Detroit Tigers history was made 57 years ago today. It took seven hours

The New York Mets made headlines last week when they named Phil Regan their interim pitching coach. It was a move less notable for his qualifications — Regan did stints as pitching coach for the Mariners, Indians, Cubs and Team USA, and managed the Orioles for a season — and more for his age: Regan turned 82 back in April. Of course, the Michigan native (and Western Michigan alum) has a Detroit Tigers tie, too: He was the losing pitcher in the franchise’s longest game (by minutes), a seven-hour affair back on June 24, 1962 that ended in a 9-7 loss.

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(Full disclosure: The game actually clocked in at six hours, 59 minutes, but Joe Falls, writing for the Freep and serving as the official scorer, declared it an even seven hours. The man had a sense of poetry, even after working overtime at The Corner.)

The Tigers and Yankees took the field at 1:31 p.m. likely a bit weary from the day before, which had featured a doubleheader that lasted four hours, 50 minutes. 

The early action on Sunday looked like it, too, with the Yanks jumping to a 6-0 lead off Frank Lary, and the Tigers responding with three runs off Bob Turley, who got just one out before getting pulled. We don’t want to be here for seven hours ourselves, or even 6:59, so we’ll just hit the bullet points:

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♦ The Tigers tied it at 7-all in the sixth inning on a Rocky Colavito single.

♦ Neither teamscored again until Jack Reed — who didn’t even enter the game until the 13th — hit a two-run home run off Regan in the top of the 22nd inning. The homer was the first of Reed’s career. It came at 8:15 p.m., about a minute after Michigan law forced the concession stands at Tiger Stadium to close.

♦ The teams combined to use 43 players (21 Yankees, 22 Tigers), including an appearance by pitcher Don Mossi as a pinch-hitter for the Tigers in the 21st inning. (He struck out looking.)

♦ Regan — whopitched for 13 years and acquired the excellent nickname of “The Vulture” — probably shouldn’t have pitched; he had given up eight runs in three innings in the first game of the previous day’s doubleheader. But somebody had to, and Mossi was slated to start the next day.

♦ Yankees rookie Jim Bouton (who would go on to write one of the great baseball books, “Ball Four”) got the win with seven innings of shutout ball.

♦ Colavito went 7-for-10, but scored just one run and had one RBI. (Which is basically a week’s worth of work for a Tigers outfielder these days.)

♦ Five Tigers and seven Yankees went the distance, but few worked as hard as Hall of Famer Yogi Berra, who caught all 316 Yankee pitches, in just his third start at catcher that year. (Hall of Fame pitcher Whitey Ford recorded all 316 on paper, but writing isn’t nearly as hard as catching — trust us.)

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♦ The Tigers’ pitches went unnumbered, or at least unreleased. As Detroit pitching coach Tom Ferrick told the Freep afterward: “If we had a pitching chart I would have flushed it down the drain … what we need is a hitting chart.”

♦ The game finally ended on a flyout by Norm Cash at 8:30 p.m. — with Colavito on first, naturally.

♦ In all, 35,638 fans were in attendance, at least at the beginning, and most of them stuck around for the full show. That included young fan Michael Kern, who managed to sneak into the clubhouse with his father after the game. Of course, there was just one problem with that: his dad had told his mother, before the game, to start the barbecue after the seventh inning.

Whoops.

Of course, with all that, it still isn’t the longest game by innings in Tigers history. That would be a 24-inning marathon against the Athletics in Philadelphia on July 21, 1945. (The longest game in minutes in Comerica Park history, by the way, was a 330-minute, 14-inning 5-4 win by the Tigers over the Pirates on June 30, 2015.)

Oh, and the Tigers and Yankees weren’t done with each other yet. They were back at the park Monday afternoon for the fifth game of the series, which started at 1:33 p.m. That one went a little quicker, as the Yankees shut out the Tigers, 2-0, in just 2:24. Good thing, too: The Tigers had a scheduled doubleheader against Cleveland on Tuesday at Tiger Stadium.

Contact Ryan Ford at rford@freepress.com. Follow him on Twitter @theford. Read more on the Detroit Tigers and sign up for our Tigers newsletter.