The Lords of the Realm, page 40
Sambito won. At the time, the $213,000 award was the highest ever in salary arbitration. It wouldn’t be for long. Two sharp Chicago agents were about to go to bat for one sharp Chicago pitcher.
Jim Bronner and Bob Gilhooley rode the commuter train into the Loop each morning from the north suburbs. While other commuters buried themselves in the morning papers, they talked baseball. Bronner was a trial lawyer who also dabbled in real estate. Gilhooley was a former Detroit Tigers farmhand, now in marketing.
One morning in early 1977, they passed a newspaper story back and forth. Marvin Miller had announced the union was taking steps “to control abuses by player agents.” He blasted the high fees reaped by Jerry Kapstein and representatives of other first-time free agents. “It represented nothing less than gouging,” he said. Miller also charged that the agents’ ranks were rife with “conflicts of interest” and “quick-buck artists.”
They shook their heads. Bronner wondered aloud, “Wouldn’t it be interesting to get involved and provide a different level of service?”
Gilhooley was intrigued. “Let’s see if we can do the job,” he said.
They got their start from Steve Stone’s mother, a cousin of Gilhooley. She put him on to Stone, and Stone put him on to Cubs teammate Rick Reuschel. The pitcher was having problems with an investment he’d made in a downstate Illinois farm. After Bronner and Gilhooley helped work out his problems there, Reuschel asked them to negotiate his next contract with the Cubs.
His letter to them, laying out his objectives, is still framed in their office. His goal was to make at least $100,000. The agents’ goal, recalled Gilhooley, was “to approach Rick’s contract as though he were a businessman. No executive in the fifty percent tax bracket would take that whole tax hit. We didn’t think Rick should, either.”
They drew up a forty-three-page contract that was their pride and joy and GM Bob Kennedy’s despair. It bagged Reuschel his $100,000 but also got him valuable deferrals and myriad other goodies. That contract became the fledgling agents’ ticket to representing more Cubs.
One of them was Bruce Sutter. After his first two years in the bigs (’76 and ’77), the pitcher was negotiating his next contract with the Cubs. He and Kennedy agreed on the basic terms—three years at $150,000 per—but then Rick Reuschel offered a suggestion. Why not let Bronner and Gilhooley help him structure the payments?
They agreed to do the job, though they wondered if he hadn’t already sold himself short. Sutter had established himself as a promising reliever. “What if you do great?” Bronner asked. “You’ve locked yourself in.”
Sutter, who’d already shaken hands on the terms, didn’t want to renege. He did, however, authorize the agents to send out a feeler. “Would you be interested in leaving the third year open to renegotiation?” Bronner asked Kennedy.
The GM was cool.
“This would give you the right to renegotiate down as well as up,” Bronner reminded him.
Now, that had some appeal. The Cubs always expected the worst of their players.
“You’d give me the right to go down as well as up?” asked Kennedy. “Nobody’s ever done that.”
They struck a bargain that was sufficiently unusual that it required the blessing of both union and PRC: two years, guaranteed, at $150,000, with the third year subject to renegotiation. If the two sides were at an impasse at that time, it would go to salary arbitration.
Sutter proceeded to become baseball’s finest reliever. He’d perfected a split-finger fastball that batters were helpless against. In 1979 he led the National League in saves with thirty-seven and won the Cy Young Award.
It was a banner season and it came in his contract’s second year. Naturally, Sutter wanted to renegotiate the third. Bronner and Gilhooley proposed a new three-year contract, at $550,000 per. Bob Kennedy countered with $400,000. Back and forth they went until they finally struck a compromise: five years at $475,000 per. Sutter was happy to trade off some bucks to stay in Chicago and to enjoy the security of a long-term contract Done, said Kennedy.
But when the two sides took the proposed contract to Cubs owner Bill Wrigley, he turned it down flat. Sutter recalled the tone of one meeting in a corner office of the ornate Wrigley Building: “Mr. Wrigley didn’t think a player should get that much.”
The two sides filed for salary arbitration, the Cubs at $350,000, Sutter at … $700,000. The baseball world gasped. Only a few veteran players made that kind of money: Pete Rose, at $805,000; Rod Carew, $800,000; Dave Parker, $775,000. Only one pitcher made more: the recently signed Nolan Ryan, at $1 million. Now Sutter was trying to zoom up there with the elite.
Nobody ever tried doing that in salary arbitration. The convention was that players were compared with players of similar experience. Sutter, with only three-plus years in the majors, was saying he was in the same salary league with graybeards like Rose, Carew, and Ryan.
In truth, Sutter never expected such a salary and never expected to go before an arbitrator. Talks continued toward a multiyear deal Wrigley could live with. The pitcher was still more interested in security than the stratosphere of $700,000. “We filed beyond what we wanted,” recalled Bronner, “but that number gave us negotiating room.”
At least 80 percent of all salary arbitration cases are, indeed, settled by negotiation between the time parties file for salary arbitration in December and cases are heard in February. Sutter and the Cubs still hadn’t closed the gap, however, when their scheduled arbitration day came. Walking into the hearing room, Bronner saw Kennedy. They made small talk, and the agent sensed the GM really had no stomach for the proceedings.
“Are you sure you want to go ahead with this?” he asked. “We could probably come to terms right now.”
Kennedy hesitated.
“Let me check,” he said.
He called Ray Grebey in New York. No, the labor chief advised, go ahead with the case. The Cubs had a winner, he assured the GM.
The Cubs’ case was presented by Andy MacPhail, Kennedy’s assistant. He was twenty-seven years old and looked five years younger. But he had excellent baseball bloodlines—son of Lee MacPhail, grandson of Larry MacPhail—and he’d prepared assiduously. “I felt the weight of the baseball world on my shoulders,” he recalled.
The young MacPhail waded right in. He pointed out that Goose Gossage, the American League’s premier reliever, was only paid $330,000 a year. Joe Sambito of the Astros, who had come up the same year as Sutter and who was also a quality reliever, had just won his arbitration case for $213,000. The $350,000 the Cubs would pay Sutter exceeded anything ever paid a three-year man. Even Bronner would later concede: “MacPhail did a wonderful job.”
Nonetheless, he effectively counterattacked. Sutter had tied a National League record for saves in 1979. He’d been among the NL’s top four relievers in saves every full year he’d pitched. Bronner pointed out how few other relievers had ever won the Cy Young (only two). He argued that Sutter’s value to the Cubs transcended his pitching stats. On an otherwise blah fifth-place team, he was a prime attraction. Bronner entered in evidence the Cubs’ ticket brochure, with Sutter’s picture on the front.
He emphasized Sutter’s accomplishments versus the game’s other top-paid players and minimized MacPhail’s comparisons with other relievers. Brenner hammered home a repeated theme: “A star is a star is a star.” He reminded the arbitrator, “You don’t have to find that Bruce Sutler is worth $700,000. You only have to find he’s worth one dollar more than $525,000 [the midpoint between the two sides’ numbers].” He even tried to frame it as a moral, as opposed to a mere fiscal, issue: “You have the power to put an end to this artificial constraint on salaries.”
The arbitrator, an NYU law professor named Tom Christensen, mused, “I could be pretty popular with the players if I go for Mr. Sutter. And I could be pretty popular with the owners if I go for the Cubs.”
The next day he went for Sutter. Christensen was indeed a popular fellow with the players, though they didn’t get to know him personally. It was years before he ever got another salary-arbitration case. Andy MacPhail was devastated. He was unconsoled when the Wrigley Company lawyers complimented his performance, when Gilhooley offered him a job, when Dick Moss called it “the best management presentation of a case I ever saw.”
MacPhail knew only that the case would have huge repercussions. The old convention that players were compared with players of like seniority was out. The sky was the limit, and from that sky free agents’ riches could now rain even on junior players.
The case jumped not only Sutter’s pay but his agents’ stock. Hitherto, they’d been so obscure that Reds executive Dick Wagner, who met with them soon after the landmark case, didn’t know they were its masterminds.
“What did you think of those buttholes who won the Sutter case?” asked Wagner.
Brenner and Gilhooley beamed. “We’re the buttholes,” they said, as one.
The team remained undefeated in salary arbitration for six years, which didn’t hurt their reputation, or their practice. Out of a modest suburban-Chicago office, Bronner-Gilhooley had assembled, by the end of the eighties, one of baseball’s biggest client stables. They also underscored another factor that drove up the stakes of salary arbitration. It provided a great forum for an agent to make a big score and a big name.
* * *
Three years after Sutter, a young player would go for the next big salary-arbitration milestone when Fernando Valenzuela shot for $1 million. Though the Dodgers pitcher was only twenty-three years old and a two-year veteran, his agent made the case, again persuasively, that “a star is a star is a star.”
The agent was Dick Moss, who had parlayed his longtime union post into superagent status. Moss’s clients included Andre Dawson, Gary Carter, Nolan Ryan, Jack Morris, and, perhaps the most appealing of all the early-eighties stars, Valenzuela.
He came out of nowhere in 1981. Pressed into service as an emergency Opening Day starter, Valenzuela pitched a shutout and just kept going. He threw seven more shutouts that year, tying a big-league record despite the strike-shortened season.
It wasn’t just that he won games—thirteen his first year and nineteen his second, both times second-best in the league. It wasn’t just that he struck out batters—a league-high 180 his first year, a fourth-best 199 the next. It wasn’t just that he pitched more complete games—twenty-nine—than anyone in the league those two years.
It was how he did it. He was a roly-poly figure who rolled his eyes skyward with each windup. He baffled batters with a killer screwball and a pitching savvy that belied his age. He was only two years removed from the Mexican League and he attracted throngs of proud, roaring Mexican-Americans to each Dodgers game, a phenomenon that came to be known as “Femandomania.”
After his second year, Valenzuela was eligible for salary arbitration. As Dick Moss saw it, a man for whom a whole mania had been named was worth $1 million. Even he would later concede that it was a tough sell. The Dodgers’ $750,000 offer was 40 percent more than the most ever paid a two-year veteran—namely, Rickey Henderson’s $535,000. It would more than double his $350,000 salary of 1982. Nonetheless, he went for the million.
Moss harkened back to the last pitcher to explode on the scene like Valenzuela: Mark “The Bird” Fidrych. In 1976 he won nineteen games and the hearts of millions of fans. He talked to baseballs before pitching them, groomed the mound on his hands and knees, and displayed a general radical innocence. Like Valenzuela, The Bird was arguably his league’s top pitcher as a rookie, compiling the best ERA (2.34) and throwing the most complete games (24).
Then, midway through his second season, Fidrych blew out his arm and his career was essentially over. “He never got paid what he should have,” Moss argued. “You have to pay special players like Mark Fidrych and Fernando Valenzuela what they’re worth today. You can’t assume they’re going to be able to keep going on into the future.”
Moss produced charts to show what Valenzuela was worth to the Dodgers right now. He’d analyzed attendance for each of the pitcher’s starts, factoring in days of the week, promotions, and the opposition. The finding: Valenzuela was worth 6,000 to 7,000 extra fans per game. He’d helped propel the Dodgers to a major league record gate of 3.6 million. What’s more, he’d gained the Dodgers a vast new Hispanic market.
Moss presented a video montage of “Fernandomania,” capped off by a clip from an interview with Dodgers GM Al Campanis: “All through the years, Mr. O’Malley used to talk about how wonderful it would be if we had a Mexican player. I know that Walter O’Malley is looking down on us and smiling now, because his dreams have come true.”
Fernando Valenzuela won his $1 million. When Orel Hershiser had a huge second season two years later, going 19–3, he used the precedent to get his own $1 million. And the money ball bounced on.
Tom Reich was another master of the game. He’d been at it longer than almost any other agent—going back to 1969, when agents could still be thrown out of a GM’s office. He lived in Pittsburgh, where he was a corporate lawyer. He was a self-confessed baseball fanatic, with Pirates season tickets, and, in his own words, “a cause-oriented guy.”
When he met Dock Ellis at a party one night, the two interests merged. Ellis was a Pirates pitcher and an original. He wore an earring decades before it was fashionable. He once pitched a no-hitter on LSD. He was a black man who wore hair curlers to get his “do” just right. He was complaining, at the party, about being shafted by Joe Brown, the Pirates’ GM.
“I’ll go in and do your contract for free,” said Tom Reich.
Reich proceeded to knock heads with Brown over Ellis and a succession of other Pirates: Dave Parker, Manny Sanguillen, Al Oliver, John Candelaria, and more. Then, through a Cincinnati business contact, he began representing Joe Morgan, George Foster, Ken Griffey, and Dan Driessen of the Reds.
The makeup of those teams meant Reich’s early client base was predominantly black and Latino. That led to referrals to other blacks and Latinos: Jose Cruz, Bob Watson, Omar Moreno, J. R. Richard, Enos Cabell.
“He relished the idea he was the defender of the poor minorities,” said Chuck Berry, one of a team of assistants he assembled. “He became the Black Knight, in a sense.”
Reich’s clients didn’t stay poor after the Messersmith decision, of course, and Reich’s baseball practice wasn’t perpetually pro bono. Like Jerry Kapstein, he was perfectly positioned for the dawn of free agency. He soon abandoned the rest of his practice and plunged full-time into the baseball scene.
He loved it. He’d close down a bar with players at 2:00 A.M. and huddle with a GM over breakfast at eight. Or vice versa. “I had my best time with it in the seventies,” he recalled, “when you could still do deals with general managers on bar napkins.”
By the eighties he was baseball’s biggest agent. While Jerry Kapstein was scaling back, Reich’s stable just kept growing. He eventually had more than eighty players and a staff of lawyers to handle all the details.
Reich was bearded and boisterous and loved the sound of his own voice. Every meeting with an owner or GM had to open with a soliloquy on The World According to Tom Reich. Still, he had more good relationships with management than the likes of Dick Moss.
“Moss hates owners and anytime he can get more somewhere else, it’s adios,” said one GM. “Tom will build a bridge between clubs and players.”
It was a toll bridge, however, and Reich aimed to collect top dollar. He was at his most aggressive in salary arbitration. When players and teams exchanged their filings in mid-January, Reich’s numbers often left his own staff gasping. This time, they said, he’d surely overreached himself.
Usually not. Reich had a riverboat gambler’s feel for how the cards would fall. The trick was to gauge in mid-January where the market would be by the time a player’s case was heard in February. Bellwether cases would be won or lost. Cases would often settle by negotiation, each redefining the market. It was more art than science, but Tom Reich’s faith in the inflationary push of the market was rarely disappointed. His brother, Sam, took care of the rest.
Sam Reich was a top trial attorney in Pittsburgh. Each winter he took time out from his regular practice for the salary arbitration season. When Sam Reich’s courtroom polish was combined with Bill James’s statistical wizardry, the other side was really in trouble. James was best known for his bestselling books that analyzed baseball’s numbers in new and unique ways. He also hired out for the arbitration season.
When Mario Soto went 14–13 for the last-place Reds of 1982, James dredged up historical records that showed that winning records for starters on last-place teams were rarer than hens’ teeth. Phil Niekro, for instance, who would win 318 games in his career, was a twenty-game loser on the 1977 Braves. He also documented how much better Soto’s record could have been with some support. He won every game in which the Reds scored three or more runs; he lost every one in which they didn’t.
“It was a pretty one-sided case,” recalled Sam Reich, and Soto pocketed $625,000. (The Reds had filed for $450,000.)
For an arbitration on behalf of Tim Raines, James compiled what they called “the Hall of Fame exhibit.” James listed every leadoff hitter in Cooperstown—Lou Brock, Lloyd Waner, Max Carey, and numerous others—and listed their four best consecutive seasons. Then he compared them with the Montreal outfielder’s first four seasons. Raines’s numbers sparkled beside those of the immortals.
Sam Reich moved in for the summary.
“You know, Mr. Arbitrator, Tim Raines is worth exactly what the club says he’s worth” … dramatic pause … “if you cut off his legs. But if you consider what he’s done with his legs—his stolen bases, his runs scored—then he’s worth what we’ve asked for.”
He got it.
Certainly not all agents were brilliant and bold.
The agent representing Alan Trammell and Lou Whitaker presented his case in all of about eight minutes, summing it up thus: “You can see these guys are great. Just look it up.”
