The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (140 page)

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 perhaps 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.”

Dwayne Murphy, the A’s center fielder, denied Seaver’s allegation about teams in the American League West. “I’ve never heard that on this club,” he said. “And I’d have heard it if it was going around. Nobody wants to play .500 ball for a career. What you do hear when you’re going bad is some people beginning to blame others. They’re pointing fingers. It’s always wrong, because one man can’t do it for you—can’t make you win and can’t lose it for you. It’s a team effort, either way.” He paused—he is a quiet man, and speaks very softly—and I had to lean closer to hear what came next: “But I don’t know the other side, really. I’ve never been on a real winning club, except in ’81, when we got to those playoffs in the short season. I tell you, I’m dying to find out what it’s like to win.” He paused again and then repeated himself, even more quietly. “I’m dying to be there.”

Tony LaRussa said, “There are clubs that have some success in the early part of the season and think that’s where their club is going to end up, but this isn’t always the case. There are clubs that have lost for a while and think that’s it—it’s over. But there are always those clubs that seem to be able to pick themselves up, no matter what they’ve done, because they have a history of doing well in the end. The Yankees. The Baltimore Orioles. To some degree, what we’re all trying to do is extend the good side and cut down on the bad. It’s difficult, but it isn’t so hard that you just throw your hands in the air and say it can’t be done. You try to do some little things. You want to make sure that the club is together—that you do things together. A little togetherness. You’d be surprised how often you’ll notice that a winning club has the habit of going to places together on the road. They’re at the same watering holes. On a losing club, guys are sort of embarrassed to be seen together. Playing better ball can make
such
a quick difference. It’s so much more fun. I’ve been watching the Giants this year, because Roger Craig has his guys convinced of that. There may be a few people in baseball who are as good as Roger Craig, but none who are better. None. He’s also got his coaches and players playing one game at a time, which is the whole trick. Back in 1982, the White Sox made a real strong comeback at the middle of the season. We’d won fifteen out of eighteen and put ourselves two and a half or three games out of first place. Then the nineteenth came along—it was against the Rangers, a road game. I wasn’t there, because my first daughter was being born, and Charlie Lau had the club. We were down 1–0 in the top of the ninth, and we got two two-out hits—Squires and LeFlore—and that tied it up, 1–1. In the tenth or eleventh inning, we had a good two-run rally and took the lead, but in the bottom of the inning Dave Hosteller hit a three-run homer for them, and we lost it. Later, I heard a lot of people say, ‘Oh, wasn’t that a shame—that was the night the White Sox lost the pennant.’ Bullshit. Sure you get your heart broken in this game. But what happened after that game was that this real depressed, we-lost-it atmosphere took over. We hadn’t learned to handle that. What’s worse than losing in extra innings? What’s worse is carrying it over and losing two or three more. It’s a million times worse. That’s what you want to be afraid of.

“I think fear of not coming through can be a real motivator, no matter where you are or who you’re up against. Right now, we’re playing the Red Sox three games and then the Blue Jays three games, and I’m worried to death. What you have to do is try. I’m scared to death that between now and October we’ll only be ordinary. If I do a job, we should at least be decent.”

I took in parts of the Oakland-Boston games in Roy Eisenhardt’s private box, behind first base, which offered a perfect view of the action below and of the pleasant, sun-drenched park (two of the games were afternoon affairs) and of the pains of major-league ownership. Eisenhardt, who is in his forties, is lean and athletic, and I sometimes have the impression that he would enjoy baseball more if he could be in uniform and out on the field himself. He watches a game with more intensity than anyone else I know, and I noticed now that he seemed almost wary about his team’s improved fortunes and its suddenly brisk and efficient brand of play. He responded warmly to good news and surprises—a stolen base by Dave Kingman; another sparkling stop by Griffin, far behind second base; a pinch-hit single by Canseco, who had been struggling at the plate in recent games—but then he would resume his grave and abstracted view of the events before us. It had been a difficult summer for the Oakland club, which had begun the season with such high hopes but had seen most of the good news and most of the luck fall on the Giants, who are the perennial Bay rivals of the A’s for a baseball audience that may not be quite large enough or dedicated enough to sustain two major-league clubs. Since purchasing the club, in 1980, the Haas family, which owns Levi Strauss, has made large investments in the refurbishing of the Oakland team and ballpark, and in the essential minor-league chain and scouting system, but the expected accompanying resuscitation of the team’s fortunes on the field has been frustratingly slow in coming, as we have seen, and fans have not turned out in sufficient numbers to prevent a flow of red ink. The A’s have cut back by trading away some high-salary stars, like Rickey Henderson (who went to the Yankees in 1985 in return for five younger prospects), but the club lost five and a half million dollars last year, and it seems clear that the rewards of good will and good works alone cannot be expected to keep the current owners in baseball forever. Over the last couple of years, there have been sporadic rumors that the club might be sold and moved to another city, but shortly before my visit the A’s concluded an agreement with the city of Oakland to extend their lease on the Oakland Coliseum through the year 2000. In return, the club received a five-year low-interest loan of fifteen million dollars, a larger share of the Coliseum food-and-beverage revenues, and a promise that local business and industrial concerns would be recruited to take on a share of the A’s losses; the agreement also includes an escape clause that would permit the club’s departure by 1991, if revenue and attendance figures go below certain minimum levels.