B18 OTHE GLOBE AND MAIL | WEDNESDAY,APRIL8,2020
A
l Kaline, one of baseball’s finest hitters and defen-
sive outfielders whose Hall of Fame career
spanned 22 seasons with the Detroit Tigers, died
on Monday at his home in Bloomfield Hills, Mich.
He was 85.
His son Mark confirmed the death. No specific cause was
given.
Mr. Kaline lacked the charisma of a Mickey Mantle or a
Willie Mays, and he played on only one World Series cham-
pionship team, but he was among baseball’s premier fig-
ures of his era.
He became the youngest batting champion in major
league history in 1955 when he hit .340 at the age of 20. He
had 3,007 career hits, the 12th player to reach the No. 3,000
milestone, and he hit 399 home runs, a Tiger record.
Renowned for his powerful arm, Mr. Kaline won 10 Gold
Glove awards for his play in right field and sometimes in
centre. He set an American League record for outfielders by
playing in 242 consecutive games without an error. He
played in 2,834 games from 1953 to 1974, the most of any Ti-
ger, and only Ty Cobb equalled his 22 years with the team.
Mr. Kaline was a perennial all-star, and in 1980 he be-
came the 10th player inducted into the Baseball Hall of
Fame in his first year of eligibility.
Billy Martin, his manager late in his career, referred to
Mr. Kaline as Mr. Perfection, but his achievements came in
the face of twin obstacles. He encountered the pressure of
comparisons with Cobb, one of baseball’s greatest players,
and he had been hampered since childhood by the bone
disease osteomyelitis.
“When you talk about all-around ballplayers, I’d say Ka-
line is the best I ever played against,” the Baltimore Orioles’
Hall of Fame third baseman Brooks Robinson told United
Press International in September, 1974, as Mr. Kaline ap-
proached his career’s final days.
Albert William Kaline was born on Dec. 19, 1934, into a
working-class family in Baltimore that was determined to
see him become a major league ballplayer. His father, Ni-
cholas, two uncles and a grandfather had been semi-pro
catchers on Maryland’s Eastern Shore.
“Even though my family could have used the money I
might have made at odd jobs, my father would never let me
earn a dime,” Mr. Kaline once told The Detroit News. “I nev-
er had to take a paper route or work in a drugstore or any-
thing. I just played ball.”
When Al was eight years old, doctors removed two inch-
es of bone from his left foot to ease his osteomyelitis, leav-ing scars, a deformity and discomfort when he took the
field. But that didn’t deter the young Kaline, who some-
times played for five teams at the same time in Baltimore.
“I’d play a game in one end of town, then my father or
uncle would drive me to another game,” he recalled. “I
would change uniforms in the car on the way. Sometimes
I’d play three games in a day. I never got enough.”
Mr. Kaline signed with the Tigers in June, 1953, a few days
after graduating from Southern High School in Baltimore,
where he batted over .400 in three of his four seasons. He
never spent a day in the minor leagues.
He was soon a fixture in Detroit, sometimes known sim-
ply as Six, for his number. At 6 feet 2 inches and a trim 180
pounds, he lacked the classic mould of many a power hit-
ter. But he squeezed rubber balls to strengthen his hands
and relied on superb timing and his study of pitchers out of
his right-handed stance. He hit .300 or better seven times
between 1955 and 1963.
Mr. Kaline finally reached the World Series in 1968, when
the Tigers played the St. Louis Cardinals. He had broken an
arm when he was hit by a pitch in late May, sidelining him
for six weeks, and Jim Northrup had replaced him in right
field. But Mr. Kaline got his batting form back late in the
season, and manager Mayo Smith moved Mickey Stanley
from centre field to shortstop for the Series in place of the
light-hitting Ray Oyler, switched Northrup from right field
to center and put Mr. Kaline in right.
In Game 5, with the Tigers down three games to one and
trailing in the game by 3-2, Kaline delivered a two-run sin-
gle that gave the Tigers the lead, and they went on to win in
seven games behind the pitching of Mickey Lolich and
Denny McLain. Kaline hit .379 for the Series with two home
runs and eight runs batted in.
He reached the postseason only one more time, when
the Tigers lost to the Oakland A’s in the 1972 AL Champion-
ship Series. Mr. Kaline had a .297 career batting average,
with 1,582 runs batted in and 1,622 runs scored.
After retiring as a player, he was a long-time commenta-
tor for the Tigers’ television broadcasts and then a special
assistant in the team’s front office. When Detroit played its
last game at Tiger Stadium, in September, 1999, Mr. Kaline
brought the lineup card to home plate, receiving a stand-
ing ovation. He is honoured with a bronze statue behind
the centre-field wall at Comerica Park, where the Tigers
play today.
In addition to his son Mark, he leaves his wife, Madge
Louise (Hamilton) Kaline; another son, Mike; and four
grandchildren.NEWYORKTIMESNEWSSERVICELIFETIMETIGERSET
MLBMILESTONES
Over22seasonswithDetroit,hebecametheyoungestbattingchampion
andsettheclub’shome-runrecorddespitewinningonlyonechampionshipHallofFamebaseballplayerAlKaline,seenin1953,hada.297careerbattingaverage,with1,582runsbattedinand
1,622runsscored,numbersheachieveddespitesufferingabonediseaseinchildhood.ASSOCIATEDPRESSALKALINE
BASEBALLPLAYER,85RICHARDGOLDSTEINOBITUARIES
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SendusamemoryofsomeonewehaverecentlyprofiledontheObituariespage.
PleaseincludeIRememberinthesubjectfieldA
fter earning a doctorate at
the University of Natal in
Durban, South Africa, in
1994 while raising two young chil-
dren, Gita Ramjee was exhausted.
Her thesis had been on kidney
diseases in children – she had
worked in a pediatrics ward at a
hospital – but she took a job on a
small research project in a differ-
ent field, since it promised a less
frantic pace. It was a life-changing
choice.
The research involved whether
a vaginal microbicide was useful
against AIDS, which was rampant
in South Africa. The research put
her in contact with sex workers,
who told chilling stories of eco-
nomic hardship, high-risk beha-
viour and men who were indiffer-
ent to using protection.
“It opened my eyes,” Ms. Ram-
jee told The Guardian in 2007.
“That’s when I knew I wanted to
be involved in the prevention of
HIV infection in women.”
Ms. Ramjee became a leading
researcher on the AIDS epidemic.
On Tuesday another epidemic
claimed her: She died of CO-
VID-19, the disease caused by the
coronavirus, at a Durban hospi-
tal. She had become ill shortly af-
ter returning from a visit to her
sons in London, local news ac-
counts said. She was 63.
Ms. Ramjee was chief scientific
officer at the Aurum Institute in
Johannesburg, which battles
AIDS and tuberculosis and an-
nounced her death on its website.
She had previously been director
of the HIV prevention unit at the
South African Medical Research
Council.Those jobs put her at the
forefront of the effort to contain
AIDS, especially in eastern and
southern Africa, which has long
had the highest rate of HIV infec-
tion in the world.
Gita Parekh was born April 8,
1956, in Kampala, Uganda, to Dhi-
rajlal and Nirmala Parekh. After
Idi Amin, the Ugandan dictator,
forced Asians to leave that coun-
try, Ms. Ramjee finished high
school in India, where her family
was from, and then earned a
bachelor’s degree at the Universi-
ty of Sunderland in England.
There she met her future hus-
band, Pravin Ramjee, a South
African of Indian descent, and
they settled in South Africa in the
early 1980s.
“Gita was fundamental and in-
extricably linked to the endeav-
ors to find solutions to prevent
HIV in women,” Glenda Gray,
president and chief executive of
the council, said in a statement
on the organization’s website.
Winnie Byanyima, executive
director of UNAIDS, a global orga-
nization working on the issue,
called Ms. Ramjee’s death “a huge
loss at a time when the world
needs her most.”
In addition to her husband, Ms.
Ramjee leaves two sons, Shaniel
and Rushil Ramjee; a brother,
Atul Parekh; and three sisters, Ri-
ta Kalan, Asmita Parashar and
Reshma Parekh.
Ms. Ramjee recognized early
on that the response to AIDS
could not be simplistic, and that
the key was finding ways to give
women control in cultures and
communities that did not always
encourage that. Policy makers,
she knew, needed to understand
that the ABC approach, as it was
often called – “abstinence,” “be
faithful” and “condoms” – was
not enough, a point she made at
the annual International AIDS
Conference in 2006.
“I would like to believe HIV
prevention will be more than
ABC,” she told the conference.NEWYORKTIMESNEWSSERVICEResearcher
workedat
forefrontof
AIDScrisisin
SouthAfrica
NEILGENZLINGERGitaRamjeeGITARAMJEE
DOCTOR,63B
ruce was a wonderful writer and a wiz at analyzing
government and financial statistics, but what I re-
member most were two other fields in which
Bruce excelled.
We both landed at The Globe in 1984 and we each had
two sons about the same ages. In con-
versation, I told him in 1985 that I was
about to become a leader of a local Bea-
ver colony in a nearby church because
the boys (aged 5-7) needed someone to
run the junior Scouting movement.
Our older boys were of Beaver age and,
though Bruce didn’t live in the area, he
signed up Ned, as well as himself as a
leader.
Bruce told me of how the Beavers in
the Ottawa area went on overnight
campouts in the summer. I was enthu-
siastic about the idea of our colony do-
ing this too.
Scouts Canada, however, deemed
that the boys were too young for even a
single night camp away from their par-
ents. Even four or five leaders were too few for a colony of
24 boys, we were told.
Bruce and I refused to concede and called on the peo-
ple at Scouts Canada personally. The only way theywould allow us to take so many boys camping was if each
boy brought along a parent or guardian. Yikes – 24 boys
and 24 adults!
This was how Bruce and I ended up, with 22 other par-
ents, taking the whole colony for a weekend campout at a
location near Canadian Forces’ Camp
Borden, an hour north of Toronto. It
was a success and led to other similar
trips.
Back at the office, we also shared an
interest in “fantasy baseball,” then in
its nascent years.
Bruce made The Globe league a
great success by being statistician. Ev-
ery week he compiled the stats on the
25 players held by each of the eight
league “owners” and ranked the
teams on how well they were doing.
At a time when the sports network
ESPN was in its own early days, and the
internet was a glint in some people’s
eyes, the manual task of keeping the
numbers in eight statistical categories
on a total of 200 American League players was formida-
ble. Bruce actually had fun staying up late and doing this.PatrickMartin,TorontoBruceLittleIREMEMBER
BRUCELITTLE