Play ball! Jonathan Siegel

Last week, having nothing better to do, I decided to check out the A's exhibition game against some team from across the bay. At one point, new shortstop Marcus Semien hit his head on the dugout while celebrating a home run. One of his teammates came over and consoled him with a hug and a head rub.

"Who was that nice guy?" I wondered, but I had no idea, since I don't recognize most of the team's many new players. Later, I was watching with the sound off, and some chubby guy hit another homer. I was certain it was new backup catcher Josh Phegley, since I had seen him earlier in spring training and noticed that he was built like an old-school catcher. Actually, it was new first baseman-DH Billy Butler, who apparently is also built like an old-school catcher.

This off-season the A's were involved in nine transactions involving 27 players. By my best estimate, the A's will open the season with 10 players on the 25-man roster who were not in the organization last year, as well as another four who didn't start last season with them. A's announcers Ray Fosse and Glenn Kuiper were trying to convince us during the broadcast that this is the new normal for the major leagues, but it's not. It's not even normal for the A's, and fans will be challenged to figure out who the players are, let alone bond with them as the season progresses. Fortunately, the A's have used rent money they owed the Coliseum authority on new hi-def scoreboards, so we'll at least get a good look at these guys.

I love baseball, so I am going to do my best to accept this new group and will start the season as I always do: full of hope and optimism. The entirely new infield (Ike Davis or Butler at first, Ben Zobrist at second, Semien at short and Brett Lawrie at third) is actually a clear improvement, even without Josh Donaldson. The pitching looks young, strong and deep. New guys Jesse Hahn and Kendall Gravemen join Sonny Gray, Scott Kazmir and Drew Pomeranz in the rotation, with Jesse Chavez in reserve. The group looked very tough this spring.

I am, however, obsessed with the outfield, and not in a good way. Coco Crisp will start the season on the DL for six to eight weeks, and Josh Reddick is out for at least five games. In the meantime, the A's will start three guys (Billy Burns, Sam Fuld and Craig Gentry) who all scream eighth-inning defensive replacement. The A's need Crisp and Reddick to return to form and Rule 5 guy Mark Canha to continue to display the power he showed all spring for the team to really contend.

I'm sure it'll all work out: the A's had the best record in the Cactus League, and its early April.

Play ball!

           
 Jonathan Siegel is the founding partner of Siegel LeWitter Malkani, an Oakland labor and employment firm which is ranked in the "Best Law Firms in California-- First Tier" by US News. A recovering Yankee fan, when he is not representing unfairly treated employees, he loves rooting for the A's and yearns for the day when the A's management requites the love of the team's passionate fans, commits to Oakland, and comes up with a little more scratch for ball players.

Santa Cruz fishing story Isaac Cronin

I blame Ron Berger for my introduction to commercial fishing in the 1960s. It became his lifetime passion. For me it was a romantic interlude that introduced a world of dangerous backbreaking work and a Sicilian American culture that had its own Old World charm.

First Ron convinced me that I would be happier leaving UC Berkeley for UC Santa Cruz, where he knew he could find work as a fisherman. Ron had grown up in Encino, an affluent neighborhood in the San Fernando Valley. He had been a track star and all-league tight end at Birmingham High School. A handsome romantic, his head was turned around by the Free Speech Movement and he dropped his pre-law track in favor of English literature. Ron favored work shirts unbuttoned to show his hairy chest, a full beard, tight jeans and sandals. He carried the green box bag that telegraphed progressive politics.  

For me sexual freedom was only an idea, an unrealized promise along with free speech and civil rights. Ron, on the other hand, got plenty of action in Berkeley. He had a parade of thin, long-haired coeds passing through his bedroom, seduced by his good looks and a well-thought-out persona that blended the sensitive, poetry-loving soul (Blake made him swoon) and the urbane connoisseur who served chilled chablis while spinning Miles Davis ballads and smoking a pipe, a la Hugh Hefner. His apartment walls were decorated with paisley Indian bedspreads and Ansel Adams photographs of Yosemite. Patchouli-scented candles, bead curtains and incense from Telegraph Avenue head shops provided atmosphere. Playboy centerfolds in the bedroom betrayed his ties to the old world a few years before the feminist movement made objectification of women taboo. Ron was a man in rapid transition.

We rented a bachelor pad, a two-bedroom cabin in Boulder Creek surrounded by redwoods, with a roaring stream in the backyard and a massive stone fireplace in the wood-beamed living room. We made the 12-mile drive to campus in cars left over from our Los Angeles adolescences - mine a canary yellow Ford Mustang and his a white Chevy Impala. The first week we were in town, Ron announced that we were going to the Santa Cruz harbor to find a fishing boat that would take us on as apprentices. He had been reading the great Norwegian writer Knut Hamsun and had concluded that hard work to the point of suffering, in the eternal battle against nature, was the path to spiritual enlightenment. I wasn't so sure. The most demanding labor I had performed was painting the inside of a couple of houses for beer money.

We went to the marine supply, bought knee-high rubber boots and drove to the docks. A middle aged couple were loading their 42-foot albacore boat as Ron sauntered up. They took one look at his broad shoulders and earnest face and accepted our offer. We headed out of the harbor before they told us this would be a four-day trip and that we were heading out more than 100 miles off Big Sur, where the albacore were running. My spoiled middle-class Jewish heart sank as I looked back at the setting sun to see the pine tree-covered mountains of Santa Cruz dip below the horizon.

The next 96 hours was a nearly sleepless ordeal. The boat tossed like a cork in the 8-foot swells and troughs, which the sea anchors did little to diminish, as we wedged ourselves against the sides of the bunk to keep from being tossed onto the floor. We woke at dawn and worked the hand gurdies and lines strung on outriggers that jerked when the albacore tuna bit. The boat trolled continually until dusk at 5 mph, and we pulled in the fish using rubber pads cut from inner tubes to protect our hands against the taught nylon monofilament. The pull of the 20-pound fish combined with the momentum of the boat created a powerful resistance that cut into our hands, which were bloody and raw within a few hours. We tossed the fish into the refrigerated hold, where they glistened silver and black, like sleek aquatic torpedoes. At trip's end the hold was nearly full with more than 200 albacore. At 18 cents a pound with an average weight of 20 pounds per fish, the boat had earned about $700. Our crew shares amounted to about $100. Depending on how you looked at it, it was either the beginning of a lifelong romance with the sea and its bounty or a damn good reason to stay in school. Walking to the car, I felt the deep relief of solid ground and the nagging doubt that this would not be the last time I would let Ron persuade me to go out into the Pacific.

Ron and I wanted to extend the moment, to bring proletarian reality to the middle-class "city on a hill," so we drove up to campus for the first day of orientation wearing our work clothes, with wool watch caps pulled down on our heads and jeans tucked into rubber boots. We must have smelled ripe as we swaggered through the courtyard. Heads turned momentarily, but we learned quickly that UC Santa Cruz was a bastion of tolerance; a giant marshmallow and stinky fishermen were welcomed along with stoners, Jewish princesses and black nationalists.

Thus another education began.

Isaac Cronin is a writer, marketing consultant and author of six cookbooks, including two on seafood. He was a commercial fisherman in Santa Cruz and Moss Landing from 1966 to 1972, working on net boats with first- and second-generation Italians.

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