How the 1973 Oakland A's got me married
A love story.
Today my wife Susan and I are celebrating our 19th wedding anniversary—and I want to thank the 1973 Oakland A’s for making it all possible.
I was introduced to Susan by her cousin who was a colleague of mine. Susan lived outside of Atlanta at the time, and I was in Maryland, so our courtship was conducted via email and then on the phone. We quickly fell in love but didn’t know what each other looked like. (This was pre-social media.) I convinced her that we should exchange photos and reassured her that “even if she looked like Herman Munster” it wouldn’t matter to me.
With more confidence than was warranted, I emailed her a picture of me with my shirt off at the beach. I opened the email attachment from her with a mixture of excitement and trepidation. And there, staring at me, bolts and all, was, you guessed it, Herman himself. Nobody could ever say that Susan doesn’t have a sense of humor.
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Our mutual love of sports, especially hockey and baseball, quickly became an important part of our relationship.
I played hockey for most of my life (although never well) and am a die-hard Washington Capitals fan. Susan knew little about hockey when we met but now watches more Caps games on TV than I do, and pretty much the only time we argue is when she thinks I’m being too critical of the Caps, which—truth be told—is often.
Shortly after the Caps won the Stanley Cup in 2018, Susan put a Caps’ pennant in the window next to our front door. Six years later she still won’t let me take it down.
When the NHL season kicks off every fall, Susan places a wooden sign in our living room that reads, “We interrupt this marriage to bring you hockey season.” It’s an interruption we both love.
Susan doesn’t know a lot of present-day baseball players but ask her about players from the distant past and she’s a bit of a savant.
Her knowledge stems from All Star Baseball, a board game she played with her father and two older brothers in the early ‘70s. The manufacturer described the game this way: “The game is essentially a batting simulation of major league baseball, built around a spinner and player disks that are divided into sections in such a manner that a hitter has the probability of reproducing his real-life statistics in such important categories as home runs, triples, doubles, singles, walks, and strikeouts.”
Susan’s family took the game seriously. Her father was the commissioner, and he required the team “managers” to submit their statistics each week. That’s how Susan learned to score a game. She still has a notebook containing her teams’ stats.
At first, Susan’s brothers wouldn’t let her play. But in 1970 they relented and granted her an expansion team and held an expansion draft so she could choose a team.
Like most expansion teams, Susan’s team struggled in its first season, going 2-10. That may be because she chose many of the players based on the names she liked rather than their batting prowess. Her line-up included “Ducky” Medwick, Birdie Tebbetts and Whitey Kurowski. (She was 10 years old.)
By her third season, Susan had the game figured out and her team went 16-4 and won the championship thanks to players like Hank Greenberg, Tris Speaker and Hank Aaron. Her father named her Manager of the Year.
One time when I was visiting Susan in Georgia, we started talking about the 1973 Oakland A’s (I don’t remember why), and she asked if I could name the three 20-game winners on the team. I got two of them, but Susan named Vida Blue, Catfish Hunter and Ken Holtzman without missing a beat. She then said, “wait here” and disappeared upstairs. About five minutes later she returned holding a copy of an issue of The Sporting News with the three A’s pitchers on the cover. Little did I know that as a young girl she loved the A’s and had a subscription to The Sporting News.
Shortly after Susan showed me the cover, I called my friend John Rawlings, who was editor of The Sporting News at the time. When I told him the story, he had two words of advice: “Marry her.”
And I did.
What an awesome story. Thanks for sharing it!
Love this! I too am a die hard baseball fan and my husband and I will be celebrating our 35th wedding anniversary this summer. He tells people he knew he had to marry me when he found out that I liked to drink beer, knew the infield fly rule and had my own subscription to Sports Illustrated.