Late last year, major league baseball owners approved a planned move of the Oakland A’s to Las Vegas. News around whether this is certain to happen, and where the A’s will play between 2025 and 2027 before a major league baseball stadium is built in Las Vegas, seemed to change almost daily before it was determined they’d play in Sacramento through 2027, and possibly beyond, depending on whether a stadium (and indeed move to) Las Vegas is completed. This doesn’t necessarily mean Oakland won’t have a major league baseball team after this year, or 2027. One of the numerous options that at least has been posed is for MLB to make sure one of the two next expansion teams goes to Oakland.

That might seem like an odd roundabout way to keep big league baseball in Oakland, but there are precedents where a city lost a team and gained one back pretty quickly. These are:

Famously, the New York area lost both the Brooklyn Dodgers and the New York Giants to Los Angeles and San Francisco respectively in 1958. The National League was without a New York team for just four years, with the Mets becoming an expansion team in 1962. Politics are involved in the Oakland-Las Vegas move, and they were involved in the inauguration of the New York Mets too. It was pretty complex, but basically Branch Rickey, perhaps the most famous baseball executive of all time (including with the Brooklyn Dodgers in the 1940s and 1950s), was spearheading the formation of a third major league, which would have had a team in New York. The major leagues responded by expanding by four teams in the early 1960s (two in the NL, two in the AL), including the New York Mets for the NL. That ended the Continental League’s plans to form a league of its own.

As part of this early-’60s expansion, the Washington Senators replaced — the Washington Senators. The Senators that had been in the American League since it was formed moved to Minnesota and became the Twins, and an entirely different franchise, also named the Senators, became one of the two AL expansion teams in 1961. So Washington didn’t miss a year of major league baseball, though the Twins quickly became good, and the new Senators had just one winning year (in 1969). The “just one” is a hint that this isn’t the greatest example to hearten Oakland baseball fans, since the expansion Senators lasted just eleven years before moving to Texas and becoming the Rangers in 1972. Washington, DC was then without baseball for more than thirty years before the Montreal Expos moved there to become the Nationals.

There’s another precedent tied closely to the history of the Oakland A’s. The franchise started in Philadelphia, moving to Kansas City in 1955. Lasting thirteen years, the Kansas City A’s had one of the least successful stints in major league history, never having a winning season, and not developing top stars, although there were some players who were good for a few years, like Dick Howser. When they started to promote major talents like Bert Campaneris, Reggie Jackson, Catfish Hunter, and Sal Bando to the majors, the franchise would turn around — but not get above .500 until moving to Oakland in 1968, where they had a winning season, and were soon perennial contenders, winning three straight World Series in 1972-74.

But Kansas City was only without a team for a year. The Royals became an expansion team in 1969, and they’re still there. They were almost as bad as the A’s last year, and are having issues of their own in establishing a new stadium. But there hasn’t been talking of them moving, and they recently made a major commitment to their future by signing young star Bobby Witt to a huge long-term contract, the kind of thing that’s not a remote possibility with the current A’s ownership. That quickly paid off when the Royals made a remarkable turnaround and made the playoffs, just a year after losing 106 games.

The quick installment of the Royals also had a political dimension. A Missouri senator threatened to introduce legislation threatening baseball’s antitrust exemption. This might have hastened baseball’s expansion to 24 teams in 1969, though even after expansion was approved in late 1967, the initial idea was not to do so until 1971. 

Arguably the least successful stint a team had in a city in major league history was in 1969, when the Pilots played in Seattle for just one year. However, they then filled a gap in another city that had lost a major league team, Milwaukee, where the Boston Braves had relocated in 1953. The Braves moved to Atlanta in 1966, although they ‘d been very heavily supported by Milwaukee fans in the 1950s, when the Braves won the World Series in 1957. Milwaukee was only without a team for four years before the Seattle Pilots became the Milwaukee Brewers in 1970.

The Pilots finished last in the division their only year in Seattle, playing in a small and substandard stadium and not drawing well attendance-wise. This iteration of the team would have been largely forgotten if not, of course, for Jim Bouton being on the Pilots for most of 1969, as documented in one of the best and best-selling baseball books of all time, Ball Four. Seattle wasn’t entirely pleased with losing a team so quickly, however, and in 1977, the Mariners moved in when the American League added two teams. That’s a pretty long gap between teams—seven years—but it wasn’t eternal, and the Mariners are still there.

Since the expansion Senators moved to Texas, there’s been only one franchise move (not counting the current A’s relocation to Sacramento), when the Montreal Expos moved to Washington in 2005 to become the Nationals. Montreal, however, hasn’t gotten a replacement team, in part because baseball itself hasn’t expanded in about a quarter century. Montreal’s usually near the top of the list when future expansion cities are speculated, and also when there are rumors an existing team will relocate, such as ones surrounding Tampa Bay in recent years. That’s no guarantee that Montreal will get a major league team again.

While these precedents might slightly cheer Oakland baseball fans hoping there won’t be any years without major league baseball in the city, or very few years before there’s a replacement expansion team, there also instances when a team wasn’t replaced besides Montreal. Unfortunately, these were all within regions that, like the A’s, were one of multiple teams within a metropolitan area. They’ve all been referred to in passing in this post:

New York had three teams through 1957, if you’re counting Brooklyn as part of New York, which basically everyone does. They got one team back with the Mets, but never a third. There’s often speculation New York could support three major league baseball teams, with the third one being not in the Bronx (where the Yankees are) or Queens (where the Mets are), but in Brooklyn, or maybe in northern New Jersey, a la the Brooklyn Nets in the NBA. 

Boston had two teams through 1952, when the Braves moved to Milwaukee. It’s not a huge city, ranking about 25th in the US in size, and it could be questioned whether it could have ably supported two teams, certainly in the mid-20th century. Given the success of the Red Sox, Celtics, and Patriots in developing a big fan base that encompasses all of New England, it could be argued that the region could actually support two major league teams now. But that never seems to be discussed as an expansion option.

And getting back to the A’s history, Philadelphia had two teams before 1955. It’s a bigger city than Boston, about sixth in the country. Its metropolitan area is substantially bigger than the San Francisco Bay Area. It’s unimaginable an expansion team would land there, in part because of objections from the Phillies (as the Red Sox might object to another New England team), but also in part since Philadelphia’s already pretty close to another franchise, Baltimore, and not terribly far from Washington and New York.

There’s always been some uncertainty about whether both the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s can comfortably draw crowds on a longterm basis when both are situation in the San Francisco Bay Area, about a dozen miles from each other. The Giants’ future has never been in doubt since a new stadium opened around the dawn of the 21st century, though they had some shaky times that almost saw them move to Toronto in the mid-1970s, and then Tampa-St. Petersburg early 1990s. The A’s have had some hard times too, especially when Charlie Finley sold off their stars in the mid-to-late 1970s and their games were even briefly broadcast by a college station. As hard as it might be to believe after the A’s struggled to draw more than a few thousand (or sometimes even that) to their games the last couple years, they’ve also had some years where they’d drawn very heavily—almost three million in 1990, and two million as recently as ten years ago. A healthy Oakland franchise, and admittedly a heavily renovated or new stadium, would draw well now.

Will that happen, whether Oakland gets an expansion team or somehow stays put? There are too many variables to predict—a viable ownership group and construction of a good new stadium being among the most important— and it could take five years or more to fully play out. Another complication is that San Jose and Sacramento would very much like to have major league teams. Both cities are fairly close to Oakland, but not so much that fan bases would substitute one for another. Getting a stadium in place is especially key — the Giants, Dodgers, Angels, Astros, and Mets, to name a few examples, only played in small and/or outdated parks for a few years after they moved or began as expansion teams, and might not have been able to stay in their areas permanently had new and better ones not been built specifically for them.

With all the precedents I’ve cited, a final thing to note is that I don’t really recall any precedent for the Oakland A’s’ current situation. There will be three or possibly even more (if the Las Vegas stadium isn’t finished) years as a sort of lame duck team, with little chance present ownership will invest heavily in payroll, afford or attract free agents, or sign young talent like surprising new slugger Lawrence Butler to longterm deals. There will be three or possibly more years where they play only temporarily in Sacramento. It’s not good for major league baseball, whether you live here in the Bay Area or not, and no matter how you feel about the Oakland A’s and their long history.

In my Ball Four Outtakes post a few months ago, I discussed the unedited full transcripts of the audio tapes Jim Bouton recorded for the basis of his classic book about his experiences in the 1969 season. These are available at the Library of Congress, though you have to make arrangements to view them in person at the library in Washington, DC. I also detailed some examples of interesting material that didn’t make the book, even if Bouton and his collaborator/editor Leonard Shecter almost always picked the best stories and observations for the final manuscript published in 1970.

There are many other items that didn’t make the book, some trivial or of not nearly as much value as what made the cut. Some of the omissions, however, were noteworthy, even if they weren’t on the level of what you read in Ball Four. Here are a few other examples, for what might be called Ball Four outtakes.

**One of the most colorfully controversial stories of the era in major league baseball took place the year after Ball Four, when Dock Ellis pitched a no-hitter, or so he at least sometimes claimed, on LSD. Acid isn’t mentioned in Ball Four, but it turns out shortly before 1969, Bouton and fellow Yankee pitcher Fritz Peterson went to Haight-Ashbury and were offered LSD by a youngster calling himself the Acid Man. Bouton demurred, in part because he thought he might be used in relief (presumably the Yankees were playing in Oakland). Peterson pointed out Jim couldn’t pitch any worse on LSD, considering how he’d been pitching of late.

**There’s an interesting observation on pitcher abuse, before that term was used, that’s both perceptive yet at the same time illustrates how faulty memories could be even four years after the fact — and how difficult it was to check on their accuracy in the days long before baseballreference.com. Bouton’s career went sharply downhill starting in 1965, when he went 4-15 with a 4.82 ERA after winning 21 games in 1963 and 18 in 1964 (and pitching very well in three World Series starts, winning two of them in 1964). He blames the sore arm he developed in 1965 in part on pitching eleven innings on a cold-weather opening day versus future Hall of Famer Jim Kaat, whose Minnesota Twins went on to win the pennant that year.

These days no pitcher goes eleven innings, let alone on a cold opening day after, according to Bouton, going no more than six innings in spring training. As he correctly points out, it’s poor management to risk someone’s long-term career by using a pitcher that way in cold conditions so early in the season.

But when you go to baseballreference.com to check the boxscore, it didn’t happen that way. Bouton went just five innings, not pitching that well, giving up four earned runs. The game did go eleven innings, the Yankees ultimately losing. Maybe Bouton felt sore during or after the game, and retrospectively blamed this on pitching too long when remembering how long the contest lasted. Whatever the case, he never would pitch too well in the majors again, though his status as opening day starter indicates the Yankees were expecting him to.

**In about the only story in the book that reflects badly on a member of the Astros, Bouton writes about a fight breaking out on the team bus after Jimmy Ray makes fun of Wade Blasingame. Several members of the Astros got up to block a coach’s view of what was going on, so the incident didn’t blow up any more than they thought necessary. In the transcript (but not the book), those members are named: future Hall of Famer Joe Morgan, star outfielder Jimmy Wynn, and Curt Blefary. Jim especially praises pitcher Denny Lemaster for telling the coach (also named, Buddy Hancken) to get back to the front of the bus where he belonged. Bouton also hails Lemaster, the Astros’ player representative, for not being shy of standing up to coaches and the team’s general manager.

**In a take on baseball politics that didn’t make it into the book, Bouton notes that player representatives seem to get traded more often than others, in the days when a strong baseball union was just getting off the ground under Marvin Miller. This is specifically sparked by relief pitcher Jack Aker, the Pilots’ player rep, getting traded early in 1969. Aker, who generally had a good career (including leading the American League with 32 saves in 1966), was off to a poor start with Seattle, with a 7.56 ERA after fifteen games, which could be seen as reasonable justification. He was traded to the Yankees for Fred Talbot, who had a mediocre career (and barely pitched in the majors after 1969), and to Bouton the trade didn’t make sense. Aker righted himself with the Yankees, putting up a 2.06 ERA the rest of the year, and had five more good-to-average years.

**Mike Marshall would become one of baseball’s most successful relief pitchers for much of the 1970s, albeit with some down years. In 1974, he won 15 games and saved 22, setting a still-standing record for pitchers of appearing in 106 games. In Seattle he was used as a starter and, after some early success, did poorly, getting sent down to the minors in July. Bouton points out that in the minors he quickly pitched better, in part because Marshall was able to set his own pitching program instead of fitting into what Seattle wanted. He also points out that after seeing Jack Aker pitch much better with the Yankees, Pilots manager Joe Schultz might be starting to understand that it was better to leave pitchers alone with their methods instead of trying to impose these on them. Schultz wouldn’t have much of a chance to try that out, getting fired after the season, the only one in which he’d manage in the big leagues.

**There aren’t many comments in the book about then-Washington Senators manager Ted Williams and then-Minnesota Twins manager Billy Martin, but the ones that were used weren’t negative. In the transcripts, Bouton does cite a newspaper article — probably hard to track down now, especially as he doesn’t name the publication — where Martin criticizes Williams for being the kind of player who wouldn’t get his uniform dirty or slide to break up a play. Jim admires Martin for having the guts to say this, considering how canonized Williams, one of the greatest hitters of all time, already was by 1969. Acknowledging he never saw Williams play, Bouton does remember Ted being a player who didn’t give his all on defense or being that well-rounded in his effort.

**Bouton’s very complimentary about Tommy Davis in the book. Briefly a superstar in the early 1960s with the Dodgers, when he one two batting championships, Davis never recaptured his peak performance after breaking his ankle in 1965. But Jim praises Tommy for being one of the Pilots’ team leaders. Of greater interest, he notes that on most other clubs, there were factions in which team leaders gathered around black players or white players, without overlap.

**In a small fun story about how the game is played, Bouton remembers how umpires would speed up games to make sure they finished quickly, whether because of rain or other reasons. Specifically, he relates a story from Tommy Davis of how on the Dodgers, Junior Gilliam was told by an umpire who had an appointment to get to with one out in the ninth inning that if there was a ground ball, Gilliam could get the first out and the umpire would get the second to complete the double play. Gilliam got a ground ball, and the umpire called the runner out at first base before the ball got there.

**In Ball Four, Bouton is very critical of some elements of the Yankees, whether specific players, the culture of the club, the executives he dealt with, or manager Ralph Houk. Yet he wanted very much to be able to play for them again, if in large part because his home and family were in New York and he wanted to be based there. Extraordinarily, he even said he’d be willing to go to New York’s minor league system to work on his knuckleball if he could get back in the organization. He noted he’d be willing to play for the Mets too, though 1969 being the Miracle Mets year of their surprise World Series championship, there wouldn’t have been a place for him on that club. Bouton never did play for the Yankees again, and in fact he wasn’t invited back for a Yankees old-timers day until 1998, with the help of a New York Times article from Jim’s son Michael urging the Yankees to lay aside grudges stemming from his father’s remarks in Ball Four.

Shohei Ohtani. What can you say about the 2021 American League MVP that hasn’t been said already? Which doesn’t stop broadcasters and pundits from repeating a variation of that sentence ad infinitum. Even some people who aren’t baseball fans might know that in 2021, he almost became the first guy to have both ten wins and ten home runs in a season since Babe Ruth did it a little more than a hundred years ago, in 1918. Which would have made him the only guy besides Ruth to have done that. Actually Ohtani had nine wins and forty-six home runs, though unlike Ruth, he seldom played in the field when he wasn’t pitching.

(Important note: Almost one year after this post was written, Ohtani did become the first player since Ruth to win ten games and hit ten homers in a season when he won his tenth game of 2022 on August 9. He also hit his 25th homer of the year in that game. Also note that two players from the Negro Leagues, Bullet Rogan of the 1922 Kansas City Monarchs and Ed Rile of the 1927 Detroit Stars, also accomplished this feat.)

It’s not often been mentioned, however, that there are a couple of other guys who’ve both won ten games in a season and hit ten home runs in a season, though not in the same year. One of them’s the only player besides Ruth to both win twenty games and hit ten home runs in separate years. Another’s the only guy besides Ruth to both win ten games and hit twenty home runs in separate years. There are a few other guys who came close to notching double figures in both wins and home runs, one in the same year. 

One of those other men pulled off the double-double, if you want to call it that, fairly recently. As a rookie, Rick Ankiel showed great promise in 2000 for the Cardinals, going 11-7 in thirty starts with a 3.50 ERA and striking out 194 batters in 175 innings.  Rather infamously, he melted down in the 2000 playoffs, with stats that still astound – four innings pitched in three games and two starts, a 15.75 ERA, eleven walks, and nine wild pitches.

These were the early days of being able to follow a game online if you couldn’t watch it or hear it on the radio, and I still remember wondering if the site relaying the play-by-play was having a meltdown by displaying wild pitch after wild pitch. No, it really happened. And Ankiel never regained adequate control, though he pitched a few more games in the majors. His 2001 minor league Triple A stats are particularly gruesome—4.1 innings, seventeen walks, and twelve wild pitches—and though some low-minor stints went much better, in a few years he decided to concentrate on trying to make it back to the bigs as an outfielder.

That went pretty well, and in 2008 he hit 25 homers as a Cardinal. He didn’t sustain that success, in part due to injuries, and finished with 76 career home runs—the only man besides Ohtani and Ruth to win more than ten games and hit more than 70 homers, as Wikipedia will tell you. Would he have been a better hitter, or star, had he focused on hitting and fielding from the beginning? We won’t know, though his overall unspectacular record suggests he wouldn’t have been an all-star.

The other man to have double-digit seasons in both the home run and win column is much more obscure. As a rookie, Reb Russell went 22-16 for the White Sox in 316 innings, with a 1.90 ERA. Norms were much different for pitchers in the dead ball era, of course, but that’s still an impressive start. Russell also won 18 games for the Sox when they won the World Series in 1917, and started one of the series games, but was pulled after failing to retire a batter. He wasn’t given much of a shot, getting relieved after just three batters – a walk, single, and double. (Which is, by the way, another rabbit hole baseball trivia question: how many starters were pulled from World Series games without recording an out? See the end of this post for some follow-up.)

Back to Russell: he’s one of the most obscure members of the Black Sox, pitching to just two batters in one June game (retiring neither) in 1919. He’d been a good if unspectacular hitter for a pitcher, with ten triples in White Sox uniform. Like Ankiel, he also converted to outfield and worked his way back to the majors by hitting well in the minors. When he played for the Pirates in the final months of 1922, he played better than well. 

Get a load of this stat line: 60 games, 12 home runs, a .368 batting average, a .668 slugging average, and 75 RBI. Over 150 games, that works out to 187 RBI, which threatens Hack Wilson’s all-time record of 191. Sure, that’s inflated by the conditions of the early 1920s, a boom time for hitting, but even relative to those, that’s stunning. Could he have been a bigger star if he’d been an outfielder all along?

Russell didn’t even get much more of a chance in the majors. He was 33, and while he did get a fair amount of playing time in 1923, his stats fell back to ordinary status, though he did hit nine home runs. Had he hit one more, he would have joined Ruth and Ankiel as the only players to have both ten-win and ten-homer seasons more than once. He didn’t play in the big leagues again, defensive limitations also being a factor, though he hit well in the minors the rest of the 1920s.

Who’s the closest to pulling off a double-double without quite managing it? Fairly famously, Wes Farrell holds the record for home runs in a season by a pitcher—nine, in 1931 with Cleveland. He also holds the record for home runs in games in which the player is a pitcher—37 (he had 38 lifetime, but one was as a pinch-hitter). He was a pretty good pitcher too, with 193 lifetime wins, and six seasons where he won twenty or more. One of them was 1931, when he won 22 games besides bashing those nine homers.

Ferrell seemed headed for a Hall of Fame career, but developed arm trouble as he entered his thirties. I once read it suggested that Ferrell would have been a Hall of Famer had he been an outfielder, and he did try to play outfield for about a dozen games in 1933 while maintaining his career as a pitcher, though that was soon abandoned. I’m not so sure about that.

While he was undoubtedly the best-hitting pitcher in history who primarily played games as a pitcher, it’s a little curious he—unlike Ankiel, Russell, and a couple others we’ll soon get to—didn’t make it back to the majors as a position player after his pitching career ended. He did play as an outfielder for a few years in the low minors in the 1940s before and after the war, putting up some awesome numbers—a .425 BA with 24 homers and .766 SA in class D in 1948, for instance, at the age of forty. Maybe he was too committed to pitching to make a relatively quick conversion after his arm troubles, or maybe considered too old to advance once he’d started tearing up the low minors as a hitter.

There are a couple other guys who didn’t miss the double-double by much—one pretty well known, one not so well known. Smoky Joe Wood, like Ferrell, seemed on track for a Hall of Fame career after going 34-5 with a 1.91 ERA with the Red Sox when they won the World Series in 1912, aged just 22. He hurt his arm the next year and, while effective with a much reduced workload the next three years, barely pitched after 1915. 

But he was a good-hitting pitcher—.290 in the year he won 34 games, with 13 doubles. In 1918 he came back to the minors with Cleveland as an outfielder and, if not exactly a star, did okay, hitting .366 as a part-timer in 1921. The next year, as a regular, he hit .297 with eight homers—not star material by early-‘20s standards, but alright. He probably had some baseball left in him and maybe could have had a shot at hitting ten home runs in a year. But as he told it in The Glory of Their Times, “Could have played there longer, too, but I was satisfied. I figured I’ve proved something to myself. So in 1923 when Yale offered me a position as baseball coach at the same salary as I was getting from Cleveland, I took it. Coached there at Yale for twenty years.”

Also getting a chapter in The Glory of Their Times was the far less famous Rube Bressler. As a nineteen-year-old rookie pitcher with the 1914 Philadelphia Athletics, he was outstanding—10-4 with a 1.77 ERA, though he didn’t get to pitch in the World Series, which they lost to the Braves. A’s manager Connie Mack notoriously sold off most of his star players after the Series loss, and in 1915 the team fell to last, Bressler contributing with a 4-17 record and 5.20 ERA. It looked like he was on his way back by going 8-5 with the Reds a couple years later, but he didn’t pitch much after that. He got into some games with the 1919 Reds, but didn’t pitch in the World Series, which they won over the Black Sox.

Yet by then he was playing more in the outfield than the pitcher’s mound. By 1921 he was just a position player (sometimes at first base), and nearly a regular, hitting .307 in just over a hundred games. While he wasn’t a star as a semi-regular for the Reds during much of the 1920s, he was okay, and had a lifetime .301 average with 1170 hits. In 1924-1926 he posted averages of .347, .348, and .357, helped by conditions that inflated batting averages to historic proportions throughout the majors. He never had much home run power, but he did have nine in 1929, just missing double figures.

An honorable mention should be given here to Don Newcombe, one of the first outstanding African-American major league pitchers. Besides winning 153 games (mostly for the Dodgers, including three years when he won twenty or more), he was one of the best-hitting pitchers of his or any era. In 1955, besides going 20-5, he hit .359 with seven homers, nine doubles, a triple, and 23 RBI in 117 at-bats. Wrote Bill James in The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, “That was, with the exception of one Wes Ferrell season and Babe Ruth, the best-hitting season by a pitcher in the twentieth century.”

After wrapping up his big league career at the beginning of the 1960s, Newcombe played one season in Japan. However, he only pitched one game, playing outfield or first base the rest of the time. In about a half season (81 games), he held his own, hitting 12 home runs to go with a .473 slugging percentage. If you consider the Japan Central League a major league, that means he hit double figures in wins and homers in two different seasons – in fact, that he both won twenty games in a year and hit ten homers in a different one. In fact, that would make him the only player to win 25 in a year (he won 27 in 1956) and ten in a different year. Even Babe Ruth didn’t do that.

(Back to a question posed earlier: how many starters besides Reb Russell were pulled from World Series games without recording an out? There were four. Harry Taylor of the Brooklyn Dodgers faced four batters (two singles, a walk, and a fielder’s choice) without getting an out in the fourth game of the 1947 series. That game’s famous, for an entirely different reason. It’s the one where Yankee pitcher Bill Bevens had a no-hitter with two outs in the ninth, only to lose the no-hitter and the game on Tommy Henrich’s two-run double. And neither Taylor nor Russell, by the way, ever pitched in another World Series game, thus never retiring a batter at all in World Series competition.

Another World Series starter not to retire a batter was Hank Borowy, who faced three batters in the final game of the 1945 World Series, giving up singles to each of them. There were extenuating circumstances. After starting games one and five for the Cubs against the Tigers, he pitched the last four innings of a twelve-inning game in relief the day after game five to get the win. Then, just two days after game six, he started game seven, and didn’t have much left on such short rest. He’s one of the few pitchers to get four decisions in a World Series, winning two and losing two. Another, Red Faber, was a teammate of Reb Russell in the 1917 World Series, when he went 3-1, winning the game that Russell started.

And there’s another 1917 game in which a starting pitcher didn’t retire a batter that’s fairly famous, and involves another guy in this survey. On June 23, 1917, Babe Ruth walked the first batter against the Senators, and was thrown out of the game for arguing with the umpire. He was relieved by Ernie Shore, who, after the runner who’d walked was thrown out stealing, retired the next 26 batters in a row. For many years this was considered a perfect game, though now it isn’t officially classified as one.)

Two other less colorful World Series games in which the starter didn’t record an out were Charlie Root in 1935 and Bob Welch in 1981. Charlie Root, more famous as the pitcher who gave up Babe Ruth’s legendary called-shot homer in the 1932 series, gave up four hits and four runs as the starter against the Tigers in game 2 in 1935. Root was a decent pitcher who won 201 regular season games, but was bad in the World Series, with a lifetime record of 0-3 and a 6.75 ERA in four series for the Cubs (all of which they lost) between 1929 and 1938. He was also the starting pitcher in the famous game 4 of the 1929 World Series when the Cubs lost an 8-0 lead to the A’s (and eventually the game, 10-8) when they gave up ten runs in the seventh inning, though Root wasn’t on the mound long enough that inning to get charged with the loss. Welch gave up three hits, a walk, and two runs in game 4 of the 1981 series against the Yankees, though his Dodgers actually won that game 8-7, though they lost the series.

Baseball season’s starting, and with it the unavoidable hopeful predictions that so-and-so is poised to have a “breakout” year. Much of this is hype from managers, owners, broadcasters, and sometimes the players themselves. Every year sees some “career” years that are unexpected, but you can’t count on too many of them, no matter which team you’re following. Here on the San Francisco Giants, for instance, it doesn’t seem impossible that Brandon Belt would somehow put it all together one year and hit .330 with 35 homers and 120 walks. Even if he did, however, it’s likely that would be his one “peak” year, and he’d revert to his usual streaky slightly-above-average performance at the plate.

Some years do see more out-of-context performances than others. I don’t know if there’s any way to measure such things, but for some reason, 1970 seemed to see more of them than most other seasons, and perhaps any other season. You could field a killer All-Star caliber team with the guys who, for just that year, exceeded their career norms by implausibly high margins.

Perhaps the most improbable of them, given his age (33) and how he’d never before approached stardom in his nearly decade-long career, was Cubs outfielder Jim Hickman. His career high in homers had been 21, his highest batting average .257. He’d even been demoted to the minors for a while a couple of years previously, at the age of 31. Suddenly he was a Triple Crown threat, hitting .315 with 32 home runs, 115 RBI, and 93 walks. He even delivered the game-winning hit in the bottom of the twelfth inning of the All-Star game—the famous one in which Pete Rose scored the winning run by crashing into (and injuring) catcher Ray Fosse. Hickman had a couple of fair years for the Cubs over the next two seasons, but never approached those numbers again.

On base between Hickman and Rose as that All-Star finish played out was Billy Grabarkewitz, who that year hit .289 with 17 HR, 84 RBI, 95 walks, and 19 stolen bases for the Dodgers—the only season, unbelievably, in which he had more than 200 at-bats. Grabarkewitz had hit a mere .092—that’s not a misprint—in 65 at-bats the previous year, in his first big-league trial. Injuries would limit his playing time to 90 at-bats in 1971; he his a woeful .167 with more action (144 at-bats) in 1972; and he never got regular playing time again. What happened?

“What was amazing was the day after the All-Star game, which was a day off, [Dodgers general manager] Al Campanis calls me into his office and says, ‘You’re doing real good, but you know you need to cut down on your strikeouts,’” Grabarkewitz told Michael Fedo in the book One Shining Season. “So he got [coach] Dixie Walker to go out and work with me. I’m hitting .376 and Dixie wants to change my whole hitting style again. And he says, ‘First of all, you need to quit swinging for home runs.’ He switched me to a heavier bat again, and it’s like I didn’t have a choice. I’m being told to do this. So in the month of August, I don’t think I struck out six times. And I think I hit .101…[in September] I went to [the lighter] bat, and the last month I did real good again—hit home runs, struck out a lot, but got base hits.”

For the record, Grabarkewitz was actually batting .341 at the All-Star break; he’d have two walks and a two-run homer, his tenth, the first day after the break. But he was indeed down to .289 (and had been dropped from leadoff to the eighth spot in the order) by the end of August, in which he batted .173 (not .101, but bad enough). (He also struck out 26 times in August, not six.)

What really killed his career, however, might have been (again according to his memory in One Shining Season) being told to work on double plays for a long time the second or third day of spring training the following year. That hurt his shoulder badly enough to keep him out of the lineup most of 1971, and he never got a foothold in the big leagues again, with the Dodgers or several other team he’d play for over the next few years.

Or, there might have been a more prosaic explanation. I wish I could find it for reference, but I remember Phillies broadcaster (and ex-center fielder) Richie Ashburn writing in a newspaper column that Grabarkewitz had come looking for him after a game because of a negative comment from Ashburn. Ashburn wrote something along the lines of that if Grabarkewitz had tried to hit him, if Ashburn had curved, Billy would have missed.

Also on the Dodgers that year, in the midst of a much longer career, was Wes Parker, regular first baseman for the team since the mid-1960s, including on the pennant-winning squads of 1965 and 1966. Although acknowledged as an excellent fielder, Parker had never seemed to live up to his potential at the plate. His best season had been 1969, when he hit .278 with 13 homers (though just one came after July, around the time he had an emergency appendectomy). In 1970, however, he had his only superb year, hitting .319 with 111 RBIs, and leading the league with 47 doubles.

His explanation for why he didn’t approach those figures again will no doubt vex Dodgers fans unaware of Parker’s attitude at the time. “After doing that for one season, I decided it wasn’t worth it,” he revealed in One Shining Season. “It was a conscious decision on my part that the sacrifices and effort, the amount of energy that had to go into it, was more than I thought it warranted. 1970 was for one season only. I’m glad I did that once, but I wanted to enjoy all aspects of my career, part of which was dating again, part of which was enjoying people. I didn’t want to live like a hermit again”—which he’d done in 1970, so he could focus almost exclusively on baseball—”and I really believe that’s what it would have taken for me to have another year like 1970.”

There could have been other grounds for criticizing Parker’s approach to the game. Again I wish I could find the newspaper story, but I remember in 1976, Phillies manager Danny Ozark (who’d been a coach with the Dodgers in 1970) was getting on outfielder Jay Johnstone for not hustling on extra-base hits that could have been triples, stopping at second to pad his doubles total. (Johnstone hit 38 doubles that year, finishing second in the National League.) Parker, Ozark remembered, had led the league in doubles back in 1970 by doing the same thing.

Moving across the diamond, at third base Tommy Harper had a superstar year for the Milwaukee Brewers, then playing their first year under that name after having started life as the Seattle Pilots in 1969. Harper always had speed—he’d stolen 73 bases the previous year—and he’d flashed some power by hitting 18 homers for the Reds in 1965, though he’d never hit more than ten in any other season. Suddenly he hit 31 homers to go with 38 stolen bases, a .296 average, 35 doubles, and 104 runs. He’d never come too close to that stat line again, and never hit more than 17 homers in his remaining years, though he did lead the American league with 54 stolen bases in 1973.

At shortstop, Bert Campaneris had the best career of any player to have a fluke season in 1970. He made the All-Star team six times; led the American league in stolen bases six times; and was the shortstop on the A’s team that won three straight World Series in 1972-74. He was not, however, a power hitter, with 79 home runs in a 19-year career. Except, that is, in 1970, when he somehow clubbed 22 roundtrippers (and 28 doubles). In no other year did Campaneris manage more than eight homers. In 1969, he hit two; in 1971, five.

There’s no vintage anecdote explaining what happened, but it’s interesting to note that Campaneris turned on the power again for a few weeks a few years later, when it mattered most. In 1973, he hit just four home runs (and slugged just .318) in the regular season. Yet in the postseason, he hit three—two in the American League playoffs, and one in the World Series.

In San Diego, Cito Gaston, like Jim Hickman, had a near Triple Crown-worthy season — .318 average, 29 homers, 93 RBI. It was all the more shocking coming after a rookie year in which he’d hit .230 with two homers, slugging .309. Unlike Hickman, Gaston was relatively young (26), and fans of the second-year-expansion Padres entertained reasonable hopes they had their first superstar. Yet the following year, his average dipped to .228, with 17 homers. Only once did he top ten homers again, with 16 in 1973, his last year as a regular.

As great as his 1970 was, Gaston never did master the strike zone. Even in ‘70, he struck out 142 times—the same year he had his highest walk total, a modest 41. His 121 whiffs in 1971 (accompanied by a mere 24 walks) suggests poor command of the strike zone that pitchers learned to exploit. Gaston’s greatest fame, of course, came not as a player, but as a manager with the Toronto Blue Jays in 1989-1997 and 2008-2010, where he was the first African-American manager to win a World Series (in both 1992 and 1993).

Behind the plate, San Francisco Giants catcher Dick Dietz had an amazing 1970, at least at the plate. He hit .300 with 22 HR, 107 RBI, and 109 walks, not to mention 38 doubles. He’d only played semi-regularly in his earlier seasons, but for that year, was almost as good a hitter as the National League MVP, fellow catcher and future Hall of Famer Johnny Bench.

Dietz tailed off in 1971, but was still very above average for a catcher as a hitter, with 19 homers and 79 walks. Somehow he was waived (not traded) to the Dodgers in April 1972, where a broken hand ruined his 1972 season, in which he hit .161 in 56 at-bats. He rebounded with a rather phenomenal, if unheralded, year as a reserve (playing more first base than catcher) for the Braves in 1973, hitting .295 and walking 49 times in just 139 at-bats, compiling a .474 OBP. That translates to about 150 walks in a full-time year.

Dietz was just 31, and it seems like he should have kept finding work as a reserve, perhaps moving to the American League to DH considering his subpar defensive reputation. It’s been suggested that he was blackballed owing to his role in the 1972 players strike, when he was serving as the Giants’ player representative (and, likewise, suggested he was waived to the Dodgers in early 1972 because of that as well).

With a bit of juggling, you have a starting eight of fluke 1970 seasons here. You could move either Grabarkewitz or Harper from third to second (both played some second base in their career). There are only two outfielders; you could add Bernie Carbo, who had a great rookie year as a platoon player for the Reds (21 HR, .310, 94 walks in just 365 at-bats) and never hit nearly as well again.

Pitchers aren’t nearly as well represented by fluke 1970s, but there was one guy whose All-Star year came out of nowhere. Clyde Wright had started and relieved for the Angels for a few years without distinction, especially in 1969, when he was 1-8 with a 4.10 ERA. In 1970, he somehow won a place in the rotation and rocketed from 1-8 to 22-12. He’d have a couple other good years in 1971 and 1972 (winning 34 games with a sub-3.00 ERA) before declining into retirement by the mid-’70s. His 12-6 record at the break was good enough to get him a spot on the American League All-Star squad, where he gave up the game-winning hit in the twelfth inning to…Jim Hickman, which is where we started.