Lefty reliever John Hiller (Scarborough, Ont.) had the career movies are made of … comeback kid from three heart attacks.

April 7, 2023

Movie should be made about Hiller’s comeback after three heart attacks on the same day in 1971

By Danny Gallagher

Canadian Baseball Network

It was a wintry day in February, 1962 and John Hiller dragged his younger brother Jim to Birchmount Stadium at the intersection of Kingston Road and Birchmount Road in Toronto’s Scarborough district for a special assignment.

John was there to meet up with Detroit Tigers scout Bobby Prentice, who was accompanied by a guy with a catcher’s mitt. Prentice wanted a final look-see of a future Detroit Tigers pitcher.

“In the middle of a ball diamond in the middle of winter, John was throwing balls to this guy with a catcher’s mitt,” Jim Hiller was telling this writer in an interview April 6 in advance of his brother’s 80th birthday on April 8.

“That was one of the final things they (Tigers) wanted to do,” Jim said. “This was their way to see if his arm was okay, if you know what I mean, before they signed him. In these days, they would do a physical. In those days, they didn’t do that.

“Probably they would have signed him shortly after that. The San Francisco Giants was another team interested in him. I would have been 12 or 13 when he signed. I’m 5 1/2 half years younger than John.”

Hiller’s dad Donald handled some of the negotiations that night at the Hiller home near Scarborough General Hospital when Prentice came to officially sign Hiller. Jim recalls his brother signing a “ridiculously low contract,” worth a “few thousand dollars.”

The official signing date, according to Baseball Almanac, was July 8, 1962. Hiller came from salt-of-the-earth folks. His father was of German-Polish blood, born in a small village in Saskatchewan north of Saskatoon and his mother Ethel, of English background, was a stay-at-home mom.

“Our dad owned two auto-body shops in downtown Toronto,” Jim said. “They were called Reliable Auto Body.”

The Hiller family had its early stakes in the Toronto suburb of East York before moving to Scarborough in 1954 when John was 11, which was around the time he started playing ball.

John attended David-Mary Public School and West Hill Collegiate Institute in Scarborough, specializing in track and field, when he wasn’t playing hockey or ball. He dropped out of school at the end of Grade 11 and the focus was on pitching.

Prentice had already known what Hiller could do because he had scouted him for several years prior to that throwing session at Birchmount Stadium. On Friday nights at Highview Park at the corner of Birchmount and St. Clair Ave., Hiller and a slew of all-stars -- the Scarborough Selects -- would match their skills with teams from Leaside, High Park, the Toronto Playground league and against top-flight teams Prentice brought in from Buffalo, Cleveland, Detroit, Rochester, N.Y. and Pennsylvania.

John Hiller wasn’t available for an interview but his brother Jim stood in as his designated spokesman.

“Some of these guys John pitched against had already signed pro contracts,” Jim said.

“When John pitched on these Friday nights, he was really interested in the next day when he could go fishing because there was no baseball on Saturdays and Sundays. John was a real character,” said Doug Kelcher, one of his Scarborough teammates.

When he wasn’t playing for Prentice on Friday nights, Hiller pitched on Mondays and Wednesdays in the Scarborough league for the Dependable Caterers-sponsored Highland Park team. In 1962, after signing with Detroit, he wore a Tigers hat given to him by Prentice.

Hiller’s teammates recall Hiller driving down the street in his convertible, honking the horn and waving his hands with great delight.

“He was really proud of that convertible,” said rival player Ernie Collins. “I played for Wexford and he played for Highland Park. He’d always want to come to our parties at my parent’s place after games because he said the parties were better than his team parties.”

Tom Flood remembers Hiller “could throw the ball really hard,” and that he was “head and shoulders above everybody else,” with his fastball and curve.

“Bobby Prentice used to call John a goaltender without equipment,” Flood said. “He was excellent. I played against him for four years and probably got only two hits off him. He had one of those crazy, unorthodox pitching styles. He had an unbelievable pitch, an overhand curve. In those days, we called it a drop ball.

“In those days, when you rated pitchers in Scarborough, Ken Cable was kind of everybody’s best guy but with Hiller, he would grab the ball and throw it,” Flood said. “With the curve, the catcher’s couldn’t catch it. With two strikes on the batter, the catcher was reluctant to call for the curve because the catcher couldn’t catch it.”

In one of those games Hiller’s team played on mid-week nights, he did the unthinkable: striking out all 22 batters he faced in a seven-inning game. The lefty missed a perfect game when the catcher mishandled a third-strike for a passed ball.

“There were stories in the Scarborough Mirror and the Toronto Star about that,” Jim Hiller said. “John was 17-18 years as a junior in the summer of 1961. That publicity might have brought the scouts out. They see this story, maybe embellished a bit, in the papers that he struck out 22 batters.”

Less than a year after he signed with Detroit, Hiller began his ascent to the majors by starting in the minors in 1963 at class-A Jamestown, N.Y. where he opened eyes with a 14-9 record.

In the ensuing years, he also pitched at class-A Duluth-Superior, Minn., double-A Knoxville, Tenn., double-A Montgomery, Ala., triple-A Syracuse, N.Y. and triple-A Toledo, Ohio, mostly in relief.

To give Hiller a taste of the major-league life, the Tigers brought him up for five games in 1965 and one game in 1966. Near the end of the 1967 season, Hiller was up for good with the Tigers, going 4-3, 9-6, 4-4 and 6-6 in consecutive years. The year 1968 was special for Hiller and the Tigers as they won the World Series, beating the St. Louis Cardinals.

Then a few months following the 1970 season, Hiller’s life took a turn in a way he never imagined. On a cold winter day in January, 1971 in Duluth, where he had taken up year-round residence supplanted by occasional visits to Scarborough, Hiller was outside likely shovelling snow, when he felt pain in his chest.

He had been smoking since he was 13 and ate what he wanted. He was only 27 going on 28. He was about 20 pounds overweight at 220.

“He came into the house and wasn’t feeling well and felt pressure on his chest,” Jim said. “He thought he had done something to his rib cage. His wife said he should go to the hospital. They had to get the snowmobile out of the driveway so he could drive to the hospital.”

Hiller found out he had suffered not one, not two, but THREE heart attacks that day. Tests discovered his arteries were hardened due to high cholesterol.

“He wasn’t eating properly, he wasn’t taking care of himself,” Jim said. “The way I understand it, when they were finished doing all their tests at the hospital in Duluth, the specialist said to him that, ‘You really have two choices. One choice is going on a strict diet and taking some medication and taking it easy and definitely baseball is out of the question.

“Or there is this fairly new procedure that might allow you to continue a normal life. I don’t know what they called it,’’ Jim said. “It was an operation (intestinal by-pass surgery) that would not allow cholesterol to build up in the arteries. It was a fairly new operation and told him he could soon play.”

So, Hiller decided on the operation with the hope he could work his way back to the majors.

“I don’t know all the details but basically, he worked out, he exercised, he tried to get back into the shape the rest of the year,” Jim said. “When he talked to the Tigers, I remember this very clearly -- they said they didn’t know of anybody who came back from that magnitude of a heart attack. On top of that, around that time, there had been a Detroit Lions player (Chuck Hughes in an August 1971 pre-season game against the Buffalo Bills) who died from a heart attack on the field.

“John managed to make an appointment with a famous heart surgeon. He was famous enough that he produced an examination of John. He made a statement to one of the newspapers that, in his opinion, ‘John Hiller would be better off playing baseball than not, because the exercise would be good for him.’ He gave John a clean bill of health.”

Jim recalled John saying to family and friends: “It was easy for me to come into a ball game in the ninth inning with a one-run lead with the bases loaded and nobody out. I had a completely different frame of mind after the heart attack. It made me mentally a much different pitcher. The worst that could happen is that I’d give up a run and lose the game.’’

In one of the greatest comebacks in sports history, Hiller returned to the mound for a few games in 1972 after sitting out all of 1971. Hiller continued his comeback in 1973 for his finest season when he recorded a then American League record 38 saves and produced a 10-5 record with a 2.39 ERA. In 125 1/3 innings he averaged almost a strikeout per inning with 124 strikeouts. This was vintage Hiller.

His return to work in 1972 should have cued the screenwriters for a movie pitch but what he did in 1973 made the potential movie that much more powerful. In 1974, Hiller again was very stellar with a 17-14 record, a mark made all the more remarkable because in those days, relievers logged a lot of innings.

Hiller went on to finish his entire career with the Tigers, accumulating a record of 87-76, with 125 saves and a 2.83 ERA in 1,242 innings of work over 545 games. His last outing May 27, 1980 saw him throw four innings, allowing 10 hits and four earned runs. He retired shortly after that, making him at the time the last Tiger remaining from the ’68 World Series-winning club.

After he retired, he worked for the Tigers for a few years as a minor-league pitching coach. One of his pupils before he was traded to the Atlanta Braves was Hall of Famer John Smoltz.

Hiller is one of Canada’s greatest sports heroes and was one of our country’s very best relief pitchers. He’s a member of Canada’s Sports Hall of Fame and the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in St. Marys, Ont.

Jim said his brother is in good health and has not had any heart problems since his episode more than 52 years ago. He spends summers in Big Mountain, Mich., and winters in Arizona.

As for that movie, they could call it Comeback Kid or even Hiller.

Wherever you are, John, all the best on your birthday, and continued good health.

Danny Gallagher’s new Expos book Around the Horn is now available.