by Gruver , Ed;
Add Hall of Fame pitchers Paige, Bill Foster, and an aging Smoky Joe Williams, along with lefty ace Leroy Matlock and fellow southpaw Sam Streeter, and the 1932–36 Crawfords rank with the greatest clubs ever.
Beyond the National League, the Reds’ Great Eight has been favorably compared with the 1927 Yankees, ’30 Philadelphia Athletics, ’36 Yankees, ’61 Yankees, and ’70 Orioles. Each of those powerhouses featured at least two Hall of Famers in their great eight—the ’27 and ’36 Yankees had the most with four (Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Tony Lazzeri, and Earle Combs in ’27; Gehrig, Lazzeri, Joe DiMaggio, and Bill Dickey in ’36); the Athletics had three (Jimmie Foxx, Al Simmons, and Mickey Cochrane); and the ’61 Yankees and ’70 Orioles had two each (Mickey Mantle and Yogi Berra for the former, and Brooks Robinson and Frank Robinson for the latter).
The startling fact about the Cincinnati Great Eight is that it played only eighty-eight games together over the ’75–76 seasons. However, as Reds writer John Erardi and team historian Greg Rhodes note, the Great Eight’s combined career total of 19,230 games is some 5,000 more than any other great eight lineup. In their eighty-eight games the Great Eight went 69-19, a .784 winning percentage. In ’76 seven of the Great Eight made the NL All-Star team. The eighth member—Geronimo—batted .307 and won his third straight Gold Glove.
The Great Eight played its final game together on an arctic night in Yankee Stadium. It was fitting in hindsight since in the more than three decades since only one team—the 1996–2001 Yankees—has drawn serious comparison to the Big Red Machine. The dynasty debate between Anderson’s Reds and Torre’s Yankees escalated following the Yankees’ historic 125-win season in 1998.
While the Reds had the Great Eight, the A’s flashed the Big Four in their pitchers: Hunter, Fingers, Blue, and Holtzman. Just as the Big Red Machine showed that for them the swing was the thing, as far as the Mustache Gang was concerned, it was more a matter of “You ain’t got a thing if you ain’t got that fling.”
Hunter was widely considered the best big game pitcher of his era. The Catfish fronted a starting staff that, while together for only three seasons, won its division, the LCS, and the World Series each of those years. That’s a level of clutch pitching unmatched in the modern era. The 1998–2000 Yankees three-peat staff came close, but the only two mainstays were Andy Pettitte and Orlando “El Duque” Hernandez. By 2000 David Cone had effectively been replaced by Roger Clemens, who had come to the Bronx the year before in the David Wells deal.
Hunter, Fingers, and Vida Blue each won a Cy Young in their respective careers, the Cat pitched a perfect game, and Holtzman had two no-hitters. Blue and Fingers combined with Glenn Abbott and Paul Lindblad on a no-hitter. There had been ace relievers before Fingers—the much-traveled Hoyt Wilhelm, Luis Arroyo with the ’61 Yankees, Barney Schultz with the ’64 Cardinals, Ron Perranoski with the ’65 Dodgers—but it was Fingers, along with contemporaries Dave Giusti, Sparky Lyle, Tug McGraw, Mike Marshall, and Goose Gossage, who popularized the modern role of the ace reliever. They set the stage for decades of dominant closers: Bruce Sutter, Dennis Eckersley, and Mariano Rivera preeminent among them.
The role of the relief ace has become more refined over the decades. Fingers was brought in to “close” as early as the fifth inning, Gossage and McGraw in the seventh. Both scenarios would have been unimaginable to Rivera, Brad Lidge, or Sergio Romo.
Hunter, Holtzman, and Blue each won 20 games in 1973 and through 2014 remain the last major league trio to accomplish that feat. Since 1900 only 14 AL staffs and 8 NL rotations have boasted three 20-game winners in the same season.
In an era when 20-win seasons have diminished, the ’73 A’s pitching staff’s place in history won’t be threatened any time soon. Hunter and Blue gained added fame as the subjects of songs. Bob Dylan rhapsodized about the Catfish in 1975, Hunter’s first year with the Yankees. The bluesy classic was later covered by Joe Cocker. Blue’s tribute song was some tight funk done by Detroit soul singer Albert Jones.
Catfish and Vida comprised one-half of an A’s Fearsome Foursome that, like the Reds’ Great Eight, can be compared to baseball’s all-time best. The team that comes closest to matching the Mustache Gang in recent years is another world champion from the Bay Area, the 2010 and ’12 San Francisco Giants. The 2010 Giants featured a Big Four of starters Tim Lincecum, Matt Cain, Jonathan Sanchez, and closer Brian Wilson; the 2012 group was even deeper, with Lincecum, Cain, Madison Bumgarner, Barry Zito, Ryan Vogelsong, and relief ace Sergio Romo. The 2012 Giants paralleled the ’72 A’s in that both featured a former ace (Lincecum, Blue) in the role of a bullpen stopper.
Along with that of the Giants, the A’s armada of arms compares favorably with the great Series-winning staffs of the past half-century: the 1998 Yankees (Wells, Cone, Pettitte, and Rivera); the ’95 Braves (Greg Maddux, Tom Glavine, John Smoltz, and Mark Wohlers); the ’89 A’s (Dave Stewart, Storm Davis, Mike Moore, Bob Welch, and Eckersley); the ’70 Orioles (Jim Palmer, Dave McNally, Mike Cuellar, and Pete Richert); the ’65 Dodgers (Sandy Koufax, Don Drysdale, Claude Osteen, and Ron Perranoski); and the ’61 Yankees (Whitey Ford, Ralph Terry, Bill Stafford, and Luis Arroyo).
It is not just Oakland’s pitching that leads many observers to rank the 1972–74 squads as among the best ever. The A’s were a well-rounded outfit. Jackson, who went on to become “Mr. October,” is one of the game’s all-time great sluggers and clutch hitters. Campaneris was the AL’s premier base stealer of his era; Rudi, baseball’s best left fielder in the early ’70s. Williams is a Hall of Fame skipper and was one of the game’s top strategists; Dick Green, one of the best defensive second basemen of his generation; and Captain Sal, one of the most respected leaders in sports during the decade of the ’70s.
The ’72 A’s brought the first major sports championship to the Bay Area, but fans’ hopes that they would host two title teams as Baltimore had done in 1970 with the Orioles and Colts were sadly disappointed on Saturday, December 23, 1972. Franco Harris’s “Immaculate Reception” in the final seconds at Three Rivers Stadium paced the Pittsburgh Steelers past the stunned Oakland Raiders. The Pirates and A’s had just missed colliding in the postseason two months prior, but that December 23 marked the start of a Pittsburgh-Oakland NFL rivalry that would run from 1972 to 1976 and rank as one of the most fiercely fought in history.
Bay Area fans barely had time to recover from the Raiders’ last-second loss when the San Francisco 49ers were stunned by the Dallas Cowboys in similarly shocking fashion that same day. West Coast fans referred to the season-ending defeats as “Black Saturday.”
While the A’s and Reds made their respective marks in the 1970s, so did other teams and players. In 2012 the 1972 Chicago White Sox were honored with induction to the Chicago Baseball Museum as “the team that saved the Sox.”
“The 1972 team stands out in franchise history,” Sox senior vice president of marketing Brooks Boyer said. “Personalities and stars like Dick Allen, Goose Gossage, Bill Melton and many others changed this franchise and deserve to be recognized.”
Allen played two more seasons with the White Sox before being traded back to Philadelphia. He ended his career in ’77 with the A’s, the club that had edged Allen and the White Sox in the wild West race in ’72.
Nolan Ryan dominated the American League the remainder of the decade. His Ryan Express fastball, fired from a compact and powerful delivery, led the AL in strikeouts in seven of the eight seasons from ’72 to ’79 and blazed a path for him to Cooperstown.
The trade for Willie Mays didn’t produce a postseason trip for the Mets in ’72, but they would upset the Reds in the ’73 NLCS and force the A’s to rally to win the World Series in seven games.
Pittsburgh’s run of division titles ended at three straight following the ’72 season, but the Bucs returned to the top of the East in ’74 and repeated in ’75.
The building toward the future that began for the Dodgers and Phillies in ’72 continued in earnest. Los Angeles reached t
he World Series in ’74; Philadelphia won the East in ’76. In ’77–78 the Dodgers and Phils collided in the playoffs, the former taking both best-of-five series in four games. Two years later the Phillies, anchored by their Sesame Street Gang from ’72—Schmidt, Greg Luzinski, Larry Bowa, Bob Boone, and Steve Carlton—captured their first world championship.
Los Angeles followed suit in ’81. The infield of former Baby Dodger Blues Steve Garvey, Dave Lopez, Bill Russell, and Ron Cey made its final appearance together that October and went out in style by celebrating an elusive World Series title.
Those who made the ’72 season one of the more memorable in history have gone their separate ways. Some, like Hunter, Williams, Anderson, and McGraw were taken too early. Hunter’s passing was particularly moving. Following an injury-ridden 9-9 season in 1977, he was diagnosed with diabetes in the spring of ’78. He retired following the ’79 season and spent his retirement years as a gentleman farmer.
In 1999 Hunter was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), a progressive and ultimately fatal disease that had claimed another famous but humble Yankee, Lou Gehrig. The disease left Hunter, a superb all-around athlete and pitcher, unable to grip a baseball or move his arms. There were days, he said at the time, when he and his wife Helen would just sit together and cry. On August 8, 1999, he fell, and robbed of the ability to extend his arms to brace himself, hit his head on concrete steps at his home. He was unconscious for several days in the hospital and died one month later on September 9.
Hunter’s combative adversary from ’72, Pete Rose, was banned from the sport for life by then commissioner Bart Giamatti on August 24, 1989, for gambling on baseball. At the time, baseball’s all-time hits king held nineteen major league records. In 2004 Rose publicly admitted to betting on games as the Reds’ manager.
While Rose had problems with gambling, Vida Blue battled drug addiction. Years later he acknowledged that drug use had contributed to his sub-par 1972 season. The problem prevented him from becoming one of baseball’s all-time great pitchers—as it did Mets superstar Dwight Gooden, “Dr. K,” who arrived in the majors a decade after Vida.
Whatever their life paths, the personalities of ’72 left their imprint. Blue, speaking of the Mustache Gang but in a very real sense speaking of his contemporaries, was proud of the imprint they left on the game and on their times. They were fun, they were different, and they were good, he said.
Perhaps never more so than in the tumultuous summer of ’72.
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