The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (141 page)

Eisenhardt is a friend of mine, and I worried about him when the news turned bad for the A’s this summer, because his complex appreciation of baseball and his concern for its future deserve better returns, to my way of thinking. Losing is always painful, as we have seen, but what Eisenhardt was forced to watch from his box this summer may have been something far more costly and difficult to accept than a few failed rallies and lost ballgames. When I talked to him between innings, he did not seem embittered by the team’s poor record to date, but he told me that he had been startled by some hostile reactions in the sporting press (“The A’s stink” was the way a mid-June column in the San Francisco
Chronicle
began, and it went on to blame Eisenhardt and Alderson personally for the club’s “complete inability to develop young pitchers or to keep the ones they have in working order”) and by some vindictive, almost wildly angry letters from A’s fans.

“Losing is a lightning rod for frustrations, many of which have nothing at all to do with sports,” Eisenhardt said at one point. “I don’t think this bitterness is anything new, but its level is rising. People everywhere have highly polarized emotions just now, and they express them directly and often inappropriately. I think high player salaries have something to do with it, because there’s always an accompanying and absolutely unjustified expectation of success. Television presents this stream of winning players and winning teams, which leads to artificially heightened expectations and an artificial, monolithic view of the world. A majority of the teams in baseball are losing money, and sometimes I’m not sure the game can survive the fans’ unremitting demands for success. That’s inconsistent with the genetic nature of baseball—what it’s really like. I worry about it, because so many young people are coming to baseball through television. That’s inescapable, but it leads to inattention and anger. If your team isn’t winning, you turn off the set or switch to one of the eighty other channels. You don’t stay with things.”

I suggested that a winning team might make a very large difference in the response of the A’s fans.

“Of course it would,” he said. “And our fans deserve it. But no team wins forever, and nowadays no team even seems able to repeat as a winner. It’s important for fans to be able to use professional sports as an outlet for their hopes and frustrations, but it would be better if we could keep that in proportion. You see that sort of balance at the Cubs’ games, and it’s beautiful. For some reason, there’s a different perspective at Wrigley Field—a clearer understanding of failure as a consistent part of baseball. Because ball teams play every day, the chances for failure are always high, but the Cubs fans somehow understand that. It’s a higher level of baseball culture. I think that’s the model we should be striving for.”

Just after the A’s had won the third game against the Red Sox, completing their unexpected sweep, I ran into Sandy Alderson in a corridor outside the A’s clubhouse. Rock music came floating out of the locker room, along with the raucous, unmistakable sounds of young men who have just won a game. I said to Alderson that I had heard some of the Boston writers in the press box talking about their team’s injuries and wondering how the Sox could be expected to win when there were so many substitutes and rookies—names like Romine, Stenhouse, Romero, and Tarver—in their lineup just now.

“That’s exactly what we went through,” Alderson said. “We still are—look at Dave Stewart, who pitched such a great game for us today. He’s 3–0 as a starter now, but he was just a pickup for us. The Phillies had released him, but we knew he’d had major-league experience and we signed him up in May to play at Tacoma. Then we had all those injuries, and we brought him up. The same goes for Doug Bair. It’s a matter of economics as well as necessity. Very few teams can afford to keep a full line of experienced major-league players on hand these days. We’re all playing with twenty-four-man rosters this year, to save money, but you’ll see a lot of clubs looking around and then picking up experienced older players when they need them. Like the Cards, who did so well when they signed Cedeno during the season last year. The Royals did the same with Steve Farr, and just the other day the Angels picked up Vern Ruhle. Only the Yankees can afford to keep all those high-salary veteran players around—people like Claudell Washington and Al Holland.”

“And look at the troubles the Yankees are having,” I said.

He shrugged—not quite resignedly, I noticed. “You never know,” he said. “In this game, whether you’re a player or a manager or a coach or in the front office, there are just so many things you can control. After that, it’s just fortuity. You may have an injury or a whole bunch of injuries. You may have a bad hop, a terrible call by an umpire, a ball that just goes through-whatever. Or a whole
bunch
of them. All this constitutes thirty or thirty-five or maybe even forty percent of the game. Nobody will ever accept that in the end, and so somebody is always held accountable for the result—for who wins and who loses. In a way, that’s a good thing. If there wasn’t that accountability, you’d have to ask ‘So what the hell am I doing here?’ because then anybody could roll the dice—you or me or some child. These accidental events are important, because you always have to make some response to them—change the pitcher out there, make a trade, change the manager, throw away the uniform. In some cases, you decide to do nothing. You have to come to some rational judgment, no matter how irrational things have begun to look. It’s what keeps you in the game.”

Since I got home from Oakland, the four clubs I came to know and care about on my little tour have not fared very differently, except for the Giants, who were swept by the Cardinals on their next stop and now trail the Houston Astros by a discouraging seven and a half games in the National League West. There was a prolonged brawl on the field in the second game at Busch Stadium, and photographs of the scene show Roger Craig still in the thick of things, as usual: this time, he was trying to tear Whitey Herzog’s head off. The split-fingered fastball didn’t help Steve Carlton, by the way, who won but one game for the Giants; early in August, he announced his retirement from baseball—but he reemerged almost instantly as a member of the White Sox’ pitching corps. Gods are inexplicable.

Nothing happened to the Cubs.

The Red Sox’ lead was a mere four games on their return home, but then they received back-to-back pitching masterpieces from Bruce Hurst and Tom Seaver and suddenly began to feel much better. Oil Can Boyd was back in action, too. The last time I looked (about twenty minutes ago, at this writing), the Sox led the Yankees by five and a half games, the Blue Jays by six and a half, and the Tigers by seven. September in the A.L. East will be
something.

The A’s continued their winning ways after the Boston games, sweeping the Blue Jays as well, and suddenly climbed into fifth place. Then they hit the skids again, losing four in a row, and slipped back into the cellar. Then they got better: by the middle of the month, their 18–9 record since the All-Star break was the second best in the league. They are as likely to end up in third place as in the cellar (often a capacious apartment in the A.L. West), which is to say that respectability—something better than Tony LaRussa’s inner fears, something better than embarrassment—seems within reach.
**
Some of their recent encounters have presented a greater variety of adventure and disaster than the horrors of June. In a home game against the Mariners, Oakland relief pitcher Fernando Arroyo (another late pickup) walked in the tying run in the ninth inning; then he walked in the winner. The next night, with the score again tied, the A’s put their first two runners aboard in the bottom of the ninth, and Carney Lansford lined into a triple play. Then they won the game on the first pitch of their half of the tenth, which Mike Davis whacked for a homer. Nothing
to
it.

Before my trip, I would not have given my attention to such trifling melodramas, but these days, I notice, I watch or listen for the Boston scores and Oakland scores with almost equal hopes and trepidation. One evening in Maine (I was on vacation), I asked my host at dinner if he’d heard the Oakland score from the night before—the A’s had played the Twins in Minneapolis, but my local Down East morning paper, which goes to bed with the chickens, had reported the results in typical fashion: “Oakland at Minneapolis (n)”—and he looked at me in a startled way and said, “But the A’s are in last place, aren’t they? They’re a terrible team this year.” He grinned. “Just terrible.”

He said this with conviction, and I suddenly understood that he found pleasure in the pronouncement. Nothing much else was established as yet in the baseball season (except for the Mets), but he knew one thing for a certainty: the A’s were terrible.

The next morning, I discovered that the Twins had beaten the A’s by 8–0, and as I studied the box score in the paper and tried to squeeze more news out of it than it could convey, I murmured to myself. “Oh, if the A’s would only—”

Then I stopped. Would only
what!
I thought about it for a moment or two, and then it came to me that what I badly seemed to want for a team I cared about was an end to bad luck, an end to bad news—no more fortuity, to use Sandy Alderson’s word. I wanted the exact opposite of what my friend had seen as established: I wanted good news forever. Then—within an instant, I think—I perceived something I hadn’t quite understood about baseball before. Alderson had said that thirty or forty percent of the game was beyond his control or the manager’s or the players’ control. But I am a fan, and my lot is far worse, for everything in baseball is beyond my control; for me every part of the game is just fortuity. Because I am a fan, all I can do is care, and what I wish for, almost every day of the summer, is for things to go well—to go
perfectly—
for the teams and the players I most care about: for the Red Sox, for the A’s now, for the Mets, for the Giants, for Tom Seaver and Keith Hernandez and Roy Eisenhardt and Don Baylor and Wade Boggs and Carney Lansford and Tim Shanahan and Danyl Strawberry and Roger Craig and many, many others. I think every true fan wants no less. We wish for this seriously, every day of the season, but at the same time I think we don’t want it at all. We want our teams to be losers as well as winners; we must have bad luck as well as good, terrible defeats and disappointments as well as victories and thrilling surprises. We must have them, for if it were otherwise, if we could control more of the game or all of the game and make it do our bidding, we would have been granted a wish—no more losing!—that we would badly want to give back within a week. We would have lost baseball, in fact, and then we would have to look around, without much hope, for something else to care about in such a particular and arduous fashion.

*
Before my visit to Wrigley Field, the Chicago
Sun-Times
ran a story about Ron Cey that mentioned his age and declining mobility afield—and his insistence that he was still as good as ever out there. The headline went:
“WASHED UP? CEY: IT AIN’T SO.”

**
The A’s finished the season in a tie (with Kansas City) for third place, sixteen games behind the division-winning Angels. Under LaRussa, the team compiled a 45–34 record and moved up from their season low of twenty-four games below .500 to ten below at the end.

—
Fall 1986

Y
ES, IT WAS. YES,
we did. Yes, that was the way it was, really and truly…The baseball events of this October—the Mets’ vivid comeback victory over the Boston Red Sox in seven games, and the previous elimination of the Houston Astros and the California Angels in the hazardous six-game and seven-game (respectively) league championship playoffs—will not be quickly forgotten, but disbelief is a present danger. Sporting memory is selective and unreliable, with a house tilt toward hyperbole. In inner replay, the running catch, the timely home run become incomparable, and our view of them grows larger and clearer as they recede in time, putting us all into a front-row box seat in the end, while the rest of that game and that day—the fly-ball outs, the four-hop grounders, the fouls into the stands, the botched double play, the sleepy innings, the failed rally, the crush at the concession stand, the jam in the parking lot—are miraculously leached away. This happens so often and so easily that we may not be prepared for its opposite: a set of games and innings and plays and turnabouts that, for once, not only matched but exceeded our baseball expectations, to the point where we may be asking ourselves now if all this really did come to pass at the end of the 1986 season and if it was all right for us to get so excited about it, so hopeful and then so heartbroken or struck with pleasure, which let it be said again: Yes, it did. Yes, it was. Yes, absolutely. What matters now, perhaps, is for each of us to make an effort to hold on to these games, for almost certainly we won’t see their like again soon—or care quite as much if we do.

Purists are saying that the postseason baseball this year was not of a particularly high quality. In the World Series, the first five games were played out without a vestige of a rally, or even of a retied score; that is, the first team to bring home a run won the game. Each of the first four games, moreover, was lost by the home team: not much fun for the fans. One of the games turned on an egregious muff of a routine ground ball, and another produced the decisive event (it turned out) on the third pitch of the evening—a home run by the Mets’ Lenny Dykstra. Neither of the pennant winners’ famous and dominant young starters, Dwight Gooden and Roger Clemens, won a game in the Series. In the playoffs, the Angels committed three errors in one inning in the abysmal second game, and gave up two and then seven unearned runs in their last two games. In that same series, a plunked batsman figured significantly in the outcome of the critical fourth game—and again in the fifth. The Astros, over in the other league, contributed to their own downfall with an errant pickoff throw in the twelfth inning of their penultimate game, and with a butchered fly ball, a throwing error, and two wild pitches in the sixteenth inning of the finale.