This Un-Athletic Performance Doesn’t Compute in Oakland

OAKLAND —  Charles O. Finley would have yanked this team off the field.

Were he still owner of the Oakland Athletics, Finley would not have tolerated one more goof-up in Saturday’s 7-5 Game 3 playoff loss to Toronto. Back in the 1970s, Finley would have been threatening to sell the next player who makes a mistake to Baltimore or Tokyo or as far away as possible, so help him Bowie Kuhn.

Luckily for the A’s, Walter Haas employs them now. Charlie Finley would have gone after second baseman Lance Blankenship with a vaudeville hook, the same way he once did Mike Andrews. Finley would have fired third base coach Rene Lachemann on the spot, George Steinbrenner style. Finley would have dialed the bullpen phone to scream: “One more wild pitch and you’ll never work in this town again!”

The A’s played baseball Saturday like an elephant balancing on a beach ball. They were big, slow and clumsy. And this isn’t the way they usually play baseball up here in Northern California. This is the way they play baseball down there in Southern California.

Forty-seven thousand people went to an A’s-Jays game and a Dodger game broke out. And here you thought the only thing the A’s and Dodgers had in common was managers of Mediterranean ancestry.

Yet Tony La Russa can feed data into his lap-top for hours and it isn’t going to catch a grounder. No computer would have gone 3 and 0 on Dave Winfield or thrown wild to first base from the seat of his pants, the way control-freak Dennis Eckersley did. No computer would have waved the elephantine McGwire home to become a dead duck, the way Lachemann did.

“Coaching third base, there’s a fine line between being aggressive and stupidity,” Lachemann said. “And I crossed that line today.”

Oh, well. Just walk away, Rene. This game was no more your fault than it was Blankenship’s for juggling two routine infield rollers, or Walt Weiss’ for repeatedly stranding runners, or McGwire’s for failing to smother Manuel Lee’s two-run triple or Ron Darling’s for uncorking two wild pitches. Don’t give Darling the loss; give the whole team the loss.

Giving grades? Give every A an F.

Unhappy, Darling? Yes, the losing pitcher said: “I think everybody in the clubhouse would agree that all of us were really sloppy.”

This was Act III of what could very well become a very well-played seven-act play. Up to now, the A’s and Blue Jays have played skillfully, turning double plays, stealing bases, executing strategy. But even the winning players in this game had their heads up their caps--for example, Toronto shortstop Lee letting go of a perfect peg as Rickey Henderson slid into it or catcher Pat Borders jogging toward the dugout on Strike 2.

Maybe they lost this game in the sun.

Blankenship had no excuses for his two infield errors, and, to his credit, offered none, although the sod did recently get trampled by the keystone combination of Tinker to Axl Rose to Metallica. (Evers and Chance never had to worry about heavy-metal music.) The turf was such that Blankenship called it “a little bit chewed up,” adding that the hotter the weather got, the harder the field got, and the harder the field got, the harder the fielding got.

Usually, Oakland’s landscaping is among the best in the business.

And so are Oakland’s infielders. Blankenship committed six errors in 123 games. Weiss made 19, Mike Bordick 16. Those are Oakland’s primary second basemen and shortstops, and together they made 41 errors. The Dodger shortstop, Jose Offerman, made 42 all by himself.

One of Blankenship’s boots led to the two decisive runs.

“How many times in practice do you make that play?” he was asked.

“A hundred out of a hundred,” Blankenship replied.

For the A’s, it was one of those days.

Weiss shook his head and said: “In the past, we always did all the little things it takes to win ballgames. We, uh, didn’t exactly do that in this one.”

One of the things you don’t do is send the large, lumbering McGwire to the plate on a fly to medium-shallow right field. That’s what the third base coach, Lachemann, did in the fourth inning when Oakland had the bases full and nobody out. Joe Carter threw out McGwire by so great a distance, the catcher could have taken a moment to autograph the baseball before tagging the runner with it.

McGwire, who makes Mike Scioscia look like Carl Lewis, only does as he is told.

“I just listened and he (Lachemann) said to get going, so I went. There was nothing left for me to do but to crash into the catcher.”

He wasn’t surprised at being sent?

“I’m never surprised in this game,” McGwire said.

Possibly the first player in baseball history to proclaim himself surprise-proof, McGwire apparently wasn’t fooled at all by that hard-hit triple by Lee that hopped right over his mitt. When the first baseman made a dive for it, the ball refused to stay down with him. Not that it surprised him or anything.

Now, to see Dennis Eckersley fall behind a hitter in the ninth inning, then fall on his slacks attempting to field a ball hit off his wrist, you’d think that would surprise anybody . That actually happened in the ninth inning. In fact, the first two batters who faced Eck eked out singles. They even turned him into Eck as in Wreck.

But that pretty much summed up the whole day for the A’s.

Ecchh.