The Lords of the Realm, page 57
“When we negotiated salary arbitration in 1973, it was the first big breakthrough for the players’ union,” said Miller. “Before then, the owners told the players what they would get. It didn’t matter if you were a marginal player or Joe DiMaggio. If you didn’t like it, all you could do was find a new line of work. Jimmie Foxx won the American League Triple Crown one year and was forced to take a pay cut the following year.”
He went through the history of how many times the owners had tried to scale it back and how many times they’d defended it: 1976, 1980, and again in 1985. Those who wanted to cave on salary arbitration were ignoring past history, future well-being, and their fellow players. The owners were using the salary-arbitration issue as a ploy to divide the union. They shouldn’t fall for it.
“It’s not my place to tell you what to do,” he continued. “But it’s clear to me that what’s happened the past few days has hurt. The dissenting remarks by some players have given new strength to the owners’ resolve. A settlement has already been delayed, and the settlement you get won’t be as good as it could have been.
“But whatever happens, you’ll get a better deal staying together. I’ll tell you what I’ve told players from the beginning. Stay solid, because you are irreplaceable. Stay solid, and you can have anything that’s reasonable and fair.
“Failing to support the democratically arrived-at decisions of your negotiating committee, your executive director, and your staff can have only one result: a permanent loss of credibility. If you waver, you can count on one thing: the owners will never again take the player reps seriously. The issue here is no longer just salary arbitration. It’s the future effectiveness of the union.”
Marvin Miller, concise as always, had said his peace inside a half-hour. Then he walked out the door.
There followed more than four hours of arm-waving and speechifying. Dave Winfield, one of the few who went back to the bad old days, gave a hearty amen to Miller. Boone, Molitor, and Pete Incaviglia (the Rangers’ player rep) defended their positions and ducked more brickbats. The meeting was mostly packed with supporters of the union line, including a group of Mets who came en masse from Florida in a show of force: Bob Ojeda, Howard Johnson, Barry Lyons, Tim Teufel, and Keith Miller. As Don Fehr would later put it, “All our executive board meetings are like family fights.”
But in the end, the executive board’s vote was unanimous, and the executive director went out to announce it to the media.
“Well, we finally received the ESPN offer,” said Fehr, to laughter. And, he added, they had roundly rejected it. In a press conference that lasted fully half as long as the meeting itself, player after player testified in one voice. As Fehr later summarized it: “There are no loose pieces here. If they want to fight some more, they’ll get a fight.”
The next day, the Lords—who could, after all, read the newspapers perfectly well—began to hustle toward a settlement. The movement had really begun Saturday, when Don Fehr came over to 350 Park Avenue before the summit meeting. He wanted them to know that their latest offer wasn’t flying, and that the union’s offer of ten days ago was still on the table: 50 percent of the two-year class eligible for salary arbitration.
After he left, Vincent looked around at the owners on the PRC: Selig, Reinsdorf, Kuhlmann, McMullen, Pohlad, and Wilpon.
“I beg you to take this deal, I beg you,” he said.
They wouldn’t do it. Some could barely disguise their contempt. Beg them? Anybody with a feel for the rhythm of a negotiation knew there was plenty of endgame to play out yet.
By Sunday, that rhythm was picking up. Don Ferir and Gene Orza came to 350 Park Avenue around noon with a new proposal: make 20 percent of the two-year players eligible the first year of the agreement, 25 percent the second year, and 35 percent the third. Chuck O’Connor, who’d resumed negotiating command as they got down to the short strokes, made a counteroffer: a flat 12 percent for all three years.
Within hours, the players were back with a new formula—two of them, actually. Take your pick, they told O’Connor: making 18 percent of the two-year guys eligible the first year, 21 the second, and 30 the third; or a schedule of 18, 22, and 29 percent.
The PRC inched up to 15 percent across the board. The players came back with 20. And finally, late Sunday, they compromised at 17 percent. It was something to shake hands on, if not shout about.
Indeed, some of the Lords would only shout in anger. PRC member John McMullen, who’d left to attend a Les Aspin fundraiser (oh, the obligations of a defense contractor), returned to a galling scene. Not only had the union decisively won, in his view, but the bastards had taken over the commissioner’s office. Don Fehr was sitting at Vincent’s desk, looking like the cat that ate the canary. The players were jovially passing around and signing a baseball, at Vincent’s request. He would display it on an office shelf, beside the one autographed by Babe Ruth.
Shortly after 1:00 A.M., with all the details completed, everyone trooped over to the Helmsley Palace for the announcement. For such a happy occasion and such a well-spoken man, Vincent’s announcement struck everyone as rather flat.
“Finally we have reached what we all sought,” said Vincent, only a flicker of a smile crossing his face. “Despite the travails, despite the difficulties, this is the proper way for baseball to resume.”
What the writers didn’t know was how Vincent spent most of his day. He had plenty of time to kill between the swapping of proposals. He passed some of it discussing Greek and Latin classics with union lawyer Gene Orza. He also thoroughly read the Sunday newspapers. He was normally a Times man, of course, but today the Daily News grabbed his attention. It had broken a front-page story about a character named Howard Spira who had shaken down George Steinbrenner for $40,000. Spira was what was called in baseball a “known gambler.”
Vincent shook his head as he read and reread the story. Another crisis was shaping up even as this one wound down.
21
IN THE BEGINNING, there was Al Frohman. At five-four and 220 pounds, he looked, as one writer put it, “like ten pounds of Malt-O-Meal stuffed into a five-pound bag.” He dressed worse, wearing sweaters singed by the cigarettes he chain-smoked. Frohman, the son of a rabbi, had left a career as a caterer in New York to move to the West Coast, where he had gotten into the T-shirt business. His specialty was manufacturing ones that bore pictures of athletes’ faces.
That’s how he met Dave Winfield, who couldn’t have been more his opposite if he’d come from Mars. Actually, Winfield came from Minnesota, where he was such a great and versatile college athlete that he was drafted not only by the San Diego Padres but also by the NBA’s Atlanta Hawks and the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings. He chose the Padres, went directly to the majors, and became the toast of San Diego. The sleek, six-six Winfield spoke, dressed, and dated elegantly, doing the town with models.
He met Frohman, always on the lookout for T-shirt opportunities, and, unaccountably, the two hit it off. Frohman became a father figure to Winfield, who’d grown up without one. He spent vast amounts of time with him and taught him about business, with an emphasis on his personal credo: “Don’t think small, don’t think cheap. Think smart and intelligent. Think Jewish.”
Winfield first became a free agent in 1977 and was represented by Frohman, who drove Padres GM Buzzie Bavasi absolutely crazy. He’d light a cigarette, then rummage through Bavasi’s desk looking for an ashtray. He’d blow his stack regularly, waving his arms and shouting “Vot is dis, vaddaya mean, you givin’ me nottin’,” in Garment Districtese.
They came to terms with the Padres in mid-1977 for $1.3 million over four years. As part of the deal, Winfield would actually pay the Padres $100,000 over four years to buy 100,000 bleacher seats for kids. He’d begun to get heavily into charitable work through something he named the David M. Winfield Foundation.
The foundation raised and spent money for entertaining poor kids. It hosted thousands of them at a party before the 1978 Ali-Star Game in San Diego. It threw a bash for 8,000 local children at the 1979 All-Star Game in Seattle. By 1980, the All-Star Party in Los Angeles was up to 10,000 children, with the kids getting not only autographs from players but physicals from doctors.
“Dave really was sincere with his efforts for the foundation,” recalled Bavasi, though he sometimes wondered just how it worked. He once went to the hospital to visit Frohman, a sickly man who always seemed just one doughnut away from his next heart attack. The GM found him in a palatial suite.
“Ray Kroc stayed here once,” Frohman bragged.
“Yeah, but he’s a billionaire,” said Bavasi. “How are you affording this?”
“The foundation’s paying for it.”
Oh.
Frohman remained Winfield’s agent in sickness and in health. His main qualification was total devotion. Winfield once charged Nolan Ryan after a duster, inciting a brawl. Frohman jumped out of the stands and waded right into it. Before the All-Star Game in San Diego, Peter Bavasi noticed Frohman standing by a fancy car in the parking lot. Hey, Al, whatcha doing? “This is Dave’s car,” said Frohman. “I’m guarding it.”
Winfield tried to fix Frohman up with other clients, to no avail. He hung around Jack Murphy Stadium constantly and they knew him too well. The checks he wrote them sometimes bounced and the fine clothes he often promised for their wives or girlfriends (or both) never materialized. In the clubhouse, he was thought of as Dave Winfield’s cross to bear.
Winfield was up for free agency again after 1980. Over the past four years, he’d averaged 26 homers, 99 RBIs, and a .292 batting average. Just twenty-nine years old, with a cannon arm, he was a red-hot property.
He was also no dummy. He got some negotiating backup for Frohman, who was a great mentor but no superagent. One adviser was a man named Bob Erra, whom he’d met through one of Frohman’s cockamamie schemes. (The idea was something called Superstar Village, a resort where pro athletes would be the draw, putting on sports clinics and mingling with the commoners. Winfield and Frohman took the idea to the Scripps Clinic, an elite San Diego medical center they thought might like to invest. Erra, the clinic’s chief financial officer, thought not. But he did become friendly with Winfield.) The other backup was the formidable Dick Moss.
The game, as Moss saw it, was to get to George Steinbrenner. After three straight American League pennants, 1976 through 1978, he hadn’t gotten to the Series in the past two years. “Winning a hundred and three games is like kissing your sister,” said Steinbrenner, after the 1980 Yankees won that total but lost the league playoffs to Kansas City. “It’s nice but it doesn’t pack the wallop that kissing your girlfriend does.”
Steinbrenner clearly lusted for Winfield but was handicapped by those 103 wins. With the majors’ best regular-season record, the Yankees drafted last. Since only thirteen teams could draft a player, Winfield’s negotiating rights might be gobbled up before it was the Yankees’ turn.
Moss had to discourage the riffraff. He sent out letters to clubs, spelling out Winfield’s requirements: a long-term contract, a winning team in a major market, a natural-turf stadium, and support for the Winfield Foundation. Anybody who couldn’t step up to the plate on those needn’t bother drafting him.
It worked. In the November free-agent draft, ten clubs picked him, one of them the New York Yankees. Steinbrenner immediately applied the full Reggie treatment. As Winfield would later recount: “Flowers, Broadway shows, dinner at the 21 Club, chauffeured limousines. Even telegrams in the middle of the night—‘We want you in New York.’ ”
All Winfield need do was find some other obliging suitors to gig up the price. He found ideal ones in the Braves and Mets. Ted Turner threw a big number on the table and the Mets threw a big scare into Steinbrenner. He’d rather see one of his ships sink than lose Winfield to his Flushing Meadows rival. He made a huge offer:
A $1 million signing bonus.
A ten-year contract at $1.4 million per.
A cost-of-living escalator, matching the inflation rate at up to 10 percent per year.
To Winfield and Co., the cost-of-living clause was vital. Inflation was going through the roof in the early eighties. The escalator helped protect the value of the contract and potentially added many dollars to it. Steinbrenner, in a lather to get the deal done, failed to grasp its significance.
The deal was almost done when Steinbrenner asked for a buyout option. After eight years, he wanted to be able to buy out Winfield’s last two years at 50 percent, or $700,000 a year. He clearly considered the two to be one and the same thing. Bob Erra was clearly amazed when he caucused with Winfield.
“I can’t believe it,” he said.
“Believe what?” asked Winfield.
“The guy’s a big wheeler-dealer but he doesn’t know how a cost-of-living escalator works. He doesn’t realize it compounds.”
“Meaning?”
“Meaning if inflation’s more than ten percent and you compound one-point-four million at ten percent a year, the eighth year of the contract your base salary could be two-point-five million, and a fifty percent buyout would be …”
It didn’t take them long to do the math. Nor did it take them long to get back to Steinbrenner.
“Sure,” said Erra, “we’ll agree to give you the option of buying out the contract at fifty percent over the last two years.”
The deal was done. It was only when he saw the next morning’s New York Times that Steinbrenner realized what he’d really done. Someone had clued the Times’s Murray Chass in to the wonders of compounding. Steinbrenner had gone to bed thinking he’d signed a $16 million deal. He woke up to read it was potentially $23 million.
The phone rang at Bob Erra’s bedside at 6:00 A.M., California time.
“Erra!” George Steinbrenner shouted into his ear. “What’s going on here? We don’t have a twenty-three-million-dollar deal!”
“You’re in the shipbuilding business,” Erra said. “When you give your employees a cost-of-living increase, doesn’t it compound?”
Silence on the other end.
“Well, the compounding effect of a cap of ten percent could make Dave’s contract worth twenty-three million.”
Steinbrenner hung up. Dave Winfield, without yet donning pinstripes, was off to a terrible start with the Boss.
The even bigger hang-up would come later. Steinbrenner had made a side agreement with Erra, typed it up himself. He’d contribute $300,000 a year—$3 million above and beyond the contract—to the David M. Winfield Foundation.
* * *
Winfield was a 14-carat star in the New York firmament. He made the All-Star Team his first eight years there. He drove in 100 runs or more for five straight seasons. His 37 homers in 1982 were the most by any right-handed Yankee batter since Joe DiMaggio. His New York years would be the cornerstone of a certain Hall of Fame career.
And yet George Steinbrenner despised him. It began with the contract, on which he felt snookered. It grew with the 1981 World Series, when Winfield got just one hit and the Yankees got beat. (Steinbrenner sarcastically referred to him as “Mister May,” in contrast to postseason dynamo Reggie Jackson’s “Mister October” monicker.) The relationship deteriorated from there, with the continuing assistance of Al Frohman.
Frohman headed a Winfield-created company called Top Hat Inc., which was to market the player’s services and baseball memorabilia. Steinbrenner somehow agreed to be a 50 percent partner. He and Frohman soon fought like cats and dogs and the business went bust.
Quite apart from that, Frohman’s legendary tact could only make a bad situation worse. Once in the midst of a Winfield slump, Steinbrenner ran into Frohman and said, “You better tell your boy to start hitting.”
“He’s not a boy,” said Frohman. “Go fuck yourself.”
Steinbrenner began withholding payments to the Winfield Foundation, leading a running legal battle that lasted for years. But the foundation continued its activities. In August 1981, it threw a party for 20,000 poor kids at Randalls Island Park in New York, with a free baseball clinic, autographs, and bag lunch. In September, when he played for the first time in his hometown of Minneapolis, he gave a free baseball clinic, free physicals, picnic supper, and tickets to the game for 1,500 poor kids.
Unfortunately, the foundation wasn’t just about helping poor kids—or covering Al Frohman’s medical expenses. It was also a paycheck for assorted groupies. One of them was Howard Spira, a man once described as “the Babe Ruth of greaseball hangers-on.”
The twenty-one-year-old Spira became a gofer at the Foundation in 1981, fresh from a stint as a gofer at NBC Sports. He was Dave Winfield’s all-purpose lackey, a fixture around the Yankees clubhouse whom one player described as a “buzzing fly.” At the same time, Spira had developed an expensive gambling habit and deep debts.
He was into a chap named Joseph Caridi for $57,000 when the chief of the Colombo crime family’s gambling division took him for a little ride. As they drove around in his limo, Caridi demanded repayment and Spira tried to stave him off with Winfield souvenirs. He produced a baseball signed “To Anthony from Dave Winfield,” for Caridi’s son. He pulled out two glossies of Winfield signed the same way. Caridi, unimpressed, lifted Spira by the front of his shirt through the limo’s sunroof, then partially closed the roof. There was Howard Spira, riding through the streets of Manhattan, his head outside the car.
It was enough to focus his mind on debt service, and Spira pleaded with Winfield for help. In late 1981, he gave Spira a check for $15,000. It would later become a point of contention, Spira claiming Winfield knew damned well what it was for, Winfield saying he didn’t.
The two, in any event, fell out over time. Spira, in the manner of all scorned hangers-on, became bitter. He’d seen to the great man’s every whim, then been discarded. By late 1986, he was down on his luck, short of cash, but still possessed of a keen eye for an angle.
