Baseball (23 page)

Landis's successor, Albert D. (Happy) Chandler, from the Bluegrass region of Kentucky, was a progressive for his time and place. He could sing “My Old Kentucky Home” in a sweet, quavering tenor, and never forgot a name or a face. In his new job, Happy Chandler had only to remember sixteen, yet he probably lost a few immediately by his brave stand of championing the inclusion of blacks in the major leagues and he soon displeased a majority of owners and was dismissed in 1951.

Ford Frick, the former newspaperman, replaced Chandler, fully understanding he was there to serve the owners, which he did, from 1951 through 1965. When Frick bowed out, the owners hired an anonymous Air Force general, William D. Eckert, apparently confusing him with another general named Zuckert. As the New York sportswriter Larry Fox wrote the day Eckert was chosen, “Jeez. They went and got the unknown soldier.” Lacking any knowledge of baseball, Eckert did nothing to challenge the owners, but he was let go anyway, in 1968, followed by Bowie K. Kuhn, the former counsel to baseball. Kuhn had been a scoreboard operator at Wash-ington's Griffith Stadium as a boy and genuinely loved the game, but he came along at the worst possible time. Marvin Miller of the Players Association began hitting Kuhn's legal pitches as if it were batting practice, and the owners banished Kuhn in 1984.

The choice for Kuhn's replacement was so logical it was doomed to failure. Peter Ueberroth, a former travel agency executive, had just presided over the 1984 Summer Games in Los Angeles, using existing facilities, negotiating hard contracts, and turning profits of over $225 million to a foundation for youth sports. Ueberroth, the first businessman ever to be commissioner, did not know much about baseball but he knew about budgets and staffing and labor costs. It made him totally crazy when the club owners could not evoke the same business sense that had obviously served many of them well in their original businesses.

Ueberroth's hardest challenge in Los Angeles had been the boycott by Soviet-bloc nations. As commissioner, Ueberroth would soon
come to think of the boycott as the good old days. Unhindered by any great sentimentality for the game itself, he tried to consolidate the balkanized business practices of baseball, but antagonized the rich and independent cusses who ran the teams. He soon realized that the owners from the huge cable television markets would not find a way to share the swag with owners in the lesser cable markets, thereby creating an inequity on the field, presumably forever.

A short strike in August of 1985 ended only when Lee MacPhail, the son of Larry and one of the most respected officials in baseball, brought the sides together. On March 31, 1989, Ueberroth's term ended and he walked away from the owners' scorn with a feeling that was quite mutual.

The owners then turned to A. Bartlett Giamatti, scholar, writer, former president of Yale University, and full-fledged Red Sox fan. Giamatti was no stranger to labor strife at Yale but as commissioner he inherited an issue he took highly personally—Pete Rose's denial that he had gambled on baseball. Days after banishing Rose, Giamatti died of a heart attack on September 1, 1989, after only five months as commissioner. Fay Vincent, a former executive of Columbia Pictures and Coca-Cola, and a close friend of Giamatti, took over as commissioner. Used to dealing with corporate boards, Vincent had never encountered anything quite like the squabbling disparate owners. He presided over the Bay Area earthquake in October of 1989, but was ousted by the owners on September 7, 1992.

For nearly six years, Allan H. (Bud) Selig, a former automobile dealer and the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, served as interim commissioner. It was impossible to miss Selig's love for the game as he talked about how his mother had taken him from Milwaukee to New York on pilgrimages to Ebbets Field or Yankee Stadium. As commissioner, he was faced with contemporary problems like labor negotiations, shaky franchises, drug and steroid issues, and the imbalance of cable television revenues, praised by many fellow owners as a problem-solver but perceived by press and public as somewhat of a ditherer.

In 1994, the owners vowed they would never again be beaten in contract negotiations. Selig wrung his hands and professed sadness
at the work stoppage that summer but Donald Fehr, the head of the Players Association, skipped the niceties and said baseball would be back when the players were satisfied. For the first time since 1904, when McGraw had refused to play nicely with the American League, there was no World Series, leaving a terrible gap in the hearts of hard-core fans.

The players gained another contractual victory in the spring of 1995, and went back to work in a slightly shortened season. On July 9, 1998, Selig was officially named commissioner. He did not have an easy task. While attendance had tripled from 1964 to 2000, baseball was losing public attention to football, basketball, golf, and NASCAR. Children were playing soccer in youth leagues or skateboarding, and then going home to huddle over computer games. Some owners began paying for a portion of their new palaces, but other towns could not arrange financing for stadiums. Montreal, once a vibrant baseball city, lost its Expos to Washington in 2005.

Selig delivered a mixed message, raving about high attendance but talking about eliminating two or four teams, using the ominous word “contracting,” which sounded like something out of
The Sopranos.
(“Hey, Bud, you want us to contract the Twins or the Devil Rays?”) For all of Selig's fretting, the value of clubs continued to rise, even after factoring in inflation. For example: the small-market Kansas City Royals had been worth an entry fee of $5.35 million in the expansion draft of 1968 but were sold for $96 million in 2000.

Even the Los Angeles Dodgers were sold. Walter O'Malley had bought out Branch Rickey's one-quarter share in Brooklyn in 1950 for $1.05 million. In 1998, his son Peter sold the franchise, for estate-planning purposes, to Rupert Murdoch, the Australian-born news baron, for $311 million. The Murdochites made a mess of the gloried Dodgers, and the team was sold again, still worth a fortune because of Walter O'Malley's land deals in the 1950s.

The commissioner's job seemed to be to plead poverty, while presiding over expensive transfers of owners, some of whom had cable money to spend. The owners did slap luxury taxes on their highest spenders and distributed the money to poorer clubs in a
primitive attempt to stop the worst recidivists among themselves from spending so much money. Yet spend they did.

The world had grown complicated. Like all commissioners, Selig was overshadowed by the Landis Syndrome, the national anticipation that a commissioner would come stalking into his box seat wearing a black jurist's robe, shaking a magisterial mane, pounding a gavel, shouting, “Off with their heads!” The eighty-year chasm between high expectations of commissioners and the dysfunction of the owners would soon lead to highly public embarrassment.

T
he funniest thing I ever saw in baseball was Pete Rose's greenies kicking in during a rain delay,” a former teammate once said, evoking a vision of Rose's stocky body bouncing off the clubhouse walls, with no outlet for his chemically induced energy.

As a young reporter, I encountered players unaccountably jabbering in the minutes before a game. One of the most competitive players I ever met used to excuse himself before the game so he could drink “a major-league cup of coffee,” which, I have since come to understand, refers to a mixture of black coffee and greenies, or amphetamines. Eventually, the clubhouse doors were closed an hour before game time, so players could have time to, as the saying goes, “prepare.”

And then there was a night exhibition in Florida a long time ago, when I watched a pitcher who was trying to hang on in the majors, lurching around the mound, like a sailor in a hurricane. He fired so many wild pitches in the general vicinity of home plate that the crusty old manager had to trudge out to the mound and remove him from the game. Later that night I asked the pitcher what the problem had been, and he made a flicking motion with his hand, like a man tossing pills down his gullet. Some hyper people are just not cut out for greenies.

Since I did not report this little scene back then—the pitcher was a friend of mine—it is probably unfair to say the commissioner of the day should have done something about it. It is safe to say there is a long tradition of stimulants in major league clubhouses, and that nobody wanted to know.

By the early 1980s, the dysfunction in management and the standoff with the Players Association would lead to four scandals, all of them comparable to the disaster of 1919, when the Black Sox were throwing the World Series but owners and officials were powerless to intervene.

The first scandal was the prevalence of so-called recreational drugs among the players, whose salaries had leaped to unimaginable heights. Baseball still lagged far behind many American industries in the treatment of chemical and alcohol addiction. It was not until 1980 that players like Darrell Porter and Bob Welch talked openly about having gone through rehabilitation centers. One of the problems was that baseball people tended to regard chemical addiction as outright subversive while alcohol was regarded as a traditional way of relaxing. “Heck, he can have a beer or two,” one prominent manager insisted about a player of his who had acknowledged being an alcoholic.

Drugs were, of course, against the law. In 1983, twenty major league players were named in a drug case in Kansas City, Missouri, in which four Royals went to jail: Willie Wilson, Willie Aikens, Jerry Martin, and Vida Blue. For a brief time under Kuhn, there was an agreement that clubs could request testing for cocaine, but marijuana, amphetamines, and alcohol were not included. That policy expired in October of 1985.

The plague of drugs stopped being funny when players began losing their skills at an early age, right in front of our eyes. Every team seemed to have somebody with marvelous skills who suddenly turned into a clumsy and inarticulate hulk, no longer able to find first base without a Boy Scout guide.

Marvin Miller, the longtime leader of the Players Association, once described uppers and downers laid out “like jelly beans” in clubhouses.

“Who supplied them?” Miller asked rhetorically in an interview in the
New York Times.
“Certainly not the players union. We didn't make much progress in the early 1980s because it wasn't seen as an issue. The owners definitely weren't pushing it.”

In 1984, Peter Ueberroth came over from the Olympic movement, in which athletes faced regular testing and were banned for one positive drug test. He arrived just in time for a number of major-leaguers to be implicated in another drug case, this one in Pittsburgh. Keith Hernandez, who had been hastily traded to the Mets in 1983, testified in court that he had used cocaine while a member of
the Cardinals, describing a widespread “romance” between players and drugs. “It was like a demon in me,” Hernandez said.

Other players said they had easily obtained illegal drugs in the clubhouse in Pittsburgh. Two regulars on San Diego's 1984 league champions, Alan Wiggins and Eric Show, developed addictions and died young. Dwight Gooden and Darryl Strawberry helped the Mets win the World Series in 1986 but never fulfilled their Hall of Fame potential because of chemical and legal problems. When Olympic sports began random testing for drugs, Ueberroth called for mandatory testing starting in 1986, but Donald Fehr filed a grievance, citing the civil liberties of his clients, and the owners showed no stomach for that fight.

—

Ueberroth was present during another scandal involving the owners and the players, this one over the owners' limiting players' salaries. This practice was specifically banned by the 1985 Collective Bargaining Agreement, which included a provision that players “would not act collectively in any salary negotiation—and neither would the clubs.” Ueberroth frequently lectured the owners not to spend wildly on free agents, but he always made sure to remind the owners to stay within the legal boundaries of the agreement.

Lee MacPhail, one of the solid figures in baseball and an advisor to Ueberroth, said, “We must rely on the unilateral, self-imposed restraints of each individual club to do what experience and reasonable expectations indicate is in its own best interest.”

The owners, for once, took the advice more uniformly than anybody could have predicted. The most blatant example was Andre Dawson, a star in Montreal, who was eligible for free agency but could not get an offer until he agreed to sign a blank contract with the Cubs in 1987. Playing for an unreasonably low base salary of $500,000, Dawson hit 49 home runs and drove in 137 runs, although he did make extra money via incentive bonuses driving his earnings up to a still-ludicrous $700,000.

That was not good enough for the Players Association. Fehr and the players say they spent $4.6 million in legal costs to charge all the owners with illegally contriving to hold down salaries. The free
agency era had demonstrated that baseball would not fall apart if the players moved to the highest bidder, and now the players had legal backup. After arbitration went against them, the owners agreed to a negotiated settlement of $280 million to the players, including Dawson, and free-agency prices promptly took off again. In 1998 President Clinton signed the Curt Flood Act, which gave players the same protection under antitrust laws that all other athletes enjoyed. This legislation revoked the old antitrust exemption only for labor relations but did not affect the owners' broad powers regarding relocation, expansion, or the minor leagues.

—

It was impossible to miss the insatiable self-involvement of Pete Rose, the chesty hometown hero of the Cincinnati Reds, who had willed himself to the record for base hits, held by Tyrus Raymond Cobb. (In his second marriage, Rose would name a son “Tyler” in homage to the ornery star he would surpass.)

For a very long time, Rose was “good for the game,” a precious quality indeed. As millionaire players hid behind designer sunglasses, headsets, and protective agents, Rose was a gregarious presence at the ballpark, signing autographs for the fans, gossiping with the writers. Pete had an opinion about everything.