Summary:
In the previous 17 chapters of this series we reviewed
the history of the Los Angeles Kings baseball club from their
creation by William Randolph Hearst in 1920 to the return of two-
time former Kings manager Harry Hooper as Purple and Gold skipper
late in the ‘68 season. In this chapter we’ll look at the Kings’
roller-coaster 1969 campaign and Hooper’s final World Series run
in 1970 when Los Angeles faced the Cincinnati Reds.
******
For most citizens of southern California, the Los Angeles Kings
were an afterthought as the 1969 baseball season got underway. With a
new president in the White House, racial tensions in America reaching
an all-time high since the assassination of Martin Luther King, and
the war in Vietnam still causing problems for the American people, it
hardly seemed the most appropriate time for people to be focusing much
time or attention on a game. On a more positive note, the human dream
of going to the moon was on the verge of becoming reality and rock &
roll was on the crest of a new wave of cultural vitality. In any case
the Purple and Gold were considered a back-page item heading into the
1969 season opener; when they took the field at Hearst Palladium on an
unusually cool April afternoon to host the newly minted Houston Astros
in that franchise’s first-ever regular season game, they were playing
to half-empty stands.
Not that the Kings were being entirely ignored, however. The
longtime diehards were still coming to the Palladium, and in spite
of the counterculture’s disdain for most aspects of conventional
American society a new generation of younger fans was beginning to
embrace the franchise as it neared the half-century anniversary of
its creation. In fact, the team had started quietly marketing the
Palladium to rock bands as a potential concert venue; one of those
bands, as it happened, was the Rolling Stones, who spent months in
negotiations with the Hearsts before ultimately deciding to play the
finale of their 1969 U.S. concert tour at the Altamont Speedway-- a
decision that would have unforeseen tragic consequences.
The Kings took two of the three games in their season-opening
series with the Astros, then proceeded to reel off seven wins in a
row against Kansas City and Oakland before flying cross-country to
take on the Baltimore Orioles, who under new manager Earl Weaver were
molding themselves into one of the American League’s newer powers of
the coming decade. Weaver, a former Prospectors minor leaguer whose
playing career had fizzled out when he couldn’t overcome deficiencies
in his hitting, was only in his second year as Orioles skipper then
but had already developed a reputation for (A)snatching victory from
the jaws of defeat with innovative strategic moves and (B)getting
in umpires’ faces at the slightest provocation. Before his career as
Baltimore skipper was done Weaver would be ejected from ninety-one
games, nearly equaling John McGraw’s old MLB record and establishing
a precedent for Atlanta’s Bobby Cox in the ‘90s.
In the first two games of a four-game set at Memorial Stadium
Weaver’s Orioles beat Los Angeles by a combined score of 17-3. Not
exactly the way Hooper had wanted to start the 1969 season. And in
spite of back-to-back shutout wins by the Kings to salvage a split
of the series, Hooper was unhappy with the way his club had performed
on the field so far; when the Purple & Gold arrived in New York for
their first meeting of the regular season with the Yankees, one of
the first things Hooper did after getting off the plane at JFK was
to call the Kings’ Triple A affiliate in Bakersfield to see who was
available to take the place of the more underachieving players in his
lineup.
As it turned out, there was a solution to many of his problems
sitting right in the cleanup spot of Bakersfield’s batting order: Toby
Harrah, a talented infielder who’d been signed by the Kings fresh out
of high school and had been tearing up the Pacific Coast League for at
least two seasons at the time Hooper called him up to the big club. He
was primarily a third baseman by trade, but he could also be a highly
effective shortstop and second baseman-- and Hooper was sure Hannah’s
versatility might be just the thing to put the Purple and Gold back in
the World Series. Hannah certainly did his best to keep the Kings in
the thick of the playoff hunt: by the time he finished his rookie year
with Los Angeles his batting average would clock in at an impressive
.341.
As for the rest of the team...if it had been a Wall Street stock
investment analysts would have described it for much of the ’69 season as “volatile”: it was up one minute, down the next. They might go and
blow out the Yankees in the Bronx only to get blown out themselves at
home by Cleveland. It wasn’t until late July that they started to win
consistently, but once they did they turned plenty of heads around the
majors. By the time the September 1st trade deadline rolled around the
Kings were just three games out of first place in the AL West. They’d
eventually clinch the wild card spot by sweeping a four-game series at
home with the Kansas City Longhorns during the week of September 15th;
Los Angeles would finish out the 1969 regular season with a three-run
shutout of the Red Sox at Hearst Palladium.
******
The first leg of the 1969 American League playoffs saw the Purple
& Gold facing the AL Central champion Detroit Tigers, who were coming
off a 1968 World Series victory over the Cardinals and a 98-win 1969
season. Despite having missed much of the year due to a suspension for
violations of league rules against gambling, pitcher Denny McLain was
still a formidable weapon in the Tigers’ arsenal; sportswriters around
the country pegged him as the hurdle the Kings would have to get over
if they wanted to reach the 1969 ALCS. Mickey Mantle took the first
step toward putting L.A. over said hurdle when, in the fifth inning of
Game 1 of the Tigers-Kings divisional playoff series, he hit a two-run
shot to left off McClain for the last postseason home run of his Hall
of Fame career. That homer also paved the way for the Purple & Gold’s
eventual six-run shutout victory and gave Los Angeles major momentum
going into Game 2. “KINGS HAVE TIGERS BY THE TAIL” crowed the front
page of the Los Angeles Times the day after the Game 1 victory, and
few objective observers at the time would have been inclined to argue
with that assessment.
But Detroit flipped the script in a big way. In the second game
of the divisional series they rallied from a 4-1 deficit late in the
eighth inning thanks to a bases-loaded triple by infielder Norm Cash,
then scored two more runs in the ninth to secure a 7-5 win that tied
the series and forced a winner-take-all Game 3. While the Kings braced
themselves for this do-or-die showdown, Gil Hodges’ New York Mets were
running the table in the National League playoffs; after having defied
conventional wisdom among sportswriters during the regular season by
overcoming a slow start to win the NL East title, they had gone on to
sweep the wild card entry Chicago in the divisional playoffs and were
now sitting on top of a 2 games-to-0 lead in the 1969 NLCS against the
NL Central champion Atlanta Braves. Giddy baseball fans across America
started to anticipate the possibility of a coast-to-coast World Series
matchup, something that hadn’t happened since the Kings were swept by
the Dodgers six years earlier.
Their hopes were emphatically dashed in the rubber match of the
Tigers-Kings series; a second-inning grand slam by Detroit outfielder
Al Kaline effectively took the wind out of L.A.’s sails, sending the
Purple & Gold reeling and lighting the spark for what would eventually
become a 12-2 blowout of the Kings. Detroit thus moved on to the 1969
ALCS, where they would take the AL East champion Baltimore Orioles to
the limit before a two-out RBI double by Brooks Robinson in Game 5 of
that series clinched a 6-5 Orioles win and a date with the Mets in the
1969 World Series.
******
It was a long and miserable plane ride back to LAX for Harry
Hooper and company. But their mood might have improved considerably
had they known that just one year later the Kings would run the table
in the American League playoffs and meet the Cincinnati Reds in the
1970 World Series. The pennant race in the AL West for the 1970 MLB
regular season was effectively over by Memorial Day; the Purple and
Gold finished the year a comfortable sixteen full games ahead of San
Francisco. One thing which considerably helped the Kings’ cause was
the enforced absence of Denny McLain from the majors that year; the
Detroit ace had been suspended for the entire season for violations
of MLB rules against consorting with gamblers. With him on the shelf
Los Angeles found its path to the playoffs made that much smoother--
the Kings clinched the AL West division crown with five weeks still
remaining in the regular season. In the first round of the American
League playoffs, the Kings avenged their postseason loss against the
Tigers the previous year by sweeping Detroit in its own home field;
in the 1970 ALCS the Purple & Gold stunned baseball fans throughout
America(including some in their hometown) by steamrollering Baltimore.
The crucial turning point in their series against the Orioles came
when Cesar Tovar belted a two-out game-winning grand slam into the
upper deck at Memorial Stadium in Game 2, causing Orioles manager Earl
Weaver to blurt out in both disbelief and rueful admiration: “These
guys crawl out of more coffins than Dracula!”
It wasn’t until Game 1 of the 1970 World Series that the Kings
finally suffered a defeat, losing 3-2 to the Reds on a tenth inning
RBI single by Cincinnati infielder and hitting machine Pete Rose. The
line drive was hit so sharply it only missed becoming a double by half
an inch; the Reds weren’t going to grumble about it, though, since the
single not only won the game for them but also helped Rose break out
of an 0-15 slump which had been plaguing him since the sixth game of
the 1970 NLCS. And if Rose’s single was the most important moment of
the World Series opener, ranking a very close second a diving catch in
in the eighth inning by Rose’s teammate Lee May to rob Toby Harrah of
what would otherwise have been an RBI double that could have put the
game out of Cincinnati’s reach.
The Kings rallied from their Game 1 extra innings defeat against
the Reds by mounting their own late-inning rally to win Game 2; Mickey
Mantle, in one of the last great postseason at-bats of his career, hit
a soaring triple deep to center at Riverfront Stadium to cap off a 5-4
Los Angeles victory. Nonetheless, he and his Purple & Gold teammates
had been reminded that Cincinnati’s nickname “the Big Red Machine” was
richly deserved-- under then-Reds manager Sparky Anderson’s tutelage
the National League champions did indeed function like a finely tuned
machine. They made few if any mistakes in fielding, and even when they
did goof up they usually compensated for it by doing something amazing
on the next play. The Reds’ bats packed an incredible punch; Rose was
the centerpiece of a hitting attack that had enabled Cincinnati to run
roughshod over its NL Central division foes in the regular season, gut
the Pirates in the National League divisional playoffs, and survive a
grueling six-game battle with the Mets in the 1970 NLCS.
When the Fall Classic moved to Hearst Palladium for Game 3, the
tug-of-war between the two teams’ respective batting orders continued.
It was, in fact, one of the closest World Series games the Kings had
ever played in; they would be locked in a 2-2 tie with the Reds well
into the ninth inning before Toby Harrah finally clinched the win for
Los Angeles with an RBI ground-rule double that ricocheted off the top
of the center field wall and over the head of Cincinnati outfielder
Cesar Geronimo. The photo of a dejected Geronimo walking back to the
Reds clubhouse after the game was over made the front page of the next
day’s Cincinnati Enquirer under the headline “KINGS CROWN REDS”.
It was in Game 4 that the Purple & Gold seized the advantage for
keeps in the World Series; Don Drysdale, who’d retired from the majors
at the end of the 1969 season, threw out the first pitch with a nearly
perfect overhand curve-- a good omen for Los Angeles as it turned out,
since the Kings jumped out to a 4-0 lead in the second inning and were
ahead 7-0 before the end of the fifth inning. A frustrated Pete Rose
got himself ejected from the game early in the sixth after shoving the
home plate umpire during an argument over a disputed strike call. Lee
May had one of the worst postseason outings of his career, going 0 for
4 at the plate(including two strikeouts) and making a costly error in
the seventh inning that allowed Los Angeles to tack on three more runs
on the way to an eventual 12-2 victory.
Having shut the door on Cincinnati in Game 4 of the World Series,
the Purple and Gold locked it tight in Game 5. An RBI double by Cesar
Tovar in the third inning would provide all of the scoring Los Angeles
would need as George Culver silenced the Reds’ bats for eight innings
and the L.A. bullpen killed a potential Cincinnati rally in the ninth
inning to seal a 3-0 Series-ending victory for Los Angeles. When the
final out dropped lazily into the waiting outstretched glove of Toby
Harrah, fans from South Central to Rodeo Drive to Hollywood Boulevard
went wild. It had taken over eight seasons of blood, sweat, and tears
to make it happen, but the Kings finally had their ninth World Series
championship.
Los Angeles fans had high hopes that the Purple & Gold would
repeat as World Series champions in 1971. In spite of Mickey Mantle’s
retirement from the majors the team still had a solid outfield, and
with new stars being groomed in the Kings minor league system there
was every reason to think the big club could put together a dynasty
similar to the Yankees’ run of five consecutive World Series titles
under Casey Stengel. Even the damage done to Hearst Palladium by the
February 1971 Sylmar earthquake couldn’t disturb fans’ optimism about
the upcoming MLB season.
But another event-- this one during a press conference at the
team’s spring training complex in Arizona --would rock the venerable
franchise to its core. Three weeks into the American League’s 1971
spring training schedule, Kings manager Harry Hooper made the stunning
announcement that he was stepping down effective at the end of the
regular season due to declining health. With the exception of William
Randolph Hearst himself, no man had had a greater impact on shaping
the team’s identity during its early years than Hooper; his departure
meant the Purple & Gold would lose a priceless link to their storied
past....