The Lords of the Realm, page 44
Fehr was only mildly interested in baseball between the lines. His game was pool, a game of control and angles and anticipation. “If Marvin Miller is a Rommel, Don Fehr is an Eisenhower,” said Skip McGuire, an outside lawyer for the union. “If he could, he would make sure every battalion, company, and squad is in place before he starts the offensive. He’s very low-risk. He doesn’t move until he’s sure of his ground.”
Fehr didn’t have Miller’s gift for concise talk with the players. He spoke rapidly, in long, winding sentences, examining matters from every angle simultaneously. “I remember telling him once, when he was in the middle of a thirty-line sentence at spring training, ‘Don, you lost them,’ ” said Mark Bélanger, who became a union staffer after retiring.
But he’d studied at the feet of the master and consulted regularly with him. There would be no revisionist “time for labor peace” talk from Don Fehr. The difference between Fehr and Miller was mainly one of style.
“Marvin wasn’t reluctant to cut you off with ‘Not in this world, not in the next,’ ” said Barry Rona, the owners’ labor lawyer. “Don would discuss something exhaustively and have the patience and intellect to pick holes in it, so he could expose the deficiency in your position.”
And so it was that Ueberroth decided to cultivate Miller and Fehr. Over a long lunch with both, he shared their acid assessments of Bowie Kuhn and compared notes on the state of the game. Ueberroth also got an earful on the past decade’s labor warfare. Later, he would occasionally meet with Fehr at the Waldorf’s Peacock Alley bar. His favorite topic, in these back-channels chats, was the owners, whom he universally dismissed as jerks.
Ueberroth put down the Lords in conversations with just about everyone. Around the office he called them “the twenty-six idiots.” The half-dozen of them who called to complain about everything were known as “the whining, sniveling malcontents.”
Ueberroth’s contempt was partly for show. It helped him build a bridge with the union. It helped him establish alliances with the few owners he deemed more capable. (“You’re the only one I can talk to; the rest of them are so dumb,” he sighed to one owner—who was flattered until he found Ueberroth had said the same thing to six of the other Lords.)
In showing disdain and keeping a distance, he also maintained his aura of icy authority. “I’m not going to your kids’ graduations or weddings or bar mitzvahs,” he told them early on. “I’m not going to call you. The communication has to come from you, and I’ll give you straight answers.”
He made clear that he didn’t care what the owners thought of him, though he once did ask the Expos’ Charles Bronfman if he was doing a good job.
“Define your terms,” said Bronfman. “If you define your job as you being the boss and we working for you, you’re doing a great job.”
Ueberroth smiled. “You know, I think you’ve got it right,” he said.
But he made clear to the Lords that they were fools if they looked to him to solve all their problems—which, of course, they did. After all, they were edging ever closer to blind panic. Salaries had now broken the $2 million barrier. Since the start of the 1985 season, Ozzie Smith and Eddie Murray had signed huge contract extensions: Smith for $8.7 million over four years, Murray for $13 million over five years. “I’m tired of paying out all this money,” Reds owner Marge Schott complained to a Ueberroth aide. “Why doesn’t Peter do something about it? He’s German.”
The next chance to do something about the baseball economy came with the new labor contract. The PRC would push for some major structural changes: a cap on team payrolls, for one, and a cap on the maximum raise in salary arbitration. Lee MacPhail succeeded Ray Grebey as negotiator, and he pushed for the Lords to open their books. If the players saw the red ink, he argued, they’d see the need.
Ueberroth stepped in and appropriated the idea as his own. He ordered the Lords, over the vehement protests of some, to turn over their financial statements. (“It’s none of their goddamn business,” declared John McMullen of the Astros.) “Some owners wouldn’t forgive me for that to this day,” Ueberroth later reflected.
That was because of what the union did with the books. It turned them over to a Stanford University economist, Roger Noll, to analyze. As the Lords presented it, twenty-one of twenty-six teams lost money in 1984, for a combined operating loss of $41 million. As Noll saw it, baseball had made $25 million.
He found bookkeeping tricks at every turn. Turner’s Braves were paid only $1 million for TV rights by Turner’s Super-Station WTBS. They should have been getting at least the league average of $2.7 million. The Cardinals reported no revenue from parking and concessions, but another Anheuser-Busch subsidiary was raking in $2.5 million from that. The Yankees’ $9 million loss included Steinbrenner’s real estate investments in Tampa and $500,000 worth of charity contributions.
Noll saw more waste than distress. The A’s had the highest loss—$15 million—but also the highest marketing expenses. He questioned why anyone would spend $4.2 million to take in gate receipts of $7.5 million. He noted the Dodgers’ front-office payroll was four times the major league average. He estimated that L.A.’s $6 million profit could easily have been $3 million higher and called the Dodgers “baseball’s answer to the Denver Mint.”
The owners were furious. They had handed over their books for the first time ever and Noll had, in the words of a baseball lawyer, “urinated on them.” They disagreed with his interpretations and they fumed as items leaked into the newspapers. Los Angeles Times readers, for instance, soon learned of Peter O’Malley’s $1 million salary.
“If you can give them the books and use it for something, do it,” O’Malley later said. “But we did it, and they just ridiculed it.”
It was only the first Ueberroth move in negotiations that baffled owners. One moment he was coaching them on how to make money. The next he was slipping banana peels under them. When they proposed a salary cap, Ueberroth publicly called it “frivolous.” In Cooperstown, at Hall of Fame induction ceremonies, he said owners should “stop asking for the players to solve their financial problems.”
Ueberroth was supposed to be a great negotiator, but he had never negotiated with labor before. On one occasion when the PRC made a seven-point proposal, he ordered that it be printed up and distributed to the players and press. He didn’t seem to know that, in the ebb and flow of bargaining, it would be outdated within an hour. Nor did Ueberroth truly understand the nature of the union beast. “Peter always thought a napkin-type deal was available,” said Peter O’Malley, then a PRC member. “Marvin Miller doesn’t do napkin deals.”
Ueberroth sometimes appeared more interested in playing to the gallery than in accomplishing things. He liked to call himself “the fans’ commissioner,” and he seemed to care more about how things played in the press than how they figured into a labor agreement. The commissioner’s office, it seemed to some owners, wasn’t the highest one he aspired to. “I’ll tell you what Peter Ueberroth wants in life,” a friend of his told one Lord. “He wants to be appointed president of the United States.”
Whatever his aspirations, Ueberroth certainly kept on grandstanding. At one point, he proposed finalizing negotiations on every other issue while continuing discussions on the pension contribution. The two sides remained far apart on this issue, the players wanting $60 million, the owners offering $15 million. Ueberroth proposed that it be bargained separately, with the $45 million difference put in escrow. For each day it wasn’t resolved, $1 million would be deducted and donated to either amateur baseball or charity. The gimmick got some press, but no support from either side.
Negotiations dragged on well into the 1985 season. The union finally set a deadline: on August 6, no contract, no play. Baseball was again staring down the barrel of a strike. Emotions again ran high.
Astros owner John McMullen and his third baseman Phil Garner were out discussing the matter one day. McMullen fell into a predictable recitation of the party line about the need for big changes—salary caps and the rest. Garner finally interrupted him.
“John, what you’re failing to see is that the players’ union has made its gains over a period of twenty years,” he said. “Why don’t you project yourself out ten years from now and figure where you want to be? Now, if you can take one step to get there this time, then another step in the next negotiation, you might get where you want in ten years. The problem you owners have is you’re not sure you’re going to be around in ten years, so you want it all done today. That’s why you walk in, you want to take it all away, and you get beat.
“I’ll tell you something else. Free agency’s not your problem. Salary arbitration’s going to be your problem. You might as well leave free agency alone. It’s not an issue you’re going to change. It’s cut in stone.”
“You’re a goddamned Communist!” McMullen roared.
End of discussion.
Garner, of course, was right. Salary arbitration was the key issue. The Lords’ final strategy was to make a tradeoff: no salary cap in return for changes in salary arbitration. They wanted to change the rules to limit salary-arbitration raises to 100 percent and end the days of million-dollar deals for phenoms like Valenzuela. They also wanted players to wait three years instead of two before they were eligible for arbitration.
As the August 6 deadline drew near, the two sides reduced their negotiating teams to bare bones. For the owners, it was Lee MacPhail, Barry Rona, and Lou Hoynes. For the players, Don Fehr, Dick Moss, and, in a special return appearance, Marvin Miller. They hid out from the press, first in the Helmsley Building offices of the union’s outside lawyer, then at Miller’s Upper East Side apartment.
Miller still had the “no givebacks” mind-set of 1981, but the circumstances were far different in 1985. His union constituency had undergone a 50 percent turnover in the past four years. The players’ average salary had nearly doubled, to $369,000. The issues were far less black-and-white than in 1981, and the players far less ready to fight. “We couldn’t have gotten the ’85 players to go out fifty days,” said Don Baylor, then a union leader.
There was also a split between veteran players, who were willing to gut the two-year wait for salary arbitration, and young players, who didn’t want to wait any longer than two years for the big bucks.
“There was a huge division,” said Bob Boone, who was against going to the mats to keep the two-year threshold. It violated Miller’s basic tenet of unity, he argued: “If thirty percent of the players don’t want to strike, that’s a losing proposition.”
Boone, of course, was a thirteen-year veteran at this point. It was easy for him to argue against the young players on this point. But he also felt that his perspective differed from that of the younger guys in a broader way too. The union had succeeded beyond its wildest dreams, and the owners weren’t trying to grab control back this time. They were just asking for an adjustment.
“In the early days, I felt the players were always on the right side,” Boone said. “Now, for the first time, there was this gray area, and I didn’t know.”
On Sunday, August 4, the baseball world celebrated two great achievements. Tom Seaver beat the Yankees 4–1 for his 300th win. In Yankee Stadium, 54,000 people cheered the great forty-year-old pitcher. On the same day, in Anaheim, Rod Carew stroked his 3,000th hit in a game against the Twins.
Two days later, the baseball world went dark. The two sides met all day but conceded by late afternoon that they were still far apart. That night’s games were canceled, and the players’ reluctant strike was on.
Ueberroth called Barry Rona that evening. He was going to give them one more day to resolve this, he said. Then he would toss the whole mess into binding arbitration. It was quite clear: there was not going to be a protracted strike on the watch of the “fans’ commissioner.”
The players would be more relieved than the fans. They had painted themselves into a corner—a walkout they couldn’t long sustain—and here came Ueberroth to get them out. “We should have fired him right then,” one owner later spat.
The next morning, the negotiators had a new hideout: Lee MacPhail’s apartment. It was an elegant place on Fifth Avenue, just up the street from the Plaza Hotel, overlooking Central Park. They were sitting in his parlor, midday light flooding in through the tall windows, when Ueberroth called.
“You guys have to make a deal,” he said. “If you don’t make a deal by two o’clock, I’m going to walk down Fifth Avenue to the apartment and take it away from you. You’ve got two hours.”
They all looked at one another. They could just see Ueberroth striding down the boulevard, like Sheriff Buford Pusser in the movie Walking Tall. Maybe, like the sheriff, he’d even be carrying a Louisville Slugger. Probably a media horde would be trailing along. They all agreed: Ueberroth was just confident (or crazy) enough to do it.
“I think he’s really going to come,” said Lou Hoynes.
Barry Rona and Don Fehr retreated to a bedroom and started negotiating, one-on-one, and fast. Everybody else stood around admiring the apartment. Two hours later, Rona and Fehr emerged breathlessly with an agreement: three years for arbitration, no cap on arbitration increases, and $33 million for the pension.
Ueberroth walked in twenty minutes later, loaded for bear. As he began telling them how he was going to solve this, he was interrupted. They had a deal. It was all over. Ueberroth called a press conference; the lawyers scrambled to get it all down in writing; and the next morning the New York tabloids told the story: “Ubie” had saved baseball.
Lee MacPhail wasn’t at all sure that baseball was saved. He was planning to retire in a few months, at age sixty-eight. He’d been in baseball for forty-four years. His father, Larry, had been in it before him. His son, Andy, would be in it after him. He’d served and loved the institution well. But now he was more worried about it than ever.
The money ball just kept rolling. He didn’t care what Roger Noll said—baseball was sick.
With the contract wrapped up, MacPhail had the leisure to give the Lords some final thoughts. He began to putter around at the computer, assembling some words and numbers. It turned into a full-fledged report, in which he observed that:
Baseball owed $45 to $50 million to players no longer in the game. (They’d been released, but their guaranteed contracts went on and on.)
Players with long-term contracts spent more time injured. (Of players on the disabled list in 1984, those with one-year contracts were out an average of twelve days, those with two-year contracts were out fourteen days, and those with contracts of three or more years were out eighteen days.)
The performance of players with long-term contracts declined over the course of the contract. (He provided two tables showing the averaged performances of players with long-term contracts.)
Survey of 104 Hitters
Survey of 57 Pitchers
MacPhail suggested clubs fill their final roster spots with kids up from the minors rather than “give in to the unreasonable demands of experienced marginal players.” He noted some free-agent signings of the previous winter and published their dubious accomplishments in the 1985 season:
MacPhail also counseled clubs to be smarter about salary arbitration and to consider carrying rosters of twenty-four instead of twenty-five men. He finished with this conclusion:
These are some of the areas that I believe deserve your attention. Most important is that all clubs practice commonsense economic self-restraint. We must rely on the unilateral, self-imposed restraints of each individual club to do what experience and reasonable expectations indicate is in its own best interest. We must stop daydreaming that one free agent signing will bring a pennant. Somehow we must get our operations back to the point where a normal year for the average team at least results in a break-even situation, so that clubs are not led to make rash moves in the vain hope that they might bring a pennant and a resulting change in their financial position. This requires resistance to fan and media pressure and is not easy. On the other hand, the future health and stability of our Game depend on your response to these problems.
MacPhail sent it out in mid-October. When Ueberroth got his copy he scanned it with delight. Now, this was something he could use. He’d been in office a year now and he was ready to step up his attacks on “stupidity.” He’d pushed for a watered-down labor deal partly because he didn’t think the teams’ salvation lay in such contracts. It lay in the Lords themselves. “He believed you had to make as good an agreement as possible in the nuts and bolts, and then it’s up to the clubs,” said one aide.
The Lords were more ready for his message than ever by the fall of 1985. It was partly, however, because Ueberroth had undermined their efforts to rein in salary growth during that summer’s labor bargaining. “The thing that was called collusion,” said one owner later, “grew out of the failure to get what we wanted in 1985.”
17
THE CROWDS POURED into St. Louis for the third game of the 1985 World Series. It was a perfectly glorious day for baseball, and the Cardinals and Royals were in the middle of a stirring Series. Kansas City had lost the first two games but would come back to win it in seven.
Baseball’s owners filed into an auditorium at Anheuser-Busch, wondering if they could come back. The new labor contract was disappointing. The TV money was going down, they’d been told. And the commissioner’s jaw looked particularly set today.
Ueberroth asked them whether they’d received Lee MacPhail’s report. When several shook their heads no, he scolded them about reading their mail and distributed extra copies. He asked the outgoing PRC chief to say a few words.
MacPhail was his usual concise, understated self. It was time to stop blaming the union for all their problems and start exercising some discipline on their own. He reviewed the highlights of his report. Eyebrows shot up at the $50 million in salary obligations for nonplaying players.
