The Roger Angell Baseball Collection (77 page)

I left soon, walking through the trash and old beer cans and torn-up newspapers on Jersey Street in company with hundreds of murmuring and tired Boston fans. They did not look bitter, and perhaps they felt, as I did, that no team in our time had more distinguished itself in the World Series than the Red Sox—no team, that is, but the Cincinnati Reds.

This Series, of course, was replayed everywhere in memory and conversation through the ensuing winter, and even now its colors still light up the sky. In the middle of November that fall, a Boston friend of mine dropped into a tavern in Cambridge—in the workingman’s, or non-Harvard, end of Cambridge—and found a place at the bar. “It was a Monday night,” he told me later, “and everybody was watching the NFL game on the TV set up at the other end of the bar. There wasn’t a sound in the place, and after I’d been there about ten minutes the old guy next to me put down his beer glass and sort of shook his head and whispered to himself, ‘We never should have taken out Willoughby.’”

*
I have truncated this mind-calcifying detour into legal semantics, because time proved it to be both incomplete and misleading. Shortly after the publication of this account, the news filtered out of the league offices that the Series umpires had been operating under a prior “supplemental instruction” to the interference rules, which stated: “When a catcher and a batter-runner going to first have contact when the catcher is fielding the ball, there is generally no violation and nothing should be called.” This clearly exonerates Larry Barnett and explains his mystifying “It was simply a collision.” What has never been explained is why the existence of this codicil was not immediately divulged to the fans and to the writers covering the Series, thus relieving the umpires of a barrage of undeserved obloquy. We should also ask whether the blanket exculpation of the supplemental instructions really does fit the crucial details of
Armbrister v. Fisk.
Subsequent pondering of the landmark case and several viewings of the Series film have led me to conclude that fairness and good sense would have been best served if Armbrister had been called out and the base runner, Geronimo, returned to first. It is still plain, however, that Carlton Fisk had the best and quickest opportunity to clarify this passionate affair, with a good, everyday sort of peg down to second; irreversibly, he blew it.

—
April 1976

S
PRING AFTERNOONS ARE WARMING
, daylight lingers, and the news of baseball flowers about us once again. The news, that is, of games and scores and standings, of late rallies and shutout pitching, of rejuvenated veterans and startling young rookies—the good old summertime news, and not the news of the other side of the sport, the economics of baseball, which so confused and wearied us during the off-season. The same chilling blight has recently overtaken most major professional team sports; this year’s eruption of labor troubles and money squabbles represented only the newest stage in a long national struggle between athletes and entrepreneurs for the upper hand (or perhaps only an equal hand) in the regulation of their sports and the apportionment of profits. In baseball, however, the collisions of this past winter and early spring were notable for their bitterness and naked hostility, which suggests that a time of decision in these matters may be close at hand. The players’ strike of 1972, which erased the first few days of that season, was an unpleasant but relatively insignificant affair, caused by the owners’ refusal to arbitrate a minor pension issue—which was in fact eventually negotiated and quickly resolved. This year’s difficulties were altogether serious—something close to open warfare. The preseason camps in Florida, Arizona, and California were shut down for seventeen days—almost half the normal spring term—by a lockout called and enforced by the club owners. This year, the disagreement reached such a level of acrimony that for a time the regular season itself seemed threatened: baseball might stop altogether.

The center of it all was a decision handed down last December by a three-man arbitration panel, which ruled that two players, Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, were released from affiliation with their clubs—Messersmith from the Dodgers, McNally from the Montreal Expos—as a result of their having played out their existing contracts plus an additional year, and were now free agents, entitled to sign up with whatever club they wished, at any pay they could command. This affirmation of a seemingly minimal right was in fact a ruling of revolutionary significance—an athletes’
Miranda
decision—for it marked the long-expected end of the ancient “reserve clause,” which had bound every player irrevocably to the club holding his contract, thus fixing his place of employment and insuring that his salary was always ultimately determined by the pleasure of the owner. The decision in the Messersmith case (Dave McNally, a pitcher, had actually retired from baseball, because of a sore arm, by the time the case was settled) may have appeared historically inevitable, but it unleashed a storm of passions and legal complexities. Through the cold-weather months, the baseball hot-stove news mostly concerned the owners’ trips to court to have the arbitrators’ decisions overturned (the pleas were denied); ill-tempered, staccato haggling over the free-agent issue; onerously complex proposals and counteroffers put forward by rival professional negotiators speaking for the owners’ Player Relations Committee and for the Executive Board of the Players Association; lengthy statements of position that only confirmed the deepening division and stalemate; and, finally, the lockout. A fan searching the back pages for some word of Nolan Ryan’s elbow or Billy Martin’s pitching rotation could be forgiven if he sometimes threw down his newspaper in despair.

When the spring camps did at last suddenly open, on order of Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, the still unresolved dispute over the new Basic Agreement—the agreement on which every individual contract is founded, covering everything from meal money to transportation, trading procedures, schedules, and spring-training pay—receded a bit in urgency, only to be replaced by a succession of highly publicized, pugnacious salary negotiations and holdouts involving some of the topmost stars of the game (Messersmith, Tom Seaver, Reggie Jackson, and others), whose money demands soared and swooped in rumored multiples of millions of dollars. These nights, accelerated by the collapse of the reserve system, were watched with avidity by the players and with horrified anxiety by the owners—and with various emotions, as yet imperfectly understood, by the fans. At the same time, there were further commercial surprises, which, taken with the rest, caused the once elegant estate of baseball more and more to resemble a littered, slovenly Oz. The franchise of the San Francisco Giants was lost, then reprieved, then saved, then lost again, and then, at the last possible instant, won back for good. Bill Veeck, the cheerful showman, formed a partnership that purchased the Chicago White Sox, and instantly infuriated his fellow owners (just as they
knew
he would) with the pronouncement that his players would wear shorts on hot summer afternoons on the South Side. The American League announced its expansion to fourteen clubs in 1977; the National League announced its firm resolve to continue at the present twelve-club level, and refused also to consider the scandalous adventure, suggested by the AL, of interleague play.

I am a baseball fan in good standing, and my first reaction on regarding the enormous and unsavory dog’s breakfast that was plunked down before me on the morning of this new season was simply to push back from the table and walk away. A lot of fans, I suspect, may be on the point of leaving the game. Even more of them will try to ignore the whole mess—the lockout, the free-agent issue, the gigantic new salaries, the franchise squabbles—and follow the sport as if it were unchanged, follow it as they did when they were children. This is tempting, I must admit, for it is the game itself—the game inside the lines, as the phrase now has it—that has always most absorbed me. Part of me, much of the fan in me, is attracted to baseball games exactly because they connect me on a long straight line to my own boyhood, and because they so often seem to be the perfect release from the daily world of money, strikes, strife, and complexity. And yet … Somehow, I sense that this can’t work for long—that games considered as pure escape can’t continue to hold us entirely, because we must keep our first and best connections with the world of today. Professional sports now form a noisy and substantial, if irrelevant and distracting, part of that world, and it seems as if baseball games taken entire—off the field as well as on it, in the courts and in the front offices as well as down on the diamonds—may now tell us more about ourselves than they ever did before. Perhaps we should stay here in the gloomy counting house a little longer, then, before we grab our shades and head for the park.

The most radical alteration in the relations between baseball players and baseball owners may in the long run prove to have come not with the Messersmith decision but at the moment when Catfish Hunter signed a multiyear contract to pitch for the Yankees for a total (including various long-term retirement and insurance benefits) of three and a half million dollars. Hunter had been declared a free agent by Peter Seitz, the same arbitrator who later cast the deciding vote in the Messersmith case, but Hunter’s liberation had nothing to do with the reserve clause; Seitz ruled that Catfish was his own man because his former club, the Oakland A’s, had failed to make payments on an insurance policy that was an integral part of his contract. Hunter is one of the two or three best pitchers in baseball today, and the extended, scrambling, knockdown auction in late 1974 among several well-heeled clubs to sign him for almost any sum he cared to mention startled everyone, probably including Catfish himself. Suddenly there seemed to be no limit to the money that a baseball superstar could command—a realization that probably had much to do with the nastiness and anxiety of the negotiations over free-agency between owners and players this year.

Tom Seaver, the Mets’ shining paladin, this spring demanded something in the neighborhood of $275,000 per year over a span of three years—a pay level that caused M. Donald Grant, the chairman of the Mets’ board, to open immediate discussions with the Dodgers about the possibility of a Seaver trade. This move is believed to have been made either in sudden pure anger or as a considered corporate warning to Seaver and other high-priced stars. After a short, tense holdout, Seaver settled for a base of $225,000 a year (he had been getting $170,000), which could come to another $30,000 or $40,000, because of various bonus stipulations, if he sustains his normal high level of performance. Andy Messersmith, after nearly coming to terms with the Yankees, the Padres, and the Angels (he received other offers, too, but many of these were halfhearted publicity gestures), signed with the Atlanta Braves for a three-year, no-cut contract worth about a million dollars. Reggie Jackson, suddenly traded to the Orioles last month by Oakland (with whom he had not yet signed for the current year), has not reported to his new club; he will play in Baltimore, he is reported as saying, only for an extended contract of considerable proportions—say, five years for something like three million dollars. Dick Allen, who in 1973 became the first player to earn a quarter of a million dollars for a single season, has not come to any agreement with his current club, the Phillies. And so on. A decade ago, there were fewer than half a dozen players in the majors who earned over $100,000 per year. Last year, there were three stars (Catfish Hunter, Dick Allen, and Hank Aaron) who earned $200,000 or more per year, and forty-five who earned between $100,000 and $200,000; both groups have grown much larger this year. The world-champion Cincinnati Reds now have two stars, Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan, in the $200,000 class, and two others, Pete Rose and Tony Perez, who earn well over $100,000. (Pete Rose, whom many consider to be the team’s main man, has always seemed to be somewhat slighted by the Reds at contract time.) On the other hand, the
average
pay for a major-league baseball player last year was $46,000. (Salaries for other professional team sports in 1975, according to a survey made by the
Washington Post,
averaged $42,000 for players in the National Football League, $75,000 for players in the National Hockey League, $95,000 for players in the American Basketball Association, and, up on top, $110,000 for players in the National Basketball Association.)

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.