The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (109 page)

The postgame gathering in Steve Boros’s office was a reflective one, with Eisenhardt and Rigney and Sandy Alderson and Bill King—the A’s’ bearded, soft-spoken veteran radio-and-TV announcer—and Karl Kuehl, who is a “motivation coach” of the A’s’ minor-league players, filling up the circle of chairs, and the local writers and TV and radio people quietly coming to get Boros’s comments and going out again. “We gave the fans their money’s worth, I think,” Boros said finally. “I’ll sleep all right tonight, because those guys played an outstanding game. I could heat my house all winter with the energy Mike Norris had in the dugout between innings. He really wanted this one.”

Roy was nursing a can of Tab, and he nodded to the writers who came and went. “It was an aesthetic game,” he ventured at last.

“The worst thing about this kind of game is having to read about it again in the papers tomorrow,” Sandy said.

“We’ve scored one run in the ninth all year, against seventeen for the other guys,” Bill King said.

Roy made a down-curving gesture with one hand and said, “Our effort has been sort of Sisyphean—I have to admit it,” and Boros nodded in agreement.

I wondered briefly about how many other manager’s-office dialogues might have included the word “Sisyphean” in a post-game exchange, but the question didn’t seem to matter, because I’d never attended postgame meetings elsewhere that regularly included the owner. But Roy was always there, listening. I had discussed this matter on several occasions with a friend of mine named Glenn Schwarz, of the San Francisco
Examiner,
who has been on the A’s beat for many years.

“Right from the start, he’s sat there and paid attention,” Schwarz said. “He did it with Billy, and now he’s doing it with Steve. He’s ceaselessly curious. No other owner in baseball could get away with it without making the writers and the manager incredibly nervous, but Roy is so informal and so open that you really don’t notice that he’s there at all.”

One clear glimpse of Eisenhardt’s relations with his players had been offered to me last year, when a little group of Bay-area baseball writers—the regular beat people, including Glenn Schwarz—came to call on Roy to ask him about one member of the club who was known to have, or was strongly suspected of having, major difficulties with cocaine.

“Well, it’s a fair question,” Eisenhardt said. “You guys will have to decide whether to write it or not. The whole question of drugs and athletes is extremely complicated. Players used to go out and get drunk, and everybody thought that was manly and funny. I think the great sums of money we throw at the young players probably have something to do with it. I understand how ballplayers are under a lot of pressure, and I don’t want to toss any easy societal values around here as a solution. I don’t know what the answer is. We’re going to have to learn a lot about this in the next few years—and I don’t mean just in sports.”

One of the writers asked if the player knew that Roy knew he used cocaine.

“I really can’t say for sure,” Roy answered. “Maybe the best thing for him would be for him to know that we know but to notice we’re not doing anything about it, because it’s up to him to solve it. It’s his choice in the end. I know I kept on taking piano lessons for so long when I was a kid because my parents told me I could quit anytime.” He shrugged. “You’ll have to decide what to do about this story,” he went on. “What this means to the success of the team and what its value is as a news story seem worth about two cents compared with the damage the story might do to him as a man.”

The writers did not write the story.

The Sunday Yankee game was another pippin, matching up the Yanks’ Ron Guidry against the slim Oakland rookie righthander Chris Codiroli. The Yankees led by 1–0 in the early going, and then by 2–0 after six, but the quality of play was even better than what we had seen the day before, and the crowd was enthralled. But the game was a killer, it turned out. Rickey Henderson tied things up with a two-run homer in the bottom of the eighth, but the A’s instantly gave back the runs in the ninth with some shabby infield play and a throw to the wrong base by Mike Davis. A promising rally against Goose Gossage in the home half was cut short when base runner Wayne Gross took off in a pointless extempore attempt to steal third and was thrown out easily. It was like a door slamming shut. “Oh, what a way for a game to end!” Boros said in his office. “It looks bad and it feels bad, but you have to live with it somehow.”

“It’s a seventh chord,” Roy said. “It’s like the end of ‘A Day in the Life.’” He did not smile.

Roy’s intensity at home games and his pain over each loss by his team is matched by almost every owner I have observed at close quarters, but not many of them seem to have an accompanying composure, as he does, which arises from a habitually, almost compulsively, reflective attitude toward the sport.

I heard some of these longer views on the final day of my Oakland sojourn, when I called on Roy at lunchtime in his small, windowless office in the Coliseum. This was a bare eighteen hours after that sudden, odious end to the Yankee series, but I found that Eisenhardt could smile about it by now, albeit a bit stiffly. “One of the reasons I hate that kind of loss—that particular turn of events—is that I’m the kind of person who likes to do things myself,” he said. “When I first went into law practice, I insisted on typing all my own letters, to make sure they were done right, but then one of the partners pointed out that I wasn’t entitled to that sort of luxury anymore. And you certainly can’t do that in baseball. You have to turn things over to the players in the end. That’s the way the game
is.
It’s really much harder on the manager, who gets the blame when something goes wrong out there. I can always hide, or point out that I have no discrete function around here. But I’m connected, all right. I know I’ve never had so many people working for me—and I never dreamed of such a thing—and I can’t conceive of another job, unless it’s in high elective office, where you have the chance to affect the way so many thousands of people feel at the end of the day. The fans, I mean. Sometimes I wish I could control that, but I don’t really want the power to go down and place the ball on the field so that the game always comes out the way I want it to. Well, maybe I’d enjoy that once—for one game—but after that it would be boring, and it would mean the end of it all, of course. I think we all know how much George Steinbrenner wants that. Sometimes I see George as Lennie in ‘Of Mice and Men,’ when they gave him that puppy. You squeeze so hard that you stifle the thing you love.”

Roy ordinarily lunches at his desk, but at his suggestion we took our sandwiches (turkey on whole wheat, the invariable Eisenhardt plat du jour) and drinks (a Tab for him, a beer for me) and went down a flight of stairs, through a small door, and out into the vast, sun-struck picnic ground of the Coliseum. We had our choice of fifty thousand two hundred and nineteen available seats, and settled on a nice pair down in the Section 123 boxes, just to the left of the home dugout, where we put our feet up on the seats in front of us (Roy was wearing a pair of distressed wingtips that looked like survivors of his days as a downtown lawyer) and gazed out at the unpeopled greensward and ballroom-smooth base paths, and let the baseball talk flow.

Baseball talk at the executive level often becomes money talk, and for a while Roy addressed himself to the chronic fiscal anxieties of his trade. He said that the A’s expected to lose from five to six million dollars in 1983, in a budget of twenty-two million dollars, and that a major decline in attendance could make for further inroads. He said he wasn’t certain exactly which of the other clubs posted deficits in 1982 but thought it was as many as eighteen or twenty of them. (At the All-Star Game lunch in Chicago last month, the president of the Chicago White Sox stated that the major-league teams had lost a hundred million dollars in the past year.) Help is on the way, however, in the form of a new six-year, one-billion-two-hundred-million-dollar network-television contract, which, starting next year, is expected to produce about six million dollars per year for each major-league club—more than three times the current fixed network revenue. Most clubs, including the A’s, have also negotiated, or are negotiating, lucrative new local or regional cable television contracts, with a wide range of returns, depending on the size of the area market; the Yankees’ current fifteen-year contract with the Sports-Channel network is believed to be in the neighborhood of a hundred million dollars, while similar cable rights in Oakland produce less than twenty million for the A’s. Not surprisingly, Eisenhardt doubts that the television bonanza will do away with the game’s inherent fiscal imbalance, which is perhaps the most implacable of the sports’ continuing difficulties, because clubs with limited regional markets (the Mariners, the Twins, the Royals, the A’s, to name a few) must somehow compete, on the field and also in player salaries and free-agent bidding, with teams like the Yankees, the Dodgers, the Expos, the Phillies, and the Angels, whose markets are enormously more lucrative. (The A’s, of course, must vie with the San Francisco Giants for their audience—the region is counted as encompassing five million people—and all sports franchises in the Bay area are perennially handicapped by the popularity of active outdoor sports and recreation among the indigenes.)

Eisenhardt said that he is also wary of the long-range effect of baseball’s reliance on television as its prime source of revenue and its prime delivery system. A sizable number of clubs—the Braves, the Cubs, the Phillies, the Pirates, the White Sox—are owned by organizations with major television interests, and the game, he believes, will inexorably be twisted in order to serve those interests. The Braves, for instance, are owned by Ted Turner, the proprietor of the independent cable-TV network WTBS, who has dubbed them “America’s Team” and often schedules the Braves’ home games to start at 5:35
P.M.,
so that they may be safely concluded by eight-thirty-five, when the WTBS evening movie begins.

“Under the new national TV contract, we are obliged to play ‘Monday Night Baseball’ games here when our turn comes along,” Eisenhardt said to me. “That means starting play at five-thirty—and anyone who’s driven on Route 17 out here to the park knows what
that
means. And of course, none of the batters can see what the pitchers are throwing in that late-afternoon light. We’ve altered the game on the field to pay back our debt to the networks and suit the convenience of TV consumers on the East Coast, and the long-range damage may be deeper than we can imagine.”

As often happens when Eisenhardt talks, I heard an echo here, for we had circled back to those basic apprehensions about television that he had mentioned to me on our BART ride almost a year earlier. His ideas are consistent and extensively worked, so that they often find their terminus or connection at some other level or corridor of the great multicolumned temple of the game. He appears to see baseball as a whole, in short, instead of in flinders or as mounded rubble, which is the way it often looks to me.

I asked how important it was to him to have the A’s in the black within the next few years.

“Internally, it’s very difficult to run an organization that isn’t approaching the break-even point,” he said. “That’s ingrained in me and in most people, I think. But in one way this is a matter of psychological accounting. An executive or a millionaire can give
x
hundred thousand dollars a year to a charity, and nobody questions it or says, ‘That’s losing money.’ But if you put it into an organization that’s proprietary and capitalist in form but has as its main goal a charitable purpose, which is to provide the game of baseball to as many people as possible, in as many forms as possible, then you have to put an intangible down in your income statement, which is the psychological value of baseball to the community. That doesn’t appear as cash flow, and the bank won’t lend you money on it, but it’s a very important and positive element in what we’re trying to do. Actually, I have some basic doubts whether baseball as a self-contained economic unit
can
operate in the black. One thing I know is that the last thing we’d ever do here would be to cut back on our community projects. The only place I might want to cut down would be on player salaries, but that isn’t entirely in my control. Still, it raises the question for us of the ultimate value of a million-dollar-a-year player. What is our return on that? But to go back to your question about how long one would be willing to take a loss, the answer is: I don’t know.”

He paused, thinking about it. “Of course, revenues can vary appreciably, depending on how well your team is doing,” he went on. “Each year’s attendance is hostage to your previous year’s record. We played very poorly last year, and we’re already off by thirty percent at the gate this year. I’ve begun to see this problem almost as a capitalist-socialist argument: nobody should be
wholly
captive to success or failure, and so forth. It is not exactly a new idea. But it’s not the consequence of losing that hurts baseball nearly so much as it is the reactive behavior that tries to insure against loss—the sudden hiring of that additional expensive star player who might mean a pennant, or the signing of a free agent at whatever cost for fear that if you don’t get him some rival team will and the odds between you will have shifted. We all have such a fear of losing that we do things that actually increase the chances of our losing. It’s almost certain that your team will lose in the end, because only one team is the World Champion at the close of the season, and you’ve exacerbated the consequences. To some degree or other, all twenty-six clubs operate this way now, and the truth is that player costs are astronomically high not because we want the gratification and profit of winning but because we have such a fear of losing. We all work under that spectre.”

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.