Baseball Maverick Page 7

  Wally showed up the next day at the lawyers’ office to sign the documents finalizing the sale.

  “Look, Charlie, if you can keep this a secret, we’ll buy you dinner in San Francisco Friday night before the Saturday press conference,” Wally told him.

  Back in San Francisco, Wally and Roy realized they had a problem: Where could they possibly go for dinner without having it hit the papers? They seized on the notion of Walter’s private dining club in North Beach, called the Villa Taverna, tucked away in an alley half a block from the Transamerica Pyramid. It was a place for San Francisco’s old money, in many ways a bizarre choice for a meal with Finley, but it worked out. Wally and Roy arrived first to find the place empty except for them. Finley showed up and looked around, smiling.

  “You guys gotta lotta class!” Finley called out. “You bought this place out!”

  Wally was sweating: “I thought to myself: ‘OK, now what do we do? Do we go along with it and hope that nobody shows up? Or do we tell him?’ I said: ‘Fuck it. Let’s go along with it.’ I kept looking over at the door. Nobody came in for the two hours we were there, so he never knew.”

  Finley was in fine form at the press conference to announce the $12.7 million sale in August 1980, lamenting, “I’m having to leave because of the idiotic, astronomical, unjustified salaries today. But I don’t think I could be leaving the team in better hands.” Tom Boswell, writing in the Washington Post, described incoming team president Eisenhardt as “the consummate handsome blow-dry smoothie” and dutifully reported the Haases’ plan to build the A’s back up through the farm system, but mocked Eisenhardt for downplaying the cross-bay rivalry with the Giants and saying he hoped “mutual success would ‘create a synergy between the teams.’”

  Wally Haas still chuckles at one of the little surprises of that day. A young college student approached with his résumé, wanting the Haas family to hire him. He was at the time announcing Cal games on radio—and actually had called A’s games on ten-watt KALX as well. What struck Wally at the time was the fresh-faced young man’s “shock of reddish-brown hair, almost permed.” His name? Larry Baer, who would go on to lead the San Francisco Giants to World Series titles in 2010, 2012, and 2014, rising to CEO.

  Finley was so unpredictable, all bets were off on the sale going through until it was signed and delivered. To close the transaction, thirty-two-year-old Sandy Alderson was flown to Chicago as the lawyer representing the Haas family on the deal. “He was kind of bombastic,” Alderson says. “Charlie was concerned that we wouldn’t wire the money in time for him to get interest for that day. He kept threatening me: ‘If it’s not wired by such and such a time, if it’s not closed, I’m going to void the deal!’ He was bouncing around trying to bully everyone, including Roy and me. Finally we did get the money transferred in time, but it was one of those deals where you’re not absolutely sure it will get done until it is done.”

  For Alderson it was a chance to get his own look at a figure he’d been hearing about for years. He’d been in the Bay Area in the summer of ’75 working as a summer clerk at Farella Braun and then, back in Cambridge for fall semester, rooted for Boston in the ALCS against Oakland, which the Red Sox swept. Finley may have been bombastic, but he was his own man. In meeting Finley, Alderson did what he always did: He sized him up and imagined himself in Finley’s shoes. He liked Finley’s ideas and his fearlessness. He wondered what a man like Finley could do if he kept the flair for originality and the love of innovation, but reined in the personal irregularity, if he stopped penny-pinching to great extremes and thought instead about building a team that could last.

  One of the boldest moves the new A’s ownership group took when Walter Haas bought the team from Charlie Finley in August 1980 was to decide they were going to feel perfectly at home thinking like the fans they were. They were not grizzled, tobacco-chewing baseball veterans muttering under their breaths about the way things used to be. They had not spent decades behind home plate perfecting a pose of wry disengagement. They cared. They loved sports. They were thrilled at the prospect of being in on the action. This might have made them seem naive to some, but it gave them distinct advantages: They did not have to imagine how the fans they were trying to cultivate might feel about something. They knew because they were fans, too. They asked themselves: What would be the coolest possible thing we could do? What would be so fun, such a kick, it would excite any fan and have them eager to follow the A’s? The answer came to them with a cry of “Holy Toledo!”

  They kept in mind a core truth worth remembering: Nothing builds loyalty to a club like having a character in the broadcast booth fans love like part of the family. They wanted Bill King. They thought back to their own experiences of sports over the years and how ­often it was King, born and raised in Illinois but a fixture in the San Francisco Bay Area since the late 1950s, who had so often animated their favorite moments and given them such delicious flavor. King’s signature call was “Holy Toledo!” As award-winning broadcaster Ken Korach recalled in his book Holy Toledo, “Night after night his voice would carry excitement and energy, like a jazz saxophonist commanding a room with a solo that built to a crescendo … ‘Holy Toledo!’”

  King had called both Raiders and Warriors games for years. “I was a huge fan,” Wally told me. “What made it so interesting was he could paint a picture like nobody’s business. You could see, it was in such detail. It was not just the play-by-play, it was the color he added at the same time and doing it all in this machine-gun style.”

  Wally and Roy Eisenhardt were focused on getting King—and wanted to team him up with another great broadcaster, Lon Simmons, he of the rumbling bass voice and dry sense of humor. “I would call Lon sort of an abstract painter in his broadcasting style, and I considered Bill more a pointillist, somebody who connected all these minute dots into a panoramic portrait,” Alderson told me.

  Long before Alderson was ever listed in the A’s media guide as a vice president, he was a key adviser and confidant to Eisenhardt. The two would kick around ideas during their runs or basketball games. Eisenhardt saw it as more an intellectual partnership than a mentor-protégé relationship. “I thought of us as peers,” Eisenhardt told me. “The only difference between Sandy and me is I had eight years in age on him and he had done things I hadn’t done. I wasn’t in combat. That’s an experience that it’s hard to even think about what it must be like.”

  Having the Marine Corps in common not only deepened the bond between them, it also gave them a lens through which to see many of the challenges inherent in building the A’s franchise. “We talked about how good it was for people to have an experience where they’re mutually interdependent, as opposed to hierarchically connected, you know, ‘My boss shit on me so I’m going to shit on you,’ that kind of thing,” Eisenhardt said. “You can really learn a lot from the horizontal interconnection in the Marine Corps. You learn not to overreact or underreact to anything, because other people are counting on you.”

  They also talked about pride. They were both proud of their time in the Marines. Why not make the community proud of the A’s? To do that, they reached an agreement with KSFO, the powerhouse station in the market—“K-S-F-O in Sannnn Frannnn-cis-co”—rather than having A’s games on a small-signal FM station.

  Bolstering their radio presence was just one facet of a larger effort they undertook to energize fans in every way they could imagine. They hired sports marketing consultant Matt Levine, who used techniques he’d honed working in consumer product marketing (he’d been an executive at Scott Paper Company in Philadelphia) and international business consulting (McKinsey & Company), to explore why fans go to sporting events and what they hope and expect to get out of the experience.

  “Winning is everything,” Ray Kennedy wrote in an April 1980 Sports Illustrated article. “That has been the rallying cry in the front offices as well as the front lines of professional sports for so long that it is the turnstile equivalent of In God We Trust. And for obvi
ous reasons. As any ticket taker well knows, more victories equals more fans equals more profits. Elementary, no?

  “No. Dumb, unimaginative and hopelessly antediluvian thinking, says Matthew Levine, president of Pacific Select Corp., a marketing consultant firm that specializes in the sports business. ‘Winning isn’t everything,’ he insists. ‘In fact, only 25% of the fans come out solely because a team is winning.’”

  Among the other findings from Levine and his coworkers, based on interviews with roughly three hundred thousand fans, the article reported:

  ·More than half of the people who consider themselves loyal sports fans never attend a game.

  ·Sportswriters are much less influential than either they or the teams think they are.

  ·At any given game 15% to 20% of the fans are there to “relieve pressure and tensions.”

  ·Today’s young adults (18 to 30 years old) don’t know how to watch a game.

  ·The free-agent shuffle is destroying the sense of stability and continuity that fans thrive on.

  Eisenhardt called Levine and suggested he come out to an A’s game to meet him and Wally Haas. So there Levine was, two weeks after the August 1980 sale, for a midweek game against the Texas Rangers. Paid attendance: 2,443. “There were not a thousand people at the game,” Levine says. “I met Wally, but Roy was doing the grilling, sizing me up: ‘What would you do? What are your thoughts? Could you help staff this place?’”

  “We resonated,” Eisenhardt says. “He was a guy I could talk to who wasn’t encumbered with ‘Well, this is how you do it in baseball.’ He was thinking more broadly. It doesn’t mean every idea worked, but what Matt provided was somebody I could talk to outside of baseball who you could test ideas on. One of the ideas was: We could get Bill [King]. And Matt knew Bill and set up a meeting.”

  Eisenhardt and King also resonated. “I think it really was Roy’s personality,” Alderson says. “Bill King saw himself as kind of a Renaissance man. I’m sure that’s how he viewed Roy, an accomplished guy who had a lot of different interests. They became very close friends.”

  Family history helped dictate the Haas family’s community-minded approach. Loeb Strauss, born in 1829 in Bavaria, immigrated to the United States and before long was set up in San Francisco as the representative of the family wholesale dry-goods business. Loeb, who changed his name to Levi within a few years of arriving in America, was constantly innovating, eventually experimenting with durable denim pants he may actually have cut out himself, and he was committed to philanthropy, donating substantial sums to charities including the Home for Aged Israelites and the Roman Catholic and Protestant Orphan Asylums.

  Levi Strauss died in 1902 and turned over his company to his nephew Jacob Stern, whose daughter Elise married Walter A. Haas Sr., who in turn took over in 1928. The family business thrived on his watch. “My grandfather would always bring a transistor radio when he had to go to the opera or symphony,” Wally told me. “People thought he was hard of hearing when in fact he was just listening to the Giants game.”

  The 1960s adopted Levi’s and made them famous. The family philosophy was: If you feel you’ve been lucky, why not pass some of that luck on? A 1978 article in Forbes quoted Wally’s brother, Peter Haas, as saying, “I know a lot of people agree with Milton Friedman that a company’s only responsibility is to make money. Well, we disagree completely.”

  “Really at the end of the day the reason why my dad bought the A’s, more than giving his son and son-in-law a new job, was he really did worry that with Oakland being such a complicated and distressed community, it would be devastating for them to lose the A’s,” Wally says. “Maybe by keeping the A’s here, if we ran it the way that we ran Levi’s, which was essentially being really good corporate community citizens and giving back to the community, we could make the A’s a community asset.”

  So many franchises had been family-owned in the postwar years, resistance to change was endemic in baseball. The Stoneham family owned the Giants in New York and San Francisco, the O’Malleys owned the Dodgers in Brooklyn and Los Angeles, the Busch family owned the Cardinals, and the Yawkeys owned the Red Sox. The family atmosphere extended to sports reporters, who were often invited to parties and given World Series rings if the team won. There was a “culture of continuation,” as Steve Vucinich put it to me.

  Teams were built around strong personalities who did not want to be questioned by their underlings. The organization the Haases inherited from Finley had a front office of six people: Mickey Morabito, traveling secretary and PR man, brought to Oakland by Billy Martin; Walter Jocketty, director of minor-league operations; Ted Robinson, who handled promotions and group sales as well as doing some backup radio broadcasting; Lorraine Paulus, who handled ticket operations; Lorraine’s assistant; and Finley’s cousin Carl. “Carl was a smart baseball man and businessman and he ran the entire operation,” Jocketty told me. “He was the guy that kept things going in Oakland all those years. He always had to answer to Charlie, as we all did, by phone.” Jocketty himself never met Finley until the press conference announcing the sale of the team to the Haas family.

  “I’ll never forget walking into the office the first day,” Wally says. “I said, ‘Roy, I’m really worried about the employees. We’ve got to make them feel at ease.’ So I walked into the offices and I figured the receptionist would be the first person I’d see. The receptionist was a cardboard sign that said, ‘Dial 0 for assistance.’ We walked into Charlie’s office and it was this dusty room with a bunch of books lined up along the wall and the bookends were two World Series trophies, real World Series trophies. It looked like a bomb had been dropped.”

  As team president, Eisenhardt urged people to be creative in their problem solving and to never be afraid to surprise him. “I used to tell everybody who worked for me, ‘I expect you to make mistakes, and if you make no mistakes, that’s not necessarily good, because it means you’re not taking any risks,’” Eisenhardt told me. He divided up the organization into four quadrants: community relations, finance, marketing and fan relations, and baseball. Wally Haas made an immediate impact working in community relations, getting players out among fans in Oakland and the East Bay and also instituting a range of brand-new initiatives, from literacy programs to a complaints desk at the ballpark. Former Washington Capitals marketing executive Andy Dolich was hired to take over marketing. Later, Kathleen McCracken was hired as CFO to round out the team. For the baseball quadrant, Eisenhardt would groom Sandy Alderson.

  Everything was changing, even if not everyone in baseball understood that just yet. In 1975, five years before the Haas family bought the team, arbitrator Peter Seitz handed down the Messersmith decision, which in effect rendered baseball’s reserve clause null and void. Up to then teams could simply renew a player’s contract, even if he had not signed a new one, which kept salaries down. Once the onslaught of appeals against Seitz’s ruling in the case of Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally was exhausted, Major League Baseball and the Players Association signed an agreement in 1976 allowing all players with six years of big-league experience to become free agents. Charles Finley understood the coming age of free agency would make ­being a baseball owner much more expensive, but even he could not have foreseen how dramatically the landscape would be remade.

  Salary arbitration, which the owners had agreed to in 1973 to discourage holdouts and attempt to fend off universal free agency, was an area where being smart and doing your homework paid off. No one denied Finley was smart, but in his last two years as owner he had lost all ten of his arbitration cases. The new guys would be more diligent. “I’d been writing documents for years with arbitration clauses,” Eisenhardt told me. “That wasn’t a big deal.” The new A’s group had key arbitration cases that year with Tony Armas and Mike Norris, who could potentially land major salary increases. Armas led the team in RBIs with 109 and Norris won twenty-two games. Eisenhardt asked Alderson to work on the cases along with a partner at the firm, Alan Harris,
known as a skilled litigator.

  “At some point Alan was pulled away because of a trial,’” ­Alderson recalls. “So I ended up doing most of the work.” Then ­Alderson and Eisenhardt decided to bring in veteran baseball man Tal Smith to consult, but for the most part the young lawyer was on his own. Nonetheless, he and the A’s won both cases. Armas had asked for a raise to $500,000 from $37,000 the previous season and was awarded $210,000. Norris, seeking $450,000, wound up with $300,000.

  Eisenhardt hesitated to hire Alderson full time.

  “He didn’t think the firm would appreciate the fact that he was taking a lawyer with him,” Alderson says. “That was his hesitancy. But my attitude was ‘Hey, I can always be a lawyer. Why not try this?’”

  4

  HOOKED UP WITH APPLE

  In late 1980 Matt Levine approached Fred Hoar, Apple Computer’s vice president of communications, with a win-win scheme: The A’s would get free Apple computers and Apple would get reams of free media attention from the advent of computers in baseball. “I want to put Apple on the map in a way it’s never been,” Levine told Hoar. “I want to get you more than $1 million of PR for a handful of pieces of equipment.”

  Hoar passed him to the Apple II product manager, a huge Dallas Cowboys fan who loved the idea of marrying statistical analysis of sport with computers. He asked what Levine needed, which amounted to three Apple II Plus computers and accessories.

  “Can you wait around?” he asked Levine.

  “What do you mean?”

  “If you give me fifteen minutes, I’ll give them to you today.”

  It was all in keeping with Eisenhardt’s request to Levine when he hired him as a consultant. “I talked to him about the fact that we tried to do all this analysis of players’ statistics and so forth, but it all became so anecdotal and impressionistic,” Eisenhardt says. He told Levine at the time: “What I’d like to do is just have a system where we record every pitch and what happened. Then we can write some program where we could query the database and find out: How many ground balls does a left-hander hit to the left side?”