The Baltimore Orioles and Cincinnati Reds were far and away the best teams in baseball when they met at the 1970 World Series. The Orioles and Reds each won their division titles in a landslide. Both teams swept their way through the League Championship Series round. A great showdown was anticipated in the Fall Classic. […]
The League Championship Series round had just been instituted in 1969. The decade of the 1970s would see this round’s great rivalry develop between the Cincinnati Reds and Pittsburgh Pirates. They played for the pennant four different times in this decade. The 1970 National League Championship Series marked the beginning of both the decade and […]
The 1970 American League Championship Series was a sequel. The inaugural year of LCS play had been 1969. The AL round had seen the Baltimore Orioles sweep the Minnesota Twins three straight in a postseason round that was best-of-five through 1984. 1970 was more of the same. The Twins were good, but the Orioles were […]
The great baseball town of Cincinnati had waited a long time for a winner. The Reds had not won the World Series since 1940. They ended two decades of mostly losing baseball with a pennant in 1961. But despite fielding mostly winning teams the rest of the 1960s, they had not returned to the Fall […]
The advent of divisional play had been good for Minnesota. When the American League split into an East and West in 1969, the Twins captured the inaugural AL West crown. That was under the guidance of Billy Martin. After a falling out with the front office, Martin was fired. Bill Rigney stepped in as the […]
The West Coast had been good to the A’s franchise. In 1968 they relocated from Kansas City where they were a losing team from 1955 forward. In fact, the A’s hadn’t done anything noteworthy since they were in Philadelphia in Connie Mack’s final year of 1949. But upon arrival in Oakland, they immediately finished on […]
The 1970 Baltimore Orioles were a team in search of redemption. Yes, this was a franchise with a recent World Series title, in 1966. Yes, they had enjoyed a dominant run in 1969 under first-year manager Earl Weaver, easily winning the AL East and then the American League pennant. But as heavy favorites in the […]
The 1970 Pittsburgh Pirates said goodbye to an institution, old Forbes Field, which they moved out of at the All-Star break. They said hello to an institution, bringing back manager Danny Murtaugh, who had been at the helm for their 1960 World Series title. And the 1970 Pittsburgh Pirates ultimately said hello to their first […]