The Lords of the Realm, page 38
In one mid-strike meeting, Miller went around the room asking each player rep how he saw support on his team. The Dodgers’ Jerry Reuss admitted he’d had trouble staying in touch with his whole team. “I can’t get ahold of some of my players,” he said. “But we have fourteen housekeepers who are right behind us.”
Now, with the strike in its sixth week, many players were getting restive. Some had found temporary work. Rangers pitcher and medical doctor Doc Medien logged time on his residency at a Fort Worth hospital. Tigers first baseman Richie Hebner dug graves in suburban Boston. Reds second baseman Ron Oester helped his wife run her day-care center. Brewers second baseman Jim Gantner worked as a plumber. Dodgers pitcher Dave Stewart worked in a hardware store for six dollars an hour. Orioles pitcher Steve Stone ran his restaurant in Arizona. Teammate Ken Singleton tried his hand at reporting for a Baltimore TV station.
But it wasn’t like drawing a big-league paycheck. And it wasn’t like the rhythms of the summers they were used to. A player who was running out of money, and now also deprived of information about what was happening in Washington, was a dangerous union member. He might start popping off publicly. One quote could blow a big hole in the players’ perceived unity. Mark Bélanger had a rule of thumb: “They hear one guy and multiply it by ten,” he said.
As always, Miller would move to hush and educate the offenders. But now brushfires were starting to break out quicker than he could stamp them out. Champ Summers of the Tigers: “I wish I could afford mis, but I don’t want anyone playing chess with my money. I won’t be a martyr and give up $200,000 so [teammate] Steve Kemp can become a free agent.” Dennis Eckersley of the Red Sox: “Screw the strike. Let’s play ball.”
The news blackout was taking a toll. So was the specter of dwindling bank accounts. The union had no strike fund, and many of its members were really feeling the pitch.
“This was when the money was really starting to get big, and a lot of players had leveraged themselves too highly,” recalls one, naming tax-shelter investments and fancy houses as the prime culprits. “I personally had a huge house note I couldn’t make. I believe ownership didn’t know how close they were to causing huge cracks.”
On Wednesday, July 22, talks droned on through the first part of the day. At 2:00 P.M. Moffett announced a three-hour lunch break to reporters.
Miller, Fehr, and the five-player bargaining committee walked across the street to a burger joint. The PRC negotiators slipped out the back entrance of the Mediation Service building. Donovan, Moffett, and Nancy Broff headed for a nearby health-food eatery. The press corps watched everybody leave, then dispersed to take a break themselves.
That left all negotiating parties free to reconvene at a secret meeting site six blocks away at the federal Office of Personnel Management. There, waiting in a fifth-floor conference room, was the six-man PRC board: Ed Fitzgerald, Joe Burke, Clark Griffith, Bob Howsam, Dan Galbreath, and John McHale.
They had been waiting in the wings in the capital, along with Bowie Kuhn and his executive council. The Lords had been dividing their time between the Washington office of Baker and Hostetler and the Hay Adams Hotel. (The baseball establishment was definitely not about to patronize Ed Williams’s hotel, the Jefferson.)
They’d had two days of nothing more interesting than listening to John Fetzer’s predictions of an imminent settlement. (The Tigers’ owner, for all his conventional conservatism, had beliefs in mystical powers and occult forces. He felt higher powers were moving things toward a conclusion.) Now they wanted in, and Ray Donovan was more than happy to have them.
The Lords wanted to show their faces primarily to shut up Marvin Miller. He maintained this was dragging on because Grebey was keeping them in the dark. Miller had sent a telegram to all twenty-six clubs that week outlining his latest pooled-compensation proposal. (The players were willing to drop the protected list for compensation to twenty-four from thirty-six.) The inference was clear: Miller didn’t trust Grebey to tell them.
Nothing substantive happened that afternoon: speechifying and handing back and forth taped pieces of paper—the latest proposals, literally stitched together. But at least they had twenty-two people in one room, eyeball to eyeball.
The expanded group met again Thursday morning, and the players sensed something was afoot. They were hearing a lot more from Lee MacPhail, the American League president, and a lot less from Ray Grebey. They were hearing fewer statements and, for the first time, more questions: “Would a club have to contribute to the compensation pool if they didn’t draft any free agents?”
The players straightened up in their chairs, silently excited. Could a deal finally be coming on? The meeting went on for hours, the most substantive one since the strike’s beginning.
Then a PRC staffer hurried in, thrusting a piece of paper before Grebey. He peered at it through his half-glasses, then looked across the table. “Could we have a caucus?” he said.
After a few minutes, the PRC delegation filed back in. Discussion continued but the owners’ ranks had rehardened. The two sides had been moving toward each other rapidly; now suddenly they could go no further. It was like a ninth-inning rally that fell a run short. The day ended; dispirited, the players left.
Only later did they learn what had happened. That morning’s Los Angeles Times had carried a story headlined LOPES TAKES SOME SHOTS AT DECINCES. It had been picked up by the wires and brought to the PRC’s attention.
Dodger second baseman Davey Lopes had called the negotiations “a circus,” and that was just the beginning:
“Each side has handled it poorly,” he declared. “What the hell is the players’ executive board doing in negotiations? I don’t think they have credentials to be in a labor meeting. Do Doug DeCinces and Bob Boone have legal backgrounds?… I didn’t see any postal clerks going into their negotiations. As an entity, we have become the laughingstock of the United States. Everybody’s laughing at us. We are not to be respected as a union.…
“The last thing I want to do is pick up a paper and read Doug DeCinces’ synopsis about the players’ feelings because he is not qualified and he doesn’t know what he’s talking about. The forget-the-season attitude really eats at me. Before we do that, brother, we better stop and take a vote.
“We all better stop and think about that before we get so deep in this strike that we can’t dig ourselves out. We’ve got to get back to the field. It’s my life, it’s my livelihood.”
The players grimly read it for themselves. Clearly, the Lords saw the players’ resolve crumbling. If Davey Lopes was popping off, how many other players must be set to throw in the towel? It was the old multiply-by-ten rule.
DeCinces turned to Miller.
“Marvin, that’s it,” he said. “We’re going to hear our constituents. Let’s get going and set up some meetings.”
Miller was exhausted. He was sixty-four, a weary old fighter hanging on in the late rounds. He didn’t want to jet around the country. He didn’t want to recess the talks. It might only compound the impression that the union was in disarray.
“No,” he said, “let’s just go back to New York.”
DeCinces was drained too. He’d wrenched his back just before the strike. Had the season continued he’d have been on the disabled list, taking therapy. Instead, he’d been sitting in hard chairs, staying up all hours, jousting with Ray Grebey. He was having trouble walking, sitting, and sleeping. Last weekend he’d had a spinal tap at a Baltimore hospital. But DeCinces was adamant.
“This ball could start rolling downhill in a hurry,” he said. “We’ve got to get out there.”
Miller nodded his head wearily. He would go along.
Leland Stanford MacPhail, Jr., was as different from Leland Stanford MacPhail, Sr., as a double was from a double play. The father was called Larry MacPhail, the “Roaring Redhead.” He’d left his mark on the Reds, Dodgers, and Yankees in ten short years, then flamed out. The son was called Lee MacPhail. Though he hadn’t an ounce of flash, he had been a loyal servant of baseball for forty years: a GM at Baltimore and New York, an assistant to Spike Eckert, and, since 1973, president of the American League.
MacPhail had taught at Deerfield Academy before entering baseball, and retained the polished air of the prep-school master. He had a placid oval face, listened to classical music, and had a bland demeanor. They were unusual qualities in a baseball man, but they would come in quite handy now.
MacPhail had been around the battlefront all summer. He was a member of the PRC, if only the supporting cast. He constantly took soundings among the American League owners. MacPhail was also a steady producer of thoughtful ideas. At age sixty-three, he was old-line but not hardline. He’d been trying to figure out a form of pooled compensation that might satisfy both Miller and the Lords. “Lee was drafting and noodling all the time,” says Barry Rona.
MacPhail was about to be pushed to the fore. As the strike crept past its fortieth day, in late July, the Lords’ attitudes were shifting. The strike insurance was going to run out soon. The season was going to be lost if games didn’t start again soon. The fire in their belly on free-agent compensation was dying. “More people started thinking, ‘This isn’t worth fighting over,’ ” said Jerry Reinsdorf. “The American League was in open rebellion.”
Grebey had been fine when the Lords wanted someone to stick it to Miller. But now they needed someone who could talk to Miller. They were ready to deal. “Relations between Grebey and Miller were so acrimonious, it was time to put a new face in there,” recalled Chub Feeney, the National League president. “Lee is a super person and was much more malleable to compromise.”
MacPhail resisted. He knew he was no labor negotiator, and he didn’t want to undercut Grebey. But Bowie Kuhn, Lou Hoynes, Chub Feeney, and other old-guard stalwarts pressed him. Ed Williams, the new boy, clinched it. He had petitioned for another ownership meeting and gotten it: next Wednesday, July 29. To MacPhail, his choice was finally clear: either take action or let Ed Williams seize it. “Okay,” he finally told his old-guard friends, “I’ll do it.”
Marvin Miller was preparing to leave for the first player meeting, in Chicago, when the call came from MacPhail. Would he be willing to meet alone? Miller, intrigued, quickly agreed.
They met at the Helmsley Palace Hotel in Manhattan on Monday morning. MacPhail put it to him straight out: What would it take, bottom line, to get a settlement? Miller once again went over pooled compensation. He insisted players get service time for the strike. (This was important, since players needed full seasons to qualify for free agency and salary arbitration.) MacPhail listened quietly and said he’d get back to him.
Miller left and flew to Chicago. He wondered what was going on with the owners. He wondered, too, what was going on with the players.
Bob Boone took a deep breath, as though relaxing himself for a 3–2 pitch. He was looking out at nearly sixty players in this O’Hare Hilton conference room: twenty-six player reps, comprising the executive board, and about thirty others who lived in the Chicago area.
“Okay, here’s what’s before us,” said Boone.
For five and a half hours they would hash it all out. Boone and DeCinces recounted the history of the negotiations. Miller explained how the Lords’ notion of compensation was designed to punish clubs signing free agents. He outlined his own pooled-compensation idea, which he felt answered the clubs’ purported needs for “competitive balance” without killing free-agent demand.
“If you had to take a team vote today,” Miller asked the player reps, “do you think the clubs’ proposal would get majority support?”
Two of the reps saw it as “iffy.” The other twenty-four had no doubt: no way.
At 11:00 P.M., when the players emerged to a phalanx of cameras and microphones, they were true believers, to a man.
“I came here in communications limbo,” said Mike Krukow, the Cubs pitcher. “I was getting impatient. I was ready to shout fire and brimstone, but all my questions were answered by Marvin before I could ask any of them.”
Echoed teammate Bill Buckner: “I’m behind the negotiating team one hundred percent. I was feeling uncomfortable when I came here tonight. I don’t like sitting around. Now I can sit out the season and not feel quite as bad.”
He and Krukow left together, saying they weren’t going to work out anymore. They were going to look for jobs.
In Los Angeles, about seventy players filed into the ballroom of the Marriott Hotel near L.A. International Airport. Doug DeCinces looked out at them anxiously. The Chicago meeting had gone fine but this was Lopes country.
“Okay,” he began, “some of you have been dissenting. We want to hear from you now.”
Jerry Reuss, the Dodgers’ player rep, echoed that sentiment, declaring, “If someone has an objection, damn it, say something.”
Reggie Smith, the Dodgers outfielder, verbally leveled Lopes. Other players piled on. Hadn’t they all learned about the need for unity?
Then Lopes stood up. Yes, he’d spoken out, he said, but his remarks had been taken out of context. What really irked him was the players who were getting paid through this whole thing. Some players had negotiated contracts that guaranteed their salary: Steve Carlton, Larry Hisle, Bill Madlock, John Montefusco, Gene Garber, and Lopes’s own teammate Steve Garvey.
“When there are all these guys out here who are striking and suffering, I think anybody taking money from the owners is just a joke,” said Lopes. “I didn’t think any players were going to get paid, and if there ever was another strike I’d want to know that in advance.”
Bobby Grich disagreed. “I think anybody in this room would have gotten the same deal if he could have,” he said. “More power to them. At least we’re whacking them for a few more dollars.”
There was little other disagreement. DeCinces had feared a donnybrook. Instead he got a love fest. After two and a half hours, Rod Carew called for a voice vote. All in favor of continuing the strike: seventy voices bellowed “Aye.” All against: silence.
Afterward, Lopes made his way over to DeCinces and stuck out his hand. “I’m sorry,” he said.
DeCinces shook it. “I appreciate that,” he said. “Thanks for coming to the meeting.”
It was supremely ironic. The players had halted bargaining to tighten their ship. They hadn’t realized they’d also be tightening the screws on the owners. The longer they had no foil on the other side of the table, the more the Lords turned on one another. They were collapsing faster than a spent pitcher.
It was midday on Wednesday, July 29, day forty-nine of the strike, when the American League owners met in the league’s Park Avenue offices. Ed Williams was gloating. He had eight solid votes in his pocket to force binding arbitration. With that AL bloc, he planned to force the issue at the later joint meeting. “Here we are,” he said, delighted with his coalition, “arrayed politically from Genghis Khan [gesturing to Clark Griffith] to Mahatma Gandhi [himself].”
Lee MacPhail wasn’t amused. He coolly made two requests of Williams. One: stop mouthing off to every baseball writer in America. Two: stop acting like he was running the American League. He, not Williams, would decide when league meetings would be held.
But overall, the hour belonged to the dissidents. “This [standoff] is insane and asinine,” said Jerry Reinsdorf. “We should call it off.”
After they’d gone around the table, Roy Eisenhardt of the A’s spoke up. “I move that it hereby be resolved the strike issue be submitted to arbitration,” he said.
Gabe Paul of the Indians seconded it. Eight of the fourteen owners were prepared to vote for it when MacPhail stepped in with a plea. “This isn’t the time to break ranks and throw out the whole bargaining process,” he said. “I believe things are moving again in negotiations.”
He described briefly his own emerging role and his diplomatic initiative with Miller. The union chief was heading back from L.A. and they would resume talks tomorrow.
“Let’s give this a little longer,” he said. “Trust me.”
Since this was Lee MacPhail and not Ray Grebey speaking, they did.
What a difference three weeks made. The Lords who gathered at Citicorp Center for the joint meeting that afternoon were not the same bellicose bunch of earlier in July. They would deliver no tub-thumping speeches on solidarity. They held no illusions about seizing back control. Only Ted Turner could still manage to fire off a few stray parting shots of rhetoric.
“I say we do what God did,” he thundered. “Put two players on a boat and drown the rest of the fuckers.”
He paused.
“A strong letter will follow.”
Only weak laughter followed in this room, for everyone knew the truth. They were embarking on the dreary endgame of this strike, in which they’d once again been drubbed by Marvin Miller. All that was left to discuss, really, was how best to restart the season.
“Every strike is a war of attrition,” Barry Rona later reflected. “This one had been a tremendous battle of strengths—who’s going to blink first?”
After standing eyeball-to-eyeball for seven weeks, it was the Lords.
That night, Lee MacPhail called Marvin Miller again. Could they meet at the National League office in the morning?
MacPhail brought Grebey; Miller brought Fehr; the tone was quickly set. “We’re here to make a settlement,” said MacPhail.
It was clear who was in charge. When Grebey tried to interject points, MacPhail cut him off. When MacPhail suggested amendments to Miller’s proposals, the union chief cut him off.
“This is it,” Miller said. If he made any substantive changes, he told MacPhail, he’d have to reassemble his executive board. It would take time and they both knew the season hung in the balance. Unspoken was another important reality. Miller finally had the Lords by the short hairs and he knew it. They’d have to swallow it all: free-agent compensation his way, player service credit for the strike’s fifty days, the works. He coldly refused to cut any slack. “I wanted nothing less,” he later wrote, “than complete and unconditional surrender.”
