Juicing the Game

by Howard Bryant

  “If you have a desire for a leadership role as a representative of the players, I urge that you run for office and let the players decide in the democratic fashion whether you are to be a spokesman for your club,” Miller wrote to Yastrzemski in 1970. “If, on the other hand, you do not want that responsibility or are not given that responsibility by the players, I urge that you support the duly elected representatives. Such support of course does not preclude you from persuading members to accept your point of view on particular issues. However, I do not think it can be argued that public attacks on your fellow players are likely to be persuasive or are in the best interests of all the players.”

  Boston would always represent a special problem for Miller. The owner, Tom Yawkey, was a classic paternalist, who lavished money, gifts, and loans on his players. He paid Ted Williams and Yastrzemski handsomely, but also loaned hundreds of thousands of dollars to his players. Luis Tiant still owed Yawkey money when the owner died in 1976. Yawkey’s spending wasn’t without motivations of his own. When the game’s culture began to shift, and players finally began to extract more from ownership, the complaints never came from the Red Sox clubhouse. The result was a Boston team that tended to be the most club-friendly in baseball.

  Miller’s position did not waver. Ownership said each concession of their power, large or small, would lead to the dissolution of baseball. Yet each year, the game would grow more popular and the owners would make more money. If paying the players more money put baseball on the verge of collapse, as ownership had predicted for decades, why, Miller argued, had revenues consistently increased? The answer was simple: Ownership was not to be trusted. Miller was a zealot and his central belief pervaded the union, from the rank and file, to the player representatives, to the leadership, present and future: Ownership’s prime objective was to break the union. It didn’t matter if the union was of newspapermen, ironworkers, or baseball players.

  Miller’s greatest gift was his ability to teach. He did not tell the players what he wanted them to hear, but rather explained the issues in the simplest of terms and let the players arrive at their own conclusions. He would use that most effective of strategies of letting ownership hang by its own words. The more ownership discredited Miller, the more galvanized the players would become. He empowered them not by force, but by logic.

  “Unions have certain obligations under law. In order to carry out those obligations effectively there has to be what for lack of a better term I will call a political consensus among the membership as to what to do and how to do it, and you must achieve and maintain that consensus. That’s what we mean when we say ‘the players are united behind X,’ that they agree as to what the policy is and what the tactic is,” recalled Donald Fehr, who would succeed Miller after the brief tenure of Ken Moffett. “In order to be effective, and that means the leaders running the union and the staff, they initially have to teach players what a union is. What can it do? What are your legal rights as employees bargaining collectively, and what are the strategies and tactics to getting it done. That means you have to spend a lot of time with the players. You have to talk about the issues a lot and you have to educate them, you have to draw them out and you have to make them talk to one another. It doesn’t do any good to say I’m with the Red Sox and you’re with the Yankees, so I’m not going to talk to you. That’s not the game. The game is players against the owners. That’s the game the law requires you to play. Marvin’s genius, and I really think it was that, was to go to the players, and in a very soft spoken, deliberate and thorough manner say, ‘This is what’s going on with you. This is what the owners have been doing. Here’s how I can demonstrate that to you. Here’s how you can see it out of your own experience. This is why it is or is not the way we ordinarily do things in this country. This is what I reasonably expect would happen if we had this difference. And we all have to talk about what’s important and what’s not . . .’ That’s what he did.”

  As Miller and the Players Association grew more powerful, they became more sympathetic in the eyes of the public. Each victory underscored exactly how unjust the system had been for so long; with each defeat, the owners drew more scorn from the public and from the very press that years earlier tended to defend ownership.

  That reporters generally sided with the players on labor issues was a reflection on just how far the Players Association had come. If the two sides were historically opposed, the players and reporters had Miller to thank for their insights into one another. Miller spent countless hours engaging reporters to understand the issues and write with a measure of intelligence and analysis on labor issues. “He took the time to educate,” said Murray Chass. “The owners hated that. They thought he had the players brainwashed. All he did was challenge them to look at the facts.”

  Perhaps the most telling example came from Chass, who was so wired into the Players Association that more than a few members of the baseball hierarchy did not believe they could receive a fair shake from him. This was no small matter, for Chass was not only the preeminent baseball writer on labor issues, but he did so for the New York Times, the country’s paper of record. “You have to remember,” Rob Manfred said of the 1994 strike, “that not only were we fighting an uphill battle with the public, but we were also getting our teeth kicked in by the New York Times every day.”

  Chass saw the relationship in practical terms, “People said I sided with the union. I didn’t see it that way. I tended to believe the side that never lied to me. They didn’t lie. The owners did. It was that simple.”

  THE CARNAGE of the lost season became apparent as the strike entered its third week. Matt Williams knew as September approached that his shot at Maris was dead. Tony Gwynn, one of the great pure hitters of his generation, was challenging the magical .400 mark that hadn’t been eclipsed since 1941, when Ted Williams batted .406, but when the strike happened he was frozen at .394. Gwynn was devastated. No matter what he told himself, even Tony Gwynn didn’t flirt with .400 often enough to honestly believe he’d have another chance as good as this one. David Dombrowski, the Florida Marlins’ general manager who had been the initial architect of the current Montreal Expos in the late 1980s and early 1990s, believed something special had been lost. The Expos were playing so well, he believed, that they had just been denied a deep October playoff run. During the fourth week of the strike, on September 14, the owners canceled the remainder of the regular season, the playoffs, and the World Series, stunning the baseball world. Through two world wars and the Depression, there had always been a World Series. Now, there wasn’t, and most people couldn’t even understand the basic issues that killed the season.

  The keynote of the first few weeks of the strike was machismo. George Steinbrenner claimed to be losing more than $10 million each day that the games were canceled, yet continued to puff his chest out in solidarity with his fellow owners. His Yankees would be one of the strike’s biggest losers, both financially and on the field, but Steinbrenner still unloaded verbal punches. “Donald Fehr told his players ‘Don’t worry, the owners will fold.’ Well, the owners didn’t fold. There is no doubt the union had reason to believe the owners would fold, because the owners have always folded in the past. But they miscalculated this time.”

  The players were geared for these types of staring contests. It was their nature as competitive athletes. A challenge always sparked a response. Brett Butler, a scrappy center fielder for the Dodgers and a key union figure, threw a grenade back at ownership. “If they stick with a salary cap, players are going to play golf and have a lot of fun.” To Rob Manfred, the players may have sounded glib, but they severely underestimated the resolve of ownership and the significance of Vincent’s ouster. They had been used to the owners’ splintering along self-interest, or being stymied by the intervention of a crusading commissioner. It seemed there was always a Bowie Kuhn, Peter Ueberroth, or Fay Vincent interjecting himself into the negotiations and undermining the owners. There would be no such rescue this time.

/>   Ironically, as the strike intensified the issues seemed to recede, dwarfed by the individual personality conflicts. Steinbrenner, though generally reviled by his fellow owners, consistently cast an imposing shadow. Jerry Reinsdorf was now a power broker. Bud Selig, now the commissioner but still an owner, tried to keep the center together. All of them sought to break Donald Fehr.

  In 1985, Fehr’s first full season as head of the Players Association, ownership attempted to impose a salary cap on the players, resulting in an August player strike. After two days, the owners agreed to drop their demands if the union would push the eligibility for salary arbitration back from two to three years. Fehr agreed and the players returned to work. It was the first major concession the union had made to ownership since Miller’s arrival almost twenty years earlier. Sensing weakness, the owners responded with collusion, the most egregious breaking of the trust in baseball history. Ownership’s attempt to instigate a salary cap had armed the players with proof that the owners were determined to place artificial limits on salaries, and when it became clear that the owners were colluding against them, any chance of civility on the part of the players was destroyed.

  Yet, instead of focusing on the issues and their root causes, key members of the ownership team, veterans such as Reinsdorf and Atlanta CEO Bill Bartholomay, were convinced the real reason for the strike was Donald Fehr. Like all of baseball, they contended, Fehr couldn’t escape the considerable shadow of Marvin Miller. The union’s very essence came from Miller. Two days before the owners canceled the World Series, George Steinbrenner said he believed the players were not being advised by Fehr and his general counsel Gene Orza, but by the great Miller. “The shadow of Marvin Miller is there. I never believed Marvin Miller retired. An old warhorse like that . . . no way is he not in the picture.” It was widely believed among the owners that Fehr was embarrassed by his concession in 1985 and that the only way for Fehr to live down that blotch on the Players Association’s otherwise spotless record, put his stamp on the union, and separate his legacy from Marvin Miller’s was to lead another strike.

  DONALD MARTIN Fehr was born on July 18, 1948, in Marion, Indiana. He grew up middle class in Kansas City, Kansas, and it seemed he was destined to challenge convention. His brother Steve, who would also become a lawyer, believed that Fehr had the fertile mind for litigation and debate as early as five years old. There was, thought some intimates, a singular drive about him that not only sharpened his position on a given subject but also gave him an admirable streak of tough honesty. By the time he entered his junior year in high school, he had already met the woman he would marry. In 1977, the Fehrs left the Midwest and a fledgling law practice to join the Players Association. Fehr, who was not yet thirty, had admired the way Marvin Miller had, in the short span of a decade, shattered the iron fist of power the owners had held for more than a century.

  Fehr and Miller had a great deal in common in terms of intelligence and ideology. Where they diverged was style. If Miller was an old-school union man, Fehr would describe himself as an unrepentant sixties radical. If Miller was unfailingly patient with the press and the public, convinced that his reasoned, logical approach could ultimately reach and turn any adversary, Fehr seemed publicly impatient. He did not suffer fools gladly, and would grow agitated by a line of questioning he felt beneath him. If Miller was polished, almost serene in his stature, Fehr did not seem at all comfortable in the spotlight. If Miller was quick on his feet, glib, and charming, Fehr looked uncomfortable on television, coming across as easily annoyed by the uninitiated.

  That did not mean that Fehr could not be lighthearted or was incapable of spontaneity. Four days before the strike, on August 8, Fehr jumped from his chair and addressed his entire staff over the public address system. “At noon, we will have a moment of silence,” Fehr said into the microphone. “Because it will be twenty years to the minute that President Nixon quit.”

  If his general counsel, Gene Orza, oozed his love of baseball from each pore, Fehr’s critics saw him as too distant from the game, too unwilling to be swept up in baseball’s mystical trance. Once, during a particularly tense fight with the owners, he said that the world could survive without baseball. Life would go on. It was a rather unfortunate moment for Fehr, who had already gained a reputation for being cold and intractable. Fay Vincent believed Donald Fehr to be a brilliant mind, but insufficiently in love with the idea of baseball.

  Yet, despite his own ego and motivations, it was Fehr’s ability to put the needs of the players ahead of his own that maintained his focus and enabled his success. There was a core to his personality that allowed him not only to stand firm through two bitter strikes and a lockout with the owners but also to replace a giant like Marvin Miller.

  As Fehr replaced Miller, Fay Vincent thought, so, too, was the air of statesmanship that existed between the players and the owners replaced by one of open hostility, if not outright war. Rob Manfred tended to disagree with Vincent, thinking it more tricky nostalgia, for Marvin Miller and the owners fought teeth bared and claws out. Peter Gammons sided with Vincent. If the battles between the union and ownership had always been hard fought, there was, under Miller, a professional respect and grudging admiration between the two parties that had been destroyed by collusion. In its place was acrimony. The result, Gammons thought, was two wings on the same bird refusing to work together.

  “They literally hated one another. Don was the guy who had been there for everything. He was there in ’81 and ’85 and ’90. He was not going to trust them ever, and there was a part of him that felt embittered - toward the owners because he gave in to them on arbitration in ’85 and they responded with collusion,” Gammons said.

  THE ISSUES that led to the strike never were resolved. After 232 days, the players only returned to work in spring 1995 because a New York judge, Sonia Sotomayor, found the owners guilty of negotiating in poor faith. In December they had attempted to implement a salary cap without the agreement of the union. The following spring, they made a wicked attempt to supplant the players with replacement players, a move that was rejected by the National Labor Relations Board. Before the scheme was quashed, the owners, enamored of their solidarity and without regard for its effects on the game, toasted one another with champagne at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, D.C. In the end, thought Bill Gould, the chairman of the NLRB who was dispatched by Bill Clinton to try to work out a settlement between the parties, there was no lesson learned, no wisdom to be taken from the longest strike in professional sports history. It was, he thought, the perfect waste.

  By imposing their rule on the players, and then by trying to replace them with beer-leaguers, the owners had lost the public once more. They also lost their shirts. Instead of implementing a salary cap, which was the end game of the strike in the first place, all baseball got was some incremental revenue sharing among the teams, which meant that the wealthy owners would have to subsidize the poorer ones, something they had vowed at Kohler never to do. In the coming years, baseball executives would lament that once more the union had made them look like chumps, the Washington Generals of labor negotiations. They were angered by what they saw to be Judge Sotomayor’s interference, but the damage had been done. The union beat them up again. To Fay Vincent, it was yet another classic case of leading without leadership. Instead of appealing to the reasonable fan that the system had finally spiraled out of control, the owners looked once more like a sorry collection of union busters. They had proven to themselves they could stick together, but that victory was definitely Pyrrhic.

  The players did not fare much better. After the education of Miller, the public, aside from loud plaints about “greedy ballplayers,” had generally sided with the players, but in 1994, the players lost the moral force that sustains sympathy during a work stoppage. The union had now become so powerful that it was no longer clear if they were still the underdogs. “The bottom line,” Vincent said, “is that the union has always had better lawyers.”

  To t
he general public, and a great many people on the front lines of the negotiations, 1994 more than any other labor year was about power and establishing just who possessed it. The issues themselves seemed murky and the vitriol between the two sides seemed strong enough to sustain a permanent discord.

  Dave Winfield, one of the great players of his time, would retire after the 1995 season just as a remarkable new era in baseball was beginning. Looking back, Winfield thought that, had the owners not forced the game to the brink, 1994 might have contained all the magic of 1998, when both Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa surpassed Roger Maris, and the Yankees won 114 games. Between the hitting heroics of Williams, Griffey, Thomas, Bonds, and Gwynn and the revivals of the Expos, Yankees, and Cleveland Indians, the game could not have produced more excitement than it did in 1994, Winfield thought, yet to him that season would forever serve as the game’s lowest point, the year baseball canceled the World Series and lost the public in the process.

  Tony Gwynn recalled the frustration of the fans during the strike and the backlash that came with it. “I had problems, I just never talked about them,” Gwynn said. “There came a time when you just threw up your hands trying to explain your position. I remember the fans I spoke to - didn’t want to hear any of it. They just looked at us and the owners as millionaires fighting with billionaires. You couldn’t talk to them, but you couldn’t blame them, either. When we walked out, we lost them and it took a good five years to even think we could get them back.”

  It seemed, at last, that both sides represented the establishment. This was, thought Fay Vincent, another example of Donald Fehr living under the specter of Marvin Miller. The big issues were all taken, triumphantly, by Miller. The issues left for Fehr were inherently less sympathetic ones. They were not the dismantling of a historically unfair system, as were Miller’s, but the maintaining of an empire.