From Baseball-Reference.com:
1960 – A record opening day crowd of 53,563 at Briggs Stadium sees the Detroit Tigers chalk up their third straight win, 6 – 5, against the Chicago White Sox. Recently-acquired Rocky Colavito blasts a home run in his first at-bat with Detroit, and Eddie Yost adds a home run in the 5th inning.
Jim Bunning got the Opening Day start, Tom Morgan notched the win.
1984 — The Detroit Tigers suffer their first loss of the season after nine consecutive wins. The Tigers fall to the Kansas City Royals and rookie Bret Saberhagen, who earns his first major league victory.
Final score: Royals 5 – Tigers 2. Interesting that Dan Petry gave up five runs and Sparky still let him pitch eight innings.
Gibby hit a solo shot off Dan Quisenberry in the ninth, but it wasn’t enough. With the win, the Royals pushed their record to 6-6. Quisenberry earned saves in five of the wins.
My two years of living in Houston collided with Jose Lima‘s years with the Astros. Imagine my surprise when I saw Lima Time on TV promoting a local Mexican restaurant.
Thanks yet again to the wonder of YouTube, we can watch them again.
Still hard to believe he passed away so young.
Tooling around YouTube I got sucked into a Sparky Anderson search-fest. Here’s his Hall of Fame induction speech from 2000.
This is right after Sparky came back from his leave of absence. Interesting, he makes no bones about the Tigers not developing young players — not since Kirk Gibson. Of course that’s why Sparky was saddled with such mediocre teams for his last seven years in Detroit.
From Baseball Reference:
The Special Veterans Committee announces the election of Walter Alston and George Kell to the Hall of Fame. Alston managed the Dodgers in Brooklyn and Los Angeles to four World Series championships, while always working under one-year contracts. Kell, a standout third baseman primarily for the Detroit Tigers, batted over .300 nine times, was a 10-time All-Star, and topped American League third basemen in fielding percentage seven times during a 15-season career.
Here’s my podcast interview with George Kell from 2007.
1940 – The Detroit Tigers’ roster lists Hank Greenberg as an OF. The willingness of the team’s leading power hitter to switch, at a contract boost, from 1B allows manager Del Baker to find a position for Rudy York. Also on the list are Dick Bartell, picked up from the Chicago Cubs for Billy Rogell and Pinky Higgins, who had been shopped around. The four, along with Barney McCosky and Charlie Gehringer, produce the stuff that will move the Tigers from fifth to first, although its .588 mark will be as low as that of any pennant-winner yet.
That Tigers squad won 90 games, finishing a game ahead of the Indians. They also:
Not a bad year for a lowly 90-win team.
I shouldn’t have been as surprised as I was that Kirk Gibson left the Tigers for the Dodgers as a free agent in 1988. Not only had there been rumors of a one-for-one trade in place for L.A.’s slugging first baseman Pedro Guererro, Lance Parrish also left as a free-agent, about a year before.
Yeah, but still.
The day Gibby signed a three-year, $4.5 million contract with the Dodgers was the day I finally understood the “baseball-is-a-business” thing was legit. (And, my God, two years later Jack Morris would leave and then I’d really had it. )
Jan. 29, 1988 was the end of an era for Detroit baseball, but we didn’t know it. Or maybe most fans did; I certainly didn’t. I wanted to believe the 1988 Tigers would be okay — no better, no worse — than the ’87 team. I mean, after all, they traded for Ray Knight.
Ahem.
The Gibson that rejoined the Tigers in 1993 was nowhere near the one that left five years earlier, but it still seemed right that he came back to end his career in Detroit.
But still.
I’m going to do a deep-dive in the Internet to locate photos proving they wore these respective numbers.
Digging around in my Tigers Yearbook archive I found this entry from the ’77 edition about catcher Bob Adams, who turns 64 today.
Adams appeared in 15 games for the ’77 Tigers, hitting .250 with a pair of homers and RBI, and .792 OPS. (If that matters to a guy with 24 plate appearances.)
Happy Birthday, Bob.
dailyfungoarchive.com 