Campy's Great Game

"There was a game in 1966 that symbolized what he meant to the organization. Nobody else in the lineup got a hit; nobody else, as I recall, even reached based, but Campy went 4-for-4, stole several bases, and scored 4 runs. The A's won the game, I think 4-2 or 4-3.

-Bill James, The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (New York: The Free Press, 2001) 609.

There are an unusual number of interesting footnotes to Bert Campaneris' career. He once played all 9 positions in a game. He hit 22 home runs in 1970; his career high in homers otherwise was 8. In 1977, he had 40 sacrifice hits, still the highest total in a season since 1929. And then there was the game above, which has to rank as one of the greatest singlehanded victories in recent baseball history. But how accurate is James' reminisence?

Campaneris had three games in 1966 in which he had 4 hits. In two of them, he also scored 4 runs. One of these games came on June 6 against Cleveland. Since the A's won 11-4, this probably is not the game James remembers. The other one comes close to matching James' memory. It was a game against the White Sox in Chicago on August 16. Batting leadoff, Campaneris singled in the first, was sacrificed to second, stole third, then scored on an error while Danny Cater was stealing second. In the third, he tripled, then scored on a wild pitch. In the fifth, he singled and came all the way around to score on an error by the pitcher. In the eigth, he singled, stole second, then went to third and scored on consecutive passed balls. The final scored was 4-2.

This game doesn't match James' memory in every respect. Besides Campy's 4 hits, the A's got two singles and a walk, but they had nothing to do with the scoring. Obviously Campaneris got some help from the Sox, but he was creating some major havoc on the basepaths. It's probably not too inaccurate to say he won this game singlehandedly, a pretty rare occurance (at least for a non-pitcher) in Major League Baseball.