Summer of ’68: The Season that Changed Baseball—and America—Forever by Tim Wendel (review)

I came to Tim Wendel’s Summer of ’68 expecting a nostalgia trip, and I was not disappointed. I had been disappointed by Wendel’s previous book High Heat, a desultory search for the fastest of fastballs. But I like his novel Castro’s Curveball, an entertaining semi-fantasy set, like Summer of ’68, in more innocent times. I was certainly innocent in 1968. I was nine years old. It was the first baseball season I followed with conscious clarity from start to finish, complete with baseball cards, box scores, and Who’s Who in Baseball. Could Wendel recreate that magic summer?

It was a highly unusual summer, both for baseball and for America. I have had to remind myself ever since that pitchers don’t win thirty games every year (Denny McLain) or record era of 1.12 (Bob Gibson), and that the fabric of American life isn’t annually threatened by war, assassination, riots, and bizarre Presidential elections. Wendel conveys the improbable qualities of 1968, and its importance as a cultural watershed.

In some ways, Summer of ’68 is as desultory as High Heat. Transitions among the different strands of the baseball narrative are loose. Politics and other sports make random appearances. The story of the ’68 season was told more analytically by William Mead in Two Spectacular Seasons (1990), with an emphasis on the Year of the Pitcher. Wendel addresses the dominance of pitching in 1968, but it’s a secondary theme. His main interest is in the two clubs that drove toward a World Series showdown, the St. Louis Cardinals and the Detroit Tigers. In particular, he examines what the Tigers meant to their strife-beleagueredcity.

Wendel weaves together original interviews, quotations from secondary sources, and press reports into a seamless narrative. This is a difficult literary task, and the technical quality of his execution is high. Summer of ’68 is not a book that reveals its author at work very much (High Heat is quite the opposite). Wendel makes only a rare appearance or two in his own voice, talking about his direct experience of people and places. For the most part, you are transported back to 1968 by the voices of the men who took part.

The heroes are predictable ones: Gibson, McLain, Mickey Lolich, Lou Brock. Wendel does find one unlikely angle in the perspective of Jon Warden. A rookie relief pitcher for the ’68 Tigers, Warden had just turned twenty-two when the World Series started, and had posted an era of 3.62 during the regular season, when anything over 3.00 was worse than average. He became the only player on either roster to sit on the bench for the entire Series. But he took his so-near/so-far brush with glory philosophically. Warden never again pitched in the majors, but has had a long career as a commentator and ambassador for the game. Wendel lets Warden tell his bullpen’s-eye version of things, providing a counterpoint to the oft-retold stories of the immortals.

The haphazard narrative of Summer of ’68 tightens notably when Wendel gets to the World Series, and the available distractions dissipate. From the time October begins, there’s just one story to tell. It’s a compelling story, and Wendel tells it like a master. After the 1967 and 1968 World Series, I imagined that every year would bring a nail-biting seven-game finish. It’s probably been good for my heart over my lifespan that few Series have taken such roller-coaster courses.

Though he tracks political events in the course of the 1968 baseball season, Wendel is cautious not to draw overly-fraught connections between events on and off the field. In this I think he’s quite right. In retrospect, 1968 was a year of dark events in America, some of which still cast shadows four decades later. But baseball continued to be played in full...