August 25, 1980: Collision at the Coliseum: Ruppert Jones’s life-altering crash into an unpadded outfield wall

Two days after the announcement that the Oakland Athletics were being sold by Charlie Finley, A’s manager Billy Martin told reporters he had already spoken with the team’s new ownership about improvements needed at Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum.

“I met with the new owners all afternoon and one of the first things we’re going to do here is pad the outfield walls,” Martin said1 on August 25, 1980, about 30 minutes before the start of that night’s game against the New York Yankees.2

The padding would come too late for Yankees center fielder Ruppert Jones, who in the bottom of the first inning crashed headfirst into the plywood wall in center field.3 Jones was knocked unconscious and carried off the field on a stretcher with a separated shoulder that ended his season and a concussion that, he later said, dramatically altered the course of his life.

The Monday night game between the Yankees, clinging to a half-game lead in the AL East race over the Baltimore Orioles, and the A’s, 17 1/2 games behind the AL West-leading Kansas City Royals, drew the largest crowd of the year to the Coliseum—49,300.4

On the mound for the A’s was twenty-five-year-old Mike Norris, who entered the game with a 17–7 record, a 2.26 ERA, and 131 strikeouts in 214 2/3 innings. He was a contender for the Cy Young Award, along with Baltimore’s Steve Stone and several others, including New York’s Tommy John—that night’s opposing pitcher. The thirty-seven-year-old lefty started the day 17–6 with a 3.49 ERA and 53 strikeouts in 196 innings.5

Jones led off the game for the Yankees and struck out. Norris then allowed back-to-back singles to Bobby Murcer and Bob Watson before striking out Reggie Jackson and getting Lou Piniella to ground out to short for the inning-ending force.

In the bottom of the first, John allowed a leadoff single to Rickey Henderson, followed by a walk to Dwayne Murphy. That brought up Tony Armas, who hit a slicing line drive to deep center. Jones raced back and made an over-the-shoulder catch—then stumbled on the warning track and crashed headfirst into the plywood wall.

“Then there was the sickening thud that could be heard all the way to the Yankee dugout some 400 feet from the scene and Jones crumpled to the ground,” Bill Madden wrote in the New York Daily News.6

The ball trickled out of Jones’s glove as he lay unconscious on the warning track. Henderson and Murphy scored and Armas steamed into third as Piniella, the left fielder, retrieved the ball and threw it in before turning to check on Jones.

“He came close to swallowing his tongue, and he was knocked unconscious. A thing like that makes you think. It shakes you up,” Piniella said.7

A’s team physician Dr. Tom Richman and Yankees trainer Gene Monahan raced onto the field and tended to the motionless Jones for nearly 10 minutes. Thirty years later, Monahan told the Daily News he had never been more concerned about a player’s life.8

Jones was born in Dallas, Texas, but grew up in the Bay Area, graduating from Berkeley High School. Watching from the stands were his mother, wife, and mother-in-law, Madden reported: “Reggie Jackson, who was DH-ing, brought them into the clubhouse while the medical people continued to work on Jones.”9

The game resumed after Jones was carried from the field on a stretcher and taken to Merritt Hospital.10 Bobby Brown replaced Jones in center, and John retired the next two batters. Jim Essian then singled to knock in Armas for the third run of the inning before John retired Mario Guerrero for the final out. The A’s added two more runs in the second inning on an RBI single by Henderson and a bases-loaded walk to Dave Revering, and a sixth run in the bottom of the fourth when Jeff Cox scored on a double play.

In the bottom of the fifth, John was replaced by Gaylord Perry—three weeks shy of his 42nd birthday and with three seasons to go before retirement—who pitched the rest of the game, allowing three more runs on four hits and two walks.

Norris, meanwhile, went the distance, allowing just one run on seven hits and four walks while striking out seven. Watson supplied the Yankees’ lone run with a one-out homer in the eighth.

The 9–1 win, Norris’s fourth in a row and his 18th overall, earned the pitcher a ringing endorsement in the race for the AL Cy Young Award from New York’s Jackson, who thought Norris deserved it more than Stone, the perceived frontrunner.

“This kid’s got better numbers. He’s got numbers like Bob Gibson in ’68. He’s got numbers like the old guys,” said Jackson, who was teammates with Norris on the A’s in 1975. “Nineteen complete games and 65 or 70 hitless innings. You got a stat sheet there? Look at how many hits he’s given up in the number of innings pitched. Then look at our pitchers. We’ve got a pretty good pitching staff, right? Look at Tommy John or Ron Guidry. See what I mean?

“It’s a shame people don’t really understand the game. Bleeping people don’t understand.”11

The Yankees also lost to the A’s the following night, but the Orioles lost as well, leaving the Yankees with a slim half-game lead. They then returned to Yankee Stadium for an 11-game homestand and won 10 games, opening up a 4 1/2-game lead; they won the AL East by three games but were swept by the Royals in the American League Championship Series.

But baseball seemed of little importance compared to Jones’s condition. He said he woke up in the hospital 24 hours later. “Initially, I was just grateful to be alive,” he later said.12 He missed the rest of the season with a shoulder injury and concussion. He had already missed six weeks earlier that season after undergoing abdominal surgery to repair an appendectomy from 1978.

Jones was traded to the San Diego Padres during the following spring training and was an All-Star with them in 1982; he later played with the Tigers and Angels and half a season in Japan, hanging it up at age thirty-four after a 27-game stint with the Oklahoma City 89ers in 1989.

After the concussion, Jones said he had to drink himself to sleep almost every night. Addiction and depression nearly ruined his life. In a book Jones wrote about his injury and recovery called #NeverGiveUp, Jones said he was unaware his problems could be related to the incident until 2010, when Justin Morneau was diagnosed with a traumatic brain injury after a concussion.13

The incident led to an immediate call for improvements at the Coliseum and other ballparks.

“He hit the wall full tilt. That’s one of the reasons the major league players’ contract calls for padded walls,” Piniella said. “It’s greatly ignored a lot of places. Oakland is one of them.”14

The unpadded walls “are just one of the many glaring inadequacies that are the legacy of Charlie Finley’s threadbare regime here,” Madden wrote.15

But the problem was bigger than Oakland, Sports Illustrated reported.

“It would be tempting to many to make a scapegoat out of cheapskate Charlie Finley, who owned the A’s until last week, or the Oakland politicians who run the Coliseum, but the fact is both the American and National League offices have ducked the issue of safe walls, leaving them up to the individual clubs. As a result, some parks have padded walls, others do not. A number of parks have plywood walls that are supposed to give on impact. Oakland’s is one such. Others have wire fences. Atlanta had a wire fence until Brian Asselstine broke his ankle in 1978 when his spikes caught in the mesh. Now the Braves have Plexiglas with padding on top. Tiger Stadium has padding on the walls, but there is an auxiliary scoreboard that juts out dangerously in left field. Wrigley Field has brick walls covered with ivy, which the National League office says would be ‘impossible’ to pad.

“But what’s really incredible about all this is that the Major League Players Association, aside from a complaint now and then, has never moved effectively to protect its own members by insisting that there be safely padded walls everywhere. Indeed, its Safety and Health Committee no longer exists. But after Jones was carted off to the hospital, Marvin Miller, executive director of the association, said the committee would obviously have to be reinstated. He also vowed that the association would ‘move rapidly.’ Move rapidly to do what? To file a grievance in the Jones case, said Miller. Moreover, said Miller, there could be a lawsuit. The possible charge? ‘Extreme negligence.’”16

The A’s opened the 1981 season on the road; when they arrived in Oakland for the home opener on April 17, it was to a renovated ballpark.

“The game was played under bright, new lighting, and some of the fans sat in newly installed seating in the lower deck,” the New York Times reported. “They saw outfielders who weren’t afraid to go back on fly balls because, for the first time, the rear wall has been padded.”17

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org for pertinent information, including the box score and play-by-play, and Adam Ulrey’s SABR Biography Project biography of Ruppert Jones.

https://www.baseball-reference.com/boxes/OAK/OAK198008250.shtml

https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1980/B08250OAK1980.htm

https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/ruppert-jones/

Notes

1 Bill Madden, “Jones’ Injury Had a Cruel, Ironic Touch,” New York Daily News, August 27, 1980: 53.

2 King Thompson, “Yanks Lose More Than Game: Jones Injured,” San Francisco Examiner, August 26, 1980: 52. “The game was held up for almost half an hour because of the massive traffic tie-up outside the Coliseum. Part of the problem was that the circus was playing next door at the Arena.”

3 Robert H. Boyle, “Scorecard,” Sports Illustrated archives, September 8, 1980; retrieved January 16, 2026 from https://web.archive.org/web/20231006152129/https://vault.si.com/vault/1980/09/08/scorecard. “A number of parks have plywood walls that are supposed to give on impact. Oakland’s is one such.”

4 King Thompson, “Norris: Cy Young Hopeful?” San Francisco Examiner, August 26, 1980: 51. “Most of the players agreed that the record crowd helped psych them up. ‘I felt like I was in the World Series,’ said catcher Jim Essian.” Thompson reported the “half-price sellout crowd of 49,300” was “the largest ever at the Coliseum for a regular-season game.” However, it was in fact the third-largest regular season crowd to date according to attendance numbers reported on Baseball-Reference.com. The first A’s game in Coliseum history on April 17, 1968, drew a reported crowd of 50,164 to see the Wednesday night game against the Orioles. Four years later, on June 12, 1972, 50,182 people came to see the A’s play the Orioles on a Monday night. A year after the reported crowd of 49,300 for the August 25, 1980, game against the Yankees, a new record was set at the home opener on April 17, 1981, when 50,255 came to see the Friday night game against the Mariners. Opening Day the following year, April 6, 1982, drew a new record of 51,513. The 49,300 fans at the Coliseum the A’s drew on August 25, 1980, remained the fifth-largest regular-season crowd until 50,792 came to see the A’s play the San Francisco Giants—the first interleague regular-season game between the Bay Bridge rivals—on September 1, 1997. The largest crowd ever for an A’s game in Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum was 56,310 for another Battle of the Bay game, played July 21, 2018.

5 Stone, who had beaten the A’s in Oakland just two days earlier, was at the time 21–4 with a 2.94 ERA and 113 strikeouts in 190 innings. Others receiving consideration that year were Baltimore’s Scott McGregor, Kansas City’s Larry Gura and Dan Quisenberry, and New York’s John and Rich Gossage. McGregor entered the day at 15–6 with a 3.20 ERA and 88 strikeouts in 182 2/3 innings. Gura was 17–5 with a 2.25 ERA and 85 strikeouts in 220 1/3 innings, while Quisenberry was 10–4 with a 2.74 ERA and 30 strikeouts in 101 2/3 innings, with a league-leading 29 saves in 32 opportunities. Gossage was 5–1 with 22 saves in 24 opportunities, with a 2.24 ERA and 71 strikeouts in 72 1/3 innings.

6 Madden.

7 Al Mari, “Yanks Lose Game and Jones,” (Nyack, New York) Journal-News, August 26, 1980: 18. Murcer, who ran over from right field, was quoted by Madden: “He slipped on the warning track, then slipped again as he approached the wall. The whole side of his head hit the wall. He was unconscious on the ground the whole time although his eyes were open.”

8 Wayne Coffey, “Healing Thyself: In 48th Season with Yankees, Monahan Faces Lonely Battle,” New York Daily News, May 9, 2010: 81. “Late in August in 1980, in the first inning of a game with the A’s, Jones, a center fielder, crashed into the cement [sic] outfield wall in Oakland-Alameda Coliseum. Jones did not get up, did not even move. When Monahan arrived, Jones was unconscious. His tongue was back, blocking his trachea. Monahan used forceps to move his tongue and enable him to breathe. He stabilized him for the trip to the hospital. Monahan has never been more worried about a player’s welfare.”

9 Madden.

10 United Press International, “Yanks Routed, 9-1, But Birds Fall Too,” Paterson (New Jersey) News, August 26, 1980: 13. Merritt Hospital is now known as Alta Bates Summit Medical Center.

11 King Thompson, “Norris: Cy Young Hopeful?” San Francisco Examiner, August 26, 1980: 51. Norris finished the year 22–9 with a 2.53 ERA and finished second to Stone (25–7, 3.23 ERA) in the Cy Young Award voting, though they did tie in first-place votes.

12 Adam Ulrey, “Ruppert Jones,” SABR Biography Project, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/ruppert-jones/.

13 Ruppert Jones with Ryan Dempsey, #NeverGiveUp: A Memoir of Baseball Traumatic Brain Injury (independently published, 2021).

14 Associated Press, “Largest A’s Crowd of Season Watches Yanks Lose,” (Bridgewater, New Jersey) Courier-News, August 26, 1980: 15.

15 Madden.

16 Boyle.

17 Ira Miller, “Records Are Falling for 10-0 A’s,” New York Times, April 19, 1981: S6.