Anderson represented a new kind of leadoff hitter for a new era. He was a high-risk, high-reward hitter. Henderson once hit 28 home runs. Anderson hit 50. Henderson mitigated high strikeout totals with an even greater number of walks, but Anderson would play his entire seventeen-year career and never walk more than he struck out. During his best years, Anderson struck out more than 100 times three straight seasons. Yet during Anderson’s time, the strikeout no longer seemed to carry the stigma it did in Bonds’s and Henderson’s day. To Dusty Baker, the lack of shame of the strikeout was one of the newest elements of the current game. Anderson was celebrated. Thomas Boswell of the Washington Post called Anderson’s stretch from 1992 to 1996 the best for any leadoff hitter ever. Anderson was vindicated. He wasn’t going to play like Richie Ashburn, Maury Wills, Kenny Lofton, or any of the other traditional prototypes. He wasn’t like Henderson, a leadoff hitter who happened to have power, but just the opposite. Bobby Bonds was baseball’s first power-hitting leadoff man, but Anderson’s approach was accepted in a way Bonds’s never was.
The Yankees and Orioles were locked in a season-long duel, one that culminated with the two teams meeting in a hotly contested American League Championship Series—best remembered for a young fan reaching over the right-field fence in Game Two at Yankee Stadium and turning an out into a crucial Derek Jeter home run—and Watson had seen Anderson up close. He was muscular, as so many of the modern players seemed to be. Maybe, Watson decided, everyone thought he was a power hitter. Perhaps the old notion of hitting according to one’s position in the batting order no longer applied. Now, everybody, the leadoff hitter to the ninth batter, was a threat.
Anderson had always prided himself on his hard work, and his ability to combine this new approach with dedication and creatine made him a big league center fielder, instead of a minor leaguer at a crossroads. That the degree to which creatine transformed him was impossible to determine explained why the mere discussion of legal drugs became such a murky proposition. No player wanted his effort diminished, but even Anderson’s own teammates were privately skeptical of him, convinced that average players didn’t become great power hitters overnight. Some thought he used anabolic steroids in addition to creatine, but no evidence, outside of one magical season and a sculpted body, had ever linked him to steroids. “All you had to do was look at the guy. There was something overtly muscular about the way he walked,” recalled Bob Klapisch, who covered the Yankees in 1996. “It wasn’t just the distance or the number of his home runs, but the entire essence that he exuded. He was too muscular. More than one player told me that they thought they - could stick a pin in him and he would deflate like the Michelin Man.” This much was true, however: Doing it the old way landed him in the minor leagues. Brady Anderson knew choosing to play his own way had saved his career. There was another part to Anderson that people took notice of: Home runs meant more money. Anderson earned $365,000 in 1992. The following year his salary increased by 408 percent, to $1.8 million. In 2001, his final season in Baltimore, Brady Anderson, once destined for the Japanese leagues, earned $7.2 million per season, more than his teammate Cal Ripken. In 1997, Anderson hit just 18 home runs, and never again hit more than 24, but he would forever represent a flashpoint for a different era.
By the mid-1990s, creatine was as ubiquitous in major league clubhouses as tobacco. Several teams, including the Oakland A’s and St. Louis Cardinals, purchased creatine for their players. During the early days of the Arizona Diamondbacks, an expansion team launched in 1998, the team supplied creatine and protein powder to its players. “Jerry Colangelo had a supplement guy that provided us with all the creatine we wanted,” recalled Clarence Cockerell, then a member of the Diamondbacks’ strength and conditioning team. “There were jars and jars of creatine in the clubhouse. It was probably the lowest grade you could find, but it was free creatine, and the players could use it as much as they wanted. It wasn’t forced on anyone, but it was there.” The next year, creatine became controversial. It was unpredictable. Some players complained of constipation and stomach pains. Others who used it suffered from cramps and muscle pulls. Unsure of the long-term effects, the team stopped the practice.
THE CONVENTIONAL wisdom was dead forever. Thanks to creatine, players could now do something they never could before: They could lift weights and still maintain their bat speed. In the past, bigger muscles came at the price of a slower bat. Now, a hitter could have both. There was an emerging fear that went largely unspoken outside the medical staff: What would happen if creatine wasn’t strong enough? What would players resort to? Anabolic steroids were next on the food chain, but they were illegal. Bob Watson thought the workout regimen of the players had become fanatical. Players were using weights constantly. Some players used to lift in the offseason, to stay loose, but now, to the horror of the baseball old guard, weightlifting was part of most players’ everyday exercise during the season. In the early 1980s, when Billy Beane was a young farmhand with the New York Mets, he remembered hearing stories of the buzz a few years earlier when Fred Lynn and Carlton Fisk had worked out using Nautilus machines over the winter and had shown up at spring training looking ready for Opening Day. But it was in Oakland, Billy Beane thought, where baseball’s culture took a historic turn.
SANDY ALDERSON’S entry into baseball came as something of a lark. An Ivy League-educated lawyer, Alderson worked for Roy Eisenhart in San Francisco in the late 1970s. Eisenhart happened to be the son-in-law of Walter Haas, the Levi-Strauss magnate who also happened to be owner of the Oakland Athletics. Alderson joined the A’s front office in 1981, during the tumultuous period in Oakland when Billy Martin managed the team. Within a half decade, Alderson would be the general manager.
As a baseball fan, Alderson loved power. Home runs were fun, the best part of the game, he thought. As a general manager, Alderson began to tailor his teams toward power. This didn’t just mean seeking out power hitters, although in the late 1980s Alderson assembled one of the most ferocious offensive teams of any era. It also meant exploiting a trend he had noticed as the 1980s came to a close. Baseball executives were now looking for bigger offense-minded players, even in the case of positions that had traditionally been occupied by smaller, more defensive-minded players such as shortstop, second base, and center field. Cal Ripken hit the ball with more power than any shortstop since Ernie Banks. Ripken was also six-foot-four, very large for that position. Perhaps, Alderson thought, considering offensive players at traditionally defensive positions might give Oakland an advantage.
Alderson recalled his acquisition of Dave Henderson as a turning point. Henderson, a big man who in another time would have played one of the corner outfield positions, played center field for three teams before joining Oakland, but Alderson believed those other teams failed to recognize the value of Henderson’s size. Not only was Henderson big for a center fielder, but he was also better known for his offense than his defense. “He was really an offensive player,” Alderson said, “and if you go back and look at shortstop, center field, and second base, what you find over the last twenty years is that making a choice between an offensive and defensive player, more and more frequently clubs made the choice for the offensive player.” The acquisition of Henderson was a subtle yet important moment, for it meant that Alderson was going against convention. It was also the genesis of the “Moneyball” philosophy famously adopted by Alderson’s successor in Oakland, Billy Beane, in which the organization focused on undervalued player traits in order to gain a competitive advantage.
The reason for the increased focus on offense, thought Alderson, was money. Teams with limited budgets could not afford to have three or four spots on a roster from which there would be little to no offensive reward. All clubs sought the classic “five-tool” player, one who could run, throw, catch, hit, and hit for power. Those players, however, were rare and incredibly expensive. “If you have a smaller budget, you can’t sign a five-tool player. You may have one because you draft one, but eventua
lly you have to decide which of the tools you’re going to buy,” Alderson said. “You have to prioritize those tools. You can buy one or two, but not five. If you study the game analytically, the tool that you buy is offense. The Luis Aparicios of the world wouldn’t be playing today. Some of the great shortstops of the past, the ones that were ‘good field, no hit,’ probably wouldn’t get the opportunity. That’s part of it also. It’s not just that players got bigger and stronger; the preferences changed. If you’re not big and strong and not an offensive player, you’re probably not going to get a chance to play.” When he became general manager, Billy Beane was asked if there was a single position in the lineup where defense came first. Beane offered a one-word answer that would speak for the decade: “No.”
THE A’S rose to power in the late 1980s under Alderson and manager Tony LaRussa. In the five years from 1988 to 1992, Oakland won 486 games, an average of 97 per season, and made the playoffs four times, participating in three World Series and winning one. Their clubs were fearsome, and they played the intimidation game better than any team in the league. Rickey Henderson may have been the greatest leadoff hitter of all time, but he was powerfully built, low to the ground, a running back in spikes. Henderson could have hit third for any team in the league. Jose Canseco dwarfed Henderson, but could steal bases like a leadoff hitter. Mark McGwire was enormous, even bigger than the six-foot-four-inch Canseco. Dave Parker, six-foot-five like McGwire, had earned his reputation as the most fearsome hitter in the National League in the mid-1970s, when Canseco and McGwire were still in middle school and Henderson was just graduating from Oakland Technical High School. The A’s exuded power. It was as if, Billy Beane thought, the A’s were part of an old Warner Brothers cartoon, in which each hitter was bigger than the next, and all the skinny and helpless pitcher could do was take a big gulp before taking a beating.
Not only were the players physically imposing, but the A’s were the first team in baseball to fully embrace the weightlifting culture. They were the first team to hire a strength coach, and the first to put their players on weight-training programs with the intention of building muscle instead of losing weight. In the past, weight programs were treated as a punishment for players who got too soft during the offseason. By being first to appreciate the virtues of weight training as a proactive strategy, Oakland would be the first organization to comprehensively reject the old baseball wisdom.
All of this was the brainchild of Alderson, who was perplexed by the baseball wisdom that discouraged weight training. In baseball, he thought, much was taken at face value without much thought as to why. Alderson was taken with Carlton Fisk’s 1985 season, when the White Sox catcher hit 37 home runs, but only 8 during the final two month of the season. Fisk attributed his fast start to the workout program he used in the offseason, but he did not continue the offseason regimen once the season started. To Alderson, this made no sense. Had Fisk continued even a reduced version of his offseason program, he might not have declined. “That was a motivator for me,” Alderson recalled. “That, ‘Look, this is what occurred in the offseason, and this was the result.’” The result was Alderson’s hiring of Dave McKay as Oakland’s first-ever strength and conditioning coach. A former A’s infielder, McKay was known for being in superior shape during his playing days, despite hitting just .229 with 21 homers in his 645-game career. Putting players on an in-season conditioning program was radical for baseball, and as Alderson remembered it, McKay’s toughest task in those early days was getting players out of bed on the road. Still, the results were immediate. The A’s were big men, already intimidating, and now came another bonus: The A’s became one of the teams with the lowest use of the disabled list, a trend Alderson attributed to the team’s aggressive strength and conditioning program.
The A’s exploited their intimidating presence. It actually became part of the game plan. Whereas the old guard had warned against hitting too many homers during batting practice for fear it would ruin a hitter’s swing, the A’s turned batting practice into a weapon, demoralizing the opposition with the prodigious blasts of Canseco, McGwire, and Parker. Stunning the fans with their power, Canseco and McGwire would engage in their own pregame home run derby, transforming a hostile audience into a mesmerized one. To Billy Beane, who was a member of the 1989 A’s, teams would shrink at the thought of having to pitch four times through the Oakland lineup.
Jeff Brantley, who pitched for the San Francisco Giants club that was swept by the A’s in the 1989 World Series, recalled those monstrous A’s teams. More than their individual talent, which was considerable, Brantley remembered how intimidating the A’s were as a group. In the spring, the A’s and Giants trained minutes from each other in Arizona. “You saw those guys and you were like, ‘holy shit.’ They were some big boys, and you had to pitch to them. Good luck.”
During spring training the A’s players would engage in powerlifting contests and post the results on a wipe board in the weight room. The practice was carried over to the Oakland Coliseum in the regular season, where the visiting team shared the A’s weight room. Each homestand, visiting players couldn’t help but notice the wipe board and the staggering bench press numbers from Henderson, Parker, Canseco, and McGwire. As the months wore on, and word got out about Oakland’s powerlifting prowess, the A’s decided to use the wipe board to their advantage, erasing the actual totals and adding fifty or sometimes one hundred pounds to each player’s total, scaring their opponents to death. Ellis Burks, who at the time was a young player with the Boston Red Sox, remembered seeing the famous wipe board and its phony totals on a road trip to Oakland. “They were already fearsome because you knew what McGwire and Canseco could do. You saw them hit balls that nobody else hit, and now you go in to lift a little bit and you saw that Canseco bench-pressed a million pounds. The thing we had to remember was not to tell our pitchers about those numbers we saw in the weight room.” Such psychological warfare had its merits, thought Billy Beane. Talent was one thing, but the ability to both have talent and intimidate a team before the game even started, Beane later decided, was easily worth a handful of wins a season.
Even the Oakland pitchers were frightening. In terms of intimidation, Dave Stewart was the direct descendant of Bob Gibson and Don Drysdale. In the late 1980s, when Stewart was on his way to winning twenty games in four straight seasons, no pitcher took the mound with more presence. He was a competitor, physically and psychologically imposing. Stewart was muscular, possessing none of the baby fat that often made pitchers targets of ridicule. He wore his cap so low that the shadow of the bill covered deep, burning eyes. Stewart’s dark, African American face, shiny with sweat, made the batter-pitcher conflict that much more intense. An early member of these A’s teams, utility man Tony Phillips, once said, “Stew? Stew doesn’t look like he wants to pitch against you. Stew looks like he wants to kick your ass.”
Not only was Stewart tough, but he was toughest in the biggest games. In addition to winning championships, Stewart’s greatest moments on the mound came against the great Roger Clemens when Clemens was a member of the Boston Red Sox. Stewart was never better than when facing the man considered the best pitcher of his era, and his teammates rallied around him. To members of those A’s teams, some of their fondest memories were watching the gallant Stewart, pitching full of grievance, motivate himself for a showdown with Clemens. That Clemens could never seem to beat Oakland, and Dave Stewart especially, was always a source of stinging frustration for the future Hall of Famer. Before he became a champion with the Yankees, Clemens’s signature postseason moment had come in Game Four of the 1990 ALCS in Oakland, when, three days after losing a hotly contested Game One to Stewart and the A’s, he was ejected in the second inning after an expletive-laced tirade against umpire Terry Cooney. That day Stewart threw eight shutout innings as the A’s completed a four-game sweep of the Red Sox.
To Sandy Alderson, there was something almost preordained about Stewart’s hold over Clemens. He recalled that Tony LaR
ussa’s first game as Oakland manager came against Boston. The year was 1986 and the Red Sox were on their way to the World Series while the A’s were in the early stages of rebuilding. Clemens, who would win the American League Cy Young and Most Valuable Player awards that year, was the scheduled Boston starter. Alderson remembered that LaRussa inexplicably gave the ball to Stewart, who had been released by Philadelphia less than two months earlier and had made just one previous start for the A’s. Although neither pitcher was at his best, Stewart outlasted Clemens for the win, a harbinger. In later years, when Oakland was dominant, Alderson noted to no one in particular one day in the clubhouse that Roger Clemens never seemed able to beat Oakland in a big game. Stewart looked over at him and said, “That’s because I’m the one who always pitches against him.” Sandy Alderson knew at once how important beating Clemens was to Dave Stewart.
Years later, after Stewart retired, Dave Winfield joined the front office of the San Diego Padres. As Winfield was interested in learning more about the relationship between the front office and agents, it was once suggested that he speak to Dave Stewart, who after retiring had worked in the front office of the Toronto Blue Jays before becoming a player agent. It seemed a natural assumption that they knew each other, for Winfield was active throughout Stewart’s career, but they did not. “I played against him all those years,” Winfield said. “But I never thought about talking to him. Stew never looked like he was in the mood for conversation.” Even in an era in which fraternization between opposing players was commonplace, Stewart’s wall of intimidation remained impenetrable.
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