The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (108 page)

Although the Oakland club is paying its players net salaries of more than eight million dollars in 1983, out of its major-league operating budget of twenty-two million dollars, I knew that the Haas fortune would certainly permit the club to bid in the blue-chip free-agent market for an occasional high-priced slugger or pitcher—a Dave Winfield, a Floyd Bannister, a Don Baylor—if Eisenhardt and the Haases so desired, but no moves have been made in that direction. Back in spring training this year, I had tried to probe Eisenhardt’s resolution about such matters by asking him if he would ever consider making an expensive late-season trade for one star pitcher or hitter if he felt that such an acquisition would probably nail down a pennant. This stratagem has become a commonplace in the latter stages of every season; the Milwaukee Brewers did it in August last year, when they acquired Don Sutton from the Houston Astros, taking over his salary of three-quarters of a million dollars and dispatching three of their highly regarded minor-league prospects to the Houston club.

“I’d think a long time before I tried it,” Eisenhardt said. “If the deal includes the transfer of good young players, it means you’re just mortgaging your future for the present. Qualitatively, what’s the worth of winning the whole thing versus the worth of being competitive each year? No one wants to accept second place, but unless you actually win the World Series you’ll see yourself as having lost in the end. I enjoyed watching Bud Selig’s team in the World Series last year”—the Brewers, that is, who lost to the Cardinals in seven games—“but I don’t think Bud enjoyed it much. I hope I’d resist the Golden Apple. But then, of course, coming along year after year with a team that never has a chance of being there is much, much worse.”

The Yankees never did quite catch up in that Friday-night game, although there were some troubling moments along the way: Tony Phillips made two frightful errors at short, and the visitors put the tying runs aboard in the eighth before Oakland reliever Steve McCatty got Ken Griffey to pop up for the third out, with the bases loaded. But the situation was never really critical, as it often seems to be when the A’s are playing—the team has a chronic difficulty in scoring runs, especially in late innings—and there was time and ease enough in the game for me to enjoy the look and feel of Oakland baseball: the eight World Championship banners (five won in Philadelphia, three in Oakland) arrayed across the outfield perimeter; the new home-game uniforms that have replaced Charlie Finley’s garish old tavern-league greens and yellows; and the youthful beat and bounce of the brilliant ballpark music. The A’s sound apparatus is a state-of-the-art system, and Roy and Wally have enjoyed themselves in the selection of its repertoire. When Steve Baker came in to relieve Tom Underwood during the Yankee seventh, we heard Carole King’s “You’ve Got a Friend,” and when Tom Burgmeier very soon arrived to relieve Baker, the Beatles’ “Help!” piped him aboard. The Yankee relievers, of course, heard Johnny Paycheck’s “Take This Job and Shove It.” The Oakland victory song is “Celebration,” by Kool and the Gang, and fans slouching out to the parking lots after a tough loss are sometimes reminded that “It’s Not Easy Being Green.” Ballpark organists also play mood music, of course, but for me the mighty Wurlitzer can suggest only hockey or prayer.

The A’s won by 8–4, with the last two Oakland runs scoring in ravishing fashion in the bottom of the eighth, when Tony Phillips laid down a dandy suicide-squeeze bunt, to score Kelvin Moore from third—and Davey Lopes from second, too, when the flustered Yankee pitcher threw the ball away. Showing Billy Martin the squeeze play is like hawking lavalieres on the sidewalk in front of Tiffany’s, and when it happened Roy said, “Getting the right count to set up the squeeze bunt is as good as the next-to-last move in Scrabble. Once it got to three and one, we had them.”

He was smiling and youthful when the game ended and we all trooped out of the box, and I was happy, too. Last summer, I had visited the A’s during a particularly dreary string of home-game losses to the White Sox and the Blue Jays. One of those beatings had come in a game in which the A’s had led Chicago by 5–0 in the middle innings, but then the White Sox sluggers hit a couple of monstrous home runs, and the A’s died at the plate once again—and on the base paths and the mound, too—and the visitors finally took it, 7–6, in the tenth. After that game, I got a lift into San Francisco with Roy and Wally—a trip of long silences and desultory broken-off sounds of mourning. “I wouldn’t want to be in that clubhouse tonight,” Wally murmured at one point, and Roy said, “That game is a perfect example of why you can’t do anything about a season like this. There’s just no place to
start.”
There was another longish stretch of uninterrupted highway hum, and then Roy, in a faraway, musing sort of voice, said, “You know, this sport might be a whole lot more interesting if there were no such thing as a home run. You could put up this enormous wall…”

Emil Roy Eisenhardt (the first name is vestigial) grew up in South Orange, New Jersey—a suburb just west of Newark that is so self-consciously tidy and green that it looks like a World’s Fair replica of a turn-of-the-century village—in what he describes as “the middle of the middle class.” His father, who died in 1980, was the director of purchasing for New York University, and his mother, who is seventy-two, taught college English and then linguistics in the New Jersey state-university system. Each of his parents had been the first family member to attend college. Roy’s paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Germany, was a baker. (The Eisenhardts are Catholic, but the combination of Roy’s name and his marriage into the Haas family has caused many people to assume that he is Jewish.) Roy, who has a younger brother and sister, was a versatile, extremely energetic member of his class at Columbia High School, in nearby Maplewood, where he belonged to the dramatic club, played bass drum in the band, and held down right field on the baseball team, in spite of inordinate and incurable shortcomings at the plate. He was also a Boy Scout, a home carpenter, and a woodworker, and he took piano lessons—as he still does: he tries to play a half hour to an hour every day, partly because Chopin and Schubert allow him to put baseball entirely out of his mind for the moment. Roy was a year ahead of his age in school, and what he remembers most about himself then is his immaturity. “One of the important things back men was to have everybody like you,” he once said to me. “When I went to Dartmouth”—he was in the class of 1960—“I fully expected to be elected president of my fraternity, but I wasn’t—a wonderful thing, because the shock of it began to shift me away from that external system of validation. I began to care more about my own ideas and values, and a little less about what people thought of me.” Another shift was away from baseball to rowing; he made the Dartmouth first boat, but thinks he wouldn’t have at a larger university. He was a naval ROTC cadet at Dartmouth, but switched into the Marine Corps upon graduation, serving two years on active duty in Okinawa (this was just before the American involvement in Vietnam), and rising to the rank of captain in the reserves. Law school ensued. He graduated thirteenth in his class at Boalt Hall, in 1965, and spent a further year studying tax law in Germany. “I loved the law, it turned out,” he says. “Not the practice of it so much as its ideas—the idea of our trying to define the rules we’re going to live by—and its examination of the history of ideas.”

By the late sixties, Eisenhardt was a young married lawyer in San Francisco, with a passionate fan’s interest in the San Francisco Giants. His first wife, Auban Slay, whom he married in 1965, told me that as she joined him at the altar during their wedding Roy whispered, “The Giants are leading, 3–1, in the fifth.” (They were divorced in 1976, but remain on amicable terms; Auban Eisenhardt is also a lawyer in San Francisco.) Roy Eisenhardt’s work at his firm, Farella, Braun & Martel, was mostly in business law—conglomerations, real-estate acquisition, and the like—and in 1974, when that palled, he began teaching law at Boalt Hall. A little later, he took over as coach of the U. Cal heavyweight freshman crew. “Maybe that’s what I really am—a teacher,” he once said. “I’d love to teach anything—how to grab an oar, how to paint a wall.” By 1979, he was a full-time professor at Boalt Hall, teaching courses in commercial law, bankruptcy, and real property. He tried to continue there on a part-time basis after taking over the A’s late in 1980, but the double load was too much. “I still miss it,” he says. “Sometimes I feel like Kermit in “The Muppet Movie,’ when he says, ‘Why did I ever leave the swamp?’” A close friend of Roy’s, Dr. Hirsch Handmaker (he is a nuclear radiologist, and now has come aboard as director of medical services with the A’s), does not quite agree. “The job with the A’s was
exactly
the right chance for Roy at that moment in his life,” he said to me. “The person and the place and the work came together in a miraculous sort of way. If you’re a fan of destiny, you really appreciate it.”

Destiny had also brought Roy and Betsy Haas together at a Chinese-cooking class. They were married in 1978. After I had come to be sufficiently at ease with Roy to raise the question, I asked him how he had felt about marrying into such a wealthy and distinguished family.

“It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said. “There hasn’t been a moment of discomfort about it, and that’s because the Haases are all so unintimidating and open and modest. They all have a basic and proper sense of values, and a great sense of humor. Everything about Walter reflects his sensitivity and feeling of concern. We talk almost every day—not so much for business as for the fun of it. The whole family is the same. I am in awe of the subtlety and passion of Wally’s involvement in our community efforts. He has a genius for sensing the proper areas and people for us to see, and for figuring out how we can be of use to them. The same sort of thing was true of Walter Haas, senior—Walter’s father—who ran the company before Walter did. He was still going to work on the bus every day when he was ninety. I remember a conversation he had with Betsy and me a few weeks before he died. He asked us if we were concerned about the future—how things were going in the country. We both said yes, we were, and he said, “So am I, so am I.” There he was, an old, old man, and he wasn’t thinking back and being sore about the New Deal or anything like that. He was worrying about what our country would be like for young people in the next twenty or thirty years. You can’t beat people like that.”

Bill Rigney, the white-haired, angular savant who serves with the A’s as Assistant to the President in Baseball Matters (he is a former manager of the Giants, the Twins, and the Angels, and he also does color commentary on the A’s’ telecasts), told me that Walter Haas had once asked him for whatever special advice he thought would be most useful to a newcomer to the game. “I told him, ‘Don’t fall in love with the players,’” Rig said. “‘They’ll do beautiful things for you out there. They’ll pitch a great game or drive in the winning run, but they’re also young and they can’t know and they don’t care, and they’ll break your heart, a lot of them, before you’re through.’” I asked if he thought Roy needed the same warning, and Rig said, “No, I think he’s got it figured out. But I hope he’ll never lose the kind of concern he has for his players. I’ve never seen the like of it in baseball.”

I had this conversation with Rig in the living room of the Eisenhardts’ narrow, comfortable house in the Cow Hollow section of San Francisco (a pink palazzo at the end of the same block belongs to Bob Lurie, who owns the San Francisco Giants), where we were having cocktails with Roy and Betsy and Rig’s wife, Paula, before going out to dinner together. Roy joined us, and we stood together at a big window looking out at the hillside, crowded with rooftops and tilted backyard gardens, which fell away steeply toward the bay, and, beyond that, at the sunlit banks of evening fog that were beginning to swirl in from the sea. Roy pointed down to his own garden and said, “I was doing a lot of digging up and replanting down there last summer, just when the team was beginning to go bad.” He laughed and shook his head. “That’s the best-dug dirt in northern California.”

As we left, Roy pointed out (at my request) several large and elegantly finished pieces of furniture in the house that he had made in his basement workshop, including a new nine-foot white-pine toy cabinet for Jesse, with lathed split-turnings on the corners, four doors, and eight interior-latch drawers on oak runners. “It’s an antidote,” Roy said of his woodworking. “You can complicate an easy job and try to make things come out perfectly—and I can listen to our road games on the radio while I’m doing it.”

We said goodbye to Betsy (the babysitter had crumped out, and Betsy was staying home with the kids), and she turned to Roy at the door and said, “Got your keys?” He shook his head and went off in search of them, and Betsy said, “He just can’t pay attention to some things. Last year, our car broke down, and it sat out there in front of the house for days and days before they came to fix it, and when they opened the door there was Roy’s wallet under the front seat.”

Roy returned and happily jingled the keys for us to see.

“Good,” said Betsy, kissing him. “No midnight pebbles against the windows tonight.”

The second game of the Yankee series, on Saturday afternoon, was almost better than the first. The sun shone, and the soft winds blew, and thirty-eight thousand baseball-entranced fans roared and cheered and made waves, while the pitchers—Mike Norris for the A’s and Shane Rawley for the Yanks—and fielders on the greensward together wove a lengthening skein of brilliant, scoreless innings. Norris, in a lather of intensity and mannerism on the mound, fanned nine batters with his screwball and darting heater, and Tony Phillips turned Dave Winfield’s rocketed grounder into a double play, and Dwayne Murphy cut down a Yankee base runner at third base with a mighty peg from center, and the A’s truly seemed to be having all the best of it until, in the bottom of the eighth, Mike Davis made a trifling, young-ballplayer’s sort of mistake on the base paths that amputated an Oakland rally, and the Yanks, suddenly reprieved, put Willie Randolph on second with a walk and a sack (Norris, kicking the dirt on the mound, was positive that the ball-four count had been strike three), and scored him when Winfield muscled a single into center against a tough, tough Norris pitch, up and in, and that was the ballgame, of course: 1–0 Yankees. Walter Haas, getting up from his seat in the box after the last out, said, “Boy, that was a game to remember. That’s the way baseball should be played. Nuts.”