Throwback Thursday: Herb Washington, Baseball's First And Last "Designated Stealer"

(Editor's note: Each week VICE Sports will take a look back at an important sports event from this week in sports history. We are calling this regular feature Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.)

Forty-one years ago this week, the Oakland Athletics pulled the plug on one the strangest experiments in modern sports history: They released a baseball player who was never really a baseball player in the first place. His name was Herb Washington, and he was 23 years old, and over the course of two-year major-league career in 1974 and 1975, he did not have a single at-bat, or play a single inning in the field.

No, Washington was signed by A's owner Charlie Finley to do one thing, and one thing only. Run.

Finley, upon signing Washington, a sprinter out of Michigan State, referred to him as his "designated stealer." Washington had tied or set world records in the 50- and 60-meter dashes while in college; he had tried, but failed, to qualify for the 1972 Olympics in Munich, and had briefly dabbled in football a la Dallas Cowboys sprinter-turned-wide receiver Bob Hayes.

But Finley, always an iconoclast, saw in Washington an opportunity. He offered Washington—who hadn't played baseball since high school--a $45,000 no-cut contract with a $20,000 signing bonus, with a Finley-esque clause that mandated Washington grow a mustache by opening day. (Unable to grow facial hair, Washington colored in his stubble with an eyebrow pencil.) "I'm confident he'll win at least five games," Finley told reporters. "He can be very valuable to the A's."

It would have been easy to dismiss Washington's signing as an attention-seeking gimmick, or perhaps the Major League Baseball version of the stoned dorm room insight hey man, why don't they just have a sumo wrestler play goalie in hockey? Only Washington wasn't a joke: that season, in 1974, he stole 29 bases—he was also caught stealing 16 times—and scored 29 runs, and the A's went to the World Series. He tried to make up for his steep learning curve, studying baserunning with Los Angeles Dodgers great Maury Wills. But Washington, while well-liked, was never fully accepted by his teammates. It was too strange; it felt like an affront to the guys in the clubhouse who had actually come up playing baseball. He was, in a sense, the polar opposite of the archetype John Kruk would cling to a couple of decades later. "He's a great athlete," teammate Reggie Jackson said, "but he's not a baseball player."

Remarks like that led Washington to get up during a team meeting and demand his teammates give him a chance. "I wasn't like some scared rookie," he said. "I mean, I was a champion, a world-class athlete …. So I was confident and prideful. I knew I could do the job."

Over the course of his brief major-league tenure, Washington became a fascination. At one point, he said, Chicago White Sox first baseman Dick Allen—a well-known horse breeder—felt his ankles in the midst of studying the structure of Washington's legs. He trash-talked New York Yankees catcher Thurman Munson, stealing a base after Munson had threatened him with embarrassment if he tried to run on him. He was having fun, and he knew his role—a few times, A's manager Alvin Dark offered him an opportunity to hit, and Washington refused. "I knew I'd be in the record book if I never batted," he said.

As it turned out, he would wind up in the record book anyway, for the most ignominious of reasons: During Game 2 of the 1974 World Series, Washington was sent in to pinch-run for Joe Rudi. Washington, representing the tying run, was then picked off first base by the Dodgers' Mike Marshall. ("It's simply experience over immaturity," broadcaster Vin Scully would say.) This came after catcher and team captain Sal Bando had said he'd rather Washington not play in the World Series, in case he made an inexorable error.

"You got 24 guys who regret he's even on the ballclub," the A's Gene Tenace said in the wake of Washington's gaffe. "They know the only thing he can do is run … I really like the guy … When he was picked off, nobody criticized him—nobody said anything on the bench. They knew how he felt. They knew it wasn't really his fault."

In the end, it would become a footnote, as Game 2 of that series was the only one the A's would lose on their way to the World Championship; in the end, Washington would take home a $35,000 World Series share, thereby earning over $100,000 merely for running the bases.

Washington didn't last much longer—after the A's signed another pinch-running specialist who could also play the outfield, Washington was released in the first week of May in 1975. It was not, he said, his greatest athletic disappointment; that was his failure to qualify for the 1972 Olympics.

After his release, Washington briefly joined the professional track circuit, then took a job with Michigan Bell before purchasing the first of several McDonald's franchises in 1981. Eventually, he formed a company, based near Youngstown, Ohio, that runs more than 20 McDonald's franchises throughout that state and Pennsylvania. He also purchased a small share of the Cincinnati Reds. And in 2014, on the 40th anniversary of the A's World Series victory, Washington returned to the Coliseum for the first time since then.

"I felt like if I had spent the time in baseball that I did in track, I could have played," Washington said. "I just had not done the kind of training that was necessary to compete at that level."