Baseball Maverick Page 11

  At that point they were still feeling their way. “It wasn’t a pervasive thing where everything we did was a function of this system or of a bunch of numbers,” Alderson says. “There were basic principles that we tried to adhere to and we were looking at players from a statistical perspective. But as time went on, Eric Walker began to develop some more sophisticated models. Among the first things Eric did for us was to incorporate adjustments in the data for league and park factors.”

  That big Newsweek article on the coming age in baseball had cited two managers who used computers as a tool in sizing up patterns, Steve Boros of the A’s and Tony La Russa of the Chicago White Sox. Boros lasted into the ’84 season, then was replaced as A’s manager by his bench coach, Jackie Moore, who in turn lasted until ’86. La Russa, born in Tampa, Florida, played part of six seasons, mostly for the A’s, and finished with a .199 average. He had a law degree and was more cerebral than most baseball lifers and every bit as intense as Alderson. Once the White Sox fired him after their 26-38 start to the ’86 season, the A’s hired him to replace Jeff Newman.

  The A’s were twenty-one games under .500 going into La ­Russa’s first game as A’s manager, in Boston on July 7, 1986, and faced the challenge of going against 14-1 Roger Clemens, who led the league in strikeouts. La Russa insisted on a bold move. In May the Phillies had released Oakland-born pitcher Dave Stewart, and Alderson signed him to a minor-league contract that month. Stewart, drafted originally by the Dodgers as a catcher, had been traded twice by then and had never won more than ten games in a season. His career record stood at 30-35. La Russa wanted him on the mound to face Clemens at Fenway, and his hunch paid off: The A’s won, 6–4, Jose Canseco and Kingman both homered, and Stewart outpitched Clemens.

  Roy Eisenhardt, the law professor turned A’s executive who brought Alderson into baseball, prepared to step down as president in 1986. The shift, though long planned, was still jarring; Eisenhardt had so much to do with creating the identity of the Haas-family-owned A’s, but once he passed leadership of the team to his brother-in-law, Wally Haas, Alderson had a counterpart who was as ferociously competitive as he was.

  7

  EARTHQUAKE

  A block away from the San Francisco house where Sandy and Linda Alderson lived for most of the 1980s is a sports bar called the Bus Stop Saloon, right at the corner of Union and Laguna Streets, well known as a gathering spot for San Francisco Giants fans. Alderson rooted for the Giants when his high school best friend, Tom Bradley, was pitching for the team in the early 1970s. But once the Haas family brought Alderson into the A’s organization, his stance on the Giants shifted. Early in the 1984 season, Alderson stopped by the Bus Stop to catch some of an A’s game, but it wasn’t on the TV. Instead, they had on the Detroit Tigers, who had won thirty-five of their first forty games that year. Still, this was the Bay Area, not Michigan.

  “How about turning on the A’s game?” Alderson asked the bartender, not mentioning that he lived a block away or that he was the A’s general manager.

  “Aw, shit!” the bartender barked at him. “We’re not watching the A’s. They’re terrible! We’re watching Detroit.”

  Alderson did not even bother to give the bartender a piece of his mind.

  “I just walked out,” he says now. “That was 1984. It was the last time I set foot in that place.”

  The San Francisco Giants always had a way of looking down on the Oakland A’s, who did not arrive in California until 1968, a full decade after the Giants moved from New York. To the world, San Francisco had long been the glamour city, cosmopolitan and beautiful, and even when the Giants played at concrete-slab Candlestick Park, far away from downtown, the “SF” still counted for something. The A’s were the not-quite-invited guests at a swank cocktail party, garish and crude Charlie Finley laughing too loud over by the hors d’oeuvres table. Even under the Haases, a socially prominent San Francisco family, the suggestion was that if the Bay Area could not support two teams, sooner or later the East Bay interlopers had to go.

  The A’s had five straight losing seasons under their belt going into 1987, but three days before the start of the season they made a five-player swap with the Chicago Cubs, trading three minor-leaguers for starting pitcher Dennis Eckersley and a journeyman infielder named Dan Roan. Eckersley, thirty-two by then, had slipped to 6-11 with a 4.57 ERA for the Cubs the year before and was not impressive in spring training, especially against the A’s. The Cubs wanted to work a twenty-one-year-old prospect named Greg Maddux into their rotation and considered Eckersley expendable. Eckersley fit right in with the A’s. He was born in Oakland and attended high school in nearby Fremont, and he was consummately California in all the right ways, from the dashing looks to the hyperactive mound presence to the joyous command of baseball lexicon (“I threw him a cookie!”) to the spectacular verve with which he would rip himself after a disappointing outing. Eckersley, with more than twelve seasons in the big leagues, had always been a starter, including a 20-8 record for the 1978 Red Sox, and Alderson traded for him thinking he could start with the A’s or be a long man in the bullpen.

  “Eckersley wasn’t pitching much in spring training because he’d pulled an oblique swinging the bat,” Alderson recalls.

  Eckersley, only twenty years old when he broke into the big leagues, had enjoyed the nightlife at least as much as the next guy, but just before he wound up with the A’s, he’d confronted his alcoholism. In January 1987, he entered a treatment center in Rhode Island and later told Sports Illustrated, looking back, “I’m prepared to explain that I am an alcoholic… . I could have lost my wife, my career, everything. Instead, I finally started growing up.”

  La Russa was never a full-fledged adherent of Alderson’s baseball philosophy, and the field manager and general manager clashed at times. But overall, La Russa was a great fit for the team, primed to think differently about baseball, as aware of statistics on matchups as anyone. Getting him in an A’s uniform made a huge difference, but the team faltered at the start of the ’87 season, losing five straight, the kind of belly-flop beginning to a year that can get a manager in hot water with the higher-ups. Sure enough, La Russa was informed that Walter Haas, Wally Haas, and Alderson would be stopping by to see him to talk about it. “We just came here to make sure you’re all right,” Walter told him.

  Eckersley’s two starts with the A’s in 1987 did not go well and he was lost in the bullpen much of the season. Pitching coach Dave Duncan had suggested to La Russa that Eckersley could be good in the bullpen, and then A’s closer Jay Howell went down with shoulder trouble. “Initially we had him for depth, and then Dave and Tony turned him into one of the best closers in history,” Alderson says.

  The other major event in 1987 was the arrival of the Bash Brothers as a cultural phenomenon. The year before, Oakland’s fifteenth-round pick, Jose Canseco, had won Rookie of the Year honors with thirty-three homers, 117 RBIs, and a whole lot of charisma. McGwire followed that up in 1987 with one of the all-time great rookie seasons, hitting a rookie-record forty-nine home runs, adding 118 RBIs to lead the team (Canseco had 113 that year), and also showing what a classic Alderson player he was with a team-leading seventy-one walks, a .289 average, and on-base percentage of .370. Like Canseco a year before, he was named Rookie of the Year. “From the very beginning we were kind of put against each other as competitors,” Canseco told me. “Who’s better? Who’s this? Who’s that? Who is the number one Bash Brother?”

  The A’s finished the ’87 season at .500, a step up after five straight losing seasons, and moved into the offseason ready to upgrade. Wally Haas points to baseball’s 1987 winter meetings at the Hilton Anatole Hotel in Dallas as the key to the team’s rebuilding effort. Early in the meetings Alderson packaged two of the pitchers picked up in the Rickey Henderson trade, Rijo and Birtsas, and sent them to the Reds in exchange for veteran slugger Dave Parker, finalizing the deal after hours of talks.

  The Mets thought they had engineered a deal to send
Jesse Orosco, Mookie Wilson, and Rafael Santana to the Los Angeles Dodgers in exchange for Bob Welch, a former first-round pick who had finished that season 15-9 with a 3.22 ERA. When that swap was spurned by the Dodgers, the Mets stepped up an intense effort, meeting with nine teams, including Oakland, to try to arrange a more complicated deal. “Let’s get this straight,” Alderson told them. “We’re here trying to do the same thing you want to do.” The A’s were after Welch, too, ready to deal sought-after shortstop Alfredo Griffin, and Alderson stayed in Dallas even after the meetings officially wrapped up on Wednesday to try to close the deal.

  Alderson had been pressing his case to Dodgers general manager Fred Claire since the recent GM meetings in Florida, where they’d gone running together. “Sandy was a good jogging companion, and you always gained something when you engaged him in conversation,” Claire wrote in his book Fred Claire: My 30 Years in Dodger Blue. “As it turns out, we were a little too engrossed in our discussions during this particular run and got lost… . The key part of my discussion with Alderson had focused on one aspect of the deal: Welch to the A’s, Griffin to the Dodgers.”

  Wally Haas had left the winter meetings at the normal close, not staying late with Alderson and his special assistant, Ron Schueler. He called the hotel room in Dallas very late at night to see if they’d finally completed the deal. Schueler answered the phone and told him the trade had been finalized.

  “I could hear Sandy in the background, saying, ‘Now what did we just do again?’” Wally told me.

  “Well, that’s real reassuring, Schu!” Wally said at the time.

  The Mets received Jack Savage from the Dodgers and Kevin Tapani and Wally Whitehurst from the A’s; the Dodgers picked up Griffin and Jay Howell from the A’s and Jesse Orosco from the Mets; and the A’s landed Bob Welch and Matt Young from the Dodgers.

  “We got on the plane going back and we actually got applause,” Alderson says. “We felt like we’d taken some major steps.”

  Heading into the 1988 season, the A’s raised eyebrows by going with an untested rookie at shortstop, Walter Weiss, born in Tuxedo, New York, and drafted by the A’s in the first round of the 1985 draft. “Everyone said we couldn’t win with a rookie shortstop,” Alderson recalls. “That was the year Walt Weiss was Rookie of the Year.”

  The A’s eased to a 6-6 start in ’88, and then it was like the warp drive engaging in a Star Trek movie: Whoosh! They won eighteen of their next nineteen games, including a fourteen-game winning streak, and were in first place to stay. By May 9, Bob Welch had already won five games, Eckersley had twelve saves, Canseco had nine home runs and thirty-two RBIs. They clinched the AL West on September 19, Stewart winning his nineteenth game that day. The A’s steamrolled the Red Sox in the ALCS, winning all four games once they got past a tense Game 1 with Dennis Eckersley called on to close. Canseco homered in three of the four games, and in the game he didn’t connect the A’s got homers from McGwire, Carney Lansford, Ron Hassey, and Dave Henderson.

  The A’s developed an unmistakable swagger, not only showing up at your ballpark convinced they were going to beat you, but carrying on as if they fully expected to walk off with your girlfriends, too. Winning 104 games in the regular season will do that for you. That was the attitude they brought to Dodger Stadium to open the World Series on October 15. L.A. manager Tommy Lasorda was forced to sit his best power hitter, Kirk Gibson, who led the team in homers that year with twenty-five but had sprained his right knee. Mickey Hatcher took his place in left field and started the game off with a jolt, hitting a two-run homer in the bottom of the first off Stewart. Canseco made up for that in the second, blasting his first career grand slam to put the A’s up 4–2. The Dodgers added a single run in the sixth, but going into the ninth the A’s still had a one-run lead—Eckersley, called on to close, got two quick outs before walking pinch-hitter Mike Davis.

  Behind the A’s dugout, Sandy and Linda Alderson were sitting with their young son, Bryn, and Wally Haas was sitting with his wife, Julie. Wally had learned never to watch games with his family; he wasn’t always fun to be around. In Oakland he and Alderson watched games together in the owner’s box along with former Giants and Angels manager Bill Rigney, a man who had seen everything in his many years in the game, and team physician Allan Pont. “Anyone else, beware coming in there, because it got so intense,” Wally told me. But at Dodger Stadium, Wally was sitting with Julie.

  The great Dodger announcer Vin Scully had said during his game broadcast that Kirk Gibson’s sprained knee was so bad, he was probably not even available to pinch-hit. Gibson, listening to Scully as he sat in the clubhouse getting treatment, decided to take a few swings, just to see, and then let Lasorda know he was available to bat. Once Davis walked, the Dodger Stadium crowd of 55,983 heard Gibson’s name announced as the hitter and went into a state of delirium. Eckersley worked it to a full count and decided to come in with a backdoor slider.

  As soon as Gibson swung, pandemonium broke out. Everyone was jumping around. Alderson had trouble seeing what had happened. “Bryn was sitting on my lap, so it was hard for me to get up and watch it go out,” he told me.

  Unbeknownst to Wally, Julie hid her head below the seat rather than watch. It was all too nerve-wracking.

  “Did he hit it out?” she asked Wally, truly not knowing.

  “No, he didn’t hit it out!” he yelled. “They’re cheering Canseco’s great catch! No, he didn’t hit it out! Those are all A’s fans dressed in blue!”

  He went on in that vein, sprinkling his outburst with some colorful language.

  “The place was as loud as Chavez Ravine probably ever got,” he says. “I lost it. I snapped. It was not a pretty picture. So I got mine later that night, because Rig and my father and I went back to the hotel and tried to drown our sorrows. I went up to my room and found out that Julie had locked me out, which quite frankly was what I deserved. She was going to leave the next day, she was so upset, and got into one of those commuter vans and it caught on fire on the way to LAX, so she couldn’t even leave. She had to come back and watch [Orel] Hershiser stick it to us the next game. Believe me I was a nicer person that night.”

  Hershiser was masterful in Game 2, pitching a three-hit, ­complete-game shutout. The Series moved to Oakland for Game 3 and Mark McGwire won it in the ninth with a home run, but that was about all Oakland had to cheer before the Dodgers won the next two to close it out in five. It was a crushing way to end a season. The A’s were sure they had the better team, and many in baseball agreed, but they’d been outplayed. There was no solace to be had. Alderson seethed. Wally Haas seethed. “If you guys don’t cool it and stop living and dying with every pitch,” Pont eventually told Alderson and Wally, “you’re going to both die of heart attacks.”

  Nothing teaches like pain and disappointment, and going into 1989 the A’s had learned a lot. They got off to an 18-7 start and once again looked unstoppable. The key moment in the season involved Alderson: Four and a half years after trading Rickey Henderson to the Yankees, Alderson brought him back. The June 21 swap with the Yankees cost the A’s outfielder Luis Polonia and pitchers Eric Plunk and Greg Cadaret, but heading into the postseason with Henderson leading off, the A’s had a much different look.

  The A’s and Giants were two teams that could hit—that much was clear going into Game 1 of the World Series. San Francisco first baseman Will Clark had one of the sweeter left-handed swings you’ll ever see and had just led his team over the Cubs in the NLCS. Former Met Kevin Mitchell backed him up, and behind him the Giants had third baseman Matt Williams, just coming into his own after three seasons of bouncing up and down. But whereas the A’s threw out proven ace Dave Stewart in Game 1, the Giants countered with Scott Garrelts. “The one thing the Giants didn’t have, they didn’t have any dominating starting pitching,” Alderson says.

  There was nothing very startling about Oakland’s systematic dismantling of Garrelts in Game 1; Stewart, meanwhile, held San Francisco to five hits in p
itching a complete-game shutout. Game 2 looked a lot like Game 1: Again the A’s pounded out five runs against the Giants starter, this time forty-year-old Rick Reuschel, known as Big Daddy. Rickey Henderson led off the first with a walk, stole second, and scored on a Carney Lansford double, and the A’s never looked back. Up by two games in the Series, they turned their focus to heading across the Bay Bridge to San Francisco for Game 3 two days later, the first World Series game in San Francisco since Bobby Richardson snagged a line drive off Willie McCovey’s bat to end the ’62 World Series.

  I was in my apartment on the third floor of an old Victorian in San Francsico when the temblor hit at 5:04 on October 17. As a veteran of many quakes, I was more curious than worried, trying to gauge where on the Richter scale this one would hit. I was lucky not to be at Candlestick. The old concrete slab was engineered to handle the stresses of an earthquake, but few among the sixty-two thousand on hand knew that. Many described hearing a roar.

  “When it started to shake, my first thought was that people were stomping their feet on the third deck,” Alderson says. “Then it got stronger and it became pretty clear it was an earthquake, having been through a few. I didn’t notice light columns swaying or any of that. At some point it stopped and there was an eerie silence, then a roar from the crowd. Immediately after the earthquake, the lights went out and I thought, ‘Wow, maybe the game will be delayed until the next day because the lights went out.’”

  Many players had wives or girlfriends in the family section, located under an expanse of Candlestick concrete, and rather than risk having it fall on them, they were evacuated onto the field. Players and team officials were also brought down. As bad as it seemed at first, the damage was relatively contained. The Chronicle headline the next day screamed hundreds dead—quadrupling the actual number—and in the aftermath there was a widespread feeling of relief that the quake had not resulted in more fatalities.

  For many baseball fans, it felt odd when the Series resumed at Candlestick following a ten-day hiatus. Once again Dave Stewart was the starter, and the A’s erupted with five home runs to win 13–7. The A’s jumped ahead early in Game 4, Rickey Henderson hammering Don Robinson’s third pitch of the game to left field for a leadoff home run. The A’s jumped to an 8–0 lead and held on to win 9–6.