Hairs vs. Squares

by Gruver , Ed;

  Like many of the A’s, he had a history of bad blood with the Tigers. In a 1967 game Detroit’s hitters, especially McAuliffe, thought Blue Moon was throwing too many brush-back pitches, and a mass brawl erupted. Odom said he brushed McAuliffe back after he had stolen home with a five-run lead.

  The next season Odom had another throwdown with the Tigers. It was said Blue Moon was seen by an umpire running in place on McAuliffe’s chest and stomach. Odom shrugged it off. They just met on the field, he said.

  They met again on the afternoon of Sunday, October 8, and McAuliffe went 0-for-4 as the Tigers’ leadoff hitter. Watching from the dugout, Hunter thought Game Two belonged to Blue Moon. But Odom’s outstanding effort was lost in the shadows of Campaneris’s at-bat in the seventh.

  Leading off against Lerrin LaGrow—the fourth of five pitchers Martin called on that day and a twenty-three-year-old who Williams thought was a young man “with the shakes”—Campy dug in while Moore called what became one of the most bizarre at-bats in baseball history:

  Here’s Campy Campaneris to lead it off for the A’s and all the little roadrunner has done today is have three hits in three at-bats. . . . Lerrin LaGrow is on the mound and he’s winding. Here’s the pitch to Campy. . . . Look out! It hit him right in the leg! Campy is mad and he throws the bat at him! . . . Campaneris was hit in the leg by a pitch and he threw his bat at the pitcher. . . . Billy Martin is having to be restrained.

  Kell made the call on the Tigers’ television station: “Excitement aplenty! The umpires are holding Billy Martin, he’s trying to get to Campaneris.”

  Campaneris had tried to jump out of the way of the pitch, but it hit him on the left ankle. Williams heard the ball bounce off the bone. A review of the video shows the force of the blow spinning Campy around. When he stood up, Campaneris stared out at LaGrow for a second and then reached back and whipped his bat toward the mound. Williams heard someone on the Oakland bench scream, “No!” The bat spun like a helicopter blade, and A’s writer Ron Bergman recalled the 6-foot-5 LaGrow prudently shrinking to something closer to 3-foot-5 as the Louisville Slugger sailed past his head.

  Nestor Chylak engulfed the 160-pound Campaneris in his left arm and chest protector. (American League umpires at the time wore their chest protectors outside their dark blue blazers; NL umpires wore their chest protectors beneath their blazers.) Chylak initially held Campaneris back from charging the mound but then had to protect the A’s shortstop from angry Tigers players climbing over each other to get to Campy.

  It was the most deplorable scene in baseball since Giants pitcher Juan Marichal, facing fellow ace Sandy Koufax, suddenly started hitting Dodger catcher John Roseboro in the head with his bat in a 1965 game. Campaneris heaving his bat at LaGrow is a scene that would be repeated in reverse in the 2000 World Series, when Yankees pitcher Roger Clemens picked up Mike Piazza’s shattered bat barrel and flung it over the first base line. Piazza was running toward first and believed Clemens had thrown the bat at him.

  Clemens claimed he thought the bat shard was the ball, and when he realized it wasn’t, he threw it away. Most people didn’t see it that way, just as the A’s didn’t believe LaGrow hadn’t thrown his fastball at Campy’s ankle on Martin’s orders. Williams figured Campaneris was driving Detroit’s defense crazy. He looked across the field at Martin and saw his opposite cussing. Williams knew that Martin, like all managers, loved to win in small ball fashion but hated to lose that way. Williams knew Martin wanted to slow Campy down. By getting the A’s sparkplug so mad that he might be stopped by suspension, Williams figured Martin had more than accomplished his mission.

  Prior to his two-run double Jackson had been decked twice by high heat thrown at his head by southpaw reliever Fred Scherman. The bad blood between the teams had boiled over, and following Campy’s flinging of his bat, Martin had to be restrained by both third base umpire Larry Barnett and first base ump John Rice. Detroit infielder Ike Brown found Campaneris’s bat, snapped it into pieces, and hurled the offending lumber toward the Oakland dugout. Martin screamed at Campy to come out and fight him and then screamed at the rest of the A’s to come out and fight his team. Oakland’s players stood on the dugout steps and shook their heads. Epstein thought Martin’s challenge was Billy’s way of firing up his club, which looked listless against Odom.

  Chylak ejected Campaneris and LaGrow, and order was finally restored. Battling Billy, however, was still fuming afterward.

  Martin asked for Campaneris to be suspended. He said throwing a bat was as gutless as anything he’d ever seen in baseball. And did you see those A’s, he asked reporters. They didn’t want to fight. Bando and the A’s believed, like Shakespeare’s Falstaff, that discretion was the better part of valor. Oakland had nothing to gain and everything to lose by fighting, Bando said.

  American League president Joe Cronin told reporters he had not yet reached a decision on whether to suspend Campaneris, but in truth he already had. Williams knew the A’s would lose Campy. Cronin was just waiting to inform Campaneris first that he was out for the remainder of the series and would be fined $500.

  On the charter plane to Detroit, the star shortstop was subdued. “I no try to hit him with the bat,” the thirty-year-old Cuban muttered in broken English. “I can hit him with it if I throw sidearm rather than overhand. I only try to make him scared. I try to let him know not to do it next time.”

  Forty years later, on October 9, 2012, the A’s and Tigers were again battling each other in the playoffs, and Campaneris was back at the Oakland Coliseum throwing—not a bat, but the ceremonial first pitch prior to Game Three.

  As the Mustache Gang winged its way to Motown, Williams tried to tune out the Dixieland Band Finley had brought on board the World Airways charter. The A’s departure had been delayed an hour due to a bomb threat, and all Williams could think was that despite Oakland’s 5–0 win, there was one basic truth about the Mustache Gang: an A’s game didn’t even have to be close to be full of controversy.

  12

  He was a free-swinging, free-spirited player with an ever-present smile.

  “Manny being Manny” was popularized by the polarizing Ramirez in the twenty-first century, but in the same summer the future star of the Indians, Red Sox, and Dodgers was born, another Manny was being Manny in Pittsburgh.

  Pirates catcher Manny Sanguillen may have labored in the shadows of his more famous teammates and Cincinnati counterpart in 1972, but it was the durable Panamanian who proved to be the difference in Game Three of the National League Championship Series.

  Curt Gowdy referred to Sanguillen as the “smiling Panamanian,” but Roberto Clemente cautioned observers not to let Sanguillen’s syrupy smile fool them. Manny may have been a good-natured needler in the Pirates’ riotous clubhouse, but he took the game very seriously. Smiling doesn’t always tell everything, Clemente said. Some guys can smile all season and never help the club. Sanguillen had made himself, in Roberto’s opinion, the best catcher in baseball in 1972. “He has done it,” Clemente added, “by hard work.”

  Gowdy agreed and lauded Sanguillen for playing aggressive baseball. While the sports world buzzed about Bert Campaneris’s bat-throwing incident and the A’s and Tigers took a travel day on Monday, October 8, the Pirates and Reds renewed hostilities in Riverfront Stadium. It was the third time in the four-year history of the league championships that the National League had declined a day off for travel. Only in 1971, when the NLCS had opened in San Francisco before shifting to Pittsburgh, had the league scheduled a travel day.

  If any player on the Pirates or Reds would be least affected by the lack of time off, it would be Sanguillen. Willie Stargell said if there was one word to describe Sanguillen, it was “durable.” Sangy, as his teammates called him, was so strong that he never seemed to tire despite playing the toughest position on the field.

  Born and raised in Colon, Panama, Sanguillen was a surprising twenty years old when he began playing baseball. He had grown up playing basketball
and soccer and doing some boxing. He had won five of his seven fights and was teaching in a Bible school in Panama when he was asked to play baseball.

  Pirates super scout Howie Haak heard of him, and when he saw him, Sanguillen was getting playing time in the outfield, at third base, and at first base. Moments after signing Sanguillen to a contract worth less than $5,000, Haak told him, “You’re a catcher.”

  Manny being Manny, he agreed. “When Howie say I’m a catcher, I say to him, ‘Okay, I’m a catcher,’” Sanguillen said.

  Eight years passed, and by 1972 Sanguillen had risen to the lofty status as one of the best backstops in the business at a time when guys named Bench, Munson, Freehan, and Fisk were bringing glamour to the gritty position.

  Not that the transition came easily to Sanguillen. He couldn’t speak English when he began playing at Batavia in the New York–Penn League in 1965. Two years later he joined the Pirates for thirty games, but in 1968 Manny was back in the minors—Columbus in the International League. He was still learning, and the process was impeded at times by the language barrier.

  Sanguillen learned with a little help from his friends. When he arrived in Pittsburgh, Manny Mota helped him understand English. Danny Murtaugh helped Manny in the minor leagues; Johnny Pesky helped in Columbus. Clemente, Stargell, Matty Alou, Joe Brown, and others helped Manny make it big in the majors.

  By 1972 Pirates manager Bill Virdon could see how Manny had improved in all facets of the game. The biggest change, Virdon opined, was his base running. Sanguillen was not a good base runner when he joined the Bucs. Because of his inexperience he didn’t know how to take advantage of his speed. He routinely ran singles into outs trying for two bases and ran doubles into outs trying for triples.

  Sanguillen began catching regularly for the Pirates in 1969, and it was on-the-job training for a guy who wouldn’t catch fewer than 128 games in any of his first full seven seasons. He didn’t know the tendencies of opposing hitters, didn’t know who hit the fastball or who hit the curve. In some cases, he didn’t even know the names of the hitters. By ’72 he had a mental book on every batter in the National League.

  Steve Blass thought Sanguillen deserved all the credit in the world for overcoming as much as he had. The Pirates ace once recalled that when Sanguillen first arrived in the bigs, he’d leave the calling of games up to the pitcher. Bruce Kison recalled that as a young pitcher who didn’t yet know opposing hitters, “I was going to rely on Sangy. We shared the game.” The only request Manny made of Pirate pitchers was to keep runners close. If they did, Sanguillen felt his arm was strong enough to throw out any man in baseball.

  Lou Brock didn’t dispute Sanguillen’s claim. The St. Louis speedster said Sanguillen was the toughest catcher in the league to run on. Dave Cash recalls Sangy having “some kind of throwing arm. He threw lasers and the ball was on a line. He didn’t get a lot of credit because he’s Panamanian and didn’t speak a lot of English. But we knew how good he was. He was as good as any catcher.”

  It wasn’t just Sanguillen’s arm that had the respect of opponents. The Orioles’ scouting report for the 1971 World Series warned of the damage Sanguillen could do with his bat. “Every scout who made out a report on the Pirates said the same thing: ‘Sanguillen is as tough an out as Clemente,’” Orioles scout Jim Russo said then.

  Sanguillen caught every inning of the seven-game Series and battered Baltimore’s four 20-game winners and celebrated staff for 11 hits in 29 at-bats, a .379 average. One year later he hit over .300 against the Reds pitching, and it was Game Three where Manny being Manny paid off big for the Bucs.

  Cincinnati struck first. Joe Morgan resumed his Red-hot play, reaching Pirates starter Nelson Briles for a run-scoring single to right in the third, then stealing second and scoring on Bobby Tolan’s single to center field.

  Donning his mustard-gold matte-finished batting helmet—achieved by flocking, a process in which tiny particles of fiber are applied on a surface to create a velvet-smooth texture and mimic the effect of a cloth cap—Sanguillen started Pittsburgh’s comeback in the top of the fifth with a leadoff home run against Gary Nolan.

  In the seventh, Sanguillen’s single to center off reliever Pedro Borbon put Richie Hebner in scoring position, and Rennie Stennett’s run-scoring single punched through the right side off Clay Carroll tied the game at 2. Stennett’s single was a freak play, the ball taking a high bounce off the Astroturf and over the head of a surprised Perez at first base.

  With one out in the eighth and the bases “FOB,” in the words of the Gunner, Bob Prince, Sanguillen topped a slow roller and then legged it out while pinch runner Gene Clines scored the eventual winning run.

  The blown save was unusual for Carroll, a fireman who was accustomed to putting out fires. To Sparky Anderson, Carroll was “Super Hawk,” swooping down on opponents in the late innings with his good sinker and slider. Carroll’s approach was a no-nonsense one, as he told an NBC television audience that season: “When I come in with the bases loaded or a couple of guys on base, the tying run or go-ahead run is on base so all I’ve got on my mind is to get that ball down and try to get them to hit a double-play ball.”

  Stennett, the Pirates’ leadoff hitter, was also one of the heroes in Game Three. Along with his two hits and RBI, Stennett made the defensive play of the game with a perfect peg to the plate that nailed Bench when the Reds catcher was attempting to score on a Cesar Geronimo fly out in the fourth.

  Virdon called it the “biggest play of the playoffs” to that point, and it surprised Cincinnati third base coach Alex Grammas. “I honestly didn’t think they’d try to make a play on Johnny,” he told reporters in the Reds’ quiet clubhouse.

  Aided by Stennett’s startling putout, Briles blanked the Reds through the middle innings with his palm ball, slider, curve, and sinker. Nellie’s fall-away delivery occasionally left him face down on the first base side of the mound. “He does that for no reason,” Gowdy told viewers during the 1971 World Series. “He can’t explain it himself. Sometimes he just collapses out there.”

  A veteran of postseason play with St. Louis in 1967–68 and Pittsburgh in ’71, Briles later attributed his falling off the mound to the lowering of the hill in 1969 from fifteen inches to ten following the “Year of the Pitcher.” It was, he said, the product of his having to reach back for more. He wasn’t big enough at 5-foot-11, 195 pounds to get a lot of push off the lower mound. He thought the new rule also affected his overhand curve and, minus the leverage of the mound, took a couple of miles off of his 90–92 m.p.h. fastball as well.

  Briles worked six innings and left trailing 2–1. Bucs relievers Kison and Dave Giusti protected the eventual 3–2 lead; “a gnat’s eyelash,” the Gunner called it. Kison, who had a whip for a right arm, got the win, Giusti the save, and Stennett starred in the field. But in the end it was Sanguillen’s slashing bad-ball hitting, which resulted in two hits, two RBIs and one run scored, that fueled the furious comeback.

  “If that club in Pittsburgh was in New York, everyone would know about Manny Sanguillen,” Kison says. “Sangy was a fabulous catcher and hitter.”

  Gowdy noted that Sanguillen’s hits were usually vicious line drives or sharp blows back through the box. Sanguillen would seemingly swing at anything. At the time Manny may have been the best bad-ball hitter since Yogi Berra. Prince called Sanguillen a “scrambling-type hitter.” Sometimes Sanguillen’s wild swings would, as Prince put it, threaten to “blow the air out of the infield.”

  Bench was one of the most intelligent catchers when it came to calling a game, and the Reds’ plan for Sanguillen was to try and fan him on a bad pitch or get a groundout. But Sanguillen’s free-swinging ways made it tough for Bench and the pitchers to work him.

  By game’s end, Manny being Manny put the Pirates on the brink of a second straight pennant.

  The following day in sun-drenched Detroit, Joe Coleman dominated the A’s, striking out a then playoff record 14 in a 3–0 win. The result was not w
holly unexpected. Coleman, a right-hander who had been rescued from continued toiling for the Washington Senators in the Denny McLain trade in 1970, won 19 games for the Tigers in 1972 and fashioned a 2.80 earned run average that was a career best for a full season.

  He was, in fact, no ordinary Joe. Coleman had won 20 games the season before and would win 23 in ’73. His success was due in part to his cooling down of a hot temper.

  The son of Joe Coleman Sr., who had pitched for the Philadelphia Athletics, Baltimore, and Detroit in the 1940s and ’50s, and father of future major league hurler Casey Coleman, Joe Jr. learned from his father that the breaks of the game eventually evened out. Especially, Joe Jr. said, if one was with a good club.

  Before being dealt to Detroit, Coleman was with Washington, and by his admission, being with a losing team had a lot to do with his being nicknamed “Boy Blunder” and “Junior” by Senators’ teammates for his petulant attitude. Temper tantrums led Coleman to toss his chair around the clubhouse following a loss. What his teammates didn’t realize was that because he was a starting pitcher, he would have to sit and stew about a tough loss for five or six days before getting a chance at redemption.

  Coleman regretted his tantrums and the reputation they gave him. It was a reputation he didn’t want, but he knew it was deserved. Being in the big leagues before he had a right to be had something to do with his attitude. Maybe, he mused, he tried just a little too hard.

  Maybe if he had gone to the minor leagues and won nine or ten games in Triple A, he would have had more confidence in himself, he said. He had spent only two seasons in the minors when the Senators called him up in 1967. His minor league record at the time was 9-29, but the Senators’ coaching staff had confidence in him, so Coleman tried hard to keep their confidence and it upset him when he didn’t. He was put in the starting rotation, and being young and inexperienced, he couldn’t adjust to the rapid rise.