Damn Yankees by Edward Drobinski - HTML preview

Damn Yankees

Page 304

trust his untested bullpen. He was applauded by baseball fans across the country even when he was kicked out of a game and suspended by the league for a week for kicking dirt on the umpire. The Oakland momentum was finally checked by the 1981 Major League Baseball strike, which shut down baseball for nearly two months midseason. The season was split into two halves, the division leaders at the time of the strike, in the AL West, the A's, to play the second half winners, the Royals, in a special division series. The A's won in three straight games to face the Yankees in the League Championship Series. The opportunity to beat the Yankees meant much to Martin, and Steinbrenner, seeing the Oakland success, was privately stating that he might have been too quick to fire Martin after the marshmallow salesman incident. But the veteran New York lineup

and pitching staff was able to dominate the A's as the Yankees swept the series in three games.

With the best combined record in the American League and second best combined record in all of baseball in 1981, expectations were high for the A's in 1982. However, the season did not go well for the A's, who never got much over .500. They had a 17– 14, .548 record after a win on May 10, then cooled down. By the All Star break in mid-July, they were 38–50, .432, twelve games back in sixth place, well out of the pennant race. None of the