WORLD SERIES / CINCINNATI REDS VS. OAKLAND ATHLETICS : A’s Went Meekly to Slaughter

The World Series of 1990 came to an untimely end at 8:15 p.m. PDT Saturday night.

The Oakland Athletics, you might say, died in their sleep.

The Oakland “dynasty” went the way of all such--the Hapsburgs, Hohenzollerns, Romanoffs and the rest of the royal families. You might say the crowned heads rolled--except there is some doubt these guys were real royalty. They weren’t dragged to their doom, they went meekly enough to the slaughter. They got no hits at all for the last eight innings of the tournament, got no baserunners in the last seven innings and didn’t appear to battle their executioner at all in the final analysis. They almost seemed to welcome the coup de grace.

In point of fact, it wasn’t much of a World Series.

Cincinnati became the 13th team in history to sweep four games. As such, they join the great Yankee teams of the past, the Cincinnati Big Red Machine, the Miracle Braves, the Koufax-Drysdale Dodgers and the Willie Mays Giants among others.

Somehow, they seem overmatched in this august company. They were a no-name cast of characters, a rabble, players you never heard of batting .750, platoon players taking starring roles, .500 pitchers managing to look like Cy Young or Walter Johnson against the suddenly punchless Oakland regulars. Oakland managed only eight runs in four games, got a total of 28 hits and got shut out in Game 1. They didn’t even go out with a whimper.

Oakland pretty much struck its colors before hostilities began Saturday when it announced it was going to spike its biggest cannon and take the field without Jose Canseco, who hit 37 home runs this season, and bench him in favor of a player who has hit three. “We need defense,” the manager explained, surprising a lot of people who remembered that other dynasties never tried to beat you with the glove.

Still, every World Series needs a goat and Jose Canseco will have to do. He did come to bat in the ninth inning with a chance to square the game and instead hit a sickly ground ball to third. He gets the horns although he had plenty of company on a team that managed a .207 batting average for four games.

Cincinnati gets certified as the best team in baseball, considerably to their surprise and that of other longtime observers of the grand old game, particularly anyone who had seen them play in August or September.

A World Series needs a hero, too, and, as usual, this is an improbable character who was recognized in baseball chiefly as a role player and part-time replacement player.

This was Billy Hatcher, a journeyman outfielder who was valued chiefly for his legs and faced a future as Eric Davis’ “caddy” before Series play. Hatcher beat out 29 infield hits this season, stole 30 bases, hit .270 and didn’t strike out much.

But nobody ever called him Belting Billy or the Wild Horse of the Osage. Put it this way: Nobody ever mixed him up with Darryl Strawberry till he began to fatten up on Oakland pitching. Oakland couldn’t seem to find a way to get him out and once they had to resort to letting him get a hit, then picking him off first base. They got him out only three times at the plate as he got nine hits, two bases on balls and he finally left after being hit by a pitch Saturday.

The authors somewhat inexplicably picked a pitcher, Jose Rijo, as the MVP of the tournament. He stifled Oakland effectively in Game 4 and held them at bay creditably in Game 1--but so did the entire Cincinnati pitching staff.

There was a famous story involving Dizzy Dean involving the Detroit slugger he had been getting out with some regularity with fancy stuff until, in Game 7, he called his manager over and inquired, “What did you say this guy could hit?” And the manager said, “Inside fastball.” So, Dean threw him one and the hitter slugged it off the wall. The manager screamed, “What did you do that for?” Dean shrugged. “I was beginning to think he couldn’t hit anything,” he explained sunnily.

The Cincinnati pitchers could be pardoned for thinking Oakland couldn’t hit anything, either. To them, every Cincinnati pitcher should be named “Dazzy” or Cy or “The Big Train.”

The real hero of the piece should have been the wildly improbable third baseman of the Reds, a four-eyed ex-hockey puckster in space cadet goggles and the profile of a grade school truant. Chris Sabo was as refreshing as a mountain spring in this era of the briefcase-carrying ballplayer and personal-agent, high-contract baseball.

Sabo managed to look as if he was playing the game in an empty lot on a hot summer day: torn-pants, dirty-uniform baseball. He battled pitchers, smothered line drives and his interview had the elegance of an Our Gang comedy. But he hit .563 with two home runs and 16 total bases and if Oakland had him in the scouting report you’d never know it by the way they pitched him.

He appeared to be having fun playing in the Series, not just going through the motions. You had the feeling it was 1910 again and baseball was something you played on real grass with your cap on backward and your socks hanging down and broken bats taped at the handle and dime store baseballs the sawdust fell out of when hit flush.

Chris Sabo is who I’ll remember when I think of the 1990 World Series. He had the most fun in a Series since the one Pepper Martin ran wild in 60 years ago. He’s what baseball used to be all about before it became just another prime-time television show. The World Series except for Sabo was only one bunch of nameless business executives getting the best of the deal over another.