Let's say he's talking about 1971-1974, and let's look at team OPS+ and team ERA+. One thing to note is that Oakland's ballpark generally ran park factors of around 95, and if you break that down into components, it was particularly good at suppressing batting average. In 1971 and 1972, the league OPS+ balanced out to 93; after that, with the DH rule, the league OPS+ became 100. So I'll just add 7 points to the team OPS+ in 1971 and 1972 to make it look right.

1971: Oakland team OPS+ 108, ERA+ 109
1972: Oakland team OPS+ 111, ERA+ 111
1973: Oakland team OPS+ 108, ERA+ 109
1974: Oakland team OPS+ 105, ERA+ 113

In all it looks pretty balanced between offense and defense. Of course Reggie is full of it when he says that they didn't have the batting stats but managed to get their hits at key times. They did have the batting stats, as a power hitting team in a pitcher's park.

But one other thing jumped out at me looking at the AL stats for those years: Baltimore was better than Oakland in OPS+ and ERA+, usually (except in 1972 when the offense went sour) a lot better. Either there's a large East/West divide in talent in that AL (which I don't particularly see) or Oakland was lucky to win as many ALCS as it did.

Reading that again: Reggie was a little more nuanced that I was giving him credit for; he was essentially acknowledging that they were a power hitting team. When is says that Rudi was their only .300 hitter: it's actually true that Rudi in 1972 was the only regular who hit .300 in any of the four years. And 1972 was the lowest-scoring year of the bunch - an extreme fluke year in which that AL was at dead ball/1968 scoring levels.

A number of members of this team have attracted some attention and support for the Hall of Merit. Reggie, of course, is in, but Campaneris, Bando, and Tenace have all drawn votes.

As for Reggie himself and .300: he never had a .300 season average. But take the very years I'm talking about, 1971-1974 and run them through the bb-ref neutralizer to the default 4.46 R/G level, and his seasonal averages for those four years are .295, .301, .312, .316.

As for Reggie himself and .300: he never had a .300 season average.

He hit .300 in 1980.

I remember reading a biography of Reggie when I was a kid that said it was a big deal to him to hit .300. The happy ending was that 1980 season. I see now that it was only rounded up from .2996. It's like my childhood was a lie.

.300 was a psychological sticking point for some of those '60s-'70s sluggers. It was the same with Mike Schmidt, who only hit .300 in the strike year of 1981, and was defensive at the time about his inability to hit for average. I'm glad Adam Dunn doesn't have such a hangup :)

The .2996 was no accident. Reggie got a hit in his first at-bat of the last game of the 1980 season, and was immediately taken out. Sort of an anti-.406 story, although obviously without the drama.

As BDC notes, .300 was much more of a talisman than it is today. Nobody was there to tell Mickey Mantle (143 OPS+ in his final, terrible, awful season) that he had plummeted all the way down to being as good as Tony Oliva.

But one other thing jumped out at me looking at the AL stats for those years: Baltimore was better than Oakland in OPS+ and ERA+, usually (except in 1972 when the offense went sour) a lot better. Either there's a large East/West divide in talent in that AL (which I don't particularly see) or Oakland was lucky to win as many ALCS as it did.

Baltimore swept the ALCS in 1971. That was the last of their truly dominant years. Their hitting went south in '72 and they didn't win the East.

In 1973 and 1974 the O's were better on paper, but the A's starters outperformed the O's starters in the playoffs, and that was the critical difference. In 1973 it came down to McNally's implosion, Holtzman's brilliance, and Hunter's dominance combined with Alexander's collapse. And in 1974 Holtzman, Blue and Hunter pitched as good a set of back-to-back-to-back games as you'll ever see---1 runs in 27 innings---and that's what won it for them. Reggie may have been onto something with his "when it counted" rhetoric, because in the 1972-73-74 postseasons, the A's were 14 and 5 in one run games. That's what great pitching depth can do for you.