Baseball (16 page)

Losing money in St. Louis, Veeck reasoned that proud old Baltimore, still brooding since losing its major league franchise after 1902, would be an ideal site for his team. Since then, baseball had frozen in place for half a century, still concentrated in the northeast quadrant. At mid-century, California still seemed too far to move twenty-five players and their bats. The traditional overnight train rides from St. Louis to Boston in midsummer, with hot coal smoke blowing back into the Pullman cars (veterans below, rookies above), were long enough, without contemplating a road trip clear across the continent. The sturdy little two-engine airplanes that a few teams had begun to use for some trips were not capable of supporting a transcontinental schedule, over the Rockies. The Pacific Northwest seemed exotic; the Southwest was just emerging; and the Southeast was still getting over the Civil War.

Veeck's business logic was perfect but his fellow owners were committed to making him go broke right there in St. Louis, and they could make it stick, courtesy of the United States Supreme Court. In a nation that gave lip service to free enterprise, the industry was still protected by the 1922 decision that baseball was a game, not a business. The owners played a cutthroat game with Veeck, openly regulating interstate commerce by allowing only their friends to move.

When Milwaukee, still suffering from having lost its major league status after 1901, began making overtures for a team, Veeck might have moved there. Instead, the owners tipped off one of their good friends, Lou Perini, the construction operator, whose Boston Braves were losing money. In March of 1953, Perini was given hasty permission to beat Veeck to Milwaukee.

On opening day in early April, the Braves' damp, funky old park near the Charles River was vacant and desolate, and so were Braves fans, who could still remember Rabbit Maranville's artistry at shortstop in 1914 and had loved the pitching of Warren Spahn and Johnny Sain. (“Spahn and Sain and pray for rain” was the hopeful ditty of the Braves fan.)

Thus began a modern American phenomenon—the grumpy, aging fan who swears he has not been to a ball game since the Braves (Browns, A's, Dodgers, Giants, Senators, etc.) left town. But for every disgruntled fan back east, there were new fans in new corners of the United States, delighted to finally be labeled Major League. The reception was marvelous in Milwaukee, with the Braves leading the league in attendance five straight years from 1953 through 1957, going over 2 million the last four years. Ownership was able to develop young players, including Henry Aaron, and the Braves would win pennants in 1957 and 1958.

The owners proudly watched Veeck go broke in St. Louis, barely drawing a million fans in the three years from 1951 through 1953. The owners then magnanimously agreed to let the Browns move to Baltimore, so long as Veeck did not go with them. Baltimore, with its long and parochial memories, proved an excellent choice, just as Veeck had known it would. The Philadelphia A's, decimated by Connie Mack's fire sales and now under new ownership, moved to Kansas City in 1955 and promptly drew 1,393,054 fans in their first season, second only to the Yankees.

The profits from the three moves were not lost on Walter O'Malley, a lawyer who had gone to work for the Brooklyn Dodgers and gradually picked up some shares in the team, finally forcing Rickey out in 1950. The Dodgers led the league in attendance five times after the war and were solvent mainly because
O'Malley had been quick to negotiate income from television rights, but he could see himself making considerably more money somewhere else.

O'Malley soon pulled off one of the great real estate deals in the history of American sports. Insisting he wanted to replace dumpy but vibrant Ebbets Field with a new stadium in downtown Brooklyn or in Queens, O'Malley really had his eye on Los Angeles. First, he talked the Wrigley family, which owned the Cubs, into trading its minor league Los Angeles franchise to him. Then O'Malley charmed the mayor of Los Angeles into deeding him a ravine on the northern edge of downtown. Wild and crazy spendthrift that he was, O'Malley even promised to build a ballpark with his own money. He knew building a ballpark was a mere operating expense. Land was the main thing.

Next, O'Malley informed Horace Stoneham, the owner of the Giants, of this wonderful opportunity out west. The once proud Giants had slipped to New York's third team, partially because they played too many day games, mainly to give Stoneham more time at night to drink. The Dodgers and Giants, with their heritage going back into the 1880s, played their respective last home games before sullen, modest crowds in 1957.

In California, the Dodgers would play in the football stadium, the Coliseum, while awaiting their new ballpark in Chavez Ravine. Left-handed Duke Snider, remembering the snug right field at Ebbets Field, took one look at the miles of open space in right field in the lopsided Coliseum, and he quietly died inside.

The Giants played in Seals Stadium for two seasons while awaiting the building of their new ballpark, at Candlestick Point a few miles down the peninsula. City slickers from the East, the Giants owners had agreed to the new site, a bayside promontory, during an inspection visit on a warm and sunny high noon. They soon learned that every afternoon a savage gale screeched over the western hills, lashing Candlestick Point with full fury. The signature sound at 4:00 P
.
M. in Candlestick Park would be beer cans clattering down the concrete steps. Fans would bring blankets and down coats to night games, but were rarely warm.

With baseball finally on the West Coast, the two leagues still consisted of eight teams apiece, which meant the talent ratio was higher in the National League because of black stars like Mays, Aaron, Frank Robinson, Clemente, Bob Gibson, and Ernie Banks. Mickey Mantle, Al Kaline, and Brooks Robinson came along in this era, along with Sandy Koufax, a wild left-hander who came up with his hometown Brooklyn Dodgers, finally becoming the greatest pitcher of his generation, albeit in Los Angeles.

For better or worse, America was expanding—and so was baseball. Inevitably, the country was too large to permit baseball to remain at sixteen teams. Branch Rickey, the ancient sage, represented various cities eager to join the major leagues in a new entity, the Continental League. Rickey, who had prospered from baseball's exemption from antitrust legislation, now took the other side, lobbying Congress to repeal the 1922 Supreme Court decision that bound players to their clubs for life. Before Congress could pass any such legislation, the owners saw the wisdom of Rickey's argument and voted to expand in 1961.

The Griffith family was allowed to move its team from Washington to the Twin Cities, to be known as the Minnesota Twins, and two new teams were formed from an expansion draft—the new Washington Senators and the Los Angeles Angels. The American League owners were so inadvertently generous in exposing what they considered to be marginal talent in the 1961 expansion draft that National League owners vowed they would never let such a calamity happen to them. When two more teams were formed for 1962, the owners sheltered their best prospects on minor league rosters, leaving only culls and rejects to be drafted by the two new teams.

For the first three years, the Houston Colt .45s, named after the six-shooter that helped win the West, played in a rickety outdoor park, braving heat, humidity, and Texas-sized mosquitoes. I will always remember Richie Ashburn, a wise old outfielder with the New York Mets, demonstrating how he sloshed insect repellent all over him before a twi-night doubleheader in that malarial setting.

The theme park changed in 1965, with the team renamed the
Astros, in homage to Houston's space industry. Instead of exploring outer space, the Astros hunkered down under a roof, in the Astrodome, locally called the Eighth Wonder of the World. The builders had installed a grass field under a glass roof, but the glare from the sun blinded the players so badly that the roof had to be painted, as a result of which the grass promptly died. The faulty planning led to a series of green carpets for the playing surface, and ultimately to a product called AstroTurf, which produced erratic bounces and leg injuries, most notably the annoying phenomenon called “turf toe,” from stubbing the toes on the ersatz lawn. Artificial turf, a downright blight on the game, would take more than a quarter of a century to eradicate.

Speaking of blight, the other expansion team was even worse than the one in Houston. The New York Mets—homage to a nineteenth-century team, the Metropolitans—felt the need to emphasize the glorious National League tradition. The front office accumulated old Brooklyn Dodgers plus other grizzled veterans, all of them past their prime, and for a manager hired Casey Stengel, who had won 10 pennants in 12 years with the Yankees.

This nostalgia exercise was responsible for the worst team in the history of baseball. The Mets lost 120 of 160 games but otherwise their first season was a joyous homecoming in the rusting, pigeon-befouled Polo Grounds. Stengel's rubbery face and caustic truths about his team (“We're a fraud”) helped draw 1 million fans. From the start, the Mets captured a portion of New York fans away from the Yankees, who were merely winning their third consecutive pennant, plus the World Series.

All the old certainties were gone, including the old 154-game schedule that mandated four trips to every city. The new 162-game schedule became controversial in 1961, when Roger Maris of the Yankees hit 61 homers, thereby breaking Babe Ruth's record of 60. At first, Ford Frick, now the commissioner (and a former ghostwriter for Ruth), suggested that both records be recognized because of the unequal lengths of the seasons, but eventually all records were based on a full season, whether 154 or 162 games.

The major leagues continued to spread over the continent, with
the Braves deserting Milwaukee, where the novelty had worn off, and moving in 1966 to Atlanta, which was just becoming a major American city. By 1998, there would be thirty major league franchises, including teams across the border in Toronto and Montreal, but only after a major challenge to the way the business was operated.

B
y the mid-1960s, Curt Flood of the St. Louis Cardinals was considered the best defensive center fielder in baseball, better even than the aging Willie Mays. He was also one of the many socially conscious African-American players in the most stimulating locker room in the major leagues in the 1960s, with vocal and intelligent players like Bill White, Bob Gibson, and Lou Brock. All but Gibson had been traded from their first teams and understood the cold business of their sport, yet perhaps three pennants had given them a false sense of security.

After the 1969 season, Flood was stunned when the Cardinals' management traded him to Philadelphia—nothing personal, just another of those trades that are said to improve both teams. Flood had played in St. Louis long enough to know he liked it there, and did not want to be shuffled anywhere without his approval.

Flood was something of an artist who, in the midnight hours when he could not unwind, would draw sketches of people. An oil rendering of August A. Busch, Jr., the owner of the Cardinals, signed by Flood (but perhaps completed by an artist in California), hung in the Busch yacht, perhaps leading Flood to believe he was a member of some mythical Cardinal family.

Many other ballplayers over the years, whether white or black or Hispanic, had felt powerless when suddenly uprooted by a trade. Flood asked Commissioner Bowie Kuhn to cancel the trade but Kuhn refused. Given the owners' exemption from antitrust laws, Flood did not appear to have any options to void the trade, but in 1969 some Americans were not putting up with rules or traditions they considered unjust. They wanted to sit farther up in the bus.

Besides, Flood had resources that had not existed a generation or two earlier—a union, a real union. In 1966, the Major League Baseball Players Association had hired Marvin Miller, forty-eight, the chief economist and assistant to the president of the United Steelworkers, as the executive director. Used to dealing with hardened
steel industry attorneys, Miller got the feeling the baseball owners had never quite met anybody like him.

“Essentially, it seemed to me, Miller had a deep hatred and suspicion of the American right and of American capitalism,” Kuhn would write in 1987. “And what could be more the prototype of what he hated than professional baseball, with its rich, lordly owners and its players shackled by the reserve system.”

There was another way to look at Miller: he was a labor leader, whose tactics and point of view were familiar to leaders in other industries. “To the owners, the union in 1966 was an aberration, a temporary irritation,” Miller would write, years later. “Surely, they thought, once they applied pressure, the players would give up and I would be gone, and in a very short time. And who could blame them for such beliefs? They had ridden over every single challenge to their absolute authority and control for almost a century.”

Miller recognized a more insidious problem: most baseball players accepted the owners' line that the reserve clause was needed to stabilize the business. This acceptance cut across educational and racial lines. Going back to the days of Albert Spalding and the forging of baseball as the American pastime, even players who came from a union background generally thought of union activity in baseball as vaguely unpatriotic. Like many Americans who buy the malarkey and vote against their own self-interest, the players tended to see themselves as samurai or cowboys, performing a noble act, in the American blend of open spaces, free enterprise, capitalism, patriotism. Their motto could have been: Don't fence me in.

Handicapped by the players' own ambivalence, Miller was trying to improve on the modest advances by earlier versions of unions. In 1946 a lawyer, Robert Murphy, helped found the American Baseball Guild, which forced the owners into providing pensions, a minimum salary of $5,000 a year, a maximum pay cut of 25 percent, and spring training expenses of $25 a week. Seven years later, the players, led by Ralph Kiner and Allie Reynolds, hired a New York labor lawyer, J. Norman Lewis, prying loose 60 percent of the broadcast revenues from the World Series and the All-Star Game for their pension fund. But in 1954, the players switched to
Robert C. Cannon, a municipal judge in Milwaukee, whose salary was paid by the owners. By 1966, the minimum salary had grown exactly $1,000 in twenty years.