Chapter Excerpt

October 1974

A burly, all-male, all-white assembly stood in cliquish knots of four or five guys in the pressroom at the Biltmore Hotel in downtown L.A. National media were here on the eve of Game 1 of the World Series, this one unique because it was the first ever all-California spectacle, the Dodgers against the Oakland A’s. Baseball media people were a hard lot, ample of girth and opinion, suspicious of outsiders, as surly and unapproachable as the regulars at any rural pub in Ireland. Mostly, the baseball-writing hierarchy consisted of people with faces the color and texture of wet biscuit dough, flesh that was seldom exposed to sunlight.

These men were inclined toward snappishness, due in part to the torment of prostate glands swollen to the size of croquet balls. Their darting, bitter eyes echoed a lifetime resentment over being too short to work for the fire department. They chain-smoked—even though the room had a twenty-five-foot-high ceiling, a thick, choking haze corrupted the oxygen—and they told stories that weren’t true. One of them talked out of this puckered, Dick Tracy comic strip mouth that a county medical examiner might identify as an exit wound and told his group, “...and then he said, ‘Well, this is the first time I ever ate one that came with pepperoni and mushrooms!’ Haw. Haw. Haw.” The boys bent forward at the waist, they were laughing so hard.

I watched, and listened, wishing to join the group and share in the mirth. Tell ’em my great joke about the epileptic oyster shucker. These were my kind of people, but I was not their kind of people, and therefore was excluded. That was because they regarded me as a hippie, probably some chickenshit draft dodger who’d snuck off to Canada. Hippies were unwelcome in press boxes throughout the land, because, as Ronald Reagan had so aptly put it, they (we) dressed like Tarzan, had hair like Jane, and smelled like Cheetah.

Even so, being subjected to occupational quarantine and behind-the-back insults was hardly a consequential drawback to the overall proposition of experiencing an all-expense paid trip to the World Series—courtesy of the newspaper that employed me, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram. As an act of extreme generosity, the management people at the paper offered the World Series adventure as compensation for having labored for long months watching the Texas Rangers perform. Who cared if the Rangers were the most low-rent franchise and were regarded as an inferior league in what Forbes magazine, among others, insisted was a slowly dying sport? And who cared if nearly all the newspaper readers back in Texas cared absolutely nothing about a World Series staged entirely in California, province of the godless, land of the gay caballero, where the natives all ordered grapefruit on their tacos, where everyone drove foreign-made automobiles, where Okies went to get pissed on, and where the recently exiled president of the U.S. was currently experiencing the heartbreak of phlebitis?

What a gig! After an estrangement that had lasted nearly a decade, baseball was back in my heart. And my liver, too. Why, just that very morning, fresh out of the cab from an interview session at Dodger Stadium, I’d won thirty Wiki-Wiki Dollars in a scratch-off game, and then drank it all up in the icy darkness of Mandy’s Caribbean Grotto. Fortified by several hefty beakers of tequila and coconut milk, it was now time to go to work.

The task was to compose a pregame, or pre-series story, known in the newspaper trade as an “advance.” In this case, the task was a snap, easier than taking your kid’s lunch money at gunpoint. I caressed the keyboard of the manual Smith-Corona that was placed before me in the Biltmore pressroom amid the chattering-typewriter chorale now long extinct from the American workplace. In a presentation designed to pander to the California-loathing readership back home, I composed a story alluding to the perplexing reality that only out here on the Left Coast, the world’s largest can of mixed nuts, could a person fluent in the language of physics become a bullpen hero and the dominant figure on a pennant-winning baseball team. This was Mike Marshall. Doctor Mike Marshall. The doctorate had been awarded at Michigan State, in something known as kinesiology, which, as the doctor himself had told a blank-eyed sportswriter, related to the “interaction of body parts.” Marshall had earned the Ph.D. with a thesis he might as well have entitled: “Why Major League Baseball Pitching Coaches Don’t Know Their Ass from the Washington Monument.”

Marshall, who would soon become the first relief pitcher to win the National League Cy Young Award, had exploited the media mob assembled at a Dodgers workout to press his polemic. “Most pitching coaches are incompetent,” he explained evenly, “and they merely perpetuate the old, ignorant ways of pitching. They do so because of their fundamental lack of knowledge of physiology and muscle structure. And, as a result, they destroy pitchers’ arms.” While Marshall delivered that diatribe, his own pitching coach, Red Adams, stood not far away, smoking a Newport menthol and rolling his eyes.

The pitcher continued his oral dissertation, explaining how his Three Laws of Force were actually based on Isaac Newton’s Three Laws of Motion. Okay, I knew all about Newton, having purchased many screw-top bottles of 59-cent wine from the Isaac Newton vineyard with its catchy slogan, “What Goes Down Must Come Up.”

But what did Isaac Newton know about baseball, and who was this pitcher talking all this heresy? Marshall’s appearance was as unconventional as his ideas. Most major league baseball pitchers were lanky characters who came equipped with the torso of a buggy whip, and they sure as hell never used words like “perpetuate.” Dr. Marshall might measure five-foot-nine if he was wearing shoes borrowed from Zsa Zsa Gabor, and was as big around as he was tall. He sported rather spectacular muttonchop sideburns, and whenever he entered a game, the person in the stands might have expected the public address man to announce: Now pitching for Los Angeles...Ulysses S. Grant.

So, even though Mike Marshall rather reminded me of the cartoon walrus that sang and danced in Prestone Antifreeze commercials back in the 1950s, the pitcher could say anything he damn well pleased. For that season, at least, Marshall produced the stats to back it up. With a body that consisted of half-blubber, half-rubber, Marshall had taken on the heavy lifting agenda of a Russian coal miner, appearing in 106 games, and pitched over 200 innings out of the bullpen.

As for his diatribe regarding pitching coaches and their alleged penchant for wrecking arms and careers, Marshall’s timing was superb. Two weeks before the start of the World Series, another kind of doctor, Frank Jobe, had performed a radical and experimental surgery in an attempt to bring the career of Dodgers starter Tommy John back from the dead. Jobe had taken a tendon from John’s right wrist and reattached it to the pitcher’s left elbow. Fortunately for both Dr. Jobe and the pitcher, the Dodgers’ press guide had confirmed that Tommy John was, indeed, a left-hander.

So I concluded my feature story about the Dodgers’ mad scientist, Mike Marshall, with a couple of sentences about the strange goings-on in Jobe’s operating room, describing the procedure as “ghoulish” and noting that some Hollywood hotshot could get rich merely by taking the master print of Frankenstein and distributing it under the title The Tommy John Story.

Then I quickly evacuated the pressroom at the Biltmore, feeling nauseated from the cigarette smoke, my head pounding from the racket of all those typewriters. Near the exit, Joe Falls, the revered columnist from the Detroit Free Press (why did they call it free when it actually cost a quarter?) was holding court. Falls delivered prose in the two-fisted patois of the crescent wrench set, a style that was perfectly textured for his readership back in Detroit, the most no-nonsense, no-bullshit city in the whole world.

Joe was a confirmed, born-again traditionalist, and he bemoaned the reality that six long years had rolled by since the Tigers, behind the pitching of Denny McLain and Mickey Lolich, had stunned the baseball community with their breathtaking seven-game World Series triumph over Bob Gibson and the seemingly invincible Cardinals, and Falls was now sadly convinced that nothing of such magnitude would ever occur again. “This isn’t right,” Falls was saying. “Fall classic, my ass. You can’t have a World Series surrounded by all these goddamned palm trees. The atmosphere is...well, hell. There is no atmosphere.”

Compelled to interrupt, I said, “What you need to do, Joe, is take a couple of hits of windowpane acid before you go to the game tomorrow. That’ll make it all better. Betcha I can score some for you from one of the bellhops.”

Falls’s face contorted into a knot of utter disdain, and he said, to nobody’s surprise, “You’re really full of crap, you know that?”

“No. I’m serious. You oughta give it a try,” I came back. “It sure worked for me last year in Oakland. God awmighty, man, in the sixth inning, when Yogi replaced Tom Seaver with that fuckin’ unicorn, it was the greatest World Series moment since Babe Ruth called his shot at Wrigley Field.”

Joe Falls laughed, then said, “Go to hell.”

That was when I almost told him that I didn’t have time because of an impending appointment to have my ears pierced, but tactfully refrained, having done enough damage as it was.

That was on Friday, and soon I was out on the town. In a city populated almost entirely by an all-you-can-eat buffet of undiscovered ingenues with high cheekbones and low self-esteem, I declined to partake. Actually, I’d long ago learned that ladies with theatrical ambitions don’t mix well with men of less-than-pristine elocution skills. Naturally, that excluded all Texans. Once the Texan opened his mouth, the California girl gazed back with an expression that said, “Cram it, buckaroo. Go home and oil your windmill.”

Why even bother? So Friday night was largely devoted to the more convivial companionship of the esteemed Johnnie Walker.

Then Saturday came and so did Game 1, and in honor of the occasion, the smog that filled the Southern California sky appeared in more festive shades of brown and gray. In the lobby of the Biltmore, one familiar face from home appeared. Danny O’Brien, general manager of the Texas Rangers, a man of dignity and know-how, who maintained a commendable rise-above-it approach to the tantrums of his field manager, Billy Martin, waved me over.

“Here. Do you know anybody who might want to use these?” said O’Brien. He handed me two tickets to Game 1.

“Sure, Danny. Thanks. I saw a man in here with a little crippled boy, hoping to take the kid to the game.”

Three minutes later, I got on the hotel elevator, which was crammed, held the tickets aloft and stood there while some guy took them out of my hand and replaced them with two $50 bills. It was a quick and wordless transaction. Between that and my Wiki-Wiki Dollar windfall, my trip to the Series was already a five-star success.

Then I rode the press bus to the stadium, eager to watch what was going to unfold. This Dodgers–A’s match-up might even be fun to write about, since this was a confrontation featuring beyond-the-obvious contrasts.

The Dodgers organization provided the template for the immaculately constructed sports franchise, a paradigm of smarts, class, and cool efficiency. Yes, Walter O’Malley had broken a million hearts in Flatbush when he moved the franchise to the shores of the Pacific, but the evacuation did for baseball what the completion of the transcontinental railroad did for the passenger train people whose industry might not have collapsed had it been run with the top-to-bottom operational foresight that the Dodgers employed. The eternal influx of talent from the team’s minor league network was on display once again as the 1974 World Series began. L.A.’s infield—Steve Garvey, Davey Lopes, Bill Russell, and Ron Cey—was the natural successor to the storied around-the-horn quartet of Gil Hodges, Jackie Robinson, Pee Wee Reese, and Billy Cox that hung up National League pennants like laundry drying on the balconies of a Hong Kong high rise.

So 2.4 million fans had come to Dodger Stadium that summer to cheer the team that had won 102 regular season games, and sawed off the Pittsburgh Pirates in five quick games in the National League playoff. L.A. was back in the World Series for the first time in eight years and a clear favorite in the minds of most to beat the A’s with the same ease with which the Blue Boys had dismantled the Pirates.

Yes, the A’s, whose ownership motif was the mirror opposite of the Dodgers. If the Los Angeles Dodgers functioned like a Swiss bank, then Charles O. Finley and his Oakland Athletics presented all the decorum of a bail bond company. Charlie O. was the renegade on the reservation, a man who felt it a moral obligation to spit in the face of the tradition and long-upheld rituals of the game itself. When Finley emerged upon the scene, major league baseball found itself confronted with a sheer anarchist unconvincingly disguised as an “innovator.”

The A’s played in Kansas City when Finley, an Indiana native wealthy from the insurance racket, bought the team in 1960. People in K.C. liked Charlie at first. Right off, he decreed that the A’s would cease any and all player transactions with the New York Yankees, who’d been exploiting the Midwest rubes on a yearly basis. Then—as the second-division summers in Kansas City dragged by like starving cattle—the fans began to sense that they might have an element of tinhorn despot in their baseball owner.

Charlie began suspending players because of what he deemed “rowdyism” on the team’s charter flights. Rowdyism? What had Charlie expected from these guys? An episode of Masterpiece Theatre? After Finley had identified Ken “the Hawk” Harrelson as the rowdiest of his rowdies, Harrelson described Charlie as “a menace to baseball.”

And after Charlie loaded up his A’s and packed the franchise off to Oakland, Missouri senator Stuart Symington did the Hawk one better and, speaking in the U.S. Senate, referred to Finley as “the most disreputable character ever to enter the American sports scene.” The mother of an acquaintance of mine, the woman being an ardent follower of the Kansas City A’s, lacked access to the congressional floor as a platform to express her feelings toward Finley, but did so more emphatically than Senator Symington. She purchased a doll, labeled it Charlie F., soaked it in kerosene, and torched the thing in her front yard.

After Finley arrived in Oakland, the quality of the A’s on-the-field talent improved dramatically. But the burr in Charlie’s britches and the pebble in his shoe was that Charlie had decided that the sport itself had become about as exciting as lentil soup. He initiated some radical departures from the norm. When Charlie complained that baseball lacked color, he meant that literally. In Charlie’s world, the home team would no longer wear white; the visitor gray. Charlie’s A’s took the field in their trademark kelly green and gold ensemble...or sometimes, gold and green, and always accented with small-town-Saturday-night white shoes...a fashion statement that resembled, at best, the Baylor University marching band and, at worst, a last-place softball team in South Side Chicago’s Marvin Rottblatt tavern league.

Finley advocated the introduction of orange baseballs, and red, white, and blue bases. Finley lobbied for changing “four balls, take your base” to three. That proposal was actually auditioned in an A’s exhibition game, and, after 19 walks in a nine-inning game, hastily abandoned.

Charlie mandated that his players wear handlebar mustaches, which was ultimately a measure designed to demean the hired hands, like the car dealer in Texas, who allegedly made his black employees dance the chicken dance during his sales motivation pep rallies. Finley made sure the team’s mascot, a mule named Charlie O., became a fixture at both games and away-from-the-ballpark promotional functions. Finley’s creative genius provided A’s games with ball girls, tarted up in hot pants. It was Charlie’s mandate that star A’s pitcher Jim Hunter, having grown up in the sticks, would henceforth be known as Catfish. Charlie’s public relations notions were geared to a kind of Corn Belt sophistication that was as passé as Buster Keaton movies. In short, Charlie was kind of a hick. His penchant for the abnormal occasionally backfired. Before being famous as a big league manager, Whitey Herzog combed the backwoods and back roads of America, working as a baseball scout. For a while, he was employed by Finley.

Herzog described Charlie O. as “nuttier than a June bug in July.” Herzog elaborated. “I found this kid in Florida, a pitcher, who had everything, all the makings for a big leaguer. I asked him what he wanted to sign with the A’s. His demands weren’t much—a new car and $18,000. The kid’s name was Don Sutton. I called Charlie directly, and he didn’t care about Sutton’s ability. He wanted to know if Sutton had a nickname. I covered the phone with my hand, Sutton was sitting right there, and I asked him about a nickname. He shrugged and couldn’t think of one. So I told Charlie the news, and he said, ‘No deal,’ and hung up. Now if Sutton had told me that people called him ‘Peckerneck’ or some such, he would have made his Hall of Fame acceptance in an A’s hat, instead of the Dodgers’.”

Finley’s ardent lobbying for the designated hitter rule (Finley also wanted to include a designated runner) came to pass when the American League installed the drastic format in 1973. It was the DH innovation that purists of the sport insisted was as good for baseball as pantyhose had been for finger fucking. Charlie Finley maintained nothing but contempt for anything in baseball that represented the status quo. If Finley had owned the New York Metropolitan Opera, he would have put the divas on Weight Watchers and forced Richard Tucker to stand on stage and sing, “Ninety-nine Bottles of Beer on the Wall.”

Oakland fans responded to the Great Innovator’s revolutionary themes by ignoring them. Even though the ’74 A’s had been the only baseball franchise outside of the Bronx to claim three straight World Series championships, their regular season attendance was a pitiful 845,000. In a season in which American League fans throughout the country had been avoiding the ballpark like poison ivy, even the bottom-of-the-keg Cleveland Indians managed to outdraw the A’s.

With numbers like those, Finley confided in some people that moving his franchise to Oakland had been a sorry idea in the first place. So Finley calculated that over the course of 81 games, his team had played before slightly more than 3 million empty seats and used that calculation to justify the team’s paying security guard wages to a lineup choked with American League All-Stars.

Earlier that season, I’d sat in the A’s dugout during batting practice before a Rangers game and talked to a couple of players on the topic of alleged feuding in the clubhouse. Pitcher John (Blue Moon) Odom had exchanged punches with Rollie Fingers in the bullpen, and had come close to blows with Vida Blue amid a throng of reporters after a playoff game. So one could only imagine what took place behind closed doors. Shortstop Bert Campaneris, a six-time All-Star and the greatest Cuban to land on the American mainland since Desi Arnaz, downplayed the rumors of unrest.

“Ees not so unhappy family,” Campaneris insisted.

I needed a stronger quote than that. “Okay,” I asked the shortstop, “how do you like working for Mr. Finley. He is nice man, yes? No?”

“Meester Finley,” said Campaneris, his eyes narrowing, “ees the kind of man who likes to put hees hand in other man’s pock-eet.”

At first, I thought Campaneris might be implying that his owner was the sort of fellow who gets rolled in bus stations throughout the land. What the player meant to say was that when it came to matters of the pocketbook, Finley was tighter than Joe Namath’s pantyhose. So the deacons of the high church of baseball frowned on Charles Finley. Yet they could not deny that the A’s, with all of the corporate cohesion of a band of Turkish Gypsies, had returned once again to the World Series. But hardly anybody thought the A’s could bring down the Dodgers. Oakland had won only 90 games, and with barely a week remaining in the regular season, that silly little team from Texas had drawn so close to Oakland in the AL West standings that the A’s could smell the booze on the Rangers’ breath.

In the second inning of Game 1, the A’s made it known that they would not die easily—might not even die at all. I was stationed in an auxiliary press area along the first base line, way the hell up, with the California sun right in my face. Reggie Jackson took a cut off the Dodgers’ starter, Andy Messersmith, and because of the glare and ever-present L.A. haze, I had no idea where the ball had gone. What a ridiculous situation. My job detailed describing a baseball game to an audience of readers who saw a close-up of Reggie Jackson’s tonsils just as he swung his bat, courtesy of the camera artistry of the National Broadcasting Company, and eloquently described by Curt Gowdy and Vin Scully, when I couldn’t see a damn thing. Then I saw Jackson performing his patented strut around the bases, his chest stuck out like Foghorn Leghorn, the posture that told the world that nobody screws with Mr. October. That top-of-the-second opposite field shot produced a collective moan from the 50,000-plus Dodgers fans—each one blasé and wearing designer sunglasses. Jackson sucked all of the pizzazz from the crowd, and the Dodgers never recovered.

While Mike Marshall delivered his relief artistry for the Dodgers and Rollie Fingers slammed doors on the opposition out of the A’s bullpen, this confrontation took on more of the aspects of a World Cup than a World Series. First team that scored won the game. One–nil. Or that was the way it shaped up. That being the case, this Series promised to unfold into a production void of thrills and dramatic tension. The only stat in baseball that indicated an exciting game was the one they called the blown save. If some reliever blew a save, that meant that a team came from behind in the late innings to win or tie a game. As a lover of the game, nothing, to me, could have been more rewarding then witnessing a passionate and sensuously blown save. But with the two bullpens involved here, there would be no blow jobs in the California Fall Classic of ’74. Ahead by a run in the bottom of the ninth, Oakland manager Alvin Dark pulled a gambit. After two batters were out, Dark yanked his ace closer, Fingers, and replaced him with the ace, Catfish Hunter, who was not scheduled to start until Game 3. Hunter got the last out.

In the A’s clubhouse, about a hundred reporters surrounded Reggie Jackson’s locker, another hundred besieged Catfish Hunter, another twenty or so encircled Alvin Dark, and the remainder of the Oakland roster was left free to shower and dress in peace. Finally, the mob began to disperse, and I shoved my way into the notebook-bearing reporters still pumping questions to Catfish. Hunter withstood the inquisition patiently, although his eyes pleaded for a little privacy.

Reporter: If this had been a regular season game, do you think Alvin would have brought you into the game in the ninth like that?

Hunter: You can ask him. But since we played 162 games and that never happened, my guess would be that the answer was no.

Reporter (asking another dumbass question because he thought that was what reporters are supposed to do): So, do you see yourself as a part-time starter, part-time closer now?

Hunter: No.

What a quote! At that point, I should have felt compelled to rush to the nearest pay phone, call the newspaper back home, and scream, STOP THE FUCKIN’ PRESSES! But I didn’t because I lacked the instincts of a good reporter. Or so I had been told on numerous occasions by various colleagues, a sophisticated collection of fellows who all went to Texarkana on their honeymoons.

Game 2 saw the Dodgers bounce back. Game 2 was much like Game 1, another 3–2 yawn fest. This was L.A.’s Don Sutton working against Oakland’s Vida Blue. The teams registered 12 base hits—combined—nine of them singles. Catcher Joe Ferguson won the game with a two-runner for the Dodgers. Sutton weakened in the ninth, then the Ph.D. Marshall trotted to the mound, applied his Three Laws of Force, and while Isaac Newton watched and smiled on some distant cloud, the game ended.

I gazed at the blank sheet of paper in my typewriter. The paper gazed back. Finally, I wrote, “Sorry, honey. No blown saves tonight. I’ve got a headache.” Of course, none of the readers in my paper’s circulation realm would have known what their man in L.A. was talking about. It didn’t matter. The top of the sports section story for the Monday morning edition would not have involved this World Series game. While the Dodgers were beating the A’s, the St. Louis football Cardinals were beating the Dallas Cowboys, 31–28. That marked Dallas’s fourth straight loss, so by the time any of the readers might have gotten around to reading about the World Series, they would have already committed suicide.

So the Series moved up to Oakland. Bad ballpark. Uninspired setting. The stands were a long way from the field. At twilight, the fog usually came boiling in from the Bay, and offered a setting more proper for a Dracula movie than a spectacle befitting baseball’s most dramatic hour.

Game 3. A night game. Just like Games 4 and 5 would be as well, courtesy of Charlie Finley. Finley had been the leading advocate of playing the World Series under the lights, to hell with tradition, and baseball Commissioner Bowie “the Fox” Kuhn had endorsed the concept. Neither Finley nor Kuhn had to write for a Central Time Zone deadline from the West Coast at night, meaning for my story to make the paper, I would have about six minutes to interview the players, then compose the article.

Also—my assigned location at the Oakland Coliseum turned out to be even crappier than the press box crow’s nest at Dodger Stadium where they’d stuck the reporters who did not work for California or New York publications. Now I was stuck in a little cage, underneath the stands actually, behind home plate. My chin was at field level, so, for the next three games, the only view of the pageantry taking place on the field was obscured by the plate umpire’s big, fat ass. And each of the umpires assigned to this World Series—Ron Luciano, Bill Kunkel, Doug Harvey, Tom Gorman—had an ass as wide as Nebraska.

I was jammed in there with about a dozen other poor turkeys. Prison cells were more comfortable than this setup. Not that Charlie Finley gave a flip about the human rights of sportswriters. But what else could we have expected from Señor Cheap-O, who presented the crappiest pressroom food service in both major leagues. Lunch meat, white bread, and a fly-infested jar of Miracle Whip.

Oakland won the game, behind Catfish Hunter, the last one he would pitch in an Oakland uniform. Another 3–2 sleep-a-thon. Again, the teams combined for 12 lousy hits. Rollie Fingers was shaky but still closed the sale. Yawn. Snore.

Game 4 produced more fireworks. Instead of another 3–2 game, this one wound up 5–2. Oakland actually came from behind with a four-run surge in the mid-innings. The Dodgers wilted once again against the Oakland bullpen.

The attempt to describe the action was an insurmountable task. There was more suspense and drama at school board meetings than what this Series produced. In Game 5, the reporters in the field-cage behind the plate could stand it no longer. In the third inning, it was agreed that two writers, selected in a random drawing, would be sent into the stands to attempt a suicide-mission beer run. I was one of the unlucky two. It went smoother than I could have hoped. In less than an inning and a half, I was back in the cage, carrying a box that held six beers, the really good news being that the beer they sold in the Oakland Coliseum came in half-gallon boxes, like orange juice containers. I sipped my half-gallon out of a little Styrofoam coffee cup. That was for two reasons. One, the act of guzzling from the carton appeared gauche, and two, drinking out of the little cup made you drunker. When the game (3–2 again) ended, the World Series with it, everybody in the cage was too messed up to care. After the last out, the writers practically trampled one another as they fought toward the press cage exit. They weren’t rushing out to secure beat-the-deadline quotes. Everybody had to take a leak.

So it was over. Nobody seemed sorry. I stood next to Dodgers manager Walter Alston on the press elevator. He was still in uniform. Tall, stoic, and serene; if losing the World Series was a source of anguish to Walter Alston, he sure didn’t show it.

The A’s held a victory party, of sorts, afterward in the press lounge. They actually popped for champagne, the $6 kind they sold at the Circle K. Charles O. Finley was not present. But the ubiquitous mule, Charlie O., naturally was on the scene. I talked to the mule’s handler, some old character that Finley dressed up in a costume that looked like something from an episode of Death Valley Days. The guy admitted that his gig was not all that bad—except for the part where he administered the mule’s pregame enema, to prevent any on-the-field mascot “incidents.”

Evidently, the guy had done his job well enough, so I gave him my vote as the MVP of the 1974 World Series. The mule’s valet lost out to Rollie Fingers in the voting. When a relief pitcher was anointed hero of a five-game World Series, it confirmed that the sport’s cornerstone spectacle presented all the thrills and spills of a string quartet recital, one that featured the works of Shubert. The instant-gratification generation had taken root in America, and baseball seemed archaic and out of touch. If the sport were going to stage an all-California World Series, the last feature it needed was Rollie Fingers slamming the door. What the games desperately lacked was a scenario where a crippled Kirk Gibson might stagger off the bench and sock the home run that knocked the people in the stands, and the ones who watched on TV, flat on their butts, and leave them saying, “Did I just see what I thought I saw?”

Fortunately, a different kind of season waited in the on-deck circle, a season that would delineate the conclusion of an era, and do it in a manner that restored America’s faith in a game that was not dying after all.

Copyright © 2008 by Michael Shropshire