Men at Work Page 8
Thinking aloud about the risks in this game that has risks on every hand, La Russa plays Ping-Pong in his mind with alternatives. Ping: “If the pitcher against us is Frank Viola, someone we hardly ever hit, or Dave Stieb, well, push it. Why sit back and get beat? So what if you have a play that has a poor chance of being successful? Your chances that day are poor anyway. So, for example, if you have a slow runner on first, a power hitter at the plate and a 2–0 count, it is a good time to start the runner because the other side will be surprised.” Pong: “But it may also be a bad time because the power hitter may not be reliable about putting the ball in play to prevent the slow runner from being thrown out at second.”
La Russa believes in taking risks precisely because baseball, the game of failure, is all risks, the odds being what they are: against. Against almost anything you try. “If we get a man to second with no one out, we may have three guys coming up who can hit home runs, but why stand around and wait for that? Let’s have the next guy get the runner to third and pick up one run. It’s not correct to sit and wait for extra-base hits.”
La Russa does not tailor the Athletics’ game to the park they are playing in on a given day. “The game tells you what to do,” he says, “not the park.” A good pitcher can turn a bandbox park into the Grand Canyon. La Russa is more apt to play for one run at a time, with a lot of hitting and running, when, as in a League Championship Series and World Series, television dictates a starting time around 5:30 P.M. Pacific Time. Pitchers have an enormous advantage throwing through slanting sunlight and twilight. And the weather—the temperature, the humidity, the winds—can also influence La Russa’s approach to a game. “If it’s hot and the ball is carrying, maybe you don’t bunt, don’t play for one run.” But meteorology has precious little to do with managing. What will prevail is the manager’s fundamental style, which is another name for tendency.
“We wanted to establish an A’s style of play,” says La Russa, “a lot of effort and playing with an idea.” La Russa’s idea is to find a way to find an edge in every situation. Earl Weaver’s credo was: Make all your outs at home plate, not on the bases. That is not La Russa’s style. As soon as some managers fall behind by even a run they become less aggressive about starting runners or otherwise risking outs on a steal or a hit-and-run. La Russa thinks such restraint is often unreasonable. Suppose, he says, you are down by three runs going into your at bat in the third inning. Suppose your eighth-place hitter gets on first with one out, your ninth-place hitter is, to begin with, a ninth-place hitter and he is struggling. Assume, for good measure, that he is facing a sinker-ball pitcher, so a ground ball is probable. La Russa says: Start the runner. The ninth-place hitter probably will not get a hit, but if he grounds out you will have a man at second and two outs and your leadoff man up. The fact that you are behind does not make it more likely that the ninth-place hitter will score the runner by getting an extra-base hit.
Even with a home-run hitter like Canseco in the middle of his order, La Russa says, “You’ve got your best chance to win when you’ve got good sharp line drives all over the park. Canseco stays in control, with discipline, trying to just hit the ball hard. He can hit .290, even in the .300s, he’s got that good a stroke. And he’s so strong that every once in a while, there goes one.” Even in a year when there are 40 or more every-once-in-a-whiles from Canseco, he gets a lot more singles than home runs—more singles than extra-base hits. What is true of Canseco is true of baseball generally. In 1988 there were more than twice as many doubles (6,386) as home runs (3,180), but there were 25,838 singles. Baseball is still what it always has been and always will be, basically a 90-feet-at-a-time game.
Baseball people love numbers, but there are limits to what can be quantified, even in baseball. Part of baseball’s charm is the illusion it offers that all aspects of it can be completely reduced to numerical expressions and printed in agate type in the sports section. La Russa, who when younger was considered the archetype of the numbers-crunching modern manager, has no such illusions. He constantly recurs to one intangible: intensity. One way to build it is to keep pushing for small achievements. Remember the law of cumulation: The result of many little things is not little. Playing “little ball,” scrambling to manufacture runs—“looking for just 90 feet, every once in a while,” La Russa calls it—energizes a team. It puts a team up on the balls of its feet, ready to run. And the intensity carries over into defense.
“When a team comes in to play the A’s, their dugout should not be comfortable. They should be thinking, ‘Uh oh, they steal third, they hit-and-run, they bunt for a base hit, they try to hit the hole, they knock the pivot man down.’ I remember when I was playing second base against a team like that, you’re worn out when the day is over. A station-to-station club is easy to play against because you just play the ball.” A station-to-station team, meaning a team that puts runners on base and waits for the batter alone to make something happen, simply has fewer ways to score runs. You do not often string together three singles in an inning. True, if you take risks you can run yourself out of a big inning, and as La Russa says, “You don’t want to shoot down your chance for a crooked number [more than one run].” But if you are aggressive in ways other than by blasting extra-base hits, you can put together big innings that are built in part out of the other team’s anxieties. La Russa wants the other team to look out from its dugout “and get real bad vibes” about his team’s physical and mental aggressiveness. He wants them to be saying, or at least thinking, “Oh, man, do you see those A’s, with all that talent, they’re not just out here letting the numbers fall into place. Did you see that slide into second base? He just knocked our pivot man into left field. Did you see the way Jose handled that two-strike situation, the way he spread it out, put the ball in play? See what McGwire did? They’re down by three runs so he took the 2-and-0 pitch. See McGwire take the ball to right field with a runner on second base?” La Russa says, “That’s what happened last year [1988]. I had managers tell me, ‘I hate to say it, but your club is fun to watch.’”
The Athletics’ aggressiveness was not fun for the Toronto Blue Jays to watch in the sixth inning of the first game of the American League Championship Series of 1989. With the score tied 3–3, the Athletics had the bases loaded with one out. Carney Lansford hit what could have been an inning-ending double-play ball to the Blue Jays’ shortstop, Tony Fernandez. He fielded the ball a tad too casually and tossed the ball so that it arrived a fraction of a tenth of a second later than it should have in the glove of second baseman Nelson Liriano. Unfortunately for Liriano, the runner arriving from first was fast and was not feeling friendly. It was Rickey Henderson, who had reached first base by being hit on the wrist by a pitch. He hit Liriano, whose throw went down the right-field line allowing two runs, including the winning run, to score. “Rickey,” said La Russa later, “had just been hit by a pitch and he’s out there with a lot of adrenaline pumping. You see that pivot man pay the price. That’s our style.”
Many fans think that the maximum aggression in baseball is the big swing that drives the ball 400 feet. However, leaving aside the fact that a lot of balls driven 400 feet are just loud outs, there is also the fact that a 30-foot bunt can be more aggressive. “The most aggressive thing in baseball,” says La Russa, “is guys on base running around and sliding, raising dust.” In 1988 only 3 percent of all batted balls put in play in the major leagues were bunts. But that is hardly the whole story of the role of bunting. Again, the ability to bunt, and the threat to do it, pulls in the infield and creates better angles through which to hit the ball for singles. Get enough of those 90-foot advances, you win.
The foremost recent practitioner of “little ball” was Gene Mauch, who managed for 26 years for the Phillies, Expos, Twins and Angels. He retired shortly before Opening Day, 1988. The fact that Mauch never managed a team to the World Series and won only two divisional titles is cited as evidence that “little ball” leads to little glory. Well, now. Leave aside th
e fact that Mauch’s Angels came within one strike of getting past the Red Sox and into the 1986 World Series. Note instead how hard it is to prove that “little ball” tactics actually mean a low-scoring team. The Elias Bureau, which specializes in slaying theories with facts, calculates that in the three seasons 1985, 1986 and 1987 Mauch’s Angels executed 260 sacrifice bunts, more than twice the average of the rest of the league (128). But these bunt-crazed Angels also scored approximately the same number of runs as the rest of the league’s teams averaged. In fact, slightly more: 2,288 to 2,276. One-run innings accounted for 29.9 percent of the Angels’ scoring, 29.7 percent of the rest of the league’s. And the Angels had more three-run innings than the other teams averaged (162 to 141).
Besides, the difference between “little ball” and big-inning baseball is not usually as big as you might think. “Little ball” may mean a lot of one-run innings, but even “big bang” teams will have more one-run innings than innings with “crooked numbers.” And most of their big innings (more than two runs) will be three-run innings. Four-run innings will be much rarer. An Elias study of a recent season found that even in the American League, where the DH increases the number of big innings, only one half inning in every 110 produced five or more runs. It was one in every 135 in the National League.
Whitey Herzog’s Cardinals of the 1980s have been track teams built to scamper across the carpet of cavernous Busch Stadium. They are rightly considered the archetype of teams built to avoid reliance on the long ball. In the 1982 World Series the Cardinals, who had hit 67 home runs during the season, met—and beat—the Milwaukee Brewers, who had hit 216. And in 1987 the Cardinals scored four or more runs in 16 consecutive games. That was the longest such streak since 1950.
Advocates of big-inning baseball have an axiom by which they dismiss one-run-at-a-time baseball. The axiom is: If you play for one you get one—only one. But to that axiom the appropriate response is: Perhaps, but you get that one. And it matters. The 1986 Elias Analyst reported that scoring the first run gave the typical American League team, in 1985, a 2-to-l edge on its opponents. In addition, the worst team in the league, after scoring first, had a better record than the best team in the league when its opponents scored first. The Elias study of the 1986 season showed that 65 percent of all American League games were won by the teams that scored the first runs. And in 84 percent of those wins the team that scored first never fell behind. In the National League, where the parks are generally larger and there is no DH, scoring is a bit lower and the value of early runs is a bit higher. In 1986 National League teams scoring first won 67 percent of the time, never trailing in 86 percent of those wins. This is a reason why La Russa toils so hard at getting the Athletics ready to play from the instant of the first pitch.
Compare conditions in baseball with those in another emblematic American industry. In the automobile industry from the 1920s through the 1950s competition was not nearly as fierce as (thanks to industrious foreigners—and I do mean thanks) it has become. Back then, if the door seal let the rain in, or a door handle fell off, the industry just shrugged. Those were little things, common to all brands, and were not taken very seriously. But in recent decades increased competition has raised standards. Something similar has happened in baseball.
The man who feels the increased pressure most is the manager. His players prepare for a game by doing what they have done all their lives—throwing, fielding, swinging a bat. The manager must prepare for his several roles, and he must also superintend all the roles of all the players. He must not take it for granted that his players will be properly motivated day in and day out. La Russa motivates by giving everyone work. He uses role players enough to make them feel needed and appreciated—and to make the regulars feel some bracing competition from the bench. Over the course of a 162-game season, a group of young men, some of them quite young—younger than major leaguers used to be—are going to be together a lot. They are going to be away from home half the time, spending hours hanging around hotels and playing cards in clubhouses. Over the course of such a season, intensity and concentration must be constantly cultivated. “Every player on our club, without exception, is so much better off [financially] than he was two years ago,” La Russa says. “So now there is not the survival motivation.”
When you play every day, 162 times, it becomes difficult to be ready to play with proper intensity from the first pitch of the first inning. Most teams start most games at less than full energy. But 162 first innings are one-ninth of a season, or the equivalent of 18 games. And La Russa believes they are even more important than that. “The best two ways to win are to play real well early or real well late. The middle innings take care of themselves. The first inning may be the only inning in which your leadoff man leads off. And every year the same statistic comes out showing that clubs that score first, their winning percentage in those games is anywhere from .550 to .650.”
Earl Weaver was a strong proponent of baseball megatonnage. A manager’s best friend, he said, is the three-run home run. He considered it irrational to bunt a runner over from second to third with no outs, counting on a sacrifice fly to drive him in. Weaver reasoned that a successful sacrifice bunt is by no means a lead-pipe cinch, and that a sacrifice fly is harder to come by than people think. So leave the runner at second and hope for a single to bring him in rather than counting on two contingencies (the bunt, the sacrifice fly). La Russa disagrees.
“Advancing guys in run-scoring situations is the key to consistent offense. A man leads off with a double. If we don’t score with a runner on second and no one out, the other side is going to get a lift. It is difficult to get a sacrifice fly, but it is not easy to get a base hit either. You get more fly balls than singles. So you look at who you have at bat. Hopefully, you have someone who can hit the ball hard to the right side, so you don’t have to give up the out automatically with the bunt. One of our best at that is McGwire. We keep those stats, a running month-by-month total of about six, seven, eight situations. One of them is runner on second, no outs. How many times you need to get the runner over, to hit it or bunt it. McGwire has been asked to do it six times this season [1988]. Five times he has gone to the right side for hits.”
La Russa offers the following scenario. The Athletics’ leadoff man, Carney Lansford, doubles in the first inning. The second batter is Stan Javier, a switch-hitter who does not pull often and who this day is batting left-handed against a pitcher throwing fastballs on the outside edge of the plate. Javier can not pull him, can not hit the ground ball to the right side, so he is going to bunt. That way, Lansford will be at third when the third hitter, Jose Canseco, comes up. On the other hand, suppose you have someone like Don Baylor, a right-hander, at the plate. He is a dead pull hitter and not a good bunter. With a runner on second and no one out, you are not going to ask him to push the ball to the first-base side or to bunt. Just let him swing. “I always want at least to get the guy to third. Because there is another statistic. When we score first, our winning percentage is very high.
“Here is another fact Jim Lefebvre pulled out, something I had never seen before. He took last year’s club [the 1987 Athletics], a pretty good offensive club, and looked for the stat of how many innings were scoring innings in a game. It didn’t matter how many runs we scored. When we scored at least three different times in a game, our winning percentage was at least .600, even if the scoring was just a one and a one and a one. This year around the All-Star break Jim did that stat for this year’s team. When we scored four times we were something like 15–1.”
There is, he says, a psychological advantage in getting the lead and then increasing it. That builds an expectation of defeat in the other team, especially if you have a bull pen that can hold leads. So La Russa thinks scoring runs one at a time is important because scoring frequently is important. This is so despite the fact, frequently cited by proponents of big-inning baseball, that in 75 percent of all games the winning team scores more runs in one inning than the los
ing team scores in the whole game. It is generally true that the more scoring there is, the more the cream among baseball’s teams will rise to the top. The ideal of “may the best team win” is most apt to be fulfilled in lopsided games. The better of two teams is most apt to win blowouts because close games are more apt to turn on luck—bad bounces, broken-bat singles, line shots—rockets—hit right at some fielder.
But, again, reliance on extra-base hits is not the only, or even the most reliable, way to score runs in bunches. One of baseball’s few recent dynasties, the Athletics of 1972–74, won three consecutive world championships with a team batting average below that of the league over the three seasons. The Athletics did get a lot of long hits. And a lot of those long hits were preceded by walks. Furthermore, the Athletics had a high level of successful steals and (partly for that reason) a high rate of success at avoiding hitting into double plays.
One problem with building a team that relies heavily on home runs is that the number of home runs can vary considerably from one season to the next. In 1987 both leagues and nine teams (six American League, three National League) set records for most home runs in a season. This was the continuation of a trend. The American League had set a home-run record in 1986. The trend ended, as trends tend to do, but not before the scandal known as Rawlingsgate or (depending on your point of view; I tend to skepticism) the great sound and fury about next to nothing. Here is what happened.
In 1984, the last year of Commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s reign, there were 3,258 home runs. In 1987 there were 37 percent more than that, 4,458. That led—especially among pitchers, who are prone to dark suspicions—to dark suspicions. Had the ball been “juiced” to pump up offense and gate receipts?