Blue mood

 So I find out over the weekend that Vida Blue is dead at 73, and, damn, that can't be right. Wasn't it just yesterday he was 22 and ringing up the entire American League?

Sure it was.

Sure, the people who say 1971 was 52 years ago are lying through their incisors, because Vida Blue is out there on the mound. Here's Joe Rudi and Sal Bando and Reg-gie and Bert Campaneris. Catfish Hunter is over there in the bullpen, awaiting his next start, and Rollie Fingers is twirling his Snidely Whiplash moustache, and the mod, hairy, party-on Oakland A's are confounding the buttoned-up Cincinnati Reds.

Vida Blue was the child wonder in all of that, and '71 was his year. A year after pitching a no-hitter at 21, the kid went 24-8 with a 1.81 ERA and 301 strikeouts. He pitched an astounding 24 complete games, eight of them shutouts. At the end of the season, he became one of only 11 pitchers in the history of the game to win both the American League Cy Young and MVP awards.

After that there was a falling out with Charlie Finley and stints with the Giants and Royals, and a brief stretch in prison in the early '80s when he got caught with a tenth of an ounce of cocaine -- not an unusual occurrence in those years. But he came back in '85, and later became a mentor to other pitchers, most notably Dave Stewart.

He died Saturday in a San Francisco hospital, way too damn young. Cancer got him. But before that he got three World Series rings and six All-Star appearances and that unforgettable summer of '71, when he was young and had a left arm touched by the gods, and all of the American League was swinging and missing.

That year is long gone now. And I feel old again, knowing the man is, too.