Thompson, Evan. A Complete History of the Major League Baseball Playoffs – Volume 1: Pre-Divisional Tiebreakers Through 1976. BookBaby (self-published). Pp. 460. $34.95 (paperback).
Reviewed by Richard A. Macales
By the mid-1960s Major League Baseball was in trouble. BIG TROUBLE! Attendance had tanked. Batting statistics and runs scored––which fans generally prefer over great pitching––“hit” record lows by 1968. Aging stadiums for teams that hadn’t relocated to other cities (eight and counting since the 1950s) were crumbling.
Football was overtaking baseball in popularity. In desperation, billionaire baseball team owners who made their fortunes in other business enterprises were seeking additional sources of revenue, while concurrently dodging litigation via their ties to the “Grand Old Game.” Legendary business tycoon families such as du Pont/Carpenter (Philadelphia Phillies), Whitney/Payson (New York Mets), Anheuser-Busch (St. Louis Cardinals), and Gene Autry (California/Los Angeles Angels), among others, demanded publicly funded stadiums––and usually got them––at taxpayer expense. So, belatedly, baseball owners decided to introduce their own postseason playoff format which began in 1969. It was far less inclusive than MLB’s playoffs of today. Initially, only two MLB teams per league were eligible for the playoffs. The “Lords of Baseball” (i.e., the owners) labeled it the “League Championship Series” (LCS). This gave the National Pastime––so steeped in tradition and pageantry––more panache than merely designating it as a “playoff.” The winner of the LCS qualified for the World Series, the most prestigious competition in American sports from its inception in 1903, until the NFL’s Super Bowl surpassed it in popularity by 1970.
Until 1985, the LCS was a best-of-five series, after which it expanded to a best-of-seven that remains intact to the present. The first-place finishers in the National League (NL) and American League (AL) East and West divisions faced off to decide who would represent their respective league in the World Series. To give the LCS more prestige, owners decided to compile separate player stats, which would not be incorporated into World Series records.
While the World Series has been the topic of countless books, surprisingly, the 54-year-old League Championship Series has tended to be overlooked by writers and sports researchers, especially in recent decades. When The Sporting News was “the bible of baseball,” they published annually an outstanding reference work, The Series by Joe Hoppel, who was one of the premier historians and chroniclers of 20th century pro and collegiate American sports. The yearly LCS and World Series were included in one handy volume. Unfortunately, The Series ceased publication after the 1993 season, and it has not been digitalized.
Presently, sportswriter/blogger Evan Thompson has written and compiled a self-published book titled A Complete History of the Major League Baseball Playoffs – Volume 1. Thompson is an active member of the Society for American Baseball Research, or SABR (pronounced “saber”). Being a number cruncher, he is aptly serving as treasurer of his local SABR chapter in Arizona. His publication covers only the LCS’s formative seasons, from 1969 to 1976. These years had already been recounted by Joe Hoppel in The Series. Box scores and other essential statistical information contained in Thompson’s reference book can be easily found online on reliable baseball history and encyclopedia websites. If Thompson gets around to taking us from 1994 to the present in future volumes, it will be most welcome for those who prefer seeing baseball records in hardcopy.
Thompson provides us with an inning-by-inning account of all 61 LCS games played in the first eight seasons of baseball’s initial foray into postseason playoffs. What sets Thompson’s work apart from other baseball record books/encyclopedias is that it also includes the “pennant playoff series” (as they were called by The Sporting News) when the NL or AL required supplemental games for teams that tied for first place at the end of the regular season. This happened five times, and Thompson relives them all. In the NL: 1946 (Cardinals vs. Dodgers); ’51 (Giants vs. Dodgers); ’59 (Dodgers vs. Braves); and ’62 (Giants vs. Dodgers). In the AL: 1948 (Cleveland vs. Boston Red Sox). Inclusion of the pre-LCS league tie-breakers and records (which were included by MLB in regular-season stats) are a most welcome addition by the author.
Volume 1’s core audience is most likely Baby Boomers and Gen-Xers who closely followed baseball in their youth. Why? In the pre-free agency era, rosters of the better teams, in particular, remained, more or less, the same yearly, giving that generation of fans a sense of continuity of a given player associated primarily with one team for most of his career. Author Thompson’s work takes us from the final years of the reserve clause (whereby a player had to remain with his team until being traded, sold, or waived) to the dawn of free agency (1975). And some of the most exciting post-season baseball games in the LCS over the years have surpassed the World Series for sheer drama.
The LCS has enabled us to get one, two or three last glimpses of all-time greats, such as Hank Aaron, Willie Mays, and Roberto Clemente, in postseason play at the twilight of their careers. The LCS has also served as the springboard for “up-and-comers” appearing in their first LCS, such as Nolan Ryan, Tom Seaver, George Brett, and Vida Blue. The LCS also has been the only postseason stage for us to see batting greats such as Rod Carew, Dick Allen, and Bobby Bonds (Barry’s father). Each is included in Thompson’s book. Their names appear in the inning-by-inning summaries, in the individual game box scores, and in the accumulated LCS stats. We discover that, in some instances, their LCS stats didn’t measure up to the outstanding regular season marks. But it doesn’t detract from their greatness!
In understanding the birth of the LCS, we must explore the circumstances that baseball faced in the 1960s. Owners were beginning to buy teams hoping to turn a profit rather than using them for tax write-off purposes to offset profits they obtained in their core business enterprises. As such, MLB added four expansion teams in 1969, with two placed in both the NL and AL. Both leagues would grow to an unwieldy 12 teams. Too many teams in one league vying for first place and a shot at the World Series forced owners to divide each league into two divisions. Therefore, the establishment of the annual LCS became a necessity.
Some of the greatest ideas come impulsively, or through the threat of lawsuits. In the case of baseball in the 1960s, the sport fell into both of these categories. Some baseball researchers contend that no long-term strategic plan had been devised by the “Lords of Baseball” in pursuing a second expansion during the 1960s (approved by owners in 1967). It appears that MLB’s expansions of 1961 (Los Angeles and Washington, DC in the AL), 1962 (New York and Houston in the NL), and 1969 (Kansas City and Seattle in the AL; San Diego and Montreal in the NL) were Band-Aids to make up for some cities losing their teams, which resulted in litigation because business titans were deprived of joining “the exclusive club.” In the 1960s alone, club owners moved three franchises with permission granted by MLB: the Milwaukee Braves to Atlanta (1966), the original Washington Senators to Minnesota (1961), and the Kansas City Athletics to Oakland (1968). Each city abandoned by MLB caused problems. Angry politicos with clout on the municipal and national level clamored for replacement teams to please their disappointed voting constituents/fans.
Leaving Washington, DC, without Major League Baseball was especially problematic to the “Lords of Baseball.” Loud threats were made on Capitol Hill to remove MLB’s sweetheart deal of exempting the sport from antitrust legislation. Leading the drive in the 1960s was influential (and fuming) US Senator Stuart Symington of Missouri. He came to the fore after Kansas City was jilted by the Athletics’ move to Oakland in 1968. The exemption issue was shelved by Congress only after MLB agreed to rush up expansion by two years in granting Kansas City a new team––the Royals––no later than by 1969. Thanks to Kansas City’s steadfastness, MLB’s expedited second expansion in the 1960s played a role in the establishment of the LCS. And the Kansas City Royals benefited greatly by the addition of the LCS. In the decade of 1976-85 the Royals competed in the LCS six times, making it to the World Series twice (1980 and 1985). KC’s glory years are unfortunately excluded from Thompson’s “complete history,” which concludes with the 1976 season–the first year the Royals appeared in the LCS (losing to the New York Yankees, who were also making their first of a record 18 appearances through 2023).
During the eight years covered by Thompson, the most dominant teams in the LCS were clubs playing in smaller markets, before free agency tipped the scale in favor of larger market teams (with a notable exception being the St. Louis Cardinals). Big-market clubs had the potential to generate higher revenues from television, radio, product endorsement, and merchandising rights. From 1969-1976 in the NL, the Cincinnati Reds (West) and Pittsburgh Pirates (East) each appeared in five LCSs. AL teams that dominated during this period were the Baltimore Orioles (East) and Oakland A’s (West), who each appeared in five LCSs. These four clubs developed new rivalries, perhaps an unexpected bonus in popularizing the LCS that the “Lords of Baseball” may or may not have foreseen with its launch in 1969.
The most surprising team to appear in the first LCS was the New York Mets of 1969. This was followed four years later by another unexpected appearance by the Mets in a strike-shortened 1973 season. Their zany players had finished last every year from their inception in 1962 through 1967, and the Mets came within one game of finishing in the cellar in 1968. The 1969 Mets surprised the sports world by winning 100 games in the regular season before sweeping the Hank Aaron-led Atlanta Braves in three games in the LCS. Aaron hit a total of three home runs––one in each of the three games. All 1969 LCS games in the NL were played in front of sellout or near-capacity crowds. The success of the Mets in the LCS carried over into the World Series in 1969. The Mets went on to upset the favored Baltimore Orioles, who logged an astounding 109 regular season victories and had an all-star player at almost every position. This helped reinvigorate fan and media interest in baseball. Critics had said baseball was “dying” and “irrelevant” to the younger generation in the “New Age.”
Admittedly, in the lower-attended AL, their fan base was slower in adapting to the LCS. Games between Baltimore and the Minnesota Twins in 1969 and 1970 were box-office flops, particularly in the Twin Cities. None of the games played were sellouts, or even came close to filling the stands in Minnesota. Only one game in the Twin Cities drew more than 30,000 (1969). Even The Sporting News was caught off-guard at the low AL attendance. The LCSs first two games in Baltimore were tightly fought extra inning duels (mirroring the personality of their legendary managers, the combative Billy Martin and Earl Weaver), which should have stimulated fan interest. Oakland has the dubious record of drawing the lowest attendance ever for an LCS game, with only 24,265 attending the fifth and deciding game between Oakland and Baltimore on Oct. 11, 1973 (which the A’s won). But, the A’s do have an LCS record for which their team can be proud: The Oakland A’s are the only team to appear in five consecutive LCS’s (1971-75).
A Complete History of the Major League Baseball Playoffs: Volume 1 serves as a reminder of the National Pastime from a bygone era about a half century ago. The author’s greatest contribution is compiling the stats and history of the five league pre-LCS league tie-breakers, most notably the 1951 NL pennant playoff between the old Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants. In the third and deciding game played on Oct. 3, 1951 at the Polo Grounds in New York City’s Harlem neighborhood, Bobby Thomson (not to be confused with the author) hit a dramatic ninth-inning home run for the Giants, granting them the right to face the New York Yankees in the World Series, which was secondary in fan and media enthusiasm to the playoffs.
An interesting factoid: The next batter was the legendary Willie Mays, who went on to earn accolades as The Sporting News’ player of the decade for the 1960s. Now the oldest living Baseball Hall of Famer, Mays had begun his long career in 1948 in his native Alabama with the Birmingham Black Barons of the Negro American League. Mays later went on to play in two NL tie-breakers (1951 and 1962) and two LCSs (1971 and 1973), which are all documented by the author. Hopefully in future volumes, Evan Thompson will carry us into the 21st century and live up to his promise in compiling a truly “complete history.” It would be a welcome addition to any baseball library!
Rich Macales, a native Angeleno, was a former senior writer and public information officer for UCLA. He is a contributor to the anthology/encyclopedia, American Sports: A History of Icons, Idols, and Ideas, edited by Prof. Murry R. Nelson, ABC-Clio. He has closely followed Major League Baseball’s League Championship Series [LCS] since its inception.)
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