BRAINS, BATS AND BIG BUCKS : The Oakland A’s Engineer a New-Age Dynasty

OAKLAND ATHLETICS general manager Richard L. (Sandy) Alderson decided this spring that the team absolutely had to sign a Texas pitching phenomenon named Todd Van Poppel. Never mind that the 18-year-old, who can throw 97 m.p.h., was the most sought-after high school player in the nation. Never mind that he had already scared off other teams by announcing that he wanted to attend college before becoming a baseball star. Alderson was in a gambling mood.

When all the other teams, which took the 6-foot-5 right-hander at his word, passed over the No. 1 prospect in the first round of the June draft, Alderson snatched him up. In spite of Van Poppel’s exhortations and his parents’ protests, Alderson pursued him, wooed him and in a matter of weeks won him, paying him a mere $1.2 million for three years (not including a $600,000 signing bonus). Completely foiling the draft, which is supposed to give bad teams first crack at good talent, the best team in baseball had made off with the best prospect of the year (of a generation, some scouts said).

“It wasn’t just the money. I don’t think I would have signed with any other organization,” Van Poppel told reporters during his first appearance in Class A ball in Oregon. “They were very classy.”

Lately, it seems as if everything the A’s touch turns to gold. Van Poppel is just another addition to an already overflowing clubhouse of baseball riches.

Jose Canseco, enormous and misun derstood, is smacking towering “taters” over fences around the American League; the Floridian draws the boos and oohs of crowds across the country. Less flashily, first baseman Mark McGwire competes for the American League home run title. Rickey Henderson, still going strong at 31 in his second tour with the team, is closing in on Lou Brock’s all-time stolen base record, and incidentally has been leading the league in hitting.

And that’s only a portion of the strength of this awesome baseball machine; its steady, dependable pitchers may be the best in the league. Dodger alumnus Bob Welch is having a career-best season. Quiet local hero Dave Stewart, rehabilitated by the coaching staff, has pitched one no-hitter and regularly mows down the opposition; he’s the only pitcher in the majors to have won 20 games three times in this decade. Dennis Eckersley, the stopper, specializes in ninth-inning heroics.

Presiding over this fearsome group in its garish green and gold uniforms is a lawyer-turned-statistician, manager Tony La Russa. He coordinates the collection of youngsters and veterans, directing the superstars and supporting cast with the aid of computers, videotapes and the best “book” in baseball on the opposition’s quirks. Not for him old-fashioned dust-ups with the umps and the vainglory of pep talks. La Russa prefers method to mayhem.

The A’s are a team built on modern management, a new-age approach to developing its stars, and money. Lots of it. The A’s have the second-largest player payroll in all baseball. Yet, the Kansas City Royals, the team that tops the list, are having a dismal season, which goes to show that spending big bucks is not as important as knowing how and when to do so.

The A’s, by contrast, are methodically marching toward another pennant, drawing huge crowds at home and on the road. During the past three years, all the A’s have done is win. And win. And win. In that time, they’ve never been more than three games out of the lead. They’ve won 203 games in the past two years--as many as some teams rack up in three. Last year, they had the best record in baseball, finishing seven games ahead of Kansas City, despite a rash of injuries.

This year, they’re on a pace to win at least 100 games. They have been leading the majors in home runs, which is what draws the crowds, but more important they’ve been flying forward on the strength of a deep pitching staff--so far they’ve got the best earned-run average in the game, and the most shutouts and the most saves. Though they have been surprisingly challenged by a young Chicago White Sox club, odds are the A’s will sweep into the World Series for the third consecutive year.

This is the stuff of which dynasties are made. Almost any club can have a good year and make the system work for a season or two. But when the Los Angeles Dodgers won the World Series in 1988, and the Minnesota Twins a year before that, few sports fans seriously talked about either of those teams as the start of a new dynasty. But dynasty, that magical word that harks back to the legendary New York Yankees, the teams of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig and Mickey Mantle, was lavished on the current group from Oakland before it had even won a World Series. The praise scarcely abated when disappointed fans watched the team unexpectedly lose the 1988 World Series.

Then the A’s swept the earthquake-interrupted Series from cross-bay rival San Francisco Giants last year with what the authoritative Elias Baseball Analyst called “as dominant a World Series victory as has ever been witnessed in nearly a century of fall classics.” The A’s are now poised on the edge of legendary greatness.

“I look at the A’s compared to other teams like this: There is a difference in mechanics between a Jaguar and a Pinto,” says Lon Simmons, who’s been broadcasting the team’s games since 1981. “They both have all the same parts, still put it together the same way, but the Jaguar flows. The A’s are like a Jaguar. They are so good that when they do something mechanically wrong, you’re surprised.”

EACH GAME, BEFORE the first pitch, before the national anthem, even before batting practice, the A’s gather for a little conference. For an hour or so, the players huddle around the coaching staff and the portable video console that accompanies the team wherever it travels. They seek insights and inspiration from The Book.

The Book is the aggregate wisdom of Dave Duncan, Rene Lachemann and four other A’s coaches. The wisdom is drawn from hours and hours of videotapes that have captured every ball that A’s opponents have hit, thrown, caught and dropped. This information is then meticulously charted and catalogued so that team members can see, at a glance, which pitches opposing hitters like to swing at, where they hit the ball, and what pitches a rival pitcher tends to use in almost any situation a batter can dream up. It’s like “War Games.”

“You don’t go into depth or detail. You just refresh everybody’s memory,” says catcher Terry Steinbach. “An example would be (Doug) Jones of Cleveland. What does he have? A great, great change-up; good fast ball. If we have a guy who has hit him well, we might pick his brain a little bit. Maybe they’ll come to me and say, ‘Terry, what do you think of Doug Jones?’ I say, ‘Well, I look fast ball.’ ”

The tips also apply to the defense. “It doesn’t mean we catch everything,” La Russa admits, “but if a guy hits the ball to a certain area a lot, we’re not surprised by it.”

A lot of teams leave such record-keeping to the players themselves, something that Steinbach and the other A’s find hard to imagine. “You talk to guys on other teams and ask, ‘What do you do at your hitters’ meetings?’ and they say, ‘What hitters’ meetings?’ ” says Steinbach, shaking his head. “It all comes from our coaches, and I can’t imagine going without.”

“Being prepared makes you confident,” reliever Eckersley says. “You go into every game expecting to win. Tony is always saying that.”

“They are such a well-defined organization, everything is done with a purpose,” notes Peter Gammons, baseball analyst for ESPN. “The G.M. knows how to hire people, how to run an organization. They realize the value of thinking. They address issues that most other coaches would ignore. “ In fact, he adds, the A’s have taken a number of so-called “problem” players and, through individual attention, helped them to thrive in Oakland.

La Russa is a disciplinarian, but unlike other managers he does not bother with dress codes or beard bans. Inner strength--intensity, concentration and self-discipline--is what he expects from his players, as he demands it from himself.

“La Russa is a very strong personality,” says broadcaster Simmons. “The players know that when he says something, he has a reason. But he can’t be a tyrant; you can’t make rules that are going to be broken.”

“He is tuned into the players all the time,” adds Karl Kuehl, director of player development. “He doesn’t miss a thing that goes on; body language is really important to him.”

Making a winning team out of unproven talent was what the A’s hired La Russa to do. He took a team that lost as many games as it won in 1987, his first complete season, and turned it into a team with the best record in baseball for three years in a row.

La Russa has a long history with the A’s: They drafted him on his high school graduation day in 1962. He played second base for their minor league teams while he attended college and law school at Florida State University. After graduation, he managed two minor league teams. He then spent seven years in the majors with the Chicago White Sox before he was hired in 1986 by the A’s, who were impressed by his educational background as well as his baseball experience. He had the traits vital to Alderson’s management style: communication and teaching skills.

La Russa sought and found coaches with those same skills. In 1985, for example, when the A’s foresaw a shortage of catchers, Alderson decided to train Steinbach, then a minor-league third-baseman to catch. Bullpen coach Dave McKay, a former catcher, taught the youngster a new position in just a few months by putting him in front of a video camera and talking him through every skill--catching, throwing, blocking the plate--again and again and again. Not a common practice, or feat, even for the A’s.

“I had everything happen to me that first season: Guys stealing home on me, running the bases at will. I was crude, very crude,” Steinbach recalls. “But I took the situations and learned from them. Working with Dave was like an apprenticeship.”

Three years later, Steinbach was named Most Valuable Player of the 1988 All-Star Game.

“You don’t create talent,” La Russa says. “All you do is support it. The success is the players’. But a good coach can keep the guys going in the right direction, offer suggestions about a change here and there. Maybe it’s a small change, but when you’re at this level even small changes can be significant.”

SANDY ALDERSON LIKES to call the A’s style of coaching a “progressive” approach. Among the coaches he hired is instructor Harvey Dorfman, a sports psychologist who began a “performance enhancement” program for minor league players using such concepts as “visualization,” “breathing techniques” and “concentration exercises.”

“We use a lot of sports psychology,” Karl Kuehl says. “The ballplayers know how to visualize, how to relax, how to get themselves keyed up. Winning takes a lot of mental discipline. Sometimes they traumatize a loss or a walk or an error,” he adds. “We tell them to get beyond it.

If it all sounds very new-age in a Northern California kind of way, well, it seems to have started a trend among other teams. The A’s have long had, for example, a statistician to document every line drive, grounder, error and balk for La Russa and his staff. This year, the Dodgers hired one of their own.

“The A’s are run more like a company than a baseball team,” Gammons says--but a company that knows how to motivate individuals, is happy to pay them well and avoids confrontations.

“They’ve just done a better job paying attention to detail--preparing for games with their statistics, putting the right people on the field, marketing the team,” says Mike Port, executive vice president and general manager of the struggling California Angels. “We’re working with all the same basic tenets. They’re just doing them better.”

“Yes, we have access to data base, and we use whatever information that’s there,” Alderson says. “But, I don’t think we have a technocratic organization. We still have a lot of traditional approaches to the game--hard work, batting practice, all the basics. You can’t get beyond playing the game.”

La Russa himself is quick to point out the simple talent of the players and front-office management as well as his best-in-the-business stable of coaches. Oh, yes, and his hat.

Don’t think that this skipper is all logic and strategizing; little barnacles of superstition stick around the edge. When his team plays well, he wears the same cap each day, regardless of how torn or dirty, rain-splotched or misshapen it may be. If they play poorly, as they did early this season, he simply changes hats. In 1988, when the A’s were playing particularly well, La Russa wore the same cap all season. “It’s a neat hat,” he says. “It’s in my house. I had 109 wins in that one hat.”

WINNING BASEBALL games consistently in the ‘90s is a dicey and hideously expensive business. Gone are the glory days when owners could sign whichever players they fancied, pay them whatever they wanted to and hang on to them for forever. No longer can ballclubs count on thousands of loyal fans, with few other entertainment or recreational options, to fill the park for every home game.

While the saga of Yankee owner George Steinbrenner’s banishment was filling the sports pages, A’s owner Walter A. Haas Jr., the Levi’s jeans baron, has quietly spent big bucks to liven up his franchise, including revitalizing the 22-year old concrete-and-steel Oakland Coliseum. In an attempt to draw families, Haas built a picnic plaza, complete with barbecues, behind the stadium, and installed a play area for kids. Anything to get the fans to come.

Haas also hands out the paychecks. The Athletics’ cool $20-million player payroll is almost double what the Haas family shelled out to buy the whole franchise a decade ago. Merely to hold onto Canseco, the team agreed this summer to pay him $23 million over five years.

Modern managers have to act fast in an age of free agents and astronomical salaries. Alderson is a master of this side of baseball business. La Russa calls Alderson’s famed acquisition spree after the 1987 season “one of the damnedest performances by a front office” he has ever seen.

“We literally listed, at the end of our season in ‘87, our eight or nine needs,” La Russa recalls. “A month later, the front office filled all eight needs with either the No. 1 or No. 2 choices for those positions. How the hell can anyone do that?”

Such acumen is surprising from Alderson, a fellow who concedes that, when he was hired, his baseball savvy was limited to his biases as a fan and his recollections as an infielder at Dartmouth in the 1960s.

“A lot of the baseball establishment doesn’t like Alderson--they look at him as someone with no background in baseball,” Gammons says. “Some people think he is really smug. But that’s good. He’s not afraid to gamble.”

Alderson, 41, whose mild-mannered mug and wire-rimmed glasses hardly hint of his secret life as a relentless deal-maker, has been particularly successful at signing good players who had been underutilized by other teams.

“They put together a winning ballclub using other teams’ mistakes,” Stewart says.

But Alderson himself has not been error-free. His first two choices for managers, Steve Boros and Jackie Moore, proved “too intellectual”--meaning too ineffectual. He broke many fans’ hearts in 1984 by trading Rickey Henderson for a pocketful of prospects (Henderson returned via a trade in June, 1989). Alderson regrettably traded a promising young catcher, Mike Heath, for a temperamental old pitcher, Joaquin Andujar.

But Alderson more than made up for such lapses with other smart moves, including the acquisition, through trades and free-agency, of the best pitching staff in baseball.

Alderson sprinkles his conversations of squeeze plays and on-base averages with such phrases as “econometric approach” and “entrepreneurial models,” revealing business skills essential to the current baseball operating procedures, and dealing with the multimillion-dollar player contracts.

It was this present system--free agency, arbitration and multi-year contracts--that 15 years ago tore apart the last ballclub that could claim to be a dynasty: the Oakland Athletics.

In the mid-1970s, Oakland won five straight American League pennants and three consecutive World Series--only the third team in history to have won three straight world titles. Despite their success, then-owner Charlie Finley refused to pay his players competitive salaries. This provoked the creation of the free agency rule, by which established players can sell their services to the highest bidder at the end of their contracts. Finley’s stinginess worked to break up that club before its greatness could be tested fully.

In 1979, the A’s ran up their worst won-loss record in 33 years while, understandably, attracting the fewest number of fans in a quarter-century.

So it seems fitting that the first great team destroyed by free agency may become the first great team created by deft use of free agency.

“It is no longer possible to keep the same 20 to 25 players together over a long period of time,” Alderson says. “In order to sustain any success over a period of time, you have to accommodate change.”

For Alderson, that means paying what it takes to keep essential “marquee” players and replacing fading, high-priced veterans with young, equally talented players who don’t demand huge salaries.

“We try to retain the identity of the team,” Alderson says. “That is not the same as retaining the team; it is trying to retain its essence.”

This system doesn’t please all of the players all of the time. Pitcher Storm Davis, infielder Tony Phillips and outfielder Dave Parker last year fled to teams willing to pay them a total of $3.3 million a year for their skills. They were replaced by younger, less expensive players who will earn a total of $1.35 million. Annual savings: about $1.9 million.

“If we had kept those players,” Alderson explains, “it would have made it much more difficult for us to retain Dave Stewart, Rickey Henderson, Dennis Eckersley, Jose Canseco, Gene Nelson, Rick Honeycutt. You have to make some choices.”

Alderson says the club’s player payroll jumped from $11 million in 1988 to $20 million this year. And next year, because of the number of contracts up for renewal, including those of two All-Stars, pitcher Welch and first baseman McGwire, Alderson fears that it could vault to $30 million.

A FEW FANS are trickling into Cleveland Stadium for a less-than-crucial mid-summer game. Down on the field, players are running wind sprints, loosening up, casually tossing balls, kibbitzing. Here, you can glimpse some of the dynamics of these champions.

At 32, Dave Henderson--”Hendu” to his teammates--is the very picture of the veteran. He’s played well for a number of teams and is having another fine season in the A’s outfield. A loose and talkative sort, he will do almost anything but sit quietly in front of his locker before a game. Now, he is hitting beside matinee-idol Jose Canseco, he of the long locks, the massive muscles and the mood swings.

Henderson tells the young slugger he should sharpen his ability to aim his booming line drives. It’s too easy for Canseco to settle for admiring gasps by simply drilling ball after ball high over the left field fence. And frankly, it’s getting boring. “That ain’t my style, man. You know that,” Canseco says, walking coolly out of the batting cage.

“OK, OK,” says Henderson, who changes the subject by stepping back up to the plate. Now it’s time for a little fantasy baseball, complete with patter befitting a Little Leaguer. “Two out in the bottom of the ninth!” he yells, ripping a ball deep to centerfield. “Dave Henderson at the plate!” A sharp grounder to right. “He can win the game!” A long fly to the wall.

Minutes later, Canseco returns for more practice swings. Sure enough, he gives up the boomers and works on sharpening his bat control. No one says a word.

“There is a lot of peer pressure within the team,” La Russa says. “They support each other, push each other. It’s an old-fashioned thing. These guys respect each other . . . and I think that has carried this club through some hard times.’

“I’ve been on a lot of teams with a lot of talent, but they can’t win because the chemistry just isn’t there,” says third-baseman Carney Lansford. “It’s something we work at. It doesn’t happen on most teams.”

It is also, La Russa believes, what makes a team more than just a collection of talented ballplayers. “I would hope that when you think about the A’s, you think about a team. A team called the A’s,” La Russa says. “In 1987, Dave Stewart won 20 games; Jose hit 30 home runs and drove in more than 100 runs; Mark McGwire hit 49 home runs. Still we finished at .500. In 1988 and ‘89, we’ve done a hell of a lot better than that. They’ve continued to do their bit, but we added a lot of other things. We became a team.”

Paradoxically, as the desire to win has intensified, the atmosphere in the clubhouse has grown more casual.

“It’s more relaxed here than anyplace else I’ve ever been,” Stewart says. “Sandy Alderson, I see him all the time. We joke and kid around. . . . That never happened in the Dodger organization. It was always very formal there. For me it’s a lot better to see who your boss is and really know what kind of person he is. That way, you can say, ‘This is a good guy and I’m going to bust my tail for him.’ ”

THE A’S ARE CAREFUL not to count their champagne corks before they’ve popped. Even a great team can be better. And Alderson is never satisfied. He wishes the team had better left-handed pitching and a little speed on the bases.

The A’s don’t like to use the word dynasty , but they admit to another goal--just as lofty and perhaps harder to attain. Alderson refers to winning titles as just “the vehicle for everything else.” He wants to make the A’s not only a baseball giant but a baseball tradition as well. He wants the Oakland logo to stand for something deep-rooted and American.

Clearly, they are on the right track. Hats, jackets, T-shirts and other souvenirs with the logo, dead last in sales among 26 major-league teams a decade ago, now rank third behind those of the Yankees and Chicago Cubs, which have the legendary status Alderson craves.

“One of the things that we have tried to do in the last 10 years is create an institution,” Alderson says. In his mind, institutions are loved even when they lose. They are loved for trying. They are loved by out-of-towners. They are loved forever, regardless.

“Support in good times and bad,” Alderson says, concisely summarizing his dream. “I think that will happen when people come to understand that the team is always striving for excellence whether it is demonstrating it at the moment or not. That’s why we try to create a good environment in the stadium, why we try to have a good image in the community, so people will be proud of the A’s for more than just winning games.”