Free Terror in the City of Champions by Tom Stanton Page A

Burns. They had Walker trapped, so Greenberg headed toward third to take the pressure off Walker. Greenberg got caught in the rundown and the speedier Walker advanced to second. Moments later, Browns pitcher Jack Knott wheeled around and picked Walker off second base. Two sloppy base-running errors cost the team its best shot. The Tigers lost 4–3 in ten innings. New York regained first.
    Walker’s carelessness flabbergasted reporters. One called him “the chief squanderer” and singed him for “his characteristic crack-pottery” and for acting as foolishly “brave as the boy on the burning deck.” Another criticized him as “dizzy.”
    Cochrane was livid. After the game he raged in the dugout. He carried his anger into the clubhouse and then sequestered himself in his hotel room that evening, not leaving until lunch the next day. He had worked so hard to tame Walker in spring training. And now this? Twice in one inning? Of a tied game? With first place on the line? Cochrane suspended Walker and ordered him out of uniform. Walker watched the next day’s doubleheader from the stands in street clothes. Afterward, on Cochrane’s command, he boarded a train back to Detroit as the team headed to Cleveland.
    “All I wanted to do is to get that fellow out of my sight in a hurry,” Cochrane fumed. “I’m through with that fellow. I’ve done everything I could to help him. Everybody has tried to help him. And then he goes and kicks away a ball game through reckless, stupid blundering. It would not be fair to the other players to keep a fellow of Walker’s type around.”
    Cochrane wanted to send him to the minor leagues as punishment, but Browns manager Rogers Hornsby said he would claim Walker, which forced the Tigers to either give up on him entirely or take him back. They didn’t decide instantly. Walker’s wife, with their small sons, picked him up at the train station. He was in a somber mood. He headed home, changed into a dress shirt, and went quickly to the ballpark to meet with Frank Navin, where he apologized profusely and promised to be more cautious if given another chance. The decision would be Cochrane’s, and he wouldn’t make it until he came back to town, Navin said. Walker headed down to the field and worked out “like a freshman footballer anxious to get in shape for the opening of the season,” wrote Tod Rockwell of the Free Press .
    The Tigers returned home for a July 4 doubleheader. Thirty-eight thousand fans packed into and onto Navin Field. Among them, with a fedora tilted over his left eye, was Gee Walker, whose request to suit up had been rejected by Cochrane. “I guess I had it coming,” Walker said. In the outfield a mass of fans stood in front of the fences and sometimes made way for the fielders when balls were hit in their direction. Police on horseback patrolled the grounds, pushing back the men in their straw hats and the children in their shorts as they encroached on the territory. Navin Field had not seen such a crowd in half a decade. It had been a long time since the Tigers found themselves in the heart of a pennant race. A mania was beginning to percolate throughout the city.
    After the Independence Day doubleheader—one win, one loss—Cochrane brought the team together for a private clubhouse meeting. He put the decision in the players’ hands: Give Gee Walker another chance or cut him loose? By secret ballot they voted him back onto the team. Walker was made to apologize to his teammates, serve out a ten-day suspension, and pay a twenty-dollar fine. The experience deflated him. He was, one witness said, “thoroughly chastened,” the “saddest man” in the dugout, and “fighting off a severe case of the blues.”
    The next day, an off day, saw Cochrane, Walker, and the rest of the team at the horse races at the Michigan State Fair Grounds.
    Perhaps Dayton Dean was there. He lived just blocks away.

The Little Stone Chapel
    Heinrich Pickert took over as Detroit