On each wrist, Bonds wore sweatbands with pictures of himself, a marketing promotion the proceeds of which went to charity but which nevertheless reinforced the idea of Bonds as utterly egocentric. Williams, meanwhile, was so workmanlike in his approach as to almost seem boring. Despite being a slugging Gold Glove third baseman in the mode of Mike Schmidt, he never drew attention to himself. Monte Poole, a columnist for the Oakland Tribune, thought Williams went out of his way not to be noticed. “Did you ever see the way he hit a home run? He barely looked up. It was like he was almost embarrassed. He looked like he wanted to tell the pitcher, ‘Hey, I’m sorry.’”
Still, Williams possessed a special fire. Phillies manager Terry Francona, who would manage against Williams when he played in Arizona, loved the carnage Williams would create after making an out. When Williams made an out, Francona thought, the watercooler was never safe. In that way, he was a less-animated version of the Yankees’ temperamental right fielder Paul O’Neill. Alan Embree, a teammate of Williams’s in Cleveland and Arizona, thought people often misread Williams. “He cared. He wanted it so badly. That’s why the helmet went this way, the bat that way.” That intensity was exactly what made it possible for Matt Williams to chase Maris’s record.
By the All-Star break, Williams had 33 home runs, and it was clear that Maris’s record was facing its first major challenge since 1987, when a rookie named Mark McGwire looked as if he had a chance. Williams - wasn’t entirely alone. The day before the players walked out, Ken Griffey Jr., the marvelous Seattle center fielder, hit a three-run homer off Oakland’s Ron Darling for his fortieth. By the strike, Frank Thomas, who would win the American League’s Most Valuable Player award that year, had 38 homers, and Bonds himself finished just six behind Williams’s eventual total of 43. What made Williams the favorite, thought Monte Poole, was not that he was so far in front of the rest, but that he was a classic slugger, a “pure” home run hitter. As an all-around hitter, he was not in the class of Griffey, Thomas, and Bonds, all of whom would hit .300 or better that year and were less prone to try to jerk a ball out of the park than Williams, who hit .263. The other players were primarily concerned with getting on base, each doing so more than 40 percent of the time, while Williams, who had a mere .319 on-base percentage, would let his bat fly through the zone from his ankles.
To Mark Gonzales, who covered Williams extensively for the San Jose Mercury News and Arizona Republic when Williams was with the Giants and later the Arizona Diamondbacks, there was something even more remarkable about him. As 1994 progressed and it became clear that Williams was within striking distance of Maris and history, he never seemed bitter that the strike threatened to undo what might have been his only chance at immortality. Instead, Williams was an outspoken proponent of the Players Association. When Williams tired of talking about the home run chase, he preferred to talk about the union and how whatever took place in 1994, regardless of the personal achievements or surging teams that might be lost, it was in the best interest of baseball and the union. To Gonzales, Williams’s solidarity was an example of an institutional memory among the players that was growing rarer with each year. Most players, Gonzales thought, would have resented the union and the larger political drama because of its negative effects on their individual goals. Williams was different. Williams learned from Giants veterans and union stalwarts such as Bob Brenly and Mike Krukow. He understood what the fight was about, even if he would ultimately be one of its greatest casualties.
Like the rest of baseball, Williams did not believe when the players walked out on August 12 that the season would be finished. He still believed there would be baseball in September, and perhaps even during the final week of August. That might have given him enough time to make a serious run at Maris, but when the owners canceled the season and the World Series on September 14, Matt Williams’s pursuit of Maris was finished for good. He would play for nine more seasons and would win a World Series title with Arizona in 2001 (after losing with the Giants in 1989 and the Indians in 1997), but would never come close to duplicating his summer of 1994. In a somewhat perverse sense, time would find a way to conspire against Matt Williams. As the game underwent a dramatic shift and home runs soared in the years following the strike, Williams’s home run surge of 1994 was forgotten. Over the next ten years, hitting 50 home runs would become the dreary standard, Mark McGwire would surpass Maris twice, Sammy Sosa three times, and Williams’s former teammate, Barry Bonds, would soar past them all. Not only did Matt Williams’s moment of immortality never materialize, but his best season would be buried under the avalanche of offense that would follow.
TO PETER Gammons, the strike was inevitable. By the All-Star break, the union and owners were barely on speaking terms because of the intractability of the issues, particularly the owners’ demand for a salary cap, something the players would never accept. Gammons, who as the decade progressed would be called the “de facto” commissioner, was the most visible baseball reporter in the country, powerful enough to steer discussion in virtually any direction. He felt sympathy for the great stories that would never have endings and for the inevitability of a lost season. That he felt for Matt Williams was a given. Williams was the consummate professional that every clubhouse needed. Gammons, too, was especially fond of Ken Griffey Jr., whom he had known since Griffey was a batboy for his father when Ken Senior was an outfielder for the Cincinnati Reds. Gammons also loved Montreal’s ability to produce remarkable talent under impossible financial circumstances. The Expos were not a money team, but one that built a club the way it was supposed to be done: through its farm system and scouting rather than free agency.
Yet what he found himself most surprised by was the sympathy he felt for the New York Yankees. There had been signs of resurgence in 1993, when the Yankees had won 93 games, but the 1994 team, like the Expos, had really begun to find themselves and were primed to take off. On April 19, after Jim Abbott lost 7-1 to Seattle at Yankee Stadium, the Yankees’ record was 6-6. By May 28, after beating Kansas City 5-3 in ten innings, the Yankees had ripped off 26 wins in 33 games and were 32-13 on the season. When the strike hit, the Yankees were running away with the American League with a 70-43 record.
For Willie Randolph, it was an especially difficult time. He had finished an eighteen-year career in 1992 with the crosstown Mets and, after a year as the Yankees’ assistant general manager, had just rejoined the team on the field as Buck Showalter’s third-base coach. Randolph was the ultimate Yankee. Joining the team during the resurgent mid-1970s, he made the postseason in five of his first six seasons in New York and won two World Championships. A six-time All-Star, he became an institution at second base during the hard years of the 1980s when the Yankees were wildly talented offensively but lacked the pitching to make the post-season. He played in one last World Series with the Oakland A’s in 1990, but to Randolph there was nothing more special in baseball than the Yankees playing in October.
Randolph had always been a committed member of the union rank and file as a player, but recalls being particularly angry as the players walked out.
“I was on the field for the first time and we were going to the playoffs. It was like someone took a knife and stabbed you in the stomach. You heard what was happening and you knew something was going on, but you figured there was no way they were going to let this happen. To this day I still can’t believe it.
“It had been so long since we’d been back that you just kept thinking that you can’t just take this away. I just remember being really angry at the game because I thought there was no way in the world they would let this happen. The icing on the cake was to cancel the World Series. The way this whole thing played out, if you told me they were going to cancel the World Series, I would have asked you just what you were smoking.”
TO FAY Vincent, then two years removed from being commissioner, the only way to view the destructive events of 1994 was through the prism of Marvin Miller. Miller was a giant. Hank Aaron and Vincent both be
lieved that, along with Jackie Robinson, Marvin Miller was the most significant individual figure in the history of baseball. It was the specter of Miller—his successes at the owners’ expense, his legacy having transcended into legend while the term “owner” became an increasingly pejorative one—that gave the 1994 confrontation its weight. That the players were now equal partners in the operation of baseball was a fact that had been true for at least twenty-five years, but it was still one that many in ownership - could not brook. It was as if the owners, the majority of whom were not even in the game when Miller arrived in 1966, honestly believed that the last thirty years could somehow be undone, that the clock could be turned back to a more favorable time. They were determined, it seemed, to exorcise the ghost of Marvin Miller.
Miller was forty-nine when he left the United Steelworkers Union to head the Players Association, and what he encountered was nothing more than a company union. In 1947, the minimum salary in baseball had been $5,000. In 1966, it was $6,000. The players hadn’t seen a significant increase in the average salary in twenty years. The few attempts at organizing were quashed not only by ownership but by union figureheads such as Judge Robert Cannon, who enjoyed cozy relations with the owners at the players’ expense, and players such Carl Yastrzemski, superstars who aligned themselves with ownership because they had it so good they couldn’t imagine the union’s actually helping them. Few players knew what power they possessed, and worse, Miller thought, few cared. There had never been a basic set of governing rules between the players and owners, and what rules did exist were overwhelmingly in favor of ownership. It was not an understatement, Miller thought, to say that ownership enjoyed absolute power in baseball for a century. Above all, the owners had the reserve clause, the cudgel that kept players in their place, literally and figuratively. In 1966, free agency was not even a dream.
Players took pay cuts regularly. If they didn’t like it, they could always quit baseball for good. During a bitter holdout in 1972, Oakland starter Vida Blue walked out and worked for a plumbing company. He returned to the A’s in May, but not to the money he sought. It was thought, especially by those most loyal to the Oakland organization, that Vida Blue was never the same pitcher or person after walking out. Before, he was a buoyant, talented left-hander who stood atop the pitching world, winning both the American League Cy Young and MVP in 1971 on the strength of a 24-8 record, 1.82 ERA, and 301 strikeouts. After, he grew more sullen and cynical. His pitching dropped off, and he struggled with cocaine. The business side of baseball, cold and unforgiving, had ruined Vida Blue.
Ownership also controlled the players’ retirement money, choosing to withhold it at any sign of insubordination. The grievance process was simple and unbalanced. The commissioner, hired and paid by the owners, issued final judgments. When Miller studied the organization he had just agreed to lead, he concluded that baseball players, for all their fame and recognition, may have been the most exploited workers in America.
When Miller arrived in baseball, he had his supporters who put him into the job, but even the players he would make multimillionaires viewed him with great suspicion. Some thought he was a communist. The printed attacks on Miller by the reporters and columnists, who were every bit a part of the baseball establishment, were thinly veiled, as was the anti-Semitism that coursed throughout baseball. When he was originally considered for the job, he was told by Robin Roberts, Jim Bunning, and Harvey Kuenn, who headed the search committee for an executive director of the union, that he wouldn’t be able to choose his own general counsel. That job had been done for him. The candidate the players had decided on was a man named Richard M. Nixon, who had other ideas about his future.
For a time, ownership patronized him. Miller remembered an early encounter with American League president Joe Cronin. Cronin, the first former player to be named a league president, did everything except pat Miller on the head:
In the airport the day after the game, I bumped into American League president Joe Cronin. I was flying to New York, and he to his office in Boston. . . . When my flight was finally announced, he said: “Young man, I’ve got some advice for you that I want you to remember.” Young man? I was forty-nine years old. The advice? “Players come and go, but the owners stay on forever.” I would remember his remark, but not for the reasons he wanted. As much as any single statement I’d hear, it reflected the prevailing attitude of baseball’s brass. A league presidency was and is a nothing job. Other than staying on the right side of the right owners, Cronin’s biggest challenge was choosing between a pitching wedge and a nine-iron. But Cronin—a Hall of Fame player, field manager, general manager and now league president—had been a member of the patriarchal system for too long. He had completely misunderstood me, my motivations, and my means of operating. Basically he was saying, “Watch me and you’ll understand what it takes to stick in baseball. If you don’t play ball with the owners, you’ll be gone.”
Before long, ownership would fear him. The players struck in 1972, over pension benefits, and won. When they finally won free agency in 1975, Phillies general manager Paul Richards lamented the victory as “the end of baseball as we knew it.” In 1976, Catfish Hunter signed a five-year, $3-million deal with the Yankees. The reign was over. Under Miller, the players struck again in 1976 and 1981, winning each time and growing more powerful. By appealing to principle, the Players Association under Miller would grow to become what many baseball executives would call the most powerful union on Earth.
When not throwing haymakers, Miller liked to jab at the system. The result was a remarkable paper trail covering the most restless seventeen-year period in baseball history. If his deconstruction of the system was about providing a better environment for the players on macro issues such as pension, the reserve clause, and salary arbitration, it was also about destroying the old boy culture itself. Miller fought issues so minuscule it seemed their only purpose was to tip the power balance in the players’ direction.
In 1978, George Steinbrenner ordered all of his players to attend a charity luncheon held by the Archdiocese of New York, and fined four players who did not attend $500. Miller filed a grievance, and wrote Cardinal Cooke a letter, which explained his position. Once, a Houston Astros player was fined for not holding his cap over his heart during the National Anthem. Miller filed a grievance. Years later, in 1979, National League president Chub Feeney ordered a bulletin posted in each major league clubhouse that stated, “All managers, coaches, trainers, players, and umpires are directed that during the playing of the National Anthem all should stand at attention, feet together, head steady, facing the flag with cap in right hand placed over the heart and left arm extended downward along the left pants leg.”
Miller responded with a letter to Feeney, which stated, in part, “As with many regulations and directives, the omission of exceptions can lead to problems of administration and enforcement. For example, suppose a man has a cast which extends over the elbow. If it is on his right arm, how can he place his right hand over his heart? Or suppose that man has a tic. How can he hold his head steady? And there are those who may be knock-kneed who cannot possibly stand at attention with feet together. . . . Those are but a few examples of the type of problem one confronts when human frailties are ignored in any attempt to mandate conformity. How about trying a second draft?”
When Commissioner Bowie Kuhn threatened punitive measures against players who were involved in on-field situations during exhibition games in Venezuela and Colombia in 1976, the union and commissioner’s office sparred bitterly. In the union’s response to deputy commissioner Sandy Hadden, general counsel Dick Moss couldn’t resist pointing out that Hadden had misspelled Colombia “Columbia,” as in the university. “Finally,” Moss wrote, “I would suggest that if your office has an interest in developing and maintaining a good relationship in Venezuela and Colombia, you should learn how to spell the name of the latter country correctly.”
Miller hated Bowie Kuhn, who was commissioner for virtua
lly all of Miller’s time with the union. He saw Kuhn as the ultimate baseball hypocrite. Kuhn was a commissioner, which meant he was hired by the owners to represent the owners. Yet he steadfastly considered himself a representative of both players and owners, though the players had no say in his hiring or firing. Miller constantly reminded Kuhn that the commissioner worked for the owners, not the players. The two would be the worst of enemies during their times in baseball and beyond. For his part, Kuhn decided that Miller possessed a destructive hatred of management, and by extension American capitalism, an unsubtle way of painting Miller as a communist. The latter was an ironic assertion, since players under Miller would become millionaires. If the minimum salary rose by $1,000 in the two decades before Miller arrived, it would rise by a hundredfold during his tenure.
Miller fought with the owners and their commissioner and sparred with writers (especially Dick Young), who tended to side with management during the early years of his tenure, but he also battled with players who tended to lean toward the clubs’ positions on labor. The most egregious offender was Boston’s Carl Yastrzemski, who believed free agency was bad for baseball. Yastrzemski became the highest-paid player in baseball in 1969 and saw no reason to upset the apple cart. When Curt Flood challenged the reserve clause in 1970, Yastrzemski was his most public opponent. Miller thought Yastrzemski undermined the goals of the union, and he and Miller traded harsh letters in such volume that Miller maintained a file specifically for Yastrzemski.
Juicing the Game Page 5
