Set yer clocks to Eastern as the second half begins.
First pitch: 6:10 Central
Weather: National Weather Service still gutted, 50% chance of drizzle, 85°
Opponent’s SB site: Bless You Boys
TV: Twins TV. Radio: Motown was America’s answer to the British Invasion for sure
Detroit starter Sawyer Gipson-Long was a Twins draftee in 2019; the Twins traded him for reliever Michael Fulmer, who gave the team 24.1 decent-enough innings in 2022. He’s now played in eight MLB games in his career, so we won’t be doing Stats. He throws in the low 90s with a sinker, slider and change.
Nice story, from The Athletic: when Gipson-Long was nine, his Little League umpire took notice of the kid and told him “when you get to high school, come find me.” That umpire, Greg Robinson, would help drive him to games or unlock the playing field for Gipson-Long to practice late when his mom was at work. When he made his debut last year, his mom was there, and Robinson was there. And they all thanked Twins scout Jack Powell for giving Gipson-Long his shot.
We won’t be doing the great Willie Horton this time around. Maybe next time! Alas, the YouTube audio of Horton doing a Detroit youth city services PSA to the tune of the Supremes’ “The Happening” has been pulled down on YouTube, for now. I promise it will proudly return, some day! We’ll go with today in baseball history:
In 1963, “Tigers’ first baseman Norm Cash plays an entire game without recording a put out in the team’s 10-6 loss to the Twins at Minnesota’s Metropolitan Stadium. Six strikeouts, sixteen balls caught in the air, and two fielder choices account for the 24 outs made by the home team.”
Huh, that’s weird. Had it happened before? Did it happen again? I dunno, and don’t care. But I did look into who this Norm Cash fellow was. Quite a character, in fact.
in 2014, our friends at Bless You Boys ranked the top Tigers of all-time, and Norm Cash was #14. Ahead of Horton and Jack Morris. He’d spent a small part of two seasons with the White Sox before they traded him to Detroit for a guy who flamed out; he played 15 years for the Tigers and amassed 52.0 bWAR, mostly at first base.
In 1961, Cash had a RIDICULOUS stat line: .361/.487/.662. Which is NUTS. No, he never did it again. (His career OPS was .862, though, which is pretty darn good.) Cash knew he’d probably never do it again. “Even at the time, I realized that. Everything I hit seemed to drop in, even when I didn’t make good contact.”
(He later admitted he’d been using a corked bat… although it’s fairly likely that corked bats, at best, give players a psychological boost more than a physical one.)
Still very good without his magic feather and remarkable 1961 baBIP luck, Cash was known for being a clubhouse favorite, the guy whose good cheer rubbed off on everybody. Teammate Jim Northrup believed Cash and Brooks Robinson had more fun playing baseball than anybody he’d ever seen. Al Kaline said just the mention of Cash’s name brought a smile to his face.
Partially because Cash was quite the jokester. One time, caught in a rundown between first and second, he stopped and made the NBA/NFL hand signal for “time out.” Another time, he gave an ump a pair of novelty glasses with little windshield wipers. After rain delays, if he’d been on base, he’d try sneaking to the next base when play was resumed; he never got away with it, but one time, when he was asked to explain himself, he said he stole it during the rainstorm. And late in his career, facing Nolan Ryan pitching a no-hitter, Cash came to the plate with a table leg he’d removed from an old clubhouse table. He told the ump “why not, I won’t hit him anyway.” The ump made Cash get a real bat, he struck out, and saId to the ump, “see, I told ya.”
Cash was also great about charity events. Here’s a quote from Vintage Detroit: “‘Normy was one of the top five ballplayers, as far as human goodness was concerned,” Lindell A.C. owner Jimmy Butsicaris once said. “He’d think nothing of taking a few balls down to Children’s Hospital and autographing them for kids. When it came time to speak at some charity dinner, Norm was always there. He wasn’t like a lot of these other guys, where the first thing out of their mouths was ‘How much?’ Ol’ Normy just said, ‘Where and when?’ when it came to giving to other people.”’
Now, who was Jimmy Butsicaris? A bar owner; Lindell A.C. was a beloved Detroit sports bar. Because that’s another famous thing about Norm Cash. The guy had a battle with the bottle, as they say. A pretty severe one.
Denny McLain said Cash was a “medical miracle,” wondering “how he managed to remain upright” on the field, and suggested he should donate his body to the Mayo Clinic. Teammates appreciated how he knew all the best bars in every American League city. Cash was routinely tardy for pre-game prep. He “could not make 9:00 AM workouts because he threw up until 10:00 AM.” In his 40s, Cash enjoyed the wee hours with Billy Martin (and if you’re keeping pace with Billy Martin, that’s a risky proposition).
As you get older, alcohol can take more of a toll (and I’ve got literal scars from when I foolishly hit Billy Martin-esque levels). And it did for Cash; he had a massive stroke in 1979. Amazingly, he was able to recover his mental/verbal agility, although this didn’t last for long; in 1983, he had to give up baseball broadcasting, which he’d been doing for a few years.
Despite all this, Cash did a lot of beer ads. There are SO, SO many Norm Cash beer ads for sale on eBay. There’s Cash with Tommy Lasorda, Cash with future Best in Show actor Fred Willard, Cash with Mickey Mantle AND comedian Norm Crosby AND basketball legend Walt Frazier (misidentified by the seller as boxer Joe Frazier)… so many more. But we’ll go with the ventriloquist Willie Tyler, plus, leprechauns. Because I said so, that’s why.
And, naturally, a Miller Lite TV ad, from 1984:
Two years after that ad, in 1986, the bottle did Cash in. He’d been out to dinner with his wife and friends at the Shamrock Bar on Beaver Island in northern Lake Michigan (the Shamrock’s still around, BTW, and Beaver Island has some Very Odd history). Cash had been drinking, and wandered out to the dock, in his cowboy boots, to check something on his boat. He slipped, cracked his head, and fell into the water, where he was found.
All-in-all, not a bad way for a hard-partying man to go — if he was single. Cash had a family. His son committed suicide the following year.
Well, that’s a really awful tale. Sorry. Here’s some more of Norm Cash, the non-awful edition:
His nickname was “Stormin’ Norman,” both for his hard-living and hard-playing style. (He was a max-effort player but not a dirty or a mean one; take that, Pete Rose.) Cash, kinda dumbly, refused to wear a batting helmet. Older guys who didn’t want to wear protective helmets were allowed to keep the old style; when Cash left baseball, he was one of the last three guys who batted in a cloth cap. In 1960, Cash had 428 plate appearances and never hit into a double play; that hadn’t been done before (so far as we know), and only Carlos Correa has managed it since, with no grounding into a double play EVER in his whole life. Not even in grade school. Look it up, I dares ya.
In the 1968 World Series, Cash was the Tigers’ rah-rah guy. After they fell behind St Louis 3-1, Cash was telling the locker room, “We got ‘em right where we want them. They’re so tight over there… This is gonna be great for us.” In Game 7, facing the fearsome Bob Gibson, the game was scoreless in the seventh when Cash’s single started the go-ahead rally. They’d win the game 4-1. (Cash batted .385 in the Series.)
So… definitely a flawed guy. But a good player, and a friendly person. Bruce Markusen at the HOF wrote that Cash’s flaws “‘shouldn’t detract from the legacy of a player who was beloved by his team’s fan base, and universally liked by his teammates. As former Tigers pitcher Jerry Casale told sportswriter Maxwell Kates, “on a team with so many friends, there was no one nicer than Norm Cash.”’
And I’ll raise a toast to that. But not too many toasts!
