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The calendar said October 1990, but it seemed strangely like October 1954.
The Cincinnati Reds celebrate a four-game sweep of the favored Oakland Athletics.
The Oakland Athletics were proud American League champions in 1990, winning their divisional race by nine games and then romping in the League Championship Series.
An aura of invincibility was enveloping Manager Tony La Russa's A's, who had won three straight AL pennants and entered the '90 World Series as defending titleists. In 1989, Oakland had dispatched San Francisco in four games in the fall classic.
The Athletics had power, speed, defense and outstanding pitching. Mark McGwire belted 39 home runs in 1990 and Jose Canseco clubbed 37. Rickey Henderson led the American League with 65 stolen bases, played a sensational left field, finished as runner-up for the batting title with a .325 average and hit 28 homers.
Dave Stewart won 20 games for the fourth consecutive season. Bob Welch, whose previous major-league high had been 17 victories, finally crashed through in a big way -- he won 27 games. And reliever Dennis Eckersley recorded 48 saves and a 0.61 earned-run average.
If all this were not enough, the A's had padded their roster in late August with the acquisition of two of the major leagues' best hitters-Willie McGee from the St. Louis Cardinals and Harold Baines from the Texas Rangers. McGee wound up as the 1990 National League batting champion despite spending his final five weeks of the season in the American League.
Along with all this talent, the A's had an unmistakable swagger. And a l0-game postseason winning streak to boot.
Clearly, not since 1954 had the outcome of a World Series appeared such a foregone conclusion. In '54, the Cleveland Indians, led by one of the greatest pitching staffs of all time, roared into the Series after winning an American League-record 111 games. By capturing the AL pennant, the Indians had dethroned the New York Yankees. Incredibly, the Yankees had won five straight World Series entering the '54 season.
Just as the '54 Indians were paired against the solid-but-hardly imposing New York Giants in the World Series, the '90 A's were matched against the solid-but-hardly imposing Cincinnati Reds. The Giants had finished fifth in the National League in 1953, 35 games off the pace, before effecting a stunning turnaround; the Reds wound up fifth in the NL West in 1989, 17 games behind the leader, prior to their ascent to the top. Accordingly, no one was quite sure just how good these National League entrants were.
Cincinnati, for example, had no player with more than 25 home runs in the regular season and none with more than 86 runs batted in. The big winner on the pitching staff bagged only 15 victories. But the Reds took it to the Athletics right from the start.
With two out in the first inning of Game 1 and Billy Hatcher on base with a walk, Reds left fielder Eric Davis drilled a home run over the center-field fence. The blast came off Stewart, Oakland's fabled "big-game" pitcher.
The Reds added two runs in the third inning and, with Chris Sabo slashing a two-run single, tacked on three more in the fifth. By then, Cincinnati's Jose Rijo was coasting. The hard-throwing righthander worked seven scoreless innings, allowing seven hits and striking out five batters, and was credited with the victory. Relievers Rob Dibble and Randy Myers worked an inning apiece to close out the National Leaguers' 7-0 triumph at Riverfront Stadium.
Apparently jarred into the realization that the Reds would not go quietly -- if at all -- in this World Series, the A's garnered a 4-2 lead after three innings of Game 2. Canseco, who had driven in Oakland's first run of the game with a first-inning groundout, triggered his team's three-run outburst in the third when he slammed a homer to right.
The Reds moved within one run when pinch-hitter Ron Oester delivered a run-scoring single off Welch in the fourth and then tied the game when Glenn Braggs, another pinch-hitter, got Hatcher home with a forceout grounder in the eighth. Hatcher had opened the inning with a triple -- his record-shattering seventh consecutive World Series hit over two games.
Reds hopes soared in the ninth when Todd Benzinger ripped a Rick Honeycutt pitch to deep left field, but Rickey Henderson made a sensational leaping catch. Then, in the 10th, Cincinnati manufactured a run against Eckersley, Oakland's seemingly impenetrable reliever.
With one out, pinch-hitter Billy Bates, a June acquisition from Milwaukee and a minor leaguer most of the season, collected his first hit in a Reds uniform, an infield single. Sabo followed with a single to left and then Joe Oliver, a .231 hitter during the regular season, sent the Cincinnati crowd into a frenzy with a game-winning single down the third-base line.
Once again, the Reds' bullpen had stood out. Over the final seven innings of the Reds' stirring 5-4 triumph in Game 2, Cincinnati relievers combined for 7 1/3 shutout innings.
Down two games to none, the A's retreated to their home park facing a difficult task and considerable pressure.
Deficits of 0-2 had been overcome in World Series play, to be sure. In fact, the 1985 Kansas City Royals and 1986 New York Mets dropped the first two games of the Series or home and proceeded to reign as champions. Still, the Athletics had gotten into deep trouble -- and they knew it.
Furthermore, the A's knew that a second straight World Series crown would secure the team a place among baseball's best-ever teams. Three straight AL pennants surely would not be enough to satisfy the historians, but a repeat Series title unquestionably would do the trick.
Sabo rocked Oakland's aspirations in Game 3. He belted two home runs off Mike Moore, one a two-run blow that highlighted a seven-run third inning, and the Reds rolled to an 8-3 victory behind starter Tom Browning and "Nasty Boys" relievers Dibble and Myers (who would combine for 7 2/3 scoreless innings in this Series). Once again, the A's didn't score after the third inning.
Game 4 was a rematch of the opening-game pitchers, Rijo and Stewart. And it evolved into a thriller.
The Reds fell behind, 1-0, in the first inning when Oakland's Carney Lansford singled home McGee, who had doubled to left field. Not only did Cincinnati fall behind quickly, but it also suffered the loss of outfielders Hatcher and Davis after the first inning. Hatcher, hitting a Series-record .750 (nine hits in 12 at-bats), left the game with a hand injury he suffered when hit by a pitch, and Davis departed with a kidney injury incurred on his attempt to corral McGee's hit.
Manager Lou Piniella's team persevered, however, with outfield replacements Braggs and Herm Winningham playing key roles late in the game. Rijo kept the Reds in the game, mowing down A's hitters inning after inning; meanwhile, Cincinnati was frustrated time and again by Stewart, against whom they got leadoff hitters on base four times in a five-inning stretch but couldn't score. Finally, Piniella's team broke through.
Barry Larkin led off the Reds' eighth with a single, and Winningham followed with a bunt, which he beat out. Stewart proceeded to make a bad throw to first on Paul O'Neill's bunt, loading the bases. Braggs came through with a forceout grounder that netted the tying run, and Hal Morris followed with a sacrifice fly that nudged Cincinnati ahead, 2-1.
Rijo, who didn't permit a hit after the first inning, got into an untouchable groove and retired 20 consecutive batters before Piniella replaced him with one out in the ninth. Myers got the call, and his immediate task was to retire Canseco, who was appearing as a pinch-hitter after being relegated to the bench for Game 4 because of back problems. Myers induced Canseco to ground out, and then got Lansford to foul out.
It was all over. A sweep, as so many experts had predicted. Only thing is, the upstart Cincinnati Reds had wielded the broom just as another upstart team, the New York Giants, had done 36 years earlier. Yes, the "unbeatable" 1954 Cleveland Indians, like the "unbeatable" 1990 Oakland A's, fell in four straight.
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