Baseball's Last Dynasty: The Oakland A's

Markusen justifies use of the term dynasty as ""an attempt to describe teams that have won a number of championships and place those teams in proper historical context."" Free agency now allows players to move freely from team to team and practically guarantees that his subject, the Oakland Athletics, will indeed be the last long championship reign. Markusen's heavily detailed account of Oakland's success in the early 1970s describes a team that won five consecutive division titles, three American League pennants and three world series between 1971 and 1975. The A's are a potentially appealing subject: Owned by Charlie Finley and starring Reggie Jackson on field it was led by two of baseball's most compelling personalities. They played across the bay from San Francisco and integrated some of the persona of flower children, wearing outlandish green and yellow uniforms and sporting mustaches and sideburns. The author has brought research that enlivens almost every page, interviewing many of the team's central figures to supplement library sources and an almost week-by-week account of the A's long run. What the book lacks is a historical or biographical thread that would turn this into a compelling narrative rather than five years of baseball statistics and a blizzard of detail. Only fans who see the national pastime as the core of history and all else peripheral will celebrate this degree of baseball purity, but there are more than a few of those around. (June)