Vida Blue was a baseball comet

The bright lights would come soon enough. On that May night in 1970, in the old ballpark at the confluence of the Des Moines and Raccoon Rivers, they were dimmer than the lights in the major leagues. Tony La Russa knew that because he had been there.

La Russa was destined for a storied career as a major league manager, but on the field he was a bonus baby who couldn’t really hit. Playing for the Iowa Oaks, after a few trials in the majors, matched his talent level. The Iowa pitcher that night was way beyond that. He struckout 14 Evansville batters in nine innings and even had two hits at the plate.

“There are minor leaguers, there are big leaguers, and then there’s that higher league of All-Stars and Hall of Famers,” the 78-year-old La Russa said by phone Monday. “And that was Vida, and he was 20 years old.”

By the end of that 1970 season, in the majors for good with the Oakland Athletics, Vida Blue would throw a no-hitter. His next season would be a baseball comet, a marvel in both majesty and brevity, the kind of year people talk about forever, especially in moments of loss.

Blue passed away Saturday at age 73, another pillar away from the only franchise besides the Yankees to win three consecutive titles. Last month, he visited the place of its former glory – the doomed and dilapidated Coliseum in Oakland, California – for a celebration of the 1973 champions, the middle of three A’s teams to win the World Series. Blue shuffled slowly toward the diamond, his left hand clutching an assistant’s elbow, his right a long wooden cane.

“He looked very, very weak walking around with a big pole,” Mike Norris, a former Oakland teammate, said by phone Monday. “It was sad to see. He told me he was exhausted from the chemo, that he was weak, that it was quite painful and all that. We are both Christians so we just kept praying for each other. And yesterday was the day.”

News of Blue’s death reached his former catcher, Dave Duncan, late Sunday afternoon in Tucson, Ariz. Duncan, 77, took care of his grandchildren, but paused to share what he saw from behind the plate in 1971.

The left-handed Blue went 24-8 with an 1.82 ERA that season, went 24 complete games and eight shutouts, and went 312 innings, the most in nearly 60 years by a pitcher in his first full season. He won the American League’s Most Valuable Player Award and the Cy Young, and there was nothing subtle about that.

“If he threw 120 pitches, 115 of them were fastballs,” said Duncan, a longtime pitching coach after his playing career. “He almost never threw a curveball and had no substitution. He had great control over it – he’d put it right on right handers’ hands and right on left handers’ hands – and he didn’t miss. He was great.’

The 1971 season was stunning then, incomprehensible now. Blue lost his first start and then won eight straight games, all complete games. From June 1 to July 21, he averaged more than nine innings in a streak of 11 starts (twice he went 11 innings).

On his next start, three days off, Blue got a break: With fans blocking every corner of Detroit’s Tiger Stadium, where he had won the All-Star Game earlier that month, Blue worked just six innings. He gave up one hit and no earned runs, improving to 19-3 with a 1.37 ERA

“He was magnetic,” said La Russa, who watched from the bench that day. “His fame spread so quickly, and he was so dynamic, people just came to see him – and he delivered. It was a circus. It was like Mark McGwire, as a batter, in ’98 and ’99.”

Buck Martinez, a former catcher, struckout three batters while facing Blue in 1971, and 15 total, his most against any pitcher in a 17-year career. Martinez recalls the occasional turn between the furious fastballs – “You could hear him spinning, it was so tight,” he said – and the whirlwind of excitement that followed Blue everywhere.

“He was much better than Mark Fidrych, but he attracted the same attention as the Bird did in ’76,” Martinez said, using Fidrych’s nickname. “Everyone wanted to see Vida pitch, even if he pinned it to you.”

Blue was a national sensation. Along the way, his starts were top-attended non-opening day games for six AL teams: Baltimore, Boston, Detroit, Kansas City, the Washington Senators and the Angels. At the Coliseum, his 20 starts accounted for 40 percent of the season’s attendance.

It was a happening, and Blue, just 22 years old, had all the hallmarks of crossover stardom: a cover of Time magazine, an attribution on “The Brady Bunch,” a spot on Bob Hope’s goodwill tour of military bases in South America. Vietnam; Okinawan, Japan; Thailand; and further. His contract talks with Charlie O. Finley, the cash-strapped owner of the A, made for comic fodder.

Blue: “Mr. Finley is a very persuasive man. He pointed out that I only used one arm last season.”

Hope: “So you’re signing the same contract for next year? Are you going to pitch for the same money?”

Blue: “Of course. Right-handed.”

Blue was actually a switch hitter and remains the answer to one of the great trivia questions: who was the last switch hitter to win American League MVP? He wasn’t much of a hitter (.104 for his career) but carried himself with unusual athletic grace.

“It was like watching Bo Jackson walk onto the ballpark, or Mike Trout,” said Martinez, a longtime announcer. “I was 10 years old when Willie Mays first walked into Seals Stadium and I thought, ‘Wow, that’s Willie Mays.’ You could see it. You didn’t need to see him do anything, and you didn’t need to see his number. But you knew that was Willie Mays. Same with Vida Blue.”

Blue grew up in Louisiana and his passion was football: He wore No. 32 for Jim Brown, idolized Johnny Unitas, and enjoyed doing it all: quarterback, cornerback, punters, kick returns. He turned down a football scholarship to the University of Houston after the death of his father, Vida Sr., a steelworker.

Blue, the eldest of six children, became the breadwinner of the family. He got a $25,000 bonus from the A’s, but he struggled to get much more out of Finley. He later turned down $2,000 from Finley to change his first name to “True”, as in True Blue – the name he shared with his father was so important to Blue that he ended up wearing VIDA on his back.

It was all part of Blue’s style, an attractive package of talent and flair that inspired future ace left-handers: a lanky kid from California’s Livermore High named Randy Johnson, and a man from Vallejo, California named Carsten Charles Sabathia Sr. . , whose son, CC, joined the Black Aces.

Longtime pitcher Jim “Mudcat” Grant used that term as the title of his 2006 book celebrating all black pitchers with 20 wins in a season. There are 15 such pitchers, with Sabathia (in 2010) and another southpaw, David Price (2012), as the most recent members.

Black participation in the majors has declined since the Blue era, with amateur costs rising, limited scholarship availability, and the sheer depth in international talent. Norris, 68, who joined the club in 1980, said Blue’s death was a reminder of what the sport lacks.

“The black pitchers had more swag than anyone else,” Norris said. “I was proud of that. It’s an attitude, man, walk out like you’re the best. The other team is like animals – they smell fear, and you fight that with your own ego.

That’s all, it’s ego. And that’s one thing Vida can go to the grave with: he was one of the greatest.”