Part 19 (1/2)

”I know you,” Walter said. ”You always want the score nine to one.”

”There's such a logic to nine to one,” she said.

Earlier, I had stood with Eisenhardt down on the field in a little fenced runway that connects the A's' dugout to the clubhouse, where he remains during the first few pitches and outs of almost every game. Just before the game, he talked briefly with his chief groundskeeper and with one of his security people, and during the anthem (a cappella, by Mickey Thomas, of the Jefferson Stars.h.i.+p band, to faint accompanying Eisenhardt winces) his gaze roamed around every corner and level of the field and park. He was housekeeping, but once the game began he gave it his absolute attention. He seemed even more preoccupied than usual, and for a moment I wondered if it wasn't because of the presence of Billy Martin over there in the wrong dugout. Before this game, reporters had searched out Roy for his comments, and to one of them he said, ”This weekend is nothing like the press has made out. It's nothing to be 'handled' by me. Billy came to find me when he got here, and I went to find him. We're friends. There's nothing to be 'patched up' or discussed. A decision was made last year. Neither one of us wanted it, but we both accepted it. No substantive issues were created. I don't want to quantify a friends.h.i.+p. OK?”

OK. The reporter didn't exactly love this reply, but its content was clear, all right. A day or two later, in a quieter moment, Eisenhardt said to me, ”These games were a coda for Billy and me. It's like when you meet your ex-wife at a party somewhere for the first time after your divorce. It happens, and then it's over.” And he went on to say something about how pleased Billy had seemed to meet the new baby, Sarah, for the first time, and how affectionate Billy had always been with Jesse and with Wally's daughters. ”Billy is wonderful with kids,” he said. ”He has that touch. It's a great gift.”

Roy's preoccupation, I realized, was with his team. Uncertainty surrounds every ball club from April to October, but there were more than the usual number of doubts and hovering question marks about this particular club, starting with its new manager, Steve Boros-a scholarly, low-key baseball man in his mid-forties who had coached for the Expos and the Royals and had managed for six years in the low minors, but who was taking the helm of a major-league team for the first time. Injuries and disappointments had brought down the 1982 A's, and this year the club was already in the same sort of trouble. Third baseman Carney Lansford, who had come over from the Red Sox in a trade for Tony Armas and was expected to solidify the left side of the infield, had missed a lot of early-season games because of the death of his infant son, and was now laid up with a sprained wrist. Catcher Mike Heath and pitchers Dave Beard and Rick Langford were also sidelined (Langford had just gone on the twenty-one-day disabled list), and another starter, Steve McCatty, was coming back from severe shoulder problems and so far had made only a few brief appearances in relief. For all this, the club stood at nineteen and seventeen in the young season, one game behind the division-leading Texas Rangers.

Many chief executives of big-league teams could match this list of apprehensions and misfortunes, for most of the twenty-six clubs stumble along in a condition of semi-shock and disrepair during the better part of each season, but the burdens of baseball reality are even heavier for an owner who has chosen a particular path out of conviction rather than economic necessity, and not only wants to win but wants to succeed. Eisenhardt, I knew, had strong feelings in this regard. ”Anybody who just sets out to win, who promises his fans that their dub will be a winner, is in trouble from the start,” he once said, 'because it's built in that even the best club will win six games and lose four, and this means that almost half the time your fans will be in a state of outrage. We want fans to come to the park for the baseball-for the pleasures of the game and of being at the game-and if we also happen to win, then fine. We want to be respectable and compet.i.tive, and we want to win our share of everything, including champions.h.i.+ps. But the way to do that is by being patient and foresighted. You can't just buy it or grab for it-we've already seen too much of that in the game, and its results.”

Although the Oakland club is paying its players net salaries of more than eight million dollars in 1983, out of its major-league operating budget of twenty-two million dollars, I knew that the Haas fortune would certainly permit the club to bid in the blue-chip free-agent market for an occasional high-priced slugger or pitcher-a Dave Winfield, a Floyd Bannister, a Don Baylor-if Eisenhardt and the Haases so desired, but no moves have been made in that direction. Back in spring training this year, I had tried to probe Eisenhardt's resolution about such matters by asking him if he would ever consider making an expensive late-season trade for one star pitcher or hitter if he felt that such an acquisition would probably nail down a pennant. This stratagem has become a commonplace in the latter stages of every season; the Milwaukee Brewers did it in August last year, when they acquired Don Sutton from the Houston Astros, taking over his salary of three-quarters of a million dollars and dispatching three of their highly regarded minor-league prospects to the Houston club.

”I'd think a long time before I tried it,” Eisenhardt said. ”If the deal includes the transfer of good young players, it means you're just mortgaging your future for the present. Qualitatively, what's the worth of winning the whole thing versus the worth of being compet.i.tive each year? No one wants to accept second place, but unless you actually win the World Series you'll see yourself as having lost in the end. I enjoyed watching Bud Selig's team in the World Series last year”-the Brewers, that is, who lost to the Cardinals in seven games-”but I don't think Bud enjoyed it much. I hope I'd resist the Golden Apple. But then, of course, coming along year after year with a team that never has a chance of being there is much, much worse.”

The Yankees never did quite catch up in that Friday-night game, although there were some troubling moments along the way: Tony Phillips made two frightful errors at short, and the visitors put the tying runs aboard in the eighth before Oakland reliever Steve McCatty got Ken Griffey to pop up for the third out, with the bases loaded. But the situation was never really critical, as it often seems to be when the A's are playing-the team has a chronic difficulty in scoring runs, especially in late innings-and there was time and ease enough in the game for me to enjoy the look and feel of Oakland baseball: the eight World Champions.h.i.+p banners (five won in Philadelphia, three in Oakland) arrayed across the outfield perimeter; the new home-game uniforms that have replaced Charlie Finley's garish old tavern-league greens and yellows; and the youthful beat and bounce of the brilliant ballpark music. The A's sound apparatus is a state-of-the-art system, and Roy and Wally have enjoyed themselves in the selection of its repertoire. When Steve Baker came in to relieve Tom Underwood during the Yankee seventh, we heard Carole King's ”You've Got a Friend,” and when Tom Burgmeier very soon arrived to relieve Baker, the Beatles' ”Help!” piped him aboard. The Yankee relievers, of course, heard Johnny Paycheck's ”Take This Job and Shove It.” The Oakland victory song is ”Celebration,” by Kool and the Gang, and fans slouching out to the parking lots after a tough loss are sometimes reminded that ”It's Not Easy Being Green.” Ballpark organists also play mood music, of course, but for me the mighty Wurlitzer can suggest only hockey or prayer.

The A's won by 84, with the last two Oakland runs scoring in ravis.h.i.+ng fas.h.i.+on in the bottom of the eighth, when Tony Phillips laid down a dandy suicide-squeeze bunt, to score Kelvin Moore from third-and Davey Lopes from second, too, when the fl.u.s.tered Yankee pitcher threw the ball away. Showing Billy Martin the squeeze play is like hawking lavalieres on the sidewalk in front of Tiffany's, and when it happened Roy said, ”Getting the right count to set up the squeeze bunt is as good as the next-to-last move in Scrabble. Once it got to three and one, we had them.”

He was smiling and youthful when the game ended and we all trooped out of the box, and I was happy, too. Last summer, I had visited the A's during a particularly dreary string of home-game losses to the White Sox and the Blue Jays. One of those beatings had come in a game in which the A's had led Chicago by 50 in the middle innings, but then the White Sox sluggers. .h.i.t a couple of monstrous home runs, and the A's died at the plate once again-and on the base paths and the mound, too-and the visitors finally took it, 76, in the tenth. After that game, I got a lift into San Francisco with Roy and Wally-a trip of long silences and desultory broken-off sounds of mourning. ”I wouldn't want to be in that clubhouse tonight,” Wally murmured at one point, and Roy said, ”That game is a perfect example of why you can't do anything about a season like this. There's just no place to start.” There was another longish stretch of uninterrupted highway hum, and then Roy, in a faraway, musing sort of voice, said, ”You know, this sport might be a whole lot more interesting if there were no such thing as a home run. You could put up this enormous wall...”

Emil Roy Eisenhardt (the first name is vestigial) grew up in South Orange, New Jersey-a suburb just west of Newark that is so self-consciously tidy and green that it looks like a World's Fair replica of a turn-of-the-century village-in what he describes as ”the middle of the middle cla.s.s.” His father, who died in 1980, was the director of purchasing for New York University, and his mother, who is seventy-two, taught college English and then linguistics in the New Jersey state-university system. Each of his parents had been the first family member to attend college. Roy's paternal grandfather, an immigrant from Germany, was a baker. (The Eisenhardts are Catholic, but the combination of Roy's name and his marriage into the Haas family has caused many people to a.s.sume that he is Jewish.) Roy, who has a younger brother and sister, was a versatile, extremely energetic member of his cla.s.s at Columbia High School, in nearby Maplewood, where he belonged to the dramatic club, played ba.s.s drum in the band, and held down right field on the baseball team, in spite of inordinate and incurable shortcomings at the plate. He was also a Boy Scout, a home carpenter, and a woodworker, and he took piano lessons-as he still does: he tries to play a half hour to an hour every day, partly because Chopin and Schubert allow him to put baseball entirely out of his mind for the moment. Roy was a year ahead of his age in school, and what he remembers most about himself then is his immaturity. ”One of the important things back men was to have everybody like you,” he once said to me. ”When I went to Dartmouth”-he was in the cla.s.s of 1960-”I fully expected to be elected president of my fraternity, but I wasn't-a wonderful thing, because the shock of it began to s.h.i.+ft me away from that external system of validation. I began to care more about my own ideas and values, and a little less about what people thought of me.” Another s.h.i.+ft was away from baseball to rowing; he made the Dartmouth first boat, but thinks he wouldn't have at a larger university. He was a naval ROTC cadet at Dartmouth, but switched into the Marine Corps upon graduation, serving two years on active duty in Okinawa (this was just before the American involvement in Vietnam), and rising to the rank of captain in the reserves. Law school ensued. He graduated thirteenth in his cla.s.s at Boalt Hall, in 1965, and spent a further year studying tax law in Germany. ”I loved the law, it turned out,” he says. ”Not the practice of it so much as its ideas-the idea of our trying to define the rules we're going to live by-and its examination of the history of ideas.”

By the late sixties, Eisenhardt was a young married lawyer in San Francisco, with a pa.s.sionate fan's interest in the San Francisco Giants. His first wife, Auban Slay, whom he married in 1965, told me that as she joined him at the altar during their wedding Roy whispered, ”The Giants are leading, 31, in the fifth.” (They were divorced in 1976, but remain on amicable terms; Auban Eisenhardt is also a lawyer in San Francisco.) Roy Eisenhardt's work at his firm, Farella, Braun & Martel, was mostly in business law-conglomerations, real-estate acquisition, and the like-and in 1974, when that palled, he began teaching law at Boalt Hall. A little later, he took over as coach of the U. Cal heavyweight freshman crew. ”Maybe that's what I really am-a teacher,” he once said. ”I'd love to teach anything-how to grab an oar, how to paint a wall.” By 1979, he was a full-time professor at Boalt Hall, teaching courses in commercial law, bankruptcy, and real property. He tried to continue there on a part-time basis after taking over the A's late in 1980, but the double load was too much. ”I still miss it,” he says. ”Sometimes I feel like Kermit in ”The Muppet Movie,' when he says, 'Why did I ever leave the swamp?'” A close friend of Roy's, Dr. Hirsch Handmaker (he is a nuclear radiologist, and now has come aboard as director of medical services with the A's), does not quite agree. ”The job with the A's was exactly the right chance for Roy at that moment in his life,” he said to me. ”The person and the place and the work came together in a miraculous sort of way. If you're a fan of destiny, you really appreciate it.”

Destiny had also brought Roy and Betsy Haas together at a Chinese-cooking cla.s.s. They were married in 1978. After I had come to be sufficiently at ease with Roy to raise the question, I asked him how he had felt about marrying into such a wealthy and distinguished family.

”It was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he said. ”There hasn't been a moment of discomfort about it, and that's because the Haases are all so unintimidating and open and modest. They all have a basic and proper sense of values, and a great sense of humor. Everything about Walter reflects his sensitivity and feeling of concern. We talk almost every day-not so much for business as for the fun of it. The whole family is the same. I am in awe of the subtlety and pa.s.sion of Wally's involvement in our community efforts. He has a genius for sensing the proper areas and people for us to see, and for figuring out how we can be of use to them. The same sort of thing was true of Walter Haas, senior-Walter's father-who ran the company before Walter did. He was still going to work on the bus every day when he was ninety. I remember a conversation he had with Betsy and me a few weeks before he died. He asked us if we were concerned about the future-how things were going in the country. We both said yes, we were, and he said, ”So am I, so am I.” There he was, an old, old man, and he wasn't thinking back and being sore about the New Deal or anything like that. He was worrying about what our country would be like for young people in the next twenty or thirty years. You can't beat people like that.”

Bill Rigney, the white-haired, angular savant who serves with the A's as a.s.sistant to the President in Baseball Matters (he is a former manager of the Giants, the Twins, and the Angels, and he also does color commentary on the A's' telecasts), told me that Walter Haas had once asked him for whatever special advice he thought would be most useful to a newcomer to the game. ”I told him, 'Don't fall in love with the players,'” Rig said. ”'They'll do beautiful things for you out there. They'll pitch a great game or drive in the winning run, but they're also young and they can't know and they don't care, and they'll break your heart, a lot of them, before you're through.'” I asked if he thought Roy needed the same warning, and Rig said, ”No, I think he's got it figured out. But I hope he'll never lose the kind of concern he has for his players. I've never seen the like of it in baseball.”

I had this conversation with Rig in the living room of the Eisenhardts' narrow, comfortable house in the Cow Hollow section of San Francisco (a pink palazzo at the end of the same block belongs to Bob Lurie, who owns the San Francisco Giants), where we were having c.o.c.ktails with Roy and Betsy and Rig's wife, Paula, before going out to dinner together. Roy joined us, and we stood together at a big window looking out at the hillside, crowded with rooftops and tilted backyard gardens, which fell away steeply toward the bay, and, beyond that, at the sunlit banks of evening fog that were beginning to swirl in from the sea. Roy pointed down to his own garden and said, ”I was doing a lot of digging up and replanting down there last summer, just when the team was beginning to go bad.” He laughed and shook his head. ”That's the best-dug dirt in northern California.”

As we left, Roy pointed out (at my request) several large and elegantly finished pieces of furniture in the house that he had made in his bas.e.m.e.nt workshop, including a new nine-foot white-pine toy cabinet for Jesse, with lathed split-turnings on the corners, four doors, and eight interior-latch drawers on oak runners. ”It's an antidote,” Roy said of his woodworking. ”You can complicate an easy job and try to make things come out perfectly-and I can listen to our road games on the radio while I'm doing it.”

We said goodbye to Betsy (the babysitter had crumped out, and Betsy was staying home with the kids), and she turned to Roy at the door and said, ”Got your keys?” He shook his head and went off in search of them, and Betsy said, ”He just can't pay attention to some things. Last year, our car broke down, and it sat out there in front of the house for days and days before they came to fix it, and when they opened the door there was Roy's wallet under the front seat.”

Roy returned and happily jingled the keys for us to see.

”Good,” said Betsy, kissing him. ”No midnight pebbles against the windows tonight.”

The second game of the Yankee series, on Sat.u.r.day afternoon, was almost better than the first. The sun shone, and the soft winds blew, and thirty-eight thousand baseball-entranced fans roared and cheered and made waves, while the pitchers-Mike Norris for the A's and Shane Rawley for the Yanks-and fielders on the greensward together wove a lengthening skein of brilliant, scoreless innings. Norris, in a lather of intensity and mannerism on the mound, fanned nine batters with his screwball and darting heater, and Tony Phillips turned Dave Winfield's rocketed grounder into a double play, and Dwayne Murphy cut down a Yankee base runner at third base with a mighty peg from center, and the A's truly seemed to be having all the best of it until, in the bottom of the eighth, Mike Davis made a trifling, young-ballplayer's sort of mistake on the base paths that amputated an Oakland rally, and the Yanks, suddenly reprieved, put Willie Randolph on second with a walk and a sack (Norris, kicking the dirt on the mound, was positive that the ball-four count had been strike three), and scored him when Winfield muscled a single into center against a tough, tough Norris pitch, up and in, and that was the ballgame, of course: 10 Yankees. Walter Haas, getting up from his seat in the box after the last out, said, ”Boy, that was a game to remember. That's the way baseball should be played. Nuts.”

The postgame gathering in Steve Boros's office was a reflective one, with Eisenhardt and Rigney and Sandy Alderson and Bill King-the A's' bearded, soft-spoken veteran radio-and-TV announcer-and Karl Kuehl, who is a ”motivation coach” of the A's' minor-league players, filling up the circle of chairs, and the local writers and TV and radio people quietly coming to get Boros's comments and going out again. ”We gave the fans their money's worth, I think,” Boros said finally. ”I'll sleep all right tonight, because those guys played an outstanding game. I could heat my house all winter with the energy Mike Norris had in the dugout between innings. He really wanted this one.”

Roy was nursing a can of Tab, and he nodded to the writers who came and went. ”It was an aesthetic game,” he ventured at last.

”The worst thing about this kind of game is having to read about it again in the papers tomorrow,” Sandy said.

”We've scored one run in the ninth all year, against seventeen for the other guys,” Bill King said.

Roy made a down-curving gesture with one hand and said, ”Our effort has been sort of Sisyphean-I have to admit it,” and Boros nodded in agreement.

I wondered briefly about how many other manager's-office dialogues might have included the word ”Sisyphean” in a post-game exchange, but the question didn't seem to matter, because I'd never attended postgame meetings elsewhere that regularly included the owner. But Roy was always there, listening. I had discussed this matter on several occasions with a friend of mine named Glenn Schwarz, of the San Francisco Examiner, who has been on the A's beat for many years.

”Right from the start, he's sat there and paid attention,” Schwarz said. ”He did it with Billy, and now he's doing it with Steve. He's ceaselessly curious. No other owner in baseball could get away with it without making the writers and the manager incredibly nervous, but Roy is so informal and so open that you really don't notice that he's there at all.”

One clear glimpse of Eisenhardt's relations with his players had been offered to me last year, when a little group of Bay-area baseball writers-the regular beat people, including Glenn Schwarz-came to call on Roy to ask him about one member of the club who was known to have, or was strongly suspected of having, major difficulties with cocaine.

”Well, it's a fair question,” Eisenhardt said. ”You guys will have to decide whether to write it or not. The whole question of drugs and athletes is extremely complicated. Players used to go out and get drunk, and everybody thought that was manly and funny. I think the great sums of money we throw at the young players probably have something to do with it. I understand how ballplayers are under a lot of pressure, and I don't want to toss any easy societal values around here as a solution. I don't know what the answer is. We're going to have to learn a lot about this in the next few years-and I don't mean just in sports.”

One of the writers asked if the player knew that Roy knew he used cocaine.

”I really can't say for sure,” Roy answered. ”Maybe the best thing for him would be for him to know that we know but to notice we're not doing anything about it, because it's up to him to solve it. It's his choice in the end. I know I kept on taking piano lessons for so long when I was a kid because my parents told me I could quit anytime.” He shrugged. ”You'll have to decide what to do about this story,” he went on. ”What this means to the success of the team and what its value is as a news story seem worth about two cents compared with the damage the story might do to him as a man.”

The writers did not write the story.

The Sunday Yankee game was another pippin, matching up the Yanks' Ron Guidry against the slim Oakland rookie righthander Chris Codiroli. The Yankees led by 10 in the early going, and then by 20 after six, but the quality of play was even better than what we had seen the day before, and the crowd was enthralled. But the game was a killer, it turned out. Rickey Henderson tied things up with a two-run homer in the bottom of the eighth, but the A's instantly gave back the runs in the ninth with some shabby infield play and a throw to the wrong base by Mike Davis. A promising rally against Goose Gossage in the home half was cut short when base runner Wayne Gross took off in a pointless extempore attempt to steal third and was thrown out easily. It was like a door slamming shut. ”Oh, what a way for a game to end!” Boros said in his office. ”It looks bad and it feels bad, but you have to live with it somehow.”