A’s Big-Bang Gang Is Still Riding

Watch them swagger toward the batter’s box, the mean-looking middlemen of Oakland’s order. Harold Baines, with his dark-bearded Easter egg of a face. Bang. Home run. You’re dead. Mark McGwire, with that grisly, russet goatee. Bang. Home run. You’re dead. Terry Steinbach, with those scruffy, Brillo-pad whiskers of his. Bang. Ditto. Ditto.

Now they look more like the Oakland Athletics of old--hairy and scary. Gone is the clean-shaven face of Jose Canseco, and with it his lethal weapon of a bat. When today’s A’s parade to the plate, they might not be more dangerous, but they look more dangerous. This resembles more than a murderer’s row, this lineup. It resembles a police lineup.

Canseco? File a report with missing persons.

Yet, how much is the missing man missed? These alleged “new” Oakland Athletics won Game 1 of the American League playoffs Wednesday night by belting three home runs, here inside the stadium where Canseco once pulled one halfway to the North Pole. Three homers accounted for every visiting-team runner that crossed home plate at the SkyDome, where those terrors of Ontario, the Toronto Blue Jays, went away 4-3 losers and feeling thunderstruck.

The “Bash Brothers?” Oh, no, the Oakland brutes attempted to persuade everyone afterward. They are bashers no more. They are no longer the Bay Area bombers. Those guys left town when Canseco did.

“The Bash Brothers got a divorce,” Steinbach said. “It was a 50-50 split.”

McGwire was equally insistent, saying: “The Bash Brothers are over. They’re history.”

Nice try.

We know a basher when we see one. Back in the golden era of Oakland baseball, all it took was one look at the wanted-poster mugs of Joe Rudi, Reggie Jackson, Sal Bando and Gene Tenace to recognize trouble. No pitcher in his right mind wanted to face those kissers. The A’s made themselves look particularly mean and unclean, saving all sorts of money on razor blades until the season was over.

By the time Canseco, McGwire, Rickey Henderson and company became the tough guys of the organization, Oakland had lost little of its muscle but much of its mystique. Canseco was straight from the cover of Gentlemen’s Quarterly. McGwire was a beefcake Huckleberry Finn. Henderson was a baby-faced little scamp. Even the manager was no longer Dick Williams, with his walrus mustache and his withering glare, but Tony La Russa, with his law-school demeanor and an undershirt advertising a school that teaches ballet.

Somehow, the A’s got too cute.

But the team that took Wednesday’s playoff opener looked menacing and intimidating. Even the pitchers seemed mean--Dave Stewart, disguising his happy-go-lucky ways behind a mustache and baleful stare; Jeff Russell, brush-cut and Fu-Manchu’d, and, as ever, Dennis Eckersley, with that wonderful face of his that belongs on Wyatt Earp’s bulletin board. Out West, the Oakland A’s ride again, a hole-in-the-wall gang if ever there was one.

They took Toronto over the wall. McGwire got it started, preparing for each at-bat against Jack Morris by occupying a place in the pitcher’s line of vision, outside of the on-deck circle, where he could take practice cuts against Morris while another man stood in the batter’s box. At times, Morris saw double out there--Baines at the plate and McGwire 30 feet behind the plate, two bats swinging simultaneously.

McGwire followed a second-inning leadoff single by Baines with a home run to left field that left a trail like a comet. It so rattled Morris that, when Steinbach sent a second homer flying nearly as far, the pitcher simply stood there on the hill, grinning like a fool. Wasn’t much else he could do.

Steinbach downplayed the importance of home runs, saying: “The whole attitude of Tony (La Russa) and this ballclub now is to push, push, push until we get a run across. I’ve never heard Tony say: ‘Push and push and, oh well, we gotta get a home run now.’ ”

Oakland held an edge for 2 1/2 hours, lost it in the eighth inning, then got it back exactly six minutes later. Baines hooked a ball into the right-field upper deck that, had it gone another 10 rows up, would have landed in somebody’s hamburger at the Hard Rock Cafe.

Yes, you A’s still do bash that baseball.

“Not me,” Baines said. “I’m no home-run hitter.”

Now, Harold. . . .

“Forget it,” Baines insisted. “This year has been a year of 25 guys. Before, it had been the Bash Brothers. We do it with line-drive hitters now.”

Funny, those sure looked like the old Oakland A’s.