Summary:

In the previous 21 chapters of this series we reviewed the history of the Los Angeles Kings baseball club from William Randolph Hearst’s establishment of the team in 1920 to their 1972 World Series victory against the Cincinnati Reds. In this segment we’ll look back at their ‘73 season and the death of former Kings manager Harry Hooper in 1974.

 ******

As the 1973 MLB season was getting underway, the primary challenge to L.A.’s supremacy in the American League West came from the Charlie Finley-owned Oakland A’s. Finley, embarrassed by his ballclub’s failure to unseat the Kings from the top of the division the previous season, had dug deep into his team’s farm system and gone scouring the rest of the majors for free agents he thought could help his team surpass Los Angeles and win a pennant. One of his biggest acquisitions in the course of Finley’s quest to make his team a champion was the signing of North Carolina-born pitcher Jim “Catfish” Hunter, an ex-Kansas City Longhorns minor league prospect who owned one of the most formidable fastballs in the business.

Eager to get started on the task of dethroning the Kings as soon as possible, Oakland manager Alvin Dark designated Hunter to be his starting pitcher against Los Angeles’ Doyle Alexander when the A’s arrived at Hearst Palladium for the Kings’ first home game of the 1973 season. For seven and a half innings Alexander matched Hunter strikeout for strikeout and fastball for fastball. Only when Hunter gave up a two-out walk to Marco dos Santos in the bottom of the eighth did the tide start turning in favor of the Purple & Gold. In the bottom of the ninth inning a dramatic Cesar Tovar RBI double broke a 1-1 tie and gave a Los Angeles 2-1 victory to spark a nine- game win streak which would put the Kings a full seven games ahead of Kansas City and eight and a half of San Francisco in the AL West standings by the time they embarked on their next road trip.

It was during that road trip when the Kings got their first glimpse of a young phenom who but for a few unhappy quirks of fate might have been one of the great pitching aces of the ‘70s and ‘80s: eighteen-year-old Texas native David Clyde, who the Houston Astros had signed to a major league contract directly out of high school. Facing the Kings as Houston’s starting pitcher for the second game of a four-game L.A. stint at the Astrodome, Clyde struck out seven of the first eight batters he faced and finished the day with an eye- popping fourteen strikeouts overall. The Astros won that day 5-2; if his development had been more properly managed, Clyde’s debut in the majors might well have marked the start of a Hall of Fame career. But as it turned out he would be pushed too far too fast and disappeared from the majors after only a short time. The Astros would drop out of pennant contention by the first week of June and finish the ’73 season twelve games out of first.

******

As for Los Angeles, they managed to bounce back rather nicely from their defeat against Clyde, taking the next two games of their series with Houston and reeled off another eight wins to stay seven games ahead of San Francisco in the AL West standings. They started the month of May with sweeps at home of the Yankees, Tigers, and Red Sox and followed up those sweeps by taking two game out of three in Baltimore against the Orioles. After they posted a six-run shutout of the Red Sox in the opening game of a four-game set at Fenway Park, it looked they might at the very least be positioning themselves for yet another AL West division pennant.

But looks can be deceiving. In the second game of that Fenway series, the wheels started to come off the bus for Los Angeles as the Kings blew a 5-3 eighth inning lead and ended up losing to Boston 7-6; Pete Incaviglia hurt his right leg during that game and would spend at least two months on the sidelines, depriving the Purple & Gold of his services at precisely the time when they would be urgently needed. In his absence the Kings’ divisional lead began to slip away, and by the All-Star break it was gone completely. Los Angeles managed to claw its way back to the top of the division in mid-July, but in early August a four-game losing streak knocked it back down to second place, two full games behind Oakland.

By September 1st any hopes of winning the division were long gone and even the AL wild card berth was starting to slip out of the Kings’ reach. Billy Martin, an irascible sort to begin with, became downright hostile as his team’s position continued to deteriorate. On September 10th, after the Kings blew a 9-3 seventh inning lead in the second game of a doubleheader against the Chicago White Sox at Comiskey Park and ended up losing that game 12-10, a visibly enraged Martin actually had to be restrained from getting into a fistfight with an AP sportswriter during the post-game press conference.

The Kings were officially eliminated from playoff contention with a five-run shutout loss to the Cleveland Indians on September 21st, and from there stumbled to a fourth place finish in the AL West. As anyone familiar with Martin’s personality could have predicted, he was not in the most cheerful of moods after that loss, and his post-game comments to reporters were laced with most if not all of those seven words from comedian George Carlin’s infamous list. In fact, as he stormed out of the Cleveland Stadium visitors’ clubhouse, he tossed off a word or two Carlin overlooked.

******

In February 0f 1974, while the Kings were reporting to spring training in Arizona, Harry Hooper was admitted to UCLA Medical Center to receive treatment for pneumonia. The former manager had spent much of his time shuttling back and forth between hospitals and home since retiring as Los Angeles skipper, and there was a growing dread among those closest to him that he might not be much longer for this world. With that in mind, Kings senior front office executives announced the team would hold ceremonies on Opening Day of the ’74 regular season to honor Hooper’s contributions to the franchise’s legacy during his years with Los Angeles. Even people who had never seen Hooper in his managerial heyday wanted to take part in the tribute; tickets for the Opening Day game sold out within minutes after Hearst Palladium’s box office opened, an impressive feat considering that in those days just about the only social media available was word of mouth.

Fittingly, the Kings’ opponent for that ’74 Opening Day contest was San Francisco. The Prospectors had played a major role in both the best and worst moments of Hooper’s career, and in his final appearance at Hearst Palladium they would write a dramatic coda to his career as a member of the Kings organization. The game went scoreless for seven full innings and well into the bottom half of the eighth inning before Pete Incavigilia blasted a solo home run to straightaway center. With one out in the ninth inning, San Francisco tied the game by virtue of a bases-loaded sacrifice; Cesar Tovar finally secured the win for the Purple and Gold with a tenth-inning RBI double.

Shortly after the game ended Kings and Prospectors players alike gathered near the pitcher’s mound in a spontaneous gesture of tribute to Hooper; the crowd accompanied them by favoring Hooper with a seven- minute standing ovation. In Boston, where Hooper had launched his MLB career as a fielder with the Red Sox, his old uniform would be retired the next day at Fenway Park amidst considerable pomp and circumstance. At the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, where he’d been inducted as a player three years earlier, a special exhibit was set up to commemorate his accomplishments as a manager(many of the materials in that exhibit would be put on permanent display when Hooper made the Hall a second time in 1983 for his work managing the kings).

Hooper died in his hometown of Santa Cruz, California on December 18th, 1974 at the age of 87. In light of his passing, the Kings’ third- place finish in the AL West seemed somewhat anticlimactic; most of the talk among L.A. fans during that off-season would focus on the legacy Hooper had created during his long and tumultuous association with the franchise. The sports page of Los Angeles’ major newspapers were chock full of tributes to the longtime manager, with even many of his former critics acknowledging his contributions to making the Purple & Gold a perennial American League power. In Arizona the Kings’ spring training complex was re-christened Hooper Field.

The funeral procession stretched more than four blocks; at least 500,000 people lined the streets of downtown Los Angeles to pay their final respects to Hooper, some of them too young to have seen Hooper at work during managerial heyday but were familiar with his legacy as a result of the scores of books published about his triumphs and his setbacks during his multiple stints as Kings skipper. Just about every living former Kings player who’d ever been on one of his teams seemed to be in attendance at the memorial service; even the famously press- shy Joe DiMaggio left his self-imposed post-retirement seclusion long enough to be part of the funeral ceremonies.

Hooper was laid to rest in a grave whose headstone amply reflected his central role in the Kings’ development from an upstart ballclub in an equally upstart league to one of the American League’s most famous and consistently successful franchises. In the years to come the grave would become a touchstone for baseball fans all across the West Coast, much like the cornfield-turned-ballpark in Field of Dreams grew into a mecca for baseball aficionados in the Midwest.

******

In spring training the following February, the Kings announced they would dedicate their entire 1975 MLB regular season to Hooper. The beginning of the ’75 season would also see a heavily increased police presence at Hearst Palladium; with the Vietnam War drawing to an ignominious end and radical leftist groups such as the Symbionese Liberation Army perpetrating acts of violence at every opportunity, nobody in the LAPD or CHP high command wanted to run the risk of fans or players becoming victims of domestic terrorism....