COMMENTARY : Looking for Humble, Self-Effacing Clan? Skip the Oakland A’s

If you don’t like fake humility, the Oakland Athletics are your team. These are a bunch of guys definitely unafraid to look at themselves in the mirror. And why not, when everyone else has them under a microscope?

They are the latest greatest team in baseball, and wherever they go, the D word-- dynasty --follows. You know they’re good. They know they’re good. What we’re still working on is how good.

“We’ve got talent here,” said Mark McGwire, a bash, but not brash, brother, who ripped a couple of homers Tuesday night. “Just check the names on the board.”

Check ‘em out. The names are familiar to the most casual baseball fan, and to many investment bankers as well. Jose Canseco (you know he’s not shy) might be the best player in baseball, unless it’s Rickey Henderson. Then they throw the rest of the lineup at you. They run. They hit for average. They hit for power. And, of course, pitching is at the center of the A’s powerhouse. This is the team, with 203 wins over the last two seasons, that makes the earth shake. Do you get many of them on your Rotisserie team?

All the A’s can do is win, right?

“If we don’t win, we stink,” says Oakland outfielder Dave Henderson.

Henderson knows that it’s pro forma for teams in April to expect to win. He has been on teams where that expectation might have been slightly unrealistic.

“When I was with Seattle,” Henderson says, “we’d say we were going to win the whole thing. Then we’d look around like, ‘Yeah, right.’ ”

This is different. The A’s have to win, but that doesn’t mean they will. Which may make it especially important that the A’s are not afraid to look in the mirror. Great teams get complacent. Great teams self-destruct. Great teams get unlucky. And great teams, sometimes, are suddenly not great anymore. Anyone remember the Mets?

The concept is not lost on the A’s players, which is why they don’t like to talk about dynasties. To a man, they’ll tell you the obvious--that two pennants and one World Series title are not the stuff of history books. Carney Lansford, who has studied his sports history, hopes the A’s can be like the Los Angeles Lakers or the San Francisco 49ers.

“It takes more than talent,” Lansford says. “We have to stay focused, stay hungry and play hard. You can’t look to the end of the season now. It’s too far away. You have stay focused now, and so far this season, I think we have.”

Sure, that’s from your basic Bull Durham, baseball cliche book, but there’s truth in there. Baseball lives on cliches. And staying hungry is as good an explanation for winning as any. The A’s, playing in Oakland, don’t get many book deals. They’re not that hot on the banquet circuit. They’re hungry enough.

And back in spring training, just to remind everyone of the work at hand, Lansford handed out T-shirts, the great American billboard, with this message: “Contentment Stinks” on top of a snarling figure dressed in an A’s uniform, beneath which it says “Stay Focused.”

A greater problem than staying focused is staying the course. These A’s are not exactly the A’s we remember. Dave Parker, Storm Davis and Tony Phillips left for greener--in terms of money--pastures. Parker, the team leader in the clubhouse, led the team in RBIs last year, providing equal parts of biology and chemistry. Davis won 19 games. Phillips held the infield together. And the A’s, without them, are 11-3. That’s how good these guys are. It’s how good they have to be. Dynasties, in the modern era, will be built with all the players you’re wiling to pay.

“It’s tough to stay loyal to a team when some team offers you twice as much as you’re making,” Dave Henderson says. “You’d have to be an idiot to stay where you are.

“But last year, we lost Canseco, (Dennis) Eckersley and (Walt) Weiss, and we still won. We were picked to finish first, but when those guys went down, a lot of people put us in fourth place. It was insulting, like the rest of us were only a fourth-place team. I think we showed we’re a pretty good team.”

Pretty good?

Henderson smiles.

“I hope we’re just good enough to win,” he says. “You don’t have to be any better than that, do you?”

Lansford thinks the A’s were remarkable last season. He thought their effort showed heart. For his part, he showed hamstring, eventually pulling one because he was determined to play every day with Canseco out. Dave Henderson played with a bad knee. And the A’s kept winning. They added Rickey Henderson and they won some more. Eventually, Eckersley returned. Then Canseco. They just got better and better.

Now, all the A’s have to do is do it again. Ask Tony La Russa about it, and the A’s manager shows his concern. He’s happy with 10-3, but not impressed with it. A careful manager, now being proclaimed, in the baseball style, as a genius, La Russa knows how much can go wrong.

“It’s so damn fragile,” he says. “I get uneasy looking too far ahead.”

It is fragile. Teams that win one year disappear the next, leaving you wondering why. But you have a sense the A’s won’t leave you wondering, unless you’ve got Jose Canseco on his 900 phone line. You have a sense they won’t leave you at all. You know the names already. You may be seeing them for a while.