The Baseball 100: No. 51, Al Kaline

Starting in December and ending on Opening Day, Joe Posnanski will count down the 100 greatest baseball players by publishing an essay on a player every day for 100 days. In all, this project will contain roughly as many words as “Moby Dick.” Yes, we know it’s nutty. We hope you enjoy. 

If you just looked at the back of his baseball card — especially one of those old Topps cards that had only the most basic of statistics — you would wonder. See, Al Kaline never hit 30 home runs in a season. He didn’t crack 400 homers or hit .300 for his career. He never won an MVP award.

And yet, he became Mr. Tiger.

When I was a kid, I truly believed that the only thing that mattered in life was talent. I constantly thought about talent, worried about talent, concentrated on talent. When the idea first hit about becoming a sportswriter — and it hit like a Mack Truck — I couldn’t sleep at night for fear that I lacked the talent to do it. My philosophy of life then was that people are born to greatness.

But it isn’t true. Al Kaline had talent. He was a baseball prodigy. He never played one game in the minor leagues. At age 20, he might have been the best player in the league.

But look again at that baseball card. It wasn’t talent that made him Mr. Tiger.

This will sound familiar: Nicholas Kaline wanted his son to be a ballplayer. At some point, I need to count the baseball stories that begin with the dreams of the father. Nicholas Kaline was a broom maker in Baltimore, and he believed that if things had been different — if he’d been given a chance — he might have become a great ballplayer. He wasn’t going to make the same mistakes with Al. Nicholas taught his son to throw a curveball at 8 years old. He was going to raise himself another Bobby Feller.

But, it turns out, he actually got himself an anti-Feller. Bobby had wanted to be a hitter but had too good an arm and so his father made him a pitcher. Kaline wanted to be a pitcher, but his high school coach Bill Anderson already had enough pitchers. He made Kaline a center fielder.

And the kid hit right away. Kaline seemed to have a natural understanding of baseball that eluded other kids. Anderson remembered having a conversation with the whole team about “going with the pitch,” which is to say adjusting their hitting based on the location of the ball. All of the players nodded as if they understood, but they didn’t really. How do you go with the pitch, anyway?

Kaline, in his first at-bat, rifled an outside pitch the other way for a single.

Kaline was a bonus baby before Sandy Koufax. He signed for so much money ($15,000 for Kaline in 1953; $14,000 for Koufax in 1955) that the Detroit Tigers had to keep him on the roster as an 18-year-old. Kaline played in 30 games for the Tigers that year and got himself 30 plate appearances. He wasn’t great, but he wasn’t overmatched either — he did hit a homer off Cleveland starter Dave Hoskins.

In those days, Kaline could really run. They called him “The Baltimore Greyhound.” Don’t you miss those days when ballplayers got nicknames that fit that particular pattern? “The” + “Where they came from” + “Fun noun, usually one that shared the same first letter as the place they came from.”

This isn’t completely dead because some people, in fact, do call Mike Trout “The Millville Meteor,” which is wonderful and old-fashioned and perfect for a timeless player like Trout. But this kind of nickname is mostly dead, and it’s a shame. I’d love to see a return:

Mookie Betts is “The Nashville Nighthawk.”
Cody Bellinger is “The Scottsdale Smasher.”
Anthony Rendon is “The Houston Hammer.”
Justin Verlander is “The Goochland Gun.”
Kirby Yates is “The Hawaiian Punch.”

OK, so, no, that was not as fun as I thought it would be. Never mind.

Kaline, unlike Koufax, became a regular in his first full season in the big leagues. At 19, he finished third in the Rookie of the Year balloting. It wasn’t actually a very good year offensively — he hit .276 with no real power or walks — but he made his mark as a defensive wonder in right field. He moved like a greyhound, as you know, and his arm, whoa, it was magical. He led the league in assists, but even that didn’t tell the full story.

In one game, he threw out a runner trying for an extra base in three straight innings.

In another, he dived for a ball, couldn’t come up with it and then, while sitting on the grass, he picked up the ball and threw out Dale Mitchell trying to take second.

There was just something about this kid. Yes, the players hazed him and taunted him. “I had a guy grab my uniform, saying he didn’t want me around,” Kaline told The Detroit News a few years ago. But the talent wasn’t unmissable. One writer even put Kaline on his MVP ballot.

Then at age 20, he became a superstar — it was, at the time, probably the greatest season a 20-year-old ever had. And even now, it’s surely in the Top 5.

Best seasons ever for 20-year-olds:

1. Mike Trout, 2012: Hit .326/.399/.564 with 30 homers, a league-leading 49 stolen bases and a league-leading 129 runs.
2. Alex Rodriguez, 1996: As a good-fielding shortstop led the league in hitting (.358) doubles (54), runs scored (141) and total bases (379).
3. Al Kaline, 1955: Led the league in batting average (.340) and hits (200), scored and drove in 100 runs, mashed 27 homers and undoubtedly would have won Gold Gloves as a right fielder if the award had been invented.
4. Mel Ott, 1929: Didn’t lead the league in much because Rogers Hornsby was around but he did hit .328 with 42 homers, 151 RBIs and 138 runs scored.
5. Ty Cobb, 1907: Hit .350 to win the first of 11 or 12 batting titles (depending on how you feel about 1918 when he hit .382 but had fewer than 500 plate appearances). He also led the league in hits and RBIs.

Yes, baseball had a new star. People could not stop gushing.

“He’s made some catches I still don’t believe,” Yankees manager Casey Stengel said.

“He’s just one of those naturals,” his teammate Ned Garvin said.

“The kid can’t miss,” Joe DiMaggio said.

“He’s the greatest right-handed hitter in the league,” Ted Williams said.

The last of those compliments was particularly meaningful to Kaline, who idolized Williams. They had spoken once when he was 18, and Williams had passed along eight words that Kaline came to see as the holy gospel of hitting:

Wait for your pitch and then hit it.

Every time Kaline would get in trouble, get in a slump, feel off rhythm, he would repeat that mantra to himself: Wait for your pitch and then hit it. He always told young hitters that the way to mess yourself up as a hitter was to complicate things.

Kaline finished second in the 1955 MVP voting to the legendary Yogi Berra who, bluntly, did not have as good a season. He finished third the next year to Mickey Mantle and Berra. Mantle won the triple crown in 1956 so this isn’t to knock that vote, it’s just to say that you couldn’t really win an MVP in the 1950s and early 1960s if you weren’t a Yankee — From 1950 to 1963, Yankees won 10 of the 14 MVP awards. Kaline again finished second in the MVP voting in 1963 to another Yankee, Elston Howard.

In many ways, things peaked for Kaline at 20. He never led the league in hitting again. He only once scored 100 runs in a season after that, only twice drove in 100 runs. His body broke down repeatedly. And he began to sour on the game.

Part of this was because he got into a brutal salary dispute in 1956 after his first two good seasons. He had finished second and third in the MVP balloting but was making just $15,000 a year. Mickey Mantle, it was well known, was making $60,000 a year. To Kaline, it just seemed fair for him to get a substantial raise.

And so when the Tigers sent him a contract offering only a $3,000 raise, he sent it back unsigned.

This might seem reasonable now, but in 1956, in a blue-collar city like Detroit, it was considered utterly outrageous. Who did he think he was, anyway? Tigers president Spike Briggs was apoplectic and he wasn’t about to stay quiet about it. He was speaking at a dinner and he made it abundantly clear just how wronged he felt on behalf of the Detroit Tigers and their many hard-working fans.

“Al thinks he’s as good as Mickey Mantle and wants more money than Mantle,” Briggs said. “I don’t agree with him, and he isn’t going to get it. … I sent Kaline a contract over the holidays with a $3,000 bonus for last year. I got the contract back unsigned. I didn’t get thanks for the bonus or even a holiday greeting.”

Wow! Not even a holiday greeting! It didn’t help that Briggs flat-out lied. “I definitely didn’t ask for Mantle’s pay,” Kaline angrily told a reporter, and he explained that all he wanted was a fair raise that matched his play. But it was too late. The Tigers knew exactly what buttons to push. Kaline settled for what the Tigers offered, and when he returned he heard hearty boos at Tiger Stadium.

Yes, Detroit fans booed Mr. Tiger.

Kaline burned with rage. His composure and professionalism later would often be compared to that of Stan Musial, Baseball’s Perfect Knight. But that stuff came naturally to Musial; he was a happy warrior, someone who just let things roll off his back. Not Kaline. He was a perfectionist and his temper was always on a slow boil.

He smashed bats. “I just never thought I should make an out,” he said.

He rebelled against the constant pressure the press put on him. “They wanted me to be Ty Cobb,” he said. “But who can be Ty Cobb?”

“There was a time when Al Kaline was not a very pleasant person to be around,” the legendary Detroit sportswriter Joe Falls said.

And he resented that people thought it came easy to him. Nothing comes easy. Kaline played with a painful left-foot injury that bothered him his entire career. He played the game so hard and with such fire that he suffered constant injuries — he broke his collarbone diving for a ball (he made the catch), he was knocked unconscious after running into a wall, he broke his hand slamming his bat after a strikeout.

And this is what I mean by the limitations of talent. The young Kaline — the player Garvin called a natural — did not become great because of that talent he had. No, Al Kaline became great because he kept going through it all, kept growing as a player and a man, kept finding his better self. Despite all the injuries, he played more than 2,800 games, more than Derek Jeter. Even after time stole his Baltimore Greyhound speed, he remained a smart and superb baserunner and he kept playing right field like a dream; after they started giving out Gold Gloves, he won 10 of them.

And even though he played through the worst-hitting environment since Deadball, Kaline hit double-digit home runs for 19 consecutive seasons and climbed his way to 3,000 hits and more than 1,600 runs scored and almost 1,600 RBIs.

“There have been a lot of great defensive players,” his contemporary and mirror image Brooks Robinson once said. “The fella who could do everything is Al Kaline.”

He was also at his best in his biggest moment, the 1968 World Series. He hit .379 and slugged .650 and got the game-winning hit in Game 5.

Through it all, Kaline came to represent something larger than baseball. He came to represent fortitude and kindness and dignity. Remember how Falls said he could be unpleasant to reporters as a young player? Well, after his 2,000th hit, Kaline didn’t want to talk to reporters. He was not a stats guy, and he cared only about the team, and he just didn’t see it as a big deal.

But after shrugging off reporters, Kaline had second thoughts. He realized — perhaps for the first time — that whether he saw it as a story was not the point. Those reporters still had to write it. He walked up to Joe Falls and said quietly: “I should have understood what they wanted. Will you apologize to them for me?” And Falls said that after that, Kaline never declined to talk.

It was the same in his approach on the field. In 1960, as a 25-year old, Kaline was thrown out of a game for arguing with an umpire. On the way back to the locker room, he realized that he had been wrong. After the game he found the umpire to apologize and to say he was wrong and he was sorry. From that point on, umpires talked often about the class and graciousness of Al Kaline.

It was the same with the fans. He had a hard time forgiving them after those early boos, after they attacked him for trying to get himself a fair salary. But he soon came to appreciate that as fans, they looked to him as the luckiest of souls. And, whether he felt lucky or not, whether he felt in pain or not, he owed them that dream.

“Fans don’t want much,” he once said. “All you have to do is smile and say “hi!” And shake their hands. They’re happy.”

Fifteen years after his initial bitter salary battle, Kaline again made the papers for a contract dispute. This time, though, he was a legend. He was Mr. Tiger. He was as much a part of Detroit as Motown. And this time, the Tigers offered Kaline the team’s first-ever $100,000 deal. He wouldn’t take it.

“I don’t deserve such a salary,” he said. “I didn’t have a good enough season last year.”

We should talk, for a moment, about Kaline’s last game because he made a decision that day that he would always regret. The Tigers were lousy that year, they lost 90 games, and on a cold Wednesday, Oct. 2, 1974, they played the AL East champion Baltimore Orioles in a meaningless game. The reported crowd was 4,671, but there probably weren’t that many people in Tiger Stadium.

There were so many similarities between Kaline’s last game and the last game of his hero, Ted Williams, the game John Updike immortalized. There was one reason, and only one reason, to come to the game, and it was to catch one final glimpse of Mr. Tiger. The small hope that fluttered around the stadium was that perhaps Kaline, like the Splendid Splinter, might have one final burst of great strength and hit a home run in his last at-bat.

If anything, the hope was even more desperate in Detroit than it had been in Boston because there was nothing special about the number when Williams hit his homer. It was home run No. 521, which, you know, it’s fine but it isn’t memorable.

If Kaline could connect, it would be home run No. 400.

If Kaline could connect, he would become the first American Leaguer ever to have 3,000 hits and 400 home runs.

These sorts of round numbers become the most precious of baseball dreams.

Thing is, Kaline knew he couldn’t hit a home run. His left shoulder hurt so bad he could barely swing the bat. He came out in the first inning and struck out looking against the Orioles’ Mike Cuellar — it simply hurt too much to even try. In the third inning, though, he thought he got good wood on a pitch from Cuellar. He watched dispiritedly as the line drive sunk and landed in the glove of a charging Al Bumbry.

In the fifth inning, people again waited for Kaline to try. But he did not come out. Instead, a pinch-hitter — a 25-year-old utility player named Ben Oglivie (who would later lead the league in home runs) — stepped to the on-deck circle. The crowd began to boo, and they booed louder as Oglivie stepped toward the plate, and they booed even louder when he grounded out to second against Wayne Garland.

Things grew so contentious, that in the sixth inning some fans began gathering around the Tigers’ dugout just to scream at manager Ralph Houk.

But it wasn’t Houk who made the call: It was Kaline. He couldn’t go on. The shoulder hurt too badly. He’d suffered enough for this sport. “I’m glad it’s over, I really am,” he told reporters at the end of the game. “I don’t think I’ll miss it …  “On the Fourth of July, I’d love to be at a lake instead of at the ballpark for two.”

And Kaline didn’t miss it. He went home to spend the year with his son, who was a senior in high school and would soon be off to college. He spent many days at the lake. He stayed around the game as an announcer and team consultant, and even now, at 85, you will still see him around Tigers games pretty often.

“I can honestly tell you,” Mr. Tiger told me once, “I gave my best.”

How many misters are there anyway? You have Mr. October (Reggie), Mr. November (Jeter), Mr. Baseball (Uecker) and Mr. Met (Mr. Met). There’s Mr. Mister if you want truly terrible 1980s pop-rock.

But the most beloved of all the misters are those who became synonymous with their team and their city. There’s Mr. Cub, Ernie Banks. There’s Mr. Padre, Tony Gwynn.

And there’s Mr. Tiger, Al Kaline.

There is one final part: Kaline did regret taking himself out of that last game.

Why? Was it that he didn’t give himself another shot at that elusive 400th homer? Nah. “I’ve never been a stats guy,” he said. “Anyway, eras in baseball are all different. The game changes so much. I knew how many great hitters had hit 400 or 500 home runs, and to me, it wasn’t like I was in their class.”

Was it that the way he pulled himself out of his last game simply didn’t symbolize how he played the game? Nah. He’d given all he had. He didn’t need a show at the end to know what he was about.

No, the reason he regretted it was the most Al Kaline of reasons: He regretted taking himself out of the game because that meant he put Ben Oglivie in position to get booed. And Ben just didn’t deserve that.

Note: Portions of this series were adapted from previous work that originated on my personal blog.

(Photo: Focus on Sport / Getty Images)