Baseball Maverick Page 6

  Alderson had become a conduit through which the pride of others flowed, and that role taught him a new humility, a new awareness of the necessity sometimes to place the needs of the group before the need of the individual. He found that it was easier and more satisfying to be proud not of oneself, but of what one had accomplished through close and exacting teamwork. Even on the day when Alderson became a poster boy for the Marines, he did not set out alone from Marine Barracks, but instead with his men and three other officers, including a captain. One of the shots taken that day showed a ramrod-straight Alderson bedecked with medals facing the camera flanked by four other Marines, all of them in white gloves and white pants. That became a new recruitment poster, with the words: “The Marines are looking for a few good men … for officer training.”

  Posters for the Marines were iconic. Alderson said that with so many famous recruiting posters, the one featuring him hardly stood out, but the Marine Corps circulated it widely. “It was a very famous poster of him in his dress blue uniform that was standard all over the Marine Corps,” James L. Jones told me. “You’d see that all over the place.”

  Alderson ended up at Harvard Law School in the same “Why not?” spirit behind so much in his life. “I took the law boards in college because everybody else was taking them,” he says. “I did pretty well, so I thought, ‘I’ll apply to some law schools and see if I get in.’” When he applied in 1969, the University of Virginia and Harvard accepted him. Yale turned him down (and yes, he’s still steamed about that). Late in his time at Eighth and I, he reapplied to the law schools. The University of Virginia now refused to reaccept him. He was ticked off—and he took action. Alderson had read an article in the Washington Post by a military affairs correspondent who struck him as showing some promise, so Alderson called up the paper and got the reporter on the phone to rail about schools denying admission to Vietnam veterans who had been admitted earlier, but had put off their studies to serve in the war. “This is bullshit!” he told the reporter.

  “I called the dean at UVA and said, ‘I’ve gone to the Washington Post. This is a situation that I’m not going to tolerate!’ Five days later I got an acceptance from Harvard, but I also got a letter back from UVA saying, ‘We reconsidered your application and you’ve been admitted,’ and I was able to go back and say, ‘Take a hike!’”

  It meant a lot to Alderson that Harvard honored its earlier commitment. He and Linda moved to Cambridge and soon he was a Red Sox fan. He even grew his hair out. Walking by a Cambridge post office one day, he saw the Marine Corps recruitment poster featuring himself. “At the time my hair was about four inches long,” he said. “It wasn’t a political statement, believe me. I let it grow out because I was tired of getting haircuts two or three times a week.”

  3

  HOLY TOLEDO!

  They went out too fast. Sandy Alderson and his friend and mentor Roy Eisenhardt took off with the nearly nine hundred others in the first annual San Francisco Marathon on July 10, 1977, setting out from the eastern edge of Golden Gate Park. The two men ran shoulder to shoulder toward the sea, down the easy slope of John F. Kennedy Drive. Even when they neared the pounding surf of Ocean Beach and headed south on the Great Highway toward Lake Merced, the excitement carried them along almost without effort. Both men were intent on cracking three hours for the marathon. That meant averaging 6:52 per mile. “We went out at about 5:50s without even realizing it, and at ten miles I looked and thought, ‘Oh my god, this is good and this is bad,’” Eisenhardt told me. “We had a great time at the end of ten miles, but at an expense.”

  Alderson and Eisenhardt had done the work, but with each passing mile it was becoming clear the prospect of cracking three hours was looking questionable. The two men had by then run together hundreds of times in the two years since the law brought them together. Harvard Law had passed in a blur for Alderson. A man who was not intimidated by Vietnam, as either a student journalist or a Marine lieutenant, nonetheless found himself rocked back on his heels by the world he encountered at Harvard Law from 1973 to 1976. Alderson never felt the sense of fitting in at law school that he had felt in the Marines. “I can’t say that I totally enjoyed the experience,” he says. “It was a big change from the Marine Corps. I enjoyed my fellow students, and the professors there were incredible, but it didn’t inspire any passion for the law. In fact, at the time I thought I should have gone to business school.”

  The summer after Alderson’s second year of law school, he clerked at a prominent San Francisco firm, Farella Braun & Martel, where Eisenhardt was a partner. To many at the firm, it seemed inevitable that Eisenhardt and Alderson would become close. Both had graduated from Dartmouth, both had served as officers in the Marine Corps, both had attended elite law schools, both had agile senses of humor, and both were athletic. “How could you not like him?” Eisenhardt asks now. On their lunch breaks the two ran all the way from the Chinatown YMCA to the Golden Gate Bridge and back, a nine-mile run.

  “It was amazing to me,” Linda Alderson told me. “Roy took Sandy under his wing right away when he was a summer clerk. I was working full time, but I went out to California for a couple of weeks and Roy took us to Hawaii on a business trip. He took me, too. I have a picture of the three of us.”

  What attracted Alderson to Farella Braun & Martel was above all its location in San Francisco, where by that point his best friend from high school, Tom Bradley, was pitching for the Giants. Bradley was coming off an attention-getting run with the Chicago White Sox, where his feats included surviving as part of a three-man starting rotation and giving teammate Rich Gossage the nickname “Goose.” Bradley finished a respectable 13-12 for the Giants in 1973 and even edged Tom Seaver at Shea Stadium that August in a taut affair that had the New York Times gushing, “Tom Bradley—the Latin scholar of the San Francisco Giants—came, saw and conquered the New York Mets yesterday in a 1–0 pitching duel against Tom Seaver.”

  Bradley was heading into his third year with the Giants by ’75, but by the time Alderson arrived in town to start his clerkship, Bradley had been shipped out to Triple-A Phoenix. “I left my fastball back at Candlestick Park, I have to say,” Bradley told me. “Back then we didn’t have the protection players have now with agents. My arm just never came back.”

  Sandy and Linda needed somewhere to stay when they moved to San Francisco, and Eisenhardt offered his place. “Roy heard me calling Sandy ‘Rich,’ so he started calling Sandy ‘Rich,’ too, like, ‘Do you know when Rich is coming home?’” Linda says. “I thought that was funny.” This was a man who took up countless pursuits over the years, from carpentry to piano to languages to computers, and mastered each in turn. “He was very impressive. He was incredibly accomplished as an attorney and as an individual,” Alderson says. “A latent edge revealed itself from time to time. Was I his protégé? I’d say yes. Ultimately, I owe my entire professional career to Roy.”

  Eisenhardt specialized in business law; taught at Boalt Hall, the UC Berkeley School of Law, his alma mater; and coached freshman crew. So what had he seen in Alderson? “My belief was you can get to a certain level just by being smart and memorizing stuff, but without intuition you don’t get to the final step of being an effective lawyer,” Eisenhardt says. “What I would look for was that ability to make conceptual leaps, and I saw that in Sandy.”

  Eisenhardt was drawn to Alderson’s sense of humor. “There are plenty of different types of humor,” he said. “There’s everything from the Three Stooges to Gene Wilder. Sandy’s sense of humor I would put in the subtle one-liner category, where it’s below the radar. This little piercing insight comes out, phrased in a way that gives you a recognition about what’s really been going on, and then he lets it lie. He doesn’t follow it up with a big belly laugh that requires you to laugh as well. It just comes in and then exits stage left.”

  Charlie O. Finley’s Oakland A’s were always a colorful train wreck of a club, scruffy and entertaining, talented and tough, united in their res
entment of a miserly owner who was garish and unconventional, but also brilliant enough to build teams that won and won unforgettably. As a kid growing up in San Jose, I was lucky enough to attend one game of the 1972 World Series, cheering on Gene Tenace’s heroics in a Series the A’s won in seven, their first of three straight World Series titles. I loved the zany flair of those teams with colorful nicknames like “Catfish” for Jim Hunter, having no idea the name was cooked up by the showman Finley, complete with a cheerfully bogus backstory.

  Finley would kick around all sorts of crazy ideas with his cousin Carl, who ran the A’s front office almost single-handedly. “Dad and Charlie wanted baseball to be entertaining,” Carl’s daughter, Nancy, told me. “The game needed to be jazzed up several degrees. The designated hitter came out of these conversations. Nothing was considered a ‘stupid’ idea. Anything could be thrown out.”

  Finley brought traces of genius to his work, but he had the problem of the true visionary: He saw the future too well. For him it flashed before his eyes so vividly that he was forever disappointed at how slowly others caught up to his ideas. Some, admittedly, were better off forgotten, like orange baseballs and “Harvey,” a mechanical rabbit that would pop up near home plate with a basketful of fresh baseballs for the umpires. Many of the innovations Finley pushed—night World Series games, brightly colored uniforms—were resisted at the time, but accepted as a given long after he’d been hounded out of the game by a baseball establishment that saw him as an interloper. Finley worked as his own general manager and burned up the phone lines from Chicago with his deal-making, but invariably he alienated his players with his tightfistedness. “He seemed to get his way when he wanted to make a trade for somebody,” says Steve Vucinich, equipment manager of the A’s, who started as a bat boy and ball boy the year the A’s came to Oakland. “Most of the time it was a successful trade. You also have to take the fact that he didn’t pay anybody. He told me once, ‘Steve, you save your pennies so you can spend your thousands.’”

  Bruce Jenkins, longtime sports columnist for the San Francisco Chronicle, started covering the A’s in the ’70s. “I can’t imagine there’s been anyone in the history of sports who was so obsessed with cutting everything, getting by on the absolute least he could get away with, while not even living there, living in Chicago, and yet just dominating with the team that he put together,” Jenkins said. “Here’s a half-drunk blowhard from Chicago—this guy is going to change the game in ways that are so meaningful? I resented the hell out of it. At the same time he was a brilliant businessman, very successful throughout his life, a complex cat. There’s no one way to come up with an opinion with Finley because there’s always a flip side.”

  Jenkins was at the Oakland Coliseum on June 15, 1976, when Finley, sizing up the implications of the coming age of free agency in baseball, decided he wanted to unload his high-priced talent all in one swoop and announced that day he was selling his stars Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers to the visiting Red Sox for $1 million each and Vida Blue to the Yankees for $1.5 million. Such moves would become standard before long, but Commissioner Bowie Kuhn negated the deal. There wasn’t much for Finley to do but look for an exit strategy. Rudi, Fingers, and Blue were all gone by the 1978 season, part of an exodus of talent following the World Series–winning years. The A’s limped through ’77 and ’78 well south of .500 under a succession of forgettable managers (Bobby Winkles?), and in 1979 dropped to an almost Mets-in-’62 level of futility, 54-108, the only consolation being that almost no one saw them play that year (season attendance: 306,763) and not many heard them either. Finley, who did not attend a single A’s game that year, even in Chicago, did so little to promote the team that he was sued by local governments and the commission they appointed to run the Coliseum. Single-game attendance dropped as low as 653.

  Finley was demoralized, but he pulled one more brilliant move, hiring as his new manager for the 1980 season Billy Martin, a man who just might have been as smart, ornery, and unpredictable as he was. Though he will forever wear pinstripes in the imagination of baseball fans, Martin was born near Oakland in Berkeley, and his major breakthrough came when Casey Stengel, then managing in the Pacific Coast League, took an interest in him. Stengel schooled the young Martin in hard-nosed baseball and the lessons stuck. “If Case told me to run through a brick wall—I mean if he said, ‘Billy, I think you can do it’—I’d give it a try,” Martin once said. After Stengel’s Oakland Oaks won their first pennant in years with a young Martin on the squad, Stengel was hired by the Yankees in 1949 and soon brought Martin to play for him there. Anyone who doubts that force of personality dictates events on a baseball field just has to study the way Martin, a scrawny second baseman, became a team leader and a key part of the 1950s Yankees, going on such a hitting rampage in the 1953 World Series, a Yankees victory over the Brooklyn Dodgers, that he had to be named Series MVP. Martin loved the nightlife, so much so the Yankees eventually unloaded him, thinking him a bad influence on Mickey Mantle. By 1980 Martin had already managed Minnesota, Detroit, and Texas, and the Yankees—twice. Energized by Martin’s leadership, the 1980 A’s got off to an 18-11 start.

  Grappling with a divorce, Finley needed to sell the team. Cornell Maier, chairman of Kaiser Aluminum in Oakland, started looking to put together a group that could keep the A’s in Oakland. One of the local businessmen Maier approached in July 1980 was Walter A. Haas Jr. of San Francisco, who at the time was chairman of Levi Strauss, founded by his great-granduncle Levi Strauss. Haas, a clear-eyed businessman who steered Levi Strauss to a new international profile, also happened to be a man deeply committed to philanthropy, having founded a foundation with his wife, ­Evelyn, all the way back in 1953. Haas was a Giants fan. He was not much interested in the A’s. But he knew if Oakland lost the team to Denver or New Orleans, an already struggling East Bay would be far worse off.

  “He cared about the quality of life for everyone in the Bay Area, so it was beyond what team he liked,” his son Wally told me.

  Haas agreed to be part of a group, but Maier came back with the news that Finley only wanted to sell to Haas, not an ownership group.

  “Walter turned him down flat,” Wally says. “He said, ‘I’m still involved with Levi’s, I’m not looking to run a team.’”

  Walter was together with his family, including his son Wally, his daughter, Betsy, and Betsy’s husband, Roy Eisenhardt, and told them the story of his saying no to Finley.

  “Roy and I looked at each other,” Wally recalled. “He said, ‘You did what? You turned him down?’”

  “Well, of course,” Walter said.

  “Well, wait a minute, Dad,” Wally said. “We’ll run the team. You don’t have to run the team, if that’s really your issue.”

  The family conferred, and finally Walter said, “You mean I literally could just be sitting in the stands eating peanuts and drinking a beer and second-guessing you guys?”

  “Absolutely.”

  The die was cast. Eisenhardt said the family had spent time mulling different ways to give back to the community and saw an opportunity. “Investment in the A’s probably leveraged into $150 million to $200 million of value conferred on that community just by virtue of having something to be proud of and the gap it filled in a lot of people’s lives,” Eisenhardt told me. “That’s how we discussed it: We can leverage this into a whole lot of good stuff. I want to be very clear: To start off, our goal could not be to win the World Series, because winning a World Series to me was a false chase. The philosophy that I was extending on Walter’s behalf was to establish a winning culture and make the team an asset that people were proud of.”

  Eisenhardt figured he’d help negotiate the sale and oversee the transition and then get back to life as it was. Wally was working at Levi’s in community relations, good preparation to create a community relations department for the A’s, but at the time he had been looking to change jobs. “I really wanted to get into sports,” Wally told me. “So much so, ironically
, I literally was starting to take a correspondence course from the Columbia School of Broadcasting on how to become an announcer. You’d send a tape in and then they’d critique it and you’d have another lesson. It was ridiculous. I stopped after one time because I got this tape back from my instructor”—and here, telling the story, he slipped into a cartoonish, cheesy voice—“‘Well, Wally Haas, that’s a real good start!’ So disc jockey, L.A., plastic crap. I said, ‘I can’t do this.’”

  As more progress was made on the sale, Eisenhardt realized he needed some legal help with aspects of the deal, so he turned to his protégé, Sandy Alderson. “I didn’t want to be my own lawyer,” Eisenhardt said. “I asked Sandy if he would be the attorney on the transaction. There were a lot of i’s to dot on the whole thing. I wanted someone responsible.”

  Soon Roy and Wally were flying to Chicago to meet with Finley. One of the imperatives of the deal that was very clear to Roy and Wally was that they needed to keep talks out of the papers, which they knew could blow up any potential sale. “My job at the end of this deal was to babysit Charlie,” Wally told me. “I was thirty-two years old and he almost killed me. He was so perfect for Chicago, let me put it that way. He was married still, but he had an ex–Miss California on his arm who was about twenty-eight. Here’s a guy who had gone through quadruple bypass surgery. He was just the showman of showmen. Every time you go to a restaurant he wanted to make sure everybody knew he was there. He drank like a fish. Bourbon. Brown all the way. We’d come back after a night in the bars. I’d be staggering. He’d call me up in my hotel room—the room was literally spinning a couple of those nights—and he’d say, ‘Haas, I’ve got one more thing.’ I finally said, ‘Charlie, fuck you, I’m going to bed.’”