NOTEBOOK : Bench, Morgan: The A’s Are Good, but . . .

A couple of old cogs from Cincinnati’s Big Red Machine--Joe Morgan and Johnny Bench--were hanging around the batting cage before Saturday’s World Series game, making them easy targets for the baseball question of the hour.

How did the members of baseball’s last dynasty, the Reds of the mid-1970s, feel about the latest dynasty-in-the-making, the Oakland Athletics of the late 1980s?

Fine, just fine, Morgan and Bench agreed.

Just don’t ask them to compare the two teams.

“ What?!” Bench asked, only half incredulously. “We had five potential Hall of Famers in that lineup. (The A’s) have a few, too, but as a team, they’re just not there yet. They’ll be the first ones to admit they still have some things to do.

“Our club was compared with the ’27 Yankees and the ’61 Yankees, the greatest teams of all-time. That speaks for itself. When they compare the A’s to our team, it’s a statement of how great a team we had.”

Morgan was a bit more emphatic when given his comparison assignment.

“Position-by-position, nobody stacks up,” Morgan said. “You can’t find four players (on the A’s) that are better than what we had.

“They’ve got three--starting pitching, Rickey Henderson and Jose Canseco. Canseco replaces (the Reds’) Ken Griffey. Henderson replaces Cesar Geronimo, who won a Gold Glove by the way. And their starting pitching is better than ours.

“Those Reds were much better in speed and defense. We had four guys with Gold Gloves and it was right up the middle. And all of us could steal a base. Even Johnny Bench had 14 stolen bases (in 1976).”

For the record, the 1976 Reds, who swept the New York Yankees for their second consecutive World Series championship, featured Bench at catcher, Tony Perez at first base, Morgan at second base, Pete Rose at third base, Dave Concepcion at shortstop, George Foster in left field, Geronimo in center field and Griffey in right field.

Before the 1989 A’s, they were also the last team to sweep a World Series--a feat, Morgan says, that separates great champions from the rest of the field.

“Hey, if a World Series goes seven games,” Morgan said, “any team can win it. The best team doesn’t always win the seventh game.

“If you win it in four, then there’s only one team that could’ve won the thing. If this thing goes seven, nobody will be asking me to compare (the A’s) to the Reds.”

A few hours later, the A’s took care of that matter. Team of the ‘80s? Maybe. But suggest anything beyond that and you were certain to get an argument during batting practice Saturday night.

Morgan, now a broadcaster for the San Francisco Giants, acknowledged that the A’s have the old Reds beaten in one department.

Hot-dogging.

“Their personality is different than ours,” Morgan said, “but that’s just a fact of society. Your kids are different than you are. (But) you never saw Tony Perez standing at home plate, looking at a home run. And I didn’t look at them because I never knew if they were going out.

“The A’s are just different. Not better or worse, just different.”

Bench, however, points out that his former teammates were not above spreading the mustard on occasion.

“Joe Morgan would run around the bases with his arm in the air,” Bench said. “And Pete Rose, he was a real quiet-type player, huh? Who was the first one to bounce the ball on the Astroturf (after an inning-ending out at first base)? Pete started all that.”

Bench, covering this World Series for CBS Radio, was asked what the A’s must do to parlay their winnings from the 1980s--two pennants and a World Series title--into a full-fledged dynasty in the 1990s.

“They have to keep their players happy,” Bench said. “And money is what keeps them happy. It’s hard to convince a guy sitting around to stay put if he can become a free agent and play regularly somewhere else.

“Free agency hurt us. We could’ve had three or four more (winning) years if we’d stayed together.”

The A’s have one thing going for them, though, according to Bench.

“They play on the West Coast,” he said. “It seems like everybody now wants to play on the West Coast. By 1998, there’ll be 12 teams on the West Coast. The Tijuana Toros, that’ll be one of the expansion teams.”

In the category of discoveries, one of the more notable Series players was Giant rookie infielder Greg Litton. In six Series at-bats he had three hits, including a double, a homer and three runs batted in. Even though he appeared in just the final two Series games, he finished second on the Giants with seven total bases and tied for the lead in RBIs.

“I didn’t know what to expect, and it’s hard to believe what happened,” said Litton, 25, who batted .252 in 71 games this season and will play in Latin America this winter to learn the outfield.

The Giants hope he will return next spring as the team’s utility man, with a chance to become the starting right fielder.

Times staff writer Bill Plaschke contributed to this story.