a dominating pitcher for a pinch-hitter. The latter issue is an ongoing point of contention when we get together during summer visits. He ended up leaving Michigan the same year I did, relocating to North Carolina, as fate would have it, with his new wife (a Canadian born and raised in England who couldn’t tell the difference between a Blue Jay and an Oriole, but otherwise a lovely lady), a three-hour drive away.
We still watch games together during those visits, but only on TV, as his wobbly gait can no longer carry him up the grandstand steps, which now would appear to him like one of Escher’s endlessly looping mazes. But his memory is still sharp. When he starts carping about how the DH has corrupted the game, I remind him that it was a DH who provided the dramatics of our final game at Tiger Stadium. He responds with a disdainful grunt betrayed by a flicker of a smile fighting suppression. Sometimes the joy of such personal memories trumps the purity of national pastimes.
I’ve seen some dramatic homers with my father at Tiger Stadium: Reggie Jackson’s Homeric blast in the 1971 All-Star Game, a liner that pierced the fading evening summer sky like a mythic hero on the way to carving its own constellation, was still rising when it hit the metal stanchions of the lights in left-center field.
A no-doubt mortar shot by Lance Parrish in the 7th inning of the Tigers’ clinching Game 5 victory of the 1984 World Series against the Padres. It landed a few rows behind and to the left of our second-row seats in the left-field stands, close enough that I stretched my arm high overhead, hoping the sonic force of cheering would bend the ball’s trajectory into my mitt. It did not. Succumbing to such naïve optimism was still a thrill.
But the best homer I ever saw at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull was the one that never was.
They say a walk is as good as a hit. Sometimes a bunt is as good as a homer. And sometimes a nod is as loud as a cheer of thousands. Sometimes louder.
Tom McGohey taught composition at Wake Forest University for 20 years. He has published essays in Fourth Genre and Thread. His essay, “Friday Night Fights with Mom,” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize and selected as a Notable Essay in Best American Essays 2006.