Matthew Silverman. Swinging ’73: Baseball’s Wildest Season. Guilford CT: Lyons P, 2013. Print.

Forty years ago was one of the wildest years of major league baseball (MLB), especially for fans of the New York Mets. Matthew Silverman, longtime Mets reporter and author of a number of books on the Mets, tells the story of the 1973 baseball season from the perspective of three franchises: the Mets, the Oakland Athletics, and the New York Yankees.

OK—We get the Mets and Athletics. They were in the World Series, and they both did have wild seasons. But why the Yankees? They pretty much stunk back then.

There are several reasons. First, 1973 was the first year of the designated hitter (DH). The very first person to bat in that position was Yankee Ron Blomberg. Second, 1973 was the year that George Steinbrenner bought the Yankees. His approach to team ownership and free agency, which on its was to becoming legal, would become nearly legendary. Third, the topic of the Yankees sells more books than that of the Mets or A’s. The book notes:

Even in years when the Yankees fell before reaching the World Series, announcers still talked about Steinbrenner’s club more than any of the 28 other clubs that weren’t playing. How’s that for victory even in defeat?

The stories of all three teams that year made good press.

The Mets had one of the worst records of any team that ever made it to the World Series, and this was before wild cards. Still, they had a great bullpen with Jerry Koosman, Jon Matlack, Tug McGraw, and Tom Seaver. The author credits McGraw with coming up with the team’s battle cry that year, “Ya gotta believe!” Their manager in his first full season in that position was New York icon Yogi Berra, who had taken the place of another New York icon who had died suddenly the year before, Gil Hodges. They also had Willie Mays in his last season; Mets’ road games became a kind of farewell tour for him.

The Athletics were the future of baseball. They had a flamboyant owner in Charlie Finley—like Steinbrenner in some ways, but one who seemed to enjoy life more. They had colorful, some would even say psychedelic, uniforms. They had players with long hair and mustaches when many teams still had fifties-style grooming codes. They were the anti-Yankees, and along with the Reds in the National League, the last team to put together consistent winners before free agency, when “small market” was not an issue.

The A’s were certainly an exciting team with pitchers Vida Blue, Ken Holtzman, Catfish Hunter, and Rollie Fingers. They were complemented by hitters like Gene Tenace, Bert Campaneris, Sal Bando, and Reggie Jackson. (Joe Rudi was injured for much of the year). 1973 would be the second year of the three consecutive world championship years for the A’s—the only team other than the Yankees to accomplish that feat.

There are lots of side stories and little tidbits of information. For example, Dagoberto Campaneris really hated to be called Bert. Darold Knowles of the Athletics is the only pitcher in history to pitch in all seven games of a World Series. By the way, Charles Finley disliked the name Athletics and always referred to the team as the A’s. Perhaps channeling Abbot and Costello, Finley wanted his players to have interesting nicknames. Silverman tells us how Finley thought Jim Hunter was too bland of a name and came up with the nickname Catfish.

Finley tried to find other ways to make the team and home games more interesting. In 1973 one of the cute ball girls who retrieved foul balls in the Oakland Coliseum was Debbie Sivyer. Between innings she would bring refreshments to the umpires. Her homemade cookies were especially popular treats with them. Today she is still known for her cookies but better known by her married name—Mrs. Fields.

Swinging ’73 goes into the business of baseball quite a bit. Front offices were lively that year. For the first time a few players were being paid six figures in salary. We learn how frugal Finley was with money; at times reporters would visit the A’s office, and there would be no one there. The book also suggests that if Finley had been more careful about paying insurance premiums for Hunter as he had promised, not only would Hunter have stayed with the A’s, but MLB might not have free agency as we know it today. Both effects ultimately benefited Steinbrenner’s Yankees.

We see a contrast between the hapless if classy Yankees’ ownership by CBS and the focused if abrasive ownership of the team under Steinbrenner. One Yankee veteran shared how Steinbrenner was a shock to the team, but once team members figured out his modus operandi, the team would begin to click.

Swinging ’73 also fills in some background of American culture in 1973. This includes popular TV shows like All in the Family, popular music like Elvis’s big tours, and politics like Roe v. Wade and Watergate. Some of these things tied in with baseball. CBS dominated television with many comedies like All in the Family and MASH, cop shows like Kojak and Mannix, and even the successful variety show of Carol Burnett’s. As already noted, CBS figured in the ownership and sale of the Yankees in 1973.

Tug McGraw had not yet acknowledged his son from a premarital affair, but eventually he would develop a fatherly relationship with Tim McGraw, who has had a very successful music career. Roe v. Wade was another sign that the so-called sexual revolution of the sixties was still going strong. In 1973 the Yankees may have been best known for the two players on the team who swapped wives.

And George Steinbrenner ended up as a minor figure in the Watergate saga. He used a fund-raising technique in a crude manner that has since been perfected. He had employees donate his money in their names to Nixon’s re-election campaign to get around the $3000 maximum an individual could donate to a campaign. He was fined for this deception and technically banned from baseball operations for three years. Silverman notes that Steinbrenner was able to work behind the scenes beyond the scrutiny of MLB. Similarly, more recent political campaigns have learned to “launder” donations more subtly making them harder to trace—think Buddhist temples and Internet screen names.

Occasionally some of the trivia may feel like TMI (too much information), or it may be simply just plain funny. Silverman tells us how Tug McGraw’s mother gave him his nickname. The book also reminded this reader of an anti-Nixon bumper sticker that may be the cleverest or crudest (or both) political slogan ever.

1973 is also the year of the famous Thurman Munson-Carlton Fisk brawl, often seen as the beginning of the modern animus between the Yankees and the Red Sox. It is the year that the Sears Tower in Chicago was completed, the world’s tallest building at the time. It is the year that Dr. Atkins’ Diet Revolution was published. And Hank Aaron finished the year with 713 lifetime home runs, one shy of Ruth’s record.

Most readers would appreciate the afterword, a kind of “Where are they now?” Not only do we find out what happened to many of the key characters on the three teams, but we learn about other players who figure in the stories of the book like Nolan Ryan and Pete Rose. Somewhere we learn that Willie Mays admitted to using amphetamines, a common enough practice in the major leagues for many years.

And, as always with sports, there are what-ifs. Perhaps the biggest one for the 1973 baseball season is this: What if Yogi Berra had rested Tom Seaver in game six of the World Series? He was pitching on three days rest and the Mets were ahead in the series 3-2. Even if the Mets lost game six, they would have had a better rested pitching ace starting number seven…

We’ll never know.