The Red Smith Reader Page 17

  “Dear Mr. Kuhn,” Flood wrote on December 24, 1969, “after twelve years in the major leagues I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes. I believe that any system that produces that result violates my basic rights as a citizen and is inconsistent with the laws of the United States and of the several states.

  “It is my desire to play baseball in 1970, and I am capable of playing. I have received a contract offer from the Philadelphia club, but I believe that I have the right to consider offers from other clubs before making any decisions. I, therefore, request that you make known to all the major league clubs my feelings in this matter, and advise them of my availability for the 1970 season.”

  Kuhn replied:

  Dear Curt: This will acknowledge your letter of December 24, 1969, which I found on returning to my office yesterday.

  I certainly agree with you that you, as a human being, are not a piece of property to be bought and sold. That is fundamental in our society and I think obvious. However, I cannot see its application to the situation at hand.

  You have entered into a current playing contract with the St. Louis club which has the same assignment provisions as those in your annual major league contracts since 1956. Your present playing contract has been assigned in accordance with its provisions by the St. Louis club to the Philadelphia club. The provisions of the playing contract have been negotiated over the years between the clubs and the players, most recently when the present basic agreement was negotiated two years ago between the clubs and the Players Association.

  If you have any specific objections to the propriety of the assignment I would appreciate your specifying the objections. Under the circumstances, and pending any further information from you, I do not see what action I can take, and cannot comply with your request contained in the second paragraph of your letter.

  I am pleased to see your statement that you desire to play baseball in 1970. I take it this puts to rest any thought, as reported earlier in the press, that you were considering retirement.

  Thus the commissioner restates baseball’s labor policy: “Run along, sonny, you bother me.”

  CHRISTMAS SPIRIT

  1975

  Obviously, the arbitration award making Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally free agents came as no surprise to the men who own baseball, for they already had a paper prepared and signed firing the arbitrator. As soon as Peter Seitz delivered his opinion, John Gaherin, the owners’ representative in labor matters, handed him a letter dismissing him as umpire in grievance cases. The owners and the players’ union had agreed on Seitz as successor to another professional arbitrator, Gabriel Alexander of Detroit, slightly more than a year ago under an agreement providing that his services could be terminated by either party. Remembering that it was Peter Seitz who shook Catfish Hunter off Charley Finley’s hook—they couldn’t possibly forget—the powers, archangels and angels of the baseball hierarchy had decided before yesterday that they wanted an impartial arbitrator who would be more impartial on their side.

  Along with the dismissal notice went a demand that Seitz release no copies of his seventy-page opinion and refrain from discussing it, writing about it or making speeches about it.

  He replied that he would not circulate the opinion because he felt it was the property of the parties involved. He added that he regarded the order to button his lip, coming from people who had just fired him, as the ultimate in arrogance.

  If “arrogance” seems too mild a word, put it down to the fact that Peter Seitz is a man of judicial mind, temperate of speech, with a gift for understatement. Another man might have sent John Gaherin back to his bosses with a pointed suggestion for disposal of their pink slip.

  In making the award, Marvin Miller, executive director of the Players’ Association, concurred with Seitz, while the third member of the arbitration panel, Gaherin, voted the company way. The ruling will be appealed to the courts. Chances are baseball will attempt to carry it all the way to the Supreme Court. If it is confirmed, it will open another chink in the feudal edifice called the reserve system, but it will not put an end to the system.

  All Seitz really decided was that when a contract says “for a period of one year” it does not mean two years or twenty or two hundred.

  The standard one-year contract gives the employer an option on the player’s services for a second year. Paragraph 10-A provides that if the player does not sign a new contract for the second year, the employer may unilaterally renew the old contract “for a period of one year on the same terms.” The owners argue that “on the same terms” means “with another one-year option.” That’s how the reserve system works: it enables the employer to “reserve” the player for life, with or without a contract.

  “No it doesn’t,” Peter Seitz ruled. His decision put baseball players in the same class as football players who play out their option and become free agents.

  Messersmith and McNally, pitchers owned by the Los Angeles Dodgers and Montreal Expos, refused to sign 1975 contracts because they were not satisfied with the terms. Messersmith pitched all summer and won 19 games. With a record of 3-6 in June, McNally gave up and went home, spending the rest of the season on the disqualified list. Both went to arbitration, contending that now that the option season was over they were entitled to free agency.

  First the owners went to court to argue that this was not a proper subject for arbitration. Federal Judge John W. Oliver in Kansas City refused to issue an injunction, but had the parties stipulate that either side could come back and ask for a review of the arbitrator’s decision. That will be baseball’s next step.

  In making the award, Seitz pointed out that he was not making a judgment on the merits of the reserve system but was merely interpreting language that had been agreed upon. As he read it, that language said and meant “for a period of one year,” so the players had discharged their obligations and were free.

  Weeks ago he reminded both sides that they were engaged in negotiations for a new basic agreement on working conditions, which include the reserve system. He urged them to meet immediately and try to bargain out the issue instead of waiting for a quasi-judicial opinion. They did not meet.

  “But,” he said yesterday, “it still isn’t too late. If this finding is destructive to the reserve system, if it is a blow to the national game, there is still time for them to sit down and ameliorate the blow. As I understand it, the Players’ Association is not opposed to the reserve system, it is opposed to the reserve system with its present restrictions.”

  It is excellent advice. It will be acted upon exactly the way similar advice has been acted upon in the past: “These,” the owners and their lawyers will say as they have said time and again, “are matters best left to collective bargaining.” Then they refuse to bargain.

  Yes, and Merry Christmas to you, too.

  THE GAME THEY INVENTED FOR WILLIE

  OAKLAND, 1973

  When Willie got the hit, Ray Sadecki and Harry Parker were watching on television in the clubhouse of the New York Mets. For a moment there was silence. Then Sadecki, who had pitched an inning and one-third, turned to Parker, who had pitched one inning. “He had to get a hit,” Sadecki said. “This game was invented for Willie Mays a hundred years ago.”

  It was the longest day in the long, long history of World Series competition, and for Willie Mays it was eternity. It was the second match in the struggle with the Oakland A’s for the baseball championship of creation. It was the nineteenth such game for Willie in a span of twenty-two years. In the forty-third year of his life, this may have been the final bow for the most exciting player of his time. So he lost the game in the ninth inning, won it in the twelfth, came perilously close to losing it again—and walked away from disaster grinning.

  Never another like him. Never in this world.

  “Yesterday,” a man told him, “you said you were going to let the kids win it the rest of the way. What do you say about the old folks now?�
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  Willie took a sip from a can of Coke. He lounged on a platform behind a microphone, one leg slung over a television receiving set. His jaw worked rhythmically on a cud of gum.

  “What old folks you talkin’ about?” he asked.

  Strictly speaking, Willie never lost the game and never won it. It only seemed that way. When the Mets had the decision in hand, 6-4, in the last of the ninth, Mays fell down chasing a drive by Deron Johnson and the two-base hit that resulted started a rally that tied the score.

  Willie had gone into the game as a pinch-runner and had fallen down rounding second, but that had been only an embarrassment without effect on the score. For the most spectacular outfielder of an era, though, that pratfall in center was catastrophic.

  “I didn’t see the ball,” he said, and he wasn’t the only one dazzled in the sun field of Oakland-Alameda County Stadium. “I tried to dive for it the last second. We had a two-run lead and I shoulda played it safe.”

  His chance for redemption came in the twelfth with the score still tied, two out and two Mets on the bases. The game had already gone on longer than any World Series match before, longer than the one between the Cubs and Tigers that consumed 3 hours 28 minutes in 1945.

  Rollie Fingers, fifth of the six pitchers who worked for Oakland, threw a strike and Willie slashed at it, missing. Fingers threw another and Willie slapped it straight back, a bounder that hopped high over the pitcher’s head and skipped on into center field, sending Bud Harrelson home with the run that put New York ahead.

  “I think it was a fastball, up,” Willie said. “I’d seen Fingers a lot on television and he likes to work inside and outside, up and down. Yesterday was the test. He threw me a fastball, then gave me a breaking pitch and came back with a fastball, so I knew he’d feed me 80 percent fastballs.”

  Waxed mustache twitching angrily, Fingers flipped his glove away in disgust. One play later the Oakland manager, Dick Williams, sent Fingers away, too, but more in sorrow than in anger. By that time Cleon Jones had singled to load the bases, and errors soon would let in three more runs.

  With New York in front, 10-6, Reggie Jackson opened the rebuttal. He drove a mighty shot high and deep toward the wall in center. Willie went back to the fence, set himself and saw the ball drop in front of him.

  “I saw it,” he said afterward, “and in a close game I might have had a chance on it, but we had a four-run lead then and I didn’t want to kill myself because we got a lot more games to play.”

  “But Willie,” a man said, “you fell down in center field. What happened out there?”

  “Two balls come out there,” he said. “That’s most of it.” His voice dropped, took on a comforting tone. “You’ve seen me play enough. I wasn’t out there long today. You know when I play regular. . . . But I’m not a player that makes excuses.”

  Excuses? Some of those who heard him could remember the catch he made off Cleveland’s Vic Wertz in the World Series of 1954, the time he ran down Carl Furillo’s drive, spun completely around and threw out Billy Cox at the plate, the impossible chance he grabbed off Roberto Clemente of Pittsburgh. To be sure, this time Jackson scored and the A’s went on to fill the bases. But excuses? Not for Willie, ever.

  THE METS’ MIDNIGHT MASSACRE

  1977

  In the emotional aftermath of M. Donald Grant’s Midnight Massacre, one significant fact emerged yesterday: contrary to what the Mets’ chairman of the board had been saying and his tame columnist had been writing, Tom Seaver was not demanding renegotiation of his contract. He was not welshing. He was prepared to fufill the commitments that extended through the 1978 season, provided the club would start negotiations now on a new agreement for the seasons of 1979-80-81. He would of course have sought a salary for those years comparable with the pay now drawn by lesser players who became free agents last fall. The best pitcher in baseball made this clear to the passel of reporters, photographers and broadcasters who flocked to Shea Stadium to watch him clear out his locker and depart for the Cincinnati Reds. He also set the record straight on national television.

  Grant had been saying that Seaver had demanded to be traded. “It is with sincere regret,” M. Donald’s statement read, “that we have met Tom Seaver’s request and traded him to Cincinnati.”

  “I never demanded to be traded,” Tom Seaver said, “until Wednesday.”

  “They didn’t want to renegotiate,” he said of the Mets, “and I can understand that. But they did seem willing to talk about 1979-80-81.”

  They seemed that way Tuesday when Seaver, in Atlanta with team, talked by phone with Lorinda de Roulet, the Mets’ president. She was “reasonable and lovely,” said Tom’s wife Nancy.

  The next day Seaver read some garbage to the effect that his troubles with the brass stemmed from Nancy’s resentment of the fact that Nolan Ryan, husband of her friend Ruth, got a bigger salary than Tom’s for pitching for the California Angels. That tore it. “I want out,” Seaver told the club. Even as he did, he sensed that the club’s attitude had stiffened since his talk with Mrs. de Roulet. He suspected that Grant was infuriated because the pitcher had gone over his head.

  For weeks Joe McDonald, the general manager, had been trying to get something of value for Seaver, without success because other clubs knew he was in a bind. Wednesday night he accepted the inevitable—a sophomore pitcher, two minor-league outfielders and a utility infielder. Pat Zachry, the pitcher, was a good rookie last year but hasn’t been getting people out this season. To replace Doug Flynn, the infielder, Cincinnati got Rick Auerbach, whom the Texas Rangers had picked up after the Mets turned him loose.

  Before bringing off that clinker, the Mets had telephoned San Diego to ask: “Would you accept Dave Kingman for Valentine and another player?”

  Robert John Valentine is a part-time infielder-outfielder with a crooked leg and a batting average of .172. He was considered a bright prospect when he got out of Stanford University, but in 1973 he ran into the wall in Anaheim, California, and suffered a double fracture of the right leg. The next year he had a shoulder separation. The Padres hadn’t thought of trading for Kingman, but” it was a deal we had to make,” said Alvin Dark, their manager. As the “other player” the Mets had asked for, San Diego selected Paul Siebert, a pitcher fresh from the minors known primarily as the son of an old first baseman with the Philadelphia Athletics, Dick Siebert.

  From the talent pool that had enabled them to reach last place in their division, the Mets had now subtracted the best pitcher in baseball and one of the best home-run hitters. They also subtracted Mike Phillips, a utility infielder who can hit for distance. To replace these three they received seven silhouettes but not one regular player.

  Perhaps all seven will become useful players, maybe stars, though the laws of probability are against it. So is the record of the club’s earlier adventures in the flesh market. While the Shea Stadium clientele surveyed the wreckage, some wondered what might have been. Suppose this team had its present personnel plus Seaver, Kingman, Nolan Ryan, Rusty Staub and Amos Otis, all former Mets. It would be in first place, or near it.

  “How about Bowie Kuhn?” one fan asked. “He has vetoed other deals. Does he feel this one is in the best interests of baseball?”

  Having Tom Seaver pitch for the Reds is not in the best interests of Walter O’Malley’s Dodgers, whose fat lead over Cincinnati has been dwindling. When Walter discovers that Sparky Anderson has already calculated Seaver’s place in the rotation so he will be fit and rested for a start against the Dodgers next weekend, Bowie’s phone may start ringing.

  CASEY STENGEL’S TESTIMONY

  1981

  A young woman asked, “What was Casey Stengel like?” I thought she was pulling my leg until I realized that she was nine years old when Casey, retiring as manager of the New York Mets, dropped out of public view. “Casey Stengel,” I said, “was—well, just a minute.” I dug up my copy of Casey’s testimony before the Senate Subcommittee on Antitrust and Monopoly on
July 9, 1958. It seems to me that those of us who covered Casey in his time owe it to history to reintroduce him to readers in this fashion at least once a decade.

  Senator Estes Kefauver: Mr. Stengel, you are the manager of the New York Yankees. Will you give us very briefly your background and your views about this legislation?

  Stengel: Well, I started in professional ball in 1910. I have been in professional ball, I would say, for forty-eight years. I have been employed by numerous ball clubs in the majors and in the minor leagues.

  I entered in the minor leagues with Kansas City. I played as low as Class D ball, which was at Shelbyville, Kentucky, and also Class C ball and Class A ball, and I have advanced in baseball as a ballplayer.

  I had many years that I was not so successful as a ballplayer, as it is a game of skill. And then I was no doubt discharged by baseball in which I had to go back to the minor leagues as a manager, and after being in the minor leagues as a manager, I became a major league manager in several cities and was discharged, we call it discharged because there is no question I had to leave.

  And I returned to the minor leagues at Milwaukee, Kansas City and Oakland, California, and then returned to the major leagues. In the last ten years, naturally, with the New York Yankees, the New York Yankees have had tremendous success and while I am not a ballplayer who does the work I have no doubt worked for a ball club that is very capable in the office.

  I have been up and down the ladder. I know there are some things in baseball thirty-five to fifty years ago that are better now than they were in those days. In those days, my goodness, you could not transfer a ball club in the minor leagues, Class D, Class C ball, Class A ball.

  How could you transfer a ball club when you did not have a highway? How could you transfer a ball club when the railroads then would take you to a town you got off and then you had to wait and sit up five hours to go to another ball club?