“A Time for Reflection:
The Parallel Legacies of Baseball Icons
Willie McCovey and Billy Williams”
The author: Jason Cannon
The details: Rowman & Littlefield, $35, 328 pages, released Feb. 4, 2025; best available at the publishers website and Bookshop.org.
“A Giant Among Giants:
The Baseball Life of Willie McCovey”
The author: Chris Haft
The details: University of Nebraska Press, $32.95, 240 pages, released Feb. 1, 2025; best available at the publishers website and Bookshop.org.
A review in 90 feet or less
The software wizardry made available by Stathead Baseball, resourcing Baseball Reference data, is such a cool tool. Compare and contrast MLB players from different eras.
Or, two dudes who led a very parallel lives.
What is doesn’t show is that, during the last month of the 1976 season when the five-time defending AL West champion Oakland A’s, scrambling to overtake the Kansas City Royals, made a curious roster move.
It made Billy Williams and Willie McCovey, two National League big-time names, unlikely 38-year-old teammates trading mercenary at-bats. Based on decades of seeing these two on their baseball cards, the versions that appeared now were as jarringly abnormal in kelly green-and-yellow as Joe DiMaggio was when recruited to coach for the franchise in 1968.
In the course of their careers, Williams and McCovey each made the NL All Star team six times, but only once were they together — the 1968 exhibition at the Houston Astrodome. In a predictable 1-0 NL win (it was the Year of the Pitcher), the only run scored when McCovey grounded into double play in the first inning, pushing across Giants teammate Willie Mays, making Don Drysdale the winner. McCovey, starting at first base and hitting third, proceeded to strike out three times against Blue Moon Odom, Denny McLain and Sam McDowell. Williams got into the game as a pinch hitter in the sixth inning and flew out against McLain.
(Footnote: In the 1969 All Star Game, McCovey homered off both Odom and McLain and was named the game’s MVP in a season where he was also the NL MVP).
Now, in Oakland, eight years later, decline evident, Williams and McCovey were serviceable as a DH, a position that had only come about in 1973 when the American League rule-makers felt there wasn’t enough offense and this was a way to keep old, reliable hitters contributing if their time playing out on the field in the National League was a bit problematic.
(Tell that one to Shohei Ohtani).
Continue reading “Day 16 of 2025 baseball book reviews: Willie, Billy, and the Alabama shakes”
Tom Hoffarth's The Drill: More Farther Off the Wall 