October 1964 (50 page)

Then, in 1967, the team came together. Viewed by his employers in San Francisco as a morose, somewhat alien malingerer, Orlando Cepeda blossomed on this racially harmonious team, and at critical moments he seemed to carry the whole team with his bat. Roger Maris came over from the Yankees to play for two more years, delighted to be liberated from the declining Yankees and out of the city he had come to hate, to play now, instead, in a city where he felt at ease, and where expectations of what he could do were far less grandiose. Still bothered by a bad wrist, he was no longer a power hitter, but he was an excellent all-around player, and he gave the Cardinals what was probably the best outfield in the league. Mike Shannon, who became his close friend, went to third base, and Dal Maxvill became one of the best shortstops in the league. In addition, Steve Carlton, Nelson Briles, and Ray Washburn were finally surfacing as dependable starting pitchers, with Carlton showing signs of potential greatness. The 1967 team, led on the field and off by Gibson and Cepeda, won the National League pennant by ten games. Gibson, in particular, loved playing with Cepeda, who drove in 111 runs in 1967. When Gibson was pitching and it was time for the bus to leave the hotel for the park, Red Schoendienst would look at his watch and give the word to the driver to go. But Gibson would check out who was there and who was not there, and if Cepeda was not aboard, he would stop the bus. “No way we go until Cepeda is on board,” he would say. No one contradicted Bob Gibson on the day he pitched, and so the bus would wait.

In 1968, what was essentially the same team won by almost the same margin. The Cardinal players were uncommonly proud to be part of those teams, for they won not by dint of pure talent or pure power—San Francisco was far richer in terms of pure talent. Rather, they won through intelligence, playing hard and aggressively, and because they had a sense of purpose that cut across racial lines in a way that was still extremely unusual in the world of sports.

That special cohesiveness came to an end after the 1968 World Series. There was a glimmer of what was to come, a
Sports Illustrated
cover near the end of the season about them as the most expensive team in baseball, and revealing the salaries of each of the starting nine players and their manager. Although the total was only $607,000—less than what a utility player would get some twenty-five years later—it seemed a fortune at the time, and it changed the way the team was perceived by sportswriters, by some fans, and, in the end, by their owner. (The salaries hardly seem that grand now: Maris—$75,000, McCarver—$60,000, Gibson—$85,000, Shannon—$40,000, Brock—$70,000, Cepeda—$80,000, Flood—$72,500, Javier—$45,000, Maxvill—$37,500, and Schoendienst, the manager—$42,000). Bob Burnes, the sports columnist for the
St. Louis Globe Democrat,
a man not known by the players for working the locker room hard or for his personal knowledge of the players, wrote a column after their bitter final-game World Series defeat in which he theorized that the Cardinals had lost because they had thought more about their clothes than about winning. That column struck many of the players as perhaps the stupidest thing ever written about them, and thirty years later they still seethed about it.

In the off-season after the 1968 season, Gussie Busch, deeply offended by the rising salary demands of his players, and by the growing pressure for a strong union and by a brief strike, made the first of several mistakes that helped destroy his own team. What may have set him off as much as anything else was the rejection by Curt Flood of an offer for $77,500. Flood told Busch that if he wanted to sign a player who was the best center fielder in baseball and a .300 hitter as well, it would cost him $90,000, “which is not seventy-seven five, and is not eighty-nine thousand, nine hundred and ninety-nine.” Flood got his contract, but to Busch, who remembered how he had helped Flood out earlier when he had financial troubles, this was one more sign of the player as ingrate. In late March 1969, Busch called a special meeting of the team; he walked into the Cardinal locker room during spring training, and, accompanied by aides from The Brewery and by the press, whose members were there at his specific invitation, he dressed down his players. It was a memorable, humiliating experience for the team, an odd, rambling, somewhat incoherent speech in which the principal theme was that the players were cheating their fans. The owner himself seemed to think that the Cardinals were a nonprofit organization, a kind of athletic charity he sponsored out of civic pride. He outlined all that The Brewery had done for the players and for baseball, how much it had invested in the facilities in St. Louis. The person who was taking the risk each season, he said, was the owner, not the players. “You don’t put two million people into a stadium by wishful thinking,” he said. “It takes hundreds of people, working every day to make it possible for eighteen men to play a game of baseball that lasts for about two hours.” Busch reminded the players of the investment made in the new ball park by civic-minded businessmen. Why, he himself was seventy years old, and the last thing in the world he needed, he said, was a new ball park. So much was being done for the players, he said, and they did not seem to appreciate it.

The fans, he said, were beginning to turn away from the sport. “If you don’t already know it, I can tell you right now—from the letters, phone calls, and conversations we’ve had recently—that fans are no longer as sure as they were before about their high regard for the game and the players.” He then complained to them about their outside business activities. The players, he said, had lost touch. “Too many fans are saying our players are getting fat ... that they now only think of money ... and less of the game itself. ... Fans are telling us now that if we intend to raise prices to pay for the high salaries and so on and on, they will stop coming to the games, they will not watch and will not listen. They say they can do other things with their time and their money.” He ended with a peroration about the fans: “I urge you to watch your attitudes. I plead with you not to kill the enthusiasm of the fans and the kids for whom you have become such idols. They are the ones who make you popular. They are the ones who make your salary and your pension possible.” Then he urged them to go out and show the world that they were still champions. Then, just to make sure that the message got through, the Cardinals traded Cepeda, whom the other players thought the heart of the team, to Atlanta for Joe Torre, who was a good player but who did not arrive in St. Louis under optimum circumstances. The 1969 team was clearly a better team than the Mets, who went on to win the division, but it was an embittered team that played well below its potential.

The whole new thrust of baseball—a more aggressive union, higher salaries, and, soon, greater player freedom—was alien to Gussie Busch, who saw the Cardinals as
his
success, not the success of his players. He was a businessman and he had made a fatal mistake—he had turned the salary dispute with his players into a personal matter. He had allowed his very considerable ego to get between him and what was good for the ball club. That meant he was sure to be the loser. In February 1972 he gave orders to trade Steve Carlton, then on the threshold of being one of the greatest left-handers in baseball history, because of a ten-thousand-dollar difference in salary negotiations; a few weeks later he got rid of Jerry Reuss, a promising young left-handed pitcher, because Reuss had refused to shave off his mustache and because he too had held out.

But perhaps the most important trade the Cardinals made or tried to make was one after the 1969 season, when they tried to package McCarver, Curt Flood, and several other players to the Phillies for, among others, Richie Allen. At that moment Flood was thirty-one, the best center fielder in baseball, and a career .293 hitter. He had asked for $100,000. Busch, already angered by the previous set of negotiations, had had enough. As happens in these matters, Curt Flood found out that he was no longer working for the St. Louis Cardinals when a local reporter called to find out what he thought about the trade. Curt Flood was the quiet man. Bob Gibson, his friend and longtime road roommate, remembered a certain delicacy about him, a sensibility and an aesthetic that could easily have been ground down by the system—not just of baseball, but of race in America in those years. Baseball was a tough place: other men like him, talented enough to play baseball, had not been strong enough and had unraveled under the pressure of the life around them. What saved Curt Flood, Gibson believed, was a rare inner toughness. It allowed him to survive and triumph in the racist world of minor-league baseball, in which he had never let local prejudice and cruelty define him. He went on to play for more than a decade in the majors. At first his inner toughness was something that perhaps only his teammates and some of the opposing players saw, although the Philadelphia Phillies, the St. Louis ownership, and indeed the rest of organized baseball would eventually learn how determined and willful he could be.

“If I had been a foot-shuffling porter, they might at least have given me a pocket watch,” he wrote of finding out he was being traded to the Phillies. At the time Flood, just thirty-two, son of poor people who worked myriad menial jobs to support their six children, did the unthinkable: he refused to report. It was what many an established player, unexpectedly traded, had thought of doing. In retrospect, though, it was not surprising that the first baseball player to draw the line on the reserve clause was black. Blacks felt far more alienated from the norms of society than did whites, and in the case of athletes, they were far more sensitive to being thought of as chattel.

White athletes, often privileged and pampered since they were teenagers, were rarely skeptical about those who had treated them, on the surface, at least, so lovingly; they tended to accept society and the game at face value. Flood himself wrote of Stan Musial, a man he greatly admired, that Musial often said loving things about the game and the Cardinal organization, “not because he felt it was politic to do so, but because he believed every word he spoke.” The black players emerging in the sports world in this new era were different. In basketball, a professional sport steadily gaining in national acceptance, the leadership for a model professional athlete’s union had already come from a generation of exceptionally thoughtful black athletes. Almost all had been to college and many were graduates of the nation’s best schools, whereas most baseball players tended to be country boys, their political viewpoints fixed when they were teenagers, and thus they were far more malleable to the owners.

Unlike Gibson, Brock, and White, Curt Flood had never been to college, but like them he was intelligent, and driven. He was a serious painter who had something of an ancillary career doing portrait work. He listened carefully, not just to what people said but to what they did not say. He was articulate about any number of things that grated on black players in those days—the great differences in endorsements, the wariness of some white reporters to interview black athletes and to treat them with respect in newspaper articles. In the past, ballplayers who got into fights on the field and who were scrappy and verbal were considered tough; Curt Flood brought a whole new definition of toughness to the game. There had been certain tipoffs in the past as to what kind of man he was, a willingness to play in exceptional pain, and a willingness to stand in against Don Drysdale—who, along with Gibson, was one of the two most terrifying pitchers in baseball, a man who loved to throw at hitters, and who said of Curt Flood that he was the toughest out for him in baseball.

Flood was the first to challenge what to him was a demonstrably unfair labor law, one that bestowed all rights on the owners at the expense of the players. “I want to go out like a man instead of a bottle cap,” Flood told Marvin Miller, who became the head of the baseball players’ union.

When Flood mounted his lonely challenge to baseball’s reserve clause, Miller was cautious at first, and played the devil’s advocate to see if he would have the staying power for so hard a struggle. Miller was aware from his own experiences of the pressure that would be brought to bear on Flood by the owners and by the commissioner. Miller went down the list of things that could happen, and found that Flood remained determined to make his challenge. He was, thought Miller, a flinty young man. It did not surprise Miller that the first challenge had come from a black player on the Cardinals. The Cardinals struck him as being different from other teams in the way they had managed to deal with the issue of race: the black players whom he had first met on the Cardinals struck him as men of exceptional character—good baseball players, but by no means only baseball players.

Flood’s friends, such as Tim McCarver, with whom he had played and with whom he was being traded, tried to impress on him the serious consequences of what he was doing. “You’ll never get another job in baseball,” McCarver told his friend. “I know that,” Flood answered. Miller asked Flood to come before a meeting of all the players’ representatives, and after a long tough session in which they asked him hard questions—such as what he would do if the owners offered him a lot of money to drop the case—he said he would go forward. “I can’t be bought,” he said. Tom Haller of the Dodgers asked how much of what drove him was race. After all, Haller pointed out, it was a time of black militance. Flood thought it a fair question and answered that yes, what black players went through was often worse and more difficult than what white players did, but what he was doing was for
all
baseball players. It was time, he said, to draw the line. No other profession in the country left talented men so little control over their own destiny and deprived them of true market value.

So Curt Flood did not play for Philadelphia. Instead he sat out the season and went ahead with a lawsuit that went all the way to the Supreme Court, where he finally lost a close decision (the more conservative Nixon appointees tended to vote against him), but in so doing he began the process that would soon bring baseball players free agency, and thereby change the face and structure of baseball negotiations.