Sal Bando

Sal Bando died yesterday, three weeks short of his 79th birthday.

Bando was the captain of the great Oakland A’s teams that won three straight World Series between 1972-1974, and bookended those years with division titles. He was exactly the kind of player the advanced stats that didn’t exist yet would eventually love: an excellent defensive player at a middle of the spectrum position, who didn’t have great triple crown stats, but walked a lot, had good power, and basically produced a lot of runs while preventing a good number in the field.

His Hall of Fame case is nevertheless classically marginal even taking all that into account: He was consistently an all-star level player for a decade, but he had really only one MVPish season — 1969, when he barely got any votes; he did finish in the top four in the voting three times during Oakland’s great run — and his career collapsed a couple of years after signing with Milwaukee, when Charlie Finley decided to strip the team down. On yet another hand, he absurdly got just three out of 413 votes on the one year he appeared on the ballot — the same year his much less qualified teammate Catfish Hunter was elected (Bando could have used a better nickname and facial hair apparently).

Speaking of Finley and the A’s, a couple of stories:

)1) For the 1964 Beatles US tour, the Beatlemania tour, the group was coming to Kansas City, where Finley owned the then-KC A’s. Finley flew to San Francisco in the middle of the tour, met with Brian Epstein, and tried to get them to come to KC on their one day off.

He kept upping the bid to $150,000 which the lads from Liverpool then accepted. (This was equivalent to $1.4 million in 2022 dollars, which when inflation-adjusted was an unheard of sum to pay to a youth music group in 1964).

The image at the top of the post is the back of the KC ticket and features, in addition to the inexplicably common extraneous apostrophe, Finley very unsuccessfully wearing a Beatle wig. The front side has Finley billed first:

“Charlie O. Finley is pleased to present.. for the enjoyment of the Beatle fans in Mid-America: ‘The Beatles'”

(2) By 1979 Finley was trying to get rid of the team, had stripped it of all its good players, and had no TV contract, and a radio contract with the 10-watt student radio station at UC-Berkeley, meaning the radio broadcasts didn’t even reach Oakland itself. This terrific marketing plan resulted in average home attendance for that season of 3,787 tickets sold per game. Actual attendance was lower than that of course, with the peak or trough of this narrative being reached near the beginning of the season, on April 17, when a total of about 250 people filled the cavernous Oakland stadium to watch a game with Seattle. Historians have combed this event for its deeper cultural meaning (Warning: features MC Hammer content).

. . . forgot to mention that it’s startling how bad the attendance was for the great Oakland teams of the early-mid 1970s. They averaged about 11,000 fans per game, which was about 25% below the league average. So it’s not surprising that almost literally nobody showed up when they were terrible (the 1979 team lost 108 games).