The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

Chapter 14

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- April 1976 SPRING AFTERNOONS ARE WARMING, daylight lingers, and the news of baseball flowers about us once again. The news, that is, of games and scores and standings, of late rallies and shutout pitching, of rejuvenated veterans and startling young rookies-the good old summertime news, and not the news of the other side of the sport, the economics of baseball, which so confused and wearied us during the off-season. The same chilling blight has recently overtaken most major professional team sports; this year"s eruption of labor troubles and money squabbles represented only the newest stage in a long national struggle between athletes and entrepreneurs for the upper hand (or perhaps only an equal hand) in the regulation of their sports and the apportionment of profits. In baseball, however, the collisions of this past winter and early spring were notable for their bitterness and naked hostility, which suggests that a time of decision in these matters may be close at hand. The players" strike of 1972, which erased the first few days of that season, was an unpleasant but relatively insignificant affair, caused by the owners" refusal to arbitrate a minor pension issue-which was in fact eventually negotiated and quickly resolved. This year"s difficulties were altogether serious-something close to open warfare. The preseason camps in Florida, Arizona, and California were shut down for seventeen days-almost half the normal spring term-by a lockout called and enforced by the club owners. This year, the disagreement reached such a level of acrimony that for a time the regular season itself seemed threatened: baseball might stop altogether.

The center of it all was a decision handed down last December by a three-man arbitration panel, which ruled that two players, Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, were released from affiliation with their clubs-Messersmith from the Dodgers, McNally from the Montreal Expos-as a result of their having played out their existing contracts plus an additional year, and were now free agents, ent.i.tled to sign up with whatever club they wished, at any pay they could command. This affirmation of a seemingly minimal right was in fact a ruling of revolutionary significance-an athletes" Miranda decision-for it marked the long-expected end of the ancient "reserve clause," which had bound every player irrevocably to the club holding his contract, thus fixing his place of employment and insuring that his salary was always ultimately determined by the pleasure of the owner. The decision in the Messersmith case (Dave McNally, a pitcher, had actually retired from baseball, because of a sore arm, by the time the case was settled) may have appeared historically inevitable, but it unleashed a storm of pa.s.sions and legal complexities. Through the cold-weather months, the baseball hot-stove news mostly concerned the owners" trips to court to have the arbitrators" decisions overturned (the pleas were denied); ill-tempered, staccato haggling over the free-agent issue; onerously complex proposals and counteroffers put forward by rival professional negotiators speaking for the owners" Player Relations Committee and for the Executive Board of the Players a.s.sociation; lengthy statements of position that only confirmed the deepening division and stalemate; and, finally, the lockout. A fan searching the back pages for some word of Nolan Ryan"s elbow or Billy Martin"s pitching rotation could be forgiven if he sometimes threw down his newspaper in despair.

When the spring camps did at last suddenly open, on order of Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, the still unresolved dispute over the new Basic Agreement-the agreement on which every individual contract is founded, covering everything from meal money to transportation, trading procedures, schedules, and spring-training pay-receded a bit in urgency, only to be replaced by a succession of highly publicized, pugnacious salary negotiations and holdouts involving some of the topmost stars of the game (Messersmith, Tom Seaver, Reggie Jackson, and others), whose money demands soared and swooped in rumored multiples of millions of dollars. These nights, accelerated by the collapse of the reserve system, were watched with avidity by the players and with horrified anxiety by the owners-and with various emotions, as yet imperfectly understood, by the fans. At the same time, there were further commercial surprises, which, taken with the rest, caused the once elegant estate of baseball more and more to resemble a littered, slovenly Oz. The franchise of the San Francisco Giants was lost, then reprieved, then saved, then lost again, and then, at the last possible instant, won back for good. Bill Veeck, the cheerful showman, formed a partnership that purchased the Chicago White Sox, and instantly infuriated his fellow owners (just as they knew he would) with the p.r.o.nouncement that his players would wear shorts on hot summer afternoons on the South Side. The American League announced its expansion to fourteen clubs in 1977; the National League announced its firm resolve to continue at the present twelve-club level, and refused also to consider the scandalous adventure, suggested by the AL, of interleague play.

I am a baseball fan in good standing, and my first reaction on regarding the enormous and unsavory dog"s breakfast that was plunked down before me on the morning of this new season was simply to push back from the table and walk away. A lot of fans, I suspect, may be on the point of leaving the game. Even more of them will try to ignore the whole mess-the lockout, the free-agent issue, the gigantic new salaries, the franchise squabbles-and follow the sport as if it were unchanged, follow it as they did when they were children. This is tempting, I must admit, for it is the game itself-the game inside the lines, as the phrase now has it-that has always most absorbed me. Part of me, much of the fan in me, is attracted to baseball games exactly because they connect me on a long straight line to my own boyhood, and because they so often seem to be the perfect release from the daily world of money, strikes, strife, and complexity. And yet ... Somehow, I sense that this can"t work for long-that games considered as pure escape can"t continue to hold us entirely, because we must keep our first and best connections with the world of today. Professional sports now form a noisy and substantial, if irrelevant and distracting, part of that world, and it seems as if baseball games taken entire-off the field as well as on it, in the courts and in the front offices as well as down on the diamonds-may now tell us more about ourselves than they ever did before. Perhaps we should stay here in the gloomy counting house a little longer, then, before we grab our shades and head for the park.

The most radical alteration in the relations between baseball players and baseball owners may in the long run prove to have come not with the Messersmith decision but at the moment when Catfish Hunter signed a multiyear contract to pitch for the Yankees for a total (including various long-term retirement and insurance benefits) of three and a half million dollars. Hunter had been declared a free agent by Peter Seitz, the same arbitrator who later cast the deciding vote in the Messersmith case, but Hunter"s liberation had nothing to do with the reserve clause; Seitz ruled that Catfish was his own man because his former club, the Oakland A"s, had failed to make payments on an insurance policy that was an integral part of his contract. Hunter is one of the two or three best pitchers in baseball today, and the extended, scrambling, knockdown auction in late 1974 among several well-heeled clubs to sign him for almost any sum he cared to mention startled everyone, probably including Catfish himself. Suddenly there seemed to be no limit to the money that a baseball superstar could command-a realization that probably had much to do with the nastiness and anxiety of the negotiations over free-agency between owners and players this year.

Tom Seaver, the Mets" shining paladin, this spring demanded something in the neighborhood of $275,000 per year over a span of three years-a pay level that caused M. Donald Grant, the chairman of the Mets" board, to open immediate discussions with the Dodgers about the possibility of a Seaver trade. This move is believed to have been made either in sudden pure anger or as a considered corporate warning to Seaver and other high-priced stars. After a short, tense holdout, Seaver settled for a base of $225,000 a year (he had been getting $170,000), which could come to another $30,000 or $40,000, because of various bonus stipulations, if he sustains his normal high level of performance. Andy Messersmith, after nearly coming to terms with the Yankees, the Padres, and the Angels (he received other offers, too, but many of these were halfhearted publicity gestures), signed with the Atlanta Braves for a three-year, no-cut contract worth about a million dollars. Reggie Jackson, suddenly traded to the Orioles last month by Oakland (with whom he had not yet signed for the current year), has not reported to his new club; he will play in Baltimore, he is reported as saying, only for an extended contract of considerable proportions-say, five years for something like three million dollars. d.i.c.k Allen, who in 1973 became the first player to earn a quarter of a million dollars for a single season, has not come to any agreement with his current club, the Phillies. And so on. A decade ago, there were fewer than half a dozen players in the majors who earned over $100,000 per year. Last year, there were three stars (Catfish Hunter, d.i.c.k Allen, and Hank Aaron) who earned $200,000 or more per year, and forty-five who earned between $100,000 and $200,000; both groups have grown much larger this year. The world-champion Cincinnati Reds now have two stars, Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan, in the $200,000 cla.s.s, and two others, Pete Rose and Tony Perez, who earn well over $100,000. (Pete Rose, whom many consider to be the team"s main man, has always seemed to be somewhat slighted by the Reds at contract time.) On the other hand, the average pay for a major-league baseball player last year was $46,000. (Salaries for other professional team sports in 1975, according to a survey made by the Washington Post, averaged $42,000 for players in the National Football League, $75,000 for players in the National Hockey League, $95,000 for players in the American Basketball a.s.sociation, and, up on top, $110,000 for players in the National Basketball a.s.sociation.) The size of the money game has changed, and a lot of other baseball values are changing as a result. The most interesting alteration may be among the fans. I know of no reliable or continuing system of fan-polling, and much of what I can conclude here is intuitive or based on conversations with and letters from friends who care about sports. There seems to be absolutely no doubt that large numbers of fans are disturbed about the level of some player salaries, and that they are angry about the curtailment of spring training this year. (Many of them referred to the lockout as a strike-a startling one-hundred-and-eighty-degree error that was also repeatedly made by some sportswriters.) The reader mail received by the Sporting News, the ancient, extremely conservative weekly sports paper published in St. Louis, ran very heavily against the players; one typical letter-typical except for the mildness of its tone-said, "Professional athletes are overestimating their value. Unless they begin to realize this, they are going to continue the already downhill relationship with the fans and ultimately destroy spectator sports." Fan-in-the-street interviews in many big-league-city newspapers turned up similar expressions of this view. The anti-money, anti-player feeling does not seem to carry over to the box office, however; early-season attendance this year has been unusually healthy. It is significant, I think, that there was no major outcry from fans last year when Catfish Hunter signed for his epochal three and a half million. Nor do I recall many shouts of rage when Muhammad Ali and Joe Frazier each cleared more than two million dollars for their heavyweight-t.i.tle fight in Manila last autumn, or when Jimmy Connors took down a quarter of a million for a one-sided three-set victory in a televised tennis match a couple of months ago. On almost any weekend, some golfer or other can be seen on our television sets in the act of winning $30,000 or $40,000, and one of them, Hubert Green, recently hit a hot streak and ran up winnings of $118,000 in three weeks. Money won on television, to be sure, has always seemed a trifle unreal, more like Monopoly dollars than the real thing, but what I think we can begin to understand is that there is an enormous difference between our att.i.tude toward the individual great athlete-the superstar, the hero-entrepreneur, the nonpareil-and what we feel about the team player. We seem to derive excitement and deep pleasure from the accomplishments of a single performer. ("This putt-sh-h-h-may be worth twenty-two-thousand dollars....") The multimillion-dollar heavyweight-t.i.tle fight involves not just the biggest, toughest men anywhere but an almost unimaginable prize for the winner, and the two elements are somehow the same. When I was growing up, the fact that Babe Ruth was paid a salary of $80,000 was almost as awesome to me as his feat of hitting sixty home runs in a single season; I memorized both figures. But large payments to athletes are not enjoyed or approved of by us, the fans, if the payment is made broadly, to all the athletes engaged in a particular trade at the big-league level-all basketball players, all hockey players, and so on. "The players have gotten too greedy," "They"re all paid too much"-these are current grandstand convictions, which I also hear from many other people, in and out of the sports world. As I pick up this complaint, however, it seems to apply more to a well-paid journeyman than to the superstar-more to Rusty Staub or Roy White, say, than to Johnny Bench or Jim Palmer. It would be extremely interesting to measure this, if we could. What it means, I think, is that high pay for athletes is resented if they are seen as employees. And when these employees behave like contemporary workmen, trying to extract the most money and the most favorable working conditions and retirement benefits from a typically reluctant and unsympathetic employer, and forming a union to press their demands-which is what the baseball and football and basketball players have all done in recent years-then they are resented even more deeply, almost to the point of hatred. This is an extraordinary turn of events in a labor-conscious, success-oriented society like ours.

I think that the view of the athlete as an employee and a card-carrying union man violates our fan vision of the athlete as a mythic figure, a lone hero. The athlete should live and perform by himself, in a place far removed from our own mundane concerns for good working hours and fair pay. What he does should be impossible, or nearly so, and it is quite acceptable that his reward for this great deed should be unbelievable, beyond our measuring. If, on the other hand, we see the athlete as a mere clock-puncher and then compare his pay scale with ours, we feel envy and rage. Our indignation is deepened when we realize that he is being paid all that bread for something that is probably much more pleasurable than whatever it is we do. Come to think of it, by G.o.d, he is being paid for having fun! This gnawing ill humor is at its worst, surely, when the athlete on view is a ballplayer, for baseball looks like the easiest of all professional sports-almost easy enough for us to have been hired to play it ourselves, except that ... if only ... The fact that the game is in reality extraordinarily difficult results in the very same rancor, for everybody, including the best-paid star, is bound to fall on his face if we only wait long enough. There-look at that! And we pay him two hundred grand for that! This is the way the old sour-mouthed Yankee fans used to sound, back when the Yankees won every year. All of us have become that sort of fan now, I think, and the kind of understanding affection we once had for the hopeless, losing Mets, who so resembled ourselves, has been lost, probably for good.

I should add, of course, that there are many people who despise high pay for athletes on principle-because such gigantic funds and such exorbitant pa.s.sions are expended for such trivial ends, in a time when so many areas of our country and our social fabric are deteriorating or dying for lack of money and attention. For myself, I can say only that I think of this irony almost every day but that it no longer seems to have the capacity to shock me, or even surprise me. These polarities do not seem reversible-there is no way to siphon the purse for the Indianapolis 500 into Bedford-Stuyvesant-and it may even be that they are inevitable, locked into our society. Professional sports are an escape-probably our prime national escape just now. During the Depression, we happily paid the largest salaries in the country to Clark Gable and Mickey Rooney and Jean Harlow; today, we pay them to Kareem Jabbar and Richard Petty and Catfish Hunter. I see no difference.

The Messersmith case was the latest in a long series of tests challenging the courts" habitual protection of baseball"s monopoly status. In 1972, Supreme Court Justice Harry Blackmun, delivering the 53 majority opinion that upheld the owners in a suit brought by Cardinal outfielder Curt Flood, wrote, "Professional baseball is a business and it is engaged in interstate commerce"-and thus normally subject to federal business law. But it is "in a very distinct sense an exception and an anomaly," and he added, "The aberration is an established one." This curious logic soon impelled other players to challenge the reserve clause by appealing to the arbitration panel-a body set up in the Basic Agreement of 1970 and reluctantly accepted by the owners. Separate tests were undertaken by Ted Simmons, Sparky Lyle, and Bobby Tolan, but dropped when each of the players ultimately signed a new contract. The Messersmith-McNally grievance, when it arrived last year, had acc.u.mulated a considerable momentum. The issue in the case was straightforward-whether the standard player contract should be taken literally (as Messersmith and McNally claimed) in its provisions that seemed to say a player completing the full term of his contract and then playing one additional season under the same terms was thus freed of all obligation to his club, or whether (as the owners claimed) the obligation and the contract were infinitely extensible under the precedents of the reserve clause. Suddenly aware of a very dark shadow on the road ahead, the owners hurried to court to request that the entire arbitration process be enjoined. The action was denied, but Peter Seitz, the neutral third arbitrator (along with the owners" labor adviser, John Gaherin, and Marvin Miller, the executive director of the Players a.s.sociation), seized the occasion to urge all parties to take the immense issue out of his hands by negotiating their differences. Not a bit of it, the owners responded; mind your own business and press on to a decision. Seitz obliged, and, on December 23, cast the deciding vote that sustained Messersmith and McNally in their grievance. The reserve clause was dead. The owners reacted at once, firing Seitz from his job-an action within their rights under the rules of the arbitration panel. The bad news had come, and the messenger was put to the sword.

The group behavior of the owners-by turns stiff-necked, contradictory, apprehensive, and vengeful, and always accompanied by loud offstage trumpetings of defiance and rage from their small Tarquin minority-sometimes invites irreverence, but the truth remains that the Messersmith ruling violently disrupted their once somnolent nineteenth-century industry. Their worst ancient fear, the family nightmare, had come to pa.s.s, and other frights now seemed sure to follow. From the beginning, they had defended the reserve clause-in the courts and in the newspapers and at congressional hearings-by claiming that its removal would invite hundreds of ballplayers, including most of the great stars, to sell themselves each year to the highest bidder, thus a.s.suring an automatic championship to the franchise holder who had the largest bankroll, and also making it certain that no club could hope to maintain the year-to-year personnel and identifying character that preserve fan loyalty. Although there is new evidence every day to suggest that this is not happening, and not about to happen, in either league, the fear of it is still very much alive among the owners, and does much to explain their recent behavior. Their second difficulty is much more concrete. Baseball, they point out, is such a demanding game that the average player must spend four years (far more than in any other sport) at the minor-league and rookie levels before he attains major-league competence and begins to pay off his owner"s considerable investment in him. It would be unconscionable to allow the player to walk away at that moment and sell his services to a rival club.

The owners, having applied unsuccessfully to the United States District Court in Kansas City to have the Messersmith ruling overturned, and having also failed in the same plea in the Circuit Court of Appeals, now slowly tried to come to grips with the horrid new reality. Their Player Relations Committee had been negotiating with a committee of the Players a.s.sociation in a foot-dragging sort of way since the previous August, and not until last February 11 did the owners come up with their first version of a new reserve clause-free-agent status for a player after nine years" service in the major leagues (where the average player"s tenure is just over four and a half years). The players, who, of course, had no legal obligation to accept any modification of the basic contract-plus-one-year formula, nonetheless agreed in principle that some form of player continuity seemed essential, and suggested a six-year term, with a year"s advance notice if a player then intended to cut loose from his club.

The distance separating the two sides was canyonlike, with an entirely different economic view of things from each rim, and now there came into the discussions a legal dispute of true complexity-the so-called liability issue. Marvin Miller, having a.s.serted the Players a.s.sociation"s willingness to settle on a minimum tour of duty with a particular ball club, asked what he was expected to do about any player or players who would not agree to such a compromise-who, in fact, would be prepared to sue for damages if their basic contract-plus-one-year rights, achieved in the Messersmith decision, were bargained away. (One player, the notoriously p.r.i.c.kly Mike Marshall, of the Dodgers, had already said that he was prepared to fight it out on just those lines.) Not our concern, replied John Gaherin for the owners. All these issues are of concern to both groups and have to be faced, said Miller. Then, even as the two sides seemed to be inching closer together, the owners announced the lockout, on the eve of spring training. The stated motive-to forestall another players" strike-was an empty one, since the Players a.s.sociation had offered a four-year no-strike pledge while any new form of reserve clause was being tested. It must thus be a.s.sumed that the owners" purpose was simply to submit the negotiations to severe pressure, in hopes that public opinion would turn against the players-as it did, in fact-and that the players, for their part, would become anxious about the impa.s.se and the onrushing season and press their union for a quick compromise. A public-relations firm, T. J. Ross & a.s.sociates, was engaged by the owners, and players and reporters were subjected to frequent news releases depicting management"s plight and sweet reasonableness.

From the beginning, spokesmen for the owners, as well as Commissioner Kuhn, had frequently mentioned the rising cost of all baseball operations, the shrinking farm systems, the chronically invalid franchises like San Francisco, Minnesota, Atlanta, and Baltimore, and the unfortunate effects of any large jump in ticket prices. These are problems of some urgency, of course, but the owners" habitual cries of poverty have always been slightly disingenuous. For one thing, player salaries and pensions still form a very modest portion-less than twenty percent-of the clubs" annual outlays. Attendance is excellent, totaling 29,790,000 last year, or a hair under the all-time mark of 30,109,000 set two seasons ago, and baseball has just renegotiated its basic television agreements with the networks for a record sum, amounting to ninety-three million dollars payable over the next four years. The clubs" total radio and TV income now amounts to one and a half times the total paid out for player salaries and retirement benefits. Some franchises lose money, but it is hard to say how many and how much, because most baseball clubs now represent only a special corner of a much larger commercial ent.i.ty, and because tax write-offs and benefits can a.s.sist, or even turn around, an apparently weak performance in any given year. It is not generally known, for instance, that ballplayers can be depreciated, like oil wells or factory buildings, on the corporate ledgers. In any case, the owners have never formally pleaded inability to pay in the course of their negotiations with the Players a.s.sociation-a plea that is perfectly within their rights but would require them, under the law, to open their books. Neither have the owners hesitated to pluck another favorite old, sweet chord-team loyalty. How will the fans continue to care about our teams, they ask, if players are free to deal for themselves and then heartlessly move along to any club that makes them a good offer? A strange refrain, surely, from the dealers who traded off more than a hundred players between the 1975 and 1976 seasons, who have moved or invented eighteen franchises since the Second World War, and who propose to draft away fifty players from existing clubs to stock the two utterly superfluous new franchises that they now envision.

The lockout, an enormous predicament, lasted for more than two weeks, and its most startling moment-surely a scene like no other in the history of the game-came on March 11, when fifty-odd players stood or sat down behind a long table in a conference room of the Host International Hotel, in Tampa, and debated the structure of baseball with the owners" Player Relations Committee. The meeting had overtones that stretched far beyond the day and the place, for the owners" unspoken conviction had always been that six hundred ballplayers, taken as a group, would prove to be scattered, undisciplined, poorly informed, and probably insufficiently educated, and thus unable to stand together during a long, tough bargaining period. The players" group included not only members of their Executive Board (team representatives like Lou Brock, Tom Seaver, Rick Monday, Merv Rettenmund, and Carl Morton) but a sizable contingent of newly aroused partic.i.p.ants-Johnny Bench, Ted Simmons, Rusty Staub, Willie Stargell, Jim Wynn, and others-who had recently a.s.sembled informally and made requests that an end be found to the impa.s.se. The newcomers sat in on the next policy session of the Executive Board (any player may attend meetings) and, on hearing the logic and bargaining history behind the Players a.s.sociation positions, were apparently convinced of their justice. Any secret hope the owners may have entertained that the new faces on the scene represented an unraveling of the Players a.s.sociation ended abruptly when Johnny Bench, who had previously said in public that some simple solution to these issues must be easily discoverable, stood up at the hotel meeting and delivered an extended discourse on the players" stake in the liability issue. The champion Cincinnati Reds, taken from top to bottom, are the most conservative, old-line club in baseball, and players who were at the meeting that afternoon have told me that the expression on the face of Bob Howsam, the Reds" president, as he listened to this address by his famous star was a picture. (Since that day, it has been observed that Howsam, who had been one of the loudest opponents of any major concessions to the players, has been notably more reasonable in att.i.tude. Change is sometimes possible, even in baseball.) A few days later, in St. Petersburg, the owners delivered their "best and final" offer-a lengthy doc.u.ment that, among other things, conceded free-agent status for players who play out their options under current contracts (conceded the Messersmith decision, that is) but proposed various future restrictions that would limit the number of clubs that a free agent could d.i.c.ker with and the number of free agents that any one club could sign. This new offer was rejected by Marvin Miller, who observed that it listed fourteen unresolved and largely undiscussed issues and concluded with a clause that could throw the entire Basic Agreement into a fresh round of negotiations in 1978. The next day, however, the players" Executive Board pa.s.sed a resolution calling the owners" offer incomplete but admitting that it represented considerable progress. Some liability for obdurate players might be accepted by the Players a.s.sociation, they said, and further negotiations should proceed at once. These joint whispers of concession were enough for Commissioner Kuhn, who ordered the spring camps to open forthwith. Baseball was back in business, to everybody"s relief-with the exception, to be sure, of Gussie Busch, the president of the Cardinals, who said, "It would be insane to open the camps," a dissenting opinion supposedly endorsed by six other clubs. Change is sometimes impossible, especially in baseball.

The two sides have continued to meet since the season got under way, but progress on the new Basic Agreement has been minimal: many divisive issues, including the limitation of free agents" rights and the size of the clubs" rosters after more expansion, remain entirely unresolved. No one knows if the agreement can be signed this summer, or what new crisis will arise if it is not. The owners remain very apprehensive about the number of players who have not signed contracts for the current year and will thus become free agents in October. At last count, that number was about sixty (there are six hundred players in the majors), and not all of them were regulars. The total is diminishing slowly as players come to terms, but the roster of the still unsigned includes not only stars like Reggie Jackson and d.i.c.k Allen but Carlton Fisk, Fred Lynn, Bert Blyleven, Ted Simmons, Don Gullett, and Willie McCovey. There is, moreover, a knot of celebrated Oakland players-Sal Bando, Joe Rudi, Gene Tenace, Rollie Fingers, Vida Blue, and Bert Campaneris: the Oakland team, in effect-who have not signed, because of their dissatisfaction with the contracts offered them by their boss, Charles O. Finley. He has responded by paying them for the current season at the minimum permissible level, which is twenty percent below their last contracts. What will happen to all these players-what offers will be made to them, how many of them will in fact sign up-will determine the condition of baseball for the next few years, and should be watched with at least the same attentiveness that we will be giving to the pennant races.

I am not optimistic. Bargaining with employees in an open market requires frankness and some perception of variations in human character and motivation. The owners, as a group, do not qualify on either count. It is perhaps unfair, by the way, to apply this pejorative tag, "the owners," to the strange agglomeration of old baseball lords, highly trained, tennis-playing young business executives, sudden millionaires, careful industrialists, and second- or third-generation baseball families who, in one form or another, control the twenty-four clubs, but the fact remains that the most vivid continuous characteristic they display is a rigid and violently cautious group mentality, which seems to bear little resemblance to the energy and imagination and business courage that most of them must have possessed at some time or another in order to ama.s.s their present fortunes. This is a unique phenomenon in American business, and it suggests to me that many team owners may have chosen to enter the sports world not for its surface attractions-excitement, publicity, camaraderie, front-row seats, and so forth-but because its fixed, ancient corporate privileges looked like such a safe harbor after their turbulent fiscal voyages. They found a home.

In group negotiations, as we have seen, the first att.i.tude taken by the owners is the posture invariably struck by their most reactionary, intransigent members-the Finley-Busch-Howsam statuary group. In employee relationships, the owners" basic att.i.tude is paternalistic, sentimental, and insensitive. In spite of the grinding struggles between the owners and the Players a.s.sociation in recent years, most ball clubs pride themselves deeply on the good relationship between their front office and their players, and for some-the Pirates, the Dodgers, the Orioles, and perhaps the Red Sox-the claim seems valid. On almost every club, however, family feeling has not always prevented the sudden throwaway trade of a fading long-term star, the subtle browbeating of a rookie at contract time, or the winter deal that disposes of a clubhouse freethinker, an irreverent joker, a particularly vigorous player representative, or other "agitators." Last year, the Mets" M. Donald Grant forced a veteran outfielder, Cleon Jones, to abase himself by making a public apology, at a large press conference, for a minor s.e.xual peccadillo. Many clubs, including the Yankees and the Reds, enforce smaller humiliations on their players in the form of dress codes-short haircuts, low stocking stirrups, ties and jackets on the road-in the name of "team pride." These leftovers from baseball"s baronial past may be slowly drifting out of the game, but their persistence suggests that the owners do not trust their players or understand their motives. A general manager of the old days much preferred the ritual of calling a player into his office to talk contract terms rather than having to make an appointment with the tieless, mod-dressed lawyer or agent who now probably represents the same young pitcher or slugger in his money dealings. (One lawyer-agent, Jerry Kapstein, is employed by many of the notable current holdouts, including Lynn, Fisk, Holtzman, and Rudi.) Suspicions are deepening, and the owners, like the fans, are watching their players with ill-concealed misgivings. Owners are fans, of course; they are the ultimate in fandom. What"s happening, they wonder. Doesn"t anybody care about team loyalty anymore? All these kids are paid too d.a.m.ned much. All they think about now is money....

I doubt it. The players" new privileges will surely produce a few high-priced freebooters, who will be perfectly eager to play for any team as long as the money is right (Andy Messersmith may have been the first of these), but most players of established worth on the field have also established themselves considerably in the city-or one of its suburbs, more likely-where their team plays. They are apt to be men around thirty years old, with children in school, good-sized houses (with good-sized mortgages), and long-term local business and social connections. All these, I suspect, are more significant and more stabilizing forces than "team loyalty." Thurman Munson, before eventually signing a four-year contract with the Yankees this spring (for a salary that will exceed $150,000 in its final year), said that he wanted to play only in New York or in Cleveland, which is near his hometown. Ken Holtzman, before Finley traded him off to the Baltimore Orioles, said to a Times reporter, "All he would have to do is negotiate with me in good faith, in a civil tone of voice, and I probably would sign. I like the Oakland area, I like the guys on the ball club. I don"t want to leave." His former teammate Joe Rudi, who is also unsigned, said to me in Arizona last month, "I want to stay in Oakland. I have my home and my business and my friends there. Most of us want to stay, but we don"t feel Charlie will pay us what we need." In Arizona, I also talked with Rick Monday, the splendid Cub outfielder, who had just signed a one-year contract. He said, "The owners have this terrible fear of the players" playing out their contracts en ma.s.se and jumping to other clubs, and I think it"s wildly exaggerated. They don"t seem to know what matters to a player, and how many factors there are that work to keep him where he is, as long as he"s treated fairly."

When the lockout was unlocked, I scurried south and then west, anxious to rid myself of my pale, winter fan"s face-a complexion brought on by the tedious diet of court cases and labor law. Never was spring training more delicious, and never were its rituals more rea.s.suring. In Pompano Beach, on my first day, the visiting Orioles trotted out a very tall right-handed pitcher named Sam Stewart in the fourth inning of a game against the Texas Rangers. Stewart, a raw rookie, pitched for the Bluefield, West Virginia, Orioles in the Appalachian League last year, but he had "thrown like h.e.l.l" in batting practice a few days earlier, thus earning this shot. Now he retired a batter, threw two very wide b.a.l.l.s to the Rangers" Tom Grieve, and then hit him on the hip with a fastball. "Yahrr!" Grieve bellowed. Stewart then gave up a walk, a single, then another single, got an infield out, then surrendered a two-run double off the fence by Roy Howell, then a single, and then fanned Toby Harrah: four hits, five runs, one left on, one broken heart.

At Winter Haven, the Red Sox trotted out Ferguson Jenkins, the splendid veteran righty (191 lifetime wins) they picked up in a trade last winter. Throwing like running water, Jenkins zipped through three innings against the White Sox in about nine minutes, and came off the field in a lather of sweat and pleasure. All the Bosox looked remarkably cheerful, perhaps because they were just beginning to understand the extent of the celebrity that has come to them as a result of their performance against the Reds in last year"s peerless World Series. Their bijou park, hard by the sh.o.r.es of Lake Lulu, was packed with grateful followers, and the warm afternoon air was alive with herons, gnats, and cries of optimism. The day before my visit, the Red Sox had played the Phillies in Clearwater, where the elderly resident fans tottered to their feet to greet the Boston starter, Luis Tiant, with chants of "Lu-is! Lu-is!" In the press box at Winter Haven, I was told that Jim Willoughby still had the ball that second baseman Denny Doyle had thrown wildly into the Red Sox dugout in an attempt at a double play during the final Series game-a crucial mistake that allowed the Reds to begin their comeback toward victory. That ball, however, was damaged: its cover had been badly torn by Johnny Bench"s swing-an accident that must have affected Doyle"s peg. Doyle has refused to confirm this or to answer questions about it. "I should have made the play," he says. Cla.s.s.

In Bradenton, I approached Pirate manager Danny Murtaugh and asked him a useful, well-thought-out, mid-March-type scribe-query: "How many innings will your starting pitchers be able to go by opening day, Danny? Because of-you know-the late start this year?"

Murtaugh got rid of a little tobacco juice and murmured, "I"ve had pitchers who couldn"t go more than one inning in July."

At Payne Park, in Sarasota, I spotted Bill Veeck sitting in the open grandstand behind first base, and climbed up to say h.e.l.lo. He was stripped to the waist, with his Ahab-like peg leg propped on the row in front of him. He was a light, dusty tan all over, and somehow suggested a garrulous holy man. Laughing, squinting in the sunlight, hunching against the warm wind to light innumerable cigarettes, he talked exuberantly about baseball-Veeck baseball. "We"ve just finished taking up the artificial surface on the infield at Comiskey Park and replacing it with gra.s.s," he said. "This is an outdoor game-people are trying to get away from steel and plastic. We got the turf down in five hours. Now it looks like a ball park. How important the old parks are! We all saw that in the World Series last fall. In Boston, you had beautiful Fenway Park and thirty-five thousand partic.i.p.ants. Then, over in Cincinnati, you had fifty-five thousand spectators. I think the thirty-five thousand almost won the Series. It had a tremendous effect on the play-n.o.body who saw those games can doubt that.

"I opposed the lockout, I guess to n.o.body"s surprise. I don"t think you should fool around with the fans that way. And who loses in the end if the fans become disenchanted? Management, n.o.body else. How can you hope to bargain away the verdict in a lawsuit? And did you see about the two presidents" each announcing that his league was going to expand to Toronto? n.o.body in charge, as usual! Nothing changes much in baseball, but we"re trying to change. You heard about our new road uniforms? The lettering on the shirts is from the 1903 Sox, and the blue color we took from the nineteen twenties. And we"ll have white socks. Isn"t it ridiculous to have a team called the White Sox wearing red socks? How did that ever happen?

"We really needed the full training period. We have five center fielders and we don"t know if any of them can hit, and we have a mess of young pitchers who all deserve our consideration. None of us here has the slightest idea of what is happening in this club. To say we are in a state of confusion is putting it mildly."

He laughed delightedly and lit another cigarette, and then autographed a program for a waiting white-haired gentleman, who was wearing a visor. "I"ve been a Chicago fan since 1916," the man said, shaking Veeck"s hand. "Now we"re going someplace again."

The game that afternoon was a windy, sleepy, languorous affair against a visiting half-squad of Red Sox. Cleon Jones, who had been dropped by the Mets last year, rapped out four solid hits for the White Sox, but neither team was able to move its base runners along. Several of those young Chicago pitchers came on and proved in turn why they were not yet ready for the majors, but the score remained stuck at 11 for many innings. Up in the sunstruck, cratelike press box, the writers yawned and stretched and made jokes, and then began to bait Harry Caray, who was broadcasting the game back to Station WMAQ, in Chicago, from the adjoining booth. "Oh, Har-ry!" one shouted over in a loud falsetto. "Yoo-hoo, Harry Ca-ray!" Another tried cat noises. "Mee-ow!" he called. "Meee-iouww, Harry! Arf-arf!" The writers doubled over laughing. In time-at last, weeks later-the two teams ran out of pitchers, and the thing was called at 11, after fifteen innings. The only flicker of excitement had come when one of Caray"s broadcasting a.s.sistants burst into the press box and threw himself head first over the front row of typewriters-an apparent suicide. "Grab my legs!" he called back at the last instant, and we did. Finally he reappeared, smiling and red-faced, holding two pieces of paper he had retrieved from the foul screen below us. "Commercials," he explained.

On another day, the Mets and the visiting Yankees had at each other at Campbell Park, in St. Petersburg"s black ghetto-a stylish little green bandbox that served the Mets and the Cardinals this year while their regular park, Al Lang Field, was being totally rebuilt. Tom Seaver, who had gone through a long but fruitless contract-bargaining session with Met general manager Joe McDonald that morning, was slightly cuffed about by the Yanks, but it was plain that he was not yet cutting loose with his fastball. In the fourth, though, with the Yankees" new, extremely quick center fielder, Mickey Rivers, on third base, Seaver speared a comeback grounder hit to the mound by Roy White, and whirled and ran directly at Rivers, who had stopped twenty feet down the line and now looked like a rabbit lost on a freeway. Tom made the tag and then spun and threw out White at second base-threw him out a mile. Tom Seaver executes. Later in the afternoon, Dave Kingman hit a two-run homer to tie up the game in the ninth, and then totally missed an attempted sliding catch in right field, in the tenth, to help untie it-a perfect preview, perhaps, of coming events at Shea Stadium this summer.

I was up very early the next morning to catch a plane to Phoenix, and as I left the cashier"s counter at the St. Petersburg Hilton I spotted Jesus Alou standing alone on the other side of the lobby, with a suitcase beside him. Eddie Yost, a Met coach, stepped out of the elevator, saw Alou, and came over and shook his hand. "What do you think you"ll do?" Yost said.

"Go home," Alou said. "Then I"ll see."

He had been released the day before-the end of the Alou brothers in big-league ball. He looked in terrific shape.

I didn"t entirely forget about the other side of baseball during spring training-the lockout and the rest of it. It would have been impossible, in any case, because the players themselves, both in Florida and in the Arizona camps, seemed so anxious to talk about it. Listening to them, I became aware of a common theme-a word that they mentioned with equal frequency when they talked about their performance on the field and their relationship with their parent club and with the owners in general. Pride is the spur.

Joe Morgan, second baseman, Cincinnati Reds; National League"s Most Valuable Player for 1975: "I don"t think ballplayers are paid too much. The price of everything has gone up. The presidents of big corporations make more money than we do-we"re just getting the going rate. If the highest-paid players got only thirty thousand, that would be OK with me. I played ball a long time for free and enjoyed it-maybe I enjoyed it even more then than now. Money puts more pressure on you. I"ll play for free again in a few years and enjoy that. I"ll go back to the sandlots and have a lot of fun. n.o.body on our team plays just for the money-they play because they like it, and to win. That"s the thing. I"d be just as happy to play in the World Series for no money at all, just for the chance to be the champions. The pride of being the champions-that"s what matters. In time, the money for the Series will be gone, but I will be a world champion forever. Maybe it"s gone already, but that don"t matter. Years from now, people will read the Baseball Encyclopedia and see us in there-"Champions of the World, 1975"-and n.o.body will care how much money I made."

Dave Giusti, relief pitcher, Pittsburgh Pirates: "Money is always a motivating factor for a pro. I"ve heard players say they never think about money once their contract is signed, but I think about next year all the time. But pride comes first, of course. You don"t want to embarra.s.s yourself out there. Most players want to hold to a level, I think-play up to their own best. That"s what it"s all about."

Rick Monday, center fielder, Chicago Cubs: "I"m tickled to death to have signed my contract. They"re back in business, I"m back in business. I don"t enjoy haggling with a general manager-it makes me feel like a prize heifer. No player likes that part of it, because it almost seems to demean him. Once I put on my uniform, the last thing I think about is money. This game is hard enough as it is-trying to hit that little ball that"s coming in on you faster every year. Every time I look up, there"s some kid out there about five inches taller and throwing that thing at me, so I"m not out there thinking about money. It"s the day-in-day-out challenge that keeps you out there. If you"ve played forty straight games-played with an injury half the time-you"ve got to have something in the well to keep you going. Money doesn"t help at all."

Maury Wills, retired shortstop, six-time National League base-stealing leader, now base-running coach for the Cubs, the Padres, and other teams; forty-three years old: "I never dreamed we"d see the end of the reserve clause. It was always being discussed back when I was playing. That was the biggie on the list, and bit by bit we chipped away at it. At contract time, I only wanted to be rewarded for my hard work, but once it was signed I forgot about it. I think I was always underpaid a little, but it didn"t bother me. Now you can get the figures and find out if you"re being properly taken care of.

"Nowadays, you keep hearing that playing should be fun. Enjoy yourself and all that. A lot of young players have that wrong-they think it should be fun, ha-ha, as if it"s some kind of joke. My satisfaction all came from succeeding. I wasn"t out there on the field being sociable. I never talked to anybody on the other team-the pitcher who was about to deck me, the catcher who was about to rack me up for making him look bad. The only man I ever talked to was Joe Torre. Once, he was playing first for the Cardinals and guarding the bag against me-trying to hold me off. I slid back in and cut him up, about eight st.i.tches worth. He never complained, never said a word, because he knew I was only taking what was mine by rights. He was a professional, and I respected him. I talked to him after that, but not the others.

"I don"t know why the owners have been doing all this complaining. Football has had the one-year play-out-your-option thing for a long time, and you don"t see the big-city clubs grabbing off everybody. I think management should be grateful to have the money issues handled by negotiators and by the players" business agents. It doesn"t help to have the GM b.u.t.ting heads with a player every year. It"s distracting, and it leaves bitterness. I"ve always thought baseball was the victim of custom and tradition. Any change and they think the world is coming to an end. I remember when a new kind of spikes were being tried out, and there was a panic about it."

Scottsdale, Arizona, is a rich next-door sister of Phoenix, and almost the only shabby part of it is Scottsdale Stadium, where the Cubs train. The dark-green outfield wall there is so rickety you can see daylight between the planks. The wood of the fence is aged to a pitch of low C, and Reggie Jackson, leading off for the visiting A"s in the sixth inning of a game there, whacked a double off the wall that made it resound like a plucked cello. Like so many hard-hit b.a.l.l.s I have seen Jackson smash over the years, this one struck the distant fence almost before I could pick it up in its flight. It leaped to the wall. It was the last line drive I was to see Jackson hit for the Oakland A"s, and I remembered it a couple of days later, when I read in the papers about his trade. Then I tried to think if I had ever seen him do anything dull on the field-or, come to think of it, off the field. The day before the game in Scottsdale, Reggie had let it drop to an Oakland reporter that he had just signed with Finley-a five-year contract for a million and a quarter. The writer sprinted for his typewriter, wrote the story, and then, for no particular reason, checked back with Reggie just before filing his copy. Jackson laughed, and said well, no, it wasn"t entirely true. It wasn"t exactly the truth. In fact, none of it was. Most of all, perhaps, Reggie Jackson is an actor.

The trade that sent Jackson and Holtzman to the Orioles in return for Don Baylor, Mike Torrez, and an extremely promising young pitcher named Paul Mitch.e.l.l is generally regarded as an act of retribution by Charlie Finley. Holtzman was deeply involved in the Players a.s.sociation negotiations this year, and Jackson has always belonged only to himself. As usual, no one claims to understand what Charlie Finley is up to this year. The latest addition to the Oakland roster is a team astrologer.

Baseball-watchers need spring training, too. During an insignificant game between the have-not Cubs and Padres at Scottsdale, I sat in the sun-drenched open grandstand behind first base and allowed my interior clock to begin slowing itself to the pace of summer, to baseball time. As I watched the movements and patterns on the field, my interest in the game merged imperceptibly with my pleasure in the place and the weather. The sunlight was dazing, almost a weight on my head and arms, and my shadow, thrown on the empty bench to my right, had edge and substance. After an infield play, I wrote "43" with my pencil in a box on the scorecard on my lap, and a drop of sweat fell from my wrist and made its own blurry entry on the same page. The Cub coaches sat together on a row of folding chairs outside the home-plate end of their dugout, leaning back against the foul screen with their arms folded and their caps tipped low over their foreheads, and the Padre brain trust, over on the first-base side, made an identical frieze. We were a scattered, inattentive crowd, at times nearly silent, and between pitches we stared off at the jagged, blue-tan silhouettes of low desert peaks set about the distant rim of our gaze.

I half-closed my eyes and became aware at once that the afternoon silence was not quite perfect but contained a running pattern of innocuous baseball sounds. I could hear the murmurous play-by-play of some radio announcer up in the press box-the words undistinguishable but their groups and phrases making a kind of sense just the same-and this was accompanied by the unending sea-sound of the crowd itself, which sometimes rose to shouts or broke apart into separate words and cries. "Hey, OK!" ... Clap, clap, clap, clap ... "Hot dogs here" ... "Hey, peanuts and hot dogs!" ... Clap, clap, clap ... Whoo-wheet! (a whistle from some player in the infield). Whoo-wheet! ... Clap-clap, clap-clap, clap-clap ... "The next batter, Number One, is ... Hosay Carrdenal, right field!" (The p.a. announcer was giving it his best-the big, Vegas-style introduction-and the crowd tried to respond.) "OK, Ho-say!" ... "Hey-hey!" ... "Let"s go, Ho-say!" ... Clapclapclapclap ... Wheet! There was a sudden short flat noise: Whocck!-the same sound you would hear if you let go of one end of a long one-by-eight plank, allowing it to fall back on top of a loose stack of boards. I leaned forward and watched Cardenal sprinting for first. He slowed as he took his turn and then speeded up again as he saw the ball still free in the outfield, pulling into second base with a standup double. Real cheering now, as the next batter stood in ("... Number Eighteen, Bill Mad-lock, thirrd base!"), but soon the game wound down again and the afternoon sounds resumed. Clap, clap, clap ... "Hey, c.o.kes! Get yer ice-cold c.o.kes here!" ... Clap, clap, clap, clap ... A telephone rang and rang in the press box-pring-pring, pring-pring, pring-pring: a faraway, next-door-cottage sort of noise. Clap, clap, clap ... "Hey, Tim! Hey, Tim!" (a girl"s voice). "Hey, Tim, over here!" ... Clap, clap ... "Streeough!" ... "Aw, come on, Ump!" ... Clap, clap, clapclapclap ... "Get yer c.o.kes! Ice-cold c.o.kes here" ... Whoo-wheet! ... Clapclap ... "Ice-cold." Then there was another noise, a regular, smothered slapping sound, with intervals in between: Whug! ... Whup! ... Whug! ... Whup!-a baseball thrown back and forth by two Padre infielders warming up in short-right-field foul territory, getting ready to come into the game. The sounds flowed over me-nothing really worth remembering, but impossible entirely to forget. They were the sounds I had missed all winter, without ever knowing it.

The most exciting last-minute rally in baseball this season came on March 2, in San Francisco, when Robert A. Lurie, a local real-estate nabob, put through a telephone call to Arizona and talked to Arthur (Bud) Herseth, a Phoenix meat-packer, whose name he had first heard just a few minutes before. Lurie asked Herseth if by any chance he would like to put up four million dollars and become half owner of the San Francisco Giants. Herseth asked a few questions and then said sure, why not? The deal was made, in something like that fashion, less than three hours before the expiration of a National League deadline that would have sent the Giants to Toronto. Bob Lurie had been waiting to buy the Giants for several years, and when the longtime owner of the Giants, Horace C. Stoneham, finally put the club on the market last year, Lurie, who had four million dollars of his own to invest in the team, undertook an intensive search for a partner who could deliver the other half of the necessary capital. He tried to come to terms with a group of j.a.panese financiers, and then almost closed with the owners of the Pizza Hut fast-food chain. Nothing worked, and only a last-minute injunction obtained by the San Francisco mayor, George Moscone, in February, kept the team from being whisked away by the Toronto carpetbaggers. Lurie then formed a partnership with Bob Short, the erstwhile owner of the Texas Rangers (ne Washington Senators), but this quickly fell through, because of a dispute over team control. All seemed lost, until, lo, a Herseth arose from out of the desert.

During a Giants-Indians game at Munic.i.p.al Stadium in Phoenix, I slipped into a seat beside Bud Herseth in a box right behind the Giants" dugout. Herseth had been conversing in a loud and friendly way with most of the fans in the section where he was sitting, so it seemed all right to join him. He was wearing black shoes, black trousers, horn-rimmed spectacles, a Giants cap, and an eye-bending Hawaiian shirt. If I had had any remaining doubts about his ident.i.ty, I could have consulted his wide, tooled-leather belt, which was cut in back so that it spelled "BUD HERSETH, PHOENIX, ARIZ." above his hip pockets. Although Herseth"s understanding with his new partner is that the day-to-day baseball operations of the Giants will be Lurie"s exclusive concern, I had heard that Herseth had awakened the new Giant manager, Bill Rigney, that day with a telephone call just before six o"clock in the morning to ask whom he was planning to pitch. ("Who is this?" Rigney cried, in disbelief.) Now I asked Herseth if he often made calls at that time of day.

"Six in the morning isn"t a bit early for me," he said rapidly. "I"m down at my feedlot way before five every day, seven days a week, about fifty weeks in the year. Sundays and every other day. We kill two hundred and fifty head a day, and there"s a lot to do-get out the sick cattle, turn on the lights, get the cooler going, clean out the irrigation ditches. I fill in if anybody gets drunk and don"t show up. I"ll do anything. h.e.l.l, I been doing this all my life, I"m fifty-five years old, and I figure it"s time I had a little fun. That"s why I bought me this team-half a team. Six o"clock-why, h.e.l.l, I bought me a little Vega before five in the morning the other day. Needed it for a friend of mine. Paid seven hundred and fifty in cash. It runs real good."

He kept his eyes on the game while he talked, and I noticed that he was keeping score. I asked him how long he had been interested in baseball.

"All my life," he said. "I can remember coming down with my dad from Aberdeen-Aberdeen, South Dakota-in "32 and going to Chicago, where we saw the Series game where Charlie Root pitched against Babe Ruth, and the Babe pointed to the stands before he hit that home run. You"ve heard of that? I was there. I"ve been a Giants fan from a long time back. Even back when they had those pitchers like Grove and Earnshaw and Parmelee and-Schumacher, wasn"t it?"

He looked at his program and clapped vigorously for the Giant hitter just coming up to bat. "This is Bobby Murcer," he said. "He"s the highest-priced player we have." He frowned momentarily and then corrected himself. "It wasn"t Grove and Earnshaw on those Giants," he said. "It was Hubbell and Fat Freddie Fitzsimmons. Carl Hubbell. I knew that all along, but I got it wrong the first time."

He had been consulting from time to time with an a.s.sociate over the terms of a contract with some radio station that would form part of the network carrying the Giants" games this year, and now the man came back down the aisle and told him that the deal seemed to be off.

"I d.a.m.n well don"t understand that!" Herseth said loudly. "We make a deal, and now they go and change their mind. I"m glad I don"t buy cattle that way. I buy three, four thousand head at a time, and n.o.body has to worry if I"m going to pay off. My word is my bond-just ask anybody. I pay off like a slot machine. I know what these radio people are. I won"t say it, though, because there are ladies present. I"ll just write it down here on my program." He wrote something and showed me his program. He had written "s...o...b.."

There was action on the field, and Herseth cried, "Hit-and-run! Hit-and-run! Right through the hole! You know, these kids may not hit homers, but they sure look like they hit steady. I"d like to get back that big guy we had who hits all those home runs-that Dave Kingman. He"d help this club."

I said that Kingman also struck out a lot.

"Is that so?" Herseth said. "I didn"t know that." He shook his head again. "I just can"t understand those radio people," he said. "I don"t go for that kind of stuff."

I asked him if he had ever played much baseball.

"Sure I did," he said. "I grew up in Houghton, South Dakota-my dad had five quarters there, about eight hundred acres-but I went to high school in Hecla, South Dakota, which was on down the line. I batted cleanup on the team there for two years. I hit .400-and-something my junior year, and .666 all year when I was a senior. I played in a regional tournament then, and I remember a fellow called Al Face struck me out four times in one game. That was when I knew I wasn"t a real ballplayer. I still hear from Al Face. Once a year, he sells me a calf. He sent me a picture that somebody took of us back then, and I was wearing striped overalls. You know, by the time I was ten years old I could guess the weight of a steer right within a few pounds."

He stood up and called out to Bobby Winkles, the Giants" third-base coach, "Hey, Bobby, how come you"re chewin" and spittin" out there? What kind of example is that for my young players, hey?" He laughed uproariously, and Winkles waved and smiled.

I was about to ask Bud Herseth what he thought about the reserve clause and player salaries and the lockout and Marvin Miller, but then I decided not to. He was having too much fun. Instead, I asked him how many of the Giants" games he hoped to see at Candlestick Park this year.

"The good Lord willing and the creek don"t rise," he said, "all of them."

Two weeks later, with the season under way, I took a subway up to the Bronx for the Yankees" home opener. It was a big day, because it marked the reopening of Yankee Stadium-a homecoming for the famous team to the famous old park, which had been rebuilt by the City of New York over the past two years. The new place looked fine. The overhanging roof around the top deck was gone, and the old thick supporting columns and girders had disappeared, giving us a new, clean triple sweep of bright-blue seats from right field all the way around to left. The whole place was blue and white, and it sparkled. There were three new banks of escalators, and a new, tree-lined promenade outside the first-base side of the Stadium, where a street used to be. The playing field had been lowered and its outlines altered a little, but most of that enormous green pasture in left was there, so you knew it was still the Stadium, all right. There were some big new scoreboards out behind the bleachers, with a white scrim on top in the shape of the lacy coppery-green top-deck facade of the old park. The wall of scoreboards cut off our view of the elevated-station platform and the nearby apartment-house roofs, where in the old days you could always spot a few neighborhood fans watching from a great distance. The new Stadium is cut off from the city around it, and n.o.body can watch baseball casually there anymore.

There were 54,010 of us there for the opener. Three bands played, and the sun shone, and a lot of celebrities-Joe Louis, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle, and Mrs. Lou Gehrig and Mrs. Babe Ruth, and some others-were introduced, and then the Yankees played the Twins a

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