Men at Work Read online

  Certainly the ball has changed over time. The earliest balls were leaden—literally. They were homemade, using little lumps of lead wrapped with twine and covered with animal hide, sometimes chamois or sheepskin. When rubber replaced the lead at the core, some balls weighed as little as 3 ounces. But since 1876 the ball has had a constant size (9 to 9¼ inches in circumference) and weight (5 to 5¼ ounces). The only certain change in the ball in more than half a century was the 1975 change of covering from horsehide to cowhide.

  The crucial matter is “co-efficient of restitution,” which is what folks in the bleachers mean by the propensity of the ball to get to the bleachers—“liveliness.” The COR is measured by firing balls from an air cannon at a velocity of 85 feet per second directly at a slab of wood 8 feet away. Major league baseball requires a rebound rate of 54.6 percent of the original velocity, with a permitted deviation of no more than plus or minus 3.2 percent.

  COR is not the whole story. Smoothness could be as important as liveliness, according to Tony Kubek. He believes the seams on the ball were flatter in 1987 than in 1988. The smoother surface of the ball flattened out many breaking balls and caused the ball, once hit, to have less wind resistance and thus travel farther. Okay, you say, but why were the seams flatter? I am glad you asked. One explanation is the “Happy Haitian Theory.” The balls are made by Rawlings in Haiti. Perhaps the thread in the seams was pulled tighter, and the seams were flatter, because Haitians were full of pep and vim after the overthrow of the dictator “Baby Doc” Duvalier. Maybe the yarn inside was wound tighter for the same reason, making the balls both livelier and smoother.

  In any case, in 1988 home runs dropped by 1,278, or 29 percent below the 1987 level. But there was a continuation in the upward trend in the production of theories. The Elias authors noted that after August 6, 1987, when the bat of the Mets’ Howard Johnson was seized on the suspicion that it had been “corked,” home-run production went down. The authors suggested that the bats, not the balls, were juiced, and the illegal bats were quickly taken out of service. (Drilling out the end of a bat and filling the core with cork makes the bat lighter and increases “bat speed.” Think of it as a way of giving Tony Gwynn’s wrists to a normal hitter.) The problem with this explanation of the home-run barrage is that the only evidence is an inference, and one that probably was an example of the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy. (The rooster crows and then the sun rises, so the crowing caused the sunrise.) Did the deterrent effect of one seized bat cause a lot of cheaters to mend their ways? Not likely. Besides, there may not be a lot of cheats. Johnson’s bat turned out to be perfectly legal.

  In 1989 home runs were down 30.8 percent below the 1987 total. The two-year decline coincided with bad times in Haiti, but almost everything always coincides with bad times there. The truth about the great 1987 home-run surge may never be known. Life is like that. And life goes on. But baseball managers can derive from this episode a lesson for sensible living: Always remember that the home run is a fickle servant.

  What is true from season to season is even more true from day to day. Frank Robinson can hardly be accused of disdain for home runs. He hit 586 of them, more than all but three other players (Aaron, Ruth, Mays). The speed he combined with power enabled him to steal 204 bases. Robinson is now a manager, and he has to manage players a lot less talented than he was. He says, “Speed comes to the park every day. The three-run home run doesn’t. Speed is the most consistent thing you have.”

  The Athletics’ 1988 season ended with a power outage. In the World Series, Canseco and McGwire hit .053 and .059, respectively. Each had one hit, a dramatic home run. Perhaps too dramatic. Canseco’s was a grand slam that bounced off the center-field television camera in Dodger Stadium in the first game. McGwire’s was a ninth-inning game winner in Oakland in the third game. It was only the eighth game-ending home run in Series history, the seventh having come off Kirk Gibson’s bat two games earlier. La Russa believes the Athletics began losing the 1988 World Series six innings before Gibson hit that game-winning home run. They began losing when Canseco erased a 2–0 Dodgers lead with his grand-slam home run. Any team, says La Russa, plays better when “edgy.” After Canseco’s slam, La Russa could sense in the dugout the confidence that whatever they might need they would get. It seemed too certain, too easy.

  “Playing the game right, pitching the game right. We want to be an aggressive, come-after-you club, throw strike one, make them put the ball in play, know how to finish a hitter off if you’re ahead of him. There’s a lot of ways to play this game right. That’s how the Dodgers beat the A’s in the World Series. They played the game right. That is one of the beauties of baseball. I don’t care how much talent you have or don’t have. If you play the game intelligently, if you execute the fundamentals, you can win.”

  In game four, which the Dodgers won, 4–3, they got two of the four runs by the perfect execution of what La Russa calls “pushing.” With runners on first and third and one out, the runner on first stole second, thereby eliminating the double-play possibility. The next Dodgers batter hit what would have been a double-play grounder to second. The Athletics threw out the runner at first while the runner on third scored. The second time there was one out, a runner on third and Steve Sax was on first. Sax was running when a ground ball was hit. If he had not been running, the Athletics would have gotten a double play and been out of the inning. Instead they had to settle for one out and the (it turned out) winning run came home from third.

  “Technically,” says La Russa, “a successful hit-and-run is one where you just put the ball in play and advance the runner to second base. But if you get a base hit on the play, that’s golden. The Dodgers got base hits on 11 of their 15 hit-and-runs. Nobody’s success rate is 11 of 15, not even close to that. I give Tommy Lasorda a ton of credit.”

  In the 1950s Lasorda was a pitcher with a lousy arm and a record to prove it: He had a major league career of 58⅓ innings, no wins, 4 losses. So Lasorda learned to use his head. La Russa likes that.

  La Russa’s mantra comes from Bill Rigney, one of baseball’s sages. Today Rigney is a sort of utility infielder of baseball’s executive suites, working in the Athletics’ front office. He is a former infielder for the Giants and former manager of the Giants, Angels and Twins. He played in the 1951 play-off game when Bobby Thomson hit the home run that broke Brooklyn’s heart. He has seen a lot and talks enchantingly about it. Rigney’s baseball talk is nonstop, inexhaustibly interesting and laced with lovely anachronisms, such as his references to teams as “the Baltimores” or “the Houstons.” His distilled wisdom, and La Russa’s mantra, is that the four important things in baseball, in order of importance, are: play hard, win, make money and have fun. The problems start when the third and fourth take precedence over the first and second.

  “Baseball,” says Tom Trebelhorn, manager of the Milwaukee Brewers, “has got to be fun, because if it is not fun, it’s a long time to be in agony.” La Russa agrees but adds: Time flies when you are having fun and what is fun is winning. So back to the first point: play hard. The manager sets the tone and the example. A manager is a player in the sense that his attention and what he does during the game helps to determine the outcome. What he does most is purposeful watching.

  When La Russa is concentrating on the action his lips are thin and straight as a mail slot. He looks like an angry man, but he is not. He is, however, serious—about everything. His two young daughters—budding ballerinas—are being educated at home so they can see more of their father and can experience some educational travel during the off-season. A wit once said that it was not true that Gladstone lacked a sense of humor—Gladstone just was not often in a mood to be amused. La Russa is no stranger to laughter, but he does not often laugh when he is within a fly ball’s distance of a ballpark. With his ample dark hair and thick eyebrows, and the bill of his cap pulled low, keeping his eyes in perpetual shadow, his watchfulness has an aspect of brooding. He spends the hours of each game givi
ng signs in response to what he sees on the field in front of him, and in response to what he sees—or thinks he sees, or thinks he would be seeing if he could decipher the evidence—in the dugout across the field.

  As a voracious gatherer of information, he begins looking for an edge even when away from the ballpark. He thumbs through other teams’ media guides to find out if, say, Team A is having more success getting out a particular batter on Team ? than Oakland is. If so, he may call a friend with Team A—if he has one—to solicit information. He is more likely to do this if Team A is in the American League East. At the ballpark his watchfulness begins long before the game does. La Russa watches the other teams’ batting practice as often as possible to see what particular hitters are working on. In Boston in May, 1988, when Jim Rice was off to a slow start, La Russa watched intently to see whether Rice was trying to pull the ball. (He was.)

  “I think the manager has to keep control of every piece of the game, including the running game.” He means the baserunning by, and against, the Athletics. He has never given a player a season-long “green light”—permission to run whenever he wants to. When Canseco became the first 40–40 man, hitting 42 home runs and stealing 40 bases, he had, La Russa estimates, a green light to run at his discretion on, at most, 27 of those steals. One player who has a green light, unless La Russa takes it off, is Carney Lansford. Canseco is a lot faster; Lansford is a lot more experienced. In most other cases, if the Athletics’ first-base coach tells the runner nothing, the runner has a red light. He can not go unless he gets a sign to steal. Or the coach may tell him he has a green light in this inning or this game. Otherwise they go “pitch to pitch,” using a flash sign that may come from the bench or the third-base coach or the first-base coach. The sign is never “go.” It is “you may go.” It means everything is in favor of trying to go, so if you get anything from a decent to a good jump, go.

  La Russa assigns to himself the lion’s share of responsibility for slowing down the other team’s running game. “The single most important thing the pitcher and catcher can do is make the right pitch, so they should concentrate on that. Let me handle the running game. I keep the records, I pay attention to the opposing manager, and I’ve watched the runner more closely than they can.” So whoever is catching for the Athletics is constantly in danger of getting a crick in his neck. Catching is hazardous enough, but a sore neck is an occupational hazard for the Athletics’ catcher who, when runners are on base, is constantly looking over to La Russa.

  La Russa has four signs he can give when his catcher looks over to him in the dugout: throw over to first base, hold the ball, pitch out and make “a bad-ball pitchout.” The last is used when you are fairly sure you have decided on the other team’s signs and are reasonably sure the runner has been given the steal sign. A simple pitchout would cause the other side to wonder, did they guess right or do they have our signs? The Athletics’ pitchers are taught to throw the bad-ball pitchout head high but not far outside. The catcher rising to receive the pitch is in a good position to throw to second. The bad-ball pitchout is not a bad enough pitch that it can be used in a hit-and-run situation because a good contact hitter might be able to put it in play.

  Dave Duncan is right: We remember best the things that hurt us. So La Russa will long remember the pitchout he did not call during the 1988 World Series.

  “In game two, Hershiser got three hits. The second hit he got, there was one out, a runner, Alfredo Griffin, on first. Hershiser tried to bunt once and fouled it off. Then they let him swing and he fouled it off. Then a ball. A 1–2 count. You could tell by the runner’s lead that it looked like he was going. And the Dodgers put some signs on. A lot of times with a two-strike count you don’t bother about signs. So I said, ‘I think something is on. They wouldn’t hit-and-run on a 1–2 count with the pitcher up.’ If I had trusted what I was seeing I would have put on a pitchout. It was screaming at me to pitch out. But I didn’t. We threw a ball down and away, Hershiser threw the bat at it and punched a little hit down the right-field line, with the runner going. They knew he could put the ball in play.” Griffin would have made it to third in any case. However, right fielder Canseco missed the cutoff man throwing back to the infield and Griffin scored. “It was great baseball,” says La Russa.

  Most good managers are as watchful as La Russa. Although Roger Craig sometimes delegates to a coach the duty of watching one or more of the key people on the other side of the field, he generally wants to watch the opposing team’s manager, third- and first-base coaches and base runner before every pitch. He uses pitchouts and hit-and-runs more than most managers. (Evidence of the latter: The Giants start so many runners the team hits into fewer double plays than might be expected.) Many managers delegate to coaches various decisions that La Russa himself makes—whether to play the infield in or back, whether to throw through or hold the ball on a first-and-third steal situation, when to pitch out.

  The king of pitchouts was Nick Altrock, who pitched in the dead-ball era. He had such a deadly pickoff move that he was said to have walked some batters because he thought picking them off first was the most expeditious way of getting them out. “A pitchout,” says La Russa, “is an important part of defense. If I go against a team that doesn’t pitch out on us, it’s just like getting a free pass—run anytime you want. If you run two games in a row on a 2–0 count, in the third game we will pitch out on you.” To avoid the cost of a pitchout (a setback in the count), pitchers try to inhibit the other teams’ running game with convincing pickoff moves. But throwing over to first base also has a cost, drawn against the pitcher’s stamina. “The best shot—really airing it out—takes a lot out of a pitcher. So we have a play in which instead of putting a sign on twice, we throw over twice, the first one is your average throw, the next is your killer.”

  Baseball is a game of quick episodes; it is also a game of anticipation. Therefore, advance information can be invaluable. That is why so much attention is given to stealing signs. “At least three clubs in our league—Milwaukee, Cleveland, Toronto—work hard to steal signs when they have a runner on second base. And that really irritates me. Okay, if it’s an edge and the other team lets you take it, you go ahead. But if I were a pitcher, and I had to deal with all the changes of signs that the other team makes necessary by stealing signs, I would not put up with the disruption of my concentration. I’d do what Clemens did last year. He was going against Cleveland or some other team notorious for stealing signs. They give the batter location, in or away”—La Russa shows how, standing like a base runner, bent over at the waist, legs apart, patting one thigh or the other—“or they’ll actually signal the pitch. As Clemens came to the stretch, he looked back and saw that the runner at second was giving the location. Clemens stepped off the mound, walked back there and said to the runner, ‘If I ever see that again from you or anybody on your team I’m going to bury the guy at the plate.’” La Russa says the runner at second gave Clemens some back chat so Clemens returned to the mound and on the next pitch sent the batter sprawling.

  Another way of combating such communication is to give the communicator at second base a credibility problem. “I was talking with Whitey Herzog about that,” La Russa says. “He said that if he were a pitcher and saw a guy giving signs from second base, he’d call for the ball away and hit the guy in the ribs. The guy got a signal [from the runner on second] saying away. Pretty soon they don’t talk.”

  The ancient practice of stealing catchers’ signs from second base has been made easier by the satellite dish. This has vastly expanded access to telecasts of other teams. Center-field cameras give perfect pictures of catchers giving signs, so when runners get to second base they often do not need to decode the other teams’ signs. A coach has done that already by watching tapes before the game. The runner may even know the “switch” sign, the one the catcher uses to switch the real sign from the first to, say, the third one given. Some teams have started relying less on advance scouts and more on people who
se jobs are to tape games off satellites and cull information from the tapes, including the other teams’ signs.

  Jim Frey, who is in his fifth decade in organized baseball, has managed the Royals to a pennant and the Cubs to their first moment of postwar glory, the 1984 division title. Frey, now the Cubs’ executive vice president for baseball operations, says the 1984 Cubs stole signs by television. When the Cubs were playing at Wrigley Field, Frey would send right fielder Keith Moreland or catcher Jody Davis into the clubhouse in the bottom of innings when they were not due to hit. These two veteran players were skillful at deciphering the opposing catcher’s signs, which could be seen on the clubhouse television because the center-field camera was covering home plate on each pitch. Of course even when such deciphering occurs, the use of the intelligence depends on having runners get to second base—and having players who, when they get there, can concentrate on communicating to the batter what the catcher is signaling. You also need hitters who want to use the information.

  One way to avoid having a catcher’s signs stolen is to have the catcher stop giving signs. When Whitey Ford thought his catcher’s signs were being stolen, he called the pitches himself, shaking his head specified times for particular pitches while his catcher ran through meaningless signs. Similarly, during the 1988 World Series, as catchers Terry Steinbach and Ron Hassey were constantly turning toward La Russa in the dugout, a television camera was frequently focusing on La Russa as he gave a variety of pitchout or throw-over or similar signs by touching various parts of his face and head. Except he was not giving any signs. They were being given by someone sitting next to him. Billy Martin used to give steal signs before some batters reached first base. When a count reached 3–0 on a batter who, if walked, Martin wanted to steal, Martin would flash the steal sign to his third-base coach. If the man walked and the other team turned its attention to Martin, looking for him to reveal his intentions, it was too late to steal the sign.