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| The Oakland A's are no strangers to the cover of TIME (see more) |
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Anyone who roots for a bad team has two choices: change your attitude or change teams. The latter should have been simple for me. In the same city, playing in the same cramped stadium (unlovely Shibe Park), were the National League Phillies. In 1949 the Phillies and A's had identical 81-73 records. The following year, the Phillie "Whiz Kids" won 91 games and the N.L. pennant, before grabbing that bar of prison soap and getting butt-swept by the Yanks, in the second of five straight championships. That same year, the A's sleepwalked to an egregious 52-102 finish, 46 games out.
Yet I stuck with the town's lousy team. (The Phillies soon sank back into the slough of their fans' despond.) Part of my early A's ardor is, I think, is phonetic. I preferred that hard, proud "A" sound to the soft, equine Phillie. The budding wordsmith in me may also have been beguiled by a team whose name had no known plural (A'ses?) or possessive (A's'? A's's?). Look, who can explain why kids like what they like?
So I watched games on TV, listened to bald Quaker Byrum Saam and color man Bill Campbell — their voices respectively metallic and warm — on my bedroom radio late at night. (For a seven- or eight-year-old, any time at night is late.) I learned true fan loyalty back then, pursuing the small satisfactions and grudging pleasures of bad teams: giving the top squads a tough game, beating a league leader late in the season to keep it from clinching the pennant, savoring the work of our few exceptional players.
To page through The Sports Encyclopedia: Baseball, that wonderful and pioneering blend of stats and seasonal summaries, is to be reminded of some of the A's accomplishments. In 1951, Gus Zernial, an April import from the White Sox, and our own diluted Ralph Kiner, led the league in home runs and RBIs (and strikeouts). In 1952, Shantz — 5ft.6, 137 lbs., and one of the game's great fielding pitchers — won 24 games in 1952, a league best. In 1953, Harry Byrd lost 20, also tops for the year. The A's never sent a midget to the plate, as the St. Louis Browns did in 1951, but the following year one of their pitchers, Bobo Newsom, was a geriatric 45. The only older roster player was Satchel Paige, also and naturally playing for the Browns.
Perhaps only to a child of the Philadelphia 50s could the A's roster summon magic. Ferris Fain (1B), Pete Suder (2B), Eddie Joost (SS), Hank Majeski (3B), Elmer Valo (OF) — the old-time-ballplayer names have a crispness that their defensive play lacked. Alex Kellner, with a 101-112 lifetime record and a 4.41 ERA, was our other mound ace. Another occasional starter, Sad Sam Zoldak, joined Zernial as the two big guys at the end of the alphabet. For so many reasons, the A's of that period should have been called the Z's.
LATE A'S AND GREAT A'S
At the end of the 1954 season, when we amassed a 51-113 record and finished an impressive (even for us) 60 games out of first place, we could hear "Goodnight, Sweetheart" being played in the empty old ballpark. Mack and his family sold the A's to a man named Arnold Johnson, who deported the team to Kansas City. There the A's became known as the farm team for the Yankees, sending them promising players, receiving Bronx retreads. It was our only brush with greatness in the era. I still followed the team, fitfully, furtively, peeking at the often-incomplete box scores in the Philadelphia Inquirer. (In those days the sports section ran whatever scores had come off the wire just before deadline, so you might get a six-inning tally — tantalizingly open-ended.) But my A's amour lay mostly dormant for another decade or so.
Say this for the A's: when they moved to Kansas City, they proved that a change of venue could not dilute their losers' nature: 13 consecutive seasons under .500, and only twice not in last place or next to last. This was after the A.L. expanded from eight teams to 10: do you know how hard it is to finish 10th three years out of four? And hard on the fans. Ask my colleague Richard Zoglin, TIME's drama critic, who grew up in Kansas City and, as an A's partisan, was prematurely aged in despair.
Only when the A's got to California in 1968 did they learn to win, to show character — characters, really, with Reggie and Rollie and Vida and the other, kookie, brawling, mustachioed, three-time World Series champs of 1972-74. Thereafter, the A's recapitulated the awesome-or-awful tendency of the Mack half-century but, praise Jesus, with shorter bad intervals between the good stretches.
Billy Martin, in a rehab pause in his fiery, five-time managerial marriage to George Steinbrenner's Yankees, brought the A's from last place to first in two years (1979-81); it was called Billy Ball and, when the A's won their first 11 games in 1981, made the cover of TIME. Martin accomplished the turn-around partly on the fleet legs of Rickey Henderson, partly by ignoring all bullpen strategy and letting his quintet of strong young starters pitch till they dropped. In 1980, when they finished second in the A.L. West, the A's notched a preposterously high 94 complete games (the Yanks, by comparison, had 29, 16 of them by Tommy John). The next year, they had 60 saves in a strike-shortened season of 109 games and made it back to the playoffs. The year after that, the starters' arms all fell off; none of the five was useful again, and the A's recommenced stinking.
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