The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  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.”

  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 sta
r 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.”