The Detroit Tigers have been on my mind a lot this week. Not only are 8.5 games in front of the White Sox in the AL Central, but they look like they have a bona-fide Cy Young AND AL MVP in the form of Justin Verlander. As my friend Peter Schilling, Jr. sagely pointed out this morning, the three times the Tigers had a pitcher who won the MVP, the team won the World Series — 1945 (Hal Newhouser), 1968 (Denny McLain) and 1984 (Willie Hernandez). So, to paraphrase Bill Murray as Carl Spackler, at least we've got that goin' for us...
But along with my slowly-building excitement about the 2011 Tigers, echoes of their 70s past have been inevitably stirring in my brain. Maybe it's because today marks the 34th anniversary of the first time that Alan Trammell and "Sweet Lou" Whitaker took their places at shortstop and second base in a major league game (a 8-6 loss to the Red Sox at Fenway), thus setting in motion a double-play partnership that would last a record-setting 18 years.

Sweet Lou was one of my favorite players as a kid; Trammell less so, though I loved the way they worked together. Brought up in two very liberal households by parents who made it crystal-clear to me that racism was not to be viewed as anything other than utterly dehumanizing bullshit, I found the idea of two players — one black, one white — forming a perfect working partnership more than just appealing; in my mind, it was the way the world (or at least this country) was supposed to work. Maybe they hung out off the field, maybe they didn't; but day in and day out on the diamond, there was no doubt that they had each other's back.

But while today is the historic anniversary of two of the Tigers' most famous players to emerge from the 70s, it's also the birthday of one of their more obscure players from the decade. I'm talking about the late Reggie Sanders — not to be confused with the well-traveled 300-300 Club player of the same name. This Reggie Sanders made his MLB debut with the Tigers on September 1, 1974, just a few days shy of his 25th birthday. He'd already spent seven years toiling in the minors by this point, for both the A's and Tigers organizations, exhibiting some solid "pop" — 47 homers in his first two years of Class A ball — but also some questionable bat control (154 Ks in 482 plate appearances in '69). However, his '74 numbers for the Tigers' Triple-A franchise in Evansville (.292, 14 HR, 88 RBI) were good enough to warrant a September call-up.
Reggie played 26 games for the Tigers in September '74, starting all but one of them at first base. The glow of the Tigers' triumphs in '68 and '72 was fading quickly at that point; Al Kaline was DH-ing out his final season, and longtime first baseman Norm Cash had been given his release n August. (They traded Jim Northrup to Montreal the same day.) Mainstay catcher Bill Freehan, though only 32, played more games at first base that year than behind the plate, in order to keep his still-potent bat in the lineup, while going easy on his aching knees. But with Reggie's call-up, Freehan once again donned the "tools of ignorance," and Reggie took up his corner spot.

While he didn't blow anybody away, per se, Reggie did put up some pretty respectable rookie numbers that fall: .273 batting average, 7 doubles, 3 homers, and 10 RBI in 105 plate appearances. He homered in his first major league at-bat, off of no less than the great Catfish Hunter. (That's Freehan greeting him at the plate in the above pic.) He even had an 11-game hitting streak going at one point, including a 4-RBI performance on September 22 against the Brewers that almost single-handedly helped tag Clyde Wright with his 20th loss of the season. Sure, his OBP was only .308, and he walked only 5 times againes 20 whiffs — but he clearly held his own well enough at the plate (and with the glove, racking up a .987 fielding percentage) that manager Ralph Houk felt confident enough to send him out there every day. And hey, the cat had some killer sideburns...
And yet, no one in the Tigers organization apparently thought enough of Reggie to bring him back to the bigs in '75; instead, they traded him to Atlanta in exchange for rookie Jack Pierce, who would turn out to be one of the Tigers' six first basemen that season, a motley aggregation that including a running-on-fumes Nate Colbert. The 1975 Tigers went 57-102, the second-worst performance in franchise history. They couldn't have used a guy like Reggie Sanders?
Apparently, the woeful Braves had no use for him, either. After two solid seasons in the minors for Atlanta without ever once tasting the proverbial "cup of coffee," Reggie high-tailed it to the Mexican League for a year, then played out '78 in the Orioles and White Sox systems before packing it in. Seems like he deserved another chance in the bigs; but sadly, for some reason, he never got it. Not sure what Reggie did with the rest of his life, but it appears that he died in Los Angeles in 2002, at the age of 52. Rest in peace, man.
