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| The cover of "Big Hair and Plastic Grass," featuring Oscar Gamble and his amazing Afro. |
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| J.R. Richard throwing some heat for the Astros in the late 1970's. |
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| Steve Garvey and his massive forearms. |
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| Willie "Pops" Stargell, wearing maybe the funkiest uniform ever. |
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| My favorite baseball player, Steve Carlton, on his 1975 Topps card, surely the funkiest cards of the decade. |
I received Dan Epstein’s book “Big Hair and Plastic Grass: A
Funky Ride Through Baseball and America in the Swinging ‘70’s” for Christmas
and I just finished reading it. It’s a great read, and I would highly recommend
it to any fan of 1970’s baseball. I would also highly recommend following Dan’s
very witty Facebook page for the book, on which he wishes “funky birthday
greetings” to every player who made the 1970’s the great baseball decade they
were.
“Big Hair and Plastic Grass” takes the reader through the
1970’s, season by season, from 1970 and Curt Flood’s challenge of baseball’s
reserve clause, to 1979, when free agency was nudging player salaries towards
$1 million a year. There are several entertaining diversions along the way,
with chapters devoted to the “concrete doughnut” stadiums that proliferated
during the era, to the outlandish and amazing uniforms that teams like the
Houston Astros and Pittsburgh Pirates sported.
Even though I was born in 1981, the baseball world of the 1970’s
doesn’t seem at all like the distant past to me. One reason is that a lot of
the big stars of the 1970’s were still playing well into the mid-1980’s, when I
started following the sport and collecting baseball cards. Star players who
first blossomed in the 1970’s like George Brett, Robin Yount, Nolan Ryan, Steve
Carlton, Mike Schmidt, Fred Lynn, Dave Parker, Carlton Fisk, Don Sutton, Phil
Niekro, Tom Seaver, Steve Garvey, Graig Nettles, Don Baylor, Reggie Jackson, and
Dave Winfield were all a big part of my early baseball card experiences. I was
always interested in older baseball cards too, and I spent many hours at
Shinder’s, the local baseball card store, combing through piles of common cards
from the 1960’s and 70’s, which greatly increased my knowledge of random 1970’s
players like John “The Hammer” Milner, Kurt Bevacqua, and Mike Lum. Also, a lot
of the books I read about baseball were full of stories and anecdotes from the
1970’s. I bought books like Jim Bouton’s “Ball Four,” Sparky Lyle’s “The Bronx Zoo,”
and Bill Lee’s “The Wrong Stuff,” even though they were well beyond my
10-year-old comprehension.
Epstein makes the argument that the 1970’s saw more changes
in baseball in that one decade than in all the other decades before it. I agree
with this theory, as the game saw changes in artificial turf, polyester
uniforms, free agency, players growing facial hair and long hair, the adoption
of the designated hitter and night World Series games. Epstein does a great job
of recapping these changes, as well as the decade’s many memorable teams and
players like the “Big Red Machine,” Charlie O. Finley’s “Mustache Gang,” and
the New York Yankees “Bronx Zoo” teams of the late 1970’s. Because the book is
only 320 pages, Epstein doesn’t go into a great amount of detail about each
season, but he does a nice job of recapping the highlights and lowlights. One
of my favorite chapters is the one on the uniforms of the 1970’s, which were
much more colorful than at any other time in baseball’s history. I wish more
teams now would take chances on more brightly colored uniforms, instead of the
staid classicism that has reigned since the 1990’s. Epstein describes the
Houston Astros’ memorable “orange rainbow” uniforms of the late 1970’s thus: “Standing
in against an Astros fireballer like J.R. Richard must have been nerve-racking
enough without being additionally distracted by something out of Jasper Johns’s
mescaline nightmare.” Well put, Sir.
The 1970’s were a time for free spirits to roam free in
baseball, as players became more outspoken. The decade featured many colorful
characters like Ron LeFlore, who came to the Tigers from prison, where he had
been doing time for armed robbery, Reggie Jackson, perhaps the decade’s biggest
star, whose outsized ego was only matched by his tape-measure home runs, Bill “Spaceman”
Lee, who angered Commissioner Bowie Kuhn by saying he sprinkled marijuana on
his organic pancakes, Sparky Lyle, whose trademark in the clubhouse was sitting
naked on birthday cakes, Dock Ellis, who pitched a no-hitter in 1970 while
under the influence of LSD, Mark “the Bird” Fidrych, a pitcher who famously
talked to the baseball and who was an overnight sensation in his 1976 rookie
year, but due to injuries never regained his form, and clubhouse prankster Jay
Johnstone, backup outfielder and expert at hotfoots, and other assorted mayhem.
Even a seemingly square player like Steve Garvey, who was nicknamed “Senator”
and “Mr. Clean,” and had a junior high school named after him-while he was an
active player-proved to be more of a free spirit than everyone thought, as in
the late 1980’s it came out that Garvey was dating several women at the same
time, and had out-of-wedlock children. All of these players, and many others,
made baseball in the 1970’s a highly entertaining sport to watch.
Probably the biggest change in baseball in the 1970’s, and
the one that continues to have the largest impact on the game, was the
beginning of free agency. From that point on, players were free to sell their
services to the highest bidder, which caused salaries to skyrocket. The average
major league baseball player made just $29,303 in 1970, and by 1979 that was up
to $113,558. For the 2012 season, the average player made $3,440,000. Oh, how
times have changed.
I could go on and on about baseball in the 1970’s, but
suffice it to say that Dan Epstein does a wonderful job of making a vibrant,
yet somewhat overlooked decade in baseball’s history come alive. If you’re a
fan of baseball, go out and read “Big Hair and Plastic Grass.”
