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The Oakland pitching staff is baseball's best. The five starters (Norris, Langford, Keough, Steve McCatty, Brian Kingman) turned in 17 complete games in 21 starts—so many that the team's relievers worked a total of only 11% innings. One forlorn reliever, Bob Owchinko, did not throw a single pitch that counted. The A's team earned-run average was a minuscule 1.89. Nobody scored more than four runs a game against them (their three losses were by scores of 3-2, 3-2 and 3-1) and their opponents' batting average was .182.
Oakland's record would be impressive if it belonged to the 1927 New York Yankees. The astonishing truth is that it is held by virtually the same team that, two seasons ago, was the worst in baseball. But there is one huge difference, a stormy, unpredictable figure with fire in his eyes and victory on his mind, Alfred Manuel ("Billy") Martin.
In 1979 the A's won 54 games and lost 108. They were the tatterdemalion remains of Charlie Finley's once noble dynasty (World Series champions in 1972-74), and cheap enough to fit their owner's pinchpenny budget. The A's were not worth going to watch, and nobody did. The average attendance that year was 3,984. They were not even worth booing; when a player muffed a popup, the fans laughed instead.
It was a sad end to one of baseball's most colorful and innovative franchises. Finley was one of the first proponents of the designated hitter. He tried out orange balls. He brought a mule into the ballpark as a mascot, installed a mechanical rabbit to bring baseballs to the umpire. He gave the game the garish doubleknit uniforms that became commonplace. He harassed his managers by telephoning strategy to the dugout, yet installed a 16-year-old fan as vice president. For all his buffoonery, Finley was as shrewd a judge of talent as any in the sport since Branch Rickey. Roll the names over in the mind: Jackson, Rudi, Bando, Hunter, Fingers, Blue. But he lost them all, and others, because he was unwilling to pay them well. Toward the end, he ordered that his players' half-fare airline coupons be collected as they stepped off the planes from road trips.
Finley tried to sell the team for years.
The A's were all but moved to Denver in 1979 when a threatened lawsuit over Finley's lease with the Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum halted the sale. During that time, he ran the franchise down to the material left in his hardscrabble farm system and went through every manager out of captivity, some of them twice. Then, five months before he was to find a hometown buyer for his team, he brought in Billy Martin, a 51-year-old Bay Area boy, to manage his sinking ball club.