I was nine that year and very disappointed our Little League trip to watch a game at Tiger Stadium was cancelled, especially since that was the year the Tigers won the pennant and World Series...Al Kaline, Jim Northrup, Norm Cash, Willy Horton, Mickey Lolich, Mickey Stanley, Earl Wilson, Dick Mcauliffe, Bill Freehan, Gates Brown...what a team!
I think I went to my first game a couple years later. My Grandpa’s company had excellent first base line box seats, maybe ten rows up.
The only time I went the Tigers scored a bunch of runs, heck I think even Don Wert hit one or 2 that day.
I lived just off 8 Mile, remember the military vehicles going up and down the street, the Huey's flying overhead, smoke in the distance...what a difference a year made between summer '67(riots)and summer/fall '68(World Series).
Off course, like everyone else has said, Detroit never really recovered...that is, the destruction, as well as the generational passed-on attitudes on race...all brought to you by your "friendly neighborhood demonrat party"...who likes to(in all urban areas)manufacture, then kick that hornets nests for it's political gain.
For them it's job security, maintaining it's entrenched power/corruption base...the Country/human element be damned.
The Tigers also went out into the crowd wearing their uniforms to help unite the city. This was between games of a Double Header. Mickey Lolich was also among the crowd in uniform. As he got called up by the National Guard in between games. They filmed scenes for the movie Detroit out of my Police Station in Malden, MA. When I told production staff the story about the Tigers. It was the first time they had heard it.
Great documentary on the 68 Tigers and what they meant to Detroit after the riots
A CITY ON FIRE: THE 1968 DETROIT TIGERS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N4TyqqoDA8Q
DET ran off with the pennant in '68 and won the WS, dethroning StL.
ff