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Bases Loaded, Part 18:
The History of the Los Angeles Kings
by Chris Oakley
Adapted from material previously posted at Othertimelines.com


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....

 

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