The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (107 page)

Charlie Finley, who brought the A’s to Oakland in 1968, ran a different sort of show: a one-man band. A self-made millionaire insurance man, he ruled the club in absentia—by telephone from Chicago, for the most part. (Sometimes he listened to broadcasts of entire games over the long-distance phone.) He got rid of sixteen managers in twenty years, wrangled with players and commissioners, inflicted buttercup uniforms and “Hot Pants Day”s and team mustaches and a mascot mule named Charlie O on the fans, but he also built up the wonderfully exciting and combative Reggie Jackson-Catfish Hunter-Sal Bando-Joe Rudi ball club that dominated both leagues in the early nineteen-seventies. When free agency arrived, Finley turned off the switch and divested himself of his stars and his scouts—and, in time, his fans. The stripped-bare look of the Coliseum offices was a paradigm of the A’s status in the Bay sports scene when the Haas family took over the club. Walter Haas, who is now sixty-seven and has moved on from the routine management of Levi Strauss (he is chairman of the executive committee, and the company is now headed by his brother, Peter E. Haas), is almost the precise opposite of his predecessor. The great-grandnephew of the original Levi Strauss, who sold his first blue-jeans to prospectors in the gold rush, Haas inherited a major family fortune and a family tradition of modest hard work and dedicated, nearly anonymous community service; he may be the only trustee of the Ford Foundation whose name does not appear in
Who’s Who.
His decision to purchase the A’s—made in concert with his son and son-in-law, since it was his intention from the beginning to turn the whole shebang over to them—was motivated by his conviction that an imaginatively operated, community-oriented sports franchise would be the best and quickest means of doing something useful for the racially and economically distressed city of Oakland. Haas is an informal and extremely courteous gent, with pink cheeks and ruddy good looks. He is a serious trout fisherman and tennis player, and perhaps the world’s No. 1 rooter for and benefactor of his alma mater’s football team, the University of California Golden Bears. I first met him about a year after he had purchased the club, and he told me that he was not very well informed about baseball and that he expected not to have any serious day-to-day involvement with the fortunes of the club. Last March, in Scottsdale, during a dinner with Roy and several of the team’s baseball counsellors, he listened intently all through a multicourse conversation about the problems and expectations of thirty or forty different Oakland pitchers and catchers and fielders and hitters, and then leaned across the table and murmured to me, “I take back what I said last year about not getting hooked. This is a whole lot harder than the pants business.”

Charlie Finley’s neglect of the shop was a considerable boon to the early Haas-Eisenhardt plans for upgrading the franchise. (“That contrast in reputations was a public-relations
dream,”
Andy Dolich said to me.) Another asset was a spirited young ball team, piloted by Billy Martin. The very first Eisenhardt decision was to keep Billy in place—and, in fact, to increase the scope of his authority by making him director of player personnel as well, thus putting him in charge of training all the crab’s ballplayers at every level. The young Oaklands included outfielders Rickey Henderson, Dwayne Murphy, and Tony Armas, whom many baseball writers were calling the best picket line in either league, and a staff of durable, strong-armed pitchers, led by Mike Norris, Rick Langford, and Steve McCatty.
*
The remainder of the roster was of lesser quality, with notable shortfalls in infield defense and relief pitching, but in 1981 the club jumped away to a terrific start by winning its first eleven games in succession, and although it declined a bit after the lull of the midseason strike, it captured the American League West half-pennant by dispatching the Kansas City Royals in three straight games, in the strike-imposed, appendixlike miniseries that year. To no one’s real surprise, the A’s then lost the championship playoffs, being swept by the Yankees in three straight, but several events in that series stuck in my mind. For one thing, the team president did not accompany the Oakland players to New York, where they were to open with two games at Yankee Stadium—a curious, almost unique turn of affairs. No one could explain it to me at the time, but later on, when I knew the team and its people better, I understood. Eisenhardt had decided to stay home and watch the games on television because he sensed that his persona and presence, which were at such a remove from the public attitudes of George Steinbrenner, might make for headlines and distraction, and so diminish from the accomplishments of his young ballplayers. And then, when the action swung out to Oakland, where the Yankees’ Dave Righetti ended the A’s season with a 4–0 shutout, it became clear to me that the fans out there, although badly disappointed, were not disheartened or angry about this unhappy finale. They remained to the end of the game, all forty-seven thousand of them, cheering and yelling in the sunshine, and when the game was over they stayed on and cheered some more, at last summoning their heroes back out onto the field for a final roaring thank you and farewell.

The next year—last year—was different, of course. Like a lot of other fans, I was paying much closer attention to the A’s this time around, but nothing really went right all year. It rained ceaselessly in spring training, and the pitchers’ arms never quite got in shape, and then a long and debilitating series of injuries meant that the club’s thin line of regulars rarely played together on any given day. McCatty and Norris both went on the disabled list with shoulder problems, and the club pitching sank from its 3.30 earned-run average, which was second-best in the league in 1981, to 4.54 in 1982, which was next to worst. Rickey Henderson did set an all-time, both-leagues record with his one hundred and thirty stolen bases, but that wonder seemed to boost the team’s home-attendance figures more than its place in the standings. The club finished fifth, twenty-five games behind the division-leading Angels. A further casualty was the manager, Billy Martin, who, in psychological terms at least, was also disabled during the summer’s hard going. Losing has always been a special hazard for this intense, bitterly driven man, and his team’s misfortunes visibly wore down his confidence, his ability to lead his troops, and, in the end, his self-control. This had happened to him in other years, of course, and with different clubs, but the shock of it and the sadness of it were not less because of that. One day in late August, Martin indulged himself in obscene telephone harangues directed at two officials of the club (he had asked to have his contract extended by five years, and the wish had not been granted), and then, in a rage, demolished the furniture and fixtures in his clubhouse office. He was released in October, after the end of the season, and since then, of course, he has resumed his post at the helm of the Yankees. For the A’s, it turned out, almost the only resemblance to the 1981 campaign was the final home game, when the fans again stayed to the very end—it was a meaningless game against the Royals—and then once again summoned their players back to the field with their sustained and even more surprising cheers.

Anyone who mourns the decline of baseball as a family game should try to arrange a visit to the owners’ boxes in the first-base, upper-deck sector of the Oakland Coliseum, from which vantage point I took in a swatch of A’s home games in late May this year. A stream of visitors—A’s brass, A’s scouts, an occasional reporter, friends and relations, friends of friends—kept changing the dimensions of the party, but the regulars there included Roy Eisenhardt and Wally Haas; Walter Haas and his wife, Evie; Roy’s wife, Betsy, and their daughter, Sarah; and a large, cheerful retired Oakland cop, Sarge Ivey, who directed traffic at the door, dispensed beer and soft drinks, and rooted louder than anyone else. Everyone was really in the games, except perhaps for Sarah, who was four months old; once or twice in the middle innings Betsy took Sarah over to the back of an adjoining box for a quiet meal. For the Saturday-afternoon tilt, we were joined by Sarah’s brother, Jesse, who is four years old, and by Wally’s daughters Simone, who is nine, and Charlotte, four and a half (Wally’s wife, Julie, who is a textile designer, was away in New York on a business trip), and by three or four small cousins, whose names and ages and connections I didn’t quite catch, and by a couple of babysitter fans as well. Jesse wore a full A’s uniform (the all-white home-game getup), with “jesse” across the back. Charlotte wore a pretty flowered Liberty-print dress and a player-size pair of official A’s wristbands. Toys and clothes and sandwiches and modelling clay and raisins scattered themselves around the box carpets, and Jesse and Charlotte climbed back and forth over the knees and feet of their parents and grandparents and the other baseball people there, who absently caressed them or gave them a hand up while they stared past them and down at the riveting business on the field. The A’s were playing the Yankees, so the games had the sense of omen and anxiety that the famous Gothamites bring to every park they play in around the league, and there was a further edge of significance to it all this time, for this was Billy Martin’s first trip back to Oakland, and hordes of fans had showed up to welcome him with loud and cheerfully mixed messages. They were good games, it turned out, and the special quirks and flavors of Oakland rooting added to our pleasures—a gap-toothed cheerleader known as Krazy George (he is a former schoolteacher who is paid by the A’s for his appearances), who whanged on a tambourine and conducted the multitudes with Wagnerian passion, and the popular “A’s Waves” way of cheering, during which the customers suddenly rise and yell, section by section, quickly and in unison, round and round the park, madly waving their arms and screeching together in a rolling, accelerating vortex of fervor and foolishness.
**

Eisenhardt watches games with an abstracted, almost silent intensity, sometimes chewing on his thumb. Wally is more vocal, and tends to groan when things are going poorly; occasionally he rises from his seat, groaning, and turns his back on the field. The senior Haases, who usually sat behind me, commented to each other on almost every pitch, and clapped for every particle of Oakland good fortune. The Friday-night opener, which pitted the Yankees’ Bob Shirley against the A’s veteran Tom Underwood, went the right way from the outset, when the Oaklands scored three runs in the first inning and added another on Rickey Henderson’s homer in the second, to move off to a 4–1 lead. “Good!” said Evie Haas. “Wonderful! Now let’s get more!”

“I know you,” Walter said. “You always want the score nine to one.”

“There’s such a
logic
to nine to one,” she said.

Earlier, I had stood with Eisenhardt down on the field in a little fenced runway that connects the A’s’ dugout to the clubhouse, where he remains during the first few pitches and outs of almost every game. Just before the game, he talked briefly with his chief groundskeeper and with one of his security people, and during the anthem (a cappella, by Mickey Thomas, of the Jefferson Starship band, to faint accompanying Eisenhardt winces) his gaze roamed around every corner and level of the field and park. He was housekeeping, but once the game began he gave it his absolute attention. He seemed even more preoccupied than usual, and for a moment I wondered if it wasn’t because of the presence of Billy Martin over there in the wrong dugout. Before this game, reporters had searched out Roy for his comments, and to one of them he said, “This weekend is nothing like the press has made out. It’s nothing to be ‘handled’ by me. Billy came to find me when he got here, and I went to find him. We’re friends. There’s nothing to be ‘patched up’ or discussed. A decision was made last year. Neither one of us wanted it, but we both accepted it. No substantive issues were created. I don’t want to quantify a friendship. OK?”

OK. The reporter didn’t exactly love this reply, but its content was clear, all right. A day or two later, in a quieter moment, Eisenhardt said to me, “These games were a coda for Billy and me. It’s like when you meet your ex-wife at a party somewhere for the first time after your divorce. It happens, and then it’s over.” And he went on to say something about how pleased Billy had seemed to meet the new baby, Sarah, for the first time, and how affectionate Billy had always been with Jesse and with Wally’s daughters. “Billy is wonderful with kids,” he said. “He has that touch. It’s a great gift.”

Roy’s preoccupation, I realized, was with his team. Uncertainty surrounds every ball club from April to October, but there were more than the usual number of doubts and hovering question marks about this particular club, starting with its new manager, Steve Boros—a scholarly, low-key baseball man in his mid-forties who had coached for the Expos and the Royals and had managed for six years in the low minors, but who was taking the helm of a major-league team for the first time. Injuries and disappointments had brought down the 1982 A’s, and this year the club was already in the same sort of trouble. Third baseman Carney Lansford, who had come over from the Red Sox in a trade for Tony Armas and was expected to solidify the left side of the infield, had missed a lot of early-season games because of the death of his infant son, and was now laid up with a sprained wrist. Catcher Mike Heath and pitchers Dave Beard and Rick Langford were also sidelined (Langford had just gone on the twenty-one-day disabled list), and another starter, Steve McCatty, was coming back from severe shoulder problems and so far had made only a few brief appearances in relief. For all this, the club stood at nineteen and seventeen in the young season, one game behind the division-leading Texas Rangers.

Many chief executives of big-league teams could match this list of apprehensions and misfortunes, for most of the twenty-six clubs stumble along in a condition of semi-shock and disrepair during the better part of each season, but the burdens of baseball reality are even heavier for an owner who has chosen a particular path out of conviction rather than economic necessity, and not only wants to win but wants to succeed. Eisenhardt, I knew, had strong feelings in this regard. “Anybody who just sets out to win, who promises his fans that their dub will be a winner, is in trouble from the start,” he once said, ‘because it’s built in that even the best club will win six games and lose four, and this means that almost half the time your fans will be in a state of outrage. We want fans to come to the park for the baseball—for the pleasures of the game and of being at the game—and if we also happen to win, then fine. We want to be respectable and competitive, and we want to win our share of everything, including championships. But the way to do that is by being patient and foresighted. You can’t just buy it or grab for it—we’ve already seen too much of that in the game, and its results.”