by Gruver , Ed;
Bobby Tolan followed Morgan’s homer with a lineout to Oliver in center, and Bench continued the Reds’ hard hitting with a deep drive to center. Blass was shaken. Is this what they’re going to do with my fastball today? he wondered.
Realizing he didn’t have his good fastball, Blass switched gears and by his estimation threw the Reds only five fastballs over the next five innings. The pitch to Morgan had been low and away. It had been a good pitch, and Blass knew it. When Morgan hit it out, Blass was surprised. If they hit your best fastball, he thought, you had better try some curves.
Blass relied so heavily on feeding the Machine off-speed pitches—“slop,” Blass called it—that it brought an enraged Rose to the top dugout step. “Eat a f— steak!” Rose shouted at the Reds’ tormentor. “Throw the ball like a man!”
When Gullet took the mound in the bottom of the first inning, he began firing what Bench called “all smoke.” With legendary umpire Augie Donatelli staring over his shoulder, the Reds’ catcher put down one finger—the traditional sign for a fastball—put up his mitt, and listened for what he called “the sizzle.”
Bench knew there was no other way for Gullett to get past the Pirates than to overpower them. The Bucs, wearing their home whites with gold and black trim, accepted the challenge. Rennie Stennett stroked a leadoff single to center, then scooted to second base on a passed ball. Oliver followed with a triple to left-center. Gullett got Roberto Clemente looking, but Willie Stargell slammed an RBI double to deep right. After an out, Richie Hebner hammered a single to right to score Stargell for a 3–1 lead.
Cash recalls that Blass had “good stuff.” Steve, he said, had a good slider and worked both sides of the plate. Cash added that Pittsburgh’s offense took pressure off its pitchers because of the Pirates’ ability to score. “They knew if we could hold opponents under five runs, we would win,” he says. “We were never out of a game. Once we started hitting, everybody wanted to join the party.”
The Pirates teed off on Gullett, but Bench figured the Reds would get the runs back on Blass. It didn’t happen. Blass, delivering his pitches from the first-base side of the pitching rubber, had the Reds overstriding and overswinging. When a member of the Machine finally connected—Cesar Geronimo smoked a line drive off the backside of first base ump Ken Burkhart in the fourth inning—the ball was ruled foul. Reds manager Sparky Anderson had had a postseason run-in with Burkhart before, in the 1970 World Series following a pivotal play at the plate.
Burkhart was known for his emphatic calls. Ron Luciano wrote that in umpiring school Burkhart used to stand in front of a mirror for hours practicing “safe” and “out” calls. It would be 3 a.m., Luciano wrote, and Burkhart would be screaming “Safe” and “Out” in front of his mirror. When Burkhart called “Foul ball” on Geronimo’s drive, Anderson emerged from the dugout. “Fair ball!” he shouted, then argued and kicked some dirt.
Burkhart took umbrage. “I can run you for that!”
“Why don’t you?”
Burkhart did. It was the first time all season Sparky had been run.
“I didn’t curse him,” Anderson said afterward. “He missed the call, and I let him know it. But I didn’t curse him. Sure I kicked dirt. But what’s this game coming to when you get kicked out for just that in a playoff game?”
Dust-raising rhubarbs between umpires and managers so common in the seventies are all but a memory in the modern game. Heated disputes between Anderson and Burkhart or Earl Weaver and Steve Palermo are reminders of a dying baseball tradition. Rarely do you see skippers charging from the dugout to kick dirt on home plate or on umpires’ shoes or managers flipping their lids and their caps as they go nose-to-nose with the game’s arbiters. No more raising a little hell—and a lot of dust—with umps like Larry McCoy. No more spittle-spraying disputes. In today’s game managers merely meet with umpires and wait out the replay review. It’s more efficient but far less entertaining.
Playoff pressure in Pittsburgh brought heightened intensity from both sides. Virdon and third baseman Hebner argued a foul call the following afternoon with ump Harry Wendelstedt, who was patrolling the left-field line and declared a drive by Tolan to be a double rather than a foul ball; Clemente argued a called third strike with Donatelli.
Uncoiling out of his unique arms-and-elbows-akimbo delivery and firing his out pitch with considerable body language, Blass shut Cincinnati down the rest of the game. He was staked to two more runs in the fifth, when Stennett slapped a single and Oliver followed with a homer. Another fastball that was just too fat, Bench thought, and Oliver crushed it.
Oliver relishes the memories of that Game One meeting of Blass and Gullett, two men he now counts among his close friends. Blass was his teammate; Gullett is close to being his neighbor. Oliver said in 2014:
I live in southern Ohio and Don lives in Kentucky. We get together and I kid him about Game One. He’s a great guy and he was a great competitor. That home run was a fastball down. Nobody could hit Don’s high fastball. He was like [Tom] Seaver. You could only hit his pitches if they were down. I remember when they called him up [to the majors]. He blew people away. I thought, “OK, this is the guy everybody’s been talking about.”
Steve had great control. And he wanted the ball. To me, that’s a pitcher, a guy who wants the ball. That’s like a hitter who wants to be at the plate in tight situations. Steve wasn’t afraid of being in that situation. I’ll tell you honestly, his Game Seven in Baltimore was one of the best pitched games in World Series history, but no one ever talks about it. He was dotting the I’s, and it was great to watch him pitch in that game.
Oliver lived in the shadow of Clemente and Stargell, but Tom Seaver thought Oliver the toughest out in the Pirates’ lineup. Pittsburgh coaches agreed; they thought it uncanny how often Oliver got good wood on the ball. By Oliver’s count, he had just “six or seven hits” in ’72 that weren’t hit hard.
Virdon believed Oliver’s weight loss—a steak-and-grapefruit diet in 1971 helped him go from 220 pounds to 202—had also helped him bulk up his average. He thought Oliver could swing a quicker bat at his lighter weight, and that allowed him to handle the high inside pitches that had previously caused him problems.
Oliver’s success didn’t surprise him. His father, Al Sr., knew his son would succeed. “My father always had confidence in me,” he said. “He felt I would become a big league ballplayer, and I never doubted it either.”
Al Sr. was a bricklayer in Portsmouth, Ohio. When his wife died in 1958, he raised his two boys and his girl. In 1964, when Al Jr. was seventeen, he was being scouted by both Pittsburgh and Philadelphia. He signed with Pirates scout Sid Thrift for a small bonus, then found out the Phillies had been prepared to sign him for much more. “I lost $20,000 by not signing with the Phillies,” Oliver said.
Oliver lost much more than that on September 14, 1968, the day Al Sr. passed away. It was also the same day Al Jr. was called up to the big leagues.
Oliver was a first-rate first baseman, but when Bob Robertson became ready for the majors, Oliver was switched to center field. When spring training began in ’72, Oliver wasn’t guaranteed a starting position. Gene Clines had hit .308 in ’71, and Oliver needed a solid finish to reach .282.
Oliver had always been a strong finisher but a slow starter. He turned it around in ’72, batting over .300 early and stringing together an eighteen-game hitting streak. He also had a sixteen-game hitting streak, and his 89 RBIs were second on the team to Stargell’s and highly respectable for a guy who was hitting second in the order.
Oliver’s batting number two in the lineup helped make the Pirates number one in the East, and he raked Reds’ pitching in the series opener.
Blass worked eight and a third innings in a 5–1 win that took just 1:57 to play. When a reporter asked if he was ready to be taken out when Ramon Hernandez relieved him in the ninth, Blass said that if Virdon had stuck him with a fork, “he’d have known I was done.” Blass saw Game One of the 1972 NLCS as a go
od example of his ability to adapt to a good fastball-hitting team. The Reds trudged to their clubhouse concerned. They had lost the opener, and Morgan though the defeat was doubly tough because Cincinnati had used its best pitcher.
Prince would have agreed. He punctuated his broadcasts with, “We had ’em all the way,” one of his many trademark phrases. A broadcaster for the Pirates from 1948 to 1975, Prince was nicknamed “the Gunner” for his quick tongue and colorful commentary. He and Nellie King, a Pirates pitcher from 1954 to 1957, broadcast on KDKA Radio what Prince later referred to as the “Halcyon Days” of Pirates baseball. Prince was an unabashed Bucs fan, and while some listeners loved him and others hated him, all were amused by the Hall of Fame broadcaster and his “Gunnerisms”:
“Arriba!”: Prince’s cry to Clemente to hit one over the wall;
“The bases are FOB”: Full of Bucs;
“Kiss it good-bye”: The most famous Gunnerism, his much-copied home run call;
“Rug cuttin’ time”: Crunch time.
It was rug cuttin’ time in the American League as well, the Championship Series opening in Oakland later that Saturday. As similar as the Reds and Pirates were, the A’s and Tigers were as different as their uniforms—the A’s outfitted in California gold jerseys, Kelly green undershirts, and white cleats and the Tigers in their road grays with black and orange trim and black shoes.
Oakland had won the wild West, a division akin to the rebellious American Football League or the NHL’s rogue Western Division, which featured fists-first clubs like the ferocious Philadelphia Flyers, who were brandishing their knuckles as the up-and-coming Broad Street Bullies.
Just as the NHL filled its Western Division with expansion teams and assigned Original Six royalty—Montreal, Boston, the New York Rangers, Chicago, Detroit, and Toronto—to the East when the league increased in size in 1967, major league baseball followed suit in 1969 when it split the American and National Leagues into two divisions each. In the AL the top five teams from 1968—Detroit, Baltimore, Cleveland, Boston, and the New York Yankees—were placed in the East, and the bottom five—Oakland, Minnesota, California, the Chicago White Sox, and Washington—were placed in the West.
In each of the ALCS’s first three years from 1969 to 1971, no Western champion had won so much as a playoff game. Critics called it the “mild, mild West.” Still Oakland entered the playoffs favored to beat Detroit. Experts saw the A’s as exciting and young. The Tigers were experienced but aging, a team of holdovers from their 1968 title year who some saw as having grown thick in the waist and long in the tooth. Detroit was dubbed the “Over the Hill Gang,” a team of thirtysomethings led by “granddaddy” Al Kaline, who was thirty-seven years old; Norm Cash, also thirty-seven; and thirty-two-year-old hurlers Mickey Lolich and Woodie Fryman. The average age of the Tigers was thirty-one; of the A’s, twenty-seven. Noting that Detroit had gone 86-70 that season, A’s skipper Dick Williams caustically remarked that the latter number—70—approximated the average age of the Tigers’ players.
Williams saw the series as one Oakland should win since most of the Tigers’ fire came from a guy who would be spending the series on the sideline—Billy Martin. The managers were as different as their teams. Williams was a strict disciplinarian who had to constantly rein in his swaggering troops. Martin, meanwhile, was willing to raise hell if it meant raising a pennant flag over Tiger Stadium. Billy the Kid’s tactics didn’t find favor with all of the Tigers. Outfielder Jim Northrup said some of the Tigers got sick and tired of reading Martin’s quotes in the Detroit newspapers in which he said, according to Northrup, “I manage good and they play bad.”
Some Tigers didn’t respect Martin, so they ignored what he said and just played ball. The Tigers were not only ignoring their manager, but they were also ignoring their critics. Tired of reading that they were “ageless” and, as Murray Chass wrote in the New York Times, “living it up in the old folks’ home,” the Tigers roared into the playoffs by winning seven of their final ten games. Like another “Over the Hill Gang” that would win an Eastern Division title in 1972—George Allen’s Washington Redskins of the NFC—the Tigers were intent on turning back the clock.
Kaline, a man among men in Motown, had injured his wrist, and writers took to describing the Tiger legend as needing bailing wire and adhesive tape to hold his fingers to his wrist bone. Angered at being written off as an old man, the fifteen-time All-Star caught fire in the closing weeks of the heated division race, going 22-for-44 in the final eleven games and lifting his average thirty-five points to .313.
Kaline helped front a team of tough guys. Left-fielder Willie Horton was one of the strongest men in baseball. Horton’s cuts at the plate were sometimes so violent that a swing and miss would cause him to nearly spin around in the batter’s box. “That’s what you call goin’ after it,” A’s announcer Monte Moore observed. Burly Gates Brown, Ike Brown, Bill Freehan, and Frank Howard were Detroit strongmen as well. Martin tried to add Howard, a World Series hero with the Dodgers in 1963, to the postseason roster, but because he hadn’t reported to the club until September 1, he wasn’t eligible for the ALCS. Hondo served instead as first base coach.
As the A’s and Tigers took the sun-streaked field inside the red, white, and blue bunting-bedecked Oakland Coliseum, they were about to embark on one of the most physically demanding and emotionally exhausting playoff series in history. Three of the five games would be decided by a run; two of the five would need extra innings to decide a winner. There would be a bench-clearing brawl, an infamous bat-throwing incident, player suspensions, thinly veiled threats, cursing and snarling from both sides, errors and questionable plays by catchers playing out of position at second base and the outfield, and a superstar’s season-ending injury on a daring steal of home.
The teams had a history. The Tigers had temporarily knocked the A’s out of first place in August, but Oakland won the season series 8–4. On August 22 the A’s had put Lolich’s bid to win his twentieth game on hold when outfielder Angel Mangual had returned to the lineup and hit a three-run homer in Tiger Stadium. Mangual was in the on-deck circle in the seventh inning when Campy Campaneris hit the dirt to avoid being hit in the head by a pitch from reliever Bill Slayback. On the first pitch to Mangual, Blue Moon Odom set sail for third on a steal attempt. Considering the A’s were five runs ahead at the time, Martin saw the steal as an attempt by the A’s to run up the score. From the Detroit dugout Billy the Kid made a gesture to the mound, and Slayback’s next pitch flew behind Mangual’s neck. Slayback started in toward the plate in case Blue Moon tried to advance two bases. The enraged Mangual met the pitcher halfway and drove his right fist into Slayback’s eye.
All hell broke loose. Martin stormed from the dugout and straight for Mangual. Williams cut Martin off and held him back. The Tigers’ Willie Horton rumbled in from center field and flattened Epstein with a right hand. In a bizarre scene foreshadowing the Pedro Martinez–Don Zimmer dust-up in the 2003 ALCS, aging A’s coach Jerry Adair and Detroit catcher Duke Sims flailed at each other along the third base line. Mangual landed on top of Slayback; Campy, teammate Joe Rudi, and Tigers pitcher Tom Timmerman landed on top of Mangual. Detroit’s Ike Brown slugged the A’s Dave Duncan from behind; Oakland coach Irv Noren had his eye blackened by a punch. When Darold Knowles reached into a pile to try and pull players out, the immensely strong Horton grabbed the A’s reliever and tossed him like a salad.
Detroit also had a history with Williams, dating back to when his Red Sox finished a game ahead of the Tigers in the terrific 1967 pennant race.
The possibility of more fireworks in the playoffs didn’t pack the house in Oakland as it had in Pittsburgh. Fewer than thirty thousand were in attendance for Game One in the Coliseum, whose infield still bore the yardlines from the Raiders’ hosting of San Diego on October 1. Most northern California fans favored the college football games that day. John McKay’s top-ranked USC Trojans—one of the great teams in history—were at Stanford, which ha
d represented the Pacific 8 in the Rose Bowl the two previous seasons and beaten Big 10 champions Ohio State and Michigan, and the University of California was hosting Woody Hayes’s rampaging Buckeyes.
As much promise as the NLCS matchup of Gullett and Blass had held, Lolich versus Hunter in the AL promised something better. The two aces had combined for 43 wins in ’72, and both were 20-game winners for the second straight season.
Hunter and Lolich began the game in brisk fashion, each retiring the side in order in the first. Cash led off the top of the second, and in an era when teams were allowed to use their own broadcasters in the LCS, Tigers announcers George Kell and Larry Osterman provided the call on WJBK-TV Channel 2 in Detroit:
Kell: There’s a long drive, well-hit, deep to right, way back. . . . It’s gone! A home run for Cash! That was a line drive home run. He really laced it into the seats in right and the Tigers have taken a one-nothing lead.
The homer was Cash’s first since August 13, but the A’s answered in the third. Campaneris worked a 1-1 walk and sped to third on Matty Alou’s single to right. Rudi launched a sacrifice fly to Northrup in center, scoring Campy with the tying run.
Working in and out and up and down, tugging on his oversized cap between pitches and spotting his slider, Hunter retired ten straight from the fourth into the seventh. The hard-throwing Lolich matched the Cat pitch for pitch. Mickey could be overpowering or he could finesse hitters to death. “He’s a pitcher,” Kubek said admiringly, and Gowdy agreed, noting that Lolich’s pitches were always swerving, darting, dancing. The lefty’s pitches had late life; very rarely did a Mickey Lolich fastball break the same way.
Lolich came from the side with pitches that would dart in against left-handed hitters, and then he came in over the top with offerings that sailed in on the fists of a right-handed hitter. Either way his pitches moved in the strike zone all the time. Facing Baltimore’s Brooks Robinson earlier in the season, Lolich had delivered a fastball that looked to be about a foot inside as it darted toward the Orioles’ hitter, only to come back and almost into the strike zone. “A live arm,” Kubek observed. On top of that, Gowdy called Lolich “a mean competitor on the mound.”