Mustache Gang – Ron Bergman, 1973 ★★★

Heroes and Villains

Baseball was different not that long ago. Consider the 1972 Oakland A’s.

Blue Moon Odom, a solid veteran pitcher for the team, spent his off-season working at a store, where he was shot twice trying to stop a burglary. He recovered and went 15-6 that year.

Meanwhile, another pitcher on that same team, Vida Blue, a winner of 1971’s Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards, patiently listened as A’s owner Charlie Finley told him: “You have as much chance of getting $115,000 from me as I do of jumping out of my office window.” The amazing part: Finley was right.

In 1970, a temperamental slugger named Reggie Jackson would be forced by Finley to publicly apologize after slamming a game-winning home run. Why? For looking over at Finley’s box seat and making a face. But Jackson was still playing for Finley two years later, heroically injuring himself helping his team capture the American League crown.

Ron Bergman’s Mustache Gang is a time capsule in many ways. First, it is a deep-dish profile of the Athletics as Finley built them into the 1972 World Champions. Also, it captures the rush of excitement in that success, a feeling of being inside a speeding locomotive run by an engineer equal parts P. T. Barnum and Caligula, fueled by a nutty gang of misfits who serve up a never-ending barrage of amusing zingers and fisticuffs, at their opponents and sometimes each other.

Charlie Finley, at left, with A's manager Dick Williams. Williams was the first manager to last more than two seasons under Finley, and the last. Image from https://launiusr.wordpress.com/2015/06/19/good-charliebad-charlie-what-made-charlie-finley-tick/.

Bergman explains:

It’s said the true test of a team’s character comes in defeat and that a happy team is a winning team. The A’s always seemed to have this reversed.

Because it was published in May, 1973, Bergman’s book misses out on the A’s winning the 1973 and 1974 world championships, too. That actually makes this book more interesting in retrospect, that it brings you into the clubhouse of baseball’s last dynasty (barring those insufferable Yankees) right when they were coming up.

And what a clubhouse! After getting a four-inning save in the final game of the 1972 American League Championship Series, Blue couldn’t resist making fun of the pitcher he relieved by taunting him with the choking sign. That pitcher, Odom, had to be physically restrained in the midst of a champagne celebration.

When the players weren’t rounding on each other, they were going after the boss, the opposition, and members of the press.

The team was briefly joined by Denny McLain, the formerly great pitcher now struggling to save his career: “You work for the same network as Howard Cosell, don’t you?” he asked a sportscaster. “I tell you, if he ever gets ten feet near me, I’ll punch him in his Jewish nose.”

Manager Dick Williams was a known hard-ass who routinely called out his players to the press: “He’s a switch-hitter,” he said of outfielder Allan Lewis. “He batted .300 last season, .150 left-handed and .150 right-handed.”

The team was notoriously underpaid by Finley, but when a few key players attempted to rebel by growing facial hair, Finley co-opted their gesture by offering a $300 bonus to every Athletic who similarly grew out their face. He declared a Sunday game to be “Mustache Day.”

Of all the A's players who participated in Mustache Day, no one made more of it than relief pitcher Rollie Fingers, who added an indelible signature to his Hall-of-Fame career. Image from https://www.oursportscentral.com/services/photo/photo.php?id=8647.

Much of Bergman’s book focuses on Finley:

Actually, Finley is too large a public figure and too busy to balance out neatly. He confounds his friends and enemies with the same paradoxical style William Randolph Hearst employed on a larger scale. He seems beyond judgment.

How much of an enigma was Finley, really? He loved press attention, more than any money baseball could bring. As the owner of the A’s, baseball’s poorest franchise then as now, money wasn’t even that big a factor. Lucky for him, Finley had made his fortune in insurance. For him, the A’s generated that other revenue source he craved, controversy.

So when he found himself with a young power hitter in Reggie Jackson who in 1969 had flirted with the single-season home-run record, Finley couldn’t resist. According to Bergman, Jackson wanted a salary of $47,000, a grand for each tater he had smacked the prior year. Finley countered with an offer of $40,000, and refused to budge. Jackson held out for weeks the following spring, and never got on track. A promising 1970 season was lost.

“That big asshole,” Jackson fumed afterwards. “If he would’ve signed me, I would’ve been ready. If he’d been fair, paid me the money, if he would’ve cared about this club, he should’ve had me in on time.”

Reggie Jackson (at left) confers in the locker room with A's special coach Joe DiMaggio, circa 1969. "Had Reggie Jackson been a Met or Yankee, he would have been known throughout the country in no time," Bergman writes. "He had the talent, but more importantly the raw power that inspires." Image from https://www.sfgate.com/sports/article/A-s-arrived-in-68-with-Finley-in-full-flight-3202130.php.

Bergman clearly enjoyed Finley, but his playful tone obscures how much of Finley’s act wasn’t funny, that he was often hurtful and demeaning to players and office personnel alike. He fired managers and released players for the flimsiest of reasons, mainly so beat writers like Bergman would keep writing about him. And it worked. While not blind to Finley’s antics, Bergman serves them up as part of the entertainment:

He’d shown them, yes he had. A world’s championship. They’d mocked him and ridiculed him and laughed at him and tried to keep him out of the establishment. Now, who was on top? Charlie O. That’s who. Welcome to the Charlie O. Show.

Still, I read this book quickly because Bergman, who did his time in the press box and the locker room, knew what he was writing about and serves it up well. He has a lean style and an ear for a telling comment. Bergman was a fixture of the team’s press corps for years, both during and after Finley’s reign. When Bergman died in 2015, he was fondly remembered by Oakland fans and fellow members of the press. There are two kinds of sports writers, windy types and the kind who stick to facts. Bergman belonged in the latter camp.

Bergman doesn’t linger that long on the games themselves, but when he does, his insights are often compelling. The book opens on a small moment where back-up catcher Dave Duncan stops Williams on his way to relieve Rollie Fingers in the seventh game, with the A’s clinging to a one-run lead.

“Don’t do it,” Duncan tells the manager. “Rollie is throwing as good as I’ve ever seen. He can get Rose.”

Williams goes back to the dugout. Fingers induces Pete Rose to pop out to end the series.

Gene Tenace in his catching gear. He got one hit in the whole 1972 American League Championship Series, which scored the winning run in the final game. His World Series went better. Image from https://www.pinterest.com/pin/502151427177403770/

The Most Valuable Player of the 1972 World Series was the team’s other catcher, Gene Tenace. His four home runs tied him with Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and Hank Bauer for most in a single series. While Tenace was the only Athletic to hit multiple RBI that series, the victory was a real team achievement.

One of the unsung heroes of the 1972 Series, according to Bergman, was an A’s scout named Al Hollingsworth, who analyzed the Cincinnati Reds and gave Williams an exhaustive report: How to play this batter, how to pitch to that batter: “[Johnny] Bench and Denis Menke were not to be given fast balls or curves to hit. Just hard sliders.”

In the 1972 Series highlight film, A’s ace Catfish Hunter does strike out Menke with a high fastball. Maybe Catfish shook off a sign. The thing is, the A’s found many ways to win.

Mostly, it was pitching. Fingers and Hunter established themselves as future Hall-of-Famers with clutch performances, while Odom and Ken Holtzman did their part to keep Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine in check. Except for Game 6 where the Reds ran riot, every game was a one-run affair: 3-2, 2-1, 0-1, 3-2, 4-5, 1-8, and 3-2.

The memorable moment of the series: A’s left-fielder Joe Rudi grabbing a Menke liner high off the wall of Riverfront Stadium in Game 2. It formed the lasting image of the 1972 Series, and an appropriate one, as the A’s defense was solid throughout.

When Joe Rudi made this catch in the bottom of ninth of Game 2, the A's were clinging to a 2-0 lead. They wound up winning: 2-1. Image from http://sportsthenandnow.com/2017/10/21/vintage-video-george-springer-channels-joe-rudi-with-playoff-catch/

That 1972 World Series is a personal favorite of mine, with its amazing cast of characters and consistently high quality of play. While Bergman doesn’t spend a lot of time on the games, preferring to build up his Finley-vs.-the-world narrative, he does incorporate some piquant details when he gets around to the business on the diamond.

Mostly the story of Mustache Gang is about an unlikely crew of outcasts and malcontents finding common cause in a boss they can all agree on hating. It is part-comedy, part-tragedy. Though it never gels into an account definitive or accessible enough to recommend to non-baseball people, it does include some solid feature writing about episodes like Vida Blue’s unhappy experience on “The Dick Cavett Show” or an ugly moment where several A’s players rounded on a journalist for asking an awkward question. When I finished reading it, it was easy recalling how intimidating a ball club those guys were back in the day, even when they weren’t playing against my own favorite team in the World Series.

Winning teams come and go, but beyond that, the Athletics of the early 1970s were special. It makes me both misty and a bit chuffed knowing their like will never be seen again.