THE 1972–74 OAKLAND A’S
The 1960s were one of the most tumultuous decades in American history. So many areas of society changed. Thanks to the civil rights movement, people of all colors were finally, after nearly two hundred years, protected under the law. America endured a long, bitter war in Vietnam that changed the way citizens viewed their government and the place of war in society. A growing movement to guarantee the rights of women would soon give women opportunities in America that did not exist before. In many ways, change was taking place in America so fast, people had difficulty keeping up.
Baseball was no different. Players and owners had never really gotten along, mostly because the players were underpaid and worse, for more than a hundred years, they were not allowed to change teams when their contracts expired. It wasn’t until the 1960s that the players began to organize as a group and fight the owners for their rights. If a guy who worked at a coffee shop or as a teacher or a lawyer was allowed to change whom he worked for, why couldn’t a baseball player?
The changes in the culture from the 1960s created a different kind of baseball player as the 1970s began. The 1970s players wore their hair longer, wore sideburns and mustaches. They spoke out more. In 1972, the players even went on strike for nine days, refusing to play until the owners improved their pension benefits.
The best team of the early 1970s, the Oakland A’s, also best represented this change. This was a different type of team for a different type of game. Baseball had always been considered one of the most traditional institutions in America, but the A’s weren’t interested in following tradition. For one hundred years, baseball players wore black baseball spikes. The A’s wore white baseball shoes. Players were often expected to be clean-cut and clean-shaven, as if they were in the military. The A’s wore mustaches and beards and long hair. Most baseball teams had two uniforms: home and away. The A’s owned five different uniform combinations. Some were all green. Some were all yellow. Some were green-and-yellow. Some were white.
The purists, the ones who felt baseball should never change, were outraged that the A’s dressed like a softball team and looked like a motorcycle gang. They were outraged at the owner of the team, Charlie Finley, who, in their eyes, showed no respect for baseball traditions, making his team look like circus clowns.
And the players, well, the Oakland A’s were a group of big personalities who did not always (or sometimes at all) like each other, but for three straight years, when they stepped on the field there was no better team. From 1972 until 1974 they won three straight World Series championships.
Everything that seemed new and different about the A’s wasn’t. When the A’s won their first World Series in 1972, beating Cincinnati in seven games, the club had only been in Oakland for five years, but the Athletics name was one of the oldest in baseball. They were first the Philadelphia Athletics, the team that dominated baseball from 1910 to 1914 and again from 1929 to 1932. In both cases, the owner, Connie Mack, found himself short on money despite having great teams, and he wound up breaking up his winning teams by selling off all of the A’s superstar players to other teams. The A’s fell on hard times and in 1955 they moved to Kansas City, where Finley bought them in 1960. The team played in Kansas City from 1955 to 1967 and never enjoyed a winning season.
In Oakland, the A’s had amassed an impressive group of players, just rising to power. The A’s finished 82–80 in their first year in Oakland.
There was Jim “Catfish” Hunter, a right-hander from North Carolina who did not fish and did not particularly like catfish, either. Instead, Finley had chosen the nickname to give him “personality.”
There was right-handed pitcher John “Blue Moon” Odom, who received his nickname as a child because his head was supposedly as round as the moon. And there was left-handed pitcher Vida Blue, a rookie sensation. Rollie Fingers, whose handlebar mustache made him look like a saloonkeeper from the 1800s, was the best relief pitcher in the game. The shortstop went by the name Campy Campaneris (his first name was actually Bert). There was Reggie Jackson, the young, brash, left-handed power hitter from Wyncote, Pennsylvania, who would become an all-time great.
Each of them did things as colorful as their nicknames. Jackson was the biggest star, a slugger who swung like Babe Ruth. One time, at the 1971 All-Star Game in Detroit, he hit a home run off Pittsburgh’s Dock Ellis that appeared headed to the moon if the floodlights high above Tiger Stadium hadn’t gotten in the way. In a game full of all stars, Reggie found a way to steal the show. Even when he struck out, which was often, he would leave fans in awe because of how hard he swung.
Each of these strong personalities had their reasons for disliking one another. Blue and Odom once got into a fistfight during the 1972 playoffs, as did Fingers and Blue, but the A’s did have one thing that united them as a team: their dislike of Finley, the owner who, they felt, underpaid them. The players believed he cheated them out of money he had promised them.
They were the strangest bunch, playing in green and gold uniforms and white shoes, fighting with themselves and with their owner. Once, when the team arrived in Detroit, a woman seeking an autograph approached Reggie Jackson. “Mr. Jackson, are there any more of your friends on that bus?” Jackson looked at the woman and said, “Ain’t no friends on that bus.”
Finley tried every promotional trick to encourage fans to come see his team and to change the traditions of baseball. He changed the team’s mascot—historically an elephant since 1904—to a mule. Once, he petitioned the commissioner’s office to use fluorescent orange baseballs instead of white, to make them easier for players to see (that one never caught on).
When it came time to concentrate on the field and play championship baseball, however, few teams in history did it like this one.
In their first trip to the playoffs in 1971, the A’s were swept in three straight games by the defending World Series champion Baltimore Orioles. However, the next year, the A’s took off. The A’s faced Detroit and won a tight five-game series. Odom and Blue combined on a five-hitter to win a deciding fifth game and send the A’s to their first World Series since 1931, when the team was based in Philadelphia.
In the series, the A’s faced another budding powerhouse, the Cincinnati Reds, soon to be known as the Big Red Machine. The A’s were without Reggie Jackson, who had injured himself against Detroit. Blue saved the first game; Catfish Hunter won the second. Home in Cincinnati for Game 3, the Reds’ Jack Billingham outdueled Odom, 1–0, but the A’s rallied in Game 4 with two runs in the bottom of the ninth to win 3–2 and bring them within a game for the first Major League Championship in the San Francisco Bay Area.
The A’s, however, lost the next two games, forcing a winner-takes-all showdown. In Game 7, Odom was handed the ball to start, but it was Hunter, who entered the game in relief, who wound up the winning pitcher, 3–2. Fingers closed out the game for the save. The A’s were champions. Little-known catcher Gene Tenace hit .348 and was named the series MVP.
The next year, featuring a pitching staff that had three 20-game winners, the A’s would dominate the American League’s regular season. In the playoffs they found sweet revenge for their loss in ’71 by beating Baltimore in the American League Championship Series, reaching the World Series for a second consecutive year, this time facing the surprise New York Mets. The Mets featured the best pitcher in the game, the great Tom Seaver, and 42-year-old Willie Mays, a fading Hall of Fame talent making the final appearances of his legendary 22-year career.
The teams split the first six games, forcing a deciding seventh game for the second straight year. In the finale, Jackson, back and recharged, hit his first World Series home run on his way to being named series MVP.
After a long drought, the A’s had won back-to-back World Series.
The A’s continued their roll through the 1974 season, beat Baltimore again in the playoffs, and faced the Los Angeles Dodgers in the first all-California World Series.
This one ended quickly. The A’s were too good, too sharp, and too talented. They beat the Dodgers in five games. Hunter got a win and a save. Jackson homered, but this time it was Fingers, who appeared in four of the five games and saved two, who won the MVP.
The A’s were champions again, becoming the first and only team in baseball other than the Yankees to ever win three straight World Series titles.
History has a way of repeating itself. True to the team’s historical roots, Finley was out of money and sold off this Oakland A’s championship team the same way Mack had sold off the 1910–1914 and the 1929–1931 Philadelphia A’s teams. Oakland had its run of championships interrupted not by opponents on the field, but by big business off of it. Catfish Hunter, owed money by Finley, successfully sued him for breach of contract, became a free agent, and signed a $3 million deal with the Yankees. Jackson would be traded to Baltimore, before signing with the Yankees as a free agent. Outfielder Joe Rudi would later join the Red Sox and then the California Angels, while Vida Blue would join the San Francisco Giants. Rollie Fingers became a San Diego Padre.
Finley’s antics would rob a great team of something they had truly deserved—the right to be considered one of the all-time greatest teams—but it was only temporary, because Fingers, Jackson, Hunter, and Dick Williams, the manager of the title teams in 1972 and 1973, all ended up in the Hall of Fame. They were that good.
And so were the A’s.