Hairs vs. Squares

by Gruver , Ed;

  The Tigers were looking to slay their own monsters that summer, and their success softened the harsh realities of Detroit’s dilemma. They became part of that something special that defines September baseball. To be in position to make a final push for the playoffs brings a different feel to the entire month. The summer heat has softened, there’s a sharper slant to the shadows extending across sun-lit fields, and the sights and sounds associated with the sport—the deep green of the outfield and contrasting dark brown of the infield, the multicolored outfits of fans filling the ballpark, and the deepening roars of the crowds—are more vibrant and vivid.

  John Donne, an English poet, once wrote of autumn’s splendor: “No spring nor summer beauty hath such grace as I have seen in one autumnal face.”

  Nowhere in 1972 was this changing of the season more evident or symbolic than in Detroit, where the Tigers had gone from a team that had been pushed around just two years prior to one that was now pushing back—much like Martin, their dirt-kicking leader, was known to do. If somebody popped him, Martin said at the time, they’d better know how to fight because he was going to “beat the hell out of them.”

  While Martin was a mighty mite, John Wesley “Boog” Powell of the rival Baltimore Orioles was a 6-foot-3, 260-pound gentle giant, a man given to simple pleasures. Life, however, wasn’t always so plain and simple for Powell, and when the Booger wasn’t battling twelve-pound bonefish in Biscayne Bay, he was dealing with problems that sometimes seemed as massive as the man himself.

  Born in Lakeland, Florida, Powell was the oldest of three boys. His mother died when he was just nine years old; his father, Charles, worked as a salesman to support the family. It was Charles who bestowed the nickname “Boog” on his first-born. It’s a custom in parts of the South for parents to call mischievous sons “Buggers.” Charles shortened it to “Boog,” and the nickname stuck. Hardly anybody ever called him John, he said. Powell didn’t know if he’d even turn around if somebody called him by his given name.

  As a professional, his prowess was as a hitter, but Powell’s early success in baseball was as a pitcher. He pitched Lakeland to the prestigious Little League World Series in Williamsport, Pennsylvania. It was a family affair for the Powells—Boog’s younger brothers Carl and Charlie started at catcher and in the outfield respectively. Carl Taylor was a stepbrother who joined the family when Boog’s father remarried. Lakeland lost its opener to Schenectady, New York, but the Powell brothers continued their upwardly mobile move. Carl played in the majors for six years, from 1968 to 1973, primarily with Pittsburgh and Kansas City. Charlie played in the minors for the Orioles.

  But it was Boog who had the greatest impact. The first baseman for Baltimore from 1961 to 1974, Powell became the triggerman of the Orioles’ offense, according to Harry Dalton, general manager and architect of the Birds’ dynasty. Quite a statement, considering Baltimore had future Hall of Famers Frank and Brooks Robinson in its lineup during the dynasty years of 1966–71.

  When Boog was hot and hitting well, Dalton said then, the offense jelled. It wasn’t a one-man show, but the O’s success seemed at least partly related to his performance. Baltimore’s success was considerable, and the three-time defending league champions opened September 1972 on top of the standings and in search of another title. Their first had come six years prior, when they had stunned the reigning world champion Dodgers with a four-game sweep in the World Series. In 1969 Baltimore won another Eastern Division title and swept Martin’s Twins in the inaugural American League Championship Series before running into the “Miracle Mets” in the World Series. In an outcome more surprising even than their 1966 win over the Dodgers, the favored Orioles fell to the Mets in five games.

  Baltimore was embarrassed; its seemingly invincible Colts had been shocked by another New York underdog, Joe Namath and the Jets, the previous January in Super Bowl III. In the spring of 1970, Gotham made it three straight over the Charm City in postseason competition, the Knicks beating the Bullets in seven games.

  The Orioles returned with a vengeance in 1970, winning 108 games, sweeping the Twins for the second straight year in the ALCS, and returning the favor to the National League by routing the Reds in five games in the Fall Classic. In 1971 Earl Weaver’s Orioles won over one hundred games and swept their third straight ALCS—this time against the up-and-coming A’s. Baltimore boasted arguably the greatest single-season rotation in history, four 20-game winners in the persons of Jim Palmer, Dave McNally, Mike Cuellar, and Pat Dobson. But the favored Birds stumbled again on the game’s biggest stage, falling to Roberto Clemente and the Pirates in seven games after taking a 2–0 Series lead.

  Still the Orioles’ accomplishments were impressive. To that point, they were the first team since the 1960–64 Yankees to reach three straight World Series and just the seventh team in AL history to claim three consecutive pennants. From 1969 to 1971 they won 318 games in the regular season, still an AL record, and nine straight ALCS games.

  Powell had been a big part of Baltimore’s success and would be again in ’72 as the Birds battled Detroit, New York, and Boston. He had come a long way from his early years in the majors, when he recalled facing Ford and striking out three times on nine pitches—all curveballs. No shame there since Powell considered Ford the best he had ever faced.

  What did bother Powell was his 1967 season, when he hit 13 homers and batted .234—this just one season after he had been voted AL Comeback Player of the Year and was touted by some as the next Mickey Mantle. Hall of Fame hurler Robin Roberts had predicted Powell would hit fifty home runs a season.

  Like Johnny Bench during his slump in 1971, Powell in the 1967 season was targeted for heavy criticism. “Everyone ripped me,” Powell said, “the fans, the press, the club.”

  He tried to adjust, but nothing worked. He just couldn’t figure it out, he said. He estimated he had ninety-two different stances that season and (with just slight exaggeration) took “one million rounds of extra hitting.” The booing from Birds’ fans became so intense that Powell’s wife, Janet, bolted from her seat in Memorial Stadium and cried hysterically as she ran from the park. Powell was benched, but when Weaver took over as manager in 1968, he restored the big man’s confidence. “You bat third or fourth, depending who is pitching,” Weaver told Powell, “and you play every day.”

  Powell responded by hitting 22 homers and driving in 85 runs in ’68, the first of five straight seasons with 21 or more homers and at least 81 RBIs. He matured as a player and as a person. Powell adjusted to what opposing pitchers were trying to do. A lefty hitter, he still had trouble with southpaws, particularly when they threw breaking balls low and outside. But when they made mistakes, Powell wasn’t missing those mistakes the way he once had. He became more patient at the plate, no longer swinging at the first pitch. He became a thinking man’s hitter, punching outside pitches to the opposite field and no longer trying to pull the ball all the time.

  By the early 1970s Powell had overcome assorted injuries and nagging self-doubt to become, in Dalton’s opinion, “the most feared hitter in the American League.”

  Powell was indeed an imposing figure on the field. With his thick, bare biceps jutting from his Orioles jersey, with his black-and-orange Orioles helmet covering a crew cut, and with eye black smeared on both cheekbones, he presented as much a challenge to pitchers as the bonefish in Biscayne Bay did to him. When you’re as big as Powell, former Yankees third baseman Clete Boyer once said, you intimidate a lot of pitchers.

  Despite his size, Powell was anything but awkward of hands or feet. Yankees coach Elston Howard thought Howard “one hell of a glove man.” Dalton called Powell “The Goalie” because of all the saves the big man made at first base. “How many saves for The Goalie tonight?” Baltimore players would ask. Shortstop Mark Belanger said Powell made thirty-six “saves” of potential throwing errors in 1970. Belanger wasn’t counting the low, short throws that are easy to trap. He was counting the high throws where Powell had to tag the
runner and the low throws that bounced 12–15 feet in front of first base.

  Many observers, including Mantle, credited the Birds’ air-tight infield for part of their pitchers’ great success. Belanger, third baseman Brooks Robinson, and second baseman Davey Johnson were all multiple Gold Glove winners. Powell never won a Gold Glove, but his defensive contributions weren’t lost on his teammates.

  Brooks Robinson, the Houdini of the Hot Corner and the man Curt Gowdy called “Baltimore’s greatest discovery since crab cakes,” said he sometimes made blind throws to first because he knew Powell would catch them. Brooks recalled his famous play in Game One of the 1970 World Series, when he robbed Bench of a hit with a blind throw to first. Robinson said his throw skipped some fifteen feet in front of Booger, a tough chance, but “he made the play and I got the applause,” Brooks said then. He called Powell one hell of an underrated fielder.

  Johnson, a three-time Gold Glove winner, said that where Powell had once played conservatively at first base, lining up right behind the bag, by 1972 he was moving twenty or twenty-five feet off the bag. That adjustment allowed the Oriole infield to have more movement. Johnson could play closer to second base, Belanger deeper in the hole at short, and Brooks closer to the left-field line.

  While Powell helped orchestrate the Orioles’ famous infield, away from the game he enjoyed the orchestrations of various kinds of music. His father was an avid collector of record albums, mainly big band types like Benny Goodman. Powell preferred country. He and Roy Clark were good friends and neighbors in Miami, and the country singer’s “Yesterday, When I Was Young,” written by French singer Charles Aznavour, was a favorite among Powell’s collection of some six hundred LPs.

  When he wasn’t playing baseball, fishing, or barbequing, Powell would pull Clark’s “Yesterday, When I Was Young” from his collection, light up what writer John Devaney said was Powell’s forty-third or forty-fourth cigarette of the day, and listen to lyrics the Booger believed to be the most beautiful he had ever heard.

  The song was also a favorite of Mantle’s, and like Powell, Mickey counted Clark among his good friends. Mantle asked Clark to perform the song at his funeral, and Clark did.

  The song was a personal anthem for both Powell and Mantle; by 1972 it could have been a team anthem for the thirty-year-old Boog, the Birds, and Billy Martin’s Tigers. Their time was indeed running out. The two proud champions had combined to win four straight pennants and five of the previous six, but by the summer of ’72 they were lions in winter.

  Because they had Don Baylor waiting in the wings, the Orioles had dealt thirty-six-year-old Frank Robinson and his $130,000 salary to the Dodgers in a sudden and surprising six-player deal on December 2, 1971. From the standpoint of consistency Frank and Brooks were Baltimore’s version of death and taxes. Lamenting the trade, one O’s teammate said Frank won five or six games by himself in the late innings every season. Oakland’s Reggie Jackson, comparing the O’s to Popeye, said the dealing of his mentor to Los Angeles meant the three-time reigning AL champs had lost the “can of spinach in their shirt.”

  The Birds’ offense suffered a dramatic dropoff in ’72. Brooks still had a magic mitt but like many of his teammates wasn’t waving a wand at the plate. Wearing his trademark cropped-bill batting helmet—there were fewer uniform dress codes in the 1970s so Brooks was free to customize, and he had the team’s equipment manager saw an inch off the visor so that there was nothing in his line of vision—Robinson hit just 8 homers in ’72. It marked the first time since 1961 that he hadn’t reached double figures in homers.

  Powell also struggled—he did not surpass .200 until mid-July—and even donned glasses during games to better see the pitches. The glasses didn’t last long, and Powell’s slump came to an end as well. Over the final three months he slammed 17 of his eventual 21 homers, drove in 61 of his 81 runs, and raised his average to a more respectable .252.

  With Powell supplying the power and Palmer, McNally, Cuellar, and Dobson the pitching—the staff ERA of 2.53 was number one in the league—the Birds spent forty-three days in first place and still owned the lead as late as September 4, when they split a home doubleheader with the Yankees to fall into a first-place tie with the Tigers.

  The Orioles, oddly, never seemed at home in ’72 amid the poplar trees and gray cinder of the “Old Gray Lady of 33rd Street,” Memorial Stadium. The Birds went 38-39, a stark contrast to the 53-24 home mark they had enjoyed the year before. What did remain constant was Baltimore’s broadcast team of Chuck Thompson, Bill O’Donnell, and John Gordon. Thompson, a Hall of Fame sportscaster, and O’Donnell called Orioles games from 1966 to 1981 on WBAL and then WFBR Radio and from 1966 to 1977 on WJZ-TV. The pair also broadcast Baltimore Colts games on the radio. Thompson’s descriptive style and deeply resonant voice was punctuated when something good happened for the hometown team by his trademark calls—“Ain’t the beer cold?” and “Go to war, Miss Agnes!”

  Thompson often spoke his sentences backward—“Bats from the left side, does Boog Powell”—a quirk that further endeared him to his many followers. Gentlemanly and quick with a kind word, Thompson was beloved in Baltimore. He was “Uncle Chuck” to many fans and like other sportscasters of his era was more than an announcer.

  As writer Frank Deford, who grew up in Baltimore listening to Thompson, once said, these men were the voices of summer, of good times, of baseball, of hometown. You listened to them at night while pretending to be asleep, the radio beneath your pillow. You listened while driving or sitting on the beach, and they were as much a sound of summer as crickets, lawn mowers, and the Good Humor Man’s bell. They spoke with a tone and rhythm unique to each man, painting word pictures with clarity and crispness. Sometimes, Deford said, “the games we heard from their lips were better than the games we saw with our eyes.”

  What many witnessed away from baseball as August melted into September was the triumph and tragedy of the Summer Olympics in Munich. The Munich Massacre—a September 5 attack by Palestinian terrorists on members of the Israeli Olympic team—overshadowed the exploits of Mark Spitz, Olga Korbut, Dan Gable, Dave Wottle, Frank Shorter, Vasiliy Alekseyev, and Teofilo Stevenson. The Munich Games are also remembered for the U.S. loss to the Soviet Union in the men’s basketball final, a game USA Basketball calls “the most controversial in international basketball history.”

  Unlike the gold medal game in men’s basketball, the American League’s East championship would be settled without controversy. As the Orioles faded in the final month, the Yankees found themselves deadlocked with their longtime rivals, the Red Sox, just a half-game back in what was easily the most exciting race of the summer.

  When New York beat Baltimore September 5 on a second straight save by Sparky Lyle, the Orioles fell from first to fourth. The Birds were just a game behind, and they did rally in mid-September, when Boog’s five RBIs in two games backed complete-game victories by Palmer and Cueller in Yankee Stadium. But the dynastic O’s could not reclaim their dominance in the East and eventually finished five and a half games off the pace.

  The foursome of Palmer, McNally, Cuellar, and Dobson, which had gone a combined 81-31 in ’71, went 68-57 in ’72. Palmer was the lone 20-game winner, and Cuellar claimed 18 victories; McNally and Dobson finished with sub .500 records. But these marks are misleading; the renowned mound staff suffered from meager run support. This was still a great staff, as evidenced by the fact that three of the four aces—Palmer, Cuellar, and Dobson—had lower ERAs in ’72 than in ’71 and all four were 2.95 or under. In 1971 the fearsome Palmer-McNally-Cuellar-Dobson rotation had accomplished a feat that hadn’t been done since 1952 and hasn’t been done since: it recorded consecutive seasons with three or more 20-game winners. The 1903–1904 Boston Americans, 1904–1905 New York Giants, and 1951–52 Cleveland Indians are the only staffs in history to stand with the Orioles in that regard. The 1920 Chicago White Sox, who one year after their infamous “Black Sox” scandal flashed four 20-game winners in Red F
aber, Lefty Williams, Dickie Kerr, and Eddie Cicotte, are the only rotation that can match the ’71 O’s. In the Bronx the Yankees’ late-summer resurgence was led in part by the inimitable Lyle. Obtained from Boston for first baseman Danny Cater in March 1972 in one of the most lopsided deals in baseball history, Lyle thrived on the extra work afforded him in New York, hurling a then personal-best 107 2/3 innings and appearing in 56 games, tops among AL pitchers. By season’s end, Lyle had set an American League record with 35 saves while fashioning a 1.92 ERA. Just as Roger Kahn felt the Reds had committed grand larceny in getting Joe Morgan from the Astros, Bobby Murcer believed New York had stolen Lyle from Boston in one of the all-time great trades for the Yankees.

  New York rallied from a season-high eight-game deficit on July 27 to within a half-game of the lead on September 12 following Lyle’s save in a 3–2 win in the Stadium.

  An eccentric known to sit on birthday cakes in his birthday suit, Albert “Sparky” Lyle was a star in the Bronx Bombers’ grand tradition: colorful, cocky, and commanding respect. Amid the roiling race, Lyle would step from the pinstripe-painted Datsun that brought him from the bullpen to the bump, and, with his jaw bulging with Red Man chaw, stride to the mound as Stadium organist Toby Wright played “Pomp and Circumstance” and Yankees fans chanted “Dee-fense!”

  Despite being called upon to rescue his team time and again, Lyle resisted pressure by not thinking about it. He didn’t listen to the crowd or care who the batter was. He simply threw fastballs and sliders inside to right-handers and outside to left-handers.

  Against Milwaukee, he was called on in the ninth to protect a one-run lead with two on and nobody out. He slammed the door on six pitches. Against Texas, he relieved starter Mel Stottlemyer in the eighth with the Yankees leading 3–2, runners on second and third, and no outs. Lyle intentionally walked Frank Howard to load the bases and then struck out the next three hitters on a total of ten pitches. In a key series against Detroit in August he twice entered games in the ninth to preserve one-run leads.