There’s a lot to talk about this weekend with the Tigers taking on Kirk Gibson and Alan Trammell‘s smoke-and-mirror Diamondbacks. We’ll get to that.
Today I’d like to honor Peter Falk who died this afternoon at 83.
Here’s one of my favorite scenes from one of my favorite movies, The In-Laws — the original 1979 film, not the recent Michael Douglas/Albert Brooks abomination.
This morning I received my Baseball Hall of Fame newsletter, Inside Pitch, and the lead story recapped yesterday’s Hall of Fame Classic in Cooperstown.
Before the game they held a parade that featured Hall of Famers Jim Rice, Ozzie Smith, Goose Gossage, Phil Niekro, Andre Dawson and Dick Williams.
Scanning through the article I could’ve sworn I saw Dmitri Young‘s name.
Dmitri Young? At the Hall of Fame Classic?
Lo and behold …
Soon enough the crowds headed to historic Doubleday Field for the day’s main event, which began with a Legends Hitting Contest won by two-time All-Star Dmitri Young in a finals showdown with Reggie Sanders.
“It felt great,” Young said minutes later. “It took a couple of swings but once you get in the swing of things and the mentality comes back with all the baseball players. I just started feeling comfortable up there.
“I was here in for the Hall of Fame Game in 2005 and came in second against Big Papi (David Ortiz). But now I’m the champ and have a watch to prove it.”
At this point I had to find out which players were a part of this game. The answer included several obscure former Tigers players including pitchers John Doherty, Jon Warden and Jack Lazorko, and infielder Frank Catalanotto.
You can see the box score here (be warned it’s not a web page — it fires up an Excel document) and you’ll see several well-known names — from Bill Lee to Dale Murphy to Dave Henderson.
And with names like that you can understand my curiosity about DY.
Classic, I suppose, but not in traditionally classic fashion.
Tonight Alex Avila is the Tigers’ starting third baseman in the opener of a three-game series in Denver against the Rockies.
Avila’s never played third in the majors but he’s not the first Tigers player to be pressed into action there. Did you know that Al Kaline appeared in two games at third during his career?
In 1961, he played a full nine innings at third, fielding a pair of chances cleanly, with a putout and an assist. Four years later he played 5.1 innings of a game with three chances, two putouts and an assist.
Johnny Wockenfuss, who played mostly at first, catcher and in the outfield, became even more of a utility man for Sparky Anderson when he played … parts of two games – all of 2.1 innings – at third base but never saw any action.
Like Kaline, in 1965 Willie Horton played third but outlasted him be two-thirds of an inning. In one game he played six innings, fielded two chances and earned an assist on both.
Others taking a turn at the hot corner include:
I’m looking forward to this experiment. Having Avila’s bat in the lineup is huge and having him at third, well, can’t be any worse than Ryan Raburn.
What do you think?
Glenn Wilson
Twenty-seven years ago this past March, the Tigers orchestrated the trade that all but secured their 1984 World Series championship.
In case you’ve forgotten, on March 24 that year, the Tigers sent Glenn Wilson and catcher/first baseman extraordinaire John Wockenfuss to the Phillies for lefty reliever Willie Hernandez and first baseman Dave Bergman.
Certainly it worked out well that year, but I was disappointed that the Tigers traded one of my favorite players –Wilson – and one that Tigers many fans loved for his versatility, his name and his funky batting stance, Wockenfuss.
But back to the beginning.
Wilson made his major-league debut for the Tigers on Opening Day in Detroit against the Blue Jays on April 15, 1982. A rash of injuries to Tigers regulars — Eddie Miller (!) and Rick Leach — led the club to recall the 23-year-old Wilson and Howard Johnson from Triple-A Evansville.
“I was with the Tigers, not on the roster, during spring training,” Wilson told Tom Loomis of the Toledo Blade. “I never expected to be up here this year. I figured what I had to do was work hard down there and I’d get a good shot at the majors next year.”
There’s been a lot written about Jim Northrup in the past 24 hours. Here are some of the more notable pieces:
The first-ever autograph I scored was Jim Northrup’s.
I’m fairly confident the year was 1978 and it was at my baseball banquet at St. Isaac Jogues in St. Clair Shores. Word had spread that there would be a Tigers player at the banquet and I held out hope, despite my brother’s assurances I was nuts, that the Tiger would be Mark Fidrych.
Instead, it was Northrup and I remember thinking, “This guy?”
Of course I knew who he was. I listened over and over to the album (which is now available on CD!) my Dad bought for me, The Year of the Tiger ’68, that chronicled Mayo Smith’s amazing team.
Still, he was no Bird. Or my then-hero Jason Thompson or Steve Kemp.
Ultimately it didn’t matter a whit because I was standing next to a man who played for the Tigers.
My encounter with Northrup was memorable for another reason: I think I annoyed him. We were one of the first families to arrive at the banquet, which was held in the church basement that five days a week served as my school lunchroom. I remember my Mom encouraging me to take the banquet program and asking him for an autograph. So I made a beeline to the little stage area where he was standing by himself and got his impeccably written signature.
A while later a player from my team showed up and he ran over to a table and grabbed a banquet ticket. He asked Northrup to sign it. So enthralled was I about Northrup being there — and mind you, it could’ve been any former Tiger at this point — I took one of the same tickets from that same table and scurried up to the stage and asked him for another autograph.
He looked down at me and said, “How many autographs do you want, kid?”
I was more than a little embarrassed but he winked at me and I didn’t feel so stupid. (As it ends up, the ticket I used for the second autograph belonged to my teammate’s sister and I had to relinquish it to her. No one, it seemed, was pleased with autograph number two.)
[callout title=The Jim Northrup File]
Bats: Left Throws: Right
Height: 6′ 3″, Weight: 190 lb.
Born: November 24, 1939 in Breckenridge, Mich.
High School: St. Louis (Mich.) High
School: Alma College
Signed by the Tigers as an amateur free agent in 1960.
Debut: September 30, 1964
Numbers worn with Tigers: 30, 5
Teams (by games played): Tigers/Orioles/Expos 1964-1975
Final Game: September 27, 1975
Tigers Stats (11 seasons): 1,279 games; .267 avg., 145 HR, 570 RBI, .763 OPS
[/callout]
I don’t remember much about what Northrup said during his after-dinner remarks but I do recall lots of laughter and my parents enjoying his reminscing about the ’68 team.
A few years later I got to know and appreciate Jim Northrup when he was Larry Osterman‘s partner on the old PASS network broadcasts. I can’t verify this but I would be shocked to learn that Northrup did one nanosecond of preparation. What I can guarantee is that no other Tigers announcer in my lifetime was as appropriately critical of players and the plays they made or didn’t make as old number 5. He was, in many ways, the un–Jim Price and I thoroughly enjoyed every game he called.
More on this from Lynn Henning in his column today:
No question, Northrup was glib and acerbic. So much so, his tongue got him into trouble as much as it got him noticed.
Exhibit A there was his career as a Tigers television announcer. It ended in 1995, and no one had to explain why Northrup was unceremoniously yanked. He was blunt, unapologetically so. A new front-office regime wasn’t interested in subjecting owner Mike Ilitch to Northrup’s reviews, no matter how accurate or welcomed they might have been by a Tigers audience.
Back to the baseball banquet. The event was winding down and we all had our trophies – which we’d earned and not every kid got one. Imagine.
Anyway, my Dad suggested I get an autograph on the bottom of my trophy. I explained I already had asked for two from Northrup and he might get mad. Dad shrugged and said, “Go ask him.”
So I walked up and ever-so meekly asked him to sign the trophy and he just smiled, signed it and as he handed it back to me said, “Way to go.”
From that moment on I was a Jim Northrup fan, though I never saw him play a single game.
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