Bases 14

Bases Loaded, Part 15:
The History of the Los Angeles Kings
by Chris Oakley
Adapted from material previously posted at Othertimelines.com

Summary:

In the first 14 chapters of this series we reviewed William Randolph Hearst’s creation of the Continental League and the Los Angeles Kings; the 1935 CL-MLB merger and subsequent MLB reorganization; the Kings’ postseason triumphs and heartbreaks in the late ‘30s and the firing of manager Al Bridwell after they lost the 1940 World Series; the Kings’ spectacular 1941 season; L.A.’s World War II doldrums on the diamond; the Los Angeles postwar resurgence which led to World Series victories against the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 and the Boston Braves in 1948; the heartbreak of their 1949 ALCS defeat; their collapse in the home stretch of the 1950 baseball season; Hearst’s death late in the 1951 season; the retirement of “California Clipper” Joe DiMaggio; the return of Al Bridwell as Kings manager in 1952; the Kings’ epic playoff runs of the mid-1950s; the uproar among Kings fans over Dodger owner Walter O’Malley’s decision to move his team from Brooklyn to southern California in 1957; O’Malley’s purchase of land in the San Fernando Valley for a new Dodgers home field; the Kings’ remarkable run to the 1958 World Series championship; the evolution of Purple & Gold right-hander Don Drysdale into one of the best starting pitchers in MLB history; the Purple & Gold’s heartbreaking collapse in the final weeks of the 1959 MLB season; the Kings’ return to the postseason in 1960 ; L.A. outfielder’s outfielder Mickey Mantle’s highly memorable 1961 home run race with New York Yankees slugger Roger Maris; the Kings’ 1961 ALCS showdown with the Yankees; their 1961 World Series triumph over the Cincinnati Reds; L.A.’s disappointing 1962 season; the Kings’ 1963 ALCS clash with the Yankees; and their 1963 World Series drubbing at the hands of the Dodgers. In this chapter we’ll look back at Orlando Cepeda’s departure from the Kings and the Purple & Gold’s somewhat lackluster 1964 season.

The Kings’ embarrassing World Series sweep loss at the hands of the Dodgers convinced the Hearst family drastic changes would have to be made to their franchise’s player roster if the Purple& Gold were to have any chance of winning the Series in 1964. Alas for fans of Orlando Cepeda, one of those changes would turn out to be a trade that sent the popular infielder to the Baltimore Orioles in exchange for outfielder Russ Snyder. Cepeda’s contract talks with the Kings had hit an impasse in mid-November, and the national trauma of John F. Kennedy’s assassination had delayed the resumption of further negotiations until the second week of December 1963, by which time the Kings front office had reached the conclusion the club would be better off without Cepeda than with him.

The Cepeda-Snyder trade would have been controversial enough all by itself, but the off-handed way it was announced served to add fuel to the fire of Kings’ fans outrage: it was buried in the next-to-last paragraph of a press release about the team’s 1964 spring training schedule. The impression this created in the minds of Purple & Gold fans in general and Cepeda supporters in particular was that he was simply being tossed aside like an empty gum wrapper, and they didn’t like it one bit. For that matter Cepeda himself wasn’t too happy over the swap-- in a three-page letter to Kings general manager Fred Haney, the Baby Bull sharply protested the decision to send him to Baltimore and urged Haney to cancel the trade.

But there was little that could be done to dissuade the Hearsts from their course of action, and on December 18th, 1963 a reluctant Haney stepped up to the podium in the Kings’ press room to introduce Russ Snyder as the team’s newest member. It wasn’t exactly what one would call an enthusiastic welcome for the newcomer: even as Snyder was walking with Haney and the team’s PR director to the press room, the Kings’ customer relations department was being bombarded with a nonstop barrage of angry phone calls and telegrams bitterly denouncing the Cepeda-Snyder trade. At least two hundred season ticket holders canceled their subscriptions in protest of the swap. One particularly disgruntled ex-subscriber went so far as to try and mount a “citizen’s arrest” of Haney before he was stopped outside Hearst Palladium by an
LAPD patrol car.

The Kings’ 1964 spring training schedule opened under a cloud of lingering resentment and contempt over the way the Cepeda-Snyder deal had been handled. The team’s first preseason game, a split-squad match against the Atlanta Schooners, was played with a phalanx of protestors marching outside the Purple & Gold’s spring training facilities out in Arizona. In St. Petersburg, Florida the stands were dotted with anti- Hearst and anti-Haney banners when the Kings took on the Yankees in a weekend doubleheader. And when the Kings traveled east to Vero Beach for the first of their two annual preseason grudge matches against the Dodgers, Walter O’Malley made a point of disparaging the Cepeda-Snyder trade to anyone who would listen.

And the protests would hardly diminish when the regular season began; if anything, they got noticeably louder after the Kings lost seven of their first eight home games and three of their first five road contests. Some fans thought it was punishment from the baseball gods for sending Cepeda away; others argued it was simply proof Russ Snyder wasn’t as good as the L.A. brass had thought he would be. But everybody agreed on one important point: replacing Cepeda’s bat and glove was proving easier said than done. By the time the first week of May came around Los Angeles was already eight and a half games out of first in the AL West standings and in danger of falling even further back in the division. And getting swept by the Red Sox in a three-game set in Boston only further damaged the team’s morale....

...to say nothing of how it exacerbated the disconnect that had started to develop between Harry Hooper and his players. From the time the Kings lost the second game of the 1963 World Series, sportswriters who got the opportunity to cover Hooper’s team up close and personal had noticed that while the Purple & Gold skipper said one thing in the clubhouse his players seemed to be hearing another. And although they were reluctant to knock Hooper in public, privately they expressed a deep frustration that he wasn’t paying as much attention as they felt he should to the issue of how that disconnect was affecting morale in the Kings clubhouse. The closest any of them came to openly dissenting with Hooper in print was in a Chicago Tribune sportswriter’s interview with Dean Chance shortly after a five-run Kings shutout loss to the White Sox on Memorial Day weekend; in that interview, Chance suggested that the fault in miscommunication between Hooper and the men on his roster might not lie entirely with the players.

In early June the already serious morale issues in the Kings clubhouse got even worse after the Purple & Gold were swept in a home doubleheader by the hated San Francisco Prospectors. That alone would have been a serious humiliation, but adding insult to injury was the fact that the winning run for San Francisco in the second game of the doubleheader was driven in by a shortshop who had once been part of the Kings farm system but put on waivers because the organization’s scouts believed he lacked the necessary defensive skills to make it in the majors. The scout whose erroneous judgment led to this release was quickly fired, but that wasn’t enough to appease the outrage of Kings fans who believed Fred Haney had let a potential ALCS or World Series MVP slip through his fingers. The outcry over the prospect’s dismissal from the Kings farm system would last for much of the rest of the 1964 MLB season, as would demands for the ouster of either Haney or Harry Hooper(or both in the cases of some particularly irate Purple & Gold supporters).

The Kings managed a modest surge during a road trip to Detroit in mid-June to face the Tigers, but a loss to the Indians in the first round of a four-game stint in Cleveland put Los Angeles right back on the skids. By the 4th of July the Purple & Gold were stranded in fifth place; in contrast, Orlando Cepeda’s new teammates in Baltimore were enjoying a five-game lead in the AL East standings. And they went into the All-Star break six and a half games ahead of the Yankees, while a hapless Los Angeles floundered eleven games in back of a surprisingly strong Kansas City Longhorns club. And to make matters worse from the perspective of Kings fans only two of their players made the 1964 A.L. All-Star team; true, the players in question happened to be two of the best on the team, Don Drysdale and Felipe Alou, but for those who had
gotten used to seeing as many as eight Kings players in the American League lineup at an All-Star game it was a bit of a disappointment.

Los Angeles started the second half of the 1964 MLB season the same way it had finished the first half: in a slump. The Kings lost two of three games against the Yankees at home and three out of four against the Athletics in Houston, a skid that gave even the most die- hard optimists among Kings fandom cause to feel uneasy. And it didn’t help team morale any when Dean Chance had to be put on the fifteen-day disabled list in mid-July after he hurt the elbow in his pitching arm during a night game against the Longhorns in Kansas City. Some people even thought that the season might have ended right then and there as far as contending for a pennant was concerned.

By the time Chance returned to the lineup, the Kings were mired in fourth place and there were rumors circulating daily Harry Hooper was about to be fired for the second time in his managerial career. A TV soap opera writer who frequently attended Kings games on his days off once quipped to a colleague that he’d like to be a fly on the wall of Hooper’s office, because what went on in there when Hooper and his players got into it after one losing game was more dramatic than even a year of any daytime serial could be.

In the second week of August the Purple & Gold began to show one last flicker of life, sweeping the White Sox in a four-game road set at Comiskey Park and winning two out of three against the Orioles at Hearst Palladium. Mickey Mantle hit his 53rd homer of the season in the finale of the Orioles series, invoking memories of his 1961 race with Roger Maris for the American League home run title; unfortunately for Mantle that particular accomplishment led to him getting sidelined by injury yet again, as he sprained his left ankle while crossing home plate. When Mantle limped back to the Kings clubhouse with the aid of the team’s trainer, he took with him the Purple & Gold’s last hope of finishing higher than fourth in the AL West.

The Kings were officially eliminated from pennant contention on September 8th with a 13-2 pounding by the Yankees in New York. On September 9th, the clock started ticking down the final hours of Harry Hooper’s second stint as Kings manager when Hooper got into a shouting match with Randolph Apperson Hearst over the way the Kings skipper had handled-- or in Randolph’s eyes, mishandled --Mickey Mantle’s chronic injury problems during the ’64 season; three days after this verbal showdown Randolph phoned Fred Haney at his office and told the Kings general manager to start looking for a replacement for Hooper. On the afternoon of September 15th, the Hearst family’s chief press secretary made the formal announcement that Hooper’s contract with the franchise had been terminated and Kings first base coach Earle Brucker would be taking over as interim manager for the rest of the season.

Brucker’s two-week stint as Kings skipper was-- to put it as generously as possible --uneven. After winning his first two games at the helm by a combined score of 13-2, he proceeded to drop the next four, including a highly embarrassing eight run shutout loss against the Prospectors in the Kings’ final San Francisco visit of the regular season. Los Angeles snapped that streak with a 7-5 extra innings home win over the Cleveland Indians, then recorded back-to-back victories against Detroit before losing three straight against the White Sox at Comiskey Park and two out of four to the Washington Senators in a road series being played amidst rumors the Senators were considering a move to either Miami or Indianapolis after the 1965 season. The Purple and Gold wrapped up their ’64 campaign with a 7-2 win over an Orioles team that hadn’t got quite as much production out of Orlando Cepeda as they would have liked and would unload him and outfielder Frank Robinson on
the Cincinnati Reds the following year.

Nobody in their right mind thought Brucker would return as L.A. skipper the following year; indeed, given the way the Kings had ended the ’64 season, some thought it was questionable whether he would be on the team’s payroll in any capacity in 1965. The trick was finding a new manager who could pull the franchise out of its current doldrums and make it a serious pennant contender once again. Accomplishing that particular feat would prove almost difficult a task for the Kings as filling the gap left in their infield by the Cepeda-Snyder trade....