Hairs vs. Squares

by Gruver , Ed;

  A writer poured champagne on the thinning white hair of Oakland owner Charles O. Finley. “This is the greatest day in my life!” Finley gushed. “None of you can appreciate what this means to me.”

  A writer asked A’s manager Dick Williams to compare the ’72 Mustache Gang to the ’67 Red Sox squad he skippered.

  “This is a much better club than we had in ’67,” Williams announced without hesitation. One big reason, he stated, was Oakland’s superior depth. Williams went on to compare the Swingin’ A’s to the “Boys of Summer” Brooklyn Dodgers clubs of which he had been a member. “This club,” he opined, “is even better than the Dodgers of the Fifties.”

  Back in Oakland the forecast called for bright skies with passing showers of confetti. But one member of the A’s who wasn’t in a celebratory mood was Reggie Jackson. Because of his crutches, Oakland’s injured star couldn’t get on the field to celebrate with teammates or even shake their hands. Jackson was so disassociated from the triumph that he felt at the time it was the worst day he had ever experienced as an athlete.

  When Cincinnati second baseman Joe Morgan appeared in the A’s clubhouse to offer congratulations, Williams told him, “Great Series! I’m gonna see if Charlie can get you!”

  Reds manager Sparky Anderson visited the A’s as well. On his way out of the locker room, he bumped into Epstein.

  “I hope we see you guys here next year,” Big Mike said smiling.

  Anderson returned the smile. “So do I. If we can just get past those doggone Pirates!”

  The Reds had come to respect the A’s; Anderson called reliever Rollie Fingers “as good as anyone we’ve got in the National League” and said Cincinnati scouts had told him prior to the Series that of all the American League teams, Oakland came closest to playing National League–style ball.

  Johnny Bench, who had dinner with Jackson prior to Game Seven, sought out Reggie after the game, congratulated him, spotted Finley dancing in the aisles, and trudged toward the Reds’ dugout. Bench’s mood would be brightened when the lesion he had removed from his lung weeks later turned out to be benign.

  Cincinnati’s locker room was morgue-quiet. Center fielder Bobby Tolan, who had misjudged a fly ball in the first inning and was victimized by an injury in the sixth, murmured apologies to teammates. Morgan thought there was no need for recriminations. The season was over, and in the course of the long campaign things happened.

  Yet more than forty years have passed since the final out of the 1972 World Series, and Morgan has said he’s still sickened when he thinks of what might have been. He won four pennants and two World Series, but on a personal basis no postseason ever promised more joy and delivered more pain for the Hall of Famer than 1972.

  Anderson felt his players’ frustration. “Look how many times we had men on second and third and couldn’t score,” he told reporters. “We’re a better hitting team than that. We got the best pitching we’ve gotten all year and we got beat four times by one run.”

  The Reds’ skipper was bitterly reproachful in the postmortem. He told reporters he second-guessed himself about his decisions late in Game Four.

  “I stayed with Clay Carroll against [Don] Mincher,” he said. “I guess I should have brought in [Tom] Hall, as I look back and see how Hall pitched all Series.”

  The Series was over, but in Sparky’s mind he was still managing. He knew Carroll was 0-1 with a 1.59 ERA in five appearances in the Series and knew Hall had not been scored upon in eight and a third innings.

  “Of course,” Anderson added, “if I bring in Hall they come with [Angel] Mangual for Mincher and it’s tough to double up Mangual, where if Mincher hits the ball on the ground there’s no way you can’t double him.”

  Anderson said once that there was no future in living in the past. Yet when he thought of the 1972 World Series, he said he should have been charged with two critical errors. He called it a psychological error to downgrade the A’s prior to the Series, to state that the NLCS had brought together the “two best teams in baseball.” It was, he said, “foolish . . . stupid . . . idiotic” to make such a statement, even if he felt that way. He backed up his belief by pointing to Dick Allen:

  You certainly wouldn’t rate Allen at the top when he was in our league—there’d be maybe a half-dozen guys you’d rate above him, fellows like Roberto Clemente, Willie Stargell, Billy Williams, Hank Aaron, Tony Perez and others. But he gets over in the American League and all of a sudden he’s a superstar, just tearing that league apart. We handled him in this league but in that league he was on a plateau all alone. That’s the kind of thing that makes me suspect the overall strength of the other league.

  Anderson applied the same argument to Gaylord Perry and Sam McDowell. Perry, he pointed out, went to the American League and won 24 games. McDowell went to the National League and won 10 games. What Sparky didn’t mention and what writers at the time failed to report was that Perry had won 23 games just two years prior while pitching for San Francisco and had won 21 in ’66. McDowell, a flame thrower who led the AL in strikeouts five times, including 304 in 305 innings in his 20-win season with Cleveland in 1970, was in the process of flaming out. Persistent back and neck pain would precipitate a physical decline that forced Sudden Sam from major league baseball on June 26, 1975.

  Sparky said the second error he made in the ’72 Series was a tactical one. It involved his decision to not call time in the ninth inning of Game Four and order shortstop Dave Concepcion to adhere to Reds’ scout Ray Shore’s report on how to defend against Oakland pinch hitter Gonzalo Marquez.

  Anderson was set to order Concepcion to stick with the Reds’ scouting report but didn’t. Aw, hell, he thought in the heat of battle, David should know. Moments later, Marquez bounced a ground ball back toward the middle. Had Concepcion been playing where Shore advised, Anderson believed it would have been an out.

  “That got the A’s started,” Anderson recalled, and Oakland rallied in its final at-bat to win 3–2 and push the Big Red Machine to the brink. Had he ordered Concepcion to shade Marquez toward the middle of the field, Anderson felt the Reds would have won Game Four and tied the Series at two. Cincinnati would go on to claim Games Five and Six. “We would have won the Series,” Anderson reasoned, “four games to two.”

  Anderson continued with his mental gymnastics concerning the ’72 World Series for years. Rose, as direct as the line drives he ripped to the outfield, remained firmly on the rails when it came to recalling the loss. For one week, Rose said, Gene Tenace had become Babe Ruth. “He beat our brains out.”

  Morgan agreed. Tenace won the Series for them—he and their pitching staff, he said. None of the other seven guys in their lineup hurt the Reds with their bats. Morgan said no one could take credit away from Tenace. But he was disappointed Cincinnati’s pitchers let him do all that damage. One guy, he said, shouldn’t hurt you as much as he did.

  Tenace reached Reds pitchers for 4 homers and 9 RBIs; none of his teammates had more than 1 RBI, and Rudi was the only other Oakland player to homer. The A’s scored 16 runs and didn’t score more than 3 in any of their four victories. Through 2013 Oakland’s .209 team batting average ranked as the tenth all-time lowest for a World Series champion. The combined .209 batting average of the A’s and Reds broke the seven-game Series low of .213 set by the Yankees and Giants ten years earlier.

  True to form, the A’s teased their Series hero in the aftermath. He had surrendered 11 steals in 15 attempts over the first six games. When it was announced that Tenace was the Series MVP and had won a car that went with the award, someone in the Oakland locker room shouted, “Hey, Gino, don’t let anybody steal the car, too!”

  Some observers felt as if underdog Oakland had stolen the Series from Cincinnati. Baseball Digest called the A’s triumph the most unexpected surprise of the season. “The A’s, man-for-man, were a much inferior team to the Reds—or for that matter, to the Pittsburgh Pirates,” George Vass wrote. “What made the A’s victory even more surpri
sing was their loss before the World Series of their best player, Reggie Jackson. . . . Yet without Jackson the A’s beat the Reds. . . . They did it with superb pitching and exceptional hitting by one man who shouldn’t have hit, Gene Tenace.”

  Vass and others considered Tenace’s slugging outburst a fluke. But given a chance to start and play regularly, Tenace proved he could hit, hammering 24 homers the following season, 26 in ’74, a career-high 29 in ’75, and 22 in ’76. The truth is that Tenace was more of an unknown than a fluke in ’72.

  As subsequent seasons would show, the same could be said for the A’s, whose victory over the Reds really wasn’t much of an upset given the benefit of hindsight. Oakland went on to win world championships in 1973 and ’74—the first post-1960s “three-peat”—and the A’s stand with the Yankees of 1936–39, 1949–53, and 1998–2000 as the only teams to win three straight World Series. In the ’73 and ’74 Fall Classics the A’s conquered the Reds’ conquerors those seasons, the Mets and Dodgers respectively.

  Many believe that if the A’s had not been broken up by Hunter’s free agency in ’74 and subsequent trades, Oakland might have won four or five straight World Series. By the time the Mustache Gang wiped out the Dodgers in five games in ’74, the average age of the A’s starters was just twenty-eight, the average age of their superb pitching staff just twenty-seven. The A’s, as Curt Gowdy noted during NBC’s Game One coverage in ’74, were just approaching their prime years.

  Beyond their stars Oakland had quality depth. Outfielder Claudell Washington was a nineteen-year-old star in the making; he earned All-Star status the following season. Young infielders Phil Garner and Manny Trillo would become key starters for World Series–winning teams in Pittsburgh and Philadelphia respectively.

  Jackson, Hunter, and Fingers were future Hall of Famers. Hunter helped key the Yankees’ return to glory in the mid-seventies; he won 23 games in ’75 and was the staff ace in ’76, when New York ended a twelve-year postseason drought and returned to the World Series. The Yanks were overmatched by the Big Red Machine, who swept them in four straight to repeat as world champions, and the only game New York came close to winning was Hunter’s complete-game outing in Game Two.

  Jackson arrived in the Bronx the following season and put the exclamation point on a turbulent season with his legendary three-homer night in Game Six against the Dodgers. New York beat Los Angeles again in ’78, the Catfish pitching the clinching Game Six, a victory punctuated by Reggie’s rocketing a drive to the bullpen in Dodger Stadium to seal the deal.

  Fingers took his Snidely Whiplash mustache and sharp slider to Milwaukee and won the Cy Young award in 1981. In ’86 Fingers was approached by Rose, then the manager of the Reds, and offered a contract to play for Cincinnati. The club still had its clean-shaven policy, so Fingers, displaying some of the old A’s irreverence, told Reds general manager Bill Bergesch, “You tell [owner] Marge Schott to shave her Saint Bernard and I’ll shave my mustache.”

  Adversaries in the 1972 postseason became allies in future years. Detroit manager Billy Martin joined Hunter and Ken Holtzman on the ’76 Yankees, and Battling Billy finally got his chance to take on the Big Red Machine in that year’s Fall Classic after missing out in ’72. In ’77 Jackson joined the Yanks, along with former Cincinnati ace Don Gullett. In a sign of things coming full circle, Bert Campaneris came out of retirement in 1983 to play for the Yankees. His manager was Martin.

  Some adversaries stayed as such. Williams won another World Series with Oakland in ’73 and fed up with Finley, bolted Oakland before the champagne stains were even dry. He eventually landed in San Diego and in 1984 rematched with Anderson, then managing Detroit, in the Fall Classic. Sparky and the Tigers won in five games.

  The end of the A’s dynasty in ’75 coincided with the Big Red Machine’s rise. Cincinnati succeeded Oakland as World Series champions, edging Boston’s heroes of ’72—Luis Tiant, Carl Yastrzemski, Carlton Fisk—in a classic seven-game Series in ’75 and sweeping the Yanks in ’76.

  Just as the Mustache Gang was brought down by free agency and trades, so too was the Big Red Machine. Gullett’s departure for the Yankees via free agency crippled Cincinnati’s mound corps, and the trading of Perez to Montreal to make room for Dan Driessan proved disastrous, particularly from the standpoint of team chemistry and locker room leadership.

  By ’79 Rose was gone as well, signing a free agent deal with Philadelphia, and Anderson was fired following a second-straight second-place finish in ’78. The ’79 season saw the remnants of the ’72 Big Red Machine—Bench, Morgan, Concepcion, Foster, Geronimo, Borbon—put together one final bravura performance.

  The Reds ended the Dodgers’ two-year reign as Western Division champions but were swept by their playoff adversaries from ’72—Willie Stargell and the Pittsburgh Pirates—in three games in the NLCS. It was the fourth and final postseason meeting of the decade between the Reds and Pirates. Like Ahab and the white whale, the two ancient adversaries spent the seventies locked in a continuous and contentious struggle.

  The A’s, Reds, Pirates, and Yankees dominated the decade, each franchise winning at least two world championships. As a foursome they combined to win nine of the 10 World Series in the ’70s, 20 division titles, and 12 pennants. The ’75–76 Reds are on everybody’s short list of baseball’s greatest teams, and the Big Red Machine deserves its lofty status. Cincinnati’s blend of speed, power, and defense; its combination of four Hall of Fame–caliber talents—Rose (the all-time hits leader), Bench (recognized by many as the greatest catcher ever), Morgan (arguably baseball’s best little big man and one of the top second basemen in history), and the productive and consistent Perez—along with a Hall of Fame manager in Anderson makes the ’75–76 Reds one of history’s premier teams.

  How good were the Reds? Sports Illustrated posed that question in its October ’76 cover story after Cincinnati became the first National League team since the 1921–22 New York Giants to win back-to-back World Series. Managed by John “Mugsy” McGraw, the Giants played in four straight World Series and beat the Babe Ruth–led Yankees in ’21 and ’22, the latter a four-game sweep. The 1921–24 Giants rank with the 1931–34 St. Louis Cardinals, 1942–44 Cardinals, 1963–66 Dodgers, 1964–68 Cardinals, 1975–76 Reds, and 2010–14 Giants as the only NL teams since 1920 to win multiple World Series. There have been other senior circuit squads who have enjoyed sustained periods of excellence, notably the 1949–56 “Boys of Summer” Brooklyn Dodgers, 1991–99 Atlanta Braves, and 2008–11 Philadelphia Phillies, each of whom won one World Series and at least two NL pennants.

  Of these only the Boys of Summer fielded an everyday lineup comparable to Cincinnati’s “Great Eight.” Both featured four Hall of Famers, and the position-by-position analysis of the ’76 Reds and ’55 Dodgers shows the strong similarities:

  Catcher—Johnny Bench and Roy Campanella;

  First base—Tony Perez and Gil Hodges;

  Second base—Joe Morgan and Junior Gilliam;

  Shortstop—Dave Concepcion and Pee Wee Reese;

  Third base—Pete Rose and Jackie Robinson;

  Left field—George Foster and Sandy Amoros;

  Center field—Cesar Geronimo and Duke Snider;

  Right field—Ken Griffey and Carl Furillo

  Baseball historians question the validity of comparing teams and players across eras. Joe DiMaggio believed the game changes every fifteen years, and a timeline shows that to be mostly accurate: late ’40s—integration; early ’60s—westward expansion and the expanding strike zone; early-to-mid ’70s—Astroturf, the designated hitter, and free agency; late ’80s—drugs and expanded LCS; mid-90s—additional playoff rounds, interleague play, and steroids.

  Some, like filmmaker Ken Burns, believe you can compare eras in baseball. Others, like longtime baseball writer Peter Gammons, disagree. The differences across decades are many, as noted above—integration, expansion, equipment, training, night games, strike zones, stadiums, playing surfaces, schedu
les, regular season and postseason, etc.—but fans love to compare. It’s why they debate Lombardi’s Packers versus Pittsburgh’s Steel Curtain; Michael Jordan’s Bulls against King James and the Heat; Gretzky, Messier, and the Oilers versus the Broad Street Bullies; Ali against Tyson; Tiger versus Hogan.

  Don Zimmer, a member of Brooklyn’s Boys of Summer, managed against the Reds in 1972 and was a bench coach for the Derek Jeter–Mariano Rivera–Andy Pettitte–Jorge Posada Yankee dynasty that won five World Series and seven pennants from 1996 to 2009. Zimmer said he ranked the Big Red Machine with the ’50s Dodgers and ’90s Yankees as the best he’d seen. Zimmer’s benchmate on the dynastic Yankees, skipper Joe Torre, played against the Big Red Machine. He thought the 1998 Yankees’ lineup comparable to the ’76 Reds and New York’s pitching to be superior.

  Often left out of the debate is the 1936 Negro National League champion Pittsburgh Crawfords, who listed five future Hall of Famers among their great eight: catcher Josh Gibson, first baseman Oscar Charleston, third baseman Judy Johnson, infielder Jud “Boojum” Wilson, and center fielder James “Cool Papa” Bell.

  Gibson is considered the greatest hitting catcher in history, better than Bench, Yogi Berra, and Mike Piazza, though not the equal of Bench, Ivan Rodriguez, or Yadier Molina defensively. The multi-talented Charleston is recognized by many baseball historians to be the best player in Negro League history; Johnson is said to have been a third baseman superior defensively to Brooks Robinson, Mike Schmidt, or Pie Traynor.

  Gibson called the fiery Wilson the best hitter in the Negro Leagues, and Satchel Paige opined that Bell was faster than Jesse Owens. Owens himself thought Bell “just about the fastest ballplayer I’ve ever seen.” Bell had incredible speed and was an excellent leadoff hitter and a superb outfielder. For all-time comparisons, think Ty Cobb, Lou Brock, and Rickey Henderson. Flanking Bell were Jimmie Crutchfield and Sam Bankhead, giving the Craws what is recognized as the swiftest outfield in history.