Vida played an outsized role on those three-time champions, having taken the baseball world by storm in , butting heads with Charlie Finley during a ruined , and rebounding to place three top Cy Young finishes over the next four years amid whirling rumors of being traded or sold outright, and watching the rest of the roster depart at the dawn of the free agency era while he was left to languish in Oakland.
He even took to calling me on occasion to fact-check some conversation he was in the middle of having usually, it seemed, with a date he likely wanted to impress. The four hours I spent with the man over lunch at the Claremont Hotel in Berkeley back in , however, while researching Dynastic, was the most concentrated and wonderful dose of Vida one could hope for.
Although Vida ended up having a nice career, he proved unable to sustain his early dominance. There are many reasons for this, including overuse during that campaign and his subsequent holdout in None are more prevalent than a spiraling drug problem that saw Blue not only suspended for the season following a cocaine conviction, but serving three months of jail time at the beginning of that year. He rejoined the Giants in and hung on for a couple more seasons.
Nobody was more aware of this detail than Vida himself. And I know for a fact this drug thing impeded my road to the Hall of Fame … so far. I prefer to consider the young, cheerful wunderkind who took the American League by storm in To that end, I offer an extended excerpt from Dynastic:.
The real story of was Vida Blue. Six feet tall and well-packed pounds, the left-hander threw devastatingly hard and with disarming ease. His windup featured a uniquely high leg kick that brought his right knee almost to his chin, and a delivery in which he reached so far back with the baseball that his knuckles nearly scraped the dirt.
