The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

Chapter 23

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*Less than a year after this was written, Dwight Gooden failed a voluntary urine test and then missed two months of the 1987 season while he underwent treatment for cocaine abuse. He had been a sometime user of the drug, it turned out, going back to his high-school days. Some fans and writers and front-office people instantly claimed that Gooden"s difficulties could have been headed off if compulsory testing had been adopted. Mets general manager Frank Cashen pointed out that if the old Joint Drug Agreement had still been in force, the club might have approached Gooden months before his use of the drug came to light.

**My optimism was misplaced. The ruling on the grievance-procedure case (it was the Joel Youngblood dispute, previously described) came in July, and it upheld the Players a.s.sociation"s contention that since compulsory drug testing had never been subject to collective bargaining, it was a violation of the 1985 Basic Agreement between the player and the owners. Since the ruling, no progress has been made by the two sides toward the reestablishment of the Joint Drug Agreement, or something of its kind, which means that baseball has no over-all drug plan whatsoever. The whole matter will form part of the prodigiously difficult negotiations that will precede the signing (or non-signing) of the next Basic Agreement before the 1989 season.

Fortuity

- Midsummer 1986 THE PRESS BOX AT Wrigley Field, in Chicago, is an extended narrow shed, two rows deep, that is precariously bolted to the iron rafters just underneath the park"s second deck. To gain access, one must climb a steeply angled ramp and clamber down a little starboard companionway, guarded at its foot by a uniformed minion, and then proceed giddily along a catwalk that hangs directly above the tiered, circling rows of seats and spectators behind home plate. Seen from this vantage point, the preoccupied fans below sometimes suggest a huddled, uncomplaining horde of immigrants stuffed into steerage on some endless voyage toward better luck-not an inappropriate image if we remind ourselves that this famous rustbucket, the good ship Cubbie, last dropped anchor in the shining harbor of the World Series in 1945. The outward view from the catwalk is felicitous and hopeful: the converging faraway left-field and left-bleacher sections complete the lines of the ancient vessel that plows forever dead ahead into Waveland and Sheffield Avenues, while the bleachers in center rise bravely toward the prow of the great green scoreboard, topped by a single lofty mast, its rigging aflutter with signal pennants (the current standings, top to bottom, of the teams in the two National League divisions), which customarily tell of happier news in other places. I visited the Friendly Confines on a Friday afternoon last July, just three days after the All-Star Game, which traditionally marks the equator of the baseball season; I was there not just to take in some daytime ball (there are no lights at the park) or to watch the Cubs engage the visiting San Francisco Giants over a midsummer weekend but also in search of a better understanding of some central processes of the game: luck or momentum or confidence, and their opposites-whatever it is that can unexpectedly make winning a habit for one club and losing such a curse for the other. I had chosen these two teams with care, as will shortly be seen, but the park was a break for me, too, because Wrigley Field always offers a fresh perspective on baseball: it is the specialite de la maison.

I had skipped the All-Star Game itself (it was played at the Houston Astrodome this year, and won by the American League by a score of 32), but I did not grieve over my loss any more than I would have fretted about not getting a seat at the Emmy Awards or missing a Jerry Lewis telethon, which are also television promotions rather than sporting events. Like many other fans, I imagine, I employed the three-day All-Star break in the schedules to study the 1986 standings to date and to wonder about their strange configurations. In the National League East, the New York Mets, established before the season as solid favorites to win their division, had surpa.s.sed all expectations, bowling over their opponents in runaway-train fashion, and dominating both the standings and the National League team statistics. As a team, they led all comers in runs, home runs, runs batted in, and batting average, and had yet to be shut out in any game. This was a team effort, for once, since none of their players stood at the top of the list in any batting category, and their best-known sluggers-Keith Hernandez, Gary Carter, and Darryl Strawberry-were, in fact, experiencing slightly sub-par years. The Mets also had the best pitching in the league, with a team earned-run average of 3.06; their four prime starters-Dwight Gooden, Ron Darling, Sid Fernandez, and Bob Ojeda (a left-hander picked up in a trade with the Red Sox over the winter)-had a combined record of 4110, with twenty-one complete games. The Mets led the Montreal Expos, their nearest opponent in the National League East, by thirteen games; within a couple of weeks, they would widen the margin to sixteen games-a bigger lead than any of the three other first-place teams had established over the last-place clubs in their divisions. In the National League West, the Houston Astros (good pitching and good defense; feeble batting and few fans) had been taking turns at the top with the surprising Giants, last-place finishers a year ago, while the Dodgers, sorely afflicted with injuries, floundered along in the cellar, eight games back. The American League West, habitually a rest home for most of the league"s losing teams, showed the California Angels holding a slim game-and-a-half lead over the young Texas Rangers, with none of the five other teams so far able to get its chin over the .500 bar. The real news was the Red Sox, who were leading the second-place Yankees in the mighty A.L. East by seven full games, mostly on the strength of their pitching: a startling turn of events for a club that has always specialized in winning by cannonade-the four-hour, four-homer, 107 Fenway Park Special, with both starting pitchers back in their street clothes by the middle of the fifth. Roger Clemens, a powerful twenty-three-year-old righthander who sat out most of the 1985 season after a shoulder operation, had accounted for this turnabout almost on his own, winning his first fourteen decisions without a defeat; here at the All-Star break, he stood at 152, with a league"s-best ERA of 2.48 and a hundred and forty-six strikeouts in his hundred and forty-five innings pitched. On April 29th, he had fanned twenty Seattle batters in a single game-the highest one-game total in the history of the major leagues.

There were other happy surprises tucked in among the midterm postings (including the wholly unexpected prosperity of the Cleveland Indians, who were more than holding their own in the savage campaigning in the American League East), but the bad news seemed far more absorbing. Just recently, the World Champion Kansas City Royals had somehow lost eleven games in a row, with their vastly admired corps of starting pitchers compiling an earned-run average of 7.32 during that spell. Bret Saberhagen, the Cy Young Award winner in his circuit last summer, had a 410 and 4.39 record, and was pitching so poorly that there was talk of sending him to the bullpen for rest and cogitation.

If the Royals looked bad (fourth place and eight games below .500), their World Series opponents, the Cardinals, were abysmal. Their 3650 at the All-Star break had them a half game out of the cellar and twenty-four games behind the Mets, and they were batting .228 as a team. No one could explain what had happened to the spirited and combative club that came so close to winning the cla.s.sic last fall, but their manager, Whitey Herzog, was blunt about their season to date. "We"re just a bad club," he said late in May. "We"re not deep in any department. We"re supposed to have a great defense, and we haven"t played worth a d.a.m.n." Asked if there was some remedy for his club"s dismal showing, he said, "Better players." When the schedule at last brought the Cards a day off at a point when they had lost eleven out of their last fourteen games, Herzog said the occasion called for a victory party.

The downside news was up in other places as well. Toronto"s ace starter, Dave Stieb, was at 29 and 5.80 so far, and forty-one-year-old Steve Carlton, a lifetime three-hundred-and-eighteen-game winner, was given his unconditional release by the Phillies after surrendering twenty-five runs in twenty innings. (He was picked up by the Giants a few days later.) The Yankees lost a record ten straight games at Yankee Stadium, and the Oakland A"s, who were believed to have a fair shot at a pennant this year in the American League West, set a team mark with fifteen consecutive losses on the road. Both Chicago managers lost their jobs, as did the Oakland and Seattle skippers; the deposed White Sox manager, Tony LaRussa, was instantly hired to manage the A"s.

Midseason performances don"t mean much by September, to be sure, but all this instability at the center of the sport was something to think about. The Mets are a pretty fair team on all counts, but the pace of their success so far seemed almost out of control: they weren"t just good, they were imperious. What had happened to so many competent teams this year, I wondered, to make them go so flat? I recalled the pride and self-a.s.surance and sense of accomplishment that only last October permeated the clubhouses of the Cards and the Royals and was equally apparent in the demeanor and conversation of their front-office people. Their teams had attained the heights on merit, these men seemed to be saying, and proved the corporate wisdom and foresight of the organizations that had produced them; success so plainly established almost looked like a guarantee of further success, even in the chancy world of compet.i.tive sports. The fatuity of such hopes, in the light of the 1986 season to date, suggested the anxiety and puzzlement and sense of quaky footing that must now infect every team in baseball.

Sports teams live on confidence; it is the air they must breathe if they are to survive at all. Each of the twenty-six major-league clubs spends millions of dollars every year on player development and on the signing of young talent; sizable further funds and thousands of hours of hard work go into scouting and planning trades and into long-range projections, all with the aim of putting a team on the field that will prove resolute in the face of adversity and opportunistic and aggressive when the chance to win presents itself. Quality, however, cannot be guaranteed, which is why the threats and petulant outbursts that George Steinbrenner directs at his Yankee players in times of trouble are so disliked by executives with a better sense of the game. "Maybe we"ll surprise some folks" and "At least we"ll be respectable" are what you hear from managers of potential fifth-place clubs, but when the season begins it always becomes plain that no one is ever quite ready for the heaven-sent pink glow of success that can suddenly envelop any team when everything-the starting pitching, the bullpen, timely hitting, sound defense, freedom from injury, and the breaks-is going your way, or contrariwise, ready for how bad a club, even a strong or famous one, can turn in the s.p.a.ce of ten days. And no team, it seems, can even be sure of its own respectability when it is faced with more than its share of the vicissitudes of baseball: injuries, bad hops, bad calls, suddenly vapid pitching or hitting, trembly defense, and the unexpected and then unstoppable cascade of lost ballgames. Sandy Alderson, the able general manager of the Oakland A"s, recently said to me, "If there"s one thing I"ve learned in this game, it"s that you can very seldom afford to smile. That"s a sad statement, but the truth is that you never know which game may be your last win in a long while, or which day may turn out to be the high point of your season. If you"ve been going bad, you don"t know if the game you"ve just lost is not yet your nadir or if it"s going to be the last loss in a week. That old baseball saying about never letting yourself get too high or too low is a matter of self-preservation. You just never know."

I had never thought much about winning and losing as freestanding and presumably discussable elements of baseball, but now the idea came to me to travel about the leagues a little, here at mid-season, and talk to some players and managers and front-office people about good baseball luck and bad, watching some teams that had enjoyed the best of things in recent weeks take on opponents who had met with very little luck so far this year, and trying to learn from both sides how it felt to be hot or not, how much difference the manager makes, and how different crowds and owners and writers seemed to respond to hard times and high times. In the end, I might even have a better sense of what proportion of the game actually rests in the hands of the men who play it.

Luck always matters in baseball, and here I at once found some luck of my own in the schedules-the upcoming games at Wrigley Field, where the ebullient and onrushing Giants (they had just climbed into first place in the West again, and their nine-game margin over the .500 level represented their best grades in almost four years) would meet the better-established Cubs, who had been winners of the National League East a bare two years ago but were not skating in stately circles in the lower reaches of their division. Injuries did in the entire Cubs pitching rotation last year, but this year the Chicago pitching was the worst in the league. "Last year was an excuse year," a grizzled Cubs writer said to me later in the week. "This year-" He shrugged. "Well, Chicago is a Cubs town." A new manager, Gene Michael, had replaced Jim Frey in June, and Dallas Green, the Cubs" president and general manager, blamed his players for the ritual execution. "I"m not very happy about it," he told a reporter. "I told them in no uncertain terms that they had contributed in great part to it."

Directly after my weekend at Wrigley Field, I also discovered, I could repair to California in time to see the brilliant Red Sox, now at 5631 for the year and seven games ahead of the pack, do battle with the miserable, last-place Oakland A"s, whose season had gone down the drain during a stretch in which most of their pitchers were on the disabled list and they had dropped twenty-five out of thirty-one games; the club had likewise dispensed with a manager, the agreeable Jackie Moore, and had lately replaced him with the aforementioned Tony LaRussa. Looking at my plans, I felt a twinge of compa.s.sion for the battered losers of my planned mismatches, but baseball, I reminded myself, is not for the fainthearted.

Wrigley Field lay becalmed in furnace-like doldrums as the Giants and the Cubs took the field on Friday, but the natives, I noticed, were unaffected. With the temperature in the mid-nineties, the customary thirty thousand-plus Cubs fans threw themselves into the ancient environs for our uncrucial tilt, and the ma.s.sed descamisados in the bleachers further tanned their pelts toward the prized North Side Gurkhatones of August. Drops of sweat from my brow formed paisley patterns on my scorecard, and between innings home-plate ump Jerry Crawford tottered back to a minuscule strip of shadow next to the backstop, where a ball girl tended him with elixirs and cold cloths. Perhaps sensing our need for a swift distraction from the weather, the Chicago starting pitcher, the tall right-hander Scott Sanderson, absolutely subdued the visitors in the course of his seven innings, striking out nine of the San Franciscos and giving up one hit, a double by Jeff Leonard, and a lone unearned run; his successor, the enormous flamethrower Lee Smith, was perfect, fanning three more Giants and preserving the 21 beauty. Sanderson"s breaking ball, which an inordinate number of Giants took for called third strikes, bowing politely at the waist as it dipped across the corners, was the talk of both clubhouses. There wasn"t much else to say, for great pitching is a silencer. The Giants, like all losing players in such circs, summed things up with a shrug and a wan smile: What are you going to do?

I had seen the Giants suffer an infinitely more painful loss earlier in the season, I now recalled. Back on May 30th, at Shea Stadium, the club had stood on the verge of a hard-earned one-run victory over the Mets in the bottom of the tenth inning. Then, with two out and two Mets aboard, Giants shortstop Jose Uribe and second baseman Rob Thompson somehow collided under a harmless infield fly; the ball popped loose and the winning run came in. A killing defeat, one felt, since it dropped the Giants three games behind the Astros and suddenly ran their string of losses to four straight, all on the road; last year, the Giants lost fifty-seven on the road, on the way to their last-place, worst-ever 62100 finish. "Same old Giants," a San Francisco writer muttered as we waited for the Shea press-box elevator down to the clubhouses.

Only they weren"t. That night, the Giants manager, Roger Craig, closed his clubhouse to exhort his young troops. That game was gone, he told them, and mourning or anger wouldn"t bring it back or turn the score around. The team"s young second-base combination had already won at least six games for the team with their gloves, so what had just happened only meant that they were 61 for the year. Tomorrow"s game was the one that mattered now. And so forth. It worked-something worked. The Giants won the next day, knocking off Bob Ojeda; Rob Thompson was involved in four double plays for the afternoon and singled three times, and Uribe came through with a two-run double. The Giants won again the day after that, handing Ron Darling his first defeat of the year. The team then moved along to Montreal, swept two games there, and headed home with a suddenly satisfying 44 record for the road swing.

In Chicago, I talked to Giants catcher Bob Brenly about the turnaround. "That game in New York was the one that did it," he said. "You know, for any team there can come a day when you decide that this is going to be just another year, just like it was before. Losing can happen so fast. You lose a game, and you think, OK, we"re stuck all right. You lose the next day, and you think, Well, that was a tough one-no way we could have gone against the breaks there. Then you get blown out, say, and the day after that maybe you get beat 21, and before you know it it"s five or six in a row and you"ve slid down a couple of places in the standings. But Roger prepared us for that sort of thing this year. We know we"re a better team. We know we have that resiliency. Roger has done it-give him the credit. He"s got guys bunting, doing the hit-and-run, guys. .h.i.tting the ball to the right side of the infield who never bothered to learn that kind of ball. He"s got me running, and I"m a catcher. n.o.body"s exempt, n.o.body"s ahead on the ball club, and it"s all from Roger. Call him a guru, call him a positive guy, call him a man-a grown-up human being. You know, almost every professional athlete has had one great coach in high school or college that he remembers and thinks of most highly. I had a high-school basketball coach back at Coshocton High named Bill Bowman, who always seemed like he could pull about ten percent more out of you than you thought you had. Well, that"s the way Roger is for everybody in this room. We"ve talked about it. He reminds you of somebody important in your life. He makes you think winning is something you can be personally responsible for. The biggest difference is we"re having fun. You can hear it in the air around here. I can hardly wait to get up in the morning and come to the ballpark. Last year was mostly just a personal thing, and I think that down feeling, that first bad day, came almost on Opening Day. Baseball is a team game, and once you lose that you"ve lost all concept. Some of our guys had a pretty good year in 1985, but I don"t think they were enjoying it any. It all got washed away by the team. Roger wants it the other way now. I"ve never learned so much from one person."

The one great coach that Roger Craig reminds me of is himself-a tall, engaging, n.o.ble-nosed North Carolinian who when last seen by me was accepting congratulations in the champagne-soaked Detroit Tigers clubhouse for his part in the making of that 1984 World Champion team. As pitching coach, he had brought the Detroit staff along from eleventh-best to best in the league in the s.p.a.ce of two years, in considerable part through his teaching of the split-fingered fastball, a deadly little down-diver that he perfected some years ago while running a baseball school for teenagers. Craig retired from baseball after the Tigers" triumph and went home to his horse ranch and his family in Southern California, but came back to take over as Giants manager in mid-September of last year, as part of a fresh regime headed by an incoming general manager, Al Rosen. Craig also had a previous two-year tenure as manager of the Padres, in 1978 and "79. This summer, he has been teaching the split-finger to anyone on the Giants staff who is interested-to Roger Mason and Mike Krukow and Mark Davis and Vida Blue (who has had trouble with it, because his fingers aren"t very long), and even to Steve Carlton.

Whatever ballpark he is in, Craig is implored by the local writers to talk about his defeats as well as his successes-in particular, about the forty-six games he lost in two years while pitching for the newborn and disastrous New York Mets, near the close of his career. "Aw, I don"t want to dwell on that story all the time," he said in the casbah of the Wrigley Field dugout early one afternoon. But then, because he"s an obliging fellow, he talked about it just the same. He confirmed his most famous statistic, registered in 1963-eighteen consecutive mound losses, which tied an ancient mark. "I think the record still stands," he said now, "but maybe I"ll pitch tomorrow and break it." He lost five games by the score of 10 in that stretch-also a record. "I kept telling the guys to go out and get me one run and we"d win," he told us. "Then, one time, I remember, it got to be about the fifth or sixth inning and I said, "All right, just get me half a run!" You know, I always felt I pitched well those years. I got a raise at the end of both years, and I deserved it. I had twenty-seven complete games over those two seasons, and every game I started I expected to win."

Craig said he thought the Mets trauma had helped him as a manager. "I know all about the things that can make you lose, and all about the things that can help you win. A lot of my coaching is from that. If a guy gets on a losing streak on the mound or goes oh-for-four up at bat a few days, I can identify with that. He knows I"ve been there before him. But he also knows that I"ve been in five World Series and I got four winning World Series rings to show for it. At first, the guys on this club thought I was crazy when I said I could show them how to win, but now they"ve got the idea. If you"ve got some talent, you can win. Sure, we"ve lost some games, but I"m happier right now than I"ve ever been before in baseball." He paused, squinting in the sun. "Well, maybe you always say that. The first year I was with the Brooklyn Dodgers as a major-league pitcher, I didn"t feel I could be any happier than that. But as an old man-I"m fifty-six-as an old man, right now I"m very happy. I"ve got outstanding coaches and a fine young ball club, and that"s all you can ask for."

This summer in San Francisco, I"ve been told, you can sometimes spot five or six Giants caps at the same time among the noonday crowds waiting for the lights to change on the corner of Kearny and Post Streets. Attendance at Candlestick Park (which will not be torn down or domed over in the near future, as had been much rumored in recent years) is up by a hundred and thirteen percent, and people at c.o.c.ktail parties in Mill Valley or at dinner downtown at the Washington Square Bar & Grill sometimes refer to the Giants as "the lads" now, just as the sports columns do. Now and then, on the courts at the Berkeley Tennis Club, you can hear somebody out there yell "Humm baby!" when his partner pulls off a winning backhand shot down the alley. The expression comes from Roger Craig, and it means "Great play!" or "Wow!" or perhaps, as a noun, a pretty young woman across the street. Back in June, somebody took down the office-door sign at Candlestick that said "NO. 33-CRAIG." Now it says "HUMM BABY."

The Cubs were less talkative, and no wonder. Dallas Green had recently suggested that he was prepared to dispense with almost anyone on his roster of well-paid underachievers (anyone but all-league second baseman Ryne Sandberg, one must a.s.sume, or the brilliant young shortstop Shawon Dunston, or perhaps Lee Smith), although there are cynics who claim he wouldn"t find many takers, because of the lavish contracts that were given to the stars of "84. In any case, I had very little relish at the prospect of worming out losers" confessions in the Chicago clubhouse. Ron Cey, who had been riding the bench in recent weeks, probably because of his Rodinesque responses to hard-hit ground b.a.l.l.s around third base, was polite but distant. Now thirty-eight years old, he had played nineteen hundred and fifty-three games at third base and hit three hundred and six home runs over ten full seasons with the Dodgers and three-plus with the Cubs, and he was not prepared to be forthcoming about unsuccess. "You"d have to ask players who have been on teams that have been out of it a lot of years," he said stiffly. "It"s not a situation I"m familiar with-I don"t qualify. I"m used to being up there in the midst of things. When you"re in contention, you contest. It"s what you"re here for-why you exist as a professional. Now-well, not playing much and being with a team that"s out of it, the way we ate, is not an enviable position. I"m in a different place than I"m used to."*

Forehandedly, I had arranged for further testimony about the Cubs from the best source possible-a fan. Cubs fans, by consensus, are the best in baseball. Year after year, in good times and (mostly) bad, they turn out in vociferous numbers, sustaining themselves with a heavenly ichor that combines loyalty, criticism, cheerfulness, durability, rage, beer, and hope, in exquisite proportions. The Cubs sold a million and a half tickets before Opening Day this year, and the sellout Sat.u.r.day crowd on this second day of my trip would put them over the million mark in admissions on the second-earliest date in their long history. My companion at the game was a baseball pen pal of mine named Tim Shanahan, a young and friendly (it turned out) professor of education at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He grew up in Detroit and still sustains an ancient pa.s.sion for the Tigers ("It"s very, very unlikely that they"ll ever end up playing the Cubs in the World Series," he said when I asked about his ultimate loyalty), and followed the Phillies closely when attending graduate school in Delaware. His attachment to the Cubs is of only six years" duration, which barely puts him on the waiting list for admission to the True Cubs Sodality, but he clearly belongs nevertheless. A few weeks earlier, he and his wife and two young daughters had turned up at Wrigley for a Sunday game, to find that the remaining tickets were only for standing room. "My older daughter Erin is six, and she said that was fine with her," Shanahan said. "She"s been coming to games with us for years. But Meagan is three, and after my wife and I and the girls stood around outside the gate for about an hour we finally decided that it might be a little hard on her to be held in our arms for three hours at her very first game. I wouldn"t have minded, of course, but-" He was still thinking it over.

Shanahan and I had good seats in the deep stands just behind home, and, with the temperature back in the nineties, I did not respond when he suggested that we probably should have sat in the bleachers if I was in search of some real Cubs fans. We drank some beer, and he brought me up to date on the franchise gossip. The White Sox, who have been traditionally seen as drawing most of their fans from within the city, were probably moving out of Comiskey Park at last, he said; they were negotiating a move to the western suburb of Addison, if the financing could be worked out for a new ballpark there. "The strange thing is that most of the Cubs fans are from the suburbs, even though Wrigley Field is a city ballpark," he said. "Most of the White Sox fans cheer for the Cubs when the Cubs are in first place, but Cubs fans never, never cheer for the White Sox. They sort of don"t notice them."

Wrigley Field seemed to have survived the great lights crisis, Tim told me. After the winning 1984 season, the club had threatened to move the team elsewhere, so that it could conform with the league"s network-television contracts, which called for night games in post-season play. The city and state ordinances forbidding lights at Wrigley held firm under court testing, but now Dallas Green was talking about adding twenty thousand new seats to the park (which now holds thirty-eight thousand)-a move that seemed certain to destroy its airy vistas and rural ambience. It is reported that Green also wants the club to buy up some of the cozy, tree-shaded blocks of ancient houses that surround the field and convert them into parking lots. Shanahan thought the lights controversy would be settled by compromise: the lights would go in, but would be turned on for only fifteen or twenty games during the regular season. "n.o.body likes the idea," he said, "but it may be the only way to keep Wrigley Field. People care about this place."

The game began-the Giants" veteran ace Mike Krukow taking on the Cubs" left-handed Steve Trout-and what Shanahan noticed almost instantly was an innocuous fly ball out to left field struck by the second Giant batter of the day, Rob Thompson. "Bad," he announced. "Anything hit in the air like that against Trout means he"s going to get killed. And look at those flags." I looked, and saw the pennants on the scoreboard and up on top of the upper deck in right field beginning to stir and lift. They were pointing away from us: local storm warnings for lakeside pitchers. Shanahan was wrong in one way, it turned out: the Giants didn"t exactly kill Trout as much as discourage him to death, finally dispatching him in the third, when he got n.o.body out while giving up a pa.s.sel of singles, a walk, and a terminal double by the young power-hitting third baseman, Chris Brown, which ran the score to 51, San Francisco. But nothing is forever on windy days at Wrigley, and the Cubs responded at once with four safe knocks, including a home run by Gary Matthews that sailed five or six rows beyond the ivy at left-center. "It"s Sandberg that"s the difference," Shanahan said, referring to Matthews" immediate predecessor in the lineup. "They"ve finally got him back where he belongs. He"s got to bat second like this if we"re going to score runs. It"s vital to the whole thing."

This, I realized, was the long view-the experienced Cubs-person"s caution-but there was no cynicism or artificiality in it that I could see. Tim nodded happily when Dunston and then Dave Martinez whacked windblown back-to-back homers in the fifth, with the Cubs scoring four more times and going ahead for good in the game, but when we sat down again he said, "I think all these pop-fly home runs in this park hurt the Cubs in the end. It"s the reason we never seem to have any speed on the team, or any real defense. It"s the same kind of team the Red Sox have always been, because of that wall at Fenway. Those big innings distract you from building a real ball team. I think we may have the best defensive stats in the league right now, but that"s only because we"re so slow in the infield that we never even get to the hard chances. It"s an illusion."

Sandberg homered in the eighth, and Leon Durham bombed a triple into the ivy a moment or two later, and the Cubs won the thing by 116. I was happy for my new friend, but what I had discovered about him was that he was a baseball fan first and a Cubs fan-and a dedicated one-well after that. Maybe that was part of the secret about winning and losing-the fan"s part. "What I love about Roger Craig is the way he"s always in the game," Tim had said at one point. "He calls all the Giant pitchouts and pick-offs, you know. You remember how he used to do that when he was with the Tigers, I"m sure." I did remember, because he had reminded me. Then, a little later-an instant later-the Giant pitcher Krukow picked Sandberg off first on a move (I checked it later) signalled by Craig from the dugout. It took the Cubs out of an inning, but I noticed that Shanahan clapped for the slick move just the same. He was in the game, too.

Now I began to worry about the Giants. Their division lead was gone-Houston had won again-and after the game Craig spoke urgently about the necessity of getting out of town with a split in the series. Matters looked even graver the next afternoon-a beautiful day, a bit cooler, with a noisy family crowd on hand for a Sunday picnic of baseball-when the Cubs went up by 41 in the third inning; two pitches by Giants starter Roger Mason bounced by Bob Brenly for pa.s.sed b.a.l.l.s in the three-run second (both split-finger specials, by the look of them), and further damage was avoided only by a nifty pitchout, wigwagged by Craig, which allowed Brenly to cut down a base stealer with two Cubs on and no outs. Craig, in fact, was managing up a storm, at one point sending up a pinch-hitter for a batter in mid at-bat, with the count 31 (it didn"t work); the day before, he had relieved one of his relievers in the middle of the count. What did work on this day for the Giants was a brilliant turn at the plate in the fourth by first baseman Harry Spilman, who ran the count to 32 against the Cubs" Dennis Eckersley and then fought off four outstanding sliders for fouls before Eckersley made a mistake, a fastball up, which Spilman hit into the right-field stands for a two-run homer. Spilman, an early-season pickup by the Giants after he was dropped by the Tigers, had been filling in elegantly for the injured and slumping rookie first baseman Will Clark, who had been sent down to Phoenix for rehabilitation. After the game, Spilman said, "That was probably the best at-bat I"ve ever had in the big leagues."

The Cubs were still up by a run when another Giants sub, Randy Kutcher, led off the eighth with a rocket to short, which Chicago shortstop Dunston fielded brilliantly and then horribly threw away, to put the tying run aboard. The Cubs infield defended in cla.s.sic fashion against the inevitable upcoming bunt, but the batter, Robbie Thompson, pushed the ball beautifully to right, fast enough to get it past the pitcher and the onrushing first baseman, Durham, and short enough to allow the covering second baseman, Sandberg, no chance in the world to make a play. The bunt-a pearl of great price-went untouched, and a moment or two farther along Thompson outdid himself, pausing for an instant on the base path in order to hinder Durham"s view of Leonard"s weakly nubbed, lucky wrong-field infield bouncer to right. Durham lunged for the ball and barely missed it as it wobbled off into short right, and the game was tied, with Thompson on third; his run-he scored on a sacrifice fly by Brown, to put the Giants ahead-held up because Scott Garrelts, in from the pen, set down the six remaining Chicago batters in order, on fastb.a.l.l.s that all measured in the mid-ninety-m.p.h. range. The Giants wound up with a 54 win and the split they had to have.

How you a.s.sessed such a game depended on which clubhouse you visited. Eckersley, who had pitched very well indeed-he struck out nine Giants-was bitter about the fact that manager Gene Michael had allowed him to come up to bat in the seventh, with one out and a teammate on second, instead of wheeling in a pinch-hitter to try to deliver an insurance run. The loss ran Eckersley"s record to 36 for the year, and the Cubs" to 3850. "It"s just frustrating," the Eck said. "I know everyone here feels the way I do, so why am I going to sit here and cry about it? It"s just been a terrible year for all of us."

In the Giants" clubhouse, Roger Craig lit up his old-fashioned hook-stem pipe and blew a cloud of sweet smoke at the ceiling. "Humm baby," he said.

The teams I found on the gra.s.sy field at the Oakland Coliseum at the outset of their three-game series had come through such different terrain in this baseball summer as to make them resemble the princ.i.p.als in some morality play about reward and punishment, good fortune and bad. The Red Sox, here in the midst of their longest road trip of the summer, had just lost three out of four games at the Seattle Kingdome but still held a comfortable six-game lead over the second-place Yankees. At their high-water mark, ten days earlier, the Sox had led the pack by eight games and-to employ the statistic by which most baseball people measure team success or the lack of it-stood twenty-six games above the .500 mark. They had the league"s best pitcher in Clemens (then at 162) and the top batter in Wade Boggs (.365). The A"s, in horrendous contrast, had slipped into the abyssal deep (a level at which the only light is provided by anglerfish and a few weirdly phosph.o.r.escent umpires), fifteen and a half games behind the West-leading Angels, but had lately managed a few feeble upward strokes under then-new manager, LaRussa, and now stood thirteen and a half back although still dead last. Their only current celebrity was Jose Canseco, the enormous, thick-armed rookie slugger, who was leading the league with twenty-three homers and seventy-eight runs batted in. June held very different memories for the two teams. The Bosox had begun that month with feelings of great trepidation, having lost their most experienced starting pitcher, Bruce Hurst, who had just gone on the disabled list with a groin injury, at a time when they were already making do without the services of another strong starter, Al Nipper, who was recovering from a severe spike wound suffered in a collision at home plate two weeks before. The Sox came through June with a fairish 1510 record for the month, but somehow increased then-divisional lead from two and a half to eight games in the process. A five-game losing skid by the Yankees late in the month helped considerably, and so did Roger Clemens" six consecutive June wins-Nos. 9 through 14. The word "stopper," which is what Clemens is, doesn"t just mean that the man out there on the mound keeps the other team from scoring; what he really stops is his own club"s two-game and three-game losing streaks, which can suddenly become something much more damaging if not snipped short. The Bosox had swept a three-game series against the Yankees in mid-June and another three-game set against the Orioles at the end of the month, but that swoon by the Yankees was the kind of pure good fortune that all hot teams seem to experience, and even come to count on as being almost then-due. Back in May, the Red Sox had beaten the Indians, 20, in a game at Cleveland that was called after six innings-called by fog. Later on, they beat Toronto when a Blue Jay pitcher walked in the winning run in the tenth, and then, in a July game, they completed a four-run twelfth-inning rally against the Angels when the California pitcher was called for a balk that brought in the winning run.

Oakland"s moments were of a different nature: a series in Cleveland when the team blew leads of four runs, six runs, and three runs on successive days, losing all three games; a night in Kansas City when Rickey Peters, under the mistaken impression that the bases were loaded, trotted homeward after a base on b.a.l.l.s and was tagged out to end the inning; a nine-run second inning by the Rangers at Arlington. This last was the low point, in the estimation of Bill King, the veteran A"s television commentator. "It summed us up at that point," he told me. "It was a microcosm. Every play seemed a violation of some baseball principle. There were two misplayed line drives in the outfield, people failed to cover bases, and there was an inside-the-park home run. Another run scored while our pitcher was arguing with the first-base ump over a call and Canseco twisted his knee when his spikes caught on the wall padding in right field. Jackie Moore said it was the most embarra.s.sing game in his baseball career. Three days later, Jackie was gone-no one blamed him for that one game, of course-and I think in a way he was almost relieved."

Bruce Bochte, the Oakland first baseman, said, "The month didn"t feel like a collapse, because most of the time we kept playing just bad enough to lose. In a way, that"s worse. It was like we were in a twilight zone. I guess the only regular player we didn"t lose to injuries at some point was Alfredo"-Alfredo Griffin, the shortstop. "Even so, we should have played close to .500, and we didn"t come close. It was an avalanche. When everything"s going bad like that, you never think about baseball when you"re away from the park. It isn"t in your mind at all. It"s harder to come to the park than it should be. You think you"re tireder than you really are, and your injuries hurt more. When the game starts, the effort is there, but there"s sort of a doubtful att.i.tude. You"re looking around almost in antic.i.p.ation of what"s going to go wrong."

Bochte and Sandy Alderson and most of the other A"s agree that the most damaging stretch was a three-game series against the White Sox at Chicago early in the month, when two starting pitchers, Joaquin Andujar and Moose Haas, were disabled on successive days, at a time when the team was already trying to make do without its bullpen ace, Jay Howell, and its center fielder and team leader, Dwayne Murphy. Patchwork now became a daily necessity. Pitchers were wheeled in from the minors and, in some cases, wheeled back again; long relievers became starters; one starter, the young strikeout artist Jose Rijo, was tried in short relief-a mistake, everyone agreed later.

"After the injuries, things became very difficult," Alderson said. "The bad news seemed relentless. I remember one time when we were losing here and all the teams in our farm system lost, too, so we had an oh-for-seven day for the whole Oakland operation. But there was never any despair. You try to keep some distance in your mind at times like that, to be objective and keep your judgment, but in all our meetings here with our coaches and scouts and others in the organization we never concluded that there was something wrong with our system, that we"d made bad trades, or that any of our components-scouting, minor-league operations, or the major-league operation-were seriously flawed or at fault. Maybe there was a lack of team chemistry or a lack of effort-it"s hard to judge-but when Tony got here he felt it was just a lack of talent. We"d lost too many players. At some point, it got out of control and something had to be done. You can"t change twenty-five people, so we changed one-the manager."

Alderson didn"t say so, but others on the Oakland club intimated that the crippling of the team which led to the deadly June losing streaks-nine in a row and the record fifteen straight losses on the road-probably delayed the firing of Jackie Moore, instead of hastening it. It seemed plainly unfair to dismiss a manager who was making do with a daily lineup half full of Cla.s.s AAA ballplayers. Even before the downslide, however, there was a conviction that Moore had delegated too many responsibilities to his coaches; the pitching rotations and the decision about when to take a struggling pitcher out of a game were being made by pitching coach Wes Stock, and players had understandably begun to feel that there was no visible leadership or center of force on the club. (The new manager, Tony LaRussa, is more private and more intellectual than Moore-or than most major-league pilots, for that matter he holds a law degree from Florida State University-but there is visible steel there as well. He had managed the White Sox for eight seasons, bringing them to a divisional pennant in 1983, and his departure from that club this summer is generally viewed as the result of a clash of personalities with the flamboyant new Chicago executive vice-president, Hawk Harrelson.) In any case, there is probably no proper time to fire a manager, if it must be done during the season. Jackie Moore"s dismissal came just two days after the repellent and embarra.s.sing rat episode (Dave Kingman, the brooding and misanthropic Oakland designated hitter, arranged to have a live rat delivered to Susan Fornoff, a beat writer from the Sacramento Bee, as a signal of his dislike of her presence in the clubhouse) and one day after the club at last broke its horrific fifteen-game road losing streak with a win over the Royals at Kansas City. LaRussa took charge after an interval when the club was directed by fill-in manager Jeff Newman, and by the time I arrived in Oakland the team had won six games and lost five under its new skipper.

Anybody can explain baseball, of course; the trick is to predict it. What happened now-what happened of course-was that the A"s swept the series against the Red Sox, winning quite handily, in fact, only once falling behind in one of the games, by a lone early run. The A"s also got the better of things in every department, including pitching (the Bosox never put together more than two hits in an inning in any of the contests); hitting (Carney Lansford, the Oakland third baseman, went eight for twelve, with two home runs); and defense (silky plays by Griffin and a marvelous 3-6-1 double play in a tight moment of the Tom Seaver-vs.-Joaquin Andujar middle game, which brought a sudden shout of pleasure from the Oakland crowd). The breaks had changed, too-a telling shift of ground. In the final game, Dusty Baker, the Oakland outfielder, made a full-length airborne dive to grab a drive by Bill Buckner inches above the gra.s.s in left center ("Last month, that"s a triple," announced Bill Rigney, the senior Oakland baseball adviser, who was sitting with me); and in the bottom of the same stanza Tony Phillips" hard rap up the line bounced past Buckner at first base and into the right-field corner for a two-run double ("Last month, that"s the other team at bat," said Rig). Baseball"s inexorable cycle had swung the other way, and suddenly it was Boston"s turn to play with a very short deck. Injuries and unexpected misfortunes had depleted the lineup; in the summer so far, the club had been forced to call up nine different minor-league replacements from its Pawtucket farm club. In the games I saw, Hurst and Nipper, each recently out of drydock (it was Hurst"s first turn since his injury, and Nipper"s sixth), were cruelly treated by the Oakland offense; they had been hurried back because of the absence of Oil Can Boyd, an 116 starter for the Red Sox, who was under suspension for various infractions and instabilities. The hard-hitting outfielders Tony Armas and Jim Rice were aching and unable to play at all in the Oakland games, and the bullpen was without stalwarts Sammy Stewart and Steve Crawford. Wade Boggs was aching with a lame back, and Buckner"s bad ankles limited him to service as a designated hitter in the first two games. The customary D.H., Don Baylor, was filling in for Jim Rice in left field, where his feeble arm cost the Bosox an important run in the second game. By the time the series was over, the Red Sox lead was down to three games, and manager John McNamara was terse and careworn in his office. "We"ve got to show our character and just play our way through it," he murmured. "I don"t know-maybe we"re trying too hard." The day before, he had said, "Thank G.o.d we"ve got some leeway, but you can run out of leeway."

My own sympathies underwent something like a Nautilus workout during the games at the Coliseum, edging slowly away from the A"s, whom I had so coldly selected as a laboratory animal for my research, and toward the gimpy Red Sox, and then settling firmly, or perhaps hysterically, upon myself. I am a Red Sox fan of good standing (an oxymoron if there ever was one), and those icy fingers up and down my spine, an odd unwillingness to consult the standings in the morning papers, and my sudden need to call up distant fellow-sufferers were symptoms I recalled all too well from previous foldo summers, such as 1978, when my Sox madly threw away a ten-game mid-July lead and ultimately fell before the Yankees in a beautiful and scarifying one-game playoff at the Fens. But Red Sox fans are no help at all at times like these. "It"s all over!" sobbed a Boston-bred colleague whom I now consulted, collect, coast-to-coast. "I told you this would happen. I knew it all along."

"We can play through this," I said stiffly. "Now is the time to show some cla.s.s." I hung up.

Character, to tell the truth, is not a quality that has been generally a.s.sociated with Red Sox teams or the Red Sox clubhouse in recent years, but all that changed dramatically this summer-first when Don Baylor came over to the club from the Yankees (the teams traded designated hitters, with the left-handed Mike Easier going to the Yanks in an even-up swap for Baylor, who bats from the right side), and then when Tom Seaver joined the club in June, following a trade with the Chicago White Sox, where he had been pitching for the past two summers. Baylor, who is thirty-seven, has played for the A"s, the Angels, the Orioles, the Yankees, and the Red Sox in the course of his ill.u.s.trious fifteen years in the majors; he won a Most Valuable Player award in 1979, when he was with California. He is a longtime member of the executive committee of the Players a.s.sociation. My presiding Baylor images are of his thunderous slides into second base against the double play; his crowding, obdurate stance up at bat, when his large and leaning left shoulder almost seems to obscure the pitcher"s view of the plate; and the aura of magisterial calm that always seems to encircle his cubicle in a clubhouse. A prince of players.

"This game, for me, is not a play-for-yourself thing," he said before one of the Oakland games. "The exception is the hitter-versus-pitcher situation-when you"re up at bat. That"s when you"re on your own. When a team is playing well, it"s easy to be unselfish. Something intangible is being pa.s.sed along. Winning is contagious-but losing can also be contagious. There are some selfish ballclubs-you can spot them after a while. Look at the Minnesota club; there are guys there who have great numbers year after year, but it doesn"t mean much. The team may play good for a time and then you look up and they"re out of it again. Playing against the Red Sox all this time, I got the impression that they were divided in a number of ways. They played for themselves a lot, and they weren"t very close. You"ve heard that thing about twenty-five guys calling twenty-five cabs to take them back to the hotel after a game.

"When I got here, I told some of the pitchers they had to throw inside more, and I said I"d be the first guy out of the dugout if anything happened-if anybody complained. I said they had the reputation of not doing that. You have to do that-move the batters off the plate-or else they"re going to tattoo you off the wall. I know-I"ve been hit by pitches more than anybody in this league. There have been years when I got hit by more than fifteen or sixteen teams. But that pitcher has got to try to intimidate the batter just a little. Just one time can work. If he comes in on him in the second inning, let"s say, the batter will still be thinking about it when he comes up in the ninth, when it counts. But if a team isn"t in contention, if it isn"t playing very well, the first thing you notice is that the pitcher has lost that kind of aggressiveness. He won"t be thinking about it, and his ERA will have gone up into the fours."

I asked him how it felt to be on a club when everything was going right-when winning was the habit.

"Winning-well, everyone contributes," Baylor said. "You take the extra base, instead of playing it one base at a time. You take chances and they always seem to work. That kind of play just takes over, and the slowest guy on the team will suddenly think he"s the fastest. I remember when I was with Oakland, a long time ago, and we came into Yankee Stadium to play the Yankees in a game that was on national TV. I stole second base, and as I came into the bag Thurman Munson"s throw was off behind me toward the right-field side-he did that sometimes, with that sidearm throw-and out of the corner of my eye I saw that Mickey Rivers was playing in left center, with a long run to the ball. I got up and I knew I was going to try to score, and I did. I scored all the way from first base. Well, at that time Thurman was struggling with the bat as well as behind the plate, but he had such a determined way about him. When the season was over, he made a point of coming to me and thanking me for that one play I"d made, because it motivated him for the rest of the year, and in the end he was able to win an M. V.P. award for that 1976 season. From that day on, he played with a fire in his eye. So one play can turn a player or turn a team around, even if it"s an example from the other side.

"You want to do well in this game, you know. You don"t want to look bad-not in the major leagues. No one wants to be embarra.s.sed. If you do well and the team is going good, it"s a whole lot easier. You play for the team and not yourself. But if you happen to be going bad yourself and you can take a base on b.a.l.l.s in front of somebody who"s swinging the bat real well, that can be enough. That will do it, maybe. You don"t always want to be the man to hit an eight-run homer, because that doesn"t happen. Even taking a base on b.a.l.l.s can be a way of leading. Just lately, we"ve run into some rough spots, and we"re looking to see who"s going to lead us out of that. Everybody here wants to be that man."

Tom Seaver is forty-one years old now-it"s hard to believe-and he has said that this, his twentieth major-league season, may be his last. He is a different sort of pitcher from what he used to be-one who changes speeds and moves the ball around. Only a few times in a game do you see the hummer, thrown with that full-drop-down delivery, and even then the pitch is used as much for example as for effect-to set up the other stuff. In the game he pitched against the A"s, he looked a bit rocky in the early going, giving up three runs on a walk and three hits in the first; then he steadied. He lost, 42, but he"d kept the Red Sox in the game, given them a chance to win if they could, which is the kind of outing he had promised when the trade was made. After the game, his opposing pitcher, Andujar, said that he liked to work against Seaver because there was so much to learn from the experience-how to concentrate, how to take it easy and still bear down. "He"s a professional out there, inside his head and outside," Joaquin said.

The next day, Tom said, "The most important thing for any club is to keep the entire season in perspective, to keep that in view at all times. You know there are going to be days when your club is down, but you can"t let yourself be too affected by that. Otherwise, you"d be an emotional wreck at the end of the summer. You can"t afford to lose a guy like that"-he gestured toward Jim Rice, across the clubhouse-"for any length of time and expect to be the same. But you can"t win or lose it all in one day. You can"t spend all your dollars at one sitting. If you"ve had a bad run, like this Oakland club just did, you still have to accept it. It"s part of being a professional. You have to say to yourself, "Well, today was the end of the down side, tomorrow is the beginning of the plus side." I think there"s been a notion on some of the clubs in the American League West that being good enough to win in their division is good enough. I can say with certainty that that"s the way it was when I was on the White Sox. That att.i.tude filters down from the front office to the players, and it makes you a mediocre club, no matter where you"re playing. It"s a huge mistake."

I asked him if it felt very different to be with a club that was in contention.

"My G.o.d, yes," Seaver said. "Everything you do has meaning. You"re beyond your personal statistics, which is a real break for a professional. If you"re ever in the position where you know that only your own numbers mean anything, you find that after a while that supply is drained, too. It"s empty. On a contending team, even if a guy is. .h.i.tting .212 or is 48 on the year-well, maybe those four games that the one guy contributed were the ones that put the club over the top. They have meaning. You take pride in what everyone is doing collectively, and that"s a great feeling. It"s an amazing phenomenon how winning and losing can become part of a clubhouse and will breed on themselves, feed on themselves."

I asked if he was aware of the trepidation that long-term Red Sox fans are so quick to feel when their club begins to sag a bit.

"I"ve heard of that," he said, "but I guess I didn"t know it was so-so oppressing. But that negative is a compliment, really. They care. It might even be easier for fans like that to have their club in second place until late in the year, but I"ve never heard a player say that." He laughed-his old giggle. "Heck, no. No way!"

The Oaklands responded to their improving fortunes with tempered cheerfulness, each in his own fashion. Bochte said, "At this point, you have to forget about where you"re going to finish and just try to get things back in order. You want to play one game well. Then it gets to be two good games in a row. Right now, we"re trying to play a whole series of good games. You really have to play well for about a week before you know if you"ve pulled out of a real bad stretch."

Roy Eisenhardt, the Oakland president, said, "Winning is the condition that immediately precedes losing." Then he smiled and said, "The reverse is also true, which is the nice part."

Dwayne Murphy, the A"s center fielder, denied Seaver"s allegation about teams in the American League West. "I"ve never heard that on this club," he said. "And I"d have heard it if it was going around. n.o.body wants to play .500 ball for a career. What you do hear when you"re going bad is some people beginning to blame others. They"re pointing fingers. It"s always wrong, because one man can"t do it for you-can"t make you win and can"t lose it for you. It"s a team effort, either way." He paused-he is a quiet man, and speaks very softly-and I had to lean closer to hear what came next: "But I don"t know the other side, really. I"ve never been on a real winning club, except in "81, when we got to those playoffs in the short season. I tell you, I"m dying to find out what it"s like to win." He paused again and then repeated himself, even more quietly. "I"m dying to be there."

Tony LaRussa said, "There are clubs that have some success in the early part of the season and think that"s where their club is going to end up, but this isn"t always the case. There are clubs that have lost for a while and think that"s it-it"s over. But there are always those clubs that seem to be able to pick themselves up, no matter what they"ve done, because they have a history of doing well in the end. The Yankees. The Baltimore Orioles. To some degree, what we"re all trying to do is extend the good side and cut down on the bad. It"s difficult, but it isn"t so hard that you just throw your hands in the air and say it can"t be done. You try to do some little things. You want to make sure that the club is together-that you do things together. A little togetherness. You"d be surprised how often you"ll notice that a winning club has the habit of going to places together on the road. They"re at the same watering holes. On a losing club, guys are sort of embarra.s.sed to be seen together. Playing better ball can make such a quick difference. It"s so much more fun. I"ve been watching the Giants this year, because Roger Craig has his guys convinced of that. There may be a few people in baseball who are as good as Roger Craig, but none who are better. None. He"s also got his coaches and players playing one game at a time, which is the whole trick. Back in 1982, the White Sox made a real strong comeback at the middle of the season. We"d won fifteen out of eighteen and put ourselves two and a half or three games out of first place. Then the nineteenth came along-it was against the Rangers, a road game. I wasn"t there, because my first daughter was being born, and Charlie Lau had the club. We were down 10 in the top of the ninth, and we got two two-out hits-Squires and LeFlore-and that tied it up, 11. In the tenth or eleventh inning, we had a good two-run rally and took the lead, but in the bottom of the inning Dave Hosteller hit a three-run homer for them, and we lost it. Later, I heard a lot of people say, "Oh, wasn"t that a shame-that was the night the White Sox lost the pennant." Bulls.h.i.t. Sure you get your heart broken in this game. But what happened after that game was that this real depressed, we-lost-it atmosphere took over. We hadn"t learned to handle that. What"s worse than losing in extra innings? What"s worse is carrying it over and losing two or three more. It"s a million times worse. That"s what you want to be afraid of.

"I think fear of not coming through can be a real motivator, no matter where you are or who you"re up against. Right now, we"re playing the Red Sox three games and then the Blue Jays three games, and I"m worried to death. What you have to do is try. I"m scared to death that between now and October we"ll only be ordinary. If I do a job, we should at least be decent."

I took in parts of the Oakland-Boston games in Roy Eisenhardt"s private box, behind first base, which offered a perfect view of the action below and of the pleasant, sun-drenched park (two of the games were afternoon affairs) and of the pains of major-league ownership. Eisenhardt, who is in his forties, is lean and athletic, and I sometimes have the impression that he would enjoy baseball more if he could be in uniform and out on the field himself. He watches a game with more intensity than anyone else I know, and I noticed now that he seemed almost wary about his team"s improved fortunes and its suddenly brisk and efficient brand of play. He responded warmly to good news and surprises-a stolen base by Dave Kingman; another sparkling stop by Griffin, far behind second base; a pinch-hit single by Canseco, who had been struggling at the plate in recent games-but then he would resume his grave and abstracted view of the events before us. It had been a difficult summer for the Oakland club, which had begun the season with such high hopes but had seen most of the good news and most of the luck fall on the Giants, who are the perennial Bay rivals of the A"s for a baseball audience that may not be quite large enough or dedicated enough to sustain two major-league clubs. Since purchasing the club, in 1980, the Haas family, which owns Levi Strauss, has made large investments in the refurbishing of the Oakland team and ballpark, and in the essential minor-league chain and scouting system, but the expected accompanying resuscitation of the team"s fortunes on the field has been frustratingly slow in coming, as we have seen, and fans have not turned out in sufficient numbers to prevent a flow of red ink. The A"s have cut back by trading away some high-salary stars, like Rickey Henderson (who went to the Yankees in 1985 in return for five younger prospects), but the club lost five and a half million dollars last year, and it seems clear that the rewards of good will and good works alone cannot be expected to keep the current owners in baseball forever. Over the last couple of years, there have been sporadic rumors that the club might be sold and moved to another city, but shortly before my visit the A"s concluded an agreement with the city of Oakland to extend their lease on the Oakl

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