Empty Spaces: Part I

"What shall we use to fill the empty...
Spaces where we used to talk..." - Pink Floyd

There have been a lot of complaints about the lack of attendance with the Minnesota Twins series as the focal-point. The complaint is basically: "How can attendance be so low when a team is in the thick of a playoff race?" But what people forget is that unless the A’s show something tangible to the casual fan, such as moving past the first round or having a superstar player, people will not go out to just see a winning team. They have seen that for the past 6 years and the A’s have nothing to show for it. Not to mention the amount of roster turnover that prevents casual fans from having a player to cling on to. But when the A’s do retain players, they aren't high-impact players like Bonds, A-Rod, or Guerrero. In a three-part series, I will examine the modern era of A's Baseball analyizing connections between their play, roster make-up, and attendance.

The '87-'93 A's

Many point to the fact that the A’s had high attendance figures in late 80’s/early 90’s as a reason that if you build a winner, the fans will come. But if you look closer, you will notice that the team was a collection of older players who the A's could not keep throughout the 90's without seeing a drop-off in talent. So while the A's were able to see a spike in attendance, the play of the team past 1992 was horrible and because of the long-term contracts of the players, they could only eat the contracts.

Year	Total Att.	Att. Standings	Wins	Loss	Percentage	AL West Standing	Avg. Batting Age	Avg. Pitching Age	Total Payroll	Median Salary
1987	1,678,921	11th out of 14	81	81	0.500	3rd of 7	27.7	28.1	N/A	N/A
1988	2,287,335	7th out of 14	104	58	0.642	AL 1	28.1	28.1	$11,380,183	$377,500
1989	2,667,225	2nd out of 14	99	63	0.611	WS 1	29.3	30.0	$14,602,999	$375,000
1990	2,900,217	2nd out of 14	103	59	0.636	AL 1	29.2	31.7	$19,987,501	$272,500
1991	2,713,493	3rd out of 14	84	78	0.519	4th of 7	29.9	30.9	$33,632,500	$900,000
1992	2,494,160	4th out of 14	96	66	0.593	DIV 1	30.3	32.0	$39,957,834	$680,000
1993	2,035,025	11th out of 14	68	94	0.420	7th of 7	28.2	30.9	$35,565,834	$575,000
1994	1,242,692	13th out of 14	51	63	0.447	2nd of 4	29.2	29.8	$33,169,500	$413,500
1995	1,174,310	12th out of 14	67	77	0.465	4th of 4	29.6	30.9	$35,961,500	$235,000

If you look at the major strength of the 1989 World Series team, you would see that pitching was the main core that the team kept together, even though their ages were on the wrong side of thirty. It also happened to be the biggest chunk of money of the total payrol;, about one-third of the payroll from 1991 to 1995.

• Dave Stewart moved on to Toronto after the A’s lost to them in the ’92 ALCS. Although he could not pitch with the Jays to the level he had in Oakland, the A's brought him back in 1995 where he would have a 6.89 ERA in 81 innings as a thirty-eight-year-old.



• Mike Moore could only duplicate his success one more time in 1991 with a 2.96 ERA in 210 innings. Moore left the A's at the age of 32 in 1992.



• Bob Welch, the 1990 CY Young winner, suffered a season-ending elbow injury in August of 1992. He was retained until 1994 at the age of 37.



• In an attempt to update the rotation on the fly, the A's traded for the 30 year old Ron Darling in 1991 and signed him to a 4-year, 9.7 million dollar contract in the offseason. 1992 was his only good year posting a 3.66 ERA in 206.3 innings. He left the A's after the 1995 season at the age of 34.



• Even Dennis Eckersley could not avoid age as he fell off the table in 1993 at the age of 38, posting a 4.16 ERA in 67 innings; a far cry from the 1.91 ERA in 80 innings of the '92 season. He would leave the A's after the '95 season at the age of 40.

So without pitching, the A’s were guaranteed to fail in 1993, the first season where their roster was virtually changed from head-to-toe. So without a winning team, and no real connection of the fans to the plethora of stars the 1987-1992 teams had, the A’s needed a corner-stone player to step up and help to create a new era. In 1992, Barry Bonds, formerly of the Pirates, became a free agent and signed a six-year contract with the Giants that would pay him $43.75 million. Of course, if the A's weren't locked into their contracts that they payed solely out of wanting to keep a core together, they could have easily afforded Bonds.

But the A's had someone who could fill the job: Enter Mark McGwire.

In the next post, I will talk about the '93-'98 A's.