A NEW LOOK FOR THE OLD BALL GAME
It's a goddam good game," says Yankee President Gabe Paul, "to survive what's been done to it."
What is being done to baseball and by whom is a matter of substantial contention, but the first half of Gabe Paul's statement has been resoundingly endorsed in the past few days.
> In New York, hallowed old Yankee Stadium, the house that Ruth built, reopened in plushly refurbished form, its dedication presided over by Mayor Abraham Beame. It was 53 years from Babe to Abe, but the difference in what a community will lavish on its sports team could be measured in lightyears. Trembling at the thought that its Yankees might leave town forever, the stone-broke metropolis ponied up an estimated $100 million to provide the likes of 6,900 parking spaces and an electronic Scoreboard for the fans, expansive lavender-carpeted dressing rooms for the players and a plush lounge, featuring overstuffed chairs in the shape of fielders' gloves, for the owner's guests.
> In Chicago, Peg-Legged Bill Veeck (see box page 76), dressed as a Revolutionary soldier and playing a fife, stumped triumphantly across the 100% natural turf he has restored to Comiskey Park. Marching to Veeck's tune were White Sox fans in unheard-of numbers. There were 40,318 in the flesh at opening day (compared with 20,202 last year), season-ticket sales were up more than 40%, and a franchise that had been ready as late as December 1975 to blow the Windy City looked solid as a line-drive double--all because the greatest promoter baseball has ever known was back in action.
> In Atlanta, the Braves' new owner, a tough-minded, salty-tongued communications czar and yachtsman named Ted Turner, signed up the game's most sought-after right arm in a reported $1 million deal engineered by--of all people--a fan who took the negotiating authority upon himself. With one stroke of the pen, the moribund Braves had a bright new look. The signee was a handsome, 30-year-old, bubble-gum-chewing pitcher named Andy Messersmith, a free spirit and free agent whose victorious legal battle against baseball's "reserve clause" was reshaping the entire sport.
Little wonder then that turnstiles clicked like Castanets as combined major league opening-day attendance figures hit an alltime high. Baseball '76, which for weeks had seemed unlikely to get launched at all, was off to a rocketing start. The long legal arguments over the rights of spring, at least for the moment, proved no contest for the game's own rites of spring.
The grandest new blossom of baseball's most stimulating April ever was Yankee Stadium, a glowing renovation of the most famous, nostalgia-imbued house of sweat in America. Only New Orleans' Superdome, completed last year, cost more ($173 million); Seattle's "Kingdome," which opened this month, was a mere $60 million. Of course, teams domiciled in these weatherproof bubbles never have to worry about slipping in the rain, losing fly balls in the smog, getting grass stains on their pants or suffering other terrestrial indignities.
But even if undomed, the new Yankee Stadium has more character than those sterile, round, modular units that have sprung up across the sports landscape like mushrooms in a glen. It is basically the same looming, irregularly laid-out structure whose vast inner space Babe Ruth, Joe DiMaggio and Mickey Mantle roamed heroically. Only it is clean, shiny and for the first time comfortable. The "Telescreen" on the scoreboard that was to flash messages like "Charge!" to the crowd was not working, and some box-seat spectators complained that their view of home plate was blocked by the dugout roof. But the ugly poles that screened the vision of generations of fans have been removed, and the seats are now wide enough--22 in. instead of 18--to accommodate America's middle-age spread. This bow to our hippy culture reduced the stadium's capacity from 65,010 to 54,028.
The distinctive, swag fac,ade that once hung from the roof of the stands has been reproduced atop the new $3 million-plus scoreboard--only in concrete, not painted copper. Because the value of copper has risen almost as drastically as ballplayers' salaries since 1923, the original fac,ade was melted down and sold. Perhaps it is now plumbing in a renovated brownstone. The playing surface is still alive: Merion blue grass, in texture irregular enough to promise a few historic bounces and in color a nice uneven biological green.
On April 18, 1923, close to 65,000 fans* flocked to New York's $2.5 million house of baseball. New York Governor Al Smith threw out the first ball. The first one hit into the stands--fittingly--was a game-winning home run by Babe Ruth that beat his old Red Sox teammates 4-1. Ruth's astonishing home-run hitting and his $50,000 salary had made baseball a different game and caused many to say the new stadium should have been called Ruth Field.
At last Thursday's reopening, sold out eight days in advance, Bob Shawkey, the starting pitcher in the 1923 opener, threw out the first ball. Five of his and Ruth's teammates from the 1923 Yankees (World Series winners that year) were on hand--Waite Hoyt, "Jumping Joe" Dugan, Hinkey Haines, Whitey Witt and Oscar Roettger. The youthful crowd greeted the old heroes with no more than polite applause and saved the biggest ovation for Mickey Mantle, the most nearly contemporary demigod introduced. Even Joe DiMaggio failed to produce much of an explosion among the watchers. Because of his recent television commercials, many of them probably identify him more with coffee and a savings bank than with baseball.
But DiMaggio looked good--slim, dignified, younger than his 61 years, very classy. When DiMaggio was in kindergarten, the other kids probably came up to him and said, "Joe, you look good." When DiMaggio visits the Louvre, if he does, the Venus de Milo probably waits until they are alone and whispers, "Joe, you look good." "Welcome back, Joe," said several fans who happened to run into him and to remember back to the '40s, when he was making impossible catches with the poise of Charles Boyer stealing jewels. After DiMaggio had thanked them and moved away, the fans said to each other, "Don't he look good?"
The Yankees went on to win the game 11-4, but their inaugural moments were a fright. Starting Pitcher Rudy May walked the first Minnesota Twin to face him on four pitches, and then saw his fifth knocked over the left-centerfield fence by Dan Ford for the new stadium's first home run. With that an annoyed patron released a live piglet onto the field. But then Lefthander May, who was born in Coffeyville, Kans., and once went to a psychiatrist to cure his pitching woes, wound up and delivered a high, tight "moving" fastball to the Twins' Rod Carew, who was born in Panama on a train. Carew, who hits a baseball more consistently, though not farther, than any man alive, swung ineffectually and grounded out, and the day soon righted itself for the home team.
May's pitch was by no means epochal, but like the approximately 505,400 other fastballs, curves, sliders, sinkers, spitters, straight changes, screwballs, blooper balls and knucklers that will be thrown this year in major-league games, it was an assertion of the baseball season's venerable rhythms, which have been springing up around April and falling off around October for more than a century. It was also a useful pitch, both functional and decisive. It takes something of an artist's bravery and knowledge to throw major-league pitches. A fan savors the lines they draw in the air and the effects they produce, even if they are not fraught with drama.
But all such pretty nuances were nearly overwhelmed this spring by a tide of events that is sweeping through big-time professional sport. A mood of emancipation has changed the basic player-owner relationship. Pro football, basketball and hockey--under legal pressure--are all in various stages of changing the traditional serfdom in which owners have held players.
In baseball, the tie that binds has been the reserve clause, which states that even if a player does not agree to terms, his team automatically has the right to renew his previous contract for another year. This has always been construed to mean that the club can keep on renewing indefinitely, a unique condition of servitude that has prevailed largely because of a 1922 Supreme Court decision that baseball is a sport, not a business, and therefore exempt from vast reaches of the law. But now, in the case of Andy Messersmith, the courts have upheld the ruling of a baseball arbitrator that if a player plays out his option--performs for a full season without signing--the contract cannot be extended again by the club. Thereupon the player becomes what none of the former greats of the game could ever hope to be--a talent who can sell himself to any owner willing to meet his price. (The celebrated Catfish Hunter case of 1974 was different. Hunter was declared a free agent by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn because Oakland, in declining to pay part of Hunter's salary to a company he had designated, failed to live up to its contract with him. He signed a $3.5 million contract with the Yankees.)
Currently 85 players,** including Boston Red Sox Outfielder Fred Lynn, last year's American League Rookie of the Year and Most Valuable Player, and a host of other stars, are taking advantage of this situation. They stand to become free agents this October, unless they change their minds and settle with their current clubs. The Players' Association, baseball's equivalent of a trade union, is willing to accept a modified reserve clause in the future. Spring training, however, began 18 days late this year essentially because the association and the owners could not agree on what form the new clause would take. Kuhn eventually ordered the owners to open up their camps, but there is still no agreement. Whatever new contract is worked out, players hereafter will be able to attain independence after a given number of years in the game. In a rare burst of candor, Kuhn says of the old reserve clause: "Modifications were overdue."
The consequence of this wrangling is turmoil in the higher salary brackets. Early this month, outspoken Outfielder Reggie Jackson (TIME cover, June 3, 1974) was traded to the Baltimore Orioles by the penny-pinching owner of the Oakland A's, Charlie Finley, who argues that "too many stupid owners are willing to pay astronomical salaries." To the Orioles' dismay, Jackson, who averaged 31 homers and 91 runs batted in during his eight years with the A's, has so far refused to report to his new ball club. He says he will not come until they compensate him for having to leave his Western business interests and until they begin to show more respect for his sensibilities.
When Tom Seaver's contract talks began, the New York Mets first insulted the man known as their "franchise" by threatening to trade him. That is no way to comfort a three-time winner of the Cy Young Award, which goes to the best pitcher in each league. Then they signed Seaver to a three-year contract worth an estimated $690,000, but which includes incentive clauses of dubious legality.
Nor is the confusion just among players and owners. Leagues are fighting too. Both the National and American are claiming the right to a Toronto franchise in 1977, while teamless Washington, D.C., is being scorned by day and embraced by night. In sum, baseball is way up in the air, and all parties are circling under it hollering "I got it, I got it," perhaps with misplaced confidence.
Underlying much that is happening is a new sense of competition. Owners have always spoken highly of competition, but what they had in mind was team-against-team on the field. They never bestirred themselves greatly to compete with other amusements for the entertainment dollar, and they did not have to compete very strenuously with the players for the baseball dollar. When Pittsburgh Outfielder Willie Stargell bats against Seaver, "it's like two big rocks grinding together," says Stargell.
In the past when a player faced an owner across the bargaining table, the owner was in a position to be a rock and the player could either sign his contract or go dig rocks. "Joe DiMaggio would never have played out his option," say traditionalists. But they are wrong.
"Sure I would have been tempted to play out my option," DiMaggio told TIME last week. "After my fourth season I asked for $43,000 and General Manager Ed Barrow told me, 'Young man, do you realize Lou Gehrig, a 16-year man, is playing for only $44,000?' I said, 'Mr. Barrow, there is only one answer to that--Mr. Gehrig is terribly underpaid.' And then there was the season I hit in 56 straight games . When I came in to talk contract, I was offered a $5,000 cut."
"Ed Barrow was the toughest man I ever met in my life," says another former Yankee star, Shortstop Phil Rizzuto. For the "Scooter's" first big-league season, the Yankees offered $5,000. Rizzuto got an audience with Barrow to complain: "I went into his office and he was sitting there, a big burly guy wearing a sweater with holes at both elbows. He was eating a ham sandwich. He looked up and asked me what I wanted. I told him I thought I deserved more money. He stared at me, then said, 'Sign it or get out.' What could I do? I signed."
In 1949, his fourth season with the Yankees, All-Star Yogi Berra was paid $14,000. The by then immortal DiMaggio made $89,000, Rizzuto $37,700. The whole roster's salaries totaled $413,000. This year's Yankees--a team that most experts figure will finish third in their division--make $1,305,000.
The bargaining position for today's athlete is much stronger but more complicated. The top players are too sensitive, too proud and have too much economic clout to be told to take what they are offered or leave it. They also tend to think of themselves as special cases who should be taken care of rather than as tough horse traders dealing in their own flesh. "I have other alternatives," says Reggie Jackson. "I have a real estate business, a Pontiac dealership, a television contract, and obligations to people who work with me. Life has more to offer than hitting a ball over a fence. 'Come to me and let's talk,' I say. Let the Baltimore Orioles and Reggie Jackson hammer out something that's amicable to both sides. They must listen to what I have to say. Treat me like a human being. Treat me like a man. But in such a way that it isn't all business. In such a way that I still have some little boy in me, still some rah-rah in me, so I can play my game." That is a tall order for any negotiator.
"When it came to negotiating, what I wanted was someone to go in there and knock heads," says Messersmith. "If an athlete who has been pampered ever since he was a kid is inserted into a heavy business situation, he gets chewed up." Like many other stars, Messersmith negotiates through an agent, Herb Osmond, who enables his client to confine his pitching to the field.
Messersmith is a tough, hustling player and easygoing beach lover who looks a bit like Ryan O'Neal. He was a jock at the University of California in 1964 at the time of the Free Speech Movement there, and he searched out Mario Savio and had a talk with him "to see what the guy had to say." Now Savio is a schoolteacher and Messersmith is the revolutionary who broke the back of baseball's reserve clause.
Andy's freedom flight is a historic saga, one worthy of baseball lore. It began early in the spring of '75. On the strength of an imposing 1974 season (20 wins, 6 losses), he asked for $150,000. The Dodgers answered that if he did not take $90,000, they would trade him. The take-it-or-leave-it price was to rise dramatically, however. As last season moved on, Messersmith and the Dodgers got close to agreement on money but not on his demand for a no-trade contract. There was talk that the league had instructed the Dodgers not to grant such a clause because it would set a bad precedent. By midsummer the issue had become a matter of principle for Messersmith. Last September, backed by the Players' Association, he went to arbitration to start his successful test of the reserve clause. Unlike the Catfish Hunter case, the Messersmith ruling applies to all players, at least until some new general contract agreement can be worked out. Following the court decision, the Dodgers' best offer escalated to $600,000 for three years. After rejecting that and assorted other lures, Osmond signed a memorandum with the Yankees that reportedly would have given Messersmith $ 1 million for four years.
Next, intrigue reigned. Osmond rejected the formal contract based on this memo. Claiming provisions had been changed, he walked out of the Yankees' offices in Tampa and jumped into a cab. The Yankees looked out the window and saw the cab driver was a woman, tracked her down through the cab company and learned Osmond had told her he was flying to Vero Beach, spring-training home of, gasp, the dreaded Dodgers.
In fact, the Dodgers were out of the picture. Nonetheless, the Yankees felt they were being toyed with and threatened to hold Messersmith to their supposed agreement with Osmond. There were rumors--false, as it turned out--that the Yankees had plied Osmond with strong drink. Messersmith, offended by the threat, said he would never sign with the Yankees. The dispute went to the commissioner, but before Kuhn could adjudicate it, the Yankees gave up. "I just said to hell with it," explained Yankee Owner George M. Steinbrenner III, waving the sacred pin stripes. "If he didn't want to play for the Yankees, we didn't have room for him."
Next the San Diego Padres made a $1,150,000 offer, but Padre Owner Ray Kroc, president of all 18 billion McDonald's hamburgers, sizzled when Messersmith demanded his no-cut, no-trade provision. "Kroc said even the president of McDonald's works one day at a time," reported Messersmith. "He said only God could give a no-cut contract." Kroc's answer: "He can work in a car wash."
In all, six clubs made serious offers for Messersmith. Atlanta's had been halfhearted until the day Osmond got a call from a man named Larry Foster, who said he represented Braves Owner Ted Turner and wanted to deal for Messersmith. In twelve hours Foster and Osmond had agreed on a contract. Foster left, and Turner called Osmond. "I told him everything had been fixed with his representative," says Osmond. "It was then I learned that Foster was not with the club at all. He was just a fan!"
The owner of an Atlanta chimney-and furnace-cleaning firm, Foster indeed was a fan. "He wasn't authorized by Turner to do anything except call me," laughs Osmond, "but he got carried away and made the deal." Turner blithely went along with it. And Ed Barrow turned over in his grave.
Experienced baseball men see ominous ramifications in all this, and with reason. "These newer owners are going to have to get housebroken and learn the bottom line," says Dodger Boss Walter O'Malley. Warns Charlie Finley: "People have only so much money for food, for rent, for entertainment. Athletes are going to price themselves out of the market. I do not criticize the athletes, I criticize the owners for paying these unjustified, astronomical salaries." Says Yankee Manager Billy Martin, who took a 28% pay cut in 1950 when the Yankees brought him up from the minors: "There will come a day when players like Andy Messersmith won't be in the game. The owners will get together and decide they can't suffer them."
But for now owners are hustling to accommodate the newly powerful stars. After a bitter word battle between the New York Mets management and their suddenly Not-So-Terrific Tom, the contract Seaver has ended up with reportedly pays him $230,000 for 1976, plus $5,000 "for each game he would normally start" after he wins his 19th. If he wins fewer than 18, he agrees to take a 10% cut next year--unless injuries or lack of support from teammates keeps him from winning that many. Exactly how this squares with Major League Rule 3A is yet to be decided by National League President Charles S. ("Chub") Feeney. Seaver could get a high, hard one thrown past him. The rule reads in part: "No contract... shall provide for the giving of a bonus for playing, pitching or batting skill..."
Reggie Jackson has for years publicly proclaimed his desire to get away from Oakland and Charlie Finley. But now he contends Oakland is his business capital. On the strength of getting Jackson, bookmakers made Baltimore the 5-2 favorite to win the American League's Eastern Division. In their first five games the punchless Orioles scored only nine runs. Meanwhile, Slugger Jackson was in retreat in Tempe, Ariz., reviewing his life's options with his agent-partner, Garry Walker, and a psychologist, Ron Barnes. Walker hinted at one point that Jackson would not sign until vacationing Oriole Owner Jerry Hoffberger returned from Israel. Oriole General Manager Hank Peters, Jackson seemed to feel, lacked a sophisticated enough grasp of extra-baseball business matters to work out the deal. Oh, that an outfielder should judge a g.m. in such a way! Where will it all end?
That depends in part on what kind of reserve clause the players and owners agree to. The players have proposed free agency after six years in the majors. The owners say that would not give them enough return on their investments in the minor-league training of players. (The Yankees claim they spend $1.4 million a year on their four-team farm system, which develops about three major leaguers annually.) According to Marvin Miller, chief negotiator for the players, "The owners know they've not been spending their player-development money efficiently. There should have been a pool arrangement a long time ago, a league where the players are supported by major-league baseball, not the individual clubs, and from which they can then be drafted."
Owners also worry that free agents will roam from team to team and fans will cease to identify with athletes. But every year owners themselves shuffle 100 or so of the 600 major leaguers from team to team in trades. Indeed, they rarely hesitate to move whole teams when it suits their fancy or tax returns; witness the Boston-Milwaukee-Atlanta Braves or the Philadelphia-Kansas City-Oakland A's.
Another concern is that the richest teams will corner all the talent. The Yankees have never hesitated to try. They went for Messersmith, yearn for Jackson and came up with a true free-agent plum when they signed Hunter. But Hunter argues against any such monopoly thesis.
"Ballplayers don't want to go with a team that has all the talent," says Hunter. "They wouldn't play every day. They want to go to the team that needs help. I made it to the bigs much sooner because I signed with Kansas City. And one club couldn't buy all that many stars. There is no way they could afford such a payroll."
Marvin Miller believes that only 15 or so free agents would switch teams in a given year, "not the hundreds the owners claim. The superstars won't be the ones who will move. A superstar has far more attachment to his team's city than people realize. He's got a home, a wife, kids, and probably business interests in the city. He doesn't want to move just for a few more bucks. It's the utility player sitting behind a Johnny Bench who wants to move. And the minor-league guy who'd be in the majors if his club weren't so strong at his position. Having the right to become a free agent will be more important than actually using the right. Not just to get more money from your club, but to make management pay more attention to the basic standards of decency and human dignity."
Free agency, in one form or another, is an idea whose time is now. Phillie Pitcher Tug McGraw thinks the hassling among owners and players is a healthy sign. "It's to the benefit of everybody that all this surfaces," he says. "We are no longer going to be fooled into thinking that it is just a little boy's game we are playing out there." During his eight years as a Met, says McGraw, "the line had always been that we were a part of this big happy family. We were always the 'sons' of management. Well, that's not the way it was, or is, not at all. Let a problem come up, like the soreness in my back, and the Mets moved quick to make a good deal for me before word got out that I was hurting. But that's the way it should be. Baseball is primarily a business, and the Mets acted in their best interest. My only objection is, let's quit kidding about it."
But if McGraw is a businessman, he is one after Bill Veeck's heart. It may not be just a boy's game, but last year while the Braves were taking batting practice, McGraw hid out of sight with a hose and periodically sprinkled then-Brave Ralph Garr, who kept staring at the sunny sky in amazement. You often get that kind of thing in baseball. Once before a game in St. Louis, Bob Uecker, then a journeyman catcher, now an ABC announcer, borrowed a tuba from a band that was playing on the field and used it to shag flies. "Everybody loved it," says Uecker. "Except the tuba player."
Innocence and ebullience--these are realities of baseball that transcend contracts and lawsuits. Bill Veeck sits in his Chicago office, looking at the 15-in. file drawer on his desk that contains some 1,500 promotional ideas, pondering which one to spring on his White Sox followers next. It is no wonder he expects more than a million paid through his gates this year. Milwaukee Brewer Boss Bud Selig, 41, comes right out and calls baseball show biz. His competition? Not other sports, but "movies, the circus, rock concerts." His market? Youth. A 1975 survey showed that the average age of Brewer fans is 25; the young have discovered that the game is cheap at the gate and fine for a date ($8 is tops, in Houston; 85-c- is bottom, in Baltimore).
The players are faster, stronger and bushier than ever--New York is a notable exception now that George Steinbrenner has decreed short hair in order to instill "Yankee pride" in his players--but they still fit into the diamond in such a way as to generate the same slow magnetism of yore. Football fans pay up to $18 a seat for thrills, chills, shocks and jolts. Baseball fans welcome thrills, too; last year's rousing World Series remains a vivid memory. But for their money they just ask for flavor. It won't be easy for the sport to reconcile its players' new clout with the need to keep ticket prices down to a daily digestible level, but then it isn't easy to throw or hit a nice pitch either. Showmen like Bill Veeck and operators like Ted Turner seem to be up to the new challenge, and baseball appears to have the momentum to keep rolling along. Asked what he likes most about the game's format, Tug McGraw ponders for a moment and replies, "The shape of the ball. We must never change the shape of the ball."
* The announced figure of 74,200, the Yankees later shamelessly admitted, was impossible; the park at the time had only 62,000 seats.
** Most notably, Oakland's Vida Blue, Joe Rudi, Sal Bando, Gene Tenace, Bert Campaneris and Bill North; St. Louis' Al Hrabosky and Ted Simmons; Philadelphia's Dick Allen and Dave Cash; Minnesota's Bert Blyleven; Baltimore's Ken Holtzman; Boston's Carlton Fisk; Cincinnati's Don Gullett, and Graig Nettles of the Yankees.
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