Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126) (4 page)

Think about that one. Here you are, a promising talent for a big-league ball team, and they make you stay in an army barracks during spring training and don’t help you to get housing in Alabama.

If all those big-league teams had really used their influence, really exerted some pressure, they might have helped open up the South years before it did. But it seemed to me that wasn’t on the top of the list. For years, black players stayed in segregated hotels, until the Cardinals in St. Petersburg and the Dodgers in Vero Beach bought their own hotels in which to put their players. In 1965, the last minor-league team in Birmingham, the Barons, was forced to move out of town because Bull Connor closed the ballpark rather than let blacks and whites play together. He closed sixty public parks, all over the city, rather than let them be integrated.

I was there just two years later. You can imagine how uncomfortable it was. Charlie Finley was bringing back organized ball to the city, which was nice, but not for me. I didn’t have anywhere to live. It’s hard, being part of a social experiment. The first month, I slept on the couches of white friends, Dave Duncan, Joe Rudi, Rollie Fingers.
Their landlords didn’t like it; they would threaten to make them move out. Joe Rudi’s wife, Sharon, she had a brother who was a lawyer, and every other day she would get him to call up their landlord and insist that I was legally entitled to be there. She just insisted that I was going to be able to stay.

Finally, I left anyway, because I was afraid that something was going to happen. I moved into the Bankhead Hotel, which was a big, beautiful old hotel that was a little tired, but it seemed great to me. It beat Joe Rudi’s couch. My only problem was a little blond girl, the owner’s daughter, who was hanging around there and was always very nice—but I wanted to get out in one piece!

On the road, it was a whole other story again. By the time the season opened, I was the only African American on the Birmingham A’s. We had Gil Blanco, who was Mexican American but “looked white,” and then we had George Lauzerique, who was Cuban and looked Latino. But that was it, at least until a little later, when a couple more Latino guys joined the team.

I was really the only black guy on the Birmingham A’s. The wonder, of course, is that there weren’t more. I mean, that had been the same situation for Henry Aaron, when he was with Jacksonville in the Sally League, back in 1953. He was the only black guy on the team, the only black guy in the
league
. And here it was fourteen years later, and I was
still
the only black guy on my team—and the A’s were one of the more liberal organizations around. They were bringing up all sorts of players of color then—Bert Campaneris, Blue Moon Odom, Ramon Webster, George Lauzerique, Tommie Reynolds, and more.

Luckily, my manager was John McNamara, who was great about it. The Southern League in those days, every other team was below the Mason-Dixon Line except for Evansville, which was in southern Indiana. We’d go to Montgomery, Alabama; Macon, Georgia; Charlotte, North Carolina; Knoxville, Tennessee.

Every city we went to, McNamara would send somebody in to check the hotel, see if they’d let me stay there. If not, we would drive the bus to another hotel. This was three years after the Civil Rights Act passed, it was supposed to be against the law, but they’d just ignore it. I remember he sent Gil Blanco into a hotel in Knoxville, and he came
back and said, “They won’t let Reggie stay here.” McNamara just said, “Well, let’s go on down the street to another hotel.”

Same thing with restaurants. Driving all the way to Charlotte, Knoxville, Macon—those were
long
trips. But if we stopped at a restaurant and I couldn’t eat inside, he’d have the food brought out to the bus. For
everybody
. Everybody ate together; everybody stayed together. Major-league baseball couldn’t make that happen? John McNamara made that happen.

I was so young, so new to the South, I didn’t know what it was like. My father would talk to me on the phone and try to explain, but I didn’t really understand. But I found out fast! Back in Birmingham, I tried to eat in some local restaurants, but in some places it wasn’t meant to be. That just wasn’t part of the deal. You were in Birmingham, buddy.

Then I got off to a great start, and the A’s promoted me to the big-league team. I got to skip Triple-A and go right up to Kansas City, where I played left field for Alvin Dark. But it was too soon. I played about a month there, hit maybe .170-something. I was nervous, and the team was doing poorly. I wasn’t ready yet.

They sent me back to Birmingham. I’ve always believed that if you go up and catch on and take off, great. If you don’t, you go back down and try again. A lot of guys will say about a prospect, “You shouldn’t rush him, he’ll never develop.” But I think if you can’t recover from being overmatched and having a bad month or two, then you’re not going to make it anyway.

However, at the time, I felt crushed. I remember going to see my manager and feeling so bad, because I had failed. Johnny McNamara was waiting for me with open arms, like a father figure. He told me I hadn’t failed at all and I was going to be back in the majors in no time. Johnny Mac was always perfect at all times. I needed a “dad” at that time; he was that for me. As usual.

I remember everybody was very supportive. Guys like Joe Rudi, Bando, Duncan, Fingers. We all came up together, we all sort of got there at the same time, and we all looked out for each other.

After that, I just tore up the league. We all did. We had another great team, twenty guys on that roster who had been in the big leagues or
who would be. I finished second in home runs, had sixty extra-base hits, even though I missed a month. We finished about thirty games over .500, took the league title.

It even worked out best for me in a way that I didn’t stick in Kansas City that first time. That was the year the A’s kind of imploded. There was a big fight between Finley and Dark, who got fired, and Hawk Harrelson jumped the team. It wasn’t a good situation. The A’s had been fielding bad teams for years, and Finley was getting on the fans in Kansas City for not showing up.

He was starting to take the team apart and rebuild it for the future with his money and new talent. Say what you want about Charlie Finley. He knew how to build a team, and he knew talent.

By the time I was with the big club again, Finley had moved it to Oakland, which was a whole other story. All of a sudden we were in California, in a town with a lot of minorities, and all the guys I’d come up through the minors with were on the team. I was very comfortable there. And we were going to make some big things happen.

O
AKLAND
, C
ALIFORNIA
, 1968. Our home opener was a night game, and we drew more than fifty thousand people. To give you an idea, the A’s had been drawing fewer than ten thousand a game back in Kansas City. But here it was, our first game in a new city, and the atmosphere was electric.

I was the right fielder, batting second. Bob Kennedy, our manager, told me in spring training, “You’re gonna be the right fielder.” I was nervous. I said to myself, “Gosh, I don’t know if I’m ready. Maybe I should do Triple-A first.” And then I went out and got four hits against the St. Louis Cardinals late in spring training and boom! I was the right fielder. That was it!

That first night, there was so much excitement. It was against Baltimore, and Dave McNally beat us. Rick Monday hit a home run. I think Lew Krausse started for us.

The next day, we were back down to about five thousand fans, and it rarely got much better than that. As well as we played, Oakland was going through some hard times, and we could never get that many people out; sometimes we couldn’t even fill the ballpark in the postseason.

But still, we had this excitement about ourselves, because we knew how good we were with such great talent. I came up for good that year along with Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers. Dave Duncan was already up, and so was Bert Campaneris, who was a great shortstop, maybe even a Hall of Famer. Catfish Hunter, who
is
in the Hall. Johnny Odom, Blue Moon Odom. A couple of other guys, like Dick Green, who was a terrific
fielder down at second. Sal Bando, our third baseman, was such a solid citizen, from a great family, and our spiritual leader on the team. I’ve always had much respect for Capt. Sal. I thought he could’ve been a manager, and I wasn’t surprised that he became a general manager.

We won twenty more games than we had the year before, went from last place to sixth—almost the first division in the old ten-team league. Never mind Kansas City. It was the first winning season the A’s had had since they were back in
Philadelphia
, in 1952!
Two
cities earlier!

And every year, we just kept getting better, kept bringing guys up, and adding guys in trades—both stars and great role players. Vida Blue came up and won the Cy Young
and
the MVP his first full year with us. He went 24–8 that year, with a 1.82 ERA, 301 strikeouts in 312 innings, 8 shutouts, and 24 complete games. Gene Tenace, the first baseman and catcher. A veteran at first base named Don Mincher, Mike Epstein, a good player, a tough guy and a tough player. Ted Kubiak, Billy North. Paul Lindblad, Darold Knowles, and Bob Locker in the pen. Felipe Alou, Angel Mangual, George Hendrick, another great player. We traded Rick Monday, but we got Ken Holtzman for him, who was a terrific, underrated lefty pitcher. It seemed like he could pitch a game in less than ninety minutes.

It was a tremendously well-balanced team. Built like the Yankees of the late ’90s, to go long or go short. We could win a pennant race, and then—with baseball breaking the leagues into divisions for the first time and adding another level of playoffs—we also had the starters and the deep bullpen to win a short series. Dick Williams, our manager, was managing a game years ahead of his time. He got criticized sometimes for overspecialization, but we had the tools to play that way, always bringing guys in to pinch-hit, pinch-run, as defensive replacements. Bringing in four, five relievers in big postseason games.

We were one of the great dynasties in the history of baseball. We won five straight division titles, 1971–75. No one else did that, back in the old, six- or seven-team divisions. No one. We won three straight World Series, 1972–74. Only the Yankees have ever done better than that, in the history of the sport.

What’s more, we were a show. We were entertainment. Charlie
Finley saw to that, in part, with the outrageous, flashy uniforms, and the mustaches, and the nicknames. But it was more than that. We were the baseball equivalent of “Showtime.”

It was the attitude, the swagger we had. We believed we were good and could play like a great team together. Fran Healy called us a team of gunslingers, which was a pretty good description. There was a lot of publicity about the fights we used to get into with each other.

But that was about the passion we played with. We were a band of young renegades, playing hard and having fun. We were just following the lead of our owner, who was always getting himself involved in spats, whether it was with the commissioner or the community, or the city or the league.

There was no real tension; there was no ill will building up. We had spats, and we talked about them openly. Sometimes there were tussles as well. It would have been called insanity if we hadn’t won championships. I remember Blue Moon Odom got into a fight with Vida Blue in the locker room one day after the two of them
won
a playoff game against Detroit. Odom cut open Rollie Fingers’s head just before the start of the 1974 World Series, supposedly after Odom said something about Fingers’s wife. Rollie needed six stitches to close the cut, and Blue Moon walked away with a limp.

Didn’t matter. Rollie was the MVP of that Series; Odom picked up a win and a save. Bert Campaneris got fined and suspended for throwing his bat at Lerrin LaGrow of the Tigers, after LaGrow hit him with a pitch in the 1972 playoffs. Didn’t matter, we won the playoffs and the World Series that year. We were the Swingin’ A’s.

I got into a wrestling match myself with Billy North. Billy was a scrappy little player, terrific outfielder, a terrific base stealer. He got into a few fights. I remember once he ran out to the mound and started punching Doug Bird after Bird threw him a
strike
. Dick Williams said it was the first time he ever saw a guy go after the pitcher when he threw him a strike. That was Billy. Bird hit him with a pitch in the ear three years before, back in the Midwest League, and Billy never forgot it. Walked out to the mound and dropped Bird with a right to the jaw, then just started banging away on him.

Billy North came to Oakland in ’73 from the Cubs. He brought
with him some great skills, and he helped our team tremendously, until injuries got in the way. From the beginning, he was a tough, scrappy kid for us, who knew what it would take for him to be productive in the lead-off spot, and who played the outfield as well as any center fielder in the game at that time. He hit line drives, led the league in both putouts and stolen bases twice, and was a dependable player, year after year.

Talk about someone who had your back. During our playing days together, his attitude was “Whatever—just don’t bring it to me or my boys.” I think he was right, and I think he was underappreciated as a player and a friend. He was real good at protecting himself and his teammates.

He did seem to have a chip on his shoulder, and a lot of guys, including Billy, I think, felt like he was capable of exploding if the wrong situation happened. What did not come out when you talked to Billy was how much he’d had to overcome to make the major leagues, and how he had been treated by various teammates and management as a black player who was a smart, independent guy—but who happened to date white women when he hit the bigs in Chicago.

He was a very proud guy, and he saw the same things I saw as a black man in professional baseball, and spoke up about them in a way which no doubt rubbed management and other players the wrong way. He waited until well after he retired to express openly the racism he experienced in the game, and I don’t need to quote him. The point here is that it wasn’t just in any one city that guys were feeling this. It was all over, and it was not about who we were on the field, but rather, who we were as people.