The Glory Years of the Detroit Tigers: 1920-1950

Foreword by Dan Dickerson

Dan Dickerson f o r e w o r d The room above the garage in our house is affectionately called the“baseball room.” It’s a place where old copies of the Baseball Register sit on a shelf next to Bill James Baseball Abstracts, biographies, and baseball encyclopedias .And it’s a place where I can put some of my baseball memorabilia on display. One of my prized possessions hangs on a wall in that room: a gift from Ernie Harwell. It’s a picture of him as a young broadcaster with the Atlanta Crackers, conducting an interview with manager Paul Richards— recording it, which was quite a production back then. While Ernie stands in an aisleway next to Richards, a tall microphone stand between them, an engineer sits in front. His recording equipment takes up about four seats’ worth of space. This was an event. I love that picture. It captures everything I love about old black-and-white photographs. Especially black-and-white photographs of baseball. I guess it’s because of their timeless quality. For me, they have this incredible power to draw you in and instantly transport you to a place from long ago. Most baseball players from years past live on as a collection of numbers on a page. That’s how we know them—until you see a picture. Then they come instantly to life, as does the world they lived in. The old x Foreword become young again. And it sparks the imagination: What was it like to live then? What were fans like? What were the ballparks like? How good was the baseball? I can get lost in time looking at old baseball photographs. And that’s why I love this book. What Bill Anderson—one of our foremost chroniclers of Detroit Tigers history—has done with this book is extraordinary; it is something to be treasured. Bill has meticulously gone through some of the greatest collections of baseball photographs and picked out the very best featuring our beloved Tigers. He draws us in through those pictures, takes us back in time, and then—often in the players’ own words—tells us all about the people in those pictures. He has vividly brought to life three decades that stand as some of the most memorable in Tigers history,seasons that featured some of the biggest names and brightest stars Tigers fans have ever known. I don’t think “labor of love” even begins to describe this project. Not only has Bill combed through the Detroit News sports photo archives, he has mined the archives of the three Detroit daily papers of the day, as well as The Sporting News, to capture the feel of the era, to bring the games and the players to life, in real time. This truly was a remarkable era in baseball and in Tigers history. One world war had just ended. By the end of the era another had started, and— after exacting a terrible toll—ended.More than five hundred major leaguers served in World War II. The second player drafted was none other than Tigers Hall of Famer Hank Greenberg. And in the pages of this book, you will find Greenberg’s impassioned letter to the Detroit News vehemently denying reports he was“a man who didn’t want to go.”Others come to life through the letters they wrote during the war. The dead ball era officially came to an end,and offenses exploded—with power—in the 1920s and 1930s. The color line was broken two years after the war ended when Jackie Robinson debuted in April 1947. For the Tigers, the era brought four pennants, their first two world championships, and—incredibly—five MVP awards in the space of eleven years. Hall of Famers abounded. All the big names are here—from Cobb to Heilmann, Gehringer and Greenberg,Newhouser and Kell.We learn about the surprising managerial style of Ty Cobb—and the lasting relationship he forged with one of the truly great hitters in baseball history: Harry Heilmann.Through Bill,Heilmann tells us Cobb changed his hitting style completely in 1921,giving him Foreword xi confidence and a new swing.And a career .296 hitter went on to hit .366 for the rest of his career, which just happens to match Cobb’s career average. What Bill does so well is remind us that while it always helps...