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  Alderson, a man hungry for new ideas to try out, found a steady supply of them in A’s executive Karl Kuehl (pronounced “keel”), a leathered baseball veteran but also, surprisingly enough, a freethinker. Born in Monterey Park, California, Kuehl was a player-manager in the Northwest League starting at age twenty-one and later managed the Montreal Expos for part of a season, albeit to a disastrous 43-85 record, before he was removed in favor of Charlie Fox. Kuehl headed player development for the A’s from 1983 to 1995, but he was a fount of fresh ideas.

  Ray Karesky was working at a hospital in Phoenix in the spring of 1984 when the A’s started making inquiries about implementing an employee-assistance program. As it happened, Karesky administered the hospital’s EAP, which focused on offering support and counseling to employees going through issues with substance abuse and other personal problems. Karesky, a licensed psychologist, had a master’s degree in education from Harvard and a PhD in counseling psychology from Arizona State University. Kuehl called him up to say the A’s would like to meet with him to talk about his EAP work. “I was a casual sports fan, so it wasn’t like ‘Oh my god!’” Karesky says now.

  Alderson and Kuehl made an odd duo. “Karl was so thoroughly baseball, it oozed out of his pores, and Sandy was very new to baseball,” Karesky recalls. “But they shared some values, including the idea that if you took care of people, it was good for the club.”

  They had a list of detailed questions about EAP, its scope, its effectiveness, its risks and rewards. “They asked me about my background, and I told them I worked a lot with disturbed adolescents,” he says. “They looked at each other, smiled, and said, ‘Perfect.’”

  Two days later, Kuehl called and asked him to catch a flight to Albany, New York, to meet with Oakland’s Double-A minor-league team.

  “It wasn’t just that Sandy was an innovator; he was willing to act quickly,” Karesky told me. “Other teams could take months and years to try to work it out. My boss at the hospital said, ‘You can’t go! You don’t have a contract!’ I went anyway.”

  One of the first people he met in Albany was Keith Lieppman, manager of the team, who later succeeded Kuehl as farm director. There in Albany he also met an unusual character from New York, a writer named Harvey Dorfman the A’s hired to work as the first mental skills coach in baseball. “Karl recommended him, and my attitude at the time, frankly, was anything Karl wanted to try, I was willing to try,” Alderson told me.

  Dorfman was nothing like the German-accented egghead psychiatrist stereotype and used his Bronx accent and offbeat sense of humor to put ballplayers at ease. His message, reiterated in countless ways, was to practice clearing the mind of distraction and visualize positive outcomes. As he said at the time, “Ask any coach and he says 80 percent of the game is mental … yet they have never had anyone working full time on that part of the game.”

  “Harvey was sort of an odd duck,” Alderson says. “He reminded me immediately of Phil Silvers as Sergeant Bilko. He had the same bigger-than-life personality. It wasn’t just that he looked like Silvers. He sort of acted like him, too. Eventually he ended up with the same relationship with others in the organization that Bilko had with his Army peers. He was this wacky guy that everyone followed and revered. Harvey was Phil Silvers in a baseball uniform.”

  Dorfman grew up in the Bronx, far more interested in following the Bombers than his studies. He ended up teaching English at Burr and Burton Seminary in Manchester, Vermont, and wrote about baseball. As Rick Wolff noted in a 2011 New York Times remembrance, “Dorfman was conversant in the current best sellers and would routinely quote chapter and verse from famous philosophers about life’s challenges.”

  Kuehl met Dorfman in Vermont, through Lieppman, and later collaborated with Dorfman as coauthor of The Mental Game of Baseball: A Guide to Peak Performance, which explains, “The key, then, is for a player to regulate his mental performance as he regulates his physical performance. He must learn the strategies and skills required for controlling himself and his situation in the ball game. He must handle worry and anxiety, often based on the pressures of performing; he must take responsibility for that performance; he must approach his game with commitment, concentration, and confidence. As we said, this is not an easy task, but it’s a necessary one… .”

  Dorfman never claimed to be a psychologist (he called himself a “stretch,” not a “shrink”) and was forever interested in absorbing what insight he could from authors. As a well-read individual, he was familiar with a classic text in the area of mental preparation for high performance, Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel, one of the first books to introduce Zen ideas to Europe and the United States, inspiring more popularly read titles like Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance.

  The A’s took a proactive approach to mental-health work. Dorfman and Karesky did not sit by waiting to deal with problems as they arose. They were encouraged to travel to where different teams in the organization were playing and get to know the players and other personnel well. “My instincts told me if they don’t get to know me, they’re not going to trust me, and they’re not going to use me,” Karesky explains. “I became very much a creature of baseball operations, not just the organization. It proved to be a good model, getting involved with baseball operations; a lot of the counseling takes place informally.”

  Dorfman ultimately moved on, frustrated that the A’s were not willing to risk riling their field managers by having him work directly with major-leaguers. “His whole time with us was as a minor-league coach,” Alderson says. “He was exposed to the major-league level, but he never had any responsibilities with the major-league team or the major-league players. That’s ultimately what caused him to leave Oakland.”

  The A’s under the Haas family had a top-to-bottom commitment to making such programs work. There were, however, glitches. It was clear the foundation of any counseling program was confidentiality. No ballplayer would talk to a counselor about what was really going on in his life without faith that he could speak in private with no betrayal of confidence. Trust had to be 100 percent. Karesky could not be asked to leak information from private sessions. Alderson and Kuehl had to be completely trustworthy as well.

  “If they don’t trust Sandy and Karl, they’re not going to trust me,” Karesky says. “That was put to a test early. Others in the organization didn’t necessarily see it that way. They thought I worked for the club, and I should give information.”

  Alderson told Karesky not to worry.

  “Ray, this is not your problem,” he said. “I will deal with it. You just do what you do.”

  Karesky heard that Alderson went to the mat to back him up, and the matter was no longer an issue. Alderson to this day speaks very highly of Karesky and the work he did over many years for the A’s, including developing one of the first Spanish-language counseling programs in baseball. There was a ferment of ideas, and much of the innovative spirit was driven by Karl Kuehl.

  “Karl was very influential in all this, saying, ‘We should try this!’” Alderson told me. “He was an amazing guy. He was hard-nosed and conventional in many ways, but he was such a forward thinker in so many other ways.”

  Alderson’s time in the Marine Corps developed in him a commitment to foster talent at all levels, from the grounds crew to community relations to the guys who played music between innings. It was all forward-thinking and high-minded, the emphasis on a horizontal structure, but there was also the adrenaline rush of competition to keep the pulse rate going. “Alderson smiled at a lot of things, but it always carried some sort of meaning, because there was an edge to him,” Bruce Jenkins of the Chronicle says. “You paid attention to Sandy, because you’d better be alert. Lord knows he always was. That made him a stimulating guy to be around.”

  Their innovations in that period also included installing the first weight room in baseball. Alderson had noticed a surge in power in the early 1980s from former Red Sox catcher Carlton Fisk, he of
the famous wave-it-fair home run. Fisk attributed his increase in home runs to weight training, Alderson recalled, but because he’d worked out in the offseason and not kept it up during the regular season, his numbers tailed off. “That’s when the light went off,” Alderson says. “We have to put something together for the offseason and we have to find a way to maintain that conditioning during the season.”

  In 1982 the Raiders had left Oakland—and the Coliseum—creating some space, so the A’s put in weight-lifting equipment for their players and anyone else who wanted to use it, a group that included Alderson and Eisenhardt. It was not extensive, a small space with what Alderson calls “an odd collection of different machines, pulleys, and dumbbells.” Given the importance of weight training to the contemporary game, it’s almost comical how ­suspicious old-time baseball people were of any sort of weight lifting. Dave McKay, one of the A’s coaches, took on the extra duties of being strength and conditioning coach.

  “In those days hotels didn’t have health clubs and spas and all that, so Dave’s main responsibility as strength and conditioning coach was to wake guys up on the road, load them into a van, and drive them to Gold’s Gym or whatever,” Alderson says. “It wasn’t like he was formally trained. But McKay was physically fit and took care of himself, and knew his way around weights, and had trained in the context of a baseball career. He wasn’t in the weight room in the ballpark in Oakland coaching guys. He was a resource.”

  As part of the settlement of the 1981 strike, baseball’s rules called for “compensation picks” when teams lost valuable players to free agency. The A’s, having just lost Tom Underwood to a free-agent signing, had a pick coming in 1984 and claimed righthander Tim Belcher, selected by the Yankees in the first round and then inadvertently left exposed. It was a brassy move by Alderson, something the old-boys network of GMs would never have done, and it made the A’s a better team. “He worked the rule,” Jay Alves says. “Then three years later we traded Belcher to the Dodgers for Rick Honeycutt, who became an important part of the club.”

  As a new GM, especially one coming from outside of baseball, Alderson was not about to throw his weight around when it came to choices on which players to draft. He freely admitted to lacking a scout’s or baseball lifer’s eye for evaluation. But in leading the discussion over whom to pick, he could move the thinking toward his frame of reference. As it happened, the expected first overall pick in the June 1984 amateur draft was a raw-boned redhead named Mark McGwire, who had been putting on a show with his moon shot homers for USC, hitting an eye-popping thirty-one for the Trojans his junior year. The three teams most interested in McGwire were the Mets, choosing first, and the A’s and the Padres, choosing tenth and eleventh, respectively.

  Dick Wiencek, the A’s scouting director, loved McGwire. He lived in Claremont, California, near where McGwire had gone to high school, and often saw him play at USC. In fact, Wiencek insisted the other A’s scouts go see him as well. Alderson got a firsthand look at McGwire during a UCLA-USC Pac-10 game—and he checked his numbers. What Wiencek and other scouts kept talking about was McGwire’s ability as a pure hitter with power; that was great, Alderson thought, but still better was that he was a pure hitter with power who also had a great eye. His freshman year at USC, McGwire had more walks than strikeouts. Over his entire three-year career at USC, he finished with eighty-three walks to go with 168 hits, a highly valuable complement to his fifty-three homers and 147 RBIs.

  The A’s were considering McGwire, Shane Mack, and Oddibe McDowell. When the Mets opted not to draft McGwire, worried that he wouldn’t sign with them, the A’s pounced. “Mark McGwire was a power guy who got on base,” Alderson says now. “McGwire was the power guy in that draft, but there were some reservations about him among some scouts because of Jeff Ledbetter, another power hitter, who had been drafted a year or two earlier from Florida State and not panned out.”

  Alderson, always a gatherer of information, liked to wait to get a feel for the landscape before asserting himself. There were always certain fixed points around which his evolving perspective could pivot, and one of those was the A’s mercurial leadoff man. Rickey Henderson was an Alderson type of player all the way, getting on base and scoring runs and also hitting home runs. “Rickey was a great base stealer because he was on base all the time,” he says. “That was the icing on the cake. Those qualities were valuable. They weren’t fundamental. Rickey’s probably the greatest player I ever saw because of his on-base qualities and his power and his speed. He had it all.”

  The A’s were not quite ready to build their future around Rickey, the hometown hero who set a major-league record in 1982 by stealing 130 bases. Before the 1983 season, they offered him a seven-year deal for more than $10 million. He turned that offer down and opted to go to arbitration for a third straight year instead. The truth was team owner Walter Haas would have dug deeper to re-sign Rickey if the will was there, but a few in the A’s leadership were put off by some of Rickey’s eccentricities and a belief that he would sometimes give less than full effort. “We had this feeling that he just didn’t represent us that well and he was a loose cannon,” Alderson says. Rickey was an All-Star again in ’84, playing for the $950,000 one-year salary he’d been awarded in arbitration, and going into the offseason it was time to look to trade him.

  Alderson flew to Los Angeles in November ’84 to meet at Dodger Stadium with Al Campanis, then the club general manager, and manager Tommy Lasorda. The Dodgers, offering pitcher Alejandro Peña and a position player, thought they had the inside track on Henderson. Heading into the annual winter meetings in early December, held that year at the Hyatt Regency in Houston, the consensus was that there was not going to be much excitement. Then the Rickey rumors started flying. Campanis, knowing that the Yankees and a slew of other teams were also after Henderson, tried to set a deadline with the A’s of eleven o’clock Tuesday morning on the second day of the meetings.

  Alderson played his strong hand. With the Dodgers’ offer in pocket, he got down to business with the Yankees—the problem was which players should he ask for? Fortunately, Alderson was a man who liked to read widely, scouring sources that other general managers ignored. Four years earlier a Canadian named Allan Simpson, who had spent three summers with the semipro Alaska Goldpanners while also working as sports editor of the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, had the crazy idea of starting an all-baseball publication in his garage. He moved to the Vancouver area in 1980 to do just that, founding the All-America Baseball News, which would soon morph into Baseball America. By 1983 it was up to six thousand subscribers but still widely seen as a fringe publication. Alderson paid attention and noted that Baseball America had been on target with a number of its projections. He had little faith in the ravaged A’s scouting network of that era, still recovering from Finley-era neglect. So going into his meeting with Yankees general manager Clyde King and his assistant Woody Woodward, he boned up on its ranking of Yankee prospects.

  “I just asked the Yankees for the first five guys from Baseball America’s list of the top Yankee prospects!” he says. “Baseball America had just started being published and everybody in baseball said, ‘Oh, this is bullshit, they don’t know anything.’ But objective third parties have got to have some validity.”

  The trade worked out well for the A’s. They wound up with Jay Howell, Jose Rijo, Stan Javier, Eric Plunk, and Tim Birtsas, an infusion that helped the club build toward its dominance later in the decade. Henderson signed a five-year, $8.6 million contract with George Steinbrenner and was in for a lively time in New York.

  One move Alderson made before the ’85 season was to trade two minor-leaguers to the Giants for thirty-five-year-old slugger Dusty Baker. “He was the first nonplaying GM I had,” Baker told me. “It kind of showed me the changing times in basic baseball, which never has gone back. Before it was ballplayers, probably the smarter ballplayers, with a good head, with education, with a business mind, and they also had somebody backing them up on
the business side of the game, but then Sandy was the first guy I met who was all from the business side.”

  Baker was a former Marine, and the first time he went into Alderson’s office to talk to him, he saw the Marine recruitment poster featuring Alderson. Baker, whose five years as a Marine reservist included time as an MP in Shreveport, Louisiana, was taken aback at first.

  “He seemed like a professor type, not a Marine type,” he told me. “I had big-time respect for him because at the time he was in he had to be extremely tougher than he looked. He never wore it on his sleeve, but I knew it was in there.”

  One of Baker’s teammates, Dave Kingman, offered a glimpse of Alderson’s evolving thinking. The A’s signed Kingman in early ’84 after he was released by the Mets, and he led Oakland that year with thirty-five homers and 118 RBIs. Each of the next two seasons Kingman topped thirty homers and ninety RBIs, but he just didn’t get on base; he had thirty-three walks in ’86 and a .210 average. “We didn’t re-sign him because his on-base percentage was .255, and instead we signed Reggie Jackson,” Alderson says. Jackson’s on-base percentage in 1986, playing for the California Angels, was .379, to go with eighteen homers. “We signed Reggie, even though his power numbers were going way down, because his on-base percentage was still very high.”