Free Press columnist Jeff Seidel wrote last week about how a streak of Detroit Tigers visited a Sumatran tiger cub named Bakso, an internet sensation, at Disney’s Animal Kingdom. It’s not the first time a tiger cub has stolen the show during spring training. The following edited article first appeared on the website for Vintage Detroit Collection, which sells Detroit sports apparel in Plymouth and online.
Believe it or not, the Tigers won the 1984 World Series by the skin of their teeth. Forget the historic 35-5 start. Forget the wire-to-wire American League East championship. Forget the playoff sweep of the Kansas City Royals. Forget Kirk Gibson’s dramatic home run and just as dramatic celebration that doomed the San Diego Padres in Game 5. All that likely would not have been possible if the events on a sunny March morning at Lakeland’s Joker Marchant Stadium turned out differently.
All that likely would not have been possible if a baby tiger named Garfield had bitten down on the pitching hand of Milt Wilcox, a righty who in 1984 went 17-8, threw eight shutout innings in the 1-0 playoff clincher against the Royals and yielded one run over six innings in the 5-2 Game 3 victory over the Padres.
This is the backstory of a photograph taken during spring training in 1984. The photo was well known at the time. But it pretty much vanished from public view for the past four decades until popping up on the cover of a new book by Lance Parrish (with Tom Gage) called “The Enchanted Season: The Detroit Tigers’ Historic 1984 World Series Run and My Life as The Big Wheel.” (Check out a review of the book by longtime Free Press special writer Bill Dow at Vintage Detroit Collection’s website.) The photograph featured four crucial Tigers with a tiger cub: Parrish, the catcher; Lou Whitaker, the second baseman; Alan Trammell, the shortstop; Chet Lemon, the center fielder; and Garfield, the cute and cuddly cub with sharp teeth and sharper claws, which happened to be on Parrish’s neck. The photo was taken by Mary Schroeder for the Detroit Free Press to go with the cover story in the newspaper’s season preview section. The story carried this headline: “Real Tigers up the middle.” Written by beat reporter Bill McGraw, the story made the case that the 1984 Tigers had the strongest up-the-middle quartet in baseball. “Opinions about the Tigers might vary,” McGraw wrote, “but few quibble about the Fab Four. Their grace, speed, fielding and hitting give the team the game’s greatest strength in the place, according to Lemon’s tidy description, ‘where most of the balls are hit.’ “This valuable slice of the diamond is traditionally where good teams are at their best. It’s the area called ‘up the middle.’ … “No team in the major leagues is stronger there than the Tigers. And few teams in history have had middle-of-the-diamond groups with the stats and style to compare with what the Detroit quartet has produced over the past two seasons. “When you talk about the Tigers up the middle, you are talking Gold Gloves and .300 averages, 25 home runs and 100 RBIs. You are talking all-stars at every position, and you are talking about youth. None of them is 30.” Besides All-Stars, our backstory features a plethora of future Hall of Famers: Trammell and Gage (who covered the Tigers for the Detroit News from 1979-2015) in the Baseball Hall of Fame; Trammell, Whitaker, Parrish, Schroeder and Gage in the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame; and Schroeder, Gage and McGraw in the Michigan Journalism Hall of Fame.
Baby tiger for rent
When Schroeder arrived at Lakeland, Florida, for spring training in 1984, she sought out McGraw and his plans for a cover story. Then she pondered how to illustrate it. “There were all these different animal parks down there,” Schroeder told me. “And I called one, and they had a baby tiger.”
Like the best photographers, Schroeder’s ability to focus the lens on her cameras was the least important of her skills. She was creative and she was convincing. She hustled all over the gridiron or diamond or rink or court when covering a game. She found amazing ways to shoot features.
I still have no idea how she convinced Steve Yzerman, as a hotshot rookie, to let her shoot him doing laundry in his downtown apartment. Or how she convinced the Tigers’ top relievers to pose with a bull in a dirt pen. Or how she convinced Red Wings defenseman Dave Lewis to lie on the ground while she surrounded his head with 999 pucks and a final puck with “1000” written on it as he neared his 1,000th NHL game.
“Basically, I was just nosy,” she said summing up her career in a 2020 interview with Free Press columnist Mitch Albom. “I liked to learn about other people’s stories. I listened. You have to listen to people’s stories to know how to take the pictures.”
With a line on a baby tiger, Schroeder broached her concept with Trammell, Whitaker, Parrish and Lemon.
“I approached these four guys,” she recalled, “and they said yeah. … They liked the idea.”
Whitaker, however, never relished posing for the press during his career. Schroeder figured Trammell nudged his double-play partner to play along.
Blazing trails for women
Schroeder was a pioneer in sports photojournalism. She came to the Free Press as an intern out of Ohio University in 1979 and stayed for 40 years. In 1983, at age 25, she became the country’s only female photographer covering sports full time for a major metropolitan newspaper.
Two years later, she was the plaintiff in a lawsuit demanding the Lions allow male and female journalists equal access to locker rooms. Rather than go to court, the Lions eventually acquiesced.
Even if you never have heard of Schroeder, you know her work. She took the iconic photo of a wild and crazed Gibson celebrating his Game 5 home run against the Padres at Tiger Stadium. Schroeder was the only woman on the field in an army of photographers.
After his three-run game-clinching blast in the eighth inning off feared reliever Goose Gossage, Gibson thrust his fists into the air, circled the bases ever so slowly and blew kisses to the roaring crowd. Three Tigers, a batboy, an umpire, San Diego’s catcher and an orange-clad usher were waiting at home plate.
Gibson jumped, Marty Castillo — who had drawn a walk — jumped and they violently high-fived high in the air; Gibson exchanged a hard high-five with Parrish; and then Gibson and Whitaker shared a waist-high high-five. Gibson jumped again to high-five the batboy; when he landed and the batboy slapped him on the butt, Gibson’s batting helmet slid off.
Gibson glanced back at it for an instant, but then turned to face the Tigers’ dugout, took two steps, thrust his arms in air, did it again with a lateral hop, did it again with a bigger hop …
Got it! That’s the moment Schroeder caught on film that nobody else caught. It lasted maybe a second.
Gibson thrust his arms a few more times, hustled to the dugout and shared dozens of high-fives with his teammates. The crowd was berserk. Gibson looked like a wild man. His teammates were going crazy. Everyone knew the Tigers’ fourth world championship was in the bag.
For all that excitement and for all that emotion, none of the video and none of the stills captured it like the moment Schroeder had frozen in time. The NBC cameras missed it, showing Gibson from behind and from the waist up at the money moment. The wire services and Sports Illustrated missed it, catching Gibson’s actions but not from a full-frontal angle.
Schroeder had landed the most iconic Michigan sports photo of at least the last half-century. I’d argue it might be the best-known Michigan photo ever.
Schroeder’s photo has appeared in reprints, posters, books, T-shirts, TV broadcasts, documentaries and internet memes. It also led to an unexpected and lasting friendship between Schroeder and Gibson, who so often was surly and curt with the media in the 1980s.
“He was always great with me,” Schroeder told Albom in 2020. “With Kirk, I would say, ‘This is what I want to do.’ And he would say, ‘Yes, Mary. When?’”
Schroeder learned she had been elected to the Michigan Sports Hall of Fame on a pandemic-era Zoom call with Gibson.
Angst in the outfield
No Tigers fan will forget the famous exploits of October 1984. Back to the unpublicized photoshoot of March 1984. Schroeder said 40 years later “nobody was nervous” about having a baby tiger at the ballpark. As a courtesy, she even told Tigers president Jim Campbell about her plans; even he didn’t voice concern.
“Nobody was nervous at all,” Schroeder recalled. And she repeatedly said, “It was a baby tiger.”
Garfield the baby tiger arrived by a truck in a cage. Then he was walked on a leash to center field at Joker Marchant Stadium. The four players abandoned their daily routine to gather in the outfield. Garfield was friendly and playful. Other Tigers wandered over to check out the scene.
For the photo, Trammell stood in the middle with his hands behind his back. To his right stood Whitaker, resting an arm on Trammell’s right shoulder. To his left stood Lemon, resting an arm on Trammell’s other shoulder. Parrish crouched in front of his teammates and cradled Garfield, who no longer was on his leash.
In the money shot, Garfield extended his front right paw against Parrish’s throat.
At the time, McGraw stood behind Schroeder as she took her pictures. Forty years later, McGraw told me he couldn’t believe how nonchalant everyone was that million-dollar ballplayers were posing with a real tiger that at a moment’s notice could rip apart a uniformed Tiger.
The photoshoot took only a few minutes. And then it got weird.
“When we were done, Milt Wilcox put his pitching hand into the mouth of the tiger,” Schroeder recalled. “My eyes go wide. And I’m thinking, ‘Oh, God, what happens if the tiger chomps down? I’m gonna be forever banned. I’m gonna have to head north right now.’”
McGraw also couldn’t believe Wilcox’s recklessness. And he said Wilcox’s teammates admonished him at once and told him to cut it out. During his career, Wilcox notably dabbled in breeding chinchillas.
All’s well that ends well
Instead of spring training bloodshed in Florida, the Tigers held a parade down Woodward seven months later in Michigan.
The Fab Four up the middle, indeed, were real tigers that season. Lemon, Parrish and Whitaker started in the All-Star Game. Trammell was a reserve (behind Cal Ripken Jr.) but didn’t play because of right arm tendinitis. (Jack Morris and Guillermo Hernandez, then known as Willie, pitched in the game; manager Sparky Anderson coached third base in the American League’s 3-1 loss.)
Trammell hit .314 (fifth in the AL) with 14 homers and 69 RBIs, won a Gold Glove and was MVP of the World Series.
Parrish finished with 98 RBIs and 33 homers, breaking his record for an AL catcher, and won Silver Slugger and Gold Glove awards.
Whitaker hit. 289 with 13 homers and 56 RBIs and won Silver Slugger and Gold Glove awards.
Lemon hit .287 with 20 homers and 76 RBIs, and his .852 on-base plus slugging percentage trailed only Gibson’s .879 for the champs.
And Wilcox, at 34, gutted through the best season of his career, recording career highs in victories (17) and starts (33), his second-most strikeouts (119) and his fourth-most innings pitched (193⅔). He kept on the lowdown the searing pain in his right shoulder.
“We knew we had the kind of team you don’t put together very often, and we wanted to sweep everyone,” Wilcox told Dow for the Free Press in 2020. “I decided before the season that I wasn’t going to miss any starts. I started the year going 6-0 and ended up with 17 victories, the most in my career. I received seven cortisone shots that year.
“When I was in Kansas City for the start of the playoffs, my shoulder started bothering me again and I told Sparky. No one knew it, but the team flew me to Chicago … and I drove to Dr. Robert Teitge’s hotel room because he was there for a conference. He was waiting there to give me cortisone and Xylocaine injections. When I started the game to win the pennant, my shoulder felt brand new. I was really firing the ball, and I made it do everything I wanted it to do. …
“If we hadn’t won the Series in Game 5, I was going to get another shot because I was scheduled to pitch Game 6.”
After his World Series victory in Game 3, Wilcox won only one more major-league game. His shoulder gave out after eight starts in 1985 (1-3 with a 4.85 ERA). That December, after nine seasons and a 97-75 record in Detroit, the Tigers decided not to resign him because of his $550,000 salary, his age and his wrecked shoulder.
He latched on with Seattle for $150,000 but was released in mid-June with an 0-8 record and a 5.50 ERA. In his final game, asked to protect a one-run lead with two runners on and two outs in the top of the ninth inning against Chicago, Wilcox surrendered a two-run double to Carlton Fisk and a two-run homer to Harold Baines. The next batter — the last of Wilcox’s big-league career — hit a grounder to first baseman Alvin Davis, who tossed the ball to Wilcox covering for the inning’s final out. That put Wilcox close to an old nemesis, Jerry Hairston, who as a pinch hitter in April 1983, as the White Sox’s 27th batter, broke up Wilcox’s perfect game with a single to center.
In retirement, Wilcox regained a degree of notoriety after the turn of the century by starting with his son, Brian, Ultimate Air Dogs, a touring attraction in which canines of all breeds entered aquatic long-jump competitions.
“We had a place on Torch Lake, and I would throw tennis balls out into the water to Sparky, my Labrador retriever, who would run down the dock and dive into the water to get them,” Wilcox told Dow. “This one day I was watching ESPN and saw a dock-diving dog competition, so I decided to enter Sparky. After he won in his second competition, I got the bug. Purina paid $10,000 to sponsor him. It just took off from there. …
“I did name Sparky after Sparky Anderson, and he loved it. Sparky said to me, ‘Milt, I know why you did that. You can walk over and kick him in the ass and pretend he is me.’ I was at a golf outing with him, and he insisted that I go home and bring Sparky to him so he could have a picture taken with him. He said, ‘We have the two best Sparkys in the world right here.’ I treasure that photo.
“Believe it or not, my Sparky died on 11/11/11, and of course that was Sparky Anderson’s number.”
On April 20, 2025, Wilcox will celebrate his 75th birthday — still a righty.
Reprinted with permission of Vintage Detroit Collection.
Contact Gene Myers at gmyers@gannett.com. Follow him on X @GeneMyers.
After nearly a quarter-century as sports editor at the Detroit Free Press, Myers unretired to coordinate book and poster projects across the USA TODAY Network. He did biweekly blogs for Vintage Detroit Collection in 2024 as a retiree. His reading recommendation for this month: “Flying High,” a hardcover book on the Eagles’ Super Bowl championship from Delaware Online/The News Journal. Details at Fly.ChampsBook.com. Find more books and posters from the USA TODAY Network.
This article originally appeared on Detroit Free Press: How baby tiger nearly jeopardized Detroit Tigers 1984 World Series
