A's are making you remember a season to forget

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August 18, 3:48 PM

by David Bush, S.F. Baseball Examiner

 

 

Comparisons to the 1979 season are showing up in the A’s media notes, and trust me, nobody wants to go there.

 I saw a lot of games that season, and trust me it was not a whole lot of fun for anybody. Owner Charlie Finley had put together a team that won three straight World Series and five division titles in the early 1970s. Then through a seismic change in baseball rules (free agency) and his own penury, the team was dismantled and gradually descended to the depths.

  By ’79 things were at a nadir and luckless manager Jim Marshall in his one year on the job had an assortment of mediocre players on the downside of what careers they had, Larry Murray, Joe Wallis, Mike Edwards, Jim Essian, Miguel Dilone, and some youngsters not quite ready for stardom. The result was 108 losses and whole lot of indifference on the part of the Bay Area.

   If anybody else tells you they saw that team play, don’t believe them. Nobody was in the Coliseum stands that season. The season attendance was 306,763. The current Giants draw that many fans in a single homestand. One night that year the paid crowd, to use the term loosely, was 653. The players and staff practically outnumbered the spectators.

   In either ’78 or ’79, I remember a night when a forgettable player named Larry Wolfe was playing for the opposition. When the name Wolfe was announced over the P.A. one fan let go with a wolf yell that echoed through the empty ballpark. It didn’t take long for the few fans to pick up on it and every time Wolfe’s name came out of the speakers the few hundred fans let go with “OWWWUU”” in unison. Soon the players had their hands cupped around their mouths and were joining in. That’s the sort of thing you do to pass the time in an empty stadium.

   In the intervening years the A’s have done their best to forget those dark days, but seeing this team calls them to mind.

  They have gone a month without winning consecutive games for the third time in Oakland history. One of the other two was in June 23-July 27, 1979.

   The A’s have lost ten straight series for the first time since 1979. They have scored just 488 runs in 23 games. At that rate they will score 643 for the season, the fewest in a non strike season since, all together now, 1979.

    And things are going from bad to worse. Remember they went into spring training having dumped a couple of stars, Dan Haren and Nick Swisher for a bunch of prospects with the implied promise that this year might be a difficult but bear with us, things will improve. Then the team exceeded expectations in the first two months and hopes were raised. False hope as it turned out. Now the team is finding its level and it ain’t pretty, as it has lost 25 of its last 30.

    And while the pitching has been acceptable, the hitting has been atrocious. Pick a number, any number, and you get a wretched offense, but one stat in particular stands out. A’s hitters have struck out 948 times this year, by far the most in the American League. In fact, only three teams in the National League, where the pitchers bat, have more Ks than the A’s. At this rate they will strike out 1,249 times, threatening the AL record of 1,268 set by the 1996 Tigers, that group featuring Kimber Bartee, Mark Lewis and Melvin Nieves.

       All should not be doom and gloom however. As mentioned before, the A’s have landed quite a bit of potential in those deals, and in the middle of that disastrous 1979 season, a young outfielder was called up from the minor leagues to make his major league debut.

  Rickey Henderson was the sign that better days were on the way.

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