Five Seasons: A Baseball Companion (49 page)

The true feat of this past baseball summer—a development far more startling than a World Series sweep or a sudden batting title or any other miracle afield—was the drafting and acceptance of a revolutionary four-year pact between the owners and the players, which was drawn up, in memorandum form, on July 12 and subsequently affirmed by the Players Association, by the owners’ Player Relations Committee, and, eventually, by a binding majority of seventeen of the twenty-four major-league clubs. Very little public attention was given to the significance of this event at the time, because the headlines and news accounts concentrated on the most unusual and most immediately interesting of the document’s subclauses, which was a system establishing the drafting and readmission to the game of free agents—players who would sever their connection with their existing clubs at the end of this season. Such a system, to be sure, was urgently necessary, since the pool of coming free agents—there were twenty-five of them in the end—included a number of the game’s most expensive stars and prime talents, such as Reggie Jackson, Bobby Grich, Don Gullett, Joe Rudi, Rollie Fingers, and Dave Cash. The “reentry draft” (a terrific space-age locution) that took place just after the World Series at the Plaza Hotel in New York, thus began the most interesting redistribution of talent in the history of the game.

The reentry draft, however, was only one part of the pact, which was in fact a four-year renewal of the Basic Agreement governing every aspect of player-owner relations, including salary minimums, salary arbitration, retirement benefits, and so on—and, most significantly, free agency and trading rights. The new provisions in the last two areas call for immediate free agency, on request, for any player who has completed six years with a major-league club, and establish his right to demand a trade after five years’ service with one club. “Repeater rights” also establish a player’s privilege to proceed from trade demand to free agency, from free agency to free agency, and so forth, in various spans of five years or three years. The system appears straightforward and almost unarguably fair to all parties, and yet these are precisely the issues that profoundly divided the owners and the Players Association last winter and spring, and ultimately led to the bitter, owner-enforced lockout that delayed the opening of the spring-training camps by about three weeks last March. The signing of this agreement is a cause for rejoicing.

The accord was reached because the rival negotiators—Marvin Miller, who is the executive director of the Players Association, and John J. Gaherin, a professional labor negotiator retained by the clubs’ Player Relations Committee—had begun to sense that after months of almost continuous desultory or impassioned bargaining, with frequent intervening consultations with their larger bodies, they were on the very brink of a formal impasse, an eventuality that ultimately would force the parties into court, with unforeseeable but chaotic results. Unwilling to face such risks, the two men, accompanied only by the league presidents—the National League’s Charles S. Feeney and the American League’s Lee MacPhail—met on July 6 in a small conference room at the Hotel Biltmore, in New York, to begin a series of informal but highly intensive negotiating sessions. These Biltmore Talks, as they are now referred to, more or less in the style of the Diet of Worms or the Treaty of Ghent, at last broke through the accumulated barnacle crust of suspicions and postures, and led to hard, precisely detailed, but non-acrimonious bargaining. At the end of four days, the basic memorandum had been hammered out, with the central agreement coming after Mr. Gaherin, for the Player Relations Committee, accepted free agency for the players after six years’ service (the owners had been holding out for nine), in return for a five-year span before a player could again achieve free agency, instead of the three years that the Players Association had wanted.

Described in these terms, the accord sounds like a simple and civilized accommodation of differences, but the truth is that both sides had to travel an enormous distance over extremely bumpy terrain to arrive at a meeting place. Marvin Miller, for the P.A., had retreated from the basic “one-and-one” rights (free agency at the end of a player’s current contract plus one year’s additional service) that he appeared to have secured for the players after the Messersmith decision of last winter, which upset the reserve clause. He did so, one may surmise, in part because unlimited free agency seemed likely to destroy any form of player development or long-range team planning by the owners, and also because the cessation of the reserve clause (which had forbidden free agency) had been determined by an arbitrator’s ruling but never tested all the way up to the Supreme Court level—a long, costly fight for both sides, with an impossible final verdict for one litigant or the other.

Mr. Gaherin, for his part, had perhaps an even more horrendous task, which was to persuade first the six-man Player Relations Committee and eventually most of the twenty-four club owners or presidents that the agreement was an essential document, and that it represented what so many of those owners had, in varying degrees and to various excruciating lengths, squirmed and shuddered and shouted to avoid: a fair accommodation. It was, by any measurement, a triumph for him and his employers. Faced with the real possibility of total free agency, he had come up with a solution to the slippery problem of readmitting free agents to the ordered hierarchy of the clubs, and had also arranged matters so that in all likelihood each long-term major-league player would achieve free agency only once in his career. Mr. Gaherin—a slim, pale, precise man of sixty-two, who has an unsettling resemblance to James Joyce—has worked for the Player Relations Committee for nine years, and is thus fully accustomed to the burdens of multi-employer labor work, but his treatment at the hands of the owners on this occasion must have startled him a little. Early in August, he and the National League president, Feeney, were vilified in an unbridled statement to the press issued by Gussie Busch, the owner of the Cardinals, who said that the clubs had been “kicked in the teeth in the labor matter,” and demanded that the two men be dismissed. Since then, the owners in both leagues have held private ballotings that resulted in an expression of no confidence in Mr. Gaherin—a movement toward his dismissal that was only halted by Edmund B. Fitzgerald, who is chairman of the board of the Milwaukee Brewers and also the chairman of the Player Relations Committee.

The work of translating the memorandum of agreement into the full language of a formal Basic Agreement is not yet near completion, mostly because of the owners’ attempts to redraft it or alter it unilaterally, but the memorandum itself was signed, and is thus a binding document. Since it came as the result of extensive bargaining, it is expected to be a strong instrument that will withstand any future court tests. It is true that Mr. Gaherin (along with Mr. Fitzgerald) was the planner and promulgator of the player lockout last spring, but it is also true that he and Marvin Miller, who somehow kept his youthful, scattered six-hundred-man union informed and unified through two years of unrelenting hostility and pressure from their employers, came out at the end with an agreement that looks like a Gibraltar in the churning seas of big-time American sport.

A somewhat more lighthearted view may be taken of the summer’s other great off-diamond dustup, which was Commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s abrupt action in June to stop a multimillion-dollar sale of three of Charles O. Finley’s celebrated chattels. The deal, it will be recalled, would have delivered Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers to the Boston Red Sox for one million dollars each, and sent Vida Blue to the Yankees for one and a half million. After a meeting with Mr. Finley, Commissioner Kuhn announced that he was ordering the players back to the Oakland roster under powers entitling him to “preserve the honor of the game,” and said that “public confidence in the integrity of club operations and in baseball would be gravely undermined should such assignments not be restrained.” Mr. Finley stated that “Kuhn sounds like the village idiot,” and filed a ten-million-dollar lawsuit against him for restraint of trade. He also refused to allow the returned merchandise to go on playing for his team—a ban that lasted for two weeks and was lifted by him only in the face of a strike by the other members of the A’s.

Two interpretations of Mr. Kuhn’s motives may be postulated:

(1) He was truly concerned about maintaining the competitive balance of the leagues, and felt that the sale of such famous stars to well-heeled contending clubs would breed cynicism and despair in the heart of American fandom. (Footnote: The chart of Mr. Kuhn’s concern may be plotted with some precision, since he had offered no let or hindrance to a just previous deal involving the sale of Minnesota pitcher Bert Blyleven to the Texas Rangers for three hundred thousand dollars.)

(2) He and his employers, the owners, were truly concerned about a sale that would establish such a high price tag for free agents on the open market—a market in which most of the clubs would have to deal at the end of the season. (Footnote: The major-league clubs, by a vote of twenty-two to two, pledged to make good any financial buffeting the Commissioner’s office may undergo as the result of a judgment in the Finley suit. The nay votes were Baltimore and, of course, Oakland.)

The Red Sox never thrived after the opening of their season, but the vivid symbol of their fall from grace this year came in the bottom of the sixth inning in a game at Yankee Stadium on May 20, when Boston catcher Carlton Fisk took a marvelous peg from right fielder Dwight Evans and tagged out the Yankees’ Lou Piniella at the plate. Piniella arrived at full speed and banged into Fisk’s chest with his upraised knees in an effort to jar the ball loose; Fisk held on, but the crash—the most violent plate collision I have ever seen—knocked both players sprawling, and instantly set off a prolonged and extremely ugly fight on the field, from which Bill Lee, Boston’s only left-handed starting pitcher, emerged with a severe injury to his pitching shoulder. The Red Sox responded at once in the game, burying the Yankees with eight runs in the next three innings, including two home runs by Carl Yastrzemski, but the loss of Lee for many weeks was irreparable. The Sox—the mettlesome and exciting runners-up of last year’s bright October—fell into torpor and dissension, and eventually even into disfavor at home, finishing third in their division and never mounting even a minimal run at the dominant Yankees. The team lost its manager, Darrell Johnson, who was fired in mid-season, and its modest and much admired longtime owner, Tom Yawkey, who died in July. Many of the Fenway Park fans blamed the club’s apparent loss of pride on the fact that three of the Sox stars—Fisk, Fred Lynn, and Rick Burleson—did not sign contracts until late in the summer and were obviously prepared to become free agents if their demands were not satisfied. More dispassionate watchers, however, came to the conclusion that the Bosox were beaten by weak pitching and by the whetted competitiveness that rival clubs bring to bear against a defending pennant winner. The Sox played all summer as if they expected at any moment to regain their edge and brilliance of 1975, but that never happened. Doing it over again is the hardest task in professional sport. What was most missed at Fenway Park this year was the deep, startled pleasure of the Red Sox’ winning campaign and that extraordinary Series. Even the Cincinnati Reds mourned it. After the Reds had swept the Yankees last month, Joe Morgan said, “I’m glad we won, but last year was a lot more fun.”

Similar joys came this summer to the refurbished blue-and-white expanses of Yankee Stadium, where, right from the first week of the campaign, fans could collect the images and patterns of a team coming together, doing all the small things right, no longer being surprised by its own abilities, expecting always to win. My own summer album is full of these pictures: Mickey Rivers approaching the plate like an old man—like Walter Brennan limping up to a horse stall. Rivers batting, shifting his feet and tilting back his head and twitching his bat, and then tapping a little bunt down toward third and flying up the line—not just beating the throw but making a throw useless.… Graig Nettles taking a pitch in an odd, slightly bowlegged stance, with his hands low and back. Nettles waiting unhappily but silently through his implacable early-season slump, and then, in July at last and in August, beginning to crash the ball. Nettles expunging a bases-loaded rally in a September game against the Red Sox by scooping up a hard grounder behind third and racing to the bag and then throwing ahead, past the runner’s ear, to engineer a startling double play at the plate.… Willie Randolph, the very image of an infielder, restoring a sense of confidence and youthful expectation to the right side of the Yankee infield which had not been there since the departure of Bobby Richardson. Randolph diving over second base to snaffle a low drive by the Indians’ Larvell Blanks, and then diving the other way to tag the bag and double up the base runner.… Thurman Munson hitting all summer long. Munson driving in five runs against the A’s one night, with a homer and three singles. Munson talking in a clubhouse near the end of his great season, permitting himself to smile a little, and perhaps at last overcoming part of his chronic self-doubt.… And Billy Martin, the manager, standing in the front of the dugout with his hands in his jacket pockets and staring out from under his long-billed cap with a cold and ferrety edginess—a glare of suspicion and barely contained hostility directed at umpires and enemy batters and pitchers, and at all the hovering, invisible accidents and waiting disasters of the game that stand in the way of each day’s essential win.

These men and many others—Ed Figueroa, Fred Stanley, Dick Tidrow, Chris Chambliss, Catfish Hunter, Dock Ellis, and the rest—made it a cheerful and noisy summer up in the Bronx, but perhaps the one irreplaceable Yankee was the man who invented this team, who saw it in his mind’s eye before it ever existed on the field—the club’s president, Gabe Paul. A plump, energetic man of sixty-six, Paul came to the Yankees in 1973 and immediately undertook a series of purchases and deep-level trades that entirely altered the club. Only two members of this year’s squad—Roy White and Thurman Munson—came up from the Yankee’s minor-league system. Paul’s best-known transaction was the acquisition of Catfish Hunter, in 1975, in a bidding war against several other clubs after Hunter had been declared a free agent. Accusations began to be heard then that the Yankees intended to dominate their league with cash, but this easy bad-mouthing does not alter the fact that most championship clubs now are built on trades and purchases, and that “buying a pennant” is far more difficult than it sounds. Gabe Paul, to be sure, enjoys a marvelous working relationship with the seemingly bottomless wallet of his general partner, George M. Steinbrenner III, but his success has been much more due to imagination and trading courage and a profound judgment of baseball talent. Two deals that he made last winter started the club toward its pennant. In 1974, he had given up a longtime Yankee favorite, Bobby Murcer, in order to acquire Bobby Bonds, a potential superstar outfielder, from the Giants, but when the chance came, a year later, he did not hesitate to give up Bonds to the California Angels in return for the little-known Mickey Rivers and Ed Figueroa. This summer, Bonds was injured and played very little; Rivers led off for the Yankees all year, batted .312, and stole forty-three bases, and Figueroa won nineteen games. In the other trade, he sent Doc Medich, an established Yankee pitcher (and a medical student), to the Pirates for Dock Ellis, Willie Randolph, and Ken Brett, a subsequently retraded pitcher. Randolph, a brilliant prospect, had had virtually no major-league testing, while Ellis, a talented but moody pitcher, had fallen out with his manager and had enjoyed little success in the past three seasons. It was known, however, that Ellis’s best pitch, a sinkerball, was ill-suited to the Pirates’ artificial home turf, and word had also come that Ellis was anxious to play for a manager like Billy Martin. This summer, Dock Ellis, relishing the innumerable enemy outs attributable to grounders hammered along the slower Stadium grass, finished with seventeen wins and eight losses, while Randolph established himself as one of the premier infielders in the league. Doc Medich did not fare quite as well, winding up with an 8–11 record for the Pirates. My favorite comment about Gabe Paul’s trading abilities was made one night this summer in the press box at Shea Stadium, when a veteran Pittsburgh baseball writer who had watched Medich struggle on the mound for several unimpressive innings finally tossed his pencil in the air and cried, “Ellis is a better
doctor
than this guy!”