Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (40 page)

The size of the money game has changed, and a lot of other baseball values are changing as a result. The most interesting alteration may be among the fans. I know of no reliable or continuing system of fan-polling, and much of what I can conclude here is intuitive or based on conversations with and letters from friends who care about sports. There seems to be absolutely no doubt that large numbers of fans are disturbed about the level of some player salaries, and that they are angry about the curtailment of spring training this year. (Many of them referred to the lockout as a strike—a startling one-hundred-and-eighty-degree error that was also repeatedly made by some sportswriters.) The reader mail received by the
Sporting News,
the ancient, extremely conservative weekly sports paper published in St. Louis, ran very heavily against the players; one typical letter—typical except for the mildness of its tone—said, “Professional athletes are overestimating their value. Unless they begin to realize this, they are going to continue the already downhill relationship with the fans and ultimately destroy spectator sports.” Fan-in-the-street interviews in many big-league-city newspapers turned up similar expressions of this view. The anti-money, anti-player feeling does not seem to carry over to the box office, however; early-season attendance this year has been unusually healthy. It is significant, I think, that there was no major outcry from fans last year when Catfish Hunter signed for his epochal three and a half million. Nor do I recall many shouts of rage when Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier each cleared more than two million dollars for their heavyweight-title fight in Manila last autumn, or when Jimmy Connors took down a quarter of a million for a one-sided three-set victory in a televised tennis match a couple of months ago. On almost any weekend, some golfer or other can be seen on our television sets in the act of winning $30,000 or $40,000, and one of them, Hubert Green, recently hit a hot streak and ran up winnings of $118,000 in three weeks. Money won on television, to be sure, has always seemed a trifle unreal, more like Monopoly dollars than the real thing, but what I think we can begin to understand is that there is an enormous difference between our attitude toward the individual great athlete—the superstar, the hero-entrepreneur, the nonpareil—and what we feel about the team player. We seem to derive excitement and deep pleasure from the accomplishments of a single performer. (“This putt—
sh-h-h
—may be worth
twenty-two-thousand
dollars.…”) The multimillion-dollar heavyweight-title fight involves not just the biggest, toughest men anywhere but an almost unimaginable prize for the winner, and the two elements are somehow the same. When I was growing up, the fact that Babe Ruth was paid a salary of $80,000 was almost as awesome to me as his feat of hitting sixty home runs in a single season; I memorized both figures. But large payments to athletes are not enjoyed or approved of by us, the fans, if the payment is made broadly, to all the athletes engaged in a particular trade at the big-league level—all basketball players, all hockey players, and so on. “The players have gotten too greedy,” “They’re all paid too much”—these are current grandstand convictions, which I also hear from many other people, in and out of the sports world. As I pick up this complaint, however, it seems to apply more to a well-paid journeyman than to the superstar—more to Rusty Staub or Roy White, say, than to Johnny Bench or Jim Palmer. It would be extremely interesting to measure this, if we could. What it means, I think, is that high pay for athletes is resented if they are seen as
employees.
And when these employees behave like contemporary workmen, trying to extract the most money and the most favorable working conditions and retirement benefits from a typically reluctant and unsympathetic employer, and forming a union to press their demands—which is what the baseball and football and basketball players have all done in recent years—then they are resented even more deeply, almost to the point of hatred. This is an extraordinary turn of events in a labor-conscious, success-oriented society like ours.

I think that the view of the athlete as an employee and a card-carrying union man violates our fan vision of the athlete as a mythic figure, a lone hero. The athlete should live and perform by himself, in a place far removed from our own mundane concerns for good working hours and fair pay. What he does should be impossible, or nearly so, and it is quite acceptable that his reward for this great deed should be unbelievable, beyond our measuring. If, on the other hand, we see the athlete as a mere clock-puncher and then compare his pay scale with ours, we feel envy and rage. Our indignation is deepened when we realize that he is being paid all that bread for something that is probably much more pleasurable than whatever it is we do. Come to think of it, by God, he is being paid for having
fun!
This gnawing ill humor is at its worst, surely, when the athlete on view is a ballplayer, for baseball looks like the easiest of all professional sports—almost easy enough for us to have been hired to play it ourselves, except that … if only … The fact that the game is in reality extraordinarily difficult results in the very same rancor, for everybody, including the best-paid star, is bound to fall on his face if we only wait long enough. There—look at that! And we pay him two hundred grand for
that!
This is the way the old sour-mouthed Yankee fans used to sound, back when the Yankees won every year. All of us have become that sort of fan now, I think, and the kind of understanding affection we once had for the hopeless, losing Mets, who so resembled ourselves, has been lost, probably for good.

I should add, of course, that there are many people who despise high pay for athletes on principle—because such gigantic funds and such exorbitant passions are expended for such trivial ends, in a time when so many areas of our country and our social fabric are deteriorating or dying for lack of money and attention. For myself, I can say only that I think of this irony almost every day but that it no longer seems to have the capacity to shock me, or even surprise me. These polarities do not seem reversible—there is no way to siphon the purse for the Indianapolis 500 into Bedford-Stuyvesant—and it may even be that they are inevitable, locked into our society. Professional sports are an escape—probably our prime national escape just now. During the Depression, we happily paid the largest salaries in the country to Clark Gable and Mickey Rooney and Jean Harlow; today, we pay them to Kareem Jabbar and Richard Petty and Catfish Hunter. I see no difference.

The Messersmith case was the latest in a long series of tests challenging the courts’ habitual protection of baseball’s monopoly status. In 1972, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, delivering the 5–3 majority opinion that upheld the owners in a suit brought by Cardinal outfielder Curt Flood, wrote, “Professional baseball is a business and it is engaged in interstate commerce”—and thus normally subject to federal business law. But it is “in a very distinct sense an exception and an anomaly,” and he added, “The aberration is an established one.” This curious logic soon impelled other players to challenge the reserve clause by appealing to the arbitration panel—a body set up in the Basic Agreement of 1970 and reluctantly accepted by the owners. Separate tests were undertaken by Ted Simmons, Sparky Lyle, and Bobby Tolan, but dropped when each of the players ultimately signed a new contract. The Messersmith-McNally grievance, when it arrived last year, had accumulated a considerable momentum. The issue in the case was straightforward—whether the standard player contract should be taken literally (as Messersmith and McNally claimed) in its provisions that seemed to say a player completing the full term of his contract and then playing one additional season under the same terms was thus freed of all obligation to his club, or whether (as the owners claimed) the obligation and the contract were infinitely extensible under the precedents of the reserve clause. Suddenly aware of a very dark shadow on the road ahead, the owners hurried to court to request that the entire arbitration process be enjoined. The action was denied, but Peter Seitz, the neutral third arbitrator (along with the owners’ labor adviser, John Gaherin, and Marvin Miller, the executive director of the Players Association), seized the occasion to urge all parties to take the immense issue out of his hands by negotiating their differences. Not a bit of it, the owners responded; mind your own business and press on to a decision. Seitz obliged, and, on December 23, cast the deciding vote that sustained Messersmith and McNally in their grievance. The reserve clause was dead. The owners reacted at once, firing Seitz from his job—an action within their rights under the rules of the arbitration panel. The bad news had come, and the messenger was put to the sword.

The group behavior of the owners—by turns stiff-necked, contradictory, apprehensive, and vengeful, and always accompanied by loud offstage trumpetings of defiance and rage from their small Tarquin minority—sometimes invites irreverence, but the truth remains that the Messersmith ruling violently disrupted their once somnolent nineteenth-century industry. Their worst ancient fear, the family nightmare, had come to pass, and other frights now seemed sure to follow. From the beginning, they had defended the reserve clause—in the courts and in the newspapers and at congressional hearings—by claiming that its removal would invite hundreds of ballplayers, including most of the great stars, to sell themselves each year to the highest bidder, thus assuring an automatic championship to the franchise holder who had the largest bankroll, and also making it certain that no club could hope to maintain the year-to-year personnel and identifying character that preserve fan loyalty. Although there is new evidence every day to suggest that this is not happening, and not about to happen, in either league, the fear of it is still very much alive among the owners, and does much to explain their recent behavior. Their second difficulty is much more concrete. Baseball, they point out, is such a demanding game that the average player must spend four years (far more than in any other sport) at the minor-league and rookie levels before he attains major-league competence and begins to pay off his owner’s considerable investment in him. It would be unconscionable to allow the player to walk away at that moment and sell his services to a rival club.

The owners, having applied unsuccessfully to the United States District Court in Kansas City to have the Messersmith ruling overturned, and having also failed in the same plea in the Circuit Court of Appeals, now slowly tried to come to grips with the horrid new reality. Their Player Relations Committee had been negotiating with a committee of the Players Association in a foot-dragging sort of way since the previous August, and not until last February 11 did the owners come up with their first version of a new reserve clause—free-agent status for a player after nine years’ service in the major leagues (where the average player’s tenure is just over four and a half years). The players, who, of course, had no legal obligation to accept
any
modification of the basic contract-plus-one-year formula, nonetheless agreed in principle that some form of player continuity seemed essential, and suggested a six-year term, with a year’s advance notice if a player then intended to cut loose from his club.

The distance separating the two sides was canyonlike, with an entirely different economic view of things from each rim, and now there came into the discussions a legal dispute of true complexity—the so-called liability issue. Marvin Miller, having asserted the Players Association’s willingness to settle on a minimum tour of duty with a particular ball club, asked what he was expected to do about any player or players who would not agree to such a compromise—who, in fact, would be prepared to sue for damages if their basic contract-plus-one-year rights, achieved in the Messersmith decision, were bargained away. (One player, the notoriously prickly Mike Marshall, of the Dodgers, had already said that he was prepared to fight it out on just those lines.) Not our concern, replied John Gaherin for the owners. All these issues are of concern to
both
groups and have to be faced, said Miller. Then, even as the two sides seemed to be inching closer together, the owners announced the lockout, on the eve of spring training. The stated motive—to forestall another players’ strike—was an empty one, since the Players Association had offered a four-year no-strike pledge while any new form of reserve clause was being tested. It must thus be assumed that the owners’ purpose was simply to submit the negotiations to severe pressure, in hopes that public opinion would turn against the players—as it did, in fact—and that the players, for their part, would become anxious about the impasse and the onrushing season and press their union for a quick compromise. A public-relations firm, T. J. Ross & Associates, was engaged by the owners, and players and reporters were subjected to frequent news releases depicting management’s plight and sweet reasonableness.

From the beginning, spokesmen for the owners, as well as Commissioner Kuhn, had frequently mentioned the rising cost of all baseball operations, the shrinking farm systems, the chronically invalid franchises like San Francisco, Minnesota, Atlanta, and Baltimore, and the unfortunate effects of any large jump in ticket prices. These are problems of some urgency, of course, but the owners’ habitual cries of poverty have always been slightly disingenuous. For one thing, player salaries and pensions still form a very modest portion—less than twenty percent—of the clubs’ annual outlays. Attendance is excellent, totaling 29,790,000 last year, or a hair under the all-time mark of 30,109,000 set two seasons ago, and baseball has just renegotiated its basic television agreements with the networks for a record sum, amounting to ninety-three million dollars payable over the next four years. The clubs’ total radio and TV income now amounts to one and a half times the total paid out for player salaries and retirement benefits. Some franchises lose money, but it is hard to say how many and how much, because most baseball clubs now represent only a special corner of a much larger commercial entity, and because tax write-offs and benefits can assist, or even turn around, an apparently weak performance in any given year. It is not generally known, for instance, that ballplayers can be depreciated, like oil wells or factory buildings, on the corporate ledgers. In any case, the owners have never formally pleaded inability to pay in the course of their negotiations with the Players Association—a plea that is perfectly within their rights but would require them, under the law, to open their books. Neither have the owners hesitated to pluck another favorite old, sweet chord—team loyalty. How will the fans continue to care about our teams, they ask, if players are free to deal for themselves and then heartlessly move along to any club that makes them a good offer? A strange refrain, surely, from the dealers who traded off more than a hundred players between the 1975 and 1976 seasons, who have moved or invented eighteen franchises since the Second World War, and who propose to draft away fifty players from existing clubs to stock the two utterly superfluous new franchises that they now envision.