The Lords of the Realm, page 22
Still, Marvin Miller wasn’t at all sure the “accident” would be Andy Messersmith. He still harbored doubts the pitcher would go the distance. The Dodgers certainly had the means and motivation to sign their staff ace. And Walter O’Malley, who would ultimately call the shots, was much too smart to risk the whole reserve system over a no-trade clause. Wasn’t he?
Miller sat down with Dick Moss. What could they do? As they talked, Miller remembered something: Dave McNally. The pitcher had quit the Expos, but he was still technically an unsigned player. Miller looked up his home phone and began dialing.
McNally had been a terrific pitcher. He’d won 181 games for his previous team, the Orioles, once racking up four straight 20-win seasons. In tandem with Jim Palmer, he anchored the staff of the Orioles’ excellent teams of the late sixties and early seventies. When Baltimore sought to make over its team, following the 1974 season, McNally was packaged up in a major trade with Montreal.
He was miserable there, feeling he’d been misled. The trade had required McNally’s approval, as a 10–5 man (ten years in the majors, the last five with the same team). He told the Expos he wanted a two-year contract at $125,000 per. The answer: “no problem.” But once the deal was done, Montreal offered something quite different: one year for $115,000, the same he’d made in 1974. McNally refused to sign.
His misery was compounded that spring by a sore arm. McNally was a pro. He tried to pitch through it. But two months into the season—his record 3–6, his ERA 5.26—he’d had it. After losing the first game of a doubleheader June 8 he quit. McNally went back to his Billings, Montana, hometown and his Ford dealership there.
“Are you coming back to play?” asked Marvin Miller.
“No, never,” said McNally.
“I’d like to add your name to the grievance as insurance if Andy decides to sign a new Dodger contract.”
McNally, with the bad taste from Montreal still in his mouth, had a quick reply. “If you need me,” he said, “I’m willing to help.”
Word reached Walter O’Malley quickly, as always. If Miller had McNally, it changed all his thinking about Messersmith. He’d been willing to give him the moon to thwart a union test case. Now Miller had one anyway. There was now no reason to capitulate to Messersmith.
It was Gaherin’s turn to be frantic. He called up Expos president John McHale. “Go out to Montana,” he said. “For Christ’s sake, get the bastard drunk and sign him.”
McNally was stunned to pick up the phone one day and hear McHale’s voice.
“I happened to be passing through Billings,” he said. “Can we sit down and talk about your situation?”
McNally met him the next day at a hotel restaurant and took in an amazing pitch. McHale offered $125,000 to sign for 1976—more than McNally had ever made in his career. He’d give him another $25,000 as a signing bonus.
“Gee, I don’t know,” said McNally. “I’m not sure I can even pitch at the major league level anymore.”
“Don’t worry about it,” said McHale. “I’ll give you the $25,000 just to sign and come to spring training.”
(McHale would later maintain he was simply trying to salvage something from the Orioles deal. Not only had McNally left but outfielder Rich Coggins, the other principal in the deal, had developed a thyroid condition, finishing him as a player. The players Montreal traded—Ken Singleton and Mike Torrez—were meanwhile starring in Baltimore.)
McNally called Miller the next morning. They had a good laugh about how McHale “just happened to be passing through Billings.” Then the conversation turned serious.
“What are you going to do?” asked Miller. It was a lot of money to dangle, especially when every recently retired player entertained comeback fantasies.
McNally said he wouldn’t sign.
“McHale wasn’t honest with me last year, and I’m not going to trust him again,” he said. “It’s tempting to show up in spring training for twenty-five grand, but I have no intention of playing, and it wouldn’t be right to take the money.”
Marvin Miller breathed again.
* * *
The union filed the Messersmith and McNally grievances in early October. Baseball was on edge. On the field, as each autumn before, the championship was at stake. Off the field, as never before, the old order hung in the balance. Everyone knew it.
When Oakland lost the divisional playoffs to Boston, its players didn’t mourn their dynasty’s end. They crowded into Boston manager Darrell Johnson’s office. There, following the last game, Rollie Fingers, Joe Rudi, Reggie Jackson, and Sal Bando talked with Red Sox owner Tom Yawkey, GM Dick O’Connell, and Johnson. They wanted them to know how much they yearned to leave the A’s and join the Red Sox. They finally dared hope they had the chance.
The Lords counterattacked. Baseball’s lawyers filed for an injunction, trying to keep Messersmith-McNally out of arbitration. In a federal court in Kansas City, they argued that reserve-system matters were outside an arbitrator’s authority. The judge disagreed and ordered the hearings to proceed.
But before whom? Baseball’s arbitrator was still Peter Seitz. Debate raged among the Lords. Should they let him hear the case or let him go? He’d freed Catfish Hunter, but most felt that meant little. Some disagreed with his free-agency order, but few quibbled with his findings. Finley had been guilty as sin.
After almost two years as its arbitrator, Seitz still had a slight record in baseball. But, at age seventy, he was a veteran arbitrator in industries ranging from steel to pro basketball. Seitz had a lawyer’s training but an English professor’s bearing, reveling in classical literature and poetry.
PRC members began checking on him. Bruce Johnston, the steel industry’s chief negotiator, warned against him. Seitz had so badly mangled a case involving a U.S. Steel cement-making subsidiary that it led to a strike. “He’s not an analyst, he’s a poet,” said Johnston. One steel company dismissed Seitz not because his decisions were always for labor but because they were always baffling. Said the company’s negotiator: “We lost the grievances we should have won and won the ones we should have lost.”
Some came down for bouncing him. Lou Hoynes thought the Hunter case bared Seitz’s bias toward granting free agency. Bowie Kuhn counseled against Seitz. John McHale said they should heed the warning of his friend Walter Kennedy, the NBA commissioner: “He’s really a players’ man.”
But more argued for giving Seitz a try. He didn’t look the part of baseball’s assassin. He was a pipe-smoking grandfather who wore dark blue suits and lived in a lovely apartment overlooking the Central Park reservoir. “Any arbitrator is a compromise,” said Gaherin. “Better to go with the devil you know.”
By a vote of 6–1, with only McHale dissenting, the PRC voted to keep Seitz.
The greatest World Series of recent memory had ended less than a month earlier. It was the year of Luis Tiant’s twirls and Dwight Evans’s catch and Carlton Fisk’s wee-hours homer. Only on the visitors’ last at-bat in the last possible game was it decided: Cincinnati in seven.
Now, a few days before Thanksgiving, a contest of even greater moment would play out. In a dreary conference room of the Barbizon Plaza Hotel, hearings began on the case of John A. Messersmith v. Los Angeles Dodgers.
“Mr. Seitz,” began Dick Moss, “you have before you today a simple question of interpreting a phrase which is part of the collective-bargaining agreement between the parties and is also part of the individual contract between Mr. Messersmith and the Los Angeles club, and we believe your task will be an easy one.
“Now, sitting across the table from me are my friends Lou Hoynes and Jim Garner and Barry Rona [the owners’ lawyers]. They are all experienced lawyers familiar with the arbitration process.”
“Are they your only friends?’ Seitz asked.
“No. Their job here today is to try their best to confuse you and to make this matter sound much more complicated than it really is. You are going to hear from them all about the hundred-year-old inviolate reserve system, old congressional hearings, the Flood case, and statements made by various people, all of which is totally irrelevant to the issue in this case.
“This case involves one thing and only one thing, the interpretation of the phrase in Paragraph 10A of the Uniform Players Contract which says, ‘The Club shall have the right to renew this contract for the period of one year on the same terms.’
“The issue is whether that phrase means that the club can renew the contract for one year, at the end of which there is no longer any contractual relationship between the club and the player and he is a free agent, as we submit it means, or whether it means that the clubs can continue to renew the renewed contract year after year into perpetuity, as the clubs submit.”
Moss also offered Seitz a helpful guide to his opponents’ strategy. They were splitting the case into two issues—one on jurisdiction, one on the merits—to tempt the arbitrator into splitting his decision: “part of the case in favor of one party and part in favor of the other.”
“That regards arbitrators as being very naive,” Seitz interjected. “It is strange that you concur in that theory.”
“My next point, Mr. Seitz, is that I would never do such a thing with you because I do not regard you as that naïve,” said Moss, recovering smartly.
Lou Hoynes, as advertised, did present a more complicated picture. The reserve system wasn’t just the renewal language being challenged by Messersmith. It was an interwoven set of statutes: Major League Rule 4A, defining the reserve list; Major League Rule 3G, forbidding tampering with another club’s players; and, of course, Paragraph 10A of the Uniform Players Contract. Pull out one thread and the whole industry would unravel.
“We have to reach back something like a hundred years in order to be able to give you the full flavor of what’s happened, and so I am going to start back in the nineteenth century,” he said.
“Fortunately, your chairman was around at that time and may remember a large portion of it,” said Seitz.
Hoynes went over the Tripartite Agreement of 1883, in which the three major leagues of the time agreed to reserve eleven players per club. He introduced an affidavit by the leader of the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players, saying this early union “had no desire whatever to in any way change or affect the question of salary or the reserve rule.” Hoynes presented Cy Young’s 1891 contract renewal language and Edd Roush’s “reserve card” from 1930, a year when he refused to sign with the Giants but was nonetheless still their property. It was a historical tour de force and a defense that, when reduced to its essence, cried out: “But we’ve always done it this way.”
Back and forth the two sides went. Moss made a straightforward case: the 10A language meant what it said. In the NBA, with the same renewal language, six players had played out their option years and left for the ABA. Hoynes, for his part, produced ornate, precedent-laden arguments. He described practices in other pro sports. He turned Miller’s bargaining-table words against him. He even introduced purloined union memos, which, he contended, belied its current arguments.
The introduction of these documents irked Moss, who repeatedly asked where Hoynes had obtained them. But he never received a satisfactory answer.
It was 7:30 P.M., at the end of the second grueling day, when Bowie Kuhn swept in. With all but a flourish of trumpets, he was introduced by Lou Hoynes: “The commissioner has indicated to us that he has views he would like to express to the arbitration panel.”
Kuhn took the stand to talk of the horrors free agency would unleash.
“If you go back into the history of baseball, before there was a reserve system, the problems of integrity in the form of outright dishonesty by clubs and players alike was flagrant, and there was no public confidence in the game.
“The reserve system is the cornerstone of baseball. It gave baseball the stability, economic stability, to develop a system where you were able to eliminate the problems of integrity that had been flagrant in the game.”
If it were eliminated, he went on, “What I see is the loss of clubs—some of our clubs would not be able to survive it. You’d have the loss of employment opportunities for our players and our other personnel, the elimination of any possibility that in the near term we could expand into cities that have much wanted baseball, the loss of minor leagues—if not all of them, most of them, and, not inconceivably, the loss of a major league. I say that very carefully and very thoughtfully to the chairman. I think the loss of a major league is quite possible.
“Now, I think there is another solution, and I think that the other solution is me one that I have fought for as long as we have had a collective-bargaining relationship in this industry. That is to solve problems of this kind through collective bargaining. I think the record shows that there has been very substantial movement in collective bargaining, not only with respect to the overall reserve system, but in all other areas where demands have been put on the table by the Players Association.”
Dick Moss carved up Kuhn on cross-examination.
“Are you seriously suggesting that if Mr. Messersmith wins this case that the game will become dishonest, games will be thrown, players will gamble?” he asked.
“I don’t think there has been anybody more vocal than I have with respect to the basic honesty of the players in the game of baseball,” said Kuhn. “The problem, however, arises in the area of public suspicion. You have a player who performs in a key game at the end of the season, let’s say, against a team that wins that game. The player commits an error, strikes out, pitches badly, or what have you. What can happen is that the public, when they see him move on to the team he performed against, is apt to become suspicious of his performance against that team.”
“Now let’s try to analyze what you have said in terms of this case,” said Moss. “Start with the proposition that you do not believe the players are intrinsically dishonest—is that correct?”
“Yes, that’s correct.”
“So a player for the Los Angeles Dodgers, playing under a renewed contract, is not going to commit an error against the San Diego Padres so he can sign with the San Diego Padres next year, is that right?”
“In my judgment, that is right.”
“In fact, it would sort of be a silly thing to do. I don’t really understand why the San Diego Padres would consider him more attractive for the following year if he made an error on their behalf this year.”
“I would agree with you.”
“Then you are talking about if that player made an error against the San Diego Padres and then, when he became a free agent and negotiated with the twenty-four clubs and signed with the San Diego Padres that would create some public suspicion. What do you think the odds of that are mathematically?”
“Odds of what?”
“That he signed with the team that he made an error against that was somehow crucial enough and publicized enough that the public was suspicious.”
“I think you underestimate the press,” said Kuhn.
Seitz pressed Kuhn on his collective-bargaining remarks.
“It is a little late in the game, I realize, to ask whether collective bargaining can determine this issue rather than the panel,” he said. “But I don’t know where your statement leaves us. I don’t know whether I am to take your statement as encouraging me to persuade the parties to try some more, or whether you are merely deploring the fact that both of them, or one of them, has not done all that it might have done in collective bargaining to avoid this conflict. Perhaps you can enlighten me on that.”
“When I said that I felt collective bargaining can solve the problems that exist, I said that very seriously,” said Kuhn. “But I must say to you that I cannot sit here and tell the panel or you, Mr. Chairman, that the commissioner of baseball has the power to require the clubs to take any particular position. The power resides in the clubs. The bargaining power resides in the Player Relations Committee. Where I have been effective in the past is to use the not inconsiderable powers of persuasion of the commissioner in one direction or the other. But I can’t seriously tell you that I have the power to require them to go anywhere.”
“I wouldn’t expect that,” said Seitz. “But do you have any advice for the panel as to what its procedure is to be? Shall we just go ahead as the contract requires us to—a resolution by decision, by award? Or is there some other procedure that perhaps would be more desirable in the interest of all?”
“I think it is a very important question,” said Kuhn. “I just wonder. It is one I frankly would like to reflect on before I would try to give you an answer.”
“Arbitration is a procedure, just as procedures of the courts,” said Seitz. “It is not perfect, and it is desirable because it is better than anything else that seems to be available at the time. If anything else is available, if you reflect on it and have any idea, I will be very glad to know what they are.”
“I would be very happy to give them to you,” said Kuhn.
“Call me collect,” said Seitz.
Dick Moss finished his case with a newspaper clipping:
“An overall theme of the clubs’ entire presentation was that everybody has always understood that baseball clubs can control players for life despite the language of 10A and that somehow we conjured up this outrageous argument which is contrary to what everyone knows.”
He picked up the clip. “Well, let me demonstrate just how wrong that premise is.”
He began talking about Calvin Griffith. He’d been in baseball since 1928, when he was a batboy for his adoptive father’s team, the Senators. He’d been majority owner of the Senators and later the Twins since 1955. If anyone knew the business, said Moss, it was Calvin Griffith.
He introduced Players’ Exhibit 13—a Minneapolis Star story dated March 5, 1974—and began reading:
In one corner of the paneled office behind a desk sat Calvin Griffith. In another corner of the small room sat Tony Oliva. It was said by one Twin official to be a Mexican standoff. The two men, one the Club’s president who has been in baseball over fifty years, the other the Cuban-born star who has been a holdout most of his major league life, argued for 45 minutes yesterday. When the smoke had cleared, Oliva remained unsigned and Minnesota’s only holdout.
