A low-budget, last-place team overseen by a miserly, unpopular owner who has alienated his fanbase and is exploring a parallel path out of Oakland? Longtime followers have seen this act once before from the A’s.
It takes only cursory knowledge of those lowly 1979 A’s to realize it’s not the kind of history worth repeating.
Yet here sits owner John Fisher’s A’s, a living embodiment of the old, blundering 108-loss squad. Despite a pair of victories over the Yankees this weekend, the A’s have the second-worst record in baseball (48-81 and on pace for 100+ losses) and the game’s worst attendance. With a crowd of 29.498 for the Yankees on Sunday, the A’s passed the 650,000 mark for the season, ending fears they would supplant the 2001 Montreal Expos for the lowest total (642,745) in nearly 40 years.
Fisher, who’s keeping his options open in Las Vegas while trying to get clearance for a new stadium at Howard Terminal, is saving plenty of money in the interim. His Opening Day payroll of $47.6 million was $4 million more than Baltimore’s MLB-low payroll. But after trading and releasing a slew of veterans, these current A’s will collectively earn just $17.3 million. For comparison’s sake, the Mets’ Max Scherzer will take home 2 ½ times more in salary this season ($43.3 million) than the A’s entire 26-man roster combined.
As bad as things appear for the A’s these days, they’re still just a minor league version of old, parsimonious owner Charlie Finley’s 1979 Oakland team, whose stumbles and antics would have played out much better in the film “Major League” than they did in the American League back then.
“My recollection was that we lost nine of our first 10 games and things went downhill from there,” joked Hal Ramey, the iconic Bay Area radio broadcaster who was an A’s announcer in 1979.
Those old A’s had made-for-Hollywood characters that included a disgruntled outfielder who tried to hit Oakland’s manager over the head with a bat during a game, a relief pitcher who performed an exorcism on his own jersey while setting it on fire after a bad outing, and a seldom-used backup best known for jumping into hotel swimming pools from upper floor balconies.
“It was a really messy situation for all of us. Everybody wanted out. They knew that you were going to be treated like a piece of dog (expletive),” said former A’s reliever Dave Heaverlo, who was the highest-paid player at $100,000 on a team whose league-low payroll was $1.1 million, or $600,000 less than the next-lowest team spent.
When Finley wasn’t trying to move the A’s, he was busy micromanaging his bills. Longtime A’s clubhouse manager Steve Vucinich, who retired this season after 54 years, said no receipt was ever too small for Finley to gripe about.
“We had to justify everything and watch our spending because Charlie didn’t want to spend money on anything,” recalled Vucinich, who still laughs about the time Finley called him demanding to know why he had submitted a particularly small laundry receipt. “So he wound up making a $6 long-distance call to complain about a $4 laundry bill.”
It was a season that really needed to be seen to be believed – alas, hardly anyone bothered showing up to the Oakland Coliseum back then either.
The A’s attendance of 306,000 in ’79 remains the lowest of any team in nearly 70 years. Their 326 season-ticket holders then are also thought to be a modern-day record for futility. It never got worse than that one cold, drizzly April night when the A’s set another undesirable modern-day MLB record of 653 fans. It’s believed only 250 people were really there.
“I always said they all stayed home to listen to the game,” cracked Ramey during a recent phone conversation.
Heaverlo tried to joke about the lack of fans back then and felt the wrath of his cantankerous owner. Soon after the 653-fan night, Heaverlo told a reporter he had the perfect plan to boost A’s attendance. Since — like these days – the country was dealing with a gasoline crisis in 1979, Heaverlo figured Finley and the city could solve both its gas shortage and the A’s woeful attendance by opening up an all-night gas station in center field.
Heaverlo soon received his own long-distance call from a ranting Finley.
“Finley got so pissed off at me. He said, ‘How can you make a joke of it?,’ ” Heaverlo said during a recent phone interview. “I told him, ‘You’re the one making a joke of it, Charlie.’ ”
About the only thing those A’s had in abundance was eccentricity.
The ’79 team had an outfielder named Joe Wallis, an accomplished cliff diver who had a penchant for harrowing leaps into hotel swimming pools from dizzying heights. He had reportedly stopped his hotel antics in Oakland, but “Wild Joe” was still prone to a crazy episode or two.
One night Wallis was racing his Porsche Turbo Carrera on an East Bay freeway and wound up trying to elude some highway patrol officers. He put a little distance between himself and patrol cars before speeding into his neighborhood. Wallis figured he’d be home free once he parked his car in his garage. Only the officers didn’t have much trouble finding him – Wallis had driven his Porsche right through the garage door that didn’t open quickly enough.
Then there was Bob Lacey, one of the league’s better left-handed relief pitchers of his era, who had some unusual ways of dealing with the troubling times. Lacey wore the same No. 34 Hall of Famer Rollie Fingers wore earlier with Oakland. Lacey remembered Fingers famously struggled in Minnesota’s old Metropolitan Stadium, so after experiencing his own rough times there in uniform No. 34, he figured the jersey was to blame.
“I said, ‘I’m gonna exorcise this jersey.’ So I took it and burned it, then buried it in the bullpen,” Lacey said by phone last week. “That was a stupid thing to do.”
Maybe so, but it was ultimately less damaging than Lacey’s way of handling lengthy A’s losing streaks.
“We lost a few ballgames in a row, so I figured I’m gonna start a fight. I used to do that,” Lacey said, almost apologetically.
He said the easiest way to start trouble as a pitcher was to do it on groundballs to first base, where he could “accidentally” collide with the runner while going to cover first. Lacey, who stands 6-foot-5, took his sinister plan to the extreme when Kansas City’s Darrell Porter hit a ball to first base.
“I thought, ‘I’m gonna do a George Atkinson-style Raiders forearm cheapshot to his face,’ “ Lacey recalled. “I did it subtly. I knew he would come after me and he did. He grabbed me, we rolled over and here comes the rest of the K.C. team.
“I was really a punk,” added Lacey, who mellowed out and earned his master’s degree in education after leaving baseball and recently retired as an instructor in Arizona. “But we didn’t really have a lot of team leaders and maybe we didn’t know how to have a lot of class. We were all trying to survive in baseball.”
Their manager, Jim Marshall, found himself contemplating his own survival one afternoon after a heated conversation during the game with one of his players in the dugout. Disgruntled outfielder Miguel Dilone grabbed a bat and tried to attack Marshall before others broke it up just in time.
Dilone’s unhappiness reportedly had plenty to do with his playing time, which was going to substantially decrease since the A’s had just called up one of their top-rated rookies.
Dilone’s attack turned out to be his last act with the A’s, who soon traded him away.
That rookie outfielder, who grew up in Oakland, made his debut the next day. Years later, Rickey Henderson would be enshrined in baseball’s Hall of Fame while being recognized as the game’s greatest all-time basestealer and leadoff hitter ever.
It turns out something good did come from that otherwise miserable 1979 season in Oakland. This miserable season is unlikely to reveal the next Rickey Henderson.
On This Date: In 1979, Rickey Henderson made his MLB debut and recorded the first of his record 1,406 stolen bases. pic.twitter.com/iENzXTqmxS
— ESPN (@espn) June 24, 2018
Source: www.mercurynews.com