History of the World Series – 1972 The last edition of the Kansas City A’s, the 1967 team, was a typically overmatched aggregation and finished with 99 losses. But a check of that club’s roster shows not a ragtag collection of over-the-hill athletes, but a valuable collection of promising Athletics. Jim (Catfish) Hunter was 21…

History of the World Series – 1971 More than talk, though, Clemente went out and fiercely displayed his vast array of skills. Maybe someday his critics would wake up to the fact that he could run, hit, field and throw as well as anyone and better than most. By the end of the 1971 World…

History of the World Series – 1970 Avenge, the Orioles did. Only it wasn’t against their 1969 conquerors, the New York Mets, but instead against the Cincinnati Reds. Playing under rookie Manager Sparky Anderson, the Reds ran away with the NL West championship and swept Pittsburgh in the Championship Series. In the first World Series…

History of the World Series – 1969 So, when Don Buford of the talented and deep Baltimore club slammed Seaver’s second pitch of Game 1 over the fence, and Baltimore tacked on three more runs in the fourth inning, you could hear mutterings of “I told you so” at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium. By afternoon’s end,…

History of the World Series – 1968 The decision went to Gibson, unanimously. McLain was nicked for three fourth-inning runs by the Cardinals, who got a run-scoring single from Mike Shannon and a two-run single from Julian Javier in an uprising helped along by left fielder Willie Horton’s misplay on Shannon’s base hit. In the…

History of the World Series – 1967 While Gibson had won 19, 20 and 21 games in the previous three years and was bound for even greater success in the next three seasons, 1967 was in many ways most representative of the man’s will to win and his ability to turn that determination into success….

    History of the World Series – 1966 The ability to get great pitching certainly was no problem for the Dodgers, who had held the powerful New York Yankees to four runs in the four-game 1963 Series and limited the hard-hitting Minnesota Twins to seven runs over the last five games of the 1965…

History of the World Series – 1965 While Koufax, coming off a 26-8 season in which he boasted a 2.04 earned-run average and tossed a perfect game (his fourth no-hitter in four seasons), obviously had Series-opener credentials, he didn’t start Game 1 because it fell on the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur. Drysdale got the…

History of the World Series – 1964 The Yankees were in a particularly good groove at the end of the 1964 season, having earned their 14th Series berth in 16 years. Under first-year Manager Yogi Berra, the Yankees had won the pennant by one game over the Chicago White Sox. The’64 World Series — matching…