Dodgerland
Page 11
With Baker’s lingering injury leaving his status uncertain, and with Sutton’s attitude keeping the pitching staff unsettled, Lasorda and the Dodgers at least came to a kind of agreement with Tommy John. At the start of spring training the thirty-three-year-old John had been looking for at least a three-year contract deal. “Every time I was asked to start,” he said, “I started. I’m not asking for the moon. I just want a fair, reasonable salary comparative to Sutton, Hough and Rau—the guys I have to pitch with.”20 In comparison to his cohorts, though, John was actually reasonably well paid, but he had a point.21 While John acknowledged that the Dodgers feared that his arm would weaken or be injured again, the veteran pitcher also thought that his unprecedented feat—of overcoming, and recovering from, what was considered a career-ending injury—should have earned him some longer-term security.
The Dodgers, however, had a history of strict contract dealings, and an aversion to long-term contracts, even with their most successful veterans. And so the team balked at renegotiating the pitcher’s contract. When John finally reported to camp in early March, just a few days after the expected reporting date, he hugged the ebullient Lasorda, saying simply he was ready to pitch. He would not be the gadfly that Sutton was, though later John confided to a reporter that he was determined to leave the team after his current contract expired in 1978.
7
The Game Has Gotten Worse
Eight hundred thousand a year . . . and you throw to the wrong base!
—A baseball fan yelling from the stands in a May 1979 cartoon, “The National Pastime,” by Tom Wolfe, one of his In Our Time series of cartoon illustrations for Harper’s that parodied fads and values of the day
If fans fretted at the Dodgers’ disgruntled veteran pitchers—good old “Black & Decker” and the team’s “Six Million Dollar Man”—they did not have much time to dwell. On March 20 the Dodgers’ spring exhibition season continued with a 4–0 victory over the Mets and pitcher Tom Seaver. The Dodgers stood in first place in the Grapefruit League, but not all seemed right. This was because many began to question—especially now that Baker’s leg problems had recurred—Lasorda’s wisdom in focusing so heavily on playing his regulars during the spring’s meaningless games. Injuries were a part of the game, to be sure, but injuries suffered by a team’s starting lineup even before the season was under way could be a blow to the upcoming season. What exactly was Lasorda trying to prove? they wondered. Did he think these games actually mattered? Still, no one could argue with Lasorda’s success thus far. The team had a 7-2 record; they were playing like rookies again and winning like a team of top-notch veterans.
While spring training, at its core, has always been a meaningless event, some commenters in 1977 suggested that the practice had, like baseball itself, changed for the worse in recent years. “At best,” wrote L.A. Times columnist John Hall on March 22, “spring baseball is a hoax. A gentle and harmless hoax. A time to sell tickets and tone a few muscles and enjoy the weather and lack of pressure while making with outrageous gossip. . . . Once, spring was merely a time of innocent promise—managers promising pennants and players promising the moon. Now, one must wonder if this whole mumbling, grumbling double-taking trip was really necessary.”1
Of course, spring baseball in Florida had never been as innocent and bucolic as Hall suggested in 1977. The first recorded professional baseball team to conduct a full late-winter preseason training camp in the state of Florida was the Washington Senators, whose manager brought the team to stay in Jacksonville in February 1888. The conditions that year were far from genteel, or, as a young catcher on the Senators named Connie Mack put it: “There was a fight every night, and the boys broke a lot of furniture. We played exhibitions during the day and drank most of the night.”2 By 1977, however, fans of a certain mind-set had long forgotten the raw origins of spring baseball and now viewed the Florida baseball camps as a relic of some lost golden era. Followers of the Dodgers, in particular, who cherished the team’s adherence to tradition, knew that Dodger spring-training practices had been established by the grand doyen of the team’s golden era, Branch Rickey. And they knew that the results of his spring-training experiments through the next three decades had justified Rickey’s notions. But now, in 1977, tradition was out of sync with modern times. For traditionalists like Hall, the growing problem was plain: spring training had become a time for whining, for self-absorbed players to eschew the traditions and focus on contract demands. With local mainstays like Sutton and John proving the point in 1977, it was hard to argue with the old-timers like Hall that things were truly better in the heyday of yore.
On March 21, despite his contract frustrations, Tommy John pitched six solid innings against the New York Yankees in a 4–3 loss. Lasorda had given the regular starters a rare day off, and the backups had failed to produce, accounting for just four hits against the Yankees’ fourteen. After the game John reiterated that he felt strong and was ready for the season. Of the eight hits against him, “only four were well hit,” John said. “I felt very good. This is the best shape I’ve been in since I’ve been with the Dodgers.”3
A day later, on March 22, Don Sutton got knocked around a bit, giving up ten hits in six innings to the Astros and taking a 6–5 loss. The team’s spring-training record of 7-4 now put them in second place behind the San Diego Padres. A day earlier Hall had written, somewhat giddily, about the rumors of an “unhappy Don Sutton”; today, however, none of the journalists dwelled on Sutton’s loss. Instead, they pointed out that there was at least one bright note from the game: Dusty Baker, quietly inserting himself back in the lineup, had gone one for three and batted in a run.
On March 23 the Dodgers beat the Cincinnati Reds 2–1 on the strength of first-inning RBIs by Reggie Smith and Rick Monday. Cincinnati turned around and got its revenge on March 24, however, pounding fifteen hits—including four home runs and five doubles—to beat the Dodgers 11–9. From here, mindful that March 27 was the day that teams were required to finalize their twenty-five-man rosters for the year, the Dodgers seemed to shift into high gear. Lasorda had made plain that there was little question who the team’s eight regular starters would be, but that didn’t mean there weren’t still questions about who would be on the team’s bench and in the bullpen. Rick Sutcliffe, a promising young pitcher, had looked strong when he’d been given a chance to pitch in the spring, and Pedro Guerrero had swung the bat well. Despite their obvious promise, however, consensus around the team was that these players, who were both just twenty years old, needed more seasoning in the Minors. They were assigned to Albuquerque. The management continued to tinker, and, in the lead-up to final roster decisions several additional rumors began to circulate. Seeking at least one more veteran bat to bolster its bench, the Dodgers had sought a trade with Montreal for reserve infielder Jose Morales, a pinch-hitting expert who had batted over .300 in the last two seasons. When Al Campanis was unwilling to part with the pitching prospects that Montreal desired, the deal quietly died. The same was true with a deal he had been trying to reach with the Cleveland Indians for veteran slugger Boog Powell and with the Baltimore Orioles for reserve third baseman Tony Muser. Then on March 28 a news report revealed that the Dodgers had come close to trading left-handed starter Doug Rau to the Twins for a young, emerging star outfielder named Lyman Bostock. As a rookie in 1976 Bostock had batted .323, the fourth-best mark in the American League. Although Bostock would have made an intriguing addition to the Dodgers’ outfield, the deal fell through when the team decided it needed to keep as many left-handed pitchers on its roster as possible in order to counter the dangerous left-handed bats in the Cincinnati Reds’ lineup.
Between March 25 and 27 the Dodgers won three straight games and moved back into first place in the Grapefruit League by just a half game over the Philadelphia Phillies. After this stretch Lasorda revealed the team’s final roster, which reinforced his stated focus for the year: aggressive base running, speed, fielding, and, of course, strong pitchi
ng. The team would keep ten pitchers on its roster in 1977, including starters Don Sutton, Tommy John, Doug Rau, Rick Rhoden, and Burt Hooton and relievers Charlie Hough, Al Downing, Stan Wall, Mike Garman, and Elias Sosa. Lance Rautzhan and Hank Webb, not included on the roster, would be packing for the team’s AAA affiliate in Albuquerque. In the infield Lasorda would keep the speedy but light-hitting Teddy Martinez, along with twenty-nine-year-old journeyman corner infielder Ed Goodson. Behind the plate he had written in Steve Yeager and the veteran Johnny Oates. And in the outfield he had chosen, in addition to the starters, the young backup outfielder John Hale, utility player Lee Lacy, and veteran pinch-hitter Manny Mota. Glenn Burke and Claude Westmoreland would return to Albuquerque.
John Hall’s gripe about spring training in 1977 had of course risen not just out of his frustration with the Dodgers’ camp. His concern went much deeper—to baseball itself and to some of the changes occurring at the core of the game. The problem was, as many tradition-minded baseball fans saw it, that America’s pastime was moving away from its roots as an old-fashioned gentleman’s club, built around backroom handshakes and traditions taught the age-old way, toward something more modern and far less appealing. Baseball was becoming, they believed, a sport that was greedy and petty and far less grand than what they expected from the “grand old game.”
In fact, in 1977 more and more voices expressed their discontent over baseball. In February Ray Kroc, the owner of the San Diego Padres, had registered his complaints. Having bought his team just three years before, Kroc, who had made his wealth as chairman of the board of the McDonald’s Corporation, was bemused by what the game was becoming. “I certainly didn’t envision all the changes,” Kroc said in a Times interview by Charles Maher. “This free-agent thing,” Kroc complained in particular. “In the old days teams were pretty permanent. The Yankees had Ruth and Gehrig and then DiMaggio and they were fixtures. Now you might be an Andy Messersmith fan with the Dodgers and all of a sudden he’s gone.” And while Kroc acknowledged, ironically enough, that he had bid for many of the new free agents available over the past two years, he explained that he had done it reluctantly, simply because he didn’t want his team to fall behind. “I don’t like contracts. Nobody in McDonald’s has a contract. Buzzie [Bavasi, the Padres’ general manager] doesn’t have a contract with me. But all of a sudden we’re talking about all these five-year contracts for these free agents. It’s against the norm. . . . [But] you’re stuck.”4
Sparky Anderson, the Reds’ outspoken championship-winning manager, agreed with Kroc. In a separate Times article Anderson admitted he was worried about “what is happening to baseball” and about the changes he had seen in his own players. “The next two years in this business are going to be the most critical we’ve ever seen,” Anderson said. “If they don’t put a stop to this stuff, no young manager’s going to be able to handle it. . . . I think somebody has to, somewhere, make a stand. . . . And we’ll have to find out how much it detracts from the players’ drive. . . . How do you motivate a guy who’s got two more years on his contract and he lets himself get out of condition and he doesn’t aspire to work at it?”5
In 1977 money was distracting baseball players like almost never before. During spring training John Hall surveyed a number of key players around the league who, like the Dodgers’ Don Sutton and Tommy John, were unhappy with their current contracts. His list included such stars as Pete Rose of Sparky Anderson’s Reds, Tom Seaver of the Mets, Jim Palmer of the Orioles, Mickey Rivers of the Yankees, Luis Tiant of the Red Sox, and so on. Rose, who was beloved in his own hometown of Cincinnati, told Hall he’d asked the Reds to trade him. “I just can’t go on like this,” Rose said bitterly. Tom Seaver was so fed up that he said that “the feeling” for his club, the Mets, “was gone.” Jim Palmer, meanwhile, said, “It doesn’t pay [to be Mr. Nice Guy]. The only way to get anything out of the Orioles is to put a gun to their head.” Tiant, a veteran pitcher who had helped lead Boston to the World Series in 1975, said of his team, “I’m tired of all this bull from the Red Sox. I’m mad. My attorney is mad. My wife is mad. She said come home and we’ll move to Mexico.”6
Just about every team had their version (or versions) of this player; no franchise was immune. And why was 1977 so particularly frustrating to certain players? The main reason: 1977 was the first year of full free agency. Established after the 1975 season following a series of court decisions and other legal battles, free agency was essentially the right for a player to sign a contract with any team he chose—something that had not been possible in baseball for nearly one hundred years.7 After the 1976 season the contracts of thirty-nine veteran players—who, per the new rules, had gained free agency by serving six years in the league—had expired, making them eligible to negotiate with any team. Some of the new free agents—Reggie Jackson, Joe Rudi, Rollie Fingers, Bobby Grich, Doyle Alexander, Don Gullett—had been among the most coveted players in the league, and they cashed in. Reggie Jackson, for example, who famously signed with the New York Yankees in the 1976 off-season, saw his salary jump from $200,000 to $525,000 per year. Joe Rudi’s salary leaped from $67,200 in 1976 to $400,000 in 1977 when he left the Oakland A’s to sign with the California Angels. And so on.
In 1977, thanks to free agency, the overall average player salary, which had for most of the past decade grown by about 8 or 9 percent per year, jumped by nearly 50 percent in one year.8 With such a sudden payroll jump, and an attendant sense that this change was accelerating beyond anyone’s control, it was no wonder that many traditionalists were nervous. More surprising was the fact that these feelings, as journalists like John Hall discovered, extended to many players. On the surface this inflation might seem like something they would wholeheartedly embrace. Unfortunately, because the transition to the new contractual realities was so sudden in baseball, not every eligible player was reaping the reward in 1977. As Don Sutton and Tommy John (and Pete Rose, and Tom Seaver, and Jim Palmer, and so on) could affirm, baseball teams in 1977 were populated by a small cadre of newly rich haves and a wider, angrier array of have-nots. The fat salaries that some players had drawn through free agency during the off-season in fact were the talk of spring training in 1977, causing heated discussions to break out on the field, in clubhouses and dugouts, and in the press about who was making what money and why (or, more accurately, whether they deserved it). Tension grew so intense in some clubhouses that a few team managers felt the need to take action. “The one thing I don’t want to hear in the clubhouse,” said decidedly old-school Sparky Anderson at the start of spring training, “is talk about money, contracts, and playing out options. . . . Nobody should refer to a man’s salary. It’s a personal thing.”9 But very little could soothe the raw nerves. The subject rankled too much for players to avoid it.
To be fair to the traditionalists, especially from our current vantage point—in which free market–based economic self-determination seems such an obvious right for athletes—in 1977 it was impossible to know where free agency would take baseball. The ongoing economic troubles of teams like the Brewers, A’s, Padres, Giants, and so on were well known. And as certain free-agent players began to cash in big time, ordinary baseball fans—many of whom were still feeling the effects of an extended economic downturn with lingering high unemployment, runaway inflation, and a rising national debt—felt for the first time their favorite baseball stars moving out of sync with their own lives. So widespread was the anxiety over the changes occurring in baseball during the transition to free agency that it rippled down into the basest forms of popular media. In 1975, as players fought to win the right to free agency through arbitration, Bob Dylan recorded a song about marquee player Catfish Hunter, who was the first player to win freedom (after the 1974 season on an isolated contract technicality) from the “farm” of a greedy Charlie Finley and sign with a new team, the New York Yankees. Then, on March 13, 1976, comic artist and noted baseball fan Charles Schulz made reference to the struggles of the players of the time
in his widely syndicated daily comic strip, Peanuts. Schulz introduced a story line in which a victory-minded character named Peppermint Patty decides her baseball team is lacking a decent shortstop. Over the phone Patty strong-arms rival manager Charlie Brown to send his shortstop, Snoopy, to her team. Later, Patty is chastised by one of her players, Marcie. “You owners are all alike!” Marcie says. “You think you can trade us players like cattle!” “Moo!” Snoopy adds.
In actuality, the complaints of ballplayers in 1977 were really nothing new. They had been desperately begging for any possible table scrap from team owners, going nearly back to the earliest days of the reserve clause that essentially tied them to one team for their entire careers.10 A prominent player of the era, John Montgomery Ward, said in an 1887 magazine article, “Like a fugitive slave law, the reserve rule denies him a harbor or a livelihood, and carries him back, bound and shackled, to the club from which he attempted to escape.”11 To fight back against the owners, in 1890 Ward helped create a new baseball league to rival the National League: the Player’s League. At first the new league showed promise, siphoning off about half of the National League’s regulars and drawing a respectable audience for the first season. Unfortunately, the new league’s nervous team owners gave up when large profits did not immediately materialize. Over the next decade or so, a number of other rival leagues either closed down a few years after starting or, in the case of the American League in 1901, were swallowed up by the older league. In the mid-1940s four Mexican brothers tried, and ultimately failed, to create a player-focused alternative major league. And in the early 1950s Branch Rickey, recently let loose by the Dodgers, nearly led several new would-be baseball team owners to found a “third major league,” which would have banished the reserve clause. Unfortunately for players, Rickey’s Continental League fell apart due to actions undertaken by the Major League owners. This included the co-optation of many of the would-be owners of the Continental League by deciding, in 1961, to expand the number of Major League teams for the first time since 1901.12