Woodie Fryman: Forgotten Hero of the 1972 Detroit Tigers

He was a tobacco farmer, really. And how many of them play big league baseball? But Woodie Fryman might have been thinking that his days of a full-time purveyor of tobacco were drawing near, as he languished as the black sheep of the Philadelphia Phillies’ rotation in the summer of 1972. It’s a “What have you done for me lately?” business, pro sports is. Often, it’s lately, as in…oh, yesterday. And Fryman hadn’t done much good for the Phillies for a whole bunch of yesterdays as August ‘72 approached. If you’re sick of hearing about how the Tigers traded prospect John Smoltz for the aging, sourpuss Doyle Alexander in 1987, and of how Doyle was lights out helping the Tigers to the divisional title, then you’ve come to the right place. For before there was Smoltz-for-Alexander, there was cash-for-Fryman. Woodrow Thompson Fryman, the tobacco farmer from Ewing, Kentucky, without whom the Tigers may not have won the 1972 East D...