COMMENTARY : The Details Make the Difference for Oakland’s Manager

At precisely 8:05 (PDT) Monday night, the A’s took a subtle but inevitable step ahead, from reigning to defending World Series champions.

You may not have noticed the difference. Rest assured the Oakland A’s will. In fact, with every motion since the end of the 1989 season, the A’s have made it clear that they intended to put their best foot forward when everyone was zero-and-zero again.

For every team since the 1978 Yankees, that first step has led to a tumble. However, no season since then has opened with the same expectations that greet this year’s A’s, who defeated the Minnesota Twins in their first two games.

Unlike several other recent World Series winners--the ’88 Dodgers, ’87 Twins and ’85 Royals leap to mind--the ’89 Athletics were not flukes. As Manager Tony La Russa said on the night Oakland completed its World Series sweep of the Giants, “We didn’t do this with mirrors.”

That is, those weren’t a bunch of Mickey Hatchers putting the squeeze on the Giants last October. Nobody limped off the bench to beat San Francisco with a homer that mocked fiction.

The A’s of ’89 were very much the A’s of ‘88, and they will be the A’s of ’90. So far, those guys have won 203 regular-season games in two seasons, have dominated the American League playoffs and, arguably, had they not allowed their swaggers to get in the way, would already be the first back-to-back World Series champions since those 1977-78 Yankees.

But if the A’s, as an organization, have carved out the best situation in baseball, that condition carries with it daunting responsibility. It’s one thing to be a team that can repeat, quite another to be a team that should repeat.

That’s where La Russa comes in. La Russa the stern. La Russa the serious. La Russa the conscience. La Russa the relentless. Besides his other responsibilities, the Man Who Won’t Laugh is the Chief of Attitude Police.

“If the team comes out flat, not playing heads-up baseball, you can blame the manager,” La Russa says. He is reluctant to claim credit for the skippers whose clubs--including his--turn up day after day playing hard and smart.

However: “There are lots of things people believe to explain why a team didn’t repeat. But what beats you most of the time is frame of mind.”

The A’s know that La Russa sees everything from the moment camp convenes until the last shred of confetti shakes out of their hair. But the way they returned from the off-season, hard and eager, you get the idea they suspect that he has an eye on them all winter, too.

With La Russa, you never know. Whitey Herzog may get more out of less than anyone else around, but La Russa has proved he knows how to extract the best from the best. In an era of one-season wonders, you decide which is the tougher job.

This much is certain: No one could be more thorough. In that, La Russa is the manager’s manager. If it has anything to do with his club, it’s worth sweating bullets over.

For instance, over the winter, a couple of San Francisco Bay Area reporters collaborated on a book about the ’89 baseball season. They approached La Russa and the Giants’ Roger Craig about authoring the forewords. Eight paragraphs, maybe 600 words.

Craig dictated his version over the phone in about five minutes, and that was it. I know some editors who would love to work with Craig on a regular basis.

By contrast, La Russa suffered over his contribution in the great tradition of tortured writers. He wrote it out in longhand, dictated it and asked for a printed copy. And he was just getting started.

From first draft to final product, La Russa’s foreword underwent five revisions. “Like James Joyce,” one of the reporters said. “Too bad he doesn’t live about 10 miles south. Then we could call him the Dubliner.”

That’s La Russa, who studies details the way Augusta National tends greens.

Sunday, for instance, the topic was who would be the A’s fourth starting pitcher. As late as Sunday afternoon, La Russa had not selected between newcomer Scott Sanderson and home-grown left-hander Curt Young, which ought to have surprised no one. La Russa agonizes over decisions like an appellate court judge. Why not? Remember, in his other life, La Russa was briefly a lawyer.

Neither pitcher had made the choices any easier with their mastery of the Giants in the final game of the Bay Bridge Series.

“Hoo-wooo!” La Russa said, sighing, not sadly, a distinct gleam in his eyes revealing that he never wearies of pleasant dilemmas. “Right now, I don’t know what we’ll do.”

At that instant, the office phone rang. Reaching for it, La Russa said, “Maybe this’ll have an answer.”

“Who do you want to start?” he said to an unknown caller.

What’s this? Humor from The Judge? On the day before Opening Night? Obviously, La Russa had seen enough to boost his characteristically overwrought spirits. Effort and attitude--the first casualties of teams that get comfortable--had met the manager’s exacting standards.

Now it’s time to get on with the business of defending. With consecutive American League pennants on their resumes, it’s not like the A’s are about to stride into the unknown, even if their AL West competition has spent millions on improving.

Before that, though, La Russa had a team meeting to attend to. He pulled a folded sheet of yellow paper out of his pocket. On it were notes in black ink. More details.

“Just about six reminders,” La Russa said. Reminders about how the A’s got here. Reminders about how to get back. The manager’s manager was ready to go.