In June, Anderson accepted the job in Detroit, after turning down six others.

Jim Campbell, who had disagreed with Martin six years before, was the man who persuaded him. Houk had managed the Tigers from 1974 through 1978, and the talent flow had been restored. He told Anderson that Campbell was a good man to work for. Sparky, having learned his lesson, insisted on a five-year contract. Campbell, having learned his own lesson from Martin, had supplied Houk with one, and gave one to Sparky. And Sparky went about constructing the kind of staff he wanted. Dick Tracewski, a former Dodger infielder, was already there. Roger Craig came in as pitching coach. (He had already managed in San Diego.) Grammas, having been fired after two years of managing Milwaukee, had returned to Cincinnati and was at Atlanta in 1979. He came to Detroit in 1980.

It took them a while to put things together, but by 1983 they were in contention, losing out to Baltimore. Then, in 1984, they exploded: They won 35 of their first 40 games, the best start any major league team has ever had, wound up with 104, brushed aside Kansas City in 3 straight, and polished off the Padres in the World Series in 5 games.

Sparky was now the first manager in history to win a World Series in each league. The Tigers ran third the next two years, then finished first again in 1987, after a titanic final week in which they won the last 4 games from Toronto to finish 2 games ahead of the Blue Jays. But they were knocked out in the playoffs by Minnesota (which went on to win the World Series 4-1).

In 1988, they led the league most of the time into August, then hit a bad slump and injuries, and still made enough of a comeback to finish second, only 1 game behind Boston.

But the talent was thinning out. The 1989 Tigers came apart completely and lost 103 games.

Sparky had what amounted to a nervous breakdown, and it prompted a reevaluation of himself, which he described in the book he wrote when the season was over, Sparky!.

He called himself a "winaholic." It's great to want to want to win, he said, but not to the point where it becomes "an obsession hazardous to your health or the well-being of your family." He couldn't face that the weak team he happened to have couldn't be "willed" into winning; it was trying, but it was losing. He had never experienced this before. So he put in more and more effort in dealing with the press, making his charity and public relations appearances, and worrying about how to fix things. By May, he was at the point of physical collapse, and had to leave the team. He spent three weeks home in California learning to unwind. "I was trying to cram 48 hours into a 24-hour day," he wrote. "I actually believed Sparky couldn't lose. That was for other guys. I got footed. I can get beat."

He referred to Sparky in the third person because, he explained, it was an identity he manufactured over the years. It was a constantly upbeat, nonstop-talking, media-star personality quite different from the private George. It wasn't artificial, it was more like a split personality. He believed that part of his job was show business, that part of the enjoyment of the fans was display of enthusiasm. He considered Stengel the greatest showman baseball ever had, better even than Babe Ruth, and took any comparison as a compliment. Most of the comparisons arose when he tried his hand at radio broadcasting, in which he mangled grammar in the great tradition of Dizzy Dean and Casey while giving the listeners truly marvelous insights and witty observations. (He would do postseason games when his team wasn't in playoffs.) But the comparison was also made because of his winning record, and the obsession with winning finally made him sick.

He returned to the club, in early June, a calmer and saner man, and became -- by his own evaluation -- a better manager.

Evidentially he was. In the next two years, with a less talented roster than in the 1980s, he kept the Tigers in contention with Toronto and Boston, finishing third in 1990 with a 20-game improvement, and tied for second in 1991 with an 84-78 record.

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