Baseball (17 page)

The owners had their scares over the years, particularly from the Pasquel brothers of Mexico, who in the mid-1940s raided the majors for a few dozen disgruntled players. Most players had scampered back to the majors when threatened with ostracism, but one New York Giant farmhand, Danny Gardella, claimed he was blacklisted and settled out of court in 1949, gaining $60,000. In a separate case, in 1953, a minor-leaguer, George Toolson, sued the Yankees, claiming he was being held illegally in their farm system, but the Supreme Court upheld its 1922 ruling that baseball was not subject to federal antitrust laws.

In February of 1968, Miller negotiated the first collective bargaining agreement in professional sports, raising the minimum salary from $6,000 to $10,000 and lowering the maximum salary cut from 25 percent to 20 percent. For all their success, the owners had reason to be nervous in 1970, noticing that the Supreme Court had studiously avoided giving the same leniency to football, boxing, or the motion picture industry.

For the first time in the history of the business, a star like Flood was willing to test the system. Thinking his clients were a generation or two behind the labor movement, Miller and the intense, artistic center fielder sized each other up. Miller warned Flood that the owners would try to destroy his career if he pursued legal action, but Flood insisted on going ahead. Flood then met with some of his peers, members of the board of the Players Association, whose main concern seemed to be that Flood was acting out of racial motivation. He had to assure them that he was seeking labor justice, although he would eventually compare himself to “slaves and pieces of property,” shipped to another plantation with no say in the matter. Flood caught his peers' attention by giving up the Phillies' offer of a salary of $90,000 and vowing to sit out the 1970 season to pursue his case.

Flood lost one round in Federal District Court in New York but committed what was left of his money to an appeal. His family life
was falling apart, and he fled to Copenhagen, Denmark, where he waited for news from the association and the lawyers. In 1971 he was offered $110,000, half of it up front, by Robert Short, the owner of the Washington Senators, who admired Flood as a player and a man. But Flood had nothing left. Batting .200 in his first 13 games, and no longer able to patrol center field, Flood bolted for Europe, keeping Short's advance money. For the rest of the 1970s he remained an exile, running a bar and playing guitar on the Spanish island of Majorca or in Copenhagen. He finished with a career batting average of .293 as well as seven consecutive Gold Gloves as the best defensive center fielder in his league.

His case moved upward. In 1972, represented by Arthur J. Goldberg, a former associate justice of the Supreme Court and United States ambassador to the United Nations, Flood reached the Supreme Court. The only players to speak on Flood's behalf were Hank Greenberg, a former owner; Frank Robinson, Flood's childhood friend and former teammate; and Jackie Robinson, visibly weakened from diabetes, months before his death. Many other players testified for the opposite view.

“I thought if the reserve clause went, baseball was going,” Joe Garagiola, the broadcaster and organizer of a charity for indigent players, ruefully admitted many years later. “I was so wrong I can't begin to tell you. It took a lot of guts for him to do what he did.”

In June of 1972, the Supreme Court, by a vote of five to three, with one abstention, upheld the lower court. Justice Harry A. Blackmun delivered the majority opinion that it was not necessary to overturn the “positive inaction” of Congress over the years.

The justices' reasoning seemed tortured and sentimental, as often happens when learned and powerful Americans confront sport, somehow assuming they should like it and endorse it, straining to seem like regular fellows. Perhaps the justices had bought into the old Spalding mythology of baseball as the backbone of America, and feared the country would stop functioning if players somehow had the same vocational mobility as electricians or schoolteachers. The justices seemed to sense the illogic of the 1922 decision; they just couldn't deal with it.

“I don't think I've ever read such criticism of a majority decision of the court by the very justices who formed the
majority
,” wrote Miller, who seemed to have as much fun twitting the Supreme Court as he did the owners.

The dissenting opinion was delivered by Justice Thurgood Marshall: “Americans love baseball as they love all sports. Perhaps we become so enamored of athletics that we assume that they are foremost in the minds of legislators as well as fans. We must not forget, however, that there are only some 600 major league baseball players. Whatever muscle they might have been able to muster by combining forces with other athletes has been greatly impaired by the manner in which this Court has isolated them. It is this Court that has made them impotent, and this Court should correct its error.”

With Flood living overseas, it seemed that he had lost his quixotic tilt at the national institution. The players had other weapons. In the spring of 1972, before the Flood decision, they had voted, 663–10, to go out on a strike that would last thirteen days and delayed the opening of the season. The issues were cost-of-living increases to health and pension plans. Miller also had what he considered a better and bigger plan for the next negotiations, having studied the Uniform Player Contract:

“The first time I read it, I did a double take,” Miller would write. “What I had been told—and what the
players believed
—was that once a player signed his first contract, he no longer had control over his career. But the plain words of this section of the contract, as I read it, gave a club a one-year option on a player's services after his contract expired.
Nothing more.
It provided that if a club and player did not agree on a new contract to replace the one that had terminated, the club could renew the old contract for
one additional year.
”

The owners and their attorneys counted on the Flood case to maintain their hold on the players. They never saw change coming. In 1974, one of the best pitchers in the game, Jim (Catfish) Hunter of Oakland, believed his contract had been violated by the volatile owner, Charles O. Finley. Angry when he discovered he could not get a tax deduction for annual payments of $50,000 to Hunter's insurance policy, Finley had held back on the installments.

The case was handed to a professional arbitrator, Peter Seitz, who declared Hunter a free agent, setting up a huge migration of club officials to Hunter's home in rural North Carolina. On New Year's Eve 1974, he signed a five-year, $3.5 million contract with the Yankees.

Hunter's defection was essentially a technicality, based on Fin-ley's impulsive decision not to pay the insurance. A year later, Miller and the players had a more broad-ranging case: According to Miller's reading of the standard contract, Andy Messersmith had played out the option year on his contract with the Dodgers by not signing a contract, and was free to market himself to all clubs. Dave McNally, a former star pitcher who had retired, joined Messer-smith in the legal action.

Once again, the owners allowed the case to get into arbitration with Peter Seitz, who ruled, on December 23, 1975, that Messer-smith and McNally were free agents: “There is nothing in section 10 (a) which, explicitly, expresses agreement that the Players Contract can be renewed for any period beyond the first renewal year.” The owners fired him as arbitrator “before the ink was dry,” as Marvin Miller put it.

As a result of the Messersmith case, there was a lockout in the spring of 1976, followed by a contract that recognized free agency for players after five years of major league service. Messersmith, who had made $90,000 the previous season, promptly signed a three-year contract for $1.75 million with Atlanta in the spring of 1976, while McNally resumed his retirement. Baseball would never be the same.

The total major league payrolls would soar from $32 million in 1976 to $284 million a decade later. Seitz soon told reporters that the ruling could have been avoided had the “stubborn and stupid” owners attempted to negotiate. Years later, while professing personal admiration for the late Mr. Seitz, Bowie Kuhn would label the decision a “fundamental mistake,” claiming that Seitz had displayed “a barely concealed anti-management bias.”

Cable television money was in the air, and the players wanted to share it. In 1981, they staged a fifty-day strike over the owners' attempt
to seek compensation for players lost to free agency. The owners settled when their strike insurance ran out.

Miller retired by the end of 1982, succeeded by Ken Moffett, a mediator familiar with the business, but Moffett was soon dismissed by the players. Miller came back for a while, followed by Donald Fehr, whose name was appropriately pronounced “Fear,” a former legal counsel for the association. The average salary kept jumping from $51,000 in 1976 to $371,000 in 1985 and $489,000 in 1989 and $880,000 in 1991.

“I can remember that when I first came up, my goal was to make $100,000,” Nolan Ryan, the great strikeout artist, said in 1979. “That was what I had always hoped for. Mickey Mantle made $100,000 and that was it. Nobody ever made above that. It's kind of hard to believe what has happened the past three years in baseball.”

Gone were the days of walking unarmed into Branch Rickey's Cave of the Winds and being told, “Take it or leave it,” however grammatically and scripturally correct. In the new money age, players sent in a proxy, a hired gunslinger, an 800-pound gorilla. An agent.

At first, general managers insisted they did not need to negotiate with agents, but, by the end of the 1980s, agents were formally accepted as part of the business. Among the best was Scott Boras, a former minor league player and medical litigation attorney, known for the elaborate books he prepares for negotiations, containing statistics and other arguments for the strengths of his clients. Some agents were better at personal hand-holding of their clients, others were better at negotiating contracts, but they became a powerful presence in the new money age.

None of this did Curt Flood any good. He returned from Europe at the end of the 1970s, broadcasting for Finley for a short time, but essentially out of money and energy. In 1982, Flood went to Cooperstown when Frank Robinson was inducted into the Hall of Fame. Robinson, the first black manager in the majors, paused in a gracious speech to acknowledge his friend:

“He was the first ballplayer who made sacrifices for free agency,”
Robinson said. “I don't think players today have given him the proper credit.”

Beset by financial and marital problems, Flood had a hard final decade. He stopped drinking in 1986, but after years of smoking he came down with throat cancer. His medical bills of over $1 million were paid by the Baseball Assistance Team (BAT), a charity formed by former players like Garagiola and Ralph Branca.

In 1993, Flood was praised for having pushed baseball toward the age of free agency. “If that's my legacy, I'm proud to have been a part of it,” he said. “It turned out to be not that bad: Attendance is better; television revenue is greater. I can't see where free agency has been so negative.”

Curt Flood died on January 20, 1997, at the age of fifty-nine. The average major league salary that year was $1.3 million.

I
n 1996, the New York Yankees won their first pennant since 1981 and their first World Series since 1978. In the entitled world of Yankee fans, this is known as a very long time. The next day, a New York sportswriter took off on holiday, looking to get far away from the triumphal roar of Yankee Stadium. In the chilly courtyard outside the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, the sportswriter (me, that is) noticed not one but two Yankee caps, both worn by people speaking Italian. As they always do, the Italians looked fashionably chic and trendy, even in American ball caps.

This trend would continue at the next stop, London. Yankee caps, with that familiar logo of interlocking “N” and “Y,” were ubiquitous, not just in the tourist sections but at working-class tube stops like West Ham, east of the city. Young people, sometimes of color, displayed the Yankee cap as a symbol of connection with the rest of the world.

The Yankee caps were sometimes an anachronistic green or red but mostly they were navy blue, the color of power, the color of success, the color of Ruth and Gehrig, DiMaggio and Mantle. All over the rapidly shrinking globe, Yankee caps caught up with the insignia of the fabled Red Ox of basketball (Michael Jordan's Chicago Bulls) as a sign of international sporting supremacy.

When the sportswriter got home to New York, he realized the Yankees were once again fulfilling the great polar needs of sport. Quite like America itself, the Yankees were either classic champions, envied and admired all over the world, or else they were haughty oppressors, resented by the downtrodden masses.

Yankee fans were relieved to find the moon and stars finally back in kilter, but Yankee-haters, in their own tortured way, felt relieved to finally be oppressed again in familiar fashion. As George Orwell put it, “If you want a vision of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.”

Over the decades, the Yankees have managed to control or discourage just about every team in baseball, almost all the time. This had been going on ever since the two colonels, Ruppert and Huston, took advantage of Harry Frazee's need for money in early 1920, acquiring Babe Ruth for what seemed like a pittance even at the time.

The Yankees ruled the American League, winning six pennants in the 1920s, five in the 1930s, five in the 1940s, eight in the 1950s, five in the 1960s, three in the 1970s, and one in 1981. Then, after fourteen biblical lean years, they would win three more pennants in the 1990s and then three more at the very outset of the twenty-first century.

They did it with cold-blooded business sense, sheer skill, plodding callousness, outright panache, and what can only be described as Yankee luck. Jacob Ruppert's brewery acumen taught him to keep costs down and browbeat labor, and he hired a couple of cold-eyed men, first Ed Barrow, later George M. Weiss, to administer the financial thumbscrews. Lou Gehrig, the loyal captain, was perennially underpaid, but when Joe DiMaggio fought for more money early in his career, Barrow turned loose the yapping mastiffs of the sporting press to bloody DiMaggio's reputation.