Hairs vs. Squares

by Gruver , Ed;

  Holtzman protected the slim lead into the eighth. Concepcion stroked a leadoff single and eventually reached third with two outs. Blue came on for his third relief appearance and after walking Morgan gave up a two-run double to Tolan down the right-field line.

  Trailing 2–1 and down to the final two outs of the game, Williams was clutching at straws when he had Gonzalo Marquez pinch-hit for Hendrick. Marquez was a left-handed hitter, Hendrick a righty, and Williams thought Marquez had a better chance than Hendrick of making contact against right-handed reliever Pedro Borbon.

  Ray “Snacks” Shore’s scouting report reminded the Reds that Marquez had been successful as a pinch hitter and that when the rookie first baseman from Venezuela hit the ball in the air, it was usually to left-center and when he hit it on the ground, it was up the middle.

  “Let’s have our infielders play him to pull the ball,” Snacks said, “and the outfield shade him a little toward left.”

  Concepcion objected. “No, no, he is Venezuelan like me. I play against Gonzalo many times in winter ball. I see him hit everything to left field.”

  Shore said Concepcion was wrong. Snacks had seen the A’s for the last month and insisted the Reds should play him to pull. Anderson cast the deciding vote: “Okay, Snacks, we’re going your way.”

  Concepcion, according to Anderson, decided to do it his way. Moments later Marquez hit a high chopper over Borbon’s head and through the middle. Sparky was bitterly self-reproachful. He should have called time, he thought, and ordered Concepcion to move. Had Davey been playing where he was supposed to, Marquez would have been out. Instead Marquez got the A’s started.

  Williams sent Lewis to first base to pinch-run. Anderson trotted to the mound to talk with Borbon.

  “Nobody hurt,” Anderson told his pitcher. “Only one thing you got to do is you got to make [Lewis] stop over there. You don’t have to throw over there [to first base]. I don’t want you throwing over there. Just make him stop.”

  Borbon nodded but became flustered and tried a pickoff move. When he fell behind 2-1 to Tenace, a visibly angry Anderson headed back to the hill.

  “All right, Petey, I’m gonna bring in the Hawk,” Anderson told Borbon as he signaled for Carroll. When Borbon departed the mound, Anderson told Bench that Borbon had “lost his concentration. . . . That won’t happen to Hawk.”

  Carroll, trying to nail down the Series-tying win, surrendered a ground single to left by Tenace. The managerial machinations in full swing, Williams sent Don Mincher to hit for Green. Anderson had southpaw Tom Hall ready in the bullpen to face the left-hand hitting Mincher but elected to stay with the right-handed Carroll. Mincher smoked the ball to right-center to score Lewis with the tying run. It would be the last hit of Mincher’s career and remains the most vivid in his memory. Amid a sea of green and gold pennants waving wildly in the Coliseum, Odom entered the game to run for Mincher. Williams figured Blue Moon’s speed could break up a double play.

  Rollie was due up, and Williams, whom Gowdy called a “mustachioed marvel,” made one final move, sending in pinch hitter Angel Mangual. Three pinch hitters in the same inning was a World Series record. With runners on the corners, the A’s needed somebody who could make contact. Mangual could do that better than Fingers. Get a good pitch to hit, Williams told Mangual as he headed to the plate, and hit it safely.

  Simpson: Mangual steps in. . . . A ground ball. . . . Oakland wins!

  Mangual made just enough contact to send a bleeder through the right side between a desperately straining Morgan and Perez. To a riotous celebration of cheers and noisemakers, Tenace danced across home plate to complete a shocking 3–2 comeback.

  The Reds couldn’t believe it. Mangual’s game-winning hit had come off his bat handle. It skittered just to the left of Morgan, who was playing in to cut down Tenace at home. It was just out of Morgan’s reach and rolled slowly into shallow right. National League boosters couldn’t believe it either. One NL skipper grumped in the postmortem that Williams kept making mistakes but kept getting lucky.

  The A’s literally had an Angel on their shoulders as they carried Mangual off the field in triumph. Angel had put Oakland one win away from a world championship, but there was trouble in paradise. While Finley stood from his box seat and cheered as fireworks exploded in the night air, Mangual brooded because he had not been Williams’s choice to replace Jackson in the outfield.

  “The things people do to you here,” he told reporters in a voice tinged with sadness. Williams shrugged off the comments. These being the Swingin’ A’s, the manager was happy Mangual wasn’t slugging somebody.

  Oakland’s rally gave Fingers his second Series win in relief, and his one inning of work marked his fourth appearance in as many games. A national television audience was being introduced to Roland Glen Fingers, and what was gaining their attention wasn’t just the handlebar mustache with the waxed tips. It was the nasty sliders he was dealing.

  It was a pitch Fingers perfected when he went to the Dominican Republic following the 1970 season. He worked on the pitch, he said, until he could throw it where he wanted to nine times out of ten—the outside part of the plate.

  On May 15, 1971, Fingers made his final major league start. He was 1-4, and Williams, noting that Fingers tended to fret between starts, figured Rollie might be better suited to the bullpen, where he could make more frequent appearances. Fingers didn’t complain. He wasn’t doing the job as a starter, he thought, so he might as well try the bullpen.

  Fingers did the job well enough to finish the season with 17 saves and a 3.00 ERA. In ’72, his first season as a full-time reliever, Fingers had 21 saves, an 11-9 record, and a 2.51 ERA, and he fanned 113 in 111 innings. He had benefited tremendously from knowing from the moment he arrived at the A’s spring training site what his position would be.

  That certainty was a nice switch for Fingers, whose life and career had survived some close calls. In 1966 Fingers and Jackson were teammates on the California League team in Modesto. Fingers was supposed to pick up Jackson and Stan Jones on the way to the ballpark, but Rollie was pitching that day and was thinking so much about the game that he and car mate Steve Kokor forgot about Jackson and Stone. Another driver ran a red light and smashed the left rear of Fingers’s car, causing it to flip over. If Jackson or Jones had been in the car that day, they would have been sitting on the left side, which was crushed in the accident. “They would have been dead,” Fingers said.

  Fingers and Kokor climbed out of the window of the wreck with bruises, bumps, and scratches. A year later Fingers was chosen by Birmingham manager John McNamara to pitch the season opener against Evansville. Rollie worked three scoreless innings but in the fourth threw a change-up that Fred Kovner ripped on a line back to the mound.

  Fingers instinctively threw his arms up for protection, but the ball was hit so hard that it crashed through and hit Rollie in the face. Fingers fell face down in the dirt. Teammates rushed to the mound and rolled him over. McNamara saw blood flowing from Fingers’s right eye and thought Fingers was dead.

  Rollie’s high school sweetheart and newlywed wife, Jill, sat frozen in the stands. She didn’t know if her husband was dead or alive; he was motionless on the field. Finally she saw Rollie raise his leg and knew he was alive.

  Fingers was rushed to the hospital, where his jaw was wired shut. For three days he vomited through his teeth; he was allergic to a drug doctors were giving him. Finley called Rollie and Jill and told them to go anywhere they wanted in Florida for a delayed honeymoon; he would pay their expenses. Fingers spent six and one-half weeks on the disabled list as the right side of his face was reconstructed with metal wiring.

  It was one more twist to a tale that had begun in Jack Benny’s favorite town, Cucamonga, California. Fingers’s father, George, had moved west from Ohio to work in a nearby steel mill. George Fingers had been a pitcher as well, spending four years in the Cardinals’ minor league system.

  Rollie was a pitcher and left fielder
for Upland High’s baseball team and a center for the school’s basketball squad. Upon graduation Fingers didn’t find himself swamped by baseball scouts, so he and Jill enrolled at Chaffey Junior College. In 1964 Fingers helped lead Upland American Legion Post 73 to the national title. He threw a three-hitter in the title game, and his .450 batting average led all teams. Named American Legion Player of the Year, he was given an offer by the Dodgers. Fingers looked at the pitching-rich organization, saw Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale at the peak of their powers, and signed with the Athletics.

  The A’s initially didn’t know whether to use Fingers as a pitcher or a hitter. But in his first spring playing pro ball the organization decided Fingers’s future was in pitching. In 1971 his role was further defined as relief pitcher. It was perfect for a guy whose idol wasn’t Walter Johnson but W. C. Fields. Larger-than-life posters of the wise-cracking comedian covered the walls of Fingers’s suburban Oakland home in Newark, California. Jill gave her husband a two-foot-high statue of Fields for his 26th birthday in August 1972.

  Some considered the “Cucamonga Kid” a flake, a daydreamer, but when Fingers did daydream, it was about baseball. His relief work had helped tame the Tigers in the ALCS, and now he was doing the same to the Big Red Machine. Oakland’s 3–1 Series lead was thought by some to be insurmountable. The Reds thought otherwise.

  Morgan believed the Big Red Machine’s mood was anything but despondent. The Mustache Gang was earning all A’s for their play, but the Reds still thought they were the better team. They believed that if they played ball the way they had all summer, they would win. All they had to do was stay focused.

  The Reds’ resolve was evident from the first pitch of Game Five. Catching all of a Hunter fastball, Rose homered over the 375-foot sign in right-center. Rose’s blast wasn’t surprising since the Catfish was known as a home run pitcher; his good control meant his pitches were always around the plate. What was surprising was that it was Rose who took Hunter deep. Pete was sturdily built, but he had hit just 6 homers in 731 plate appearances that season.

  Rose’s drive was the first salvo in a gritty Game Five, a back-and-forth affair played out amid the soft sunshine of a Friday afternoon. It was Oakland’s last chance to win the World Series in front of its home crowd, which packed the Coliseum for the fifth straight sellout. It was Cincinnati’s last chance, period.

  The A’s answered the Reds’ run in the second. Epstein walked, Hendrick singled, and Tenace pulled a Jim McGlothlin pitch to deep left for a 3–1 lead. The homer was Tenace’s fourth of the Series, and the Coliseum scoreboard lit up with an announcement that Fury Gene had tied a record held by Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Duke Snider, and Hank Bauer. Tenace saw the announcement and thought, I don’t belong with those guys.

  McGlothlin was familiar with the A’s and the Coliseum. The right-hander had debuted with the California Angels in 1965, and his final American League game had come in 1969 in the Coliseum. He went 14-10 for the pennant-winning Reds in 1970 and 9-8 in ’72. McGlothlin was 3-5 against the A’s lifetime, but as Monte Moore observed in the NBC pregame, McGlothlin was the kind of pitcher who could rise to the occasion. The former AL All-Star had won five games over the final two months of the season.

  Game Five’s mound matchup between Hunter and McGlothlin favored Oakland, and the A’s armed their ace with a 3–1 lead. It was all up to him, Hunter thought. But the Cat was struggling. In the Cincinnati fourth Menke found balm for his Game Two pain by driving a Hunter delivery well beyond the reach of Rudi in left. Like Rose’s, Menke’s homer was just his second hit of the Series.

  Bando’s leadoff walk in the fourth prompted Anderson to bring in Borbon, but Oakland increased its lead when Marquez, batting for Green, worked more pinch-hit magic with an RBI single to center to score Bando.

  Trailing 4–2, the Reds refused to die. Morgan worked Hunter for a two-out walk in the fifth, and Tolan followed with an RBI single to right. Morgan had gotten such a good jump, he was almost at second base when the ball was hit. Knowing he had no chance to get back to first if the ball was caught, Morgan motored to third. Third-base coach Alex Grammas waved him home, and Morgan scored on what was essentially a routine single to right. Fingers came on and prevented any further damage, but the Reds’ dugout had come back to life. Go-Go Joe’s spectacular sprint around the bases had electrified the team.

  The Big Red Machine’s comeback continued in the eighth. Morgan, who had been criticized in the papers following Game Two for not being a clutch player, drew another walk and stole second. Tolan again came through, stroking a single to right-center that scored Morgan with the tying run.

  The season was running out, and tempers were running short. In the Cincinnati seventh Rose took offense when Tenace, thinking Pete had struck out looking, started to throw the ball to third. If you want to umpire, Rose snapped at Tenace, why don’t you get an indicator? Shut up and swing the bat, Tenace replied. Rose and Carroll gave first base umpire Bill Haller the choke sign. Haller later ejected Carroll, an inning after the Reds reliever left the game. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn fined Carroll for abusive language.

  Umpire Jim Honochick continued to have his problems with the A’s. They had started in Game One, when Honochick had to make close calls on several bang-bang plays. The veteran AL ump had been umpiring World Series games since 1952 and didn’t like it that Williams kept coming out and putting on a show, kicking dirt, etc. Honochick believed Williams had no use for him and that at their manager’s instigation the A’s had it in for him. To Honochick it was obvious Oakland was going to give him a going-over on every close call that didn’t go the A’s way.

  An example was the run-in Honochick had with Bando in Game Five. Tolan stole third in the eighth inning, and though Tenace’s throw was in time, Bando didn’t get the tag down quickly enough. Bando jumped around in vigorous protest, and Williams hurried out and wanted to know how the hell Honochick could make a call like that. When the A’s learned later that the instant replay confirmed the call was correct, Bando sought out Honochick to apologize. The embattled ump told the A’s captain where he and his skipper could stick their apologies.

  The A’s also had issues with Rose, mainly because of his belittling comments about the Catfish, and didn’t like the liberties the Reds were taking with Green at second base. A day earlier, McRae hadn’t even bothered to slide while attempting to break up a double play, preferring instead to lower his shoulder into Green and knocking the second baseman some ten feet behind the base. Bench also barreled into Green on what some observers thought a vicious play. Green insisted he didn’t mind. Actually, he said, he liked hard play.

  The Reds rallied to take the lead in the ninth. Geronimo opened by bouncing a single to right and was sacrificed to second. Concepcion reached on an error, and Rose redirected a Fingers pitch to center. Cincinnati led 5–4, but the Swingin’ A’s would go down swinging. Tenace walked to lead off the Oakland half. Ross Grimsley retired Ted Kubiak on a bunt pop fly to first and was replaced by Billingham. Williams, looking to repeat the miracle from the night before, sent Odom in to pinch-run for Tenace. Williams hated to risk possible injury to his starting pitcher, but he had already used his top pinch runner, Lewis. When you’re going for all the marbles, Williams said, you have to take chances.

  Duncan, his long blonde locks flowing under his helmet, continued the A’s amazing pinch-hitting success with a single down the left-field line that sent Odom to third. It was Game Four all over again, Williams thought. His charmed lineup card was working. No Bay Area team had ever won a major world title, and Williams believed the A’s were not only going to win the title, but they would also do so in front of their fans.

  With two outs and the tying run at third Campaneris stepped in against Cactus Jack. Bench eyed Campy warily. He’s another, Bench thought, who swings at everything. Campy lifted a high foul down the right-field line. Perez and Morgan converged on the ball, but Morgan didn’t like the way Perez was positioning himself and called him o
ff.

  The A’s report on Morgan was that he had a weak arm and should be tested. Morgan knew Blue Moon was going to tag and break for home. So did Bench, and he positioned himself to block the plate. Because of the recent rain and because the tarp hadn’t covered that part of the field, the foul territory was slick. As Morgan stabbed at the ball, his feet slipped on the wet grass. Third base coach Irv Noren, knowing the scouting report and field conditions, sent Odom on a daring dash for home. Putting his hands out so he could bounce back up off the turf, Morgan threw home. It was a perfect peg, and Bench knew there was no way Blue Moon was going to score. Amid a cloud of dirt Bench swiped at the ball with his mitt hand and made a sweeping tag.

  Home plate umpire Bob Engel got down on one knee to make the call and pumped his right fist in the air to signify an out call. Odom erupted. He climbed from the dirt and bumped Engel, who was still in a low crouch. Reds general manager Bob Howsam wondered what Kuhn would do about that. The commissioner decided against suspending Odom, hitting him instead with a $500 fine.

  Williams didn’t dispute the call. Morgan had made the perfect throw, and Odom was out on the back end of a double play, no question about it, he said. Odom had taken a calculated risk and nearly gotten away with it. Williams was happy to see the game end on a fighting note, with Blue Moon blowing up at Engel.

  Bench cared little for Odom’s tantrum. He flipped the ball on the field. We’ll win it now, he thought.

  15

  The A’s four-hour return flight to Cincinnati was miserable. To accommodate Charlie Finley’s numerous guests—“his whole damn entourage,” one Oakland player spat—the team plane was jammed to its full capacity of 163 passengers. Overflowing with people and cramped with so much luggage that the latter was stuffed into restrooms so as to render them unusable, the plane finally touched down in Cincinnati at 1:30 a.m. on Saturday, October 21, the morning of Game Six.