by Roger Angell
Dwayne Murphy, the A’s center fielder, denied Seaver’s allegation about teams in the American League West. “I’ve never heard that on this club,” he said. “And I’d have heard it if it was going around. Nobody wants to play .500 ball for a career. What you do hear when you’re going bad is some people beginning to blame others. They’re pointing fingers. It’s always wrong, because one man can’t do it for you—can’t make you win and can’t lose it for you. It’s a team effort, either way.” He paused—he is a quiet man, and speaks very softly—and I had to lean closer to hear what came next: “But I don’t know the other side, really. I’ve never been on a real winning club, except in ’81, when we got to those playoffs in the short season. I tell you, I’m dying to find out what it’s like to win.” He paused again and then repeated himself, even more quietly. “I’m dying to be there.”
Tony LaRussa said, “There are clubs that have some success in the early part of the season and think that’s where their club is going to end up, but this isn’t always the case. There are clubs that have lost for a while and think that’s it—it’s over. But there are always those clubs that seem to be able to pick themselves up, no matter what they’ve done, because they have a history of doing well in the end. The Yankees. The Baltimore Orioles. To some degree, what we’re all trying to do is extend the good side and cut down on the bad. It’s difficult, but it isn’t so hard that you just throw your hands in the air and say it can’t be done. You try to do some little things. You want to make sure that the club is together—that you do things together. A little togetherness. You’d be surprised how often you’ll notice that a winning club has the habit of going to places together on the road. They’re at the same watering holes. On a losing club, guys are sort of embarrassed to be seen together. Playing better ball can make such a quick difference. It’s so much more fun. I’ve been watching the Giants this year, because Roger Craig has his guys convinced of that. There may be a few people in baseball who are as good as Roger Craig, but none who are better. None. He’s also got his coaches and players playing one game at a time, which is the whole trick. Back in 1982, the White Sox made a real strong comeback at the middle of the season. We’d won fifteen out of eighteen and put ourselves two and a half or three games out of first place. Then the nineteenth came along—it was against the Rangers, a road game. I wasn’t there, because my first daughter was being born, and Charlie Lau had the club. We were down 1–0 in the top of the ninth, and we got two two-out hits—Squires and LeFlore—and that tied it up, 1–1. In the tenth or eleventh inning, we had a good two-run rally and took the lead, but in the bottom of the inning Dave Hosteller hit a three-run homer for them, and we lost it. Later, I heard a lot of people say, ‘Oh, wasn’t that a shame—that was the night the White Sox lost the pennant.’ Bullshit. Sure you get your heart broken in this game. But what happened after that game was that this real depressed, we-lost-it atmosphere took over. We hadn’t learned to handle that. What’s worse than losing in extra innings? What’s worse is carrying it over and losing two or three more. It’s a million times worse. That’s what you want to be afraid of.
“I think fear of not coming through can be a real motivator, no matter where you are or who you’re up against. Right now, we’re playing the Red Sox three games and then the Blue Jays three games, and I’m worried to death. What you have to do is try. I’m scared to death that between now and October we’ll only be ordinary. If I do a job, we should at least be decent.”
I took in parts of the Oakland-Boston games in Roy Eisenhardt’s private box, behind first base, which offered a perfect view of the action below and of the pleasant, sun-drenched park (two of the games were afternoon affairs) and of the pains of major-league ownership. Eisenhardt, who is in his forties, is lean and athletic, and I sometimes have the impression that he would enjoy baseball more if he could be in uniform and out on the field himself. He watches a game with more intensity than anyone else I know, and I noticed now that he seemed almost wary about his team’s improved fortunes and its suddenly brisk and efficient brand of play. He responded warmly to good news and surprises—a stolen base by Dave Kingman; another sparkling stop by Griffin, far behind second base; a pinch-hit single by Canseco, who had been struggling at the plate in recent games—but then he would resume his grave and abstracted view of the events before us. It had been a difficult summer for the Oakland club, which had begun the season with such high hopes but had seen most of the good news and most of the luck fall on the Giants, who are the perennial Bay rivals of the A’s for a baseball audience that may not be quite large enough or dedicated enough to sustain two major-league clubs. Since purchasing the club, in 1980, the Haas family, which owns Levi Strauss, has made large investments in the refurbishing of the Oakland team and ballpark, and in the essential minor-league chain and scouting system, but the expected accompanying resuscitation of the team’s fortunes on the field has been frustratingly slow in coming, as we have seen, and fans have not turned out in sufficient numbers to prevent a flow of red ink. The A’s have cut back by trading away some high-salary stars, like Rickey Henderson (who went to the Yankees in 1985 in return for five younger prospects), but the club lost five and a half million dollars last year, and it seems clear that the rewards of good will and good works alone cannot be expected to keep the current owners in baseball forever. Over the last couple of years, there have been sporadic rumors that the club might be sold and moved to another city, but shortly before my visit the A’s concluded an agreement with the city of Oakland to extend their lease on the Oakland Coliseum through the year 2000. In return, the club received a five-year low-interest loan of fifteen million dollars, a larger share of the Coliseum food-and-beverage revenues, and a promise that local business and industrial concerns would be recruited to take on a share of the A’s losses; the agreement also includes an escape clause that would permit the club’s departure by 1991, if revenue and attendance figures go below certain minimum levels.
Eisenhardt is a friend of mine, and I worried about him when the news turned bad for the A’s this summer, because his complex appreciation of baseball and his concern for its future deserve better returns, to my way of thinking. Losing is always painful, as we have seen, but what Eisenhardt was forced to watch from his box this summer may have been something far more costly and difficult to accept than a few failed rallies and lost ballgames. When I talked to him between innings, he did not seem embittered by the team’s poor record to date, but he told me that he had been startled by some hostile reactions in the sporting press (“The A’s stink” was the way a mid-June column in the San Francisco Chronicle began, and it went on to blame Eisenhardt and Alderson personally for the club’s “complete inability to develop young pitchers or to keep the ones they have in working order”) and by some vindictive, almost wildly angry letters from A’s fans.
“Losing is a lightning rod for frustrations, many of which have nothing at all to do with sports,” Eisenhardt said at one point. “I don’t think this bitterness is anything new, but its level is rising. People everywhere have highly polarized emotions just now, and they express them directly and often inappropriately. I think high player salaries have something to do with it, because there’s always an accompanying and absolutely unjustified expectation of success. Television presents this stream of winning players and winning teams, which leads to artificially heightened expectations and an artificial, monolithic view of the world. A majority of the teams in baseball are losing money, and sometimes I’m not sure the game can survive the fans’ unremitting demands for success. That’s inconsistent with the genetic nature of baseball—what it’s really like. I worry about it, because so many young people are coming to baseball through television. That’s inescapable, but it leads to inattention and anger. If your team isn’t winning, you turn off the set or switch to one of the eighty other channels. You don’t stay with things.”
I suggested that a winning team might make a very large difference in the respo
nse of the A’s fans.
“Of course it would,” he said. “And our fans deserve it. But no team wins forever, and nowadays no team even seems able to repeat as a winner. It’s important for fans to be able to use professional sports as an outlet for their hopes and frustrations, but it would be better if we could keep that in proportion. You see that sort of balance at the Cubs’ games, and it’s beautiful. For some reason, there’s a different perspective at Wrigley Field—a clearer understanding of failure as a consistent part of baseball. Because ball teams play every day, the chances for failure are always high, but the Cubs fans somehow understand that. It’s a higher level of baseball culture. I think that’s the model we should be striving for.”
Just after the A’s had won the third game against the Red Sox, completing their unexpected sweep, I ran into Sandy Alderson in a corridor outside the A’s clubhouse. Rock music came floating out of the locker room, along with the raucous, unmistakable sounds of young men who have just won a game. I said to Alderson that I had heard some of the Boston writers in the press box talking about their team’s injuries and wondering how the Sox could be expected to win when there were so many substitutes and rookies—names like Romine, Stenhouse, Romero, and Tarver—in their lineup just now.
“That’s exactly what we went through,” Alderson said. “We still are—look at Dave Stewart, who pitched such a great game for us today. He’s 3–0 as a starter now, but he was just a pickup for us. The Phillies had released him, but we knew he’d had major-league experience and we signed him up in May to play at Tacoma. Then we had all those injuries, and we brought him up. The same goes for Doug Bair. It’s a matter of economics as well as necessity. Very few teams can afford to keep a full line of experienced major-league players on hand these days. We’re all playing with twenty-four-man rosters this year, to save money, but you’ll see a lot of clubs looking around and then picking up experienced older players when they need them. Like the Cards, who did so well when they signed Cedeno during the season last year. The Royals did the same with Steve Farr, and just the other day the Angels picked up Vern Ruhle. Only the Yankees can afford to keep all those high-salary veteran players around—people like Claudell Washington and Al Holland.”
“And look at the troubles the Yankees are having,” I said.
He shrugged—not quite resignedly, I noticed. “You never know,” he said. “In this game, whether you’re a player or a manager or a coach or in the front office, there are just so many things you can control. After that, it’s just fortuity. You may have an injury or a whole bunch of injuries. You may have a bad hop, a terrible call by an umpire, a ball that just goes through-whatever. Or a whole bunch of them. All this constitutes thirty or thirty-five or maybe even forty percent of the game. Nobody will ever accept that in the end, and so somebody is always held accountable for the result—for who wins and who loses. In a way, that’s a good thing. If there wasn’t that accountability, you’d have to ask ‘So what the hell am I doing here?’ because then anybody could roll the dice—you or me or some child. These accidental events are important, because you always have to make some response to them—change the pitcher out there, make a trade, change the manager, throw away the uniform. In some cases, you decide to do nothing. You have to come to some rational judgment, no matter how irrational things have begun to look. It’s what keeps you in the game.”
Since I got home from Oakland, the four clubs I came to know and care about on my little tour have not fared very differently, except for the Giants, who were swept by the Cardinals on their next stop and now trail the Houston Astros by a discouraging seven and a half games in the National League West. There was a prolonged brawl on the field in the second game at Busch Stadium, and photographs of the scene show Roger Craig still in the thick of things, as usual: this time, he was trying to tear Whitey Herzog’s head off. The split-fingered fastball didn’t help Steve Carlton, by the way, who won but one game for the Giants; early in August, he announced his retirement from baseball—but he reemerged almost instantly as a member of the White Sox’ pitching corps. Gods are inexplicable.
Nothing happened to the Cubs.
The Red Sox’ lead was a mere four games on their return home, but then they received back-to-back pitching masterpieces from Bruce Hurst and Tom Seaver and suddenly began to feel much better. Oil Can Boyd was back in action, too. The last time I looked (about twenty minutes ago, at this writing), the Sox led the Yankees by five and a half games, the Blue Jays by six and a half, and the Tigers by seven. September in the A.L. East will be something.
The A’s continued their winning ways after the Boston games, sweeping the Blue Jays as well, and suddenly climbed into fifth place. Then they hit the skids again, losing four in a row, and slipped back into the cellar. Then they got better: by the middle of the month, their 18–9 record since the All-Star break was the second best in the league. They are as likely to end up in third place as in the cellar (often a capacious apartment in the A.L. West), which is to say that respectability—something better than Tony LaRussa’s inner fears, something better than embarrassment—seems within reach.** Some of their recent encounters have presented a greater variety of adventure and disaster than the horrors of June. In a home game against the Mariners, Oakland relief pitcher Fernando Arroyo (another late pickup) walked in the tying run in the ninth inning; then he walked in the winner. The next night, with the score again tied, the A’s put their first two runners aboard in the bottom of the ninth, and Carney Lansford lined into a triple play. Then they won the game on the first pitch of their half of the tenth, which Mike Davis whacked for a homer. Nothing to it.
Before my trip, I would not have given my attention to such trifling melodramas, but these days, I notice, I watch or listen for the Boston scores and Oakland scores with almost equal hopes and trepidation. One evening in Maine (I was on vacation), I asked my host at dinner if he’d heard the Oakland score from the night before—the A’s had played the Twins in Minneapolis, but my local Down East morning paper, which goes to bed with the chickens, had reported the results in typical fashion: “Oakland at Minneapolis (n)”—and he looked at me in a startled way and said, “But the A’s are in last place, aren’t they? They’re a terrible team this year.” He grinned. “Just terrible.”
He said this with conviction, and I suddenly understood that he found pleasure in the pronouncement. Nothing much else was established as yet in the baseball season (except for the Mets), but he knew one thing for a certainty: the A’s were terrible.
The next morning, I discovered that the Twins had beaten the A’s by 8–0, and as I studied the box score in the paper and tried to squeeze more news out of it than it could convey, I murmured to myself. “Oh, if the A’s would only—”
Then I stopped. Would only what! I thought about it for a moment or two, and then it came to me that what I badly seemed to want for a team I cared about was an end to bad luck, an end to bad news—no more fortuity, to use Sandy Alderson’s word. I wanted the exact opposite of what my friend had seen as established: I wanted good news forever. Then—within an instant, I think—I perceived something I hadn’t quite understood about baseball before. Alderson had said that thirty or forty percent of the game was beyond his control or the manager’s or the players’ control. But I am a fan, and my lot is far worse, for everything in baseball is beyond my control; for me every part of the game is just fortuity. Because I am a fan, all I can do is care, and what I wish for, almost every day of the summer, is for things to go well—to go perfectly—for the teams and the players I most care about: for the Red Sox, for the A’s now, for the Mets, for the Giants, for Tom Seaver and Keith Hernandez and Roy Eisenhardt and Don Baylor and Wade Boggs and Carney Lansford and Tim Shanahan and Danyl Strawberry and Roger Craig and many, many others. I think every true fan wants no less. We wish for this seriously, every day of the season, but at the same time I think we don’t want it at all. We want our teams to be losers as well as winners; we must have bad luck
as well as good, terrible defeats and disappointments as well as victories and thrilling surprises. We must have them, for if it were otherwise, if we could control more of the game or all of the game and make it do our bidding, we would have been granted a wish—no more losing!—that we would badly want to give back within a week. We would have lost baseball, in fact, and then we would have to look around, without much hope, for something else to care about in such a particular and arduous fashion.
*Before my visit to Wrigley Field, the Chicago Sun-Times ran a story about Ron Cey that mentioned his age and declining mobility afield—and his insistence that he was still as good as ever out there. The headline went: “WASHED UP? CEY: IT AIN’T SO.”
**The A’s finished the season in a tie (with Kansas City) for third place, sixteen games behind the division-winning Angels. Under LaRussa, the team compiled a 45–34 record and moved up from their season low of twenty-four games below .500 to ten below at the end.
Not So, Boston
— Fall 1986
YES, IT WAS. YES, we did. Yes, that was the way it was, really and truly…The baseball events of this October—the Mets’ vivid comeback victory over the Boston Red Sox in seven games, and the previous elimination of the Houston Astros and the California Angels in the hazardous six-game and seven-game (respectively) league championship playoffs—will not be quickly forgotten, but disbelief is a present danger. Sporting memory is selective and unreliable, with a house tilt toward hyperbole. In inner replay, the running catch, the timely home run become incomparable, and our view of them grows larger and clearer as they recede in time, putting us all into a front-row box seat in the end, while the rest of that game and that day—the fly-ball outs, the four-hop grounders, the fouls into the stands, the botched double play, the sleepy innings, the failed rally, the crush at the concession stand, the jam in the parking lot—are miraculously leached away. This happens so often and so easily that we may not be prepared for its opposite: a set of games and innings and plays and turnabouts that, for once, not only matched but exceeded our baseball expectations, to the point where we may be asking ourselves now if all this really did come to pass at the end of the 1986 season and if it was all right for us to get so excited about it, so hopeful and then so heartbroken or struck with pleasure, which let it be said again: Yes, it did. Yes, it was. Yes, absolutely. What matters now, perhaps, is for each of us to make an effort to hold on to these games, for almost certainly we won’t see their like again soon—or care quite as much if we do.