The author is a retired columnist and baseball writer who still regularly contributes to the Detroit News. The column was written for Deadline Detroit.
By Lynn Henning
Mickey Lolich in 2009 (Photo:Tom Hagerty for LakelandLocal)
Glance at the beige-brick wall in right-center field at Comerica Park and you’re invited to a Tigers museum-tour of noteworthy names.
Anderson. Cobb. Cochrane. Crawford. Gehringer. Greenberg. Harwell. Heilmann. Horton. Jennings. Kaline. Kell. Leyland. Manush. Morris. Newhouser. Whitaker.
It is a sublime cast of Tigers players and managers (and even a broadcaster), a group so celebrated that 15 of them have seats in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Those with deep memories and a lust for Tigers lore might wonder why another Tigers grand master, a pitcher named Mickey Lolich, should not be part of Comerica Park’s great brick gallery.
A fair question there.
Lolich, who on Sept. 12 turned 84, still lives in Metro Detroit and has always shared celebrity, to a degree anyway, with two teammates whose names are indelibly part of Comerica Park’s wall-memorial: Al Kaline and Willie Horton, both of whom also are reverenced in metal sculptures along Comerica Park’s back walkway.
Lolich, as a left-hand pitcher of longevity and even grandeur in Detroit, has distinction on a relative par with Newhouser, the World War-II-era artist whose duels with fellow Hall of Famer Bob Feller were virtuosos during the days when Detroit and Cleveland built a particularly edgy trans-Lake Erie rivalry.
Here’s why some want Lolich commemorated at Comerica:
• Only three left-hand pitchers in Major League Baseball history – Randy Johnson, Steve Carlton, and C.C. Sabathia – struck out more batters than Lolich, whose 2,832 are 23rd on MLB’s all-time list.
• Twice with the Tigers he finished among top-three voting for the American League Cy Young Award, the ultimate trophy for each league’s best pitcher in a season. Lolich was runner-up in 1971 to then-Oakland phenom Vida Blue. A year later, he lost to Gaylord Perry, and Wilbur Wood.
• His almost singular knack for working overtime also made Lolich, then and now, a marvel of pitching endurance. During his prime years, from 1964-76, Lolich averaged 263 innings per season – about 100 innings more than today’s starters often total. He threw an astonishing 371 innings in 1971 and three other seasons worked more than 300.
• Lolich, of course, owns in Detroit eternal celebrity for another reason: He won three games in the 1968 World Series, including pitching – on only two days of rest – a complete, nine-inning, vanquishing of the St. Louis Cardinals in Game 7. That game delivered to Detroit a championship parade, which, even with perspective 56 years later, is perhaps unmatched for the bliss and relief it brought a town a year after Detroit had been ravaged by the then-worst urban rebellion in American history.
So, why no brickwork bearing Lolich’s name? Why, especially, when it could be fairly argued Lolich had a career more extraordinary than perhaps another person or two hallowed by that Comerica Park collection of past greats?
Misses Cooperstown
Again, a fair question.
But with the general criterion that one needs a Hall of Fame plaque to be part of the brick mix, a person who since 1989 has voted for Baseball Hall of Fame inductees will explain why Lolich just misses on Cooperstown.
Lolich, in this and the view of most Hall voters through the years, finishes a tad beneath the ultra-picky statistical heights necessary for enshrinement. And it is precisely because entry is so difficult that the Baseball Hall of Fame has remained through generations the most respected of all such Halls.
If you go by one basic statistical arbiter that can best define how Lolich falls short, it’s career WAR: Wins Above Replacement.
It is not perfect – no statistical barometer is infallible – but it reveals in the most efficient manner how Lolich stacks up against typical HOF residents, and against some of Comerica’s names who, frankly, in some cases might more justly be replaced by Lolich.
WAR totals show how Cooperstown pitchers compare when stacked against Lolich’s career WAR of 48.0, beginning with the only three-left-handed pitchers who have surpassed Lolich on career strikeouts:
Carlton, 90.2; Newhouser, 62.8; Sabathia (eligible for Hall of Fame voting this November), 62.3. Those are massive differentials from Lolich’s 48.0.
Crunch generations of baseball numbers, as the Baseball-Reference.com hounds regularly do, and you find Lolich’s career corresponds in quality and production roughly to these men:
Jim Bunning, Jerry Koosman, Jerry Reuss, Rick Reuschel, Luis Tiant, Curt Simmons, Billy Pierce, Jim Perry, and Vida Blue (who beat out Lolich for that 1971 Cy Young trophy).
Among the above group, only Bunning, who began his career with the Tigers, has a Cooperstown plaque – and only after a Veterans Committee, designed to correct earlier oversights, inducted him in 1996.
Not that Lolich was ignored by Hall of Fame voters – qualified Baseball Writers Association of America members -- who for 15 years mulled Lolich’s credentials.
It invites an explanation for how the conventional Cooperstown election process works:
Five years after even a moderately accomplished pitcher or player retires, his name is included on that year’s Hall of Fame ballot mailed to worthy BBWAA voters.
A player must be chosen on 75% of ballots forwarded to win induction. It requires a 5% presence, minimum, to be retained for the following year’s voting.
Got the Minimum
Lolich got the minimum in the 15 consecutive years players then could be carried on a HOF ballot (it has since been reduced to 10 years). His best finish was 1988 when he got 25.5% of the vote; his fewest votes (5.2%) came in 1999, his final year of eligibility.
Lolich did get a second look and more, in 2003, in 2005, and 2007, by the HOF Veterans Committee. But he did no better there than he had with the writers.
It does not exclude him from Comerica Park consideration. It’s right to ask if his name belongs in right-center’s shrine, at least when compared with others whose names would suggest they were certified Tigers deities, with numbers to match.
But that isn’t necessarily the case.
Begin with Horton, who got 0.9% of the BBWAA vote his one and only turn on the HOF ballot, in 1985.
Horton not only has a brick niche at Comerica Park, he owns one of those six metal sculptures that otherwise belong to Ty Cobb, Kaline, Charlie Gehringer, Newhouser, and Hank Greenberg.
Horton hit 325 home runs during his 18-season, big-league career, which is tied with Jermaine Dye and Justin Upton for 125th place on MLB’s all-time list. Horton’s career WAR for those 18 seasons, 15 of which were based in Detroit: 28.5, half or less than would be typically required for an outfielder’s enshrinement.
Why would Horton be included in such a celestial cast of Tigers greats when his career numbers do not correspond?
It’s actually an easy answer:
Horton, who arrived with the Tigers in 1963, was a Detroit native and the Tigers’ first true Black star. More than his numbers, more than his unofficial role as a first man of color to bring enduring celebrity to the Tigers lineup, Horton symbolized -- especially so for late Tigers owner Mike Ilitch – the brand of man and player who for generations had been prevented from playing Major League Baseball, in Detroit, and elsewhere.
Willie Horton
Willie Horton and Mickey Lolich
Horton, it might be said, was Detroit’s counterpart to Jackie Robinson, who integrated baseball only 16 years before Horton played his first game for the Tigers.
Horton also was a native son. Although born in Arno, Va., he grew up in Detroit. And he had been no less than a civic hero during that summer Sunday night in July, 1967, when Horton – still in uniform following that day’s game at Tiger Stadium – drove to the thick of what already was becoming an urban conflagration, exhorting his friends and neighbors and Black brothers and sisters to calm a storm that was about to engulf Detroit in apocalyptic ways.
A year later, as the biggest power threat in a lineup loaded with stars, Horton then helped the Tigers storm the American League ahead of their wondrous, come-from-behind ambush of the Cardinals to win October’s World Series.
Ilitch, as a Detroit native himself, and as a man who saw in Horton all the past and present injustice people and a town had endured, and who knew Horton’s indelible place in Detroit’s hearts, wanted Horton appreciated in the same realm as Tigers Hall of Famers.
Still more names, existent and non-existent on that Comerica Park wall sanctum, are worth discussing, in the same context as Lolich’s case:
Whitaker and Trammell
Alan Trammell
Whitaker: He has no plaque in Cooperstown. But it is viewed by baseball historians galore, and supported by his career and comparative numbers, that Whitaker belongs in Cooperstown alongside his infield double-play partner, Alan Trammell.
Trammell’s career War: 70.6. Whitaker’s is 75.1. Cooperstown hasn’t yet done him justice, but the Tigers in 2023 decided Whitaker was at least going to get his Comerica Park niche. It was a first step toward justice in the Tigers galaxy’s mind.
Morris: Here, ironically, is one more endorsement for Lolich’s candidacy – and perhaps as much a vote for Lolich and Cooperstown as for Comerica Park.
Morris made the Hall of Fame in 2017 voting, alongside Trammell, courtesy of Cooperstown’s Modern Era Committee (a version of the old Veterans Committee).
Morris probably won induction with numbers as light as any pitcher has ever amassed. Note his career WAR is 43.5, putting him more in line with non-Hall pitchers such as Bartolo Colon (46.2) and Dennis Martinez (48.7).
Note also how his career WAR of 43.5 compares with Lolich’s 48.0. Morris is 42nd in career strikeouts – 19 places behind Lolich. Morris’ career ERA is the highest of any starting pitcher ever inducted, 3.90. Lolich’s ERA: about a half-run per game better at 3.44.
And yet Morris has won two places of honor, very possibly delivered by his virtuoso, 10-inning, 1-0, victory for the Twins against the Braves in Game 7 of the 1991 World Series. It was an epic performance, televised in prime-time compared with, say, the 1968 Series’ final-game mastery, which was authored by Lolich on a Thursday afternoon during baseball’s black-and-white-TV years.
Timing is everything in life, and that can apply to the Hall of Fame’s indelible images and imprints.
It could be argued that another member of that ’68 Tigers team is, in fact, a greater victim of non-appreciation – by Cooperstown, and by Comerica Park.
Bill Freehan.
Bill Freehan (Detroit Tigers art)
Freehan, a Royal Oak lad and University of Michigan prize, joined the Tigers in 1961 and was the team’s regular catcher into the 1975 season. Eleven times he was named to the American League All-Star team. Five times he won a Gold Glove as his position’s best defender.
He was a runner-up in American League Most Valuable Player voting (teammate Denny McLain won it) in the championship season of 1968, a year after finishing third on MVP ballots. His WAR of 44.8 is 15th among all-time MLB catchers. Ten of the 14 catchers ahead of him have Cooperstown plaques.
With time and perspective, and particularly with the power of Internet numbers having altered prisms by which careers now are measured, Freehan’s status has only risen over the years – and very possibly one day might see a man who died in 2021 earn veneration he probably deserves.
At the very least, Freehan’s eligibility for Comerica’s sacred wall is in the neighborhood of Horton, Whitaker, and Morris.
Does he get that local tribute he probably merits? Perhaps, one day. Or, perhaps not. And if he does, Lolich’s rooters then will argue, even more forcefully, that their man needs to be regarded every bit as much as Freehan.
And if they both happen with time and reflection to find their way to premier prominence at Comerica -- if not Cooperstown -- how long before other Tigers also must be viewed?
There is the problem, if a problem in fact exists within these conversations. Things can get crowded. Membership prestige can diminish.
You have to be careful, especially knowing other names soon will join a fabulous and fabled fraternity.
Miguel Cabrera (Photo: Major League Baseball)
Names such as Verlander and Cabrera will be part of the Comerica crowd about as soon as they, with certainty, make their Cooperstown acceptance speeches, with Cabrera a lock to win his Hall of Fame plaque in 2029.
If every borderline case is given a nudge, and sentiment triumphs, there could be traffic congestion at a place designed to be exclusive in its excellence.
Not that there’s anything especially wrong with tribal justice. Horton and Whitaker are testimonials to fixing at home what Cooperstown hasn’t yet fulfilled, at least in the case of Whitaker.
Lolich?
It’s a tough call. But, for now, Comerica Park probably doesn’t demand Mickey Lolich’s name.
Not that it requires a wall to appreciate, perpetually, a man’s extraordinary skill and unique place in Tigers lore.
