The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  Oakland’s moments were of a different nature: a series in Cleveland when the team blew leads of four runs, six runs, and three runs on successive days, losing all three games; a night in Kansas City when Rickey Peters, under the mistaken impression that the bases were loaded, trotted homeward after a base on balls and was tagged out to end the inning; a nine-run second inning by the Rangers at Arlington. This last was the low point, in the estimation of Bill King, the veteran A’s television commentator. “It summed us up at that point,” he told me. “It was a microcosm. Every play seemed a violation of some baseball principle. There were two misplayed line drives in the outfield, people failed to cover bases, and there was an inside-the-park home run. Another run scored while our pitcher was arguing with the first-base ump over a call and Canseco twisted his knee when his spikes caught on the wall padding in right field. Jackie Moore said it was the most embarrassing game in his baseball career. Three days later, Jackie was gone—no one blamed him for that one game, of course—and I think in a way he was almost relieved.”

  Bruce Bochte, the Oakland first baseman, said, “The month didn’t feel like a collapse, because most of the time we kept playing just bad enough to lose. In a way, that’s worse. It was like we were in a twilight zone. I guess the only regular player we didn’t lose to injuries at some point was Alfredo”—Alfredo Griffin, the shortstop. “Even so, we should have played close to .500, and we didn’t come close. It was an avalanche. When everything’s going bad like that, you never think about baseball when you’re away from the park. It isn’t in your mind at all. It’s harder to come to the park than it should be. You think you’re tireder than you really are, and your injuries hurt more. When the game starts, the effort is there, but there’s sort of a doubtful attitude. You’re looking around almost in anticipation of what’s going to go wrong.”

  Bochte and Sandy Alderson and most of the other A’s agree that the most damaging stretch was a three-game series against the White Sox at Chicago early in the month, when two starting pitchers, Joaquin Andujar and Moose Haas, were disabled on successive days, at a time when the team was already trying to make do without its bullpen ace, Jay Howell, and its center fielder and team leader, Dwayne Murphy. Patchwork now became a daily necessity. Pitchers were wheeled in from the minors and, in some cases, wheeled back again; long relievers became starters; one starter, the young strikeout artist Jose Rijo, was tried in short relief—a mistake, everyone agreed later.

  “After the injuries, things became very difficult,” Alderson said. “The bad news seemed relentless. I remember one time when we were losing here and all the teams in our farm system lost, too, so we had an oh-for-seven day for the whole Oakland operation. But there was never any despair. You try to keep some distance in your mind at times like that, to be objective and keep your judgment, but in all our meetings here with our coaches and scouts and others in the organization we never concluded that there was something wrong with our system, that we’d made bad trades, or that any of our components—scouting, minor-league operations, or the major-league operation—were seriously flawed or at fault. Maybe there was a lack of team chemistry or a lack of effort—it’s hard to judge—but when Tony got here he felt it was just a lack of talent. We’d lost too many players. At some point, it got out of control and something had to be done. You can’t change twenty-five people, so we changed one—the manager.”

  Alderson didn’t say so, but others on the Oakland club intimated that the crippling of the team which led to the deadly June losing streaks—nine in a row and the record fifteen straight losses on the road—probably delayed the firing of Jackie Moore, instead of hastening it. It seemed plainly unfair to dismiss a manager who was making do with a daily lineup half full of Class AAA ballplayers. Even before the downslide, however, there was a conviction that Moore had delegated too many responsibilities to his coaches; the pitching rotations and the decision about when to take a struggling pitcher out of a game were being made by pitching coach Wes Stock, and players had understandably begun to feel that there was no visible leadership or center of force on the club. (The new manager, Tony LaRussa, is more private and more intellectual than Moore—or than most major-league pilots, for that matter he holds a law degree from Florida State University—but there is visible steel there as well. He had managed the White Sox for eight seasons, bringing them to a divisional pennant in 1983, and his departure from that club this summer is generally viewed as the result of a clash of personalities with the flamboyant new Chicago executive vice-president, Hawk Harrelson.) In any case, there is probably no proper time to fire a manager, if it must be done during the season. Jackie Moore’s dismissal came just two days after the repellent and embarrassing rat episode (Dave Kingman, the brooding and misanthropic Oakland designated hitter, arranged to have a live rat delivered to Susan Fornoff, a beat writer from the Sacramento Bee, as a signal of his dislike of her presence in the clubhouse) and one day after the club at last broke its horrific fifteen-game road losing streak with a win over the Royals at Kansas City. LaRussa took charge after an interval when the club was directed by fill-in manager Jeff Newman, and by the time I arrived in Oakland the team had won six games and lost five under its new skipper.

  Anybody can explain baseball, of course; the trick is to predict it. What happened now—what happened of course—was that the A’s swept the series against the Red Sox, winning quite handily, in fact, only once falling behind in one of the games, by a lone early run. The A’s also got the better of things in every department, including pitching (the Bosox never put together more than two hits in an inning in any of the contests); hitting (Carney Lansford, the Oakland third baseman, went eight for twelve, with two home runs); and defense (silky plays by Griffin and a marvelous 3-6-1 double play in a tight moment of the Tom Seaver-vs.-Joaquin Andujar middle game, which brought a sudden shout of pleasure from the Oakland crowd). The breaks had changed, too—a telling shift of ground. In the final game, Dusty Baker, the Oakland outfielder, made a full-length airborne dive to grab a drive by Bill Buckner inches above the grass in left center (“Last month, that’s a triple,” announced Bill Rigney, the senior Oakland baseball adviser, who was sitting with me); and in the bottom of the same stanza Tony Phillips’ hard rap up the line bounced past Buckner at first base and into the right-field corner for a two-run double (“Last month, that’s the other team at bat,” said Rig). Baseball’s inexorable cycle had swung the other way, and suddenly it was Boston’s turn to play with a very short deck. Injuries and unexpected misfortunes had depleted the lineup; in the summer so far, the club had been forced to call up nine different minor-league replacements from its Pawtucket farm club. In the games I saw, Hurst and Nipper, each recently out of drydock (it was Hurst’s first turn since his injury, and Nipper’s sixth), were cruelly treated by the Oakland offense; they had been hurried back because of the absence of Oil Can Boyd, an 11–6 starter for the Red Sox, who was under suspension for various infractions and instabilities. The hard-hitting outfielders Tony Armas and Jim Rice were aching and unable to play at all in the Oakland games, and the bullpen was without stalwarts Sammy Stewart and Steve Crawford. Wade Boggs was aching with a lame back, and Buckner’s bad ankles limited him to service as a designated hitter in the first two games. The customary D.H., Don Baylor, was filling in for Jim Rice in left field, where his feeble arm cost the Bosox an important run in the second game. By the time the series was over, the Red Sox lead was down to three games, and manager John McNamara was terse and careworn in his office. “We’ve got to show our character and just play our way through it,” he murmured. “I don’t know—maybe we’re trying too hard.” The day before, he had said, “Thank God we’ve got some leeway, but you can run out of leeway.”

  My own sympathies underwent something like a Nautilus workout during the games at the Coliseum, edging slowly away from the A’s, whom I had so coldly selected as a laboratory animal for my research, and toward the gimpy Red Sox, and then settling firmly, or perha
ps hysterically, upon myself. I am a Red Sox fan of good standing (an oxymoron if there ever was one), and those icy fingers up and down my spine, an odd unwillingness to consult the standings in the morning papers, and my sudden need to call up distant fellow-sufferers were symptoms I recalled all too well from previous foldo summers, such as 1978, when my Sox madly threw away a ten-game mid-July lead and ultimately fell before the Yankees in a beautiful and scarifying one-game playoff at the Fens. But Red Sox fans are no help at all at times like these. “It’s all over!” sobbed a Boston-bred colleague whom I now consulted, collect, coast-to-coast. “I told you this would happen. I knew it all along.”

  “We can play through this,” I said stiffly. “Now is the time to show some class.” I hung up.

  Character, to tell the truth, is not a quality that has been generally associated with Red Sox teams or the Red Sox clubhouse in recent years, but all that changed dramatically this summer—first when Don Baylor came over to the club from the Yankees (the teams traded designated hitters, with the left-handed Mike Easier going to the Yanks in an even-up swap for Baylor, who bats from the right side), and then when Tom Seaver joined the club in June, following a trade with the Chicago White Sox, where he had been pitching for the past two summers. Baylor, who is thirty-seven, has played for the A’s, the Angels, the Orioles, the Yankees, and the Red Sox in the course of his illustrious fifteen years in the majors; he won a Most Valuable Player award in 1979, when he was with California. He is a longtime member of the executive committee of the Players Association. My presiding Baylor images are of his thunderous slides into second base against the double play; his crowding, obdurate stance up at bat, when his large and leaning left shoulder almost seems to obscure the pitcher’s view of the plate; and the aura of magisterial calm that always seems to encircle his cubicle in a clubhouse. A prince of players.

  “This game, for me, is not a play-for-yourself thing,” he said before one of the Oakland games. “The exception is the hitter-versus-pitcher situation—when you’re up at bat. That’s when you’re on your own. When a team is playing well, it’s easy to be unselfish. Something intangible is being passed along. Winning is contagious—but losing can also be contagious. There are some selfish ballclubs—you can spot them after a while. Look at the Minnesota club; there are guys there who have great numbers year after year, but it doesn’t mean much. The team may play good for a time and then you look up and they’re out of it again. Playing against the Red Sox all this time, I got the impression that they were divided in a number of ways. They played for themselves a lot, and they weren’t very close. You’ve heard that thing about twenty-five guys calling twenty-five cabs to take them back to the hotel after a game.

  “When I got here, I told some of the pitchers they had to throw inside more, and I said I’d be the first guy out of the dugout if anything happened—if anybody complained. I said they had the reputation of not doing that. You have to do that—move the batters off the plate—or else they’re going to tattoo you off the wall. I know—I’ve been hit by pitches more than anybody in this league. There have been years when I got hit by more than fifteen or sixteen teams. But that pitcher has got to try to intimidate the batter just a little. Just one time can work. If he comes in on him in the second inning, let’s say, the batter will still be thinking about it when he comes up in the ninth, when it counts. But if a team isn’t in contention, if it isn’t playing very well, the first thing you notice is that the pitcher has lost that kind of aggressiveness. He won’t be thinking about it, and his ERA will have gone up into the fours.”

  I asked him how it felt to be on a club when everything was going right—when winning was the habit.

  “Winning—well, everyone contributes,” Baylor said. “You take the extra base, instead of playing it one base at a time. You take chances and they always seem to work. That kind of play just takes over, and the slowest guy on the team will suddenly think he’s the fastest. I remember when I was with Oakland, a long time ago, and we came into Yankee Stadium to play the Yankees in a game that was on national TV. I stole second base, and as I came into the bag Thurman Munson’s throw was off behind me toward the right-field side—he did that sometimes, with that sidearm throw—and out of the corner of my eye I saw that Mickey Rivers was playing in left center, with a long run to the ball. I got up and I knew I was going to try to score, and I did. I scored all the way from first base. Well, at that time Thurman was struggling with the bat as well as behind the plate, but he had such a determined way about him. When the season was over, he made a point of coming to me and thanking me for that one play I’d made, because it motivated him for the rest of the year, and in the end he was able to win an M. V.P. award for that 1976 season. From that day on, he played with a fire in his eye. So one play can turn a player or turn a team around, even if it’s an example from the other side.

  “You want to do well in this game, you know. You don’t want to look bad—not in the major leagues. No one wants to be embarrassed. If you do well and the team is going good, it’s a whole lot easier. You play for the team and not yourself. But if you happen to be going bad yourself and you can take a base on balls in front of somebody who’s swinging the bat real well, that can be enough. That will do it, maybe. You don’t always want to be the man to hit an eight-run homer, because that doesn’t happen. Even taking a base on balls can be a way of leading. Just lately, we’ve run into some rough spots, and we’re looking to see who’s going to lead us out of that. Everybody here wants to be that man.”

  Tom Seaver is forty-one years old now—it’s hard to believe—and he has said that this, his twentieth major-league season, may be his last. He is a different sort of pitcher from what he used to be—one who changes speeds and moves the ball around. Only a few times in a game do you see the hummer, thrown with that full-drop-down delivery, and even then the pitch is used as much for example as for effect—to set up the other stuff. In the game he pitched against the A’s, he looked a bit rocky in the early going, giving up three runs on a walk and three hits in the first; then he steadied. He lost, 4–2, but he’d kept the Red Sox in the game, given them a chance to win if they could, which is the kind of outing he had promised when the trade was made. After the game, his opposing pitcher, Andujar, said that he liked to work against Seaver because there was so much to learn from the experience—how to concentrate, how to take it easy and still bear down. “He’s a professional out there, inside his head and outside,” Joaquin said.

  The next day, Tom said, “The most important thing for any club is to keep the entire season in perspective, to keep that in view at all times. You know there are going to be days when your club is down, but you can’t let yourself be too affected by that. Otherwise, you’d be an emotional wreck at the end of the summer. You can’t afford to lose a guy like that”—he gestured toward Jim Rice, across the clubhouse—“for any length of time and expect to be the same. But you can’t win or lose it all in one day. You can’t spend all your dollars at one sitting. If you’ve had a bad run, like this Oakland club just did, you still have to accept it. It’s part of being a professional. You have to say to yourself, ‘Well, today was the end of the down side, tomorrow is the beginning of the plus side.’ I think there’s been a notion on some of the clubs in the American League West that being good enough to win in their division is good enough. I can say with certainty that that’s the way it was when I was on the White Sox. That attitude filters down from the front office to the players, and it makes you a mediocre club, no matter where you’re playing. It’s a huge mistake.”

  I asked him if it felt very different to be with a club that was in contention.

  “My God, yes,” Seaver said. “Everything you do has meaning. You’re beyond your personal statistics, which is a real break for a professional. If you’re ever in the position where you know that only your own numbers mean anything, you find that after a while that supply is drained, too. It’s empty. On a contending team, even if a guy is
hitting .212 or is 4–8 on the year—well, maybe those four games that the one guy contributed were the ones that put the club over the top. They have meaning. You take pride in what everyone is doing collectively, and that’s a great feeling. It’s an amazing phenomenon how winning and losing can become part of a clubhouse and will breed on themselves, feed on themselves.”

  I asked if he was aware of the trepidation that long-term Red Sox fans are so quick to feel when their club begins to sag a bit.

  “I’ve heard of that,” he said, “but I guess I didn’t know it was so—so oppressing. But that negative is a compliment, really. They care. It might even be easier for fans like that to have their club in second place until late in the year, but I’ve never heard a player say that.” He laughed—his old giggle. “Heck, no. No way!”

  The Oaklands responded to their improving fortunes with tempered cheerfulness, each in his own fashion. Bochte said, “At this point, you have to forget about where you’re going to finish and just try to get things back in order. You want to play one game well. Then it gets to be two good games in a row. Right now, we’re trying to play a whole series of good games. You really have to play well for about a week before you know if you’ve pulled out of a real bad stretch.”

  Roy Eisenhardt, the Oakland president, said, “Winning is the condition that immediately precedes losing.” Then he smiled and said, “The reverse is also true, which is the nice part.”