Motor City Bengals All-Time Detroit Tigers Team: RF Al Kaline

Justin Verlander and Al Kaline. Credit: Scott Rovak-USA TODAY Sports

No Detroit Tigers historical list could ever be complete without “Mr. Tiger.” With all apologies to Harry Heilmann, who was another Tigers’ great in right field–there are perhaps just two faces on the Tigers’ Mt. Rushmore–Ty Cobb and Al Kaline.

Before we sing the praises of Kaline, let’s take a quick look back at how our team is taking shape.

1B: Hank Greenberg

2B Charlie Gehringer

SS: Alan Trammell

3B: Miguel Cabrera

C: Bill Freehan

LF: Willie Horton

CF: Ty Cobb

Albert William “Al” Kaline was one of the few greats of Major League Baseball that never played an inning in the minor leagues. The boyish Kaline made his major league debut on June 25, 1953, just weeks after graduating from Baltimore’s Southern High School.

There are certain numbers that you can blurt out to Detroit sports fans and they’ll immediately utter a name back to you. Number 9–Gordie Howe. Number 20? Barry Sanders. Number 11, Isiah Thomas. Number 19–“The Captain.” It’s perhaps hard to believe, but Number 6 wore Number 25 during his first half-season in Detroit before switching to #6 for the rest of his 22-year career.

Al really came into his own in 1955, posting a league leading 200 hits and .340 average, finishing second to Yogi Berra for the AL MVP. This was also the season in which Kaline began his long 13-year All-Star streak (18 appearances in all).

The Tigers were a lousy franchise during the 1950’s, but Kaline kept fans coming to Briggs Stadium. Not only did he hit for power and average, he rarely struck out. In fact during his early days, Ted Williams had this to say about Kaline:

In my book, he’s the greatest right-handed hitter in the league. There’s no telling how far the kid could go.

As great as he was at the plate, he may have been even better defensively. A ten-time Gold Glove winner, Al Kaline had one of the best arms of any right fielder in baseball history. Not only was he accurate with his throw, he had a precise system for positioning himself properly to get the most out of his cannon arm.

Amazingly, Tigers’ fans did not always think of “Mr. Tiger” so highly. I have an old Sports Illustrated from Tiger Stadium’s last year that reprinted an article from 1964 describing how Al Kaline had been struggling, and how it was grating on Detroit fans and media.

…Al Kaline, the best all around ballplayer the Tigers have had since [sic] Charley Gehringer, is finding himself disliked. Not long ago he stepped to the plate in a home game to the accompaniment of a Shostakovich symphony of boos and catcalls…   ….While these hostilities were being ventilated, a kindly and gifted sportswriter, long addicted to the wonders of the Tigers and their star rightfielder, was stomping about the windswept press box announcing to all who would listen, ‘As far as I’m concerned, Al Kaline can go take a jump. I’ve had 10 years of Al Kaline and that’s enough!’ -Jack Olsen, Sports Illustrated, May 11, 1964

Yikes, our Tiger fan ancestors were dicks! Keep in mind that in 1964, Kaline had just two sub .300 seasons after he broke out in 1955–and one of those seasons, 1957, he finished at .295! For the record, Kaline finished 1964 at .293 with 17 homers–a season many players today would kill for. I guess it’s true when it’s said that you never appreciate what you have until it’s gone.

Though Al’s average would stay mostly under .300 the rest of his career, he was always great in right field. Kaline had a lot of injuries, which really hampered his playing time–never playing a full 154- or 162-game season. One of those seasons was 1968 when he missed the final two months of the regular season because of a broken arm.

Mayo Smith famously made room for the veteran in right field during the World Series by moving Mickey Stanley to shortstop, and benching light-hitting Ray Oyler. While many of the Tigers struggled at the plate, Kaline hit .379 and had a key bases-loaded single in Game 5 with the Tigers trailing 3 games to 1. The hit drove in two runs to turn a 3-2 deficit until a 4-3 lead Detroit would never relinquish. They went on to win the next two games in St. Louis to win it all.

On Sept. 24, 1974, just about a week before his final game, Al reached the 3,000-hit plateau (the last Tiger to do so) in his hometown of Baltimore. He finished with 3,007 hits, a .297 average, 399 homers, and 1,583 RBIs. Al Kaline was elected to the Hall-of-Fame on his first ballot with 88.3 percent of the vote in 1980 and was the first Tiger to have his number retired by the franchise. As great of a player as he was, imagine if he could have stayed healthy.

Of course Al’s story didn’t end there. For children of the 1980’s-90’s who never saw Al play, he was a part of our childhood along with George Kell. The duo called Tigers’ games on Channel 4 for many, many years. While I enjoy Mario and Rod on Fox Sports Detroit–there was only one Tigers’ TV pairing for me, and that was George and Al.

Today, the 79-year-old  Mr. Tiger is as much a staple of Comerica Park as a hot dog. Motor City Bengals salutes our all-time Detroit Tigers right fielder!

Tune in next week, when we’ll look at the Tigers’ all-time starting pitcher–the one guy you want to win that one important game.

Scroll through the slideshow to see our entries on the other Tiger greats.

Credit: Tim Fuller-USA TODAY Sports

“Ty Cobb wanted to play, but none of us could stand the son-of-a-bitch when we were alive, so we told him to stick it!” -Shoeless Joe Jackson in “Field of Dreams”

We’ve had several no-brainers when it came to picking players on our All-Time Detroit Tigers team, and Ty Cobb was certainly a no-brainer. He is an easy unanimous choice for our all-time best Detroit Tigers centerfielder.

One of the best players in the history of the game, and easily the game’s premier player before Babe Ruth came along, Ty Cobb has left quite an uneasy legacy.

In the iconic baseball movie “Field of Dreams,” the above sentiment was echoed in the fictional baseball world where the ghost of Shoeless Joe Jackson, a man thrown out of baseball for fixing a World Series, didn’t deem Cobb worthy of his companionship.

“The Georgia Peach” was apparently an ironic nickname for Cobb, who came from a hard upbringing which saw his father accidentally gunned down by his mother. He was accused of being a vehement racist, beat up a black groundskeeper, and choked the man’s wife when she attempted to intervene.

The best moments of Cobb’s troubled life came on the baseball diamond. In his second full year in baseball, he batted a league-leading .350. In 1911 and 1912, he hit over .400 and never hit below .334 the rest of his time in Detroit, including his third .400 plus season late in his career (1922). He won the Triple Crown in 1909 and was named the AL MVP (in a forerunner to the award that would begin to be annually presented in the 1930’s).

Cobb wasn’t particularly liked by his teammates, and opponents despised his aggressive play on the field which included the dreaded spikes-first slide. In later years, Cobb served as player-manager for the Tigers before deciding to retire in 1926. The Philadelphia Athletics coaxed him back and he shed his management responsibilities to focus on playing. He retired one final time in 1928 after two very good years in Philly.

Cobb was the hits leader with 4,191 for many decades until Pete Rose surpassed him in 1985. He still holds the highest career batting average in baseball history at .366, and was a charter member of the Baseball Hall-of-Fame in 1936.

Some say Cobb mellowed out a bit later in life, though Al Stump’s biography of the legend spoke differently. The stories in that book, the basis for the 1994 movie “Cobb” with Tommy Lee Jones as the titular anti-hero, may have been exaggerated.

Cobb’s racism seemed to ease later in life as he often spoke in favor of baseball dropping its ban against African-Americans, saying:

Let me say also that no white man has the right to be less of a gentleman than a colored man. In my book that goes not only for baseball, but all walks of life.

While his character will always be called into question, the fact that he is a Tigers’ legend on the diamond is not.

Credit: Tim Fuller-USA TODAY Sports

Another unappreciated legend has been named to the Motor City Bengals All-Time Detroit Tigers team in the form of catcher Bill Freehan. One of the best catchers of the 1960’s, Freehan doesn’t get much mention nationally these days, but Tigers’ fans whose roots go back to the 1960’s will always remember Freehan fondly.

This doesn’t mean the vote between MCB staffers was not a close one. In fact, Freehan edged a Detroit Hall-of-Famer, Mickey Cochrane, by just one vote for the honor. Lance Parrish and Ivan “Pudge” Rodriguez also received mentions.

William Ashley Freehan was a native Detroiter, the only member of the MCB All-Time Team to be born in the city he played for and one of two players (Charlie Gehringer) to be born in Michigan. He played his college ball at the University of Michigan, setting the all-time Big Ten batting mark of .585 in 1961. He actually made a brief appearance for the Tigers that same season, but bowed out of the majors until returning full-time in 1963.

He split time behind the plate with Gus Triandos that first full season, but grabbed the starting job in 1964, hitting .300 with 18 homers and 80 RBIs. That year began a streak of 10 straight All-Star appearances which included seven starts. He began another streak the following year, 1965, when he collected the first of four straight Gold Glove awards.

Bill had an accurate canon behind home, throwing out a league-leading 53 percent of would-be stealers in 1964. While that exceptionally high number would plateau in later seasons, he would never dip below 32 percent in that category the rest of his career, save for his last year when he saw limited action.

Freehan’s average dipped for a few years, but as the Tigers moved back into contention in the mid-1960’s, his average and home run production increased. He placed second in the MVP voting in 1968, finishing behind teammate and 31-game winner Denny McLain.

In the Year of the Pitcher, its not a surprise that Freehan and his teammates struggled in the World Series against St. Louis Cardinals’ pitching, led by NL MVP and Cy Young winner Bob Gibson. So while Freehan’s contribution to the Tigers’ championship didn’t come at the plate (hitting just .083), it certainly came behind it.

With the Tigers facing elimination at Tiger Stadium in Game 5, perhaps Freehan’s signature moment occurred. St. Louis was up by a run in the fifth inning when Lou Brock tried to score from second on a single to left. Willie Horton gunned the ball into the catcher, who had the foresight to remember the scouting report on Brock which said he rarely slid into home. Freehan stuck his left leg out and held the ball in a collision, thus preventing the Cardinals from going up by two runs.

The rest was history. The Tigers went on to win that game and the next two in St. Louis to capture the franchise’s third championship. Had Freehan missed the tag or prepared for Brock to slide, the series may have never gone back to Busch Stadium.

All told, Freehan was known more for his glove than bat, yet when he retired in 1976 he had 200 home runs and 2,502 total bases, placing him behind just Yogi Berra and Bill Dickey for American League catchers (both of whom are in the Hall-of-Fame). He held the highest career fielding percentage of .9933 until 2002 and held the record for putouts (9,941) until 1988.

A strong case can be made for Freehan’s Hall-of-Fame candidacy. He ranks 14th among catchers in JAWS. Of the top 10 players for that statistic, only three aren’t in the Hall. Mike Piazza (#5) will eventually get in and you’d think Rodriguez (#3) would also get in, but you never know with Pudge’s PED allegations. Nonetheless, Freehan’s placement puts him ahead of Hall-of-Fame catchers Buck Ewing, Roy Campanella, and several others.

Freehan, who went on to be the head baseball coach at U-M, and had a brief run as a color guy for Tigers’ games on PASS cable, has fallen out of the limelight in recent years. Sadly, this is because the 72-year old is reportedly battling Alzheimer’s disease.

Credit: Kelley L Cox-USA TODAY Sports

More than likely our All-Time Detroit Tigers third baseman will spend just two years at the position, but how could we not name Miguel Cabrera to Motor City Bengals’ All-Time Detroit Tigers team?

Cabrera will shift back to first base in 2014 after spending two seasons at the hot corner during Prince Fielder‘s brief tenure in Detroit. Certainly Miggy wasn’t the best defensive third basemen around, and the strain of the position may have hampered any possible recovery from various injuries down the stretch in 2013, but how can you knock those two years at third which included two MVP awards and the first Triple Crown in 45 years?

Haling from Venezuela, 20-year-old Cabrera burst on the scene with the Florida Marlins in 2003–making the jump all the way from Double-A. He would never return to the minors and instead would land in the clean-up spot for the soon-to-be World Champion Marlins. He helped to further the misery of the Chicago Cubs by pounding out three homers in the NLCS.

In 2005, Miggy hit over .300 for the first time (.323) and hit 33 homers for the second straight season. He was an NL All-Star from 2004 to 2007.

In one of the more lopsided trades in baseball history, the Florida Marlins, perhaps worried that Cabrera would command too much in future income, began shopping him around baseball. Many were interested, but the Detroit Tigers won the sweepstakes by shipping Andrew Miller, Dallas Trahern, Eulogio De La Cruz, Burke Badenhop, Cameron Maybin and Mike Rabelo to Florida for Miggy and Dontrelle Willis. Before the start of the 2008 season, the Tigers agreed to an eight-year, $152.3 million contract.

Miggy didn’t miss a beat changing leagues. While his average dipped below .300 for the first time in four seasons, he still managed to hit 27 homers and drive in 127. The following year began his current streak of .300 seasons, and nearly each season has seen that average rise.

He won the Triple Crown in 2012 with numbers of .330, 44 homers and 139 RBIs (all career highs). And yet thorough much of 2013, he was on a better pace than his final 2012 numbers. Ultimately, the injuries hampered him and he again finished with 44 homers, good for second in the AL, but won his third straight batting title with an average of .348.

No one knows what the future for Miguel Cabrera holds in Detroit. One of the best pure hitters of this generation will be eligible for free agency after the 2015 season. More than likely the Tigers will do all they can to hold on to him, but the then 33-year old is sure to command a pretty penny or two.

It’s worth noting that George Kell would have been the top pick for Tigers’ third basemen if not for Miguel’s incredible few years at the position.

Credit: Christopher Hanewinckel-USA TODAY Sports

The best Detroit Tigers shortstop of all-time is Alan Trammell.

Alan Stuart Trammell was the second round pick of the Detroit Tigers in the 1976 draft. It didn’t take the San Diego native long to make his first appearance in the major leagues. On Sept. 9, 1977, in the second game of a double-header at Fenway Park, Trammell and a young second baseman named Lou Whitaker each made their major league debut.

The pair would go on to play together for 19 seasons. While his partner won the 1978 AL Rookie of the Year award (Tram finished fourth), Trammell hit nearly 100 points higher than in his limited action of 1977. His average reached .300 for the first time in 1980, and it netted him the first of six All-Star appearances.

As the Tigers began to contend in the American League East in the early 1980’s, Trammell’s plate production increased. In 1983, the Tigers won more than 90 games (92-70) for the first time since 1971 but finished a distant second place to the eventual World Champion Baltimore Orioles and, of course, we all know what happened in 1984. Those two seasons were among the best of Tram’s career. He notched double-digit home runs for the first time in his career (14 in both ’83 and ’84) and hit .319 and .314 respectively. He had a .351 average with three homers and nine RBIs in the 1984 postseason and won the World Series MVP.

After a couple off-years while battling injuries, Sparky Anderson asked a healthy Trammell to anchor the Tigers’ 1987 lineup and bat cleanup. He responded with the best year of his storied career, setting career highs with a .343 average, 28 homers and 105 RBIs. When it appeared the Tigers would miss out on the postseason after falling behind the Toronto Blue Jays in the standings, Tram came to life. He hit at a .416 clip in September, lifting the Tigers to an astonishing come-from-behind AL East title.

In shades of things to come, Trammell was robbed in the AL MVP voting that season, finishing second to Toronto’s George Bell.

Defensively, Trammell wasn’t thought of in the same sentence as defense-first guys like Ozzie Smith, but he was steady and rarely made miscues or cost his team runs with errors. He won five Gold Gloves during his career and, along with Whitaker, formed the longest continuous double-play combination in baseball history (19 years and more than 2,000 games).

In the latter portions of his career, Trammell battled numerous injuries which caused his production to ebb and flow, however he still batted over .300 three more times. Most expected Trammell to retire when Whitaker announced that the 1995 season would be his last, but Tram decided to give it one more go, playing a reduced roll for the awful 1996 Tigers. Tram spent time at third base, second base, left and center, in addition to shortstop and DH the year Detroit set a then-franchise record of 109 losses.

Seven years later, Trammell managed the worst team in American League history, the 2003 Tigers. The team bounced back from that terrible season and improved by nearly 30 games in 2004, but when the team regressed a bit in 2005, Trammell was fired. It’s worth nothing that even the best managers in baseball history could not have done anything with that 2003 team and, after winning the AL pennant in 2006, Jim Leyland thanked Alan Trammell for his help in turning the franchise around.

We’ve greatly covered Trammell’s continued Hall-of-Fame snub, so we’ll skip that for now. Most believe that he will certainly get in via the Veteran’s Committee, so how fitting will it be when Tram is (eventually) inducted into Cooperstown along with Lou Whitaker? It will happen. It’s just a matter of time.

Credit: Tim Fuller-USA TODAY Sports

We name the organization’s top second sacker, Charlie Gehringer.

We’ve lamented the fact that Lou Whitaker may never make the Hall-of-Fame, but as great as he was, Charlie Gehringer was truly one of the best players in baseball history, and certainly one of the best second basemen of all time.

Gehringer had a long and distinct career in baseball, all with the Tigers. Born in Fowlerville, Charlie was a naive Michigander and would be the place he’d live all his life.

In the early 1920’s, Gehringer lettered in basketball, not baseball, at the University of Michigan, but his skills on the diamond were solid enough to grab the attention of Tiger Bobby Veach. In 1923, Veach brought Gehringer to Navin Field for a workout in front of player-manager Ty Cobb. The Tiger legend loved what he saw and convinced management to tender him a contact.

In his second full season in the big leagues (1927), Charlie became a star under new manager George Moriarty. In the years of Lou Gehrig‘s consecutive games streak, Gehringer was the Tigers’ Iron Man, playing every game from 1928 to 1930, 1933 to 1934, and 1936. He led the league in runs (131), hits (215), doubles (45), triples (19) and steals (19) in 1929.

On the defensive side, he was a very good defender and spent more than 1,000 games forming a keystone combination with shortstop Billy Rogell.

Gehringer was the lone Tigers’ representative in the very first All-Star Game, held at Comiskey Park in Chicago in 1933, and led the team in average in the pennant-winning seasons of 1934 and 1935. He hit .371 in 1937, which was a career high and earned him the MVP.

Gehringer remained a force for the Tigers through their pennant winning season of 1940, hitting .313. In 1941, he hit nearly 100 points off his average and found himself on the bench in 1942. Following that season, he enlisted in the U.S. Navy until 1945. He considered making a comeback at the age of 41, but ultimately decided against it.

In 16 full-seasons in the majors, Charlie hit under .300 just four times (his first full year and his final two). In the peak of his career, from 1927 to 1940, the only sub-.300 season was 1932 when he hit .298. He finished with a career average of .320, 2,839 hits, 184 homers and 1,427 RBIs.

Charlie was a six-time All-Star, won three pennants, one World Series, an MVP, and batting title. His number two was retired alongside Greenberg’s number five in a ceremony at Tiger Stadium in 1983, and he was elected to the Baseball Hall-of-Fame in 1949 with more than 85 percent of the vote.

It is for all these reasons that Charlie Gehringer is named to the Motor City Bengals’ All-Time Detroit Tigers team, and was another unanimous pick by staff.

Honorable mention goes to Whitaker (of course), and Dick McAulliffe.

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The best Detroit Tigers’ first baseman of all time: Hank Greenberg.

The original “Hammerin’ Hank,” was arguably the best slugger in Detroit Tigers’ history. The bulk of his Tigers’ career came from 1933 to 1946 with nearly a four-year interruption for military service during WWII.

Greenberg had a cup of coffee with the club in 1930, but came up full-time in 1933. He helped the Tigers win their first pennant in 25 years in his second full year in the majors, hitting .339 and launching 26 home runs. The following year, in 1935, he led baseball with 36 homers and brought the very first World Series title to Detroit.

After an injury-shortened 1936 season, Greenberg reached the peak of his career in 1937 and 1938. In those two years, he mashed 98 homers, including the highest single-season total in Tigers’ history, 58, in 1938. He fell just short of Babe Ruth‘s then nine-year old record of 60 homers.

Greenberg was the first American League player drafted into military service in 1940 at the age of 29. He was honorably discharged from service just two days before the bombing of Pearl Harbor, but promptly reenlisted. Achieving the rank of captain, Hank served in the China-Burma-India theater and was enlisted for total of 47 months, the most for any major league player.

He returned to the Tigers on July 1, 1945 and homered in his first game in nearly four years. In 78 games during the 1945 season, Greenberg launched 13 homers and hit .311. He hit a pennant-winning grand slam on the final day of the season, and contributed two homers with an average of .300 over a seven-game World Series victory over the Chicago Cubs.

He’d hit another 47 homers for the Tigers in 1946, but a salary dispute with the notoriously stingy Tigers’ management team of the 1940’s ended in Greenberg being sold to the Pittsburgh Pirates. He had another great year in 1947, but chose to retire and move to a front office role in Cleveland.

Hank Greenberg finished his 13-year major league career with a .313 average, 331 homers and 1,276 RBIs. He was elected to the Baseball Hall-of-Fame in 1956 and had his number five retired by the Tigers in 1983.

It is for all these reasons that Hank Greenberg is named to the Motor City Bengals’ All-Time Detroit Tigers team, and was a unanimous pick by staff.

Honorable mention for first base go to Norm Cash, Miguel Cabrera, and Cecil Fielder.