On This Date in A's History: Athletics Set Record With 11-0 Start to the 1981 season
On this day in 1981, the A’s played a doubleheader against the Seattle Mariners, winning the first game 6-1 behind Mike Norris before dropping a 3-2 heartbreaker on an eighth-inning solo homer by Richie Zisk off Rick Langford.
The Game 1 victory behind Norris was the 11 consecutive win to start the season for the A’s, a team that was just two years removed from having lost an Oakland record 108 games. Although Norris only threw six innings that day, nine of those 11 wins by the A’s staff were complete games.
The 11 wins were the record for the most wins to start the season by any team in big league history, although that record would be eclipsed by the Milwaukee Brewers six years later when the Brew Crew opened with 13 consecutive wins.
The A’s opened the 1981 season with four games in Minneapolis against the Twins and four more in Anaheim against the Angels before returning to the Bay Area. For the home opener in the Coliseum, 50,255 showed up. That was more than double the 24,451 who’d showed up for the 1980 home opener.
It was the start of something big. The A’s, who had drawn just 306,000 fans two years earlier, drew almost half that (149,871) for the opening homestand in 1981, seven games, including one doubleheader, over six days.
It was Norris and outfielders Tony Armas and Rickey Henderson who set the early pace for the A’s. Armas, the right fielder, hit six home runs and drove in 16 runs in those first 11 games. He would wind up tying for the homer title with 22 in the strike-shortened season. And he drove in 76 runs, two behind American League leader Eddie Murray’s 78.
Henderson, just 22, had stolen 100 bases in his first full season in 1980. The left fielder started 1981 with 15 hits, 10 walks, 15 runs scored and four steals in those first 11 wins.
Coming off a 22-win 1980 season, Norris was 3-0 in the 11 games with a 1.50 ERA. He would begin the season 6-0, 2.12 in six starts through May 5, including five complete games. Matt Keough, Steve McCatty, Brian Kingman and Langford all went 2-0 in their first two starts, and Keough, McCatty and Kingman all threw shutouts.
The heavy workload that all A’s starting pitchers endured under Billy Martin would come to take its toll. After Norris’s 6-0 start, he was just 6-9 with a 4.44 ERA the rest of the way. He rebounded in the playoffs to beat Kansas City with a 3-0 shutout, but in the next round, a three-run, two-out double in the second inning doomed him to a 3-1 loss in Game 1 against the Yankees. A sweep by New York would end a season that started with such magic.
But all that was far away on April 19, 1981. After Norris’s win in the opener, Langford pitched the second game and was locked in 2-all tie until the Zisk homer.
The A’s came back to win six more games in succession, and that 17-1 start to the season remains the best in Major League history. Small wonder then, that Sports Illustrated put the A’s starting rotation – Norris, Langford, Keough, McCatty and Kingman – on the April 27, 1981 cover, dubbing them “The Five Aces.”
Follow Athletics insider John Hickey on Twitter: @JHickey3
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