The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

by Roger Angell

  From the beginning, spokesmen for the owners, as well as Commissioner Kuhn, had frequently mentioned the rising cost of all baseball operations, the shrinking farm systems, the chronically invalid franchises like San Francisco, Minnesota, Atlanta, and Baltimore, and the unfortunate effects of any large jump in ticket prices. These are problems of some urgency, of course, but the owners’ habitual cries of poverty have always been slightly disingenuous. For one thing, player salaries and pensions still form a very modest portion—less than twenty percent—of the clubs’ annual outlays. Attendance is excellent, totaling 29,790,000 last year, or a hair under the all-time mark of 30,109,000 set two seasons ago, and baseball has just renegotiated its basic television agreements with the networks for a record sum, amounting to ninety-three million dollars payable over the next four years. The clubs’ total radio and TV income now amounts to one and a half times the total paid out for player salaries and retirement benefits. Some franchises lose money, but it is hard to say how many and how much, because most baseball clubs now represent only a special corner of a much larger commercial entity, and because tax write-offs and benefits can assist, or even turn around, an apparently weak performance in any given year. It is not generally known, for instance, that ballplayers can be depreciated, like oil wells or factory buildings, on the corporate ledgers. In any case, the owners have never formally pleaded inability to pay in the course of their negotiations with the Players Association—a plea that is perfectly within their rights but would require them, under the law, to open their books. Neither have the owners hesitated to pluck another favorite old, sweet chord—team loyalty. How will the fans continue to care about our teams, they ask, if players are free to deal for themselves and then heartlessly move along to any club that makes them a good offer? A strange refrain, surely, from the dealers who traded off more than a hundred players between the 1975 and 1976 seasons, who have moved or invented eighteen franchises since the Second World War, and who propose to draft away fifty players from existing clubs to stock the two utterly superfluous new franchises that they now envision.

  The lockout, an enormous predicament, lasted for more than two weeks, and its most startling moment—surely a scene like no other in the history of the game—came on March 11, when fifty-odd players stood or sat down behind a long table in a conference room of the Host International Hotel, in Tampa, and debated the structure of baseball with the owners’ Player Relations Committee. The meeting had overtones that stretched far beyond the day and the place, for the owners’ unspoken conviction had always been that six hundred ballplayers, taken as a group, would prove to be scattered, undisciplined, poorly informed, and probably insufficiently educated, and thus unable to stand together during a long, tough bargaining period. The players’ group included not only members of their Executive Board (team representatives like Lou Brock, Tom Seaver, Rick Monday, Merv Rettenmund, and Carl Morton) but a sizable contingent of newly aroused participants—Johnny Bench, Ted Simmons, Rusty Staub, Willie Stargell, Jim Wynn, and others—who had recently assembled informally and made requests that an end be found to the impasse. The newcomers sat in on the next policy session of the Executive Board (any player may attend meetings) and, on hearing the logic and bargaining history behind the Players Association positions, were apparently convinced of their justice. Any secret hope the owners may have entertained that the new faces on the scene represented an unraveling of the Players Association ended abruptly when Johnny Bench, who had previously said in public that some simple solution to these issues must be easily discoverable, stood up at the hotel meeting and delivered an extended discourse on the players’ stake in the liability issue. The champion Cincinnati Reds, taken from top to bottom, are the most conservative, old-line club in baseball, and players who were at the meeting that afternoon have told me that the expression on the face of Bob Howsam, the Reds’ president, as he listened to this address by his famous star was a picture. (Since that day, it has been observed that Howsam, who had been one of the loudest opponents of any major concessions to the players, has been notably more reasonable in attitude. Change is sometimes possible, even in baseball.)

  A few days later, in St. Petersburg, the owners delivered their “best and final” offer—a lengthy document that, among other things, conceded free-agent status for players who play out their options under current contracts (conceded the Messersmith decision, that is) but proposed various future restrictions that would limit the number of clubs that a free agent could dicker with and the number of free agents that any one club could sign. This new offer was rejected by Marvin Miller, who observed that it listed fourteen unresolved and largely undiscussed issues and concluded with a clause that could throw the entire Basic Agreement into a fresh round of negotiations in 1978. The next day, however, the players’ Executive Board passed a resolution calling the owners’ offer incomplete but admitting that it represented considerable progress. Some liability for obdurate players might be accepted by the Players Association, they said, and further negotiations should proceed at once. These joint whispers of concession were enough for Commissioner Kuhn, who ordered the spring camps to open forthwith. Baseball was back in business, to everybody’s relief—with the exception, to be sure, of Gussie Busch, the president of the Cardinals, who said, “It would be insane to open the camps,” a dissenting opinion supposedly endorsed by six other clubs. Change is sometimes impossible, especially in baseball.

  The two sides have continued to meet since the season got under way, but progress on the new Basic Agreement has been minimal: many divisive issues, including the limitation of free agents’ rights and the size of the clubs’ rosters after more expansion, remain entirely unresolved. No one knows if the agreement can be signed this summer, or what new crisis will arise if it is not. The owners remain very apprehensive about the number of players who have not signed contracts for the current year and will thus become free agents in October. At last count, that number was about sixty (there are six hundred players in the majors), and not all of them were regulars. The total is diminishing slowly as players come to terms, but the roster of the still unsigned includes not only stars like Reggie Jackson and Dick Allen but Carlton Fisk, Fred Lynn, Bert Blyleven, Ted Simmons, Don Gullett, and Willie McCovey. There is, moreover, a knot of celebrated Oakland players—Sal Bando, Joe Rudi, Gene Tenace, Rollie Fingers, Vida Blue, and Bert Campaneris: the Oakland team, in effect—who have not signed, because of their dissatisfaction with the contracts offered them by their boss, Charles O. Finley. He has responded by paying them for the current season at the minimum permissible level, which is twenty percent below their last contracts. What will happen to all these players—what offers will be made to them, how many of them will in fact sign up—will determine the condition of baseball for the next few years, and should be watched with at least the same attentiveness that we will be giving to the pennant races.

  I am not optimistic. Bargaining with employees in an open market requires frankness and some perception of variations in human character and motivation. The owners, as a group, do not qualify on either count. It is perhaps unfair, by the way, to apply this pejorative tag, “the owners,” to the strange agglomeration of old baseball lords, highly trained, tennis-playing young business executives, sudden millionaires, careful industrialists, and second- or third-generation baseball families who, in one form or another, control the twenty-four clubs, but the fact remains that the most vivid continuous characteristic they display is a rigid and violently cautious group mentality, which seems to bear little resemblance to the energy and imagination and business courage that most of them must have possessed at some time or another in order to amass their present fortunes. This is a unique phenomenon in American business, and it suggests to me that many team owners may have chosen to enter the sports world not for its surface attractions—excitement, publicity, camaraderie, front-row seats, and so forth—but because its fixed, ancient corporate privileges looked like such a safe harbor after their turbul
ent fiscal voyages. They found a home.

  In group negotiations, as we have seen, the first attitude taken by the owners is the posture invariably struck by their most reactionary, intransigent members—the Finley-Busch-Howsam statuary group. In employee relationships, the owners’ basic attitude is paternalistic, sentimental, and insensitive. In spite of the grinding struggles between the owners and the Players Association in recent years, most ball clubs pride themselves deeply on the good relationship between their front office and their players, and for some—the Pirates, the Dodgers, the Orioles, and perhaps the Red Sox—the claim seems valid. On almost every club, however, family feeling has not always prevented the sudden throwaway trade of a fading long-term star, the subtle browbeating of a rookie at contract time, or the winter deal that disposes of a clubhouse freethinker, an irreverent joker, a particularly vigorous player representative, or other “agitators.” Last year, the Mets’ M. Donald Grant forced a veteran outfielder, Cleon Jones, to abase himself by making a public apology, at a large press conference, for a minor sexual peccadillo. Many clubs, including the Yankees and the Reds, enforce smaller humiliations on their players in the form of dress codes—short haircuts, low stocking stirrups, ties and jackets on the road—in the name of “team pride.” These leftovers from baseball’s baronial past may be slowly drifting out of the game, but their persistence suggests that the owners do not trust their players or understand their motives. A general manager of the old days much preferred the ritual of calling a player into his office to talk contract terms rather than having to make an appointment with the tieless, mod-dressed lawyer or agent who now probably represents the same young pitcher or slugger in his money dealings. (One lawyer-agent, Jerry Kapstein, is employed by many of the notable current holdouts, including Lynn, Fisk, Holtzman, and Rudi.) Suspicions are deepening, and the owners, like the fans, are watching their players with ill-concealed misgivings. Owners are fans, of course; they are the ultimate in fandom. What’s happening, they wonder. Doesn’t anybody care about team loyalty anymore? All these kids are paid too damned much. All they think about now is money.…

  I doubt it. The players’ new privileges will surely produce a few high-priced freebooters, who will be perfectly eager to play for any team as long as the money is right (Andy Messersmith may have been the first of these), but most players of established worth on the field have also established themselves considerably in the city—or one of its suburbs, more likely—where their team plays. They are apt to be men around thirty years old, with children in school, good-sized houses (with good-sized mortgages), and long-term local business and social connections. All these, I suspect, are more significant and more stabilizing forces than “team loyalty.” Thurman Munson, before eventually signing a four-year contract with the Yankees this spring (for a salary that will exceed $150,000 in its final year), said that he wanted to play only in New York or in Cleveland, which is near his hometown. Ken Holtzman, before Finley traded him off to the Baltimore Orioles, said to a Times reporter, “All he would have to do is negotiate with me in good faith, in a civil tone of voice, and I probably would sign. I like the Oakland area, I like the guys on the ball club. I don’t want to leave.” His former teammate Joe Rudi, who is also unsigned, said to me in Arizona last month, “I want to stay in Oakland. I have my home and my business and my friends there. Most of us want to stay, but we don’t feel Charlie will pay us what we need.” In Arizona, I also talked with Rick Monday, the splendid Cub outfielder, who had just signed a one-year contract. He said, “The owners have this terrible fear of the players’ playing out their contracts en masse and jumping to other clubs, and I think it’s wildly exaggerated. They don’t seem to know what matters to a player, and how many factors there are that work to keep him where he is, as long as he’s treated fairly.”

  When the lockout was unlocked, I scurried south and then west, anxious to rid myself of my pale, winter fan’s face—a complexion brought on by the tedious diet of court cases and labor law. Never was spring training more delicious, and never were its rituals more reassuring. In Pompano Beach, on my first day, the visiting Orioles trotted out a very tall right-handed pitcher named Sam Stewart in the fourth inning of a game against the Texas Rangers. Stewart, a raw rookie, pitched for the Bluefield, West Virginia, Orioles in the Appalachian League last year, but he had “thrown like hell” in batting practice a few days earlier, thus earning this shot. Now he retired a batter, threw two very wide balls to the Rangers’ Tom Grieve, and then hit him on the hip with a fastball. “Yahrr!” Grieve bellowed. Stewart then gave up a walk, a single, then another single, got an infield out, then surrendered a two-run double off the fence by Roy Howell, then a single, and then fanned Toby Harrah: four hits, five runs, one left on, one broken heart.

  At Winter Haven, the Red Sox trotted out Ferguson Jenkins, the splendid veteran righty (191 lifetime wins) they picked up in a trade last winter. Throwing like running water, Jenkins zipped through three innings against the White Sox in about nine minutes, and came off the field in a lather of sweat and pleasure. All the Bosox looked remarkably cheerful, perhaps because they were just beginning to understand the extent of the celebrity that has come to them as a result of their performance against the Reds in last year’s peerless World Series. Their bijou park, hard by the shores of Lake Lulu, was packed with grateful followers, and the warm afternoon air was alive with herons, gnats, and cries of optimism. The day before my visit, the Red Sox had played the Phillies in Clearwater, where the elderly resident fans tottered to their feet to greet the Boston starter, Luis Tiant, with chants of “Lu-is! Lu-is!” In the press box at Winter Haven, I was told that Jim Willoughby still had the ball that second baseman Denny Doyle had thrown wildly into the Red Sox dugout in an attempt at a double play during the final Series game—a crucial mistake that allowed the Reds to begin their comeback toward victory. That ball, however, was damaged: its cover had been badly torn by Johnny Bench’s swing—an accident that must have affected Doyle’s peg. Doyle has refused to confirm this or to answer questions about it. “I should have made the play,” he says. Class.

  In Bradenton, I approached Pirate manager Danny Murtaugh and asked him a useful, well-thought-out, mid-March-type scribe-query: “How many innings will your starting pitchers be able to go by opening day, Danny? Because of—you know—the late start this year?”

  Murtaugh got rid of a little tobacco juice and murmured, “I’ve had pitchers who couldn’t go more than one inning in July.”

  At Payne Park, in Sarasota, I spotted Bill Veeck sitting in the open grandstand behind first base, and climbed up to say hello. He was stripped to the waist, with his Ahab-like peg leg propped on the row in front of him. He was a light, dusty tan all over, and somehow suggested a garrulous holy man. Laughing, squinting in the sunlight, hunching against the warm wind to light innumerable cigarettes, he talked exuberantly about baseball—Veeck baseball. “We’ve just finished taking up the artificial surface on the infield at Comiskey Park and replacing it with grass,” he said. “This is an outdoor game—people are trying to get away from steel and plastic. We got the turf down in five hours. Now it looks like a ball park. How important the old parks are! We all saw that in the World Series last fall. In Boston, you had beautiful Fenway Park and thirty-five thousand participants. Then, over in Cincinnati, you had fifty-five thousand spectators. I think the thirty-five thousand almost won the Series. It had a tremendous effect on the play—nobody who saw those games can doubt that.

  “I opposed the lockout, I guess to nobody’s surprise. I don’t think you should fool around with the fans that way. And who loses in the end if the fans become disenchanted? Management, nobody else. How can you hope to bargain away the verdict in a lawsuit? And did you see about the two presidents’ each announcing that his league was going to expand to Toronto? Nobody in charge, as usual! Nothing changes much in baseball, but we’re trying to change. You heard about our new road uniforms? The lettering on the shirts is from the 1903 So
x, and the blue color we took from the nineteen twenties. And we’ll have white socks. Isn’t it ridiculous to have a team called the White Sox wearing red socks? How did that ever happen?

  “We really needed the full training period. We have five center fielders and we don’t know if any of them can hit, and we have a mess of young pitchers who all deserve our consideration. None of us here has the slightest idea of what is happening in this club. To say we are in a state of confusion is putting it mildly.”

  He laughed delightedly and lit another cigarette, and then autographed a program for a waiting white-haired gentleman, who was wearing a visor. “I’ve been a Chicago fan since 1916,” the man said, shaking Veeck’s hand. “Now we’re going someplace again.”

  The game that afternoon was a windy, sleepy, languorous affair against a visiting half-squad of Red Sox. Cleon Jones, who had been dropped by the Mets last year, rapped out four solid hits for the White Sox, but neither team was able to move its base runners along. Several of those young Chicago pitchers came on and proved in turn why they were not yet ready for the majors, but the score remained stuck at 1–1 for many innings. Up in the sunstruck, cratelike press box, the writers yawned and stretched and made jokes, and then began to bait Harry Caray, who was broadcasting the game back to Station WMAQ, in Chicago, from the adjoining booth. “Oh, Har-ry!” one shouted over in a loud falsetto. “Yoo-hoo, Harry Ca-ray!” Another tried cat noises. “Mee-ow!” he called. “Meee-iouww, Harry! Arf-arf!” The writers doubled over laughing. In time—at last, weeks later—the two teams ran out of pitchers, and the thing was called at 1–1, after fifteen innings. The only flicker of excitement had come when one of Caray’s broadcasting assistants burst into the press box and threw himself head first over the front row of typewriters—an apparent suicide. “Grab my legs!” he called back at the last instant, and we did. Finally he reappeared, smiling and red-faced, holding two pieces of paper he had retrieved from the foul screen below us. “Commercials,” he explained.