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Martin's pitching coach and longtime drinking buddy Art Fowler smartened up the staff—and there have been charges that he moistened them up as well. The A's remarkable pitching record, critics protest, has been aided by some slippery business. A team does not suddenly reduce its ERA from 4.74 in 1979 to a league-leading 3.46 last year, it is argued, without putting a little something extra on the ball. Claims Minnesota First Base Coach Karl Kuehl: "They're getting it off their foreheads and the umpires don't have the guts to do anything about it." One baseball insider asserts that Kuehl's charge is only half true. "Matt Keough keeps it in his glove. Mike Norris keeps it in his crotch. Steve McCatty and Rick Langford are the ones who keep it on their foreheads. It's grease, a salve. They all load the ball up and it makes them good. It helped turn them around in one year." Something turned Oakland's pitchers around. Keough went from 2-17 in 1979 to 16-13 , last year.
The A's pitchers angrily deny any such scurrilous allegations. Charges Norris: "I wouldn't throw that pitch. I'd get kicked out of the game." McCatty: "They've never proven it and they never will." Keough: "How do they know?" Langford: "Accusations don't bother me. I don't throw one." The speculation, true or not, is just the kind of edge that Martin likes to exploit. Says he: "I love it. I hope they keep thinking we do it, because it screws them up, ruins their concentration." This year Martin introduced another ploy: white long-sleeved sweatshirts, which make it harder for opposing batters to see the ball. Martin: "If it will give me an advantage, I'll use it."
But guile and grease, relays and rundowns are only a part of a manager's game. More difficult is instilling in a pitcher the wholly implausible belief that he can throw a ball past a hitter, or to convince a batter that he can hit a ball traveling 90 m.p.h. A good manager can impart confidence in myriad ways: leaving a pitcher in the game to work his way out of trouble, letting a batter swing away on a 3-0 count, praising on the bench, and doing the dressing down in private. Says Baltimore's Earl Weaver, the winningest manager in baseball today: "If a person can get to the subconscious, then he is going to get a lot more adrenalin flowing or a lot more out of the human body than it might be capable of. I don't know if it is through actions or words or what, but Billy has the ability to pass that on to his players."