Summary:

In the previous 18 chapters of this series we reviewed the history of the Los Angeles Kings baseball club from William Randolph Hearst’s creation of the franchise in 1920 to their 1970 World Series win over the Cincinnati Reds. In this segment, we’ll look back at Harry Hooper’s farewell season with the team in 1971 and the search to find a successor as the 1972 MLB regular season approached.

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The news of Harry Hooper’s impending retirement from the majors sent shockwaves throughout the baseball world. Not since amyotrophic lateral sclerosis forced Yankees great Lou Gehrig to quit the sport in 1939 had a medical situation had this dramatic an effect on the national pastime. Hooper’s announcement was the lead headline on the sports pages of nearly every major newspaper on the West Coast-- and many an East Coast paper too. No less a figure than CBS television news anchor Walter Cronkite called Hooper’s announcement “the most heartbreaking words spoken about a baseball man since Casey struck out”. Even the Kings’ archrivals in San Francisco couldn’t help being downcast over the circumstances of Hooper’s approaching departure; then-Prospectors general manager Gabriel H. Paul, later the architect of back-to-back World Series championships for the Yanks under the ownership of George Steinbrenner, told a sportswriter from the San Francisco Examiner: “It feels like the end of the world.” And if an executive for the Kings’ fiercest AL West rival could express those kinds of sentiments, one could only begin to imagine the great sense of loss being felt within the Kings’ own ranks. Los Angelenos could no more imagine the Purple and Gold bench without Harry Hooper on it than they could picture Beverly Hills without the iconic Hollywood sign.

The 1971 MLB season had now essentially become a Harry Hooper farewell tour. This time when Hooper left the Kings clubhouse, he wouldn’t be coming back; for better or worse, after the season was over fans would have to get used to the idea of the veteran skipper being just a part of baseball history instead of participating in shaping it. If the team were to win a tenth World Series pennant, it would have to do so with a new manager at the helm.

The search for that new manager got underway almost right at the second Hooper stepped down from the podium at the press conference to announce his coming retirement. One of the first names to be mentioned as a possible successor to Hooper was that of former Kings infielder Preston Ward; Ward had returned to the Kings organization the mid-‘60s as a coach in their minor league system and led their San Bernardino Double A affiliate to two league championships. Four days after the press conference announcing his impending retirement, Hooper flew to San Bernardino for an informal meeting with the ex-third baseman and strongly hinted he would back Ward for the L.A. manager’s position if Ward were interested. One of Ward’s old teammates, Buddy Rosar, also cropped up frequently in discussions about who might inherit Hooper’s job once his retirement became official.

Another strong candidate for the job was ex-Yankees great Phil Rizzuto, who at the time of Hooper’s retirement press conference was working as a TV color commentator for NBC’s baseball broadcasts. For a while it looked like he might be the odds-on favorite to assume the L.A. manager’s post once Harry Hooper stepped down. But in the end, Rizzuto’s emotional and psychological bonds with his former team won out over his interest in running the Purple & Gold. With Rizzuto thus out of the picture the way was thus opened up for another former Bronx Bomber, Oakland-born Billy Martin, to be entered into consideration for the managerial spot. Martin, who’d been fired by the Dallas Stars at the end of the previous season, was being actively courted by three other major league ballclubs at the time-- including the Yankees--but in his initial interviews with the Hearsts he made it clear he wanted the Los Angeles job most of all.

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If the search to find Harry Hooper’s successor was the biggest baseball story to come out of Los Angeles during the spring of 1971, then running a very close second was the unprecedented deal worked out by the Hearst and O’Malley organizations in response to the damage the Sylmar earthquake had inflicted on Hearst Palladium. In a three-way conference call with then-MLB commissioner Bowie Kuhn, the Kings and the Dodgers agreed to adjust their respective schedules so that the Kings could play their home games at Dodger Stadium while the Dodgers were on the road. This arrangement would last until at least the end of the 1971 regular season, by which time it was hoped the structural repairs to Hearst Palladium would be completed.

It was a rare example of co-operation between these longtime cross-town rivals, and a sign that the relationship between them was beginning to change from adolescent antagonism to mutual respect. The two franchises were still in competition for the hearts(and dollars) of baseball fans within the Los Angeles area, but by now it had become clear to each team that the other wasn’t going anywhere anytime soon. Thus it was in the two clubs’ individual and collective best interests to maintain some sort of connection-- if only to keep Dodger Stadium’s turnstiles from gathering dust. A corollary to the scheduling deal had the Kings and Dodgers starting a joint youth sports fund to help buy uniforms and equipment for Little League teams in some of the poorer sections of the Los Angeles area. To sportswriters familiar with the long-running rivalry that had existed between the Bums and the Purple & Gold for so many years, the idea of those clubs co-operating on any matter was something which had a distinct “man bites dog” quality to it.

The third biggest story to emerge from the Kings clubhouse during the spring of 1971 was the MLB debut of two promising rookies, pitcher Doyle Alexander and infielder Kurt Bevacqua, in a spring training game against the San Francisco Giants. Alexander in particular functioned as a one-man wrecking crew that afternoon, striking out the first ten batters he faced and finishing the game with fourteen total strikeouts on the day; he also drove in the game-tying run on a sacrifice bunt in the eighth inning. The next morning the Los Angeles Times started its account of the game with this prophetic observation: “The Kings might have just found their next great pitching star in Alexander.”

Alexander continued to impress throughout the rest of the Kings spring training schedule, so it was only natural that when the ’71 MLB regular season got started he would get the call to be the Purple and Gold’s Opening Day starting pitcher. And Los Angeles would definitely need a quality starter on the mound that afternoon: they were squaring off with the Baltimore Orioles, who were itching to get even with Los Angeles for costing them the opportunity to repeat as American League champions. Jim Palmer was Baltimore’s starter that day, and fans as well as sportswriters gathered at Memorial Stadium expecting a full- blown pitchers’ duel. Which is exactly what they got-- the game would run scoreless and hitless for eight and a half innings before Brooks Robinson broke the logjam with a solo homer to right field which drove in the only run Baltimore would need.

Los Angeles bounced back from its Opening Day loss to reel off nine wins in its next eleven games; by Memorial Day the Kings were four and a half games ahead of Houston in the AL West standings and being touted as at least a potential division champion, if not the outright favorite to win the American League pennant. In early June the Kings further strengthened their claims to legitimate pennant contender’s status with a sweep of the Yankees in New York; when they picked up Texas-born pitching ace Nolan Ryan in a trade with the New York Mets, it seemed there was nothing to stop them from running away with the AL West.

Nothing, that is, except their traditional division archrivals San Francisco. The Prospectors had overcome a slow start to notch a number of quality wins and continued to stay within striking distance of Los Angeles and Houston in the AL West division standings. In mid- June they vaulted past Houston to take over sole possession of second place in the AL West; by the 4th of July San Francisco was just a half- game behind Los Angeles in the battle for division supremacy. On July 8th the Prospectors pulled into a tie for first place with Los Angeles by sweeping a home doubleheader with the Oakland A’s while in Boston the Red Sox rallied from a two-run eighth inning deficit to beat the Kings 7-5.

It was at that point the 1971 MLB season-- or what one Sports Illustrated baseball correspondent dubbed “the Harry Hooper farewell tour” --began to go awry. The Purple & Gold dropped five games behind San Francisco just before the All-Star break; within two weeks that deficit had ballooned to ten games and there was genuine fear in the offices at Hearst Palladium that the Kings might sink to third or even fourth place in the AL West standings. A modest surge during a road swing against the AL Central cut the gap to seven games, but another slump brought it back to ten. By the first weekend in August the Kings were a full thirteen games out of first place in the AL West and their hopes for a wild card spot in the playoffs had also started to slip a notch or two.

Their cause certainly wasn’t helped by the debacle in Cleveland known as Ten-Cent Beer Night. The questionable brainchild of Indians front office executives looking for a quick fix to the attendance drop their club had been suffering since the mid-1960s, it involved letting fans at a Kings-Indians night game buy beer from the concession stands at just ten cents per cup; in theory it might have sounded like a good idea to the desperate suits, but in practice it was a recipe for what could charitably be described as total disaster. The game wasn’t even halfway through the third inning before the trouble started: Cleveland police were forced to break up a fistfight between two inebriated fans who’d been arguing over ownership of a foul ball that had dropped into the stands in the bottom of the second inning.

From there the situation steadily deteriorated until, in the top of the eighth, a barrage of debris hurled from the stands by some of the more intoxicated patrons in the stands forced the umpires to call the game off with the score tied 2-2 and Los Angeles trying to get a rally going. This decision robbed the Kings of momentum at precisely the time when the club urgently needed it in order to stay in the AL West pennant race. By September 1st Los Angeles was eighteen games out of first place and tied with Houston for fourth place in the division standings. That wasn’t exactly the way Harry Hooper had wanted to end his thirty-plus year association with the Purple & Gold; it certainly wasn’t the way his players had hoped to end their 1971 regular season.

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Over the next two weeks the Kings displayed brief flickers of like-- a five-game surge home against Oakland and Houston and a three- game win streak on the road against Kansas City --but by the middle of the third week of September it was apparent Los Angeles wouldn’t make the 1971 American League playoffs. This, combined with Harry Hooper’s impending retirement, would serve to create a rather somber atmosphere at Hearst Palladium when the Kings returned there for their final home stand of the regular season. Even Homer the First’s usually enjoyable antics couldn’t lift the fans’ spirits this time around.

On September 30th, 1971 Harry Hooper managed his final major league game, an afternoon matchup between the Kings and the White Sox. The Kings won the game 7-3, with Nolan Ryan getting twelve strikeouts on the day and Kurt Bevacqua driving home the winning run courtesy of a two-out sixth inning double with runners at first and second. When the final out of the game dropped into Toby Harrah’s waiting glove, a raucous yell went up from the Hearst Palladium crowd urging Hooper to come off the bench for a farewell curtain call; he didn’t wait long to oblige them, coming out to the pitcher’s mound for an ovation lasting close to fifteen minutes.

Just over two months after Hooper’s farewell, Billy Martin would be officially introduced as the Kings’ new manager; he would bring to his new job the same fiery intensity that had made him one of the most formidable infielders in the Yankee lineup, and in the process start the Purple & Gold on a path that would finally take them back to the World Series championship....