Summary:

In the previous 22 chapters of this series we recalled the history of the Los Angeles Kings baseball franchise from its creation by William Randolph Hearst in 1920 to the death of its longtime skipper Harry Hooper in 1974. In this installment we’ll look at the Kings’ struggles during the 1975 and 1976 MLB seasons.

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The Los Angeles Kings started the 1975 MLB season with a change in uniform that might have not sat entirely well with the late William Randolph Hearst. In an experiment to see if a wardrobe makeover could improve their players’ base-running speed, the Purple & Gold had made the choice to dispense with the traditional uniform pants in favor of gold shorts with light purple stripes down both sides of each leg. It was an experiment that-- to say the least --wouldn’t go very well for the Kings. When the new uniforms were introduced at the team’s season opener against the Kansas City Longhorns, fans reacted with everything from mute disbelief to vocal ridicule; even sportswriters who thought that they’d seen it all in decades of covering baseball in SoCal were gobsmacked by just horrendously ugly the shorts were. “If Harry Hooper wasn’t already dead,” a Los Angeles Times sportswriter quipped the day after the game(which L.A. lost 5-2), “the shock of those eyesores that his old team has the nerve to call uniforms would have killed him.”

To add insult to injury, the shorts’ effect on the team’s base- running speed was exactly the opposite of what team management had intended it to be. Far from improving speed, the shorts actually made it worse by constricting blood flow in the players’ legs. By the end of April the Kings were trailing San Francisco by a full twelve games in the AL West and their uniforms were the laughingstock of a fashion- conscious Los Angeles. In early May, to the relief of everyone in the Kings’ clubhouse, the team’s front office announced it was terminating the ill-fated experiment and going with a more traditional uniform for the rest of the season.

The improvement in team morale which ensued after the uniform experiment ended was accompanied by a corresponding upsurge in their on-field performance during the rest of May and the first two weeks of June. Slowly but surely Los Angeles climbed out of the AL West cellar and pushed its way into the thick of the division pennant race. By the beginning of July, the Purple & Gold were just a half-game behind the Oakland A’s in the division standings and there was growing conjecture in the press boxes that October might find the Kings once again going toe-to-toe with the Red Sox or the Yankees in the postseason. The All- Star break found Los Angeles tied with Oakland for first place in the AL West; at the 1975 MLB All-Star Game the Purple and Gold were amply represented on the American League roster, with three of their players in the AL starting lineup and four others on the reserve bench. Cesar Tovar drove in the winning run for the American League with a one-out RBI double off Jerry Koosman of the New York Mets; Doyle Alexander had five strikeouts in two and a half innings to clinch a 7-5 victory for the American League. By the beginning of August Los Angeles enjoyed a four-game lead over Oakland in the AL West; as the September 1st trade deadline approached that lead had swelled to eight games.

The Kings officially clinched the AL West division title with a 6-3 win over the Yankees on September 23rd and earned a spot in the AL divisional playoffs against the Kansas City Longhorns while the Boston Red Sox, who’d secured the AL East crown a week earlier, would take on the wild card-winning A’s. To the surprise of very few, the Purple and Gold made very quick work of the Longhorns, sweeping them in what one Kansas City Star aptly described as “the biggest rout since Washington beat the Hessians”. The true postseason test for Los Angeles would be their 1975 ALCS showdown with their old nemeses the Red Sox, who’d set the table for their third clash against the Kings by executing a sweep of their own in their divisional series with Oakland.

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Fenway Park was jammed to capacity for the first game of the 1975 ALCS. Barely eight years had passed since the Red Sox and the Kings had last gone toe-to-toe in the playoffs, and it seemed like even less time than that had gone by when the two teams lined up on the basepaths for their pre-game introductions. For many of the fans at the venerable ballpark as well as the two clubs involved, it was their third ALCS-- and the avalanche of boos which descended on the Purple & Gold made it clear this series wouldn’t be any less intense than the previous two had been.

A rocket of a double by Sox outfielder Jim Rice in the fourth inning of Game 1 set the tone for the rest of the ‘75 ALCS. The Rice double set the stage for an RBI single by teammate Carlton Fisk, and from there the rout was on; by the time the Kings bullpen managed to stop the bleeding, Boston was ahead 5-0 and well along the way to what would eventually be an 8-1 Red Sox victory. The next day’s edition of the Boston Globe neatly summed up on its sports pages just how anemic Los Angeles’ Game 1 effort had been; the paper’s recap of the game was printed under the headline “Kings Lose Their Crown”.

Game 2 wouldn’t be much better for the Purple and Gold-- Carl Yazstremski, the same man who’d driven the final stake through L.A.’s heart in the 1967 ALCS, tormented them again with an RBI triple in the third inning that gave Boston a 4-1 lead, and pitcher Luis Tiant would rack up eleven strikeouts on the afternoon against the hapless Kings batting order as the Sox cruised to a 10-2 victory and took a 2 games- to-0 series lead with them to Hearst Palladium for Game 3. To most of the Los Angeles sports media it looked like the Kings were just going to sputter out in the postseason...

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...but the Purple & Gold rallied in Game 3 to avert the sweep. A gem of a pitching performance by Doyle Alexander and a seventh-inning Kurt Bevacqua two-run homer paved the way for a 6-3 Kings victory that ensured the ALCS would extend to at least five games. The Kings hoped to win Game 4 and even up the series, then steal a victory out on the East Coast in Game 5 to put themselves in position clinch the American League pennant with a Game 6 win. Some Kings fans were so confident in a Los Angeles series victory in the ALCS they booked plane tickets out to Cincinnati, where the National League champion Reds were scheduled to host the first two games of the 1975 World Series.

But a Cesar Tovar knee injury in the third inning of Game 4 poked a hole in their World Series dreams. With Tovar’s bat and glove out of the lineup, Los Angeles was in deep trouble; everyone in the stands at Hearst Palladium was fearing the worst not just for Tovar himself but for the Kings collectively, and sure enough with one out in the top of the fourth Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk blasted a three-run homer into the Palladium’s upper deck to spark a Boston offensive surge that, for all practical purposes, put the series out of L.A.’s reach. In the top of the sixth Fisk’s teammate Fred Lynn hammered the last nail into the Kings’ coffin with an RBI double to straightaway center.

Most L.A. fans didn’t even bother waiting for the final out of the game to drop into Jim Rice’s outstretched glove before they got up and started for the exits with all-too-familiar feelings of grim disappointment and seething frustration. For the third time in Kings franchise history they’d gone into a playoff series against the Red Sox with high hopes only to have those hopes completely and swiftly dashed. Boston was becoming the Moby Dick to Los Angeles’ Ahab as far as the American League playoffs were concerned....

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...and bitterness over the way the ALCS had ended was still very much present in the hearts and minds of Kings fans when Billy Martin’s squad took the field at Hearst Palladium for its 1976 regular season opener against the Kansas City Longhorns. K.C.’s starting lineup was booed mercilessly before they’d even taken a single at-bat; at least twice during the game itself LAPD officers working the security detail at Hearst that day had to eject an unruly fan from the stadium because something had been thrown at third-year Longhorns third baseman George Brett. The behavior of the fans was so unruly that at one point, the home plate umpire threatened to declare the game a forfeit to Kansas City.

Not that it would have made much difference in the long run: the Kings were handed their second straight Opening Day defeat against the Longhorns, going down 6-1. Not exactly the way Los Angeles had wanted to kick off their forty-first year as an American League franchise.... and Billy Martin let the L.A. sports media know it in not very family- friendly vocabulary at his post-game press conference. So many of his words were R-rated that when portions of his interview were played on local TV sportscasts that night, at least half the audio consisted of censor’s bleeps. And Martin’s mood wouldn’t improve too much over the next few games: not only did the Purple and Gold end up getting swept by Kansas City to post an 0-4 start to their ’76 season, but they went on to drop two of their first three road games of the year when they traveled to Oakland to face the Athletics. By the time the season was three weeks old the Kings were already a dozen games under .500 and in serious danger of falling even further behind.

Things began to turn around after the Kings swept a doubleheader against the Astros in Houston the first weekend in May. Cajoled on by Martin, Los Angeles scratched and clawed its way to the .500 mark and from there proceeded to make a run at division-leading San Francisco; by May 15th Los Angeles was just five games out of first place in the AL West and poised to narrow the gap even further as they returned to Hearst Palladium to start a nine-game home stand against the AL East. Over those nine games they swept the Yankees and the Orioles and took two out of three games from the Red Sox to pull within a half-game of division leader San Francisco.

On June 2nd the Kings took over the top spot in the AL West with a 6-5 win over the Cleveland Indians and a four-run Prospectors shutout loss to the Chicago White Sox. By now Pete Incaviglia was on pace for a 50-homer season and Doyle Alexander had a shot at becoming the first major league pitcher to win 30 games in a season since Denny McLain of the Tigers did it in 1968. Cesar Tovar’s name was figuring prominently in discussions about possible Gold Glove winners, and longtime general manager Fred Haney was the subject of a Sports Illustrated piece which touted him as perhaps the greatest front office mind the game had seen since Branch Rickey.

Over the next month Los Angeles continued making case for itself as the AL West’s most dominant team; by Independence Day the Purple & Gold were eight full games up on San Francisco. As they hit the All- Star break they were in first by ten and a half games, and after the break was over and the regular season resumed the question seemed to be less if L.A. would clinch the West division title than where they would clinch it. Some people thought they’d do it on their home turf; others expected it would be at Yankee Stadium or in San Francisco; and still others predicted it would happen in Detroit, where the Kings had a four-game set with the Tigers booked in September to open their last road trip of the regular season.

But a lot can happen over the course of a month and a half, and as July turned into August the Kings found their seemingly unbreakable grip on the AL West pennant gradually beginning to slip. The warning signs began coming during a four-game home stand against the Yankees; in the third game of that quartet, the Purple & Gold set a franchise record for most team errors in a single game on the way to an utterly embarrassing 13-1 loss, and in the finale of the four-game set Cesar Tovar fell into an 0-for-47 batting slump that would drastically lower L.A.’s overall team batting average before it was over. By the end of the month the Kings’ lead in the AL West had shrunk to a razor-thin 1½ games and San Francisco was making a determined charge at Los Angeles in hopes of knocking them off the top of the ladder. It would all come down to the two weeks in September between the end of the Kings’ final road trip of the regular season and the three-game home finale against their old division archrivals.

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 During those two weeks, the Purple and Gold saw their already slim grip on the divisional lead become even more tenuous as their own hitters struggled at the plate while San Francisco’s went on a tear. But in spite of a twinge of panic in some quarters that another Kings collapse was in the making, Los Angeles managed to avoid falling into second place; when the Prospectors arrived at Hearst Palladium for the start of their three- game season-ending trifecta with the Kings the two teams were locked in a tie for first place in the AL West standings. The team who won two out of those three games would in effect win the division.

San Francisco easily won the series opener, holding Los Angeles to a paltry four hits in a 6-1 thrashing of the Kings that nearly drove Billy Martin into a hysterical rage. Then it was Prospectors manager and former Reds centerfielder Harry Craft’s turn to be infuriated after his ballclub blew a 5-2 eighth inning lead in the second game and lost to Los Angeles 8-6 in ten innings. With the series square at one game apiece, there was now increased pressure on both teams’ starting pitchers for the critical third game.

Enter Doyle Alexander. Alexander had consistently been one of L.A.’s best pitchers during the ’76 regular season and was being touted by most of the national sports media as a starter who possessed the potential to take the Kings deep into the American League playoffs, possibly even the World Series, if Martin made effective use of his skills. The Prospectors countered with 26-year-old righthander and Old Dominion University alumni Paul Mitchell, who’d been one of San Francisco’s top strikeout whizzes in the first half of the year but had started to wear down as the ’76 season neared its end. It was another classic case of the irresistible force vs. the immovable object, and everybody who came to Hearst Palladium for this critical game was eager to find out who would come out on top.

For the first six innings it looked as if Mitchell had regained his early season form; he held the Kings to just one hit during that span and struck out ten of the first twelve batters he faced while retiring the eleventh on a grounder to first base. But in the bottom of the seventh, all hell broke loose for San Francisco as Cesar Tovar smashed a two-run double to center field that tied the game for Los Angeles and touched off a Kings offensive surge that would have the Purple and Gold leading their divisional archrivals 8-3 when San Francisco came to bat in the top of the eighth inning. In the bottom of the eighth L.A. widened their lead by way of a Pete Incaviglia grand slam.

By the top of the ninth the ‘Spectors were hanging by the proverbial thread and most of the contingent of San Francisco fans that had braved the ire of the Hearst Palladium faithful to attend this season-ender had already filed out the exits. They probably made the right call: reliever John Verhoven, who’d made four critical saves for Los Angeles during the final month of the regular season, struck out the first two batters that he faced in the inning and retired the third on a pop fly to short. The crowd’s reaction when that pop fly was caught could be heard all the way to Tijuana-- the Kings were going back to the American League postseason, and if everything went well they might even return to the World Series...