This May Be Last Hurrah for Athletics

Were the Oakland Athletics a used automobile, they would be classified as a classic, which can be a creative advertising writer’s description of an aging car with high mileage that is expensive to run. That is why the team’s management has decided an overhaul is in order.

Here are the Athletics on the eve of their fourth American League Championship Series in five years and their immediate future is as uncertain as any team in baseball. They have 14 potential free agents, not including pitcher Mike Moore, who also would be a free agent if they elect not to offer him arbitration.

Who stays? Who goes? Jose Canseco already has been traded in a move driven as much by finances as the persistent pain in the organization’s rear he created. That was just the beginning of the remaking of the Athletics. Is anybody safe?

The questions are complicated by Oakland’s mission to reduce its payroll by about 25 percent. The Athletics’ payroll was $40.16 million on opening day. They plan to open next season in the neighborhood of $30 million.

So take a good look at this Oakland team in the series against the Toronto Blue Jays, which begins Wednesday night. Beginning with 1988, it has been as close to a dynasty as baseball gets in this era of free agency, $1 million average contracts and crowded disabled lists. This is the end of the Athletics as we know them.

“I think there are always those questions at the end of the year,” said third baseman Carney Lansford. “We have more of them. No one knows except the front office what’s going to happen -- and in some cases I think they don’t even know. So what good would it do to worry about it?

“You can’t sit here and think, ‘Hey, it’s our last year together.’ We’ve stayed focused all year on winning. That’s it. Not about next year. If anything, this team has proved that you win because of 25 guys, not one or two.”

Lansford, one of the many free-agents-to-be, typifies the questions that face Oakland. He will be 36 years old next opening day. But he just completed one of his finest seasons and is the inspirational and vocal leader of the team.

Lansford has been known to shout into the ear of even his venerable manager, Tony LaRussa. He once spent four continuous hours on a charter flight admonishing a player who had spent most of that afternoon’s game dozing on a trainer’s table. It may not be a coincidence that the only season in the past five that Oakland did not win the West was the one Lansford missed almost completely with a knee injury.

Other key free agents who are advancing in age, not to mention pay, include pitchers Dave Stewart, 35, Ron Darling, 32, Rick Honeycutt, 38, and Moore, 32, designated hitter Harold Baines, 33, outfielder Willie Wilson, 37, and catcher Jamie Quirk, 37.

Oakland’s top priorities may be to retain first baseman Mark McGwire and catcher Terry Steinbach, if only because they have been fixtures through the championship seasons who are entering their prime years. McGwire took what amounted to a symbolic pay cut this season after a year in which he hit .201. He then slugged 42 home runs -- that makes 217 in six full seasons -- while providing stability to a patchwork lineup. As for his next contract, suffice it to say there will be no pay cut this time.

“Mark’s chances of coming back to Oakland are 50-50 -- at best,” said his agent, Bob Cohen. “That’s not to say that he doesn’t want to come back. There are other places that he also is interested in and I expect there will be interest in him.”

If Oakland succeeds in retaining McGwire and Steinbach, that would appear to leave no room on the payroll for Ruben Sierra, who already is earning $5 million this season. Sierra has expressed interest in re-signing with the Athletics, but that might work out only if McGwire departs.

“This team has maintained its focus,” Darling said. He added that once the Athletics surged past the Minnesota Twins into first place to begin August, “they started to smell it. It’s interesting to watch people on this team respond once it looks within reach. They seem to be able to turn it up a notch. This team knows how to win.”

It has been a remarkable five-year run by an Oakland team whose profile changed little. As Lansford said, “They did an amazing job keeping the nucleus together this long.”

“They’ll make changes,” Cohen said, “but I don’t think they’re going to tear this team down. The Haas family (which owns the team) is so well-established in the area and worked so hard to build this organization from where Charlie Finley left it that they won’t allow that to happen.”

Canseco and his waggling, menacing bat already are gone. What then would the Athletics be without Stewart, the brim of his cap pulled down to his brow, staring down hitters, and McGwire, in that knock-kneed stance, baring his biceps, and Lansford, crouched so low at third base that the tip of his glove sweeps the dirt.

They will still be the Athletics, just not these Athletics, the ones with swagger and strength and the most appeal in baseball. Welcome to their farewell tour. Break up the Athletics? It will happen, win or lose.