Milt Wilcox 1983 Donruss #155

For one day, Milt Wilcox was nearly perfect. Pitching for the Detroit Tigers against the Chicago White Sox on April 15, 1983, Wilcox retired 26 batters in a row. He was just one out away from a perfect game when pinch-hitter Jerry Hairston hit a clean single through the infield. Wilcox retired the next batter and had to settle for a one-hit shutout.  

Wilcox’s 1983 Donruss card features a really cool photo of him. He has a look of grim determination on his face as he’s just delivered a ball to the plate. The crowd in the background is blurred and out of focus. I’m a sucker for that type of sports photography, where the player is in focus, but the background is blurred and indistinct. It’s sort of a visual metaphor for how I imagine sports must be for professional athletes—the crowd fades into the background; what’s in focus is only what is right in front of you. All that matters is getting this batter out.  

The back of Milt Wilcox’s 1983 Donruss card also features one of my favorite random facts. After recapping some of Wilcox’s career, the final sentence tells us: “Once raised chinchillas during off-season.” What?? Was there a Milt Wilcox Chinchilla Farm? Why did he only raise them once? Are chinchillas that troublesome or unprofitable? I have so many questions.  

Rediscovering this baseball card made me think more about Milt Wilcox’s career. Wilcox had a 16-year career in the major leagues, finishing with a career record of 119-113. He never won 20 games in a season; he was never an All-Star. He was just a gamer who battled arm and shoulder injuries throughout his career. Wilcox had a taste of glory at the very beginning of his career, as he first came up with the Cincinnati Reds at the end of the 1970 season. He won a game in the NLCS against the Pirates and pitched in two games in the 1970 World Series. But after that promising start, Wilcox was traded to the lowly Cleveland Indians. Wilcox spent the entire 1976 season in the minor leagues. His fortunes started to turn around when the Tigers purchased him from the Chicago Cubs in June of 1976. His major league record at that point was a pedestrian 22-30.  

Wilcox recovered some of his arm strength during the winter of 1976-77 through bowling. By the time spring training started, his arm finally felt healthy again. In June 1977, Wilcox was called up to the Tigers and appeared in his first major league game in two years. In 1978, Wilcox won 13 games, his first time in double digits for a season. He threw 16 complete games, pitching a career-high 215 1/3 innings. From 1978 to 1983, Wilcox won between 11 and 13 games every season. Wilcox was the Tigers’ union representative during these years, including during the 1981 baseball strike. After the 1981 season, Wilcox suffered what his 1982 Donruss card called a “career-threatening” injury, as he sprained ligaments in his right index finger during a charity basketball game. Fortunately, Wilcox healed over the offseason.  

In 1984, Wilcox and the Tigers had an amazing season. The Tigers opened the season with a 35-5 record and never looked back. Wilcox won his first 6 decisions. Wilcox was pitching through an immense amount of pain—he later revealed that he received 7 cortisone injections in his shoulder during that season. Wilcox slowed down during June, and after a loss to the White Sox on July 4, 1984, his record stood at 8-6. Wilcox was on fire for the rest of the year, as he went 9-2 in the second half of the season, to finish with a record of 17-8. Wilcox had won the deciding game of the 1970 NLCS that sent the Reds to the World Series, and in 1984 he threw 8 shutout innings, beating the Kansas City Royals to send the Tigers to the World Series. Wilcox joked that he couldn’t wait for the 1998 postseason, to continue his trend of winning a Championship Series every 14 years. In the 1984 World Series, the Tigers and the Padres split the first two games in San Diego. Wilcox started Game 3 in Detroit, the first World Series game in the city since 1968. He threw 6 innings, scattering 7 hits and giving up just 1 run, as the Tigers won, 5-2. The Tigers won the next two games to win the World Series.  

After his triumph in Game 3 of the 1984 World Series, Milt Wilcox won just one more major league game. He missed most of the 1985 season and signed as a free agent with the Seattle Mariners for 1986. In 13 games with the Mariners, Wilcox went 0-8 with a 5.50 ERA. The Mariners released him in mid-June. But the competitive fire was still there. Wilcox had a tryout with the Giants in 1988, which didn’t lead to him being signed. In 1989, Wilcox pitched for the St. Petersburg Pelicans of the Senior Professional Baseball Association and had a fantastic season, going 12-3 with a sparkling 3.19 ERA. Wilcox was 3-1 in 1990 when the league folded, bringing his professional baseball career to an end. Wilcox’s baseball career began in 1968, a pretty remarkable run.  

While researching Milt Wilcox’s career for this article, I discovered that Milt Wilcox said he had no superstitions. It was just a coincidence that he ate blueberry pancakes on the days that he started and never stepped on the foul line. I appreciate someone with a sense of humor like that.

Milt Wilcox is just a great baseball name. When I was a kid collecting baseball cards, there were players I was just drawn to because they had cool names: Julian Javier, Mike Lum, Bill North, Kurt Bevacqua, Chris Chambliss. Milt Wilcox had a cool name. He was a player whose cards I would buy when I found them in the commons bin. I doubt that I’m related to Milt Wilcox, but my great-grandmother's maiden name was Wilcox, so maybe that accounted for some of my affection for Milt Wilcox.  

Finding this baseball card yesterday was a great reminder that a baseball card set is really 600 or 700 individual stories, each with their own points of interest.  

Book Review: A Night to Remember, by Walter Lord (1955)

Walter Lord’s 1955 book A Night to Remember, about the sinking of the Titanic, is a classic about the doomed ocean liner. Lord interviewed numerous survivors and highlighted their stories in brief vignettes. At around 160 pages long, A Night to Remember is a quick and propulsive read. A Night to Remember is well-written, and Lord did a marvelous job of threading together so many different accounts and points of view.  

Lord starts the book as the fateful iceberg is sighted. The limitation of Lord’s decision to start the book at that moment is that we lose the opportunity for more scene setting. The reader can’t really differentiate very much between the characters, and there’s less of a connection to the characters, since you don’t meet them until the disaster starts. This kind of scene setting was perfected with 1970’s disaster movies, where you learn before the disaster starts who’s on the brink of getting divorced, and which adorable elderly ladies have stowed away without a ticket.  

In comparison, I just read Jonathan Mayo’s 2016 book Titanic: Minute by Minute, which begins 24 hours before Titanic hit the iceberg, so there’s plenty of time to soak up the rhythm of life on the ship before the tragedy ensues. And learn crazy little facts like the bugler played the song “The Roast Beef of Old England” in all three dining rooms to announce that meals were being served.  

Lord’s writing style is straightforward and highly readable, but A Night to Remember is quite dated in how women’s names are handled. Married women are referred to only by their husband’s name, so the unsinkable Molly Brown becomes Mrs. J.J. Brown. It’s very outdated, and honestly, the women’s names should just be updated. I know, that’s changing what the author wrote, but A Night to Remember is now 70 years old, and times change. And I’d like to know what these women’s first names were.  

Curiously, in A Night to Remember, Lord did not depict the Titanic breaking apart as it sank. (Survivors’ testimony differed on this account, but the discovery of the wreck, 30 years after Lord’s book was published, proved definitively that the ship broke apart.) Survivor Jack Thayer’s privately printed account of the sinking stated that the ship broke apart. Lord must have read Thayer’s account, so I’m not sure why Lord didn’t at least raise the possibility of the Titanic breaking apart.  

One section where A Night to Remember is very strong is Lord’s understanding of the class issues surrounding the sinking of the Titanic. He writes: “the New York American broke the news on April 16 with a lead devoted almost entirely to John Jacob Astor; at the end it mentioned that 1,800 others were also lost.” (p.91) I’m not sure who was more clueless, the New York American or the Evening Sun who ran a headline: ALL SAVED FROM TITANIC AFTER COLLISION. “The story reported all passengers transferred to the Parisian and the Carpathia, with the Titanic being towed by the Virginian to Halifax.” (p.139) If only Titanic had been so lucky.  

Lord writes: “the Titanic also marked the end of a general feeling of confidence...For 100 years the Western world had been at peace. For 100 years technology had steadily improved...Before the Titanic, all was quiet. Afterward all was tumult.” (p.95) That might be an overstatement, but it’s hard not to feel as though the sinking of the Titanic was the last gasp of the Victorian and Edwardian Age, a harbinger of the chaos that would erupt when World War I broke out in 1914. In F. Scott Fitzgerald’s 1934 novel Tender Is the Night, the main character Dick Diver says while exploring a World War I battlefield, “All my beautiful lovely safe world blew itself up here with a great gust of high-explosive love.” (p.72) The post-World War I era would bring about a time of great uncertainty and many changes, as Fitzgerald chronicled in his writings.  

It’s hard to imagine future generations displaying the sangfroid of millionaire Benjamin Guggenheim, who helped numerous women and children into lifeboats, and appeared on the boat deck in full evening dress with his secretary. Guggenheim said, “We’ve dressed up in our best, and we are prepared to go down like gentlemen.” He told a steward, “If anything should happen to me, tell my wife in New York that I’ve done my best in doing my duty.” Guggenheim died in the sinking, and his body was never recovered.  

A Night to Remember is an excellent book about one of the great tragedies of the 20th century.