by Roger Angell
The causes of this widespread unhappiness are hardly new. They include, in no particular order, night baseball, Sunday-night baseball, the extension of the season far beyond its appropriate weather, the extension and promotion of the controversial designated-hitter device by permitting its introduction into World Series play, artificial turf and its effects on players and strategies, the televising of baseball and television’s enormous influence on scheduling and on almost every other aspect of the game, and, most of all, the irresolute, insensitive, and hypocritical leadership of the executives of the sport, who permitted most of these vulgarities and dumb ideas to creep into their sport in the first place and to flourish until they now almost strangle it. Further uneasy and unresolved elements that afflict the game are the arrival of the free-agent status for players and its accompanying inflation of salaries and trade prices, the violence and anarchy of ballpark crowds, the suspicions and tensions that separate players and owners as a result of the dissolution of the reserve clause, and the utterly unneeded forthcoming expansion of the American League, with the resultant dilution of talent in the league that, as the Reds horribly proved, is already much the inferior one. These grievances, as I have said, are not exactly new—only the scheduling of two important post-season games (one playoff, one Series) in Sunday-night prime time and the entrance of Howard Cosell into the quiet chambers of the game came as true startlers this fall—but the list is so long and depressing that one’s fervent wish is simply to throw it away and to think only about the distractions and pleasures of baseball itself, to watch the games. This has been easy to do in recent years, when several riveting pennant races and a remarkable succession of World Series matchups, culminating in the epochal Reds vs. Red Sox collision last fall, have encouraged this kind of distraction; six of the last ten World Series have gone the full seven games, and only the one-sided five-game victory of the Orioles over the Reds in 1970 ranked close to this year’s affair as unnews. And here, no doubt, is the real reason for my unhappiness. This fall, the baseball games could not distract us from the truth about baseball, which is that it may well be on the point of altering itself, if not out of existence, then out of any special or serious place in the American imagination.
The season’s news was not all dismal. The summer provided a basket of surprises, including the discovery that the clubs could prosper without a vestige of a pennant race in any of the divisions. By the first week of June, the four eventual winners—the Reds and Phillies in the National League, and the Yankees and Kansas City Royals in the American—had all moved into first place for good, and by the time of the All-Star Game break in mid-July the nearest second-place team, the Dodgers, was six full games to the rear. The Phillies and Royals, it will be recalled, suffered late-season comas that brought them almost within touching distance of their pursuers, but then steadied at the end. In spite of these torpid campaigns, baseball attendance for 1976 reached an all-time high of 31,320,535—a leap of a million and a half over the previous year. Most of the new or renewed fans turned up in the American League, which improved its gate by 1,470,583, to draw within two million of the perennially more robust NL. The real causes of the surprising turnouts (aside from a numbing surfeit of Bat Days, Helmet Days, Jacket Days, Camera Days, Family Days, Bronzed-Baby-Shoe Days, and other promotions) were probably the memory of that great World Series last fall and the fact that three of the four summer leaders were new to such eminence and thus a reason for local fervor. Among them, the champion Reds and the upstart Yankees, Phillies, and Royals picked up more than two million new fans.
The only races in either league turned out to be for the batting titles, which were settled in both cases by the last couple of swings of a bat. In the National League, the Reds’ Ken Griffey held an average of .337 on the final day of the regular season, and received permission from his manager, Sparky Anderson, to sit out the Reds’ meaningless closing game against the Braves, and thus protect his lead over the Cubs’ Bill Madlock, whose average stood at .333. (An inescapable memory here is the last day of the 1941 season, when Ted Williams was told by his manager, Joe Cronin, of the Red Sox, that it would be perfectly all right if he chose to skip that afternoon’s closing doubleheader in order to protect his batting average, which was tremblingly balanced at .3996—officially .400, that is. Williams chose to play, went six-for-eight for the day, and finished at .406—the only over-.400 average of the past forty-six years.) Halfway through the Reds-Braves game, word came over the sports wire that Madlock was enjoying a terrific afternoon at the plate against the Expos; Griffey hurriedly entered the lineup, but went hitless in two at-bats and lost the title to Madlock, who had gone four-for-four and raised his average to .339. Madlock’s batting title was his second in succession. In the American League, the matter ended even more improbably, in a Twins-Royals game in which three participants—Hal McRae (.330784) and George Brett (.330733), of the Royals, and Rod Carew (.329), of the Twins—all began play with a shot at the championship. McRae and Carew each went two-for-four, thus losing to Brett, whose crucial hit, bringing him to three-for-four for the day and .333 for the year, was a short fly that landed in front of the Minnesota left fielder and bounced over his head for an inside-the-park homer. McRae, who is black, later claimed that the outfielder, Steve Brye, who is white, played the ball into a hit intentionally, thus handing the title to Brett, who is also white, and that he did so with the connivance of the Twins’ manager, Gene Mauch. This sad matter will never be entirely resolved, but it must be pointed out that to plan such a malfeasance seems utterly unlikely.
Other numbers were less disputable. Hank Aaron retired, after twenty-three years and seven hundred and fifty-five homers. Walter Alston retired, after twenty-three years at the Dodger helm—a technically impeccable but (according to many of his players) distant and impersonal leader; he won seven pennants and four world championships. Lou Brock, now thirty-seven years old, batted .301 and stole fifty-six bases—his twelfth straight summer of more than fifty swipes. Twenty-eight more stolen bases will put him past Ty Cobb’s lifetime mark of eight hundred and ninety-two, a record that has been considered one of the game’s holy minarets. The Oakland A’s, short of power thanks to the trading away of Reggie Jackson, stole three hundred and forty-one bases—only six short of the all-time record set by the 1911 Giants. Nolan Ryan led both leagues in strikeouts (327) and losses (18), thus proving something or other, and failed, for the first time since 1972, to pitch a no-hitter. The Tigers, in a game in May against the Yankees, committed three errors on one play. This horror show began when, with two Yankee runners on base, center fielder Ron LeFlore dropped a fly hit by Roy White, but picked up the ball in time to throw out the second runner at the plate; catcher John Wockenfuss, under the mistaken impression that this was the third out, lightheartedly rolled the ball out toward the mound, where it was seized by pitcher Bill Laxton, who then flung it wildly past third base, allowing White to chug home with the winning run.
The Tigers, a young and improving team, enjoyed some much happier days than this one, and raised their home attendance by more than four hundred thousand fans—a great many of whom came trooping in whenever the phenomenal young Tiger pitcher Mark Fidrych was slated to work. Fidrych finished his first season with a won-lost mark of 19–9 and an earned-run average of 2.34; the latter figure was the best among all starters in the league, which meant that Fidrych had a better summer than Vida Blue, Frank Tanana, Jim Palmer, and Luis Tiant, among others. This is notable work by any standard, but positively electrifying for a twenty-two-year-old rookie who performed for most of last season at the Class-A level of the minors and was not even on the Tigers’ roster in spring training this year. I caught The Bird’s act late in the season, in the first game of a September Sunday double-header at Yankee Stadium, when he gave up nine scattered, harmless hits and defeated the league leaders by 6–0. It was only the second shutout thrown against them by a right-hander all year. On the mound, Fidrych presented the classic profile
and demeanor of a very young hurler—long legs and a skinny, pleasing gawkiness (he is six-three); a pre-delivery flurry of overexcited twitches, glances, and arm-loosening wiggles; and a burning anxiety to get rid of the ball, to see what would happen next, to get on with this, man! The results were something altogether different. His pitching was wholly cool and intelligent, built around some middling-good fastballs and down-slanting sliders, all delivered with excellent control just above or below the hemline of the strike zone, with an ensuing five strikeouts, one walk, and innumerable harmless fly balls. Fidrych also showed us some of his celebrated eccentricities—sprinting to the mound to start each inning, kneeling to pat down the dirt in front of the mound, applauding plays by his teammates, and shaking hands with some of his infielders after an important out—but his pitching outweighed his oddities. After the game, The Bird performed again with grace and flakiness, this time for the Gotham scribes. One reporter had noticed that he always tossed the ball back to the umpire after an enemy base hit, and asked why. “Well, that ball had a hit in it, so I want it to get back in the ball bag and goof around with the other balls there,” Fidrych said. “Maybe it’ll learn some sense and come out as a pop-up next time.” Another writer, thinking ahead to the enormous salaries and lucrative commercial endorsements that now instantly reward young sporting pheenoms, asked, “What’s come your way so far, Mark?”
Fidrych thought for an instant and then smiled almost shyly. “Happiness,” he said.
Another happy pitcher was the Mets’ Jerry Koosman, who won twenty-one games and lost ten—his first twenty-game season ever. He was 12–4 after the All-Star break, and finished just behind Randy Jones, the Padres’ sinkerball artist, in the Cy Young Award balloting. (Koosman is on everybody’s All-Good-Guy first team.) The only other twenty-game man in the Mets’ annals, Tom Seaver, wound up this time at 14–11, in spite of a league-leading 235 strikeouts and an ERA of 2.59. No runs was the reason. During a typical outing of his in late July, I watched him shut out the Pirates for ten innings, fanning ten and allowing no one to reach third base—all literally for naught, since the Mets went scoreless, too, and eventually lost in the thirteenth. They played so badly in the first two-thirds of the season that their fans fell into the habit of booing them in the middle innings—booing quietly and resignedly, more out of principle than out of passion. But the Mets came on like an express train in the late going, winning twenty-five of their last forty games, taking third place, and playing a small but deadly part in the NL East pennant race. The Phillies, who led their division by fifteen games on August 27, quickly lost eight straight games, and an eventual sixteen of twenty-one, thus permitting Pittsburgh to close to within three games on September 17. The next day, however, the Mets beat the Pirates 6–2 (Seaver pitched); the day after that, they beat the Pirates 7–6 (Dave Kingman hit two home runs); and the day after that they beat the Pirates 5–4 (rookie outfielder Lee Mazzilli hit a two-run homer with two out in the ninth). The Pirates never recovered.
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.
