Hall of Fame outfielder Al Kaline, who played his entire 22-year career for Detroit and was known as 'Mr. Tiger,' died at age 85.
Al Kaline, who in a long and unique Detroit Tigers lifetime grew from youthful batting champion to Hall of Famer to distinguished elder statesman, died Monday afternoon at his home in Bloomfield Hills. He was 85.
“They’d always helped me,” he said. “They knew I wanted to be a major-leaguer, and they did everything they could to give me time for baseball. I never had to take a paper route or work in a drugstore or anything.Kaline signed with the Tigers the morning after he graduated from high school — and made his major-league debut a week later. He would never play in the minors. He would never wear any uniform but Detroit’s.Kaline was 39 when he played his final game, in 1974.
Kaline is one of six Tigers with a statue behind the left-center field fence at Comerica Park. And despite his 3,007 hits and those club-record 399 homers, that statue shows him not with a bat in hand, but making a leaping, one-handed catch like the one he made on Mantle. After one year out of baseball following his retirement, Kaline joined the Tigers’ television team in 1976 as the analyst for play-by-play man George Kell, a former Tigers third baseman. Kell, also a Hall of Famer, and Kaline, after a rough learning curve, provided engaging, incisive commentary on Tigers telecasts for the next two decades. When Kell retired from broadcasting, Kaline worked on the air with play-by-play men Ernie Harwell and then Frank Beckmann into 2001.
Still, for a bonus worth $140,000 today, Kaline basically went straight from high school graduation to the Tigers. He was 18 years and six months old when he played his first game for them on June 25, 1953. Kaline won the respect of the Boston outfielder who is widely regarded as the greatest hitter in history. This became evident one day as Kaline sat in the media dining room at Fenway Park before doing the telecast of a Tigers-Red Sox game. Into the room swooped Ted Williams. He knew his entrance would require him to fend off the Boston press with which he long feuded. But he had an important mission, as he growled at the reporters who approached him.
But the next year, 1968, the Tigers were not to be stopped, and they didn’t even need a huge season from Kaline. The team had a narrow first-place lead in the AL in late May when Kaline suffered a broken left forearm. When he returned five weeks later, the Tigers were well on their way to the pennant. They won it by 12 games with a 103-59 record. The MVP of the Tigers and the AL was right-hander Denny McLain, who became the first pitcher to win 30 games in a season since the 1930s.
If the Tigers had beaten Oakland in the playoffs, Kaline would have been back in the World Series. But in the winner-take-all final game of the playoff series, Oakland snuck out of Tiger Stadium with a 2-1 victory.
Kaline had hits in 13 of his previous 15 games but he hadn’t homered since Sept. 18 off Boston’s Reggie Cleveland, his 13th of the season. Houk said: “With a hitter as great as he is, you don’t send him back out there when he says he’s had enough. I think I owed Al that much.” Kaline was first a pitcher. That made sense, because his father and grandfather were catchers. “My grandfather was a bare-handed catcher in the old Eastern Shore League,” Kaline said on his first day in the big leagues. “And my father was an amateur catcher around Baltimore.”
In his first full season, 1954, Kaline took over as the Tigers’ right fielder. By mid-1955, when he became eligible to be sent to the minors, he was starting in the All-Star Game and was on the way to the batting title. Plus, his team finished with a winning record.
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