by Roger Angell
We sat in silence for a while, watching a lone groundskeeper who was silently moving back and forth on a power roller on the dirt warning track at the foot of the distant outfield fences. Roy tipped back his drink and then put the empty can down between his feet.
“If you asked most owners,” he said, “they would say, without giving it a thought, ‘Yes, I want my revenues to meet my expenses.’ But I don’t think that’s really the expectation of the public. The fans don’t articulate it, yet I don’t believe they expect the owner to make a profit from their baseball team. I don’t think the players feel that the owners should, or the writers, either, although a lot of journalists seem to validate a team on the basis of how much money you spend. Baseball is perceived almost as a public utility that has been granted a monopoly and is obligated to deliver quality services, so a team isn’t looked on with favor when it makes a lot of money. I don’t see anything wrong with that notion. We have been given a monopoly—that’s what each franchise is—and with monopoly comes responsibility. We really are the curators of this game. It’s a public asset, and we are the guardians of that asset.
“As I was saying, I don’t know that it isn’t an anachronism to try to keep baseball going as a form of fee-simple private ownership. If we assume that it has to be affordable and available to all, and if we’re not wholly determined to destroy it with television, and if we want every geographical area to have access to it, then I question whether private ownership or major corporate ownership can make it work. That brings us around to the quality of ownership. Can we find people who will care for the game if we tell them that they have to lose money in the process? I’m afraid of the answer to that one. So the only long-range solution I can see is some form of redistribution of profits that will reduce the risks of losing. We have to begin to ask ourselves if we really want baseball in Seattle and Oakland and Dallas-Fort Worth, or if it should be played only in surefire major market centers like New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Under the present system, some markets are inherently less valuable simply because of where they are, and not because the local owners are doing a bad job, and we don’t really know if the clubs there can survive. It seems to me that the next question we have to ask ourselves is whether the value of each franchise—the value of being permitted to play ball in Chicago or St. Louis or Oakland—belongs to those clubs, or whether it belongs to baseball. Is the great tradition and history of the Boston Red Sox owned by that club, or is it owned by the people of Boston or the people of New England or by you and me—by anyone who cares about the game of baseball?”
He laughed suddenly, and said, “I can say the Red Sox, because I know that Sully”—Haywood Sullivan, the chief executive eminence of the Bosox—“won’t get mad at me, the way some of the other owners do when I begin to run on this way.”
He looked as cheerful and buoyant as ever, and I had difficulty in reconciling such good spirits with the endless and perhaps insoluble difficulties of the problems he had been exploring. “How come you don’t get upset about all this?” I asked.
“You’re just making Thomas Hobbes’ old assumption that the natural state of man is to be bad-tempered,” he replied. “But getting mean or low-down really serves no purpose at all. Sure, I get frustrated sometimes, but I try not to show it. The games—the different contests and their outcome—don’t really bother me, even when they end the way that one did yesterday. I hope I can be like Betsy that way, who is more and more a real fan. She enjoys the baseball process—the day-to-day, the ongoing soap opera—and she doesn’t get too far down about losses or slumps. If you can’t do that, baseball will drive you crazy, because of its very high percentage of defeat. Robin Yount succeeds at the plate only one-third of the time. Just think what it would have been like if Beethoven had had to write symphonies that way!”
Afterword: Not much good fortune has befallen the A’s—now officially the Athletics—since these visits to Oakland. The team finished fourth in its division in 1983,1984, and 1985, and third (in a tie) in 1986 and 1987.*** Manager Steve Boros was dismissed in mid-season in 1985, and his successor, Jackie Moore, gave way to the incumbent Tony LaRussa two years later. Attendance in 1987 rose to 1,678,921—less than a half million shy of a financial break-even level for the club; that rivalry between the Athletics and the Giants (who won the National League West division in 1987) for the Bay-area audience remains one of big-league baseball’s intractable infirmities, but both clubs are clearly on the rise. The Athletics have fared well in the trading market, and the club’s flourishing farm and scouting systems have produced home-grown, successive Rookie of the Year slugging stars in 1986 and ’87, in the imposing persons of Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire. The team now presents a strong and confident offensive lineup, and some firming up of the infield defense and the chronically laggard pitching corps could take Oakland to a pennant one of these days. These current baseball affairs have been conducted by Sandy Alderson, who is considered one of the outstanding general managers in baseball, while Roy Eisenhardt, more or less by design, has kept himself more in the background.
By design and perhaps in self-defense. I’m not quite objective about the Athletics, but by most measurements they are almost the prototypical contemporary team. They haven’t won lately, but their hopes are up, and rightly so. Like most other clubs, Oakland is losing money, but for reasons—a divided market area; limited local television income—that are not within its powers to correct. A pennant would help: wait till next year. Most of the other twenty-five big-league clubs face similar or even less cheerful prospects, but it is my belief that the so-so Athletics are subjected to much sharper criticism than other teams from their fans, from the local media, and from other owners and front-office people—because of their articulate and iconoclastic style of management. Because of Roy. I put this suggestion to him not long ago, and he shook his head but did not absolutely disagree.
“It’s true that I’ve withdrawn a little,” he said. “I think I’ve got a new description for myself: I’m trying to be well-tempered. Sometimes I ask myself if it’s better to be in the middle of a pennant race, the way we are right now, or to be out of it in September, so you feel free to relax and think about next year. You have to opt for the first choice, but sometimes you wonder, particularly after you lose a game in the ninth, the way we did last night. It takes it out of you. People keep asking why we don’t win more, but everybody in baseball demands explanations when you don’t win. That’s understandable but it’s inappropriate. Baseball is ruled by the mathematical laws of chaos. There are too many variables to conclude anything else, and there’s some sort of comfort in that, I suppose. It’s never easy, but you go on wanting to win. If you didn’t, it wouldn’t be fun anymore.”
Listening to Roy, I thought back to the last game I attended with him on one of my trips to Oakland in 1983—a night encounter against the Milwaukee Brewers on a Monday evening, which the A’s won by 5–4, after a few adventures and surprises along the way. Bill Krueger, the A’s’ tall rookie left-hander, had matters safely in hand in the ninth, it seemed, with the A’s ahead by 3–1, and no one on base. With two outs, he walked two batters in succession, and Steve McCatty, summoned in to shut the door, instantly surrendered a three-run homer to pinch-hitter Roy Howell. Davey Lopes then tied up the game at 4–4, with a homer on the first pitch of the bottom half of the ninth, and we went into extra innings.
Roy, beside me in the box, had not made the smallest sound or gesture in response to the Howell stunner, but he whacked me on the shoulder as we watched Lopes’s blow sail over the left-field palings. Then he resumed his silent, thumb-biting vigil over the events—or non-events, more correctly—below. The game, it turned out, had a few more moments to go. The Brewers and then the A’s each moved runners into scoring position in the tenth, to no avail. The A’s got a base runner to third base in the eleventh—and stranded him there. They loaded the bases in the thirteenth, and did not score. The stream of the game b
ecame a brook, then a trickle. Pitchers and pinch-hitters came and went; fans promised themselves one more inning and then one more, and then gave up, a lot of them, and went home. Manager Harvey Kuenn, running out of substitutes, inserted a pitcher named Jamie Easterly to pinch-hit for his designated hitter, who had been lifted in an earlier inning for a pinch-runner, and men batted him again three innings later. Up in my seat, I drew in fresh columns and boxes on the right-hand side of my box score, writing over the totals columns there and then extending my chart on top of the printed team rosters on the outer margin of the page. The squidgy, messed-up scorecard looked like a child’s birthday card, and men I began to notice that all of us there in the owner’s box—Roy, Bill Rigney, Wally, Sandy Alderson, Sarge Ivey, two or three other front-office A’s people, and myself (the senior Haases had not come to the game)—were responding peculiarly to this slow and ceaseless crawl of hours and innings. “Come up!” Rig yelled whenever a Brewer grounder was rapped in the direction of an Oakland infielder. “Go through!” he ordered when the teams had changed places and the hopper had come off Oakland wood. “We have to win, because we’re the only ones still watching,” Wally pronounced. “Everyone in Milwaukee is home in bed and asleep.” Sandy Alderson, observing two lesser A’s on the bases and Rickey Henderson coming up to bat, said, “Now we’ve got them. We’ve got seventy thousand dollars on the bases and eight hundred thousand dollars up at bat. This is it!” But the eight hundred thousand dollars grounded into a force. “Now!” cried Sarge again and again. “Now! You got to!” But no one heard or heeded the command. “It’s going to be Tony Phillips who drives in the winning run,” I announced. “You’ll see—it’s always that kind of player who wins this kind of game. Unless it’s…uh, Dan Meyer.” We sounded like children, boys in a tree house. At last, we fell into silence—a prolonged daze of sleepiness and exhausted speculation—and into a sense of wonder, too, I think, at the endless variety and stubbornness and perfect unpredictability of this sport. The A’s won the game in the bottom of the seventeenth, when Henderson scored Meyer from second on a line single to left center and sent us home at last, five hours and seventeen minutes after the first pitch. All of us there in the park—the sixty-odd players and coaches on the field; the weary grounds crew and security people and ushers and venders; the burned-out, crazily remaining handful of fans and their sleepy-eyed children; the writers, whose unfinished stories had been rewarmed for several successive deadlines; and the waiting owner and attendant executives and strategists of the A’s—all of us had wanted the ridiculous party over and done with long before then, but our skills and wishes and plans and hopes meant nothing, of course. The difficulty of baseball is imperious, and prevails ever.
*Durable for about two seasons, that is. By the end of the 1983 season, four of the five starters were gone, laid low by arm miseries.
**The innocent optimism of this early report on the accursed Wave phenomenon suggests the happiness of that anonymous bygone southern gardener who first spied the pretty green tints of the kudzu vine along the back borders of his rose-beds.
***An extended account of the team’s tribulations in the 1986 campaign may be found in Chapter 12.
Tiger, Tiger
— Fall 1984
BASEBALL IS WELL INTO its wingless, or black-tie, dormant phase, and the only sound from within the cocoon is the customary late-autumn murmuration of rumors and awards, plus a steady low whine of complaint about the season just past. Not a good year, I keep hearing. Not much of a World Series, was it? And what in God’s name happened to those Padre starting pitchers? Oh, if only the Cubs had won their playoffs—what a Series that would have been! And, listen, why couldn’t we have a decent pennant race somewhere, for a change, with maybe the Dodgers and somebody fighting it out on the last weekend, the way they always used to, and could you believe that American League West, with the Twins and all those losers still in it there at the end? I mean, it was great, in a way, but what the hell happened to the White Sox, and what happened to the Orioles and the Phillies—and what did happen to the Dodgers, do you think? And, sure, it was great the way the Tigers ran away from everybody back in the spring—nothing like it, out of sight—but even when the Red Sox and the Yankees, with those nobodies in uniform, got so good there in the second half it was never really close, you know, and, sure, there were the Mets, but even when they were so hot there in July I never exactly believed they’d do it—not with those kids pitching and that lineup—but that Gooden’s unreal, you know, and, sure, if you look at the Tigers you have to say they’re great, they can kill you on the bases and the other way, too, with that batting order, and I’m happy for Sparky, because he’s an old name, like I was even happy for Reggie when he finally did it, you know what I mean, and—oh, yes, Dave Kingman! I mean, Dave Kingman! But why couldn’t the Cubs’ve won that last game out there in San Diego, for God’s sake, with Sutcliffe going, and all, and that way we’d’ve had Wrigley Field again, and some terrific games in the wind there, and something to talk about when it was over, you know?
Only full-bore fans will recognize every note of these stridulations—it is mostly their voice we are hearing—and a brief refresher gloss may be helpful. The Detroit Tigers won the recent World Series, of course, knocking off the San Diego Padres in five games, one over par for the distance; several Tiger luminaries distinguished themselves during the classic, which we will return to in due course, while the Padres, in departing, left some bloody footprints across the record books. Their four starting pitchers in the five games survived for a total of ten and one-third innings, during which span they gave up sixteen runs, twenty-five hits, and eight walks, good for an earned-run average of 13.94; in the unmemorable third game, the Padre pitchers walked the ballpark, handing out eleven bases on balls. The Tigers, by the way, scored almost instantly in each of the games, bringing the initial runs home in either the first or the second inning, thereby providing a dazzling paradigmatic reminder of their regular season, in which they won thirty-five of their first forty games (they were 9–0, 16–1, and 26–4 along the way), for the fastest start in baseball history. Only six other teams have ever led their leagues or divisions wire-to-wire, the most recent of which was the lordly Yankee club of 1927. Jack Morris, the Tigers’ right-handed ace, set the tone for their year when he threw a no-hitter against the White Sox in his second start, but Detroit’s bolt from the blocks was a true team effort; nine different Tiger pitchers came up winners in the first fifteen games. The team, moreover, did not simply cruise home after its opening burst, as other clubs (the 1977 Dodgers and the 1981 Oakland A’s, for instance) had been known to do, but actually increased its lead over the second-place Toronto Blue Jays from seven games at the midseason All-Star Game break to fifteen games at the close (the champions wound up at 104–58), which is a much better indication of their pride and deep talent, given the quality of the opposition in that extremely difficult division.
Three of the four divisions, in fact, sorted out their eventual winners by the first week in August, a full two months too soon, while the fourth, the American League West (the “Mild West,” it was sometimes called, or the “American League Worst”), produced a pennant winner of sorts in the final week, when the Kansas City Royals fell fainting across the finish line, with the only above-.500 record in their sector. The Padres, in the National League West, profited from a similar fatuousness in their opponents, since their nearest pursuers, the Braves and the Astros, wound up in a tie, twelve games back and two below the waterline. The Cubs, who overtook the surprising Mets at the beginning of August and whomped them regularly thereafter (they won eight of the nine games against New York at Wrigley Field), were easily the most popular winners of the year, thanks to their antiquity (Tinker to Evers to Ernie Banks et al.); their charming vine-covered and sunlit (there are no lights, no night games) neighborhood ballpark; their long and frightful predisposition to defeat (they led and lost a World Series in 1945 and horribly blew a sure pennant in 1
969); and their mighty electronic audience, which tunes in the Cubbies by television in forty-nine states and five foreign countries, via cable station WGN. Suddenly, even the most casual, late-summer sports bystanders perked up at the possibility of a sonorous and perhaps epochal World Series between two famous clubs—the Cubs and the Tigers—played on grass diamonds in venerable city enclosures where teams and heroes were playing baseball when each of us, no matter what our age, first became aware of the game. The Tigers took care of their part of the date by brushing aside the Royals in three quick meetings in the American League championship series, but the Cubs, after administering a pair of quick, wonderfully appreciated drubbings to the Padres at Wrigley Field, went west to finish the job and there fell into a well, or a hot tub, losing by 7–1, 7–5 (an extraordinary game, an all-timer), and 6–3, after leading in each game. Eheu, as Mike Royko did not write, fugaces.
The sense of unsatisfaction, of diminished expectation and lowered reward, that attached itself to the latter stages of the 1984 season may not be wholly attributable to the one-sided World Series or to the sad and shocking expunging of the Cubs. I think we should remind ourselves that not one of the four teams involved in the league playoffs this year was a finalist in the 1983 playoffs, in which the Phillies defeated the Dodgers, and the Orioles (who went on to win the World Series) eliminated the White Sox, and that not one of those four teams had won its division the previous year, 1982, when we saw the Cardinals and the Braves in one playoff and the Brewers and the Angels in the other, with the Cardinals overcoming the Brewers in a seven-game Series. Team inconsistency, a lack of continuity and pattern, has become a pattern all its own in recent years. In the past six full seasons—1979 through 1984—eight different American League clubs have filled the twelve playoff slots, with the Royals, the Orioles, the Angels, and the Yankees making two appearances each; while ten different National League clubs have qualified for post-season play, with only the Phillies and the Dodgers repeating. In all, eighteen of the twenty-six clubs that make up the major leagues have appeared in postseason play in the past six Octobers, and ten different teams have played in the World Series; none has repeated as World Champions.
