Tigers Are on Prowl Again After a Shaky Start

After their first 30 games of the season, the Detroit Tigers were 11-19 and looking like a submarine on war maneuvers -- headed straight for the bottom for a long, silent stay.

“This,” Detroit Manager Sparky Anderson said at the time, pointing a finger toward a moribund locker room, “is a good team. We’ve got good pitching -- the best five starters -- and come August and September we’ll be right there.”

Anderson was dead right, as he so often is, even though the 17-year veteran manager with the thinning silver hair is remembered far more for the outrageous statements he makes.

We are midway through August and there is Detroit right up there with New York, which it is finished playing, and Toronto at the top of the AL East standings. For more than three months the Tigers have been playing championship caliber baseball, too long to dismiss as just a fluke or a hot streak.

“It took a lot of time to put this club together,” said Darrell Evans, who at 40 is playing well enough to practically insure he will be playing again at age 41. “We had to find out certain people fit in certain spots.”

“When you start every season,” said Kirk Gibson, “it’s a puzzle. And you really don’t know how you going to fit together. We’re finding out that the pieces fit.”

Detroit entered the season with controversy and confusion over the loss of All-Star catcher Lance Parrish and the carnival auction All-Star pitcher Jack Morris conducted for himself.

Morris re-signed with Detroit through arbitration but Parrish left, a decision he admittedly regrets, for Philadelphia.

That left a void behind the plate and a void at cleanup. Anderson tried to fill the hole defensively, through Orlando Mercado and Dwight Lowry. But when the club began in a hitting slump he dropped those two and quickly turned to his other two catchers, rookie Matt Nokes and veteran Mike Heath.

Both not only performed soundly offensively, but defensively as well. Nokes, in particular, did so well he made the All-Star team and Anderson no longer talks of him as the future first baseman.

“Nobody expected Matt to hit like he has,” Morris said. “Or Mike to fill in and hit like he has. Really, catching has been the least of our problems.”

Anderson solved the cleanup problem radically, by taking his No. 2 hitter, shortstop Alan Trammell, and dropping him down to No. 4.

“Remember,” Evans said, “we didn’t have Trammell or Gibson the first part of the season. The reason we didn’t win before was we didn’t hit. We weren’t getting as many opportunities. Now we are.

“Everybody is getting an opportunity so you don’t feel it’s up to you. When you’re unsuccessful, somebody else gets an opportunity. Earlier we were getting one or two opportunities and not coming through.”

Trammell had a long talk with Anderson in spring training about hitting fourth. The crux of it was that Trammell should just keep doing what he’d been doing, not to try to replace Parrish’s 30 home runs or 100 RBI.

“He wasn’t put in a position where he had to replace Lance,” Evans said. “We had a good team before. We’ve probably had more wins than anybody in baseball the last six years (actually second to the New York Yankees). There was no doubt we were going to have a good ballclub.”

Reliance on the home run to score runs has always bothered Anderson, who would like more speed on his team, but the Tigers have drowned that deficiency in a lake of hits.

“We’ve got more firepower than anybody in baseball,” Evans said.

The club’s weakness against left-handers has not gone away but Vice President and General Manager Bill Lajoie has gotten right-handed hitters Bill Madlock and Jim Morrison to help in that department.

No one could have foreseen, either, how well Detroit’s rookies would perform. ‘Baseball America’ has rated the Tigers’ farm system the worst in baseball two years in a row.

Nokes, though obtained from San Francisco in October of 1985, played one season in that system, as did rookie pitchers Jeff Robinson and Mike Henneman.

Starter Robinson has shown a penchant for getting long strings of outs (he retired the last 24 in a row in his first shutout) while Henneman won his first eight relief decisions. The two are Detroit’s winningest rookie combination since Dave Rozema and Bob Sykes combined for 22 wins in 1977.

“There’s no way of knowing how your younger players are going to do,” Gibson said. “And our role players have been having great years.”

Anderson’s biggest asset has been to be able to give the ball to Morris, Frank Tanana, Walt Terrell, Robinson and Dan Petry with scarcely a missed turn among them. The staff is in the top three in the league in ERA -- and with a bullpen that has no dominant figure.

Henneman is a rookie, Willie Hernandez is too psyched to face the booing fans at home, Mark Thurmond has been so-so and Eric King is miscast as a reliever.

“I think,” Anderson said, “everybody underestimated us after we lost Lance and then because of the way we played in spring training. But I don’t know what we have left to prove. In the 1980s we’re the second winningest team in baseball. This has been a big franchise for years.

“Are they going to lynch us? Put honey on us with ants? Burn us at the stake?” Anderson asked. “I wonder what the other (less successful) franchises’ fans do?”

“We’re the only team in baseball the last five years that hasn’t had a bad year, that hasn’t fallen on its face,” Evans said. “The last two years, we’ve played in streaks. Last year we started slowly but fought our way back until we were only 4 1/2 back of Boston. Then they came in and we had two tough losses and we never recovered from that. The last two years our key series were poor ones. This year they’ve been good ones.”

“The guys here have an awful lot of pride,” Anderson said. “It’s no fun when the rabbit’s got the gun. Fortunately we’ve started winning. Now they really do not want to lose.”

Whether they do or not could be determined the final 11 games of the season. In seven of them, the Detroit Tigers play the Toronto Blue Jays.