The Roger Angell Baseball Collection Part 19

"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."

"It's a seventh chord," Roy said. "It's like the end of 'A Day in the Life.'" He did not smile.

Roy's intensity at home games and his pain over each loss by his team is matched by almost every owner I have observed at close quarters, but not many of them seem to have an accompanying composure, as he does, which arises from a habitually, almost compulsively, reflective att.i.tude toward the sport.

I heard some of these longer views on the final day of my Oakland sojourn, when I called on Roy at lunchtime in his small, windowless office in the Coliseum. This was a bare eighteen hours after that sudden, odious end to the Yankee series, but I found that Eisenhardt could smile about it by now, albeit a bit stiffly. "One of the reasons I hate that kind of loss-that particular turn of events-is that I'm the kind of person who likes to do things myself," he said. "When I first went into law practice, I insisted on typing all my own letters, to make sure they were done right, but then one of the partners pointed out that I wasn't ent.i.tled to that sort of luxury anymore. And you certainly can't do that in baseball. You have to turn things over to the players in the end. That's the way the game is. It's really much harder on the manager, who gets the blame when something goes wrong out there. I can always hide, or point out that I have no discrete function around here. But I'm connected, all right. I know I've never had so many people working for me-and I never dreamed of such a thing-and I can't conceive of another job, unless it's in high elective office, where you have the chance to affect the way so many thousands of people feel at the end of the day. The fans, I mean. Sometimes I wish I could control that, but I don't really want the power to go down and place the ball on the field so that the game always comes out the way I want it to. Well, maybe I'd enjoy that once-for one game-but after that it would be boring, and it would mean the end of it all, of course. I think we all know how much George Steinbrenner wants that. Sometimes I see George as Lennie in 'Of Mice and Men,' when they gave him that puppy. You squeeze so hard that you stifle the thing you love."

Roy ordinarily lunches at his desk, but at his suggestion we took our sandwiches (turkey on whole wheat, the invariable Eisenhardt plat du jour) and drinks (a Tab for him, a beer for me) and went down a flight of stairs, through a small door, and out into the vast, sun-struck picnic ground of the Coliseum. We had our choice of fifty thousand two hundred and nineteen available seats, and settled on a nice pair down in the Section 123 boxes, just to the left of the home dugout, where we put our feet up on the seats in front of us (Roy was wearing a pair of distressed wingtips that looked like survivors of his days as a downtown lawyer) and gazed out at the unpeopled greensward and ballroom-smooth base paths, and let the baseball talk flow.

Baseball talk at the executive level often becomes money talk, and for a while Roy addressed himself to the chronic fiscal anxieties of his trade. He said that the A's expected to lose from five to six million dollars in 1983, in a budget of twenty-two million dollars, and that a major decline in attendance could make for further inroads. He said he wasn't certain exactly which of the other clubs posted deficits in 1982 but thought it was as many as eighteen or twenty of them. (At the All-Star Game lunch in Chicago last month, the president of the Chicago White Sox stated that the major-league teams had lost a hundred million dollars in the past year.) Help is on the way, however, in the form of a new six-year, one-billion-two-hundred-million-dollar network-television contract, which, starting next year, is expected to produce about six million dollars per year for each major-league club-more than three times the current fixed network revenue. Most clubs, including the A's, have also negotiated, or are negotiating, lucrative new local or regional cable television contracts, with a wide range of returns, depending on the size of the area market; the Yankees' current fifteen-year contract with the Sports-Channel network is believed to be in the neighborhood of a hundred million dollars, while similar cable rights in Oakland produce less than twenty million for the A's. Not surprisingly, Eisenhardt doubts that the television bonanza will do away with the game's inherent fiscal imbalance, which is perhaps the most implacable of the sports' continuing difficulties, because clubs with limited regional markets (the Mariners, the Twins, the Royals, the A's, to name a few) must somehow compete, on the field and also in player salaries and free-agent bidding, with teams like the Yankees, the Dodgers, the Expos, the Phillies, and the Angels, whose markets are enormously more lucrative. (The A's, of course, must vie with the San Francisco Giants for their audience-the region is counted as encompa.s.sing five million people-and all sports franchises in the Bay area are perennially handicapped by the popularity of active outdoor sports and recreation among the indigenes.) Eisenhardt said that he is also wary of the long-range effect of baseball's reliance on television as its prime source of revenue and its prime delivery system. A sizable number of clubs-the Braves, the Cubs, the Phillies, the Pirates, the White Sox-are owned by organizations with major television interests, and the game, he believes, will inexorably be twisted in order to serve those interests. The Braves, for instance, are owned by Ted Turner, the proprietor of the independent cable-TV network WTBS, who has dubbed them "America's Team" and often schedules the Braves' home games to start at 5:35 P.M., so that they may be safely concluded by eight-thirty-five, when the WTBS evening movie begins.

"Under the new national TV contract, we are obliged to play 'Monday Night Baseball' games here when our turn comes along," Eisenhardt said to me. "That means starting play at five-thirty-and anyone who's driven on Route 17 out here to the park knows what that means. And of course, none of the batters can see what the pitchers are throwing in that late-afternoon light. We've altered the game on the field to pay back our debt to the networks and suit the convenience of TV consumers on the East Coast, and the long-range damage may be deeper than we can imagine."

As often happens when Eisenhardt talks, I heard an echo here, for we had circled back to those basic apprehensions about television that he had mentioned to me on our BART ride almost a year earlier. His ideas are consistent and extensively worked, so that they often find their terminus or connection at some other level or corridor of the great multicolumned temple of the game. He appears to see baseball as a whole, in short, instead of in flinders or as mounded rubble, which is the way it often looks to me.

I asked how important it was to him to have the A's in the black within the next few years.

"Internally, it's very difficult to run an organization that isn't approaching the break-even point," he said. "That's ingrained in me and in most people, I think. But in one way this is a matter of psychological accounting. An executive or a millionaire can give x hundred thousand dollars a year to a charity, and n.o.body questions it or says, 'That's losing money.' But if you put it into an organization that's proprietary and capitalist in form but has as its main goal a charitable purpose, which is to provide the game of baseball to as many people as possible, in as many forms as possible, then you have to put an intangible down in your income statement, which is the psychological value of baseball to the community. That doesn't appear as cash flow, and the bank won't lend you money on it, but it's a very important and positive element in what we're trying to do. Actually, I have some basic doubts whether baseball as a self-contained economic unit can operate in the black. One thing I know is that the last thing we'd ever do here would be to cut back on our community projects. The only place I might want to cut down would be on player salaries, but that isn't entirely in my control. Still, it raises the question for us of the ultimate value of a million-dollar-a-year player. What is our return on that? But to go back to your question about how long one would be willing to take a loss, the answer is: I don't know."

He paused, thinking about it. "Of course, revenues can vary appreciably, depending on how well your team is doing," he went on. "Each year's attendance is hostage to your previous year's record. We played very poorly last year, and we're already off by thirty percent at the gate this year. I've begun to see this problem almost as a capitalist-socialist argument: n.o.body should be wholly captive to success or failure, and so forth. It is not exactly a new idea. But it's not the consequence of losing that hurts baseball nearly so much as it is the reactive behavior that tries to insure against loss-the sudden hiring of that additional expensive star player who might mean a pennant, or the signing of a free agent at whatever cost for fear that if you don't get him some rival team will and the odds between you will have s.h.i.+fted. We all have such a fear of losing that we do things that actually increase the chances of our losing. It's almost certain that your team will lose in the end, because only one team is the World Champion at the close of the season, and you've exacerbated the consequences. To some degree or other, all twenty-six clubs operate this way now, and the truth is that player costs are astronomically high not because we want the gratification and profit of winning but because we have such a fear of losing. We all work under that spectre."

We sat in silence for a while, watching a lone groundskeeper who was silently moving back and forth on a power roller on the dirt warning track at the foot of the distant outfield fences. Roy tipped back his drink and then put the empty can down between his feet.

"If you asked most owners," he said, "they would say, without giving it a thought, 'Yes, I want my revenues to meet my expenses.' But I don't think that's really the expectation of the public. The fans don't articulate it, yet I don't believe they expect the owner to make a profit from their baseball team. I don't think the players feel that the owners should, or the writers, either, although a lot of journalists seem to validate a team on the basis of how much money you spend. Baseball is perceived almost as a public utility that has been granted a monopoly and is obligated to deliver quality services, so a team isn't looked on with favor when it makes a lot of money. I don't see anything wrong with that notion. We have been given a monopoly-that's what each franchise is-and with monopoly comes responsibility. We really are the curators of this game. It's a public a.s.set, and we are the guardians of that a.s.set.

"As I was saying, I don't know that it isn't an anachronism to try to keep baseball going as a form of fee-simple private owners.h.i.+p. If we a.s.sume that it has to be affordable and available to all, and if we're not wholly determined to destroy it with television, and if we want every geographical area to have access to it, then I question whether private owners.h.i.+p or major corporate owners.h.i.+p can make it work. That brings us around to the quality of owners.h.i.+p. Can we find people who will care for the game if we tell them that they have to lose money in the process? I'm afraid of the answer to that one. So the only long-range solution I can see is some form of redistribution of profits that will reduce the risks of losing. We have to begin to ask ourselves if we really want baseball in Seattle and Oakland and Dallas-Fort Worth, or if it should be played only in surefire major market centers like New York and Chicago and Philadelphia and Los Angeles. Under the present system, some markets are inherently less valuable simply because of where they are, and not because the local owners are doing a bad job, and we don't really know if the clubs there can survive. It seems to me that the next question we have to ask ourselves is whether the value of each franchise-the value of being permitted to play ball in Chicago or St. Louis or Oakland-belongs to those clubs, or whether it belongs to baseball. Is the great tradition and history of the Boston Red Sox owned by that club, or is it owned by the people of Boston or the people of New England or by you and me-by anyone who cares about the game of baseball?"

He laughed suddenly, and said, "I can say the Red Sox, because I know that Sully"-Haywood Sullivan, the chief executive eminence of the Bosox-"won't get mad at me, the way some of the other owners do when I begin to run on this way."

He looked as cheerful and buoyant as ever, and I had difficulty in reconciling such good spirits with the endless and perhaps insoluble difficulties of the problems he had been exploring. "How come you don't get upset about all this?" I asked.

"You're just making Thomas Hobbes' old a.s.sumption that the natural state of man is to be bad-tempered," he replied. "But getting mean or low-down really serves no purpose at all. Sure, I get frustrated sometimes, but I try not to show it. The games-the different contests and their outcome-don't really bother me, even when they end the way that one did yesterday. I hope I can be like Betsy that way, who is more and more a real fan. She enjoys the baseball process-the day-to-day, the ongoing soap opera-and she doesn't get too far down about losses or slumps. If you can't do that, baseball will drive you crazy, because of its very high percentage of defeat. Robin Yount succeeds at the plate only one-third of the time. Just think what it would have been like if Beethoven had had to write symphonies that way!"

Afterword: Not much good fortune has befallen the A's-now officially the Athletics-since these visits to Oakland. The team finished fourth in its division in 1983,1984, and 1985, and third (in a tie) in 1986 and 1987.*** Manager Steve Boros was dismissed in mid-season in 1985, and his successor, Jackie Moore, gave way to the inc.u.mbent Tony LaRussa two years later. Attendance in 1987 rose to 1,678,921-less than a half million shy of a financial break-even level for the club; that rivalry between the Athletics and the Giants (who won the National League West division in 1987) for the Bay-area audience remains one of big-league baseball's intractable infirmities, but both clubs are clearly on the rise. The Athletics have fared well in the trading market, and the club's flouris.h.i.+ng farm and scouting systems have produced home-grown, successive Rookie of the Year slugging stars in 1986 and '87, in the imposing persons of Jose Canseco and Mark McGwire. The team now presents a strong and confident offensive lineup, and some firming up of the infield defense and the chronically laggard pitching corps could take Oakland to a pennant one of these days. These current baseball affairs have been conducted by Sandy Alderson, who is considered one of the outstanding general managers in baseball, while Roy Eisenhardt, more or less by design, has kept himself more in the background.

By design and perhaps in self-defense. I'm not quite objective about the Athletics, but by most measurements they are almost the prototypical contemporary team. They haven't won lately, but their hopes are up, and rightly so. Like most other clubs, Oakland is losing money, but for reasons-a divided market area; limited local television income-that are not within its powers to correct. A pennant would help: wait till next year. Most of the other twenty-five big-league clubs face similar or even less cheerful prospects, but it is my belief that the so-so Athletics are subjected to much sharper criticism than other teams from their fans, from the local media, and from other owners and front-office people-because of their articulate and iconoclastic style of management. Because of Roy. I put this suggestion to him not long ago, and he shook his head but did not absolutely disagree.

"It's true that I've withdrawn a little," he said. "I think I've got a new description for myself: I'm trying to be well-tempered. Sometimes I ask myself if it's better to be in the middle of a pennant race, the way we are right now, or to be out of it in September, so you feel free to relax and think about next year. You have to opt for the first choice, but sometimes you wonder, particularly after you lose a game in the ninth, the way we did last night. It takes it out of you. People keep asking why we don't win more, but everybody in baseball demands explanations when you don't win. That's understandable but it's inappropriate. Baseball is ruled by the mathematical laws of chaos. There are too many variables to conclude anything else, and there's some sort of comfort in that, I suppose. It's never easy, but you go on wanting to win. If you didn't, it wouldn't be fun anymore."

Listening to Roy, I thought back to the last game I attended with him on one of my trips to Oakland in 1983-a night encounter against the Milwaukee Brewers on a Monday evening, which the A's won by 54, after a few adventures and surprises along the way. Bill Krueger, the A's' tall rookie left-hander, had matters safely in hand in the ninth, it seemed, with the A's ahead by 31, and no one on base. With two outs, he walked two batters in succession, and Steve McCatty, summoned in to shut the door, instantly surrendered a three-run homer to pinch-hitter Roy Howell. Davey Lopes then tied up the game at 44, with a homer on the first pitch of the bottom half of the ninth, and we went into extra innings.

Roy, beside me in the box, had not made the smallest sound or gesture in response to the Howell stunner, but he whacked me on the shoulder as we watched Lopes's blow sail over the left-field palings. Then he resumed his silent, thumb-biting vigil over the events-or non-events, more correctly-below. The game, it turned out, had a few more moments to go. The Brewers and then the A's each moved runners into scoring position in the tenth, to no avail. The A's got a base runner to third base in the eleventh-and stranded him there. They loaded the bases in the thirteenth, and did not score. The stream of the game became a brook, then a trickle. Pitchers and pinch-hitters came and went; fans promised themselves one more inning and then one more, and then gave up, a lot of them, and went home. Manager Harvey Kuenn, running out of subst.i.tutes, inserted a pitcher named Jamie Easterly to pinch-hit for his designated hitter, who had been lifted in an earlier inning for a pinch-runner, and men batted him again three innings later. Up in my seat, I drew in fresh columns and boxes on the right-hand side of my box score, writing over the totals columns there and then extending my chart on top of the printed team rosters on the outer margin of the page. The squidgy, messed-up scorecard looked like a child's birthday card, and men I began to notice that all of us there in the owner's box-Roy, Bill Rigney, Wally, Sandy Alderson, Sarge Ivey, two or three other front-office A's people, and myself (the senior Haases had not come to the game)-were responding peculiarly to this slow and ceaseless crawl of hours and innings. "Come up!" Rig yelled whenever a Brewer grounder was rapped in the direction of an Oakland infielder. "Go through!" he ordered when the teams had changed places and the hopper had come off Oakland wood. "We have to win, because we're the only ones still watching," Wally p.r.o.nounced. "Everyone in Milwaukee is home in bed and asleep." Sandy Alderson, observing two lesser A's on the bases and Rickey Henderson coming up to bat, said, "Now we've got them. We've got seventy thousand dollars on the bases and eight hundred thousand dollars up at bat. This is it!" But the eight hundred thousand dollars grounded into a force. "Now!" cried Sarge again and again. "Now! You got to!" But no one heard or heeded the command. "It's going to be Tony Phillips who drives in the winning run," I announced. "You'll see-it's always that kind of player who wins this kind of game. Unless it's...uh, Dan Meyer." We sounded like children, boys in a tree house. At last, we fell into silence-a prolonged daze of sleepiness and exhausted speculation-and into a sense of wonder, too, I think, at the endless variety and stubbornness and perfect unpredictability of this sport. The A's won the game in the bottom of the seventeenth, when Henderson scored Meyer from second on a line single to left center and sent us home at last, five hours and seventeen minutes after the first pitch. All of us there in the park-the sixty-odd players and coaches on the field; the weary grounds crew and security people and ushers and venders; the burned-out, crazily remaining handful of fans and their sleepy-eyed children; the writers, whose unfinished stories had been rewarmed for several successive deadlines; and the waiting owner and attendant executives and strategists of the A's-all of us had wanted the ridiculous party over and done with long before then, but our skills and wishes and plans and hopes meant nothing, of course. The difficulty of baseball is imperious, and prevails ever.

*Durable for about two seasons, that is. By the end of the 1983 season, four of the five starters were gone, laid low by arm miseries.

**The innocent optimism of this early report on the accursed Wave phenomenon suggests the happiness of that anonymous bygone southern gardener who first spied the pretty green tints of the kudzu vine along the back borders of his rose-beds.

***An extended account of the team's tribulations in the 1986 campaign may be found in Chapter 12.

Tiger, Tiger

- Fall 1984 BASEBALL IS WELL INTO its wingless, or black-tie, dormant phase, and the only sound from within the coc.o.o.n is the customary late-autumn murmuration of rumors and awards, plus a steady low whine of complaint about the season just past. Not a good year, I keep hearing. Not much of a World Series, was it? And what in G.o.d's name happened to those Padre starting pitchers? Oh, if only the Cubs had won their playoffs-what a Series that would have been! And, listen, why couldn't we have a decent pennant race somewhere, for a change, with maybe the Dodgers and somebody fighting it out on the last weekend, the way they always used to, and could you believe that American League West, with the Twins and all those losers still in it there at the end? I mean, it was great, in a way, but what the h.e.l.l happened to the White Sox, and what happened to the Orioles and the Phillies-and what did happen to the Dodgers, do you think? And, sure, it was great the way the Tigers ran away from everybody back in the spring-nothing like it, out of sight-but even when the Red Sox and the Yankees, with those n.o.bodies in uniform, got so good there in the second half it was never really close, you know, and, sure, there were the Mets, but even when they were so hot there in July I never exactly believed they'd do it-not with those kids pitching and that lineup-but that Gooden's unreal, you know, and, sure, if you look at the Tigers you have to say they're great, they can kill you on the bases and the other way, too, with that batting order, and I'm happy for Sparky, because he's an old name, like I was even happy for Reggie when he finally did it, you know what I mean, and-oh, yes, Dave Kingman! I mean, Dave Kingman! But why couldn't the Cubs've won that last game out there in San Diego, for G.o.d's sake, with Sutcliffe going, and all, and that way we'd've had Wrigley Field again, and some terrific games in the wind there, and something to talk about when it was over, you know?

Only full-bore fans will recognize every note of these stridulations-it is mostly their voice we are hearing-and a brief refresher gloss may be helpful. The Detroit Tigers won the recent World Series, of course, knocking off the San Diego Padres in five games, one over par for the distance; several Tiger luminaries distinguished themselves during the cla.s.sic, which we will return to in due course, while the Padres, in departing, left some b.l.o.o.d.y footprints across the record books. Their four starting pitchers in the five games survived for a total of ten and one-third innings, during which span they gave up sixteen runs, twenty-five hits, and eight walks, good for an earned-run average of 13.94; in the unmemorable third game, the Padre pitchers walked the ballpark, handing out eleven bases on b.a.l.l.s. The Tigers, by the way, scored almost instantly in each of the games, bringing the initial runs home in either the first or the second inning, thereby providing a dazzling paradigmatic reminder of their regular season, in which they won thirty-five of their first forty games (they were 90, 161, and 264 along the way), for the fastest start in baseball history. Only six other teams have ever led their leagues or divisions wire-to-wire, the most recent of which was the lordly Yankee club of 1927. Jack Morris, the Tigers' right-handed ace, set the tone for their year when he threw a no-hitter against the White Sox in his second start, but Detroit's bolt from the blocks was a true team effort; nine different Tiger pitchers came up winners in the first fifteen games. The team, moreover, did not simply cruise home after its opening burst, as other clubs (the 1977 Dodgers and the 1981 Oakland A's, for instance) had been known to do, but actually increased its lead over the second-place Toronto Blue Jays from seven games at the midseason All-Star Game break to fifteen games at the close (the champions wound up at 10458), which is a much better indication of their pride and deep talent, given the quality of the opposition in that extremely difficult division.

Three of the four divisions, in fact, sorted out their eventual winners by the first week in August, a full two months too soon, while the fourth, the American League West (the "Mild West," it was sometimes called, or the "American League Worst"), produced a pennant winner of sorts in the final week, when the Kansas City Royals fell fainting across the finish line, with the only above-.500 record in their sector. The Padres, in the National League West, profited from a similar fatuousness in their opponents, since their nearest pursuers, the Braves and the Astros, wound up in a tie, twelve games back and two below the waterline. The Cubs, who overtook the surprising Mets at the beginning of August and whomped them regularly thereafter (they won eight of the nine games against New York at Wrigley Field), were easily the most popular winners of the year, thanks to their antiquity (Tinker to Evers to Ernie Banks et al.); their charming vine-covered and sunlit (there are no lights, no night games) neighborhood ballpark; their long and frightful predisposition to defeat (they led and lost a World Series in 1945 and horribly blew a sure pennant in 1969); and their mighty electronic audience, which tunes in the Cubbies by television in forty-nine states and five foreign countries, via cable station WGN. Suddenly, even the most casual, late-summer sports bystanders perked up at the possibility of a sonorous and perhaps epochal World Series between two famous clubs-the Cubs and the Tigers-played on gra.s.s diamonds in venerable city enclosures where teams and heroes were playing baseball when each of us, no matter what our age, first became aware of the game. The Tigers took care of their part of the date by brus.h.i.+ng aside the Royals in three quick meetings in the American League champions.h.i.+p series, but the Cubs, after administering a pair of quick, wonderfully appreciated drubbings to the Padres at Wrigley Field, went west to finish the job and there fell into a well, or a hot tub, losing by 71, 75 (an extraordinary game, an all-timer), and 63, after leading in each game. Eheu, as Mike Royko did not write, fugaces.

The sense of unsatisfaction, of diminished expectation and lowered reward, that attached itself to the latter stages of the 1984 season may not be wholly attributable to the one-sided World Series or to the sad and shocking expunging of the Cubs. I think we should remind ourselves that not one of the four teams involved in the league playoffs this year was a finalist in the 1983 playoffs, in which the Phillies defeated the Dodgers, and the Orioles (who went on to win the World Series) eliminated the White Sox, and that not one of those four teams had won its division the previous year, 1982, when we saw the Cardinals and the Braves in one playoff and the Brewers and the Angels in the other, with the Cardinals overcoming the Brewers in a seven-game Series. Team inconsistency, a lack of continuity and pattern, has become a pattern all its own in recent years. In the past six full seasons-1979 through 1984-eight different American League clubs have filled the twelve playoff slots, with the Royals, the Orioles, the Angels, and the Yankees making two appearances each; while ten different National League clubs have qualified for post-season play, with only the Phillies and the Dodgers repeating. In all, eighteen of the twenty-six clubs that make up the major leagues have appeared in postseason play in the past six Octobers, and ten different teams have played in the World Series; none has repeated as World Champions.

Some of the reasons for this instability are broadly understood, since they arise, in one form or another, from the central alterations to the game brought about by free agency and salary arbitration: enormous payrolls (averaging in the neighborhood of eight million dollars per club) and the consequent s.h.i.+fting, by trades or by loss to the free-agent market, of older, more expensive players from one club to another, with a resultant smudging of team ident.i.ty from one season to the next. I don't propose to examine this phenomenon in depth here, since the responses to high salaries and limited-year contracts would require us to explore a very wide range of club philosophies, resources, needs, and plans. To ill.u.s.trate just a bit, though, a team with a limited audience and small immediate prospects (the Indians, let's say) will often try to trade off a star player near the end of his contract, since it may be unwilling to offer him big enough fresh sums to keep him out of the free-agent market; in return, it will look for some first-cla.s.s rookie prospects from the other club involved in the trade, thus saving itself the long-range cost of maintaining a full-scale scouting and farm system. Another team (try the Padres or the Angels) will habitually seek to pick up established older players, at whatever price, to fill precise needs in a roster that seems close to becoming a genuine pennant contender. Elsewhere, a change of owners.h.i.+p can inspire a depressed, fiscally cautious club (yes, the Cubs) to plunge headlong into the trading place with fistfuls of dollars and players, while, for its part, a wealthy, conservative franchise with a high record of success may begin to unload some famous but aging regulars in order to make room for s.h.i.+ning rookies whom its field personnel now consider to be ready for daily play: the Phillies and the Dodgers both recently embarked on such a course, with unhappy results so far.

A glance through the lineups of some of this year's divisional winners offers useful lessons and variations on these themes. First baseman Steve Garvey, who is thirty-five, joined the Padres two years ago as a free agent at $1.3 million per year, and third baseman Graig Nettles and the famous short reliever Goose Gossage (they are forty and thirty-three years old, respectively) came over in a trade with the Yankees last spring, adding some $2.7 million per year to the San Diego payroll. The 1984 Cubs are virtually a short-order team, grabbed up over the past two years, mostly via the trade route, by their vigorous general manager, Dallas Green, who has put twenty-two new players in place on the club since his arrival in 1981, the year that the team was bought by the Chicago Tribune's parent corporation. Six of Green's regulars, including the entire starting outfield, played for him on his former club, the Phillies. Three fixtures in his 1984 lineup-third baseman Ron Cey, shortstop Larry Bowa, and left fielder Gary Matthews-are in their mid-thirties, and achieved their high reputations and high salaries (they all earn a base pay in excess of six hundred thousand dollars per year, with considerable increments in the form of bonuses and deferred payments) while playing for other clubs that have appeared in the fall champions.h.i.+ps within the last four years-Cey with the Dodgers, Bowa and Matthews on the Phillies. Dallas Green's most brilliant acquisition for the Cubs has been then-youthful second baseman, Ryne Sandberg, this year's Most Valuable Player in the National League, who was virtually a throw-in in a trade of shortstops that brought Bowa from Philadelphia in 1982, but the deal that won the division was the Cubs' acquisition of Rick Sutcliffe, who came over from the Indians on June 13th in a multi-player swap; he won sixteen of seventeen decisions for Chicago over the remainder of the summer, and captured the Cy Young Award as the league's best pitcher. An established, dominant right-handed starter, Sutcliffe was playing out the final months of a contract that released him as a free agent a couple of weeks ago, and at this writing it is not at all certain that the Cubs will decide to bid against the eight clubs that have obtained negotiating rights to him and are expected to drive his salary up to or over the one-and-a-half-million-dollar level. He may even sign with the Padres. The Cubs' No. 2 starter, Steve Trout, is also a free agent, and so are Dennis Eckersley and reliever Tim Stoddard-which suggests that the Chicago pitching staff may have a very different look and capability come Opening Day next spring. And so it goes. The newly crowned Tigers are a stable, mostly homegrown team, as such matters are measured nowadays, but their key addition in 1984 was the left-handed short reliever Willie Hernandez, who was successful in thirty-two out of the thirty-three late-inning game-saving situations in which he worked for Detroit, and thereby emerged at the top of the balloting for both the Cy Young and the MVP awards in the American League.

I should add that there are some front-office people and managers and coaches (and baseball writers, too) who see a different cause for the pattern of vapid play by contemporary pennant-winning clubs in the years just subsequent to their champions.h.i.+ps. Last year's World Series contestants-the Orioles and the Phillies-finished nineteen games and fifteen and a half games, respectively, behind their divisional leaders this year; the 1982 pennant winners-the Cardinals and the Brewers-wound up twelve and a half and thirty-six and a half games to the bad this year. The baseball thinkers I have mentioned find all this attributable much less to the s.h.i.+fting of personnel from one club to another than to a smugness and a waning of desire among players who have been very highly rewarded at the pay windows as a result of their October triumphs. The notion has a certain logic, and if I resist it to some degree it is because it is so often put forward by some of the arch-conservatives of the game, including the Tigers' manager, Sparky Anderson. I will follow Sparky all the way, however, when he says (as he did in the Tiger dugout before the third Series game this year) that what the sport now badly wants is a consistent winner-a dynasty, if you will. "It's fine for the fans in all those different cities to have a different team in the playoffs each year," he said, "but you also need one particular team in there that half the people in the country love and half of them hate: the Yankees, the great Oakland club back in the seventies, the Cincinnati team we had"-Anderson managed the Big Red Machine that appeared in five playoffs and four World Series between 1970 and 1976-"which used to break all those attendance records wherever we played. There should be a club like that in the World Series about half the time. What baseball needs right now is a Muhammad Ali."

Anderson delivered all this in cheerfully matter-of-fact tones (he also insisted he did not blame the players for taking the loot that has been coming their way), and I wish I could persuade some of my friends who are part-time baseball followers to adopt a similarly calm and unpenitent view of money and trades and baseball as a business. It's my impression that it is the late-summer soldiers-the fans who don't pay much attention until the campaigns slip into mid-September, and "magic numbers" and MVP talk begin to turn up in the sports pages-who are most upset by the ironies and realities of contemporary baseball. They are probably the ones who most want an imperial and dynastic old club in the series every October, for that will add a morality-play savor to their tube-watching for a couple of weeks, and will also seem to confirm that nothing much has changed in the old game, which is a lie. For my part, I will happily welcome a defending champion in the October games when one turns up, but I don't think that a brusque, rather slovenly World Series or three flatfish pennant races are much cause for gloom. One should not go thirsty at dinner for want of a Chateau Margaux, and the happier fans, I think, are the ones who find time actually to go to games every so often throughout the season. This summer, I kept leaving baseball and men coming back to it-dropping in on the game, so to speak-and I had as much fun, from first to last, as I ever did. The sport didn't seem particularly Homeric this year-no clanging swordplay in the dust under ancient walls-but more resembled a collage, a ragbag, or perhaps a meadow: bits and swatches jumbled together for our pleasure, and color everywhere.

The closest meadow for me was Shea Stadium, of course, and I dropped in on the Mets again and again-not just for those enormous games with the Cubs in midseason but earlier, when the team's repeated successes were still so new and refres.h.i.+ng that a sudden Mets rally to retake the lead or a dandy double play that began with still another elegant move or unlikely stop by Keith Hernandez from deep behind first base would be greeted not only by roars and cheers and applause but by great bursts of delighted laughter all around the stands. Following the Mets back then was like watching a child of yours suddenly being good in a school play or a junior tennis tournament; you didn't know he had it in him. I was at Shea in the middle of June when the Mets beat the Phillies and slipped past them into first place in the National League East-a ridiculous, obstreperous game in which the Mets led by 61, then trailed by 76 (the clubs took turns batting around, and there were thirty hits for the afternoon), and finally prevailed by 107.1 was back again the next night, when the downy Dwight Gooden struck out eleven Montreal batters but lost by 21 to the dewy Bill Gullickson; and I was there (along with fifty-one thousand and nine others) to celebrate the Glorious Fourth with fireworks and maybe first place again, huzzah!-except that the visiting Astros put a damper on the party by bonking out seven hits (bloops and nubbers, for the most part), good for five runs, in the very first inning, and took it by 105. A couple of nights later, the Mets swept a double-header from the Reds, with Ron Darling knocking off his seventh straight win with a 10 shutout in the opener (he had a most disappointing second half of the season, partly because the club scored so few runs behind him, and wound up at 129 for the year), and the next night it was Gooden again and first place regained, in a great gala, as the Mets. .h.i.tters dealt most severely with the formidable Mario Soto, battering him for eight runs in four innings, with homers by Mookie Wilson and Darryl Strawberry, and with the firecrackers going off in the upper deck again, and the non-stop cheering, and the banner wavers and sign carriers at work, just like the grand old days of 1969 and 1973. In the stands, the new Gooden strikeout tabulators kept busy, hanging up