This day in baseball history: A forgotten divisional race

Back in the day, baseball teams had to win their division in order to play in the post-season. This setup often created clash-of-the-titans races in which the losing titan went straight home.

Perhaps the most memorable such race was the one in 1978 between the Yankees and Red Sox. Both teams won 99 games and it took a 163rd game to settle the matter in favor of the Yankees.

In 1993, the Atlanta Braves and the San Francisco Giants staged a memorable duel. The Braves won 104 games. The Giants won 103 and went home.

Most fans viewed this outcome as supporting the case for creating wild card games. After all, San Francisco’s win total was the second highest in all of baseball — six more than any team other than the Braves. But having enjoyed a month-long stretch battle between the Braves and Giants in which there was no safety net, I viewed it as an argument against the wild card.

1972 featured a dramatic division race in the American League East. That race is almost completely forgotten, probably because the teams that contested it were anything but titans. Also, the team that prevailed did not make it to the World Series.

But it was still a hell of a race with a very quirky outcome.

At the start of play on this day in 1972, the four top AL East teams were within one-half game of one another. Baltimore was in first place despite being only 9 games over .500. Boston, Detroit, and New York were all half a game behind.

Labor Day did little to separate the teams. The Orioles and Yankees split a doubleheader in Baltimore. The Orioles had to rally to win the opener, scoring four runs in their last two turns at bat to erase a 3-0 Yankee lead. Sparky Lyle was having a great year, but he gave up the winning run on a Paul Blair double.

In game two, unheralded Rob Gardner held the O’s to two runs and Lyle came back to pick up the save in a 5-2 Yankee victory.

Boston split a doubleheader in Milwaukee and thus failed to make up ground. Luis Tiant bested Boston’s former hero, Jim Lonborg, in the first game, 2-0. But the Brewers won the second game 6-2 behind the pitching of another former Red Sox, Ken Brett.

Detroit managed to gain half a game on the pack by beating Cleveland 2-1. Woody Fryman bested Gaylord Perry, the eventual Cy Young award winner. Willie Horton drove in both runs for the Tigers.

The AL East race continued to be a four-team contest for much of the month. On September 15, the Red Sox were in first, one game ahead of the Tigers and one-and-a-half ahead of the Orioles. The Yankees were two-and-a-half back.

A week later, the Yankees were all but out of it, trailing by four-and-a-half games with three teams ahead of them. This wasn’t surprising. The 1972 Yankees outscored their opponents by just 30 runs. Only Bobby Murcer hit more than 14 home runs and drove in more than 54 runs. Their pitching, Lyle’s great year notwithstanding, was middle-of-the-pack.

Baltimore was the next team to fall by the wayside. Hanging on for dear life on September 24, they proceeded to drop four straight games, during which they scored only five runs.

The demise of the Orioles was surprising. They had been to three straight World Series and despite falling off from those heights were probably still the best team in the division. They outscored their opponents by 89 runs in 1972, nearly twice as many as any of their division rivals.

But they scored the fewest runs of any of the four contenders and their bats went ice cold down the stretch. It wasn’t so much that they had traded Frank Robinson, who had a mediocre year for the Dodgers. It was more that, like Frank, such stars as Brooks Robinson, Boog Powell, and Don Buford were in decline, while up-and-comers like Don Baylor and Bobby Grich hadn’t yet become stars.

Boston and Detroit dueled until just about the end. As luck would have it, they played each other in the final three games. Boston held a half-game lead going into the series.

But Mickey Lolich pitched the Tigers into first place with a 4-1 victory in the series opener. The next day, Fryman bested Tiant 3-1. The Red Sox came back to win the finale 4-1, but it didn’t matter. Detroit held a half-game lead and the regular season was over.

How could the Tigers have won the division by virtue of having played (and won) one more game than Boston? It happened in part because a work stoppage delayed the start of the season. But surely, the powers-that-be could have adjusted things to make sure every contending team played the same number of games.

Unfortunately, Bowie Kuhn, the power-that-was, made no adjustment. When the season started belatedly, he decreed that the schedule would remain unchanged, even though it meant that not all teams would play the same number of games. (The current baseball season also started late due to a work stoppage. However, missed games are being made up and everyone is scheduled to play the same number. That’s progress!)

The Tigers were improbable division winners. They weren’t an aging team like the Orioles, they were flat-out old. Of the ten Tigers who played more than 100 games, seven were 30-years-old or more. Two others were 29.

Norm Cash, who led the team in home runs and RBIs (with only 61) was 37. So was Al Kaline, who led the team in batting average.

It was Kaline who got the Tigers over the line — he and Mickey Lolich who, at age 31, pitched a league-leading 327 innings and won 22 games.

Kaline rolled back the years down the stretch. On August 15, when he returned to the lineup after an injury, he was batting .271 with an OPS of .760. When the season ended, his batting average was .313 with an OPS of .849.

In the crucial last 8 games of the season, Kaline went 17-35 with 13 runs, 8 RBIs, and 4 home runs (including three in the final four games). In the two big wins over Boston, he went 5-8 with a home run.

Credit must also go to the Tigers’ manager, Billy Martin. In 1971, he took over a team that had finished 79-83. The next year, he squeezed 91 wins from basically the same cast — and indeed a cast not much different from the one that had won it all back in 1968. The ‘72 team regressed a bit, but the Orioles regressed much more, so the Tigers replaced them as AL champs.

As noted above, the Tigers did not get past the AL Championship series in 1972. They fell to mighty Oakland. But not without quite a fight, as I’ll chronicle next month.