Becoming Big League by Bill Mullins

Author:Bill Mullins
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780295804736
Publisher: University of Washington Press

Play-by-Play

AUGUST AND SEPTEMBER

BOTH hope and luck ran out in August. The Pilots played the worst baseball of the season, and by the end of the month, they had sunk to last in the Western Division. On the first of August, the Pilots, despite Milkes's angst, had been the star of the expansion crop with a record of forty-three wins and fifty-eight losses. The Kansas City Royals were close, at forty-two wins and sixty losses, but Montreal and San Diego were thirty-six and thirty-seven games under .500 respectively. For a while, the team played near its season's pace; then, in mid-August, the wheels came off.

As the month started at home, the shaky pitching got shakier. Marty Pattin could get only one out in the second inning before he left the game and the rotation. The Yankees completed a three-game series sweep on August 3 with a 5–3 win, scoring all their runs off Steve Barber in the first. It was Seafair race day. As the hydroplanes tooled around Lake Washington, the Pilots drew their largest crowd of the season, 23,657, with a shrewdly scheduled bat day. Although the club slipped to fourth place, they were not done yet. The team made some personnel adjustments as it went out on the road. Steve Whitaker (acquired in the Lou Piniella trade) went to Vancouver. Dick Simpson came off the disabled list as Mike Hegan prepared to leave for military reserve duty. Between the reserves and leg aches, Hegan had only eleven at bats from July 6 to August 6.

Out on the road, the Pilots opened in fine form against the Red Sox. Gene Brabender pitched a complete game, Tommy Harper stole bases fifty and fifty one, and Tommy Davis was getting hotter. He went three for five and added to his team-leading total of sixty-two runs batted in for the Pilots' 9–2 win. The second game in Boston was one of the most gratifying of the season. Down 4–2 in the seventh inning, the Pilots staged a comeback to tie and then win 6–5 in the tenth. Joe Schultz exulted that Wayne Comer, Davis, Jerry McNertney, and Hegan just “never know when they're whipped.” The Sox turned the tables the next night for what the Seattle Post-Intelligencer's Lenny Anderson called the “most agonizing reversal” of the season.1

Moving on to Washington, D.C., the Pilots lost two out of three to the team they usually beat up on. Injuries once again plagued the Seattle team. Ray Oyler went out with a knee injury for a couple of weeks, and Simpson reinjured his leg. Milkes sold infielder Gordy Lund to the Angels. The road trip ended in Cleveland, where the Pilots won two of three games. The team clung tenaciously to third. They had won five out of nine games on the road, Davis had an eighteen-game hitting streak, and Harper was at fifty-six stolen bases.

Then home and the deluge. Without playing really miserable baseball, and continuing to strive as they had all season, the Pilots nonetheless suffered a ten-game losing streak.

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