The Oakland A's youthful president is using aggressive marketing and a low-key management style to turn his team into a winner.
The camera zooms in on an elderly couple rocking on the porch of their modest home. The wife, a sweet-looking grandomotherly type, is reminiscing. "Billy was a good boy," she says, "a quiet boy. He stayed out of trouble. He was... polite to everybody. I remember..." As she prattles on, her husband leans toward the camera, eyebrows arched and head shaking in disbelief. "Mother doesn't remember too good anymore," he says.
The old folks are pitching Billyball, a particular brand of baseball practiced by the Oakland Athletics of the American League. Billyball is named for Billy Martin, the capable, pugnacious manager of the team whose image both on and off the field is the exact opposite of what "Mother" is describing. The television spot is only one component in a million-dollar advertising campaign designed to sell the A's to the public.
So far, it's working. Despite a players' strike, which cost the team a quarter of its home dates last season, 1.3 million fans paid to see the A's play in Oakland in 1981, a nice contrast to the mere 307,000 who trickled through the turnstiles just two years earlier.
Of course, there's more to the Oakland turnaround than advertising. Last year the A's won the Western Division of the American League, after spending most of the previous half-decade in the doldrums. With almost all of the talented young players who helped achieve that victory under contract for several years to come, A's president Roy Eisenhardt confidently predicts that 1982 attendance will approach the 2-million mark. At that level, the team might close in on a goal almost as important as another championship: profitability.
The A's current situation is a far cry from the circumstances that greeted Eisenhardt when he took over as president in November 1980. The team had won just 54 of its 162 games during 1979. Most of the previously mentioned 307,000 fans who turned out to watch them that year came out of either boredom or a perverse desire to boo Charles "Charlie" O. Finley, the team's owner, on those rare occasions when he made an appearance at the Oakland -- Alameda County Coliseum.
The final decade of Finley's turbulent 20-year tenure with the A's coincided with a period of change in the world of professional baseball, and Finley himself was responsible for his fair share of it. A self-made millionaire in the insurance business, Charlie knew his baseball pretty well. In fact, he almost single-handedly assembled the teams that won three consecutive championships, teams that included renowned players like pitcher James "Carfish" Hunter and slugger Reggie Jackson. Finley thought that baseball had become colorless, so be personally designed natty green, gold, and white uniforms for his team. He tried for years to convince his fellow owners that, in order to generate a larger television audience, weekday World Series games should be played at night and that teams should be allowed to substitute a "designated hitter" for the pitcher.
Finley promoted his team with flair.He offered any A's player who grew a mustache a $300 bonus in order to boost interest in "Mustache Day" at the Oakland Coliseum and brought the team mascot, a mule named Charlie O, to all of the A's public functions. Finley feuded with his managers, hiring and firing 16 of them in 20 years, and once threatened to fire second baseman Mike Andrews in the middle of a playoff series. To say he was "colorful" is like calling Babe Ruth competent.
Despite the three world championships, however, the A's were a marginal business proposition. In his best season at the gate, Finley could attract only slightly more than a million paying customers. And then in the early 1970s, baseball began to change. Free agency enabled players like Hunter and Jackson, plus a dozen other mainstays of the franchise, to sell their services to owners with deeper pockets. Stubborn as his namesake mule, Charlic simply wouldn't play the game. He refused to meet his top players' highpriced demands, and, finally, sick of it all, took the trend to its logical extreme: He sold, or attempted to sell, every asset he had, including what few star-quality players remained. Funds with the baseball commissioner and other owners ensued, the team's performance grew worse and worse, and at last Finley decided to sell out.
Enter Walter Haas, great-grandnephew of farmed California Gold Rush outfitter Levi Strauss and, at that time, chairman of the company that bears his ancestor's name. Walter Haas's son-in-law, Roy Eisenhardt, was then a professor of business law at the University of California at Berkeley. In August 1980, after helping to negotiate the purchase of the A's from Finley for $12.7 million, Eisenhardt was persuaded to take over as franchise president. His first visit to the club's offices did little to convince him that the investment had bought much more than a shell.
"Here I was," he recall, "in the office of what was supposedly a major-league franchise in the middle of a season and all I could find was a switchboard operator, a controller who collected the gate receipts, and Charlie's cousin Carl Finley answering phone calls and practically running the whole show himself." The only hint of the glorious summers and autumns of 1972, 1973, and 1974, when the A's won their World Series titles, were the three championship trophies -- being used to divide file folders on a secretary's desk. Eisenhardt clearly had a major-league rebuilding job on his hands.
Like any good businessperson in a similar situation, the new president totaled up his assets and liabilities. On the plus side, he had a proven if mercurial field manager in Billy Martin, one of Finley's last major acquisitions; a group of young and promissing, if unproven, players; and the beginnings of a good professional operations staff in the front office. The negatives seemed more significant: a lossing image, disillusioned fans, no scouting system, and not a single proven "star" who could attract fans in spite of a losing team record.
Other professional sports executives, faced with a similar situation, might have opted for the grand gesture -- signing a player of superstar status to a huge contract. Eisenhardt chose another route entirely: He had a five-part market survey conducted throughout the Oak-land-San Francisco area.
"We found that what the fans wanted was very simple," recalls Eisenhardt. "They wanted a team that tries hard. They were tolerant and intelligent enough to know that even the best teams win only 6 out of 10 games."
