Tuesday, May 22, 2007

Stick together

In the free-agency era, fans have to get used to new players shuttling on and off the team year after year. Or before and after the trade deadline. At any rate, that's one of the big knocks on baseball: no team loyalty for players seeking multimillion-dollar contracts.

In that context, I came across a truly impressive accomplishment listed in "The SABR Baseball List & Record Book." One set of records involves teammates who played together the longest: Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker played next to each other in the Tigers infield for 19 years to set the standard for a duo.

Before Trammell and Whitaker came on the scene, the Tigers were setting eye-popping records from the mid-'60s through the early '70s. No less than nine Detroit players were teammates for a full decade: Gates Brown, Bill Freehan, Willie Horton, Mickey Lolich, Al Kaline, Norm Cash, Dick McAuliffe and Mickey Stanley. Only Kaline was a Hall of Famer, but the rest were very good players, with Cash and Lolich reaching some degree of stardom.

During that decade, the Tigers won the 1968 World Series and 1972 AL East title, coming within one game of ruining the start of Oakland's amazing three-year Series run. Also in that period, Detroit barely lost the '67 pennant to the Yaz-Lonborg Red Sox and had the misfortune of playing in the same era of one of the great teams of modern history, the late-'60s/early-'70s Orioles.

Five of the longtime Detroit teammates (Brown, Freehan, Horton, Lolich and Stanley) still remained in 1975, the year the bottom fell out. The Tigers finished at 57-102, including 19 consecutive losses from July 29 through Aug. 15. Freehan, Horton and Stanley stuck it out through '76, but after that came the debuts of Trammell and Whitaker, who were together from '77 through '95.

The Tigers' consistency in personnel came during an era when the city of Detroit was undergoing a major upheaval, including the devastating riots of 1967 and the major problems for the American automotive industry that cropped up in the '70s. Detroiters never could be too sure of what was going on around them, unless they went to Tiger Stadium, where they always could see a lot of familiar faces on the diamond.


Trivia question 33: When Al Kaline retired after the 1974 season, he'd just passed one major batting milestone and fell just short of another. What were they?

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