Baseball Maverick Page 14

  For those covering the team during Beane’s years making the transition from assistant GM to GM in his own right, it all seemed the most natural thing in the world, the two of them fitting together so well, Beane’s ascension so inevitable. “Billy had been tremendously loyal through those years and had opportunities to leave and be a general manager elsewhere,” Alderson told me. “I did feel a responsibility to make a transition.”

  Mark McGwire had led baseball with fifty-two homers in 1996. His contract ran through the end of ’97 and then he would be a free agent. The general consensus was that the A’s would never keep him because tightfisted owners Schott and Hofmann would never shell out enough money to land him. That was not quite accurate. The truth was, as I knew from multiple conversations with him that year, McGwire had loved playing for the Haas family and felt a deep loyalty to the organization. He would have loved to play his whole career in Oakland, if only the owners would pay up to field a decent team. What he needed was a break from the stench of mediocrity. The A’s were on their way to a ninety-seven-loss season in 1997. McGwire wanted to know the team would spend enough to make a real effort to improve. Alderson had no cards to play: He could give McGwire no such assurance.

  The Angels should have made a major play for McGwire. He was a Southern California boy all the way and would have loved to be back in Southern California—and was not the kind of player who was obsessed with money. But the Angels briefly got hot without his bat and figured: Why bother? I’d tracked down McGwire in the tunnel leading to the clubhouse in mid-July and asked if he was disappointed the Angels were pulling out of trade talks. He was feeling good after hitting two homers to give him a league-leading thirty-four.

  “Would it be disappointing to me?” McGwire told me, smiling. “No. I haven’t ruled out the other teams that are interested.”

  Who but the Marlins and the Cardinals were interested?

  “There are a couple of others you’ll hear about,” he told me. “We’ve got two weeks left.”

  It didn’t work out that way. “To their credit, the Cardinals started figuring out: Listen, we might be the only guys in this game,” Beane recalls. “That’s the art of the deal. If you’re in and you know there’s no one else, you sort of hold firm on what you’re gonna give up.”

  Beane couldn’t stand it. A few days before the deadline, it was looking bleak, the Cardinals offering a package of three undistinguished pitchers.

  “We can’t do this deal,” he told Alderson. “This is not a good deal!”

  “Listen, we need to make this trade,” Alderson said.

  Three hours before the trade deadline on July 31, the A’s made the deal. They had a home game at the Coliseum that evening and lost 4–0 to run their losing streak to six straight. “For me it was probably the lowest point in the organization I remember being a part of,” Beane says. “We weren’t a good team, and here we’re trading one of the best players in the game. Sandy was doing all these media interviews, and I felt bad. It was a good time to be an assistant GM and not the GM, but it wasn’t any fun being the assistant GM either.”

  After the game, Alderson and Beane walked together to the parking lot for team officials.

  “You won’t have to deal with that now,” Alderson told Beane.

  It was the passing of the torch.

  “At no point had Sandy said, ‘You’re going to be the GM,’” Beane told me. “He never said anything. He just said, ‘You won’t have to deal with that now.’”

  Jocketty, who had moved on from the Rockies to become the Cardinals’ general manager, still thinks it could have worked out much better for the A’s. “I firmly believed the players I gave Oakland for McGwire would have been better,” he told me. “That worked out good for me. To get McGwire and then being able to sign him turned that franchise around.”

  A few months later Alderson gave his job to Beane. Alderson was still president of the A’s, the man in charge, but he relinquished the title—and duties—of general manager. For a man as competitive as Alderson, the move was not without its painful aspects; a Marine never retreats. But it was the only way to complete Beane’s education and development, to give him some time as general manager in his own right, but with Alderson still there. Only then did Beane fully grasp what Alderson had meant the night of the McGwire trade. Only then did he comprehend just how ugly it could have got for him as a general manager just starting out to be the one who couldn’t re-sign McGwire and had to let him walk.

  Commissioner Bud Selig offered Alderson a job late in the 1998 season working at Major League Baseball as executive vice president for baseball operations. “I admired his work,” Selig told me. “I had a lot of respect for him, which is one of the reasons I hired him.”

  Alderson’s farewell press conference was surprisingly emotional.

  “It’s going to be a little hard,” Beane told me that day, his voice catching. “We’re talking about losing a mentor, a friend, and possibly the brightest mind in baseball today. This isn’t easy for me.”

  It wasn’t always easy for Alderson, either. Working at Major League Baseball headquarters on Park Avenue in New York, even with an impressive title like “Executive Vice President for Baseball Operations,” in some ways represented a comedown from the buzz of running a team. Alderson’s physician had warned him about grave consequences to his health if he continued to live and die with every pitch, and he had tried to back off some, but the truth was he loved caring that much. He reveled in the intensity of competition. MLB was a great, new challenge, intriguing in many ways, but an office job in New York, especially with Commissioner Bud Selig 850 miles away in Wisconsin, had an almost hollow feeling.

  “That office was somewhat leaderless,” said John Ricco, who worked twelve years in the commissioner’s office. “Sandy had a presence. If it was someone’s birthday, as the ranking guy, he would make a speech. He really, you could tell, embraced that role of being a leader. We had a blackout, the whole city went black, and I remember him kind of taking the lead there. We went through that together.”

  Ricco considered Alderson a potential successor to Selig as commissioner of baseball. This was an idea that had been kicking around for years. Back in September 1989 when Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti died suddenly at age fifty-one, Ross Newhan wrote in the Los Angeles Times that among the likely replacements were only a few names: league presidents Bill White and Bobby Brown, Brewers owner Bud Selig, and three general managers: Harry Dalton, Frank Cashen, and Sandy Alderson. Dennis Eckersley, inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2004, was one of many who favored Alderson in the job. “He’s tough, he’s just so sharp, and he has that poker face,” Eckersley told me in 1999. “I think he would be great as commissioner. He has the passion for the game.”

  One of Alderson’s areas of responsibility at MLB was working to internationalize the game, an effort he promoted by organizing a game in Cuba between the Baltimore Orioles and the Cuban National Team. I was among the contingent of baseball writers on hand March 28, 1999, in Havana’s Estadio Latinoamerica to witness the odd spectacle of Cuban leader Fidel Castro and Orioles owner Peter Angelos standing side by side during the playing of the U.S. national anthem as both the U.S. and Cuban flags were raised. It had been more than four decades since a big-league team had played in Cuba. The U.S. economic embargo, imposed in October 1960, was still very much in effect. Alderson sat a few rows away from Castro at the game, but had time to talk to him at a reception the night before.

  “I was impressed by his command of detail,” Alderson told me in Havana. “He seemed to know a lot about the development of baseball in the United States and other countries. My whole point of view is that this is recognition of a cultural bond that ­exists between the two countries. It doesn’t speak to our economic systems. It doesn’t speak to our political systems. It speaks to what we have in common.”

  Alderson also squarely put to rest the myth that Castro was an outstanding pitcher. “He said he was perhaps
a better basketball player than a baseball player,” Alderson said. “That was illuminating.”

  It was easy at the time to dismiss the game as a mere stunt, a chance for ESPN to set up its cameras in an exotic locale like Old Havana, largely unchanged in the forty years since Castro led a revolution to topple the Batista government. But the game represented an important step forward in bringing more Cuban players into major-league baseball. At the time, Cuban-born players in the big leagues were still rare, despite the success of Luis Tiant, Tony Pérez, and Jose Canseco. (A record nineteen Cuban-born players would be in the big leagues in 2014, up from a record fifteen the year before, and whereas in the ’90s Cuban-born players sometimes showed up in the U.S. past their prime, Yoenis Céspedes, Yasel Puig, José Abreu, Alexei Ramírez, and Aroldis Chapman were all All-Stars.)

  Alderson covered a wide variety of issues in his six and a half years working on Park Avenue, but it was his handling of the umpires union for which he was most remembered. The headline over a January 1999 Murray Chass article in the Times read COMMISSIONER’S OFFICE WON’T TAKE ON UMPIRES. Maybe the office itself wasn’t going to do that, but MLB’s point person on the issue was. By July 14, 1999, tensions had escalated to the point where more than fifty of sixty-six big-league umpires, goaded by umpires union chief Richie Phillips, voted to resign en masse from their jobs, effective September 2. It was a classic case of overplaying a weak hand. Alderson, delighted, responded: “This is either a threat to be ignored, or an offer to be accepted.” MLB accepted the resignations of twenty-two umpires and hired replacement umps from the minor leagues. The mass-resignation gambit had backfired, leading to the demise of the Major League Umpires Association, which was replaced by a new union, the World Umpires Association.

  Alderson had started mulling the problem of how fans and media would react when technological progress imposed more ­accountability on umpires, showing the progress of pitches over home plate and highlighting the accuracy—or inaccuracy—of an umpire’s call. As every fan knew, different home-plate umpires had different strike zones. A knee-high fastball an inch off the plate might consistently be called a strike by one ump and a ball by another, or an umpire might shift the zone he called from game to game; pitchers and catchers paid close attention in the early innings to see which pitches were being called strikes, and adjusted accordingly. Alderson wanted more consistency. He felt it was important for the credibility of both the umpires and baseball itself.

  “My goal with the umpires, which I stated periodically, was to have them perceived to be the best officials of any sport, amateur and professional, anywhere in the world,” Alderson says. “That was our aspiration. We emphasized four things.”

  One, the strike zone. “The most important factor in an umpire’s credibility is calling balls and strikes,” Alderson told me. “If they’re not consistent with balls and strikes, there are 130 chances for a fan or viewer to agree or disagree.”

  Starting in 2001, under Alderson’s supervision, Major League Baseball began to implement an Umpire Information System developed by QuesTec, a company in Deer Park, New York, that used data culled from four video cameras installed at ballparks to track the flight of each pitch. The data could then be compared to the actual “ball” and “strike” calls made by each umpire working games at ballparks equipped with the QuesTec system and they could be given a score.

  “At the time we had the ability to grade them on the strike zone but it wasn’t available to the public,” Alderson says. “I told them, ‘Look, eventually the technology is going to catch up with us, the technology will be available to the networks, and you will be judged on that basis, in the same way instant replay came along and subjected you to second-guessing.’”

  Two was what Alderson called nonconfrontation. “We had to tone down the confrontations between umpires and managers, umpires and coaches, umpires and players,” he said. “They had to manage themselves and have a higher standard of conduct than we would normally expect from players and managers.”

  Three was hustle. “Just hustling creates the impression that they’re motivated to do the job and to get the call right,” he said. “It’s like the perception when an umpire runs out to the outfield on a trap play to get in the right position. They needed to hustle. Part of that was physical fitness. To hustle, you have to be physically fit.”

  Four was getting the call right. “When there was a play, get them together to talk about it,” he said. “That sort of flies in the face of the old umpire ethos, which was that you stand and fall on your own call and you never make a mistake, which flew in the face of technology. To get them together was not easy. But when you get together, it looks like you’re trying to get the play right, and people identify with that. The fact you tried earns you a lot of points.”

  Taken together, the four added up to a major shift in how umpires did what they did. Of the four, the single most telling aspect was the Alderson edict that umpires confer far more often to discuss close plays. That one stuck. “That was an important part of the program and something that has continued, which is nice,” he told me. “Sometimes you have these jobs for three or four years and leave and the whole thing goes to hell in a handbasket.”

  Alderson’s time in baseball’s New York office wrapped up in early 2005 when John Moores, a Texas-born businessman who owned the Padres, asked Bud Selig for permission to talk to Alderson about coming to work in San Diego. The Padres at that point had been in the playoffs only three times in their thirty-seven years in existence and Moores wanted Alderson to do for San Diego what he had earlier done for Oakland, and hired him as CEO starting in April 2005. “I was intrigued by the opportunity,” Alderson says. “And in retrospect I’m very happy I took it.”

  As CEO Alderson had broad responsibility for the organization, but it was understood he would take a close look at baseball operations and revamp where he thought it was needed. “I made very few changes, actually,” he says. He left in place the longtime tandem of general manager Kevin Towers, a former minor-league pitcher the Padres promoted from scouting director in 1995, and field manager Bruce Bochy, a former catcher for the Astros, Mets, and Padres, who was by then in his twelfth season leading the Padres. Bochy, NL Manager of the Year in 1996, had established a reputation as an easygoing leader good at connecting with players, a manager who believed in trusting his gut to make key choices. He had skippered the Padres to the 1998 World Series against the New York Yankees, only to be swept in four games. Each of Alderson’s first two seasons in San Diego, 2005 and 2006, the Padres reached the playoffs, and both years lost the National League Division Series to the Cardinals, 3-0 and 3-1.

  Soon after the Padres were eliminated in 2006, Giants general manager Brian Sabean, looking for a replacement for manager Felipe Alou, set his sights on Bochy, who had one year left on his contract with San Diego. Alderson gave Bochy permission to talk to the ­Giants, since at that point he was not prepared to extend his contract. Before October was even out, the Giants were announcing Bochy as their new manager. Alderson’s reservations about Bochy as manager had in part to do with a sense that Bochy and Towers, who had known each other since they were teammates on the 1988 Las Vegas Stars, were such good friends, an almost incestuous atmosphere had developed that was not always ideal for team dynamics.

  But when I caught up with Bochy in the summer of 2014 and asked him if there had been any issues between him and Alderson, he grinned at the question. “I’ve heard more than once that Sandy and I didn’t quite see eye to eye,” Bochy told me, almost laughing. “I really felt like we had a pretty good relationship. He would come down to the clubhouse, we would talk. I never felt that we didn’t get along or that we weren’t on the same page. Sandy, he’s a smart man, and he would talk about baseball, about hitting, and he’s got his philosophy and his thinking. But Sandy really loves the game. That showed. He was always a guy waiting for the players when they come off the bus right after a road trip. He felt like these were his guys, hi
s troops, and he was always behind anything we did.”

  The playoff appearances in Alderson’s first two years in San Diego turned out to be a high-water mark. The Padres were third in 2007, despite finishing 89-74, and then in 2008 plunged to 63-99 and last place in the NL West. Alderson had an inkling that Moores might be selling the team, and by spring training 2009 the deal had gone down. Jeff Moorad, the former agent, put together a group to buy the team and took over as the Padres’ new CEO, and Alderson moved on. San Diego had been a good fit for him in many ways, a beachside California city much to his liking, one with a strong military presence, but he’d also been jarred at times with the differences between San Diego, down near the Mexican border, and his Northern California stomping grounds in the Bay Area.

  In San Francisco, Alderson was known for his dry wit. As Edvins Beitiks, a columnist and former A’s beat writer at the old San Francisco Examiner, once put it to me: “It’s one of those senses of humor that’s so sharp, you’re laughing even as your head is tottering because he’s cut it right off of you. To think that there are people who believe they are sharper than he is just makes me want to fall over and grab my sides.”

  Tom Krasovic, a beat writer who covered Alderson in San ­Diego, found him to be “fair, wry, sometimes contentious” with print media, but compared his radio presence to Spock, the half-Vulcan, half-human character on Star Trek devoted to logic. “I used to make light of those interviews,” Krasovic says. “They could be torturous for the listener but also fascinating… . On the radio, he could come off as stilted, overly mental, almost robotic. He has a great dry sense of humor—but it translates better in person.”

  Alderson finally had time in 2009 to do something he’d always wanted to do: teach. He was asked to teach a sports marketing course at the University of California at Berkeley’s Haas School of Business, and found he loved engaging with the students. “The undergraduates were tremendously enthusiastic and the MBA students were very accomplished and creative,” he says. “I really enjoyed it. It was stimulating, it was challenging, and I learned a great deal myself.” Alderson continued teaching at the Haas School even after Bud Selig asked him in March 2010 to oversee an effort to reform baseball in the Dominican Republic, and he would commute back to Berkeley to honor his commitment.