The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (106 page)

“The different ways that baseball reaches its audience are extremely important, because of their effect on the fans,” Roy said to me at one point in the subway. “The fans in the stands have an entirely different perception of the game than somebody watching it on television. Sometimes I think of baseball almost as something that exists like the notes on a sheet of music, which has to be performed—performed again and again, well or badly, sometimes brilliantly—in order to go from an inchoate to a choate state. It’s performed in the stadium with fans there to watch it,
in attendance,
and they are important—a real part of the process, whether you’re aware of them or not. It’s not a studio game. Did you ever go to a game where nobody seemed to be watching, really watching, or when there were so few people in the stands that they didn’t seem to add up to a crowd? It’s a totally different experience. It reminds you of that tree felling in the wilderness: if there’s nobody to hear it, is there any sound? If there’s nobody in the stands who really understands what’s going on, you don’t really
have
a baseball game. The delivery systems of baseball are a great concern now—or should be. Television is more important than ever, of course, with the new network contract the clubs have signed, and with cable coming on so strong, but televised baseball is almost an auto-immune disease. We’re consuming ourselves. We’re attacking our own system. Baseball can’t really be taken in on television, because of our ingrained habits of TV-watching. Anybody who knows the sport understands that the ninth inning is as valid as the first inning—that’s why real fans always stay to the end of a game. But we don’t watch TV that way. If the other team scores four runs in the first inning we go
clicko,
or else we flip the dial and watch Burt Reynolds. On TV, the primary emphasis becomes the score and the possibility of the other team’s changing it, and so we miss the integrity of the nine innings and those multiples of three—three strikes and three outs. People can’t learn to watch baseball that way; they’re just learning to watch television.”

Roy speaks in almost subdued conversational tones, with very few gestures or emphasized phrases to make a point, but the intensity of his gaze—he has wide-spaced brown eyes—and the elegantly turned and finished shape of his ideas sometimes make me think that I am a juror in the sway of a subtle and riveting banister. Yet there is no sense of pleading or performance in him; he simply thinks more clearly than most people I know, and compliments his listener by his wish to convey his discoveries with the same gravity and excitement that he has brought to searching them out.

“Baseball is a terrific radio sport, by contrast, because radio feeds our imagination,” he went on. “I was a Tiger fan all the time I was growing up, and I have a perfect memory of George Kell and Hoot Evers making certain plays that I heard but never saw. I almost remember them to this day. I’d be lying out on the grass at home listening to the game, but I was really there in the ballpark. I think baseball has survived all this time because of its place in our imagination—because we’ve chosen to make the players and the games something larger than they really are. But television has just the opposite effect. The players are shown so closely and under such a bright light that we lose all illusion. It’s the same reason we’re having such trouble with our politics—our one-term presidents and our senators and mayors and representatives who are held in such low esteem. We can’t find the old feelings that we had about FDR or about Ted Williams. The best way to get rid of a hero is to put him in front of that camera. Nobody can stand such close scrutiny. Nobody can survive it in the end. Whether we want it or not, our approach to the game becomes iconoclastic and cynical.”

He paused and shook his head a little, half smiling at his own concern. We sat in silence, swaying with the motion of the train, and then we talked a bit about some games and players each of us had seen in recent weeks.

“Everyone in baseball is so afraid of losing,” Roy said at one point, “But I’ve begun to think that, for a team, learning to lose is a very important part of the game. It can be the greening of a team. You have to learn to
wait
in baseball, and losing tests that capacity. When you have a good team that’s playing badly, everybody has to be patient—the players, the organization, the media, the fans. Every team runs into losing streaks during the season, but when it happens there’s a tendency to react as if it’s a crisis that requires immediate surgery. The players press and start to change their batting stances, the writers ask shrill questions, and the front office hides out. Everybody goes into a bunker mentality, and that’s exactly the wrong thing to do. Winning looks so easy when it’s happening, but I think there are some ways of winning that are a whole lot better than others. I’m like any other fan: I love it when my team is winning big, and the hitters and pitchers all seem to be on a tear. That brings high scores and excitement, but it also brings losing streaks when everybody comes down. The clubs that do best in the end are the ones that have one player getting hot and then another and then another, each taking his turn carrying the team. But losing has it uses, if you can remind yourself. You don’t make changes when everything is going right. It’s only when things seem to be in a state of disaster that you get any progress in this world.”

Our train began to slow for another stop, and Roy reached for his blue tennis bag. “This is us,” he announced. He smiled and said, “If you want a homily, I’ve got one: The easiest thing in sport is to win when you’re good. The next easiest is to lose when you’re not any good. The hardest—way hardest—is to lose when you’re good. That’s the test of character.”

We got off the train and walked down the empty platform and up a flight of stairs in the sunshine and onto a footbridge that spanned the tracks below. At the other end of the bridge, a ballpark was waiting for us—The Oakland-Alameda County Coliseum, where the American League’s Oakland A’s play. The place was empty. There would be a game here that night, but at the moment there wasn’t another human being in sight, and the only sound was the click and whir of a couple of sprinklers at work. The triple decks of green and yellow and orange and red seats curved smoothly toward us, right and left, throwing a hard glaze of color back at the sky, but when we walked up to the high wooden fence that ran around the center-field perimeter there was a gleam of rich green visible through the narrow slats of the fence, and a sudden delicious whiff of lawns. Roy put down his bag and pressed one eye up against the fence. “I love this view,” he said. “Look at that grass! It gives me goose bumps every time.” We stood there a minute together, savoring the moment, and I wondered to myself how many other baseball owners would approach their parks this way—like a fan, like a boy. He ran the joint: Roy Eisenhardt, the president of the Oakland A’s.

The twenty-six major-league baseball owners are a much more diverse group than is popularly supposed, but it is hard for fans (including this fan) always to keep that in mind. The obtuseness and arrogance of the owners’ majority position during the negotiations over the renewal of baseball’s basic agreement between the owners and the players in 1981 was largely responsible for the strike that closed down the game for seven weeks in the middle of that season, inflicting extensive psychic and financial damage on the sport; the image we were left with was that a band of willful millionaires seeking, by main force, to solve the game’s financial problems by putting an end to the fundamental structure of free agency, thus miraculously returning the business of baseball to its antiquated nineteenth-century pattern of owner-patroons and captive players. The bitterness and wreckage of the strike probably did away with that dream for good, but the bumptious public posturings of a handful of the owners continue to obscure the relative modesty and anonymity of their peers; maybe that will always happen. So far this year, we have been blessedly spared George Steinbrenner’s customary tantrums and tirades—the firing of still another Yankee manager, the public haranguing and harassment of some of his well-paid stars if they fail always to perform at the level he demands—but other owners have hurried forward to play his Mister Bluster number, at the expense of the fans. In Seattle, a publicity-hungry novice owner, George Argyros, enraged the fans and inflamed the local media by firing the talented young Mariner skipper, Rene Lachemann, in a singularly vapid re-enactment of baseball’s ritual sacrifice of good managers of hopeless teams. In June, a band of limited partners in the Boston Red Sox, under the leadership of a general partner, Buddy LeRoux, attempted to seize control of that ancient flagship by means of a sudden, flimsy-looking legal coup—an embarrassing adventure that will embroil the club in the courts for many months to come. This selfish little war broke out on the day that the Bosox were preparing to stage a sentimental reunion of the famous pennant-winning 1967 Red Sox at Fenway Park, and, of course, it ruined the party. Roy Eisenhardt, who still thinks of himself as a novice in the business, is at sensible pains not to stand aloof from his fellow-owners or criticize their deportment, but since his arrival on the scene, late in 1980, when the club was purchased by his father-in-law, Walter A. Haas, Jr., then the chairman of Levi Strauss & Company, it has been plain to me and to a great many other people that Eisenhardt’s new involvement in the old game is founded on an intellectual and spiritual appreciation of the sport that has hardly been articulated since the time of Branch Rickey. I care about baseball, too, and worry about its future and its ultimate fortunes at the hands of its current keepers, so I have made a point of calling on Eisenhardt whenever I’m in California or Arizona (where the A’s train), and sharing his company during some of the trials and disappointments and surprises of his team’s extremely adventurous journey across the past few seasons.

The business side of baseball is a high-risk, low-return enterprise, as difficult to learn and predict and bring under control as the game out on the field. The franchise that Walter Haas purchased from Charles O. Finley on November 6,1980, for twelve million seven hundred thousand dollars was a much better ball team and an even shakier corporate structure than anyone in the incoming group had quite expected, in spite of extended advance scouting. Andy Dolich, the A’s’ vice-president for business operations, told me that the A’s offices inside the Coliseum had an abandoned-warehouse look when he first arrived that December. “It was like a quonset hut here,” he said. “There was one dusty telephone in the reception room, and nobody in sight, and when you picked it up nothing happened. Inside, we found some old trophies jammed together to hold a lot of loose files, and when we took them down we found that they were the club’s World Championship trophies from 1972, ’73, and ’74. There were six employees in the whole office, including a receptionist, and we discovered that only nineteen percent of the incoming phone calls were ever answered. So we had a job to do.”

The turnaround that the Haas-Eisenhardt group has achieved in the past two and a half years can only be suggested here: the development of a six-team minor-league farm system (all six finished at the top their respective leagues in 1982, and two won league championships), at a cost of three and a half million dollars a year; the establishment of a thirty-seven-man scouting and player-development staff (the A’s had no independent scouts in 1980); a club-record attendance of 1,735,489 last year, in spite of the team’s fifth-place finish (the A’s drew just over three hundred thousand in 1979); the setting up of an intensive and inventive marketing and publicity program, which includes classy, lighthearted television commercials (Sample: a slow-motion closeup of the great A’s base stealer, Rickey Henderson, churning into high gear on the base path, to an accompanying Mission Control voice-over countdown and down-range weather forecast); and the computerization of almost everything, including pitchers’ and batters’ and fielders’ records (via a small computer available to manager Steve Boros) and ticket sales and general revenues (via a Hewlett-Packard 3000 computer, with flanks on the order of a Greyhound bus, set up in a back-room vault). Further effort and money (more or less as expected, the club ran up a five-and-a-half-million-dollar deficit in (he first two full seasons of the new regime) have gone into a community-affairs plan that now includes more than thirty separate programs involving schools and hospitals and libraries and other local charitable and educational ventures. (More than forty thousand youngsters signed reading “contracts” with the A’s this summer; when each one has read a specified number of books before the resumption of school, he or she will receive a Certificate of Education Achievement, signed by Roy Eisenhardt and Wally Haas, and two free tickets to an A’s game.) A more noticeable change is the abolition of the quonset-hut look of the offices, by means of bright carpets and paintings and murals (there are many blown-up photos of the team’s famous ancestor club, Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics, and of baggy-uniformed Hall of Famers like Lefty Grove, Chief Bender, and Jimmie Foxx—a reflection of Eisenhardt’s conviction that ancient games and bygone heroics mean almost as much to baseball fans as yesterday’s box score), and by the perpetually crowded look of the front-office rooms and corridors (there is now a full-time, full-press staff that numbers more than fifty). The telling ingredient in the club’s management-side effort may be beyond precis, for it lies, one senses, in the looks of that staff and in its demeanor, which is youthful, laid back, and fully engaged. There are a great many women and blacks on the roster—hardly a commonplace in big-league offices—and very few of the people you pass in the hall (“Hi, there!”) appear to be immediately threatened by the arrival of a serious birthday. Some of these post-collegians are, in fact, club executives: the bearded, bespectacled, shyly smiling executive vice president, Wally Haas (the son of the principal owner and Roy’s brother-in-law), whose main engagement is with community affairs; Andy Dolich, who some days actually wears a necktie; general counsel Sandy Alderson, who has curly hair, rimless eyeglasses, and an athlete’s shoulders (an associate of Roy Eisenhardt’s San Francisco law firm, he went to Dartmouth, as did Eisenhardt, and later served in the Marine Corps, ditto, and now runs five miles over the San Francisco hills six mornings a week, often side by side with Roy). Sometimes on a busy afternoon, the next young man to pass you in the hall—he is wearing a striped yellow sweater, rumpled white jeans, and Adidas, and is nibbling on a Toll House cookie—goes by almost unnoticed until he speaks (“Hey, how’re you doing?”), and, flustered, you wave and smile back. Roy. Mickey Morabito, the team’s press-relations director, who previously held the same post with the Yankees, once said to me, “Because of the way baseball is structured, only the people at the very top tend to be important, and everyone else feels underpaid and undervalued. But not here. This is a casual office—no one is too uptight or too shy to go in and talk to Roy, and we all have a lot of leeway in how we do our jobs. You have to have good people to make that work, and that’s just what we do have.”