Henning: Lemon added dynamic defense, personality to Tigers' 1984 championship team
Parallel memories came to mind Thursday as word arrived that Chet Lemon, one of those centerpiece stars from the Tigers’ last championship team, had died at 70.
First recollection:
Tiger Stadium. Center field. A ball is lofted high into the heavens somewhere within a square mile of Lemon’s post, which was to quarterback the Tigers outfielders and take primary responsibility for anything hit his – or maybe their – way.
He glided nimbly. Got quickly to his target area. He would turn. Snare the ball. Then, completing his choreography, would fling a silky throw to an awaiting infielder. Everything was done with confident grace — and trust from his teammates, manager, and, as many will attest, from his fans.
Second memory:
It’s the Tigers' clubhouse, anytime in the ‘80s. Lemon’s locker on the left side of the dressing room is tucked within that region of players (sardines?) squeezed amid metal and caging and too many bodies in too little space. Guys named Trammell, Whitaker, Gibson, Evans, Herndon, Bergman, Grubb, surround him, with Tigers coaches stacked to his immediate left.
Lemon is talking in a manner that sounds more like singing. He is warbling, in fact, in steady, excited, upbeat tones that match the light spilling from his face.
He is in constant supply of energy and zeal for playing baseball.
More: Chet Lemon, member of Tigers' 1984 World Series team, dies at 70
“Chester!” Sparky Anderson would holler from his office, a cramped cabin just around the corner from that coaches-players locker avenue.
Lemon would stop just outside the door and turn his head toward the skipper.
“I think I’m going to give you the day off, OK?”
Anderson would grin.
Lemon would begin laughing.
There was no way Anderson was sitting Lemon.
He was too valuable – more so than we appreciated back then, before sabermetrics arrived and brought crystal clarity to how a man’s overall skills, on defense and at the plate, could create a player of such vitality and importance, never more than during the Tigers’ wondrous World Series-winning season of 1984.
Lemon arrives in Motown
A quick statistical fact testifies to how latter-year numbers have helped us better understand Lemon:
➤ His career WAR (wins above replacement, as most know) is 55.6. That’s more than Kirby Puckett, David Ortiz, Hank Greenberg, or Joe Medwick – all Hall of Famers – totaled in their lustrous years.
➤ He had 6.2 WAR in 1983, and another 6.2 season in ’84 when the Tigers stole baseball’s show, wire to wire. He made an American League-record 512 putouts in 1977 when he was with his first team, the White Sox.
Everyone, it seemed, knew how good Lemon was. Except, perhaps, the team that had groomed him and watched him put together five consecutive seasons of .800-plus OPS and make two All-Star teams from 1977-81.
Lemon, born in Jackson, Miss., in 1955, was a first-round selection of the Athletics in 1972. He was traded to the White Sox in 1975, but Chicago decided Lemon was worth shipping to Detroit in a November 1981 deal for Steve Kemp, a left-handed bat and, uh, adequate outfielder. Kemp, for his career, had 19.5 WAR and only once (4.2), in 1979, had more than 3.8 in a single year.
One thing about that era of Tigers front-office generals.
They knew players. They knew skills. They knew which players would make them better. Jim Campbell was not as astute of an evaluator as the man who followed him, Bill Lajoie, but it was Campbell, then the Tigers’ vaunted general manager, who listened to scouts and assistants like Lajoie and knew when talents would match a team’s everyday needs.
Lemon was going to be tonic for a Tigers club that had gone through the toughest years of a rebuild and was perhaps only a year or two from being playoff dynamite.
“When they traded Kemp to Chicago, I questioned that move, just as I questioned a lot of our moves when we were building our ballclub,” Lance Parrish, the All-Star catcher during Detroit’s ‘80s heyday, said during a Thursday phone conversation hours after he had learned of Lemon’s death.
“What were we doing trading these guys like Kemp, who were the nucleus of our club? But what they were getting in Chet was a big piece of our puzzle, and he turned out to be way better than I thought, even though I’d been playing against him. Day in and day out, he proved to be a remarkable center fielder with a great gift for reading the ball.”
Think indeed of that up-the-middle strength Campbell/Lajoie loaded onto Detroit’s roster ahead of 1984.
Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker at short and second. Parrish at catcher. And, in center, galloping to his right, to his left, back to the 425-foot depths of center field — or in on a blooper that he so often managed to snag, the deft Chester Lemon.
You recall that catch, of immense disbelief, in Anaheim on a Sunday in July 1983, when he reached beyond the left-center fence and somehow came away with Rod Carew’s otherwise game-winning, 12th-inning home run.
'Always in a great mood'
You can, in fact, be so immersed in recalling Lemon’s defense that a person forgets he was – on balance – quite a hitter. Eight consecutive years, from 1977-84, he was .800-plus in OPS. His career on-base percentage, which was seldom discussed during an era when OBP wasn’t much of a topic, was .355.
He hit 44 homers, total, for the Tigers during the 1983-84 seasons.
It can get a tad sticky here, which is why Lemon’s status as a “great” outfielder is better explained via WAR than by the stead in which baseball’s graybeards of 40 years ago held him.
Lemon was famous – infamous, if you insist – for late-season hitting sprees that tended to compensate for offense that in earlier months perhaps was a bit beneath his supposed skill level.
Teammates understood, also, that there were times when Lemon might know that a pitcher who likely would have him for dinner was set to start and – coincidentally, for sure – a sudden physical issue might crop up.
But that, overall, was hyper-critiquing Lemon.
He was a dynamic, drive-train player in center for a team that needed him as outfield anchorman. He had an ebullience, also, about him that seemed resistant to pouts or to impatience with people.
He was a pleaser, no question, a man who loved to be liked. It is why his face, when Anderson would josh him, lit up like the Rockefeller Center Christmas tree.
“He came to the ballpark every day with that infectious smile,” said Parrish, who remains a Tigers special assistant. “Did I ever see that guy in a bad mood? When I got the news (Lemon’s death), my first thought, picturing him in my mind, was that he was always smiling, always in a great mood.”
Lemon knew, also, that Detroit’s baseball fans considered him bedrock on a team of immense historical distinction – the ’84 club, which, during an initial, dizzying, 35-5 run, straight through October’s march to a World Series parade, got part of its fury from the power-pack of a player and personality playing center field.
He could light up a clubhouse, you bet, Parrish acknowledged Thursday. But, as his teammate and up-the-middle partner behind home plate repeated, it was Lemon’s luminous ways in center that helped define a storybook era of baseball in Detroit.
Lynn Henning is a freelance writer and retired Detroit News sports reporter.
This article originally appeared on The Detroit News: Henning: Lemon added dynamic defense, personality to Tigers' 1984 championship team
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