The Roger Angell Baseball Collection

Chapter 15

Prev List Next

"Of course, signing a player you want real bad is absolutely different from what it was back before the clubs pushed through the draft system, about ten or twelve years ago, after they"d all spent so much money on those bonus babies. If this was back then, and we wanted this boy, I"d have made it a point to get to know his parents on this trip, so that when the time came we might get in there ahead of the other clubs. That used to be about the liveliest part of it all, especially with a really and truly top prospect, and it was downright enjoyable sometimes what you had to do."

Scarborough grinned and slapped the steering wheel with one hand. "I"ll never forget signing a fellow named Cotton Clayton, way back in the early sixties," he said. "He was an outfielder, and he could do it all. He was a valuable piece of property. Harry Dalton wanted him, and Lee MacPhail, who was our GM at Baltimore then-he wanted him. I made an appointment to see Clayton down in his hometown of Henderson, North Carolina, and I checked into the local motel. You had to make an appointment, because just about every other club was anxious to get him, too, but especially the Cardinals. I made d.a.m.n sure to get him to come up to my motel room, and I swore to myself he"d never get out until I"d signed him. I also made sure that Harry and Lee, up in Baltimore, were ready on the other end of the phone. This was in the bonus days, you understand, and I had about fifty thousand dollars at my disposal, but when Clayton came in and sat down I just didn"t know how to get around to the subject at hand."

Ray laughed delightedly. "Well, sir, we talked about rabbits and about farming and about basketball-everything but money. He was one tough bargainer. When we finally got to it, we began around twenty-five thousand, and every time he"d tilt the pot a little I"d shake my head and say, "Well, let me talk to Harry," and I"d go off and make a telephone call. We talked and talked, and we got awful tired in that room, and finally he said, "Well, I can"t take one penny less than fifty thousand." I pulled back-sort of recoiled-and said, "You just knocked me out of the box," but I said that we needed a left-hand-hitting outfielder so bad that I"d make one last call to Lee MacPhail and see if I could talk him into it. I said, "If I can somehow do that, will you sign for ten thousand a year for five years, with a starting salary of a thousand dollars a month, and will you sign before you leave this room?"

"Well, he squirmed and squirmed, because, of course, he"d promised the Cardinals and some of the other scouts he"d never sign anything without talking to them first. But he finally said yes, and I called Lee, and Lee whispered "Sign him!" and I pulled out the contract-which I"d had ready all along, of course-and he signed, and I shook his hand and checked out of the motel and went home. And do you know that the next man who checked into that exact room that day was Eddie Lyons, of the Cardinals? He wanted Clayton just as bad as we did, only he"d stopped off on the way to sign a third baseman down there he"d liked. He got my room, but I"d got his outfielder!"

I couldn"t remember having heard of Cotton Clayton in big-league ball, and I asked Ray what had happened to him.

"Cotton Clayton ended up playing in the International League for about four or five years," he said. "He had some bad breaks along the way-that"s the way it is sometimes-and he never did get to the majors. Now he has a tire business down in Henderson-along with the farm that I bought with that fifty thousand."

The next morning, Ray Scarborough and I caught an early flight to Detroit, where we would pick up another car and drive to Ypsilanti to scout a highly celebrated pitching prospect named Bob Owc.h.i.n.ko, who played for Eastern Michigan University. During the flight, I asked Ray if he could remember when he himself had first been scouted. He told me he had grown up on a small farm in Mount Gilead, in central North Carolina. He was the fourth of six brothers (there was one sister), and all the Scarboroughs loved to play ball. Work on the farm was long and hard, but their father made a little diamond out behind the house, and there was time for some family baseball there in the evenings. Sometimes Ray and his next-older brother, Steve, would walk five miles in to town to play in a pickup game. Eventually, Ray was given an athletic scholarship to Rutherford Junior College, in the Carolina Piedmont section, where another brother, Bill, was doing some coaching.

In the summer when Ray turned seventeen, a shiny black Cadillac rolled up to the Scarborough farm one day, and a man wearing a suit and tie stepped out. "It was a Cardinal scout named Pat Crawford," Ray said, "and he"d come to look me over. He was a real Dapper Dan, and I was impressed. "Can you th"ow for me?" he asked, and I said yes, sir. But there wasn"t anybody else at home right then, so we didn"t know who I could throw to. I offered to throw to him, but he declined. Well, finally he pointed to a red clay bank off across the road and said, "Son, how would you like to th"ow into that bank?" We paced off the distance and he took a white handkerchief out of his pocket and stuck it up in place on that bank with a little rock. Then he got some baseb.a.l.l.s out of the trunk of the Cadillac, and I threw for about ten minutes at his old hanky. He must have liked what he saw, because he invited me to a Cardinals tryout camp in Charlotte. Mr. Rickey was there, and some others, and they picked three of us out of about a hundred or more, so I knew they thought I could play. But they only offered me sixty dollars a month, so I decided I wasn"t ready to go into baseball yet."

Ray wanted to continue with college after his two years at Rutherford, but he knew he had to earn his way. He hoped to pick up some cash by playing in the semipro Coastal Plain League but was told that he was too small. "I only weighed about a hundred and twenty-eight, which wasn"t big enough even for mumblety-peg," he said to me. "I finally hooked on with a town team in Aberdeen, North Carolina, in the Sand Hill League. We played ball two days and picked peaches the rest of the time. I got twelve dollars and fifty cents a week for playin" and pickin". No bonus, no Social Security."

He stayed out of school that winter and worked as a carhop in a drive-in, but he had begun to grow, and the next spring-the spring of 1938-he was given a tryout with a team in Hickory, North Carolina, in the Carolina League.

"That was an outlaw league," Ray said. "You know-outside of regular organized baseball. It was just a string of teams from little cities like Concord and Gastonia and Kannapolis. Strictly semipro, but there were a lot of players I"d heard of-Art Shires and Packy Rogers and Prince Henry Oana-and we all got paid. Well, I won myself a job and, do you know, I actually pitched the opening game of the season for the Hickory Rebels, against Lenoir. I was just a squirt with a curve and a fastball, but I thought I was the biggest dog in town."

Ray"s route to the big time was not quite arrowlike. Pitching with the Rebels won him an athletic scholarship to Wake Forest, and there he began to receive some attention from big-league scouts-famous men like Gene McCann, of the Yankees, and Paul Florence, of the Reds. He was treated to a special courtesy trip to Philadelphia, where he visited Shibe Park and shook hands with Connie Mack. Money and celebrity seemed to be in the offing, but Scarborough injured his arm while pitching in the fifth game of his senior year at Wake Forest, and the scouts suddenly disappeared. He took his degree and taught high school for a year, at Tabor City, North Carolina, while he waited for his arm to come around, and then signed on with Chattanooga, in the Cla.s.s A Southern League, for a fifteen-hundred-dollar bonus-a fraction of the sum the scouts had been talking about before his injury. He was sent down to Selma, Alabama, in Cla.s.s B, and there, at last, he began to win. He broke the league strikeout record there, came back to Chattanooga, and joined the Washington Senators in June 1942, just a month before his twenty-fifth birthday. "I"d finally made it off the farm," Ray said. He pitched in the majors until 1953.

Eastern Michigan is a rising power in college baseball, and the trim diamond and attractive little roofed grandstand that Ray Scarborough and I found in Ypsilanti that day were much more inviting than a lot of spring-training ball parks I could recall. We were there for a Mid-American Conference doubleheader between the Eastern Michigan Hurons and the Falcons, from Bowling Green State University, in Ohio. The home team was just finishing infield practice under a cloudy sky, and the Huron squad members, in white uniforms with green lettering, were ranged along the third-base line, where they gave some noisy cheers for each of their starting infielders as he whipped his last peg in to the catcher and trotted off the field. Football stuff. Ray Scarborough greeted some scouting friends and then sat down with a California colleague, Al Hollingsworth, who is also a special-a.s.signment scout for the Angels, operating out of Texas. Hollingsworth has thick white hair, blue eyes, and a tanned, cla.s.sic old-ballplayer"s face, with crinkly lines around the eyes and mouth. If you were casting for the part of a veteran scout in a baseball movie, you would pick Al Hollingsworth.

"Hey, I hear we won last night!" he said to Ray. "Somebody told me. It was about 75."

Scarborough had been complaining that morning that it was often impossible on the road to pick up the results of Angels games from the West Coast, and he brightened at the news. (Angels victories had been rare in recent weeks; in fact, the club was dead last in the American League West.) "That"s more like it," he said. "Who pitched?"

"All I heard was Alvarez hit a home run," Hollingsworth said. He told Ray he had just flown in from Denison, Texas, where he had seen a young pitcher named Darwin the day before. "He"s about twenty years old, and he"s comin" on," he said. "He threw about eighty-six, eighty-seven on the speed gun. He got ripped pretty good yesterday, though. He reminds you a little of a Granger or a Perzanowski. His arm"s way over here, and his ball don"t tail."

"I hear there"s a catcher on this Bowling Green team," Ray said. "I don"t recall his name, though."

"You got anything on a kid named Brown, in Indiana?" Hollingsworth said. "All I have on him is a phone number."

And then the game began, and we all began to watch Bob Owc.h.i.n.ko, who had brought us there. The Bureau scouting report on him had rated him a premium choice, with an above-average fastball, a curveball with a tight spin, a screwball, and a loose overhead arm action. He was a tall, solidly built left-hander, and he was using a full windup, with a high-kicking delivery and a long stride. He was hiding the ball well between pitches. He fanned the first two Bowling Green hitters, gave up a single to the catcher (whose name, it turned out, was Larry Owen), walked a batter, and then got the side out with another strikeout.

"A nice big boy," Ray murmured. "He"s got heavy legs and sort of a big tail, but that never hurt Lolich, did it? Pitchers can get away with that better than others. I like the way this boy comes at the batter."

The stands were filling up, and Ray kept getting up to exchange greetings with more scouts as they took seats around us, in a companionable cl.u.s.ter directly behind home plate-d.i.c.k Teed and Brandy Davis, of the Phillies; Pat Gillick and Dave Yoak.u.m, of the Yankees; Howie Haak (a famous name in scouting), of the Pirates; Syd Thrift, of the A"s; Joe Bowen, of the Reds, who had been with us the day before in Elizabethtown. (If you were writing a baseball movie or a baseball novel, you would give your scouts names like these.) The scouts sat back quietly, some with their arms folded or a knee c.o.c.ked up, and watched the field with motionless intensity. They looked like businessmen at a staff conference. n.o.body seemed to be taking any notes.

I remarked that Owc.h.i.n.ko appeared to be a good drawing card, and Ray said, "In the old days, you"d have had a drove of scouts at a game like this. They tell me the Bureau tries to discourage their men from being too close with any of the rest of us, because they"re supposed to represent their clubs impartially, but I can"t see how that"s going to work. You just can"t keep friendship out of scouting, because so many of these fellows have been buddies for years. A lot of us have played with each other or against each other, and we go back a long way together. It"s a fraternity."

The teams changed sides, and the home-plate umpire-a short, dark-haired man, whose black suit was already stained with sweat and dust-walked back to the stands with his mask in one hand and chatted with the scouts. He poked a forefinger through the wire of the foul screen and gravely shook fingers with Ray Scarborough.

"That"s Tom Ravashiere," Ray said after the umpire had gone back to work. "He was a good ump in the International League for years and years. He"s out of baseball now, but I guess he still does games like this. He lives around here someplace."

Both the teams on the field looked well trained and extremely combative, and the young players made up for their occasional mistakes with some eye-popping plays. At one point, Owc.h.i.n.ko hustled off the mound, s.n.a.t.c.hed up an attempted sacrifice bunt, and whirled and threw the Falcon base runner out at second with a fiery peg. In the bottom of the same inning-the fourth-a Bowling Green outfielder made a diving, sliding catch on his belly in short center field, and then Owen, the catcher, threw out a base runner trying to steal second-threw him out a mile. The Falcon pitcher, whose name was Kip Young, was not quite in Owc.h.i.n.ko"s cla.s.s, but he was putting up a battle, throwing a lot of low curves and showing good control. In the fifth, an Eastern Michigan threat was extinguished when the Bowling Green shortstop speared a line drive on his knees and converted it into a lightning double play at second, thus preserving the scoreless, eventful tie. Ray and the other scouts shook their heads and exchanged little smiles, enjoying it. The clouds had begun to break up, and the green of the outfield gra.s.s had turned light and glistening. Good game.

Owc.h.i.n.ko had been striking out enemy batters in considerable numbers, but now, in the sixth, he seemed to lose his concentration, walking the first two men. Then there was an error behind him on an easy double-play grounder, and a moment later a Bowling Green outfielder named Jeff Groth whacked a long drive over the left-field fence for a grand-slam home run. Silence in the stands-a very brief silence, it turned out, for in the home half the Eastern Michigan hitters came alive, with a walk, a ground-rule double, and a two-run single, and then, after a couple of mistakes by the visitors, a culminating three-run homer to center by the Eastern Michigan right fielder, Thorn Boutin. The whole Huron team came out to the third-base foul line to welcome him home, and the student fans around us screeched ecstatically. Owc.h.i.n.ko walked the leadoff man in the top of the seventh and seemed to be struggling ("Come on, c.h.i.n.k!" the fans pleaded), but the tying run died at second, and the Hurons had won it, 54.

"I don"t know if he got tired, or what, but his velocity wasn"t good at the end," Ray said. "I"d like to have seen if he could get two strikes on a man and then break off the curveball. When he gave up that homer, he"d got in the position of trying to throw strikes past the batter, instead of trying to get the man out. He threw that pitch sort of easy-a mistake pitch. But that"s normal. I try never to notice if a pitcher gives up a hit. It"s his motion I"m watching. Same thing with a hitter-I don"t care if he hits, as long as he"s making contact and swings well. But this was a good performance by Owc.h.i.n.ko. You could make a few mechanical changes with his delivery. Being sort of big-a.s.sed, he stops his right leg sometimes, so his body can"t open up, and he has to throw from over here. But he"s got a chance to make a pretty good pitcher. I think this boy might go in the first round. I"d love for us to get him along about the second round, but he won"t be around that long."

Most of the scouts had disappeared, but we waited for the second game of the doubleheader, because Ray wanted to have a look at the next Eastern Michigan pitcher-a junior named Bob Welch. During the interval, I wandered out beyond the left-field stands and found Bob Owc.h.i.n.ko lying on his stomach on the gra.s.s, with a towel around his neck. His face was red and he was streaming perspiration. I asked him if he had noticed the scouts behind home during the game.

"Yeah, I saw them there, staring me in the face," he said. "They don"t bother me-I know what they"re here for."

"Do you care about which club will draft you next month?" I said.

"I"ve been waiting for a career in major-league ball since I was eleven, and now it"s here," he said. "It"s about time. I don"t care where I go, but I do like hot weather."

The second game began, and after Bob Welch had thrown about six pitches Ray Scarborough exclaimed, "There"s a good-looking body! He"s almost got these boys overmatched already."

Welch, a right-hander, looked even taller and stronger than Bob Owc.h.i.n.ko, and he threw with a kind of explosive elegance. There was something commanding about him.

"See out there?" Ray said. "See him c.o.c.king his wrist like that behind his back? That can strain your elbow. It could hurt him. He"s cutting the ball a little-turning his hand-which takes off some velocity. If he did it a little more, it would be a slider. I wish he"d turn loose-he"s got a real good arm."

Welch fired two fastb.a.l.l.s, fanning the batter.

"There!" Ray said. "I like that! He comes off that mound like he means business." He stood up, smiling with pleasure. "I believe I"ll be making a trip back here a year from now. Maybe we better go quick, before I get dissatisfied with the whole 1976 draft."

Ray Scarborough and I parted in Detroit that evening. I went home to New York, and he flew to Madison, Wisconsin, where he planned to watch a prospect from the University of Michigan in a game the next day. What he met there, however, was rain. Early in June, Ray went out to Anaheim and, in company with Harry Dalton and Walter Shannon (the Angels" director of scouting) and Nick Kamzic and Al Hollingsworth and nine other Angel scouts and executives, partic.i.p.ated in four days of intensive discussions and appraisals of all the high-school and college free agents that they had scouted and cross-checked and talked about. The draft, which came on June 8, was conducted in the baseball commissioner"s office, in New York, over an open telephone hookup to all twenty-four clubs. The Houston Astros, with first pick, chose a much admired left-handed pitching star from Arizona State University named Floyd Bannister. The Angels" first choice, on the sixth pick, was a power-hitting outfielder named Kenny Landreaux, also from Arizona State. Tim Brandenburg went to the Kansas City Royals in the second round-the forty-second player in the country to be drafted. The Angels did not bid on him. As for Bob Owc.h.i.n.ko, he went to the San Diego Padres on the fifth pick in the first round. A little later in June, at the National Collegiate Athletic a.s.sociation championships in Omaha, the Eastern Michigan ball team went all the way into the finals before losing to the University of Arizona. On the way, they upset the favorites, Arizona State, thanks to a seven-hitter thrown by Owc.h.i.n.ko.

I thought about Ray Scarborough while the draft was going on, and later I looked up the names of some of the players he had scouted. Timothy Gla.s.s, the catcher from Springfield, Ohio, went to the Indians in the first round. Ben Grzybek, the pitcher from Hialeah, was the first-round choice of the Royals-thus becoming a potential future teammate of Brandenburg"s. Richard Whaley, the willowy left-hander from Jacksonville, North Carolina, had developed a sore arm late in the spring, which probably dropped him in the draft; he was picked by the Phillies in the third round-No. 65 nationally. None of the free agents Ray had talked to me about with such enthusiasm went to the Angels. Larry Owen, the Bowling Green catcher we had seen in Ypsilanti, was chosen by the Angels in the eighteenth round. Seven hundred and eighty-six players were drafted in all, most of whom would perform only briefly in professional ball, if at all.

I caught up with Ray Scarborough again on the evening of July 5, in another baseball setting: we were part of a crowd of 60,942 spectators at a holiday game between the Phillies and the Dodgers, in Philadelphia"s Veterans Stadium. Scarborough was there in a different scouting capacity-evaluating players on both clubs (but especially the Phillies) as potential material for postseason trades with the Angels. This process, which is known as professional scouting, goes on through the middle and latter stages of the regular season and eventually produces scouting reports for Harry Dalton on all major-league players and a considerable number of Cla.s.s AAA minor-league players as well. (Another kind of scouting-team scouting-collects tactical information about enemy hitters and pitchers to help a club prepare for an upcoming season or series; team scouting before the autumn playoffs and the World Series produces the crucial "book" on the opposition.) Ray looked younger and more rested than he had during our trip in May, and he told me that he had been taking it easy since the draft, putting in a lot of time working in his vegetable garden at home in Mount Olive. He had also caught up on his own business interests, which include real estate, a small tobacco farm, a bank directorship, and a share in a musical-instrument-and-records business.

I asked him how he felt about the Angels" draft, and he said, "Well, you always want to be a.s.sociated with your club"s top man, of course. I did see Bob Ferris, who we picked in the second round, and a fellow named Porter we took a little farther down, but otherwise we didn"t get any of the boys I"d checked. The only fruits of your work are the boys who end up with your own organization, and the luck of the draft can sure knock you down. You work like h.e.l.l all year, and then ... Sure, I felt bad-I felt punctured-but on the other hand, when I listened to what our people had to say about Ken Landreaux at our meeting in Anaheim, I had confidence that he was a better first choice for us than Gla.s.s or Owc.h.i.n.ko or the others I"d seen. Next year, it might be the other way around. You know, a scout can go for years and years and never get in on a top pick. You take Mace Brown, of the Red Sox. Mace is a real fine scout, and he went for I don"t know how many years without much luck, and I remember once he said, "All this work for nothing," or something like that. But he hung on, and then he came up with Jim Rice, who was a first-round pick, and then he had a great kid named Otis Foster last year."

I said that this sounded like more patience and optimism than most men could be expected to bring to their work, and Ray nodded. We were sitting behind home plate at Veterans Stadium, and he looked slowly around at the glittering, brightly lit field and the noisy throng filling every seat in the circular, triple-decked park. "I think it has to be a private thing," he said at last. "You don"t go around saying it, but I"m devoted to the club I work for. It was downright satisfying being connected with that winning Baltimore outfit, and I do like working for a man like Harry Dalton. I"m interested in being with him and Walter Shannon and the rest, trying to make California the same kind of organization. But first of all it"s the baseball. Those airports and motels and cars are pretty taxing on a man, and I keep thinking I"m going to ease off one of these years, but I never quite do it. It"s love of the game of baseball that keeps me at it. I still feel there"s no greater reward a young man can achieve than attaining the major leagues as a player. I truly mean that. I don"t care what the price is, I think it"s worth it. Nothing can beat it."

The Philadelphia fans had turned out in cheerful expectation of another slugging spree by their powerful young team, which had already opened up a nine-game lead in the National League East, but as happens so often in baseball, things turned out quite the other way, with the Dodgers moving off smartly to a three-run lead and the Phillies going down in rather helpless fashion before the pitching of the Dodger starter, Burt Hooton. Ray occasionally made a brief note on his program, but I had the impression that he was watching the proceedings with less intensity than he had displayed at the earlier games I shared with him. He told me that he would stay with the Phillies for four or five games-until he had seen their full pitching rotation and, with any luck, most of their bench as well. He said that in professional scouting he operated on the premise that any player, including a team"s top stars, might become available for a trade but that in practice, of course, the second-liners or players having a bad year were the ones he paid the most attention to.

"Evaluating the physical attributes of a major-leaguer isn"t very hard," he said. "It"s when he begins to change that you have a tougher time of it. Is he washed up? Is he not on good terms with the manager? Is he getting a divorce? Does he have an injury we don"t know about? You stay until you find out, and in that time you may hardly ever see him in a game. A man who"s showing a big change for the better is sometimes just as mysterious. Can you tell me why this Bob Boone is having such a great year with the Phillies? He"s batting thirty or forty points over his best, and he"s doing everything right. Maybe it"s their other catcher, Johnny Oates, coming on the club last year and playing so well-maybe Boone needed that push. Maybe it"s just being on a winning club, or maybe he"s suddenly grown up, found himself. Now, over on the Dodgers you see this catcher Yeager, who"s never been much of a hitter. The club has just traded away Joe Ferguson, who did a lot of the catching, and you wonder what kind of effect it will have on Yeager. Will he begin to hit better? Will he pick up because he feels less threatened? All the time, you keep thinking, "What about this man? Can this man help the Angels? Does he fit our plans?" I"m here to improve the club I"m working for. Right now, our prime needs are catching, a topnotch center fielder, and a home-run-hitting first baseman. I may not find anybody in those positions who"s available for a trade, but you don"t always have to have a perfect fit. Sometimes one trade can set up another. You keep watching and listening."

In the third inning, Ray made admiring noises about a fine play and peg to first by Mike Schmidt, the Phillies" third baseman. "In Elizabethtown, Kentucky, that would have been a double," he said. "You have to remember, baseball in the big leagues always looks a lot easier." A few minutes later, Greg Luzinski, the big Philadelphia left fielder, was a bit sluggish going after a drive to left by Reggie Smith, and because the center fielder, Garry Maddox, failed to back up the play, Smith wound up with a triple. "There"s no excuse in the world for that," Ray said.

The Phillies" starter, the veteran Jim Lonborg, appeared to be struggling. "His arm looks a little slow tonight," Ray said. "He"s not using his fastball at all-just sliders and that fork-ball, or whatever it is. That"s what you have to do, but it"s awful hard to win with just two pitches."

The game wore on, and the great crowd, with nothing at all to cheer about, fell into an irritable silence. Bobby Tolan, the Philadelphia right fielder, grounded weakly out to first, and Ray said, "He didn"t have a chance on that pitch, up on his hands like that. He"s got a big hitch in his swing, and you"ve got to be awful strong to come back up again with the bat and hit the ball with any kind of power. Reggie Jackson can do it, or maybe Lee May, but it certainly isn"t advisable. But that was some kind of pitch Hooton made."

Hooton, in fact, threw a two-hit shutout, winning by 60, and Ray Scarborough was overcome with admiration for what we had seen. "That"s as good a night"s work as you ever want to see in the major leagues," he said later that evening. "Hooton was throwing more overhand than I"d ever seen him. Maybe you saw sometimes he even had to lean his head over to the side to make room for his arm comin" over. He had more stuff, velocity-wise, than I"d ever seen, and he used that overhand curve just enough to make the fastball work. He was just eatin" up that outside corner. He sold that pitch to the ump"-it was Bruce Froemming-"in the very first inning. He showed him right then that he could hit that front corner. That alerts the umpire-puts him on his toes-and if he sees you can do it he"ll give it to you all night long. If you"re sort of wild-throwing up here, then down there, then way inside or someplace-he"ll sort of lose interest, and he won"t give you that little corner even if you do hit it. Control is so important. It makes the catchers look better, as well as the umpire, and the infielders do a lot better, too. They will antic.i.p.ate the play. h.e.l.l, even the fans are better!"

I pointed out to Ray that he and I had seen several remarkable pitching exhibitions.

"Well, there"s no doubt that pitching is much better now than it was when I was playing," he said. "There aren"t any better arms, but pitchers are much better coached, and they have amazing poise, even when they"re just breaking in. The biggest difference now is the slider, which was just coming in when I was pitching. A few pitchers had it naturally back then-Bob Muncrief, he was one of them. We called it the short curve. I was a curveball pitcher, but mine was a real old-fashioned curve, and that took a lot more effort to throw."

He groaned and rolled his eyes comically. "When I first came up to the Senators, I was one of the wildest goats in the AL," he said. "I used to throw that big four-foot curve, and if they didn"t swing at it it was a ball. I pitched a long time in the majors when every game was a struggle, and I guess it was five years before I got control and knew how to pitch-knew how to get a man out. I finally learned that with a good hitter you never threw him the same pitch twice. Never put it in the same place or at the same speed. That"s how I got them to hit my pitch-the one I wanted them to swing at, whatever it was. I never threw a change of pace in my life that I didn"t want the batter to swing at.

"I always had a lot of luck against Ted Williams, because I knew he was a great one for timing a pitch. He was always thinking, and I could think along with him. But Hank Majeski, who wasn"t a great batter-he could always. .h.i.t anything I threw. A lot of baseball is just confidence, of course. I finally got to feeling that if I threw a pitch behind Hank Majeski, he"d hit it somehow. I think he sometimes froze in the batter"s box on a curveball, and that always made me afraid I"d hurt him someday. George Kell was the same way."

I asked if he"d been known as a knockdown pitcher.

"Well, we didn"t have the slider then, but what we did have was that good, hard inside pitch." He said this with considerable relish. "The umpires have taken that away now, but I always felt I deserved to have that pitch. I needed to keep that batter honest-let him know that I was out there earning my living against him. What I used to hate to see was a batter stepping in and holding up his hand for time while he scratched around in the back of that batter"s box with his spikes and dug himself a toehold for his back foot. I remember a game once when Luke Appling came up against me and started that. He kicked and dug and sc.r.a.ped around in the box and finally got all set, and I walked halfway in and said, "You sure you got that all fixed up just the way you like it, Luke?" He looked at me sort of puzzled, and I could see Cal Hubbard, the plate umpire, beginning to shake his shoulders laughing. Luke said, "Sure, Horn. It"s fine." I said, "You don"t think you ought to improve that some and dig it a lot deeper back there, Luke?" He said, "What for?" And I said, ""Cause I"m going to bury you!" Well, sir, I popped him on that first pitch as pretty as you please! Got him right on the hip. He went down like a sack, but he jumped up and went on down to first, and then he called over, "Say, you really meant that, didn"t you?" I said, "Don"t you ever dig in against me.""

I had already looked up Ray Scarborough"s pitching record, which came out to eighty wins and eighty-five defeats in ten years of campaigning, mostly with terrible teams. (He missed the seasons of 1944 and 1945, when he served in the Navy.) Later, I went back and checked his fifth year in the majors, 1948-the year when he had finally learned how to pitch. That summer, he had an earned-run average of 2.82 and won fifteen games and lost eight for the Senators, a seventh-place club that hit thirty-one home runs for the season and finished forty games out of first.

Ray and I went to one more game together-the meeting between the Phillies and the Dodgers on the following night, which the Dodgers took by 51, scoring all their runs in the third inning. There was a much smaller crowd. Doug Rau pitched well for the visitors, though not as spectacularly as Hooton. Ray Scarborough took only a few notes. He told me that he had had a call that afternoon from Harry Dalton, who had asked him to curtail his report on the Phillies for the moment and come out and help the Angels with a full-scale evaluation of their own minor-league players-a preparation for the coming American League expansion in the fall, when all the AL clubs will have to contribute some of their players to an expansion draft to man the new teams in Seattle and Toronto. Ray was leaving the next day, and would go first to El Paso, to look over the Diablos, the Angels" team in the Cla.s.s AA Texas League, and then move along to Salt Lake City to study the Gulls, their Cla.s.s AAA team in the Pacific Coast League.

Scarborough looked a bit worn, and he told me he had already spent a lot of time scouting that day-scouting by telephone. He had been talking about various players on the Philadelphia club with local baseball people-people he declined to name. "This is confidential information," he said. "It"s absolutely essential, and it comes from your friendships and contacts all around the league. You have to have facts about a player that you can"t pick up just by watching him play or seeing him throw in infield practice. What is his club not telling you about this man? Does he have a physical drawback they"re keeping quiet? How good a man is he in the clubhouse? How much does he care? Will he fight for his team, or is he a troublemaker, a complainer? Does he drink? Does he use drugs? I could tell you the names of some bad customers in the major leagues who have absolutely torn some clubs apart. If we"re going to spend half a million dollars on an article, we have to know what we"re getting. His club isn"t going to tell you, but there are ways of finding out. You have to be careful and avoid a suggestion of tampering, so you learn how to listen and how to get the facts in an informal way. Everybody does this. It"s what a lot of the friendships in baseball are for. I"m loyal to the Angels, but I wouldn"t hesitate to tell a good friend of mine about one of our players who was less than he seemed."

Ray looked unhappy as he said this, and I wondered if it was because he disliked this aspect of his job. "We have something in baseball that we call "the lower half,"" he went on. "It means the personal makeup of the individual player-what he"s like inside, how he lives, what he believes in. I think finding that out is the biggest thing in scouting today. Individuals are changing, and I don"t just know how to evaluate the changes. I don"t know for sure how many of the kids today have the dedication you need in order to play this game. All these players who haven"t signed their contracts, because they want to move along to some other club for a lot of easy money-I never dreamed we"d see something like that. Why, I know some young players who are just starting out their careers-barely been up a whole season in the majors yet-and they"re playing out their options. They"ve got some agent who"s telling them to hold back and get on one of those expansion teams for a lot of money. I just-I don"t know how to comprehend that."

He shook his big head two or three times and stared out at the field. His face had become clouded and heavy. A few minutes later, he gestured with his scorecard at the Phillies" first baseman, out on the field. "Now, there"s a man, d.i.c.k Allen, who once walked out on a two-hundred-thousand-dollar contract in the middle of September," he said. "Just walked away. Now his bat looks as if it"s begun to slow down a lot, and I wonder if he isn"t kicking his tail for the time he"s missed. We never had anybody in our day who would have done anything like that."

I tried to think of something to say. Ray and I had talked several times about the Messersmith decision, which last year suddenly ended baseball"s reserve clause, and about the turbulent labor relations and enormously inflated contracts and million-dollar deals that had marked this baseball summer, and I had found him profoundly unsympathetic to the Players a.s.sociation and to the players" side of things. This should not have surprised me; I had deliberately sought out Scarborough, after all, because he represented a part of baseball that seemed fixed and unalterable. Now I had run headlong into a paradox: I badly wanted Ray to feel better about the real shift in style that has recently come to the sport-a shift which may be the result of the new beliefs that many young players and black players hold about personal independence and corporate loyalty and other considerable issues. I hoped that Ray might become less unhappy about this change than he seemed to be, because I liked him so much and so admired his spirited and generous nature. On the other hand, I also wanted him obdurate and preserved, because I had begun to sense that he still embodied the cla.s.sic att.i.tudes of baseball-the sunlit verities of the game that had first moved and attracted so many of us when we were young. At times, he almost seemed to encompa.s.s the entire history of the sport. His own country beginnings in the game sounded exactly like the boyhood memoirs of famous early-twentieth-century baseball stars that I had read in Lawrence S. Ritter"s splendid book The Glory of Their Times, and yet Ray had survived in baseball into the superjet age-into a time when his own hard-won professional judgments were in compet.i.tion with computerized data, and his long hours and months of work could be nullified in an instant by the cold economics and deadly luck of the business draw. If this game, in achieving its inevitable contemporary alterations of form and att.i.tude, could not continue to reward a man like Ray Scarborough, it would have lost something precious and probably irretrievable.

I stole a look at Ray and said, "What will it be like down in El Paso?"

"Hot!" he said instantly. "You watch a game and then you jump back to your motel-back into that air-conditioning. But at least they have gra.s.s down there-not this carpet. Baseball is an outdoor game. And we have some good boys down there. Our second baseman, Fred Frazier, is leading the whole league in hitting, and we have a kid at first base named Willie Mays Aikens, who"s already hit about twenty home runs. Willie Mays Aikens! With young players like that, you only want to be sure not to bring them along too fast. I"m certainly looking forward to seeing them."

Cast a Cold Eye

- October 1976 THE LAST OUT OF THE year was an uninteresting fly ball struck by the Yankees" Roy White, which ascended briefly through the frigid South Bronx darkness and then fell into the glove of George Foster, the Cincinnati left fielder. Foster and his teammates, who had at this instant captured an utterly one-sided and almost pa.s.sionless World Series and thus reconfirmed their t.i.tle to the championship of the world, cavorted briefly in time-honored postures of jubilation and then departed from the arena, leaving behind them a silenced half-frozen audience and the filth-strewn vacant turf of Yankee Stadium-a panorama that inescapably suggested the condition of another, larger game: the state of baseball itself. I visited the clubhouses and entered in my notebook the expected antipodal quotes from variously disappointed, triumphant, heartbroken, generous, bitter, and overmodest athletes and coaches and officials, and then headed for the subway and home, with the old, late-October tang of sprayed champagne on my sleeve and an unfamiliar gloom in my heart. For a while, I ascribed this weight to a childish, partisan disappointment over the double outcome of that last game-Reds 7, Yankees 2; Reds 4 games, Yankees 0 games-but I am not, in truth, much of a Yankee fan, and I have watched enough baseball to know that four-game sweeps are not such a rarity as to strike a grownup aghast. My discontent lay elsewhere, and when it persisted I mentioned it to friends and colleagues and new acquaintances, and found that all of them-every fan among them, that is-was suffering from a similar sense of dissatisfaction and emptiness over this baseball season and its ending. The 1976 World Series, in spite of its brevity and skimped drama, was a significant one. It profoundly enhanced and deepened the reputation of the Cincinnati Reds, who must now be compared seriously with the two or three paramount clubs of the last half-century, and it was equally notable, I think, for the harsh music of complaint that preceded and accompanied and trailed after its brief October pa.s.sage-sounds of cynicism and anger and sadness from so many people and places that they almost drowned out the thump and tootlings of our favorite old parade.

The causes of this widespread unhappiness are hardly new. They include, in no particular order, night baseball, Sunday-night baseball, the extension of the season far beyond its appropriate weather, the extension and promotion of the controversial designated-hitter device by permitting its introduction into World Series play, artificial turf and its effects on players and strategies, the televising of baseball and television"s enormous influence on scheduling and on almost every other aspect of the game, and, most of all, the irresolute, insensitive, and hypocritical leadership of the executives of the sport, who permitted most of these vulgarities and dumb ideas to creep into their sport in the first place and to flourish until they now almost strangle it. Further uneasy and unresolved elements that afflict the game are the arrival of the free-agent status for players and its accompanying inflation of salaries and trade prices, the violence and anarchy of ballpark crowds, the suspicions and tensions that separate players and owners as a result of the dissolution of the reserve clause, and the utterly unneeded forthcoming expansion of the American League, with the resultant dilution of talent in the league that, as the Reds horribly proved, is already much the inferior one. These grievances, as I have said, are not exactly new-only the scheduling of two important post-season games (one playoff, one Series) in Sunday-night prime time and the entrance of Howard Cosell into the quiet chambers of the game came as true startlers this fall-but the list is so long and depressing that one"s fervent wish is simply to throw it away and to think only about the distractions and pleasures of baseball itself, to watch the games. This has been easy to do in recent years, when several riveting pennant races and a remarkable succession of World Series matchups, culminating in the epochal Reds vs. Red Sox collision last fall, have encouraged this kind of distraction; six of the last ten World Series have gone the full seven games, and only the one-sided five-game victory of the Orioles over the Reds in 1970 ranked close to this year"s affair as unnews. And here, no doubt, is the real reason for my unhappiness. This fall, the baseball games could not distract us from the truth about baseball, which is that it may well be on the point of altering itself, if not out of existence, then out of any special or serious place in the American imagination.

The season"s news was not all dismal. The summer provided a basket of surprises, including the discovery that the clubs could prosper without a vestige of a pennant race in any of the divisions. By the first week of June, the four eventual winners-the Reds and Phillies in the National League, and the Yankees and Kansas City Royals in the American-had all moved into first place for good, and by the time of the All-Star Game break in mid-July the nearest second-place team, the Dodgers, was six full games to the rear. The Phillies and Royals, it will be recalled, suffered late-season comas that brought them almost within touching distance of their pursuers, but then steadied at the end. In spite of these torpid campaigns, baseball attendance for 1976 reached an all-time high of 31,320,535-a leap of a million and a half over the previous year. Most of the new or renewed fans turned up in the American League, which improved its gate by 1,470,583, to draw within two million of the perennially more robust NL. The real causes of the surprising turnouts (aside from a numbing surfeit of Bat Days, Helmet Days, Jacket Days, Camera Days, Family Days, Bronzed-Baby-Shoe Days, and other promotions) were probably the memory of that great World Series last fall and the fact that three of the four summer leaders were new to such eminence and thus a reason for local fervor. Among them, the champion Reds and the upstart Yankees, Phillies, and Royals picked up more than two million new fans.

The only races in either league turned out to be for the batting t.i.tles, which were settled in both cases by the last couple of swings of a bat. In the National League, the Reds" Ken Griffey held an average of .337 on the final day of the regular season, and received permission from his manager, Sparky Anderson, to sit out the Reds" meaningless closing game against the Braves, and thus protect his lead over the Cubs" Bill Madlock, whose average stood at .333. (An inescapable memory here is the last day of the 1941 season, when Ted Williams was told by his manager, Joe Cronin, of the Red Sox, that it would be perfectly all right if he chose to skip that afternoon"s closing doubleheader in order to protect his batting average, which was tremblingly balanced at .3996-officially .400, that is. Williams chose to play, went six-for-eight for the day, and finished at .406-the only over-.400 average of the past forty-six years.) Halfway through the Reds-Braves game, word came over the sports wire that Madlock was enjoying a terrific afternoon at the plate against the Expos; Griffey hurriedly entered the lineup, but went hitless in two at-bats and lost the t.i.tle to Madlock, who had gone four-for-four and raised his average to .339. Madlock"s batting t.i.tle was his second in succession. In the American League, the matter ended even more improbably, in a Twins-Royals game in which three partic.i.p.ants-Hal McRae (.330784) and George Brett (.330733), of the Royals, and Rod Carew (.329), of the Twins-all began play with a shot at the championship. McRae and Carew each went two-for-four, thus losing to Brett, whose crucial hit, bringing him to three-for-four for the day and .333 for the year, was a short fly that landed in front of the Minnesota left fielder and bounced over his head for an inside-the-park homer. McRae, who is black, later claimed that the outfielder, Steve Brye, who is white, played the ball into a hit intentionally, thus handing the t.i.tle to Brett, who is also white, and that he did so with the connivance of the Twins" manager, Gene Mauch. This sad matter will never be entirely resolved, but it must be pointed out that to plan such a malfeasance seems utterly unlikely.

Other numbers were less disputable. Hank Aaron retired, after twenty-three years and seven hundred and fifty-five homers. Walter Alston retired, after twenty-three years at the Dodger helm-a technically impeccable but (according to many of his players) distant and impersonal leader; he won seven pennants and four world championships. Lou Brock, now thirty-seven years old, batted .301 and stole fifty-six bases-his twelfth straight summer of more than fifty swipes. Twenty-eight more stolen bases will put him past Ty Cobb"s lifetime mark of eight hundred and ninety-two, a record that has been considered one of the game"s holy minarets. The Oakland A"s, short of power thanks to the trading away of Reggie Jackson, stole three hundred and forty-one bases-only six short of the all-time record set by the 1911 Giants. Nolan Ryan led both leagues in strikeouts (327) and losses (18), thus proving something or other, and failed, for the first time since 1972, to pitch a no-hitter. The Tigers, in a game in May against the Yankees, committed three errors on one play. This horror show began when, with two Yankee runners on base, center fielder Ron LeFlore dropped a fly hit by Roy White, but picked up the ball in time to throw out the second runner at the plate; catcher John Wockenfuss, under the mistaken impression that this was the third out, lightheartedly rolled the ball out toward the mound, where it was seized by pitcher Bill Laxton, who then flung it wildly past third base, allowing White to chug home with the winning run.

The Tigers, a young and improving team, enjoyed some much happier days than this one, and raised their home attendance by more than four hundred thousand fans-a great many of whom came trooping in whenever the phenomenal young Tiger pitcher Mark Fidrych was slated to work. Fidrych finished his first season with a won-lost mark of 199 and an earned-run average of 2.34; the latter figure was the best among all starters in the league, which meant that Fidrych had a better summer than Vida Blue, Frank Tanana, Jim Palmer, and Luis Tiant, among others. This is notable work by any standard, but positively electrifying for a twenty-two-year-old rookie who performed for most of last season at the Cla.s.s-A level of the minors and was not even on the Tigers" roster in spring training this year. I caught The Bird"s act late in the season, in the first game of a September Sunday double-header at Yankee Stadium, when he gave up nine scattered, harmless. .h.i.ts and defeated the league leaders by 60. It was only the second shutout thrown against them by a right-hander all year. On the mound, Fidrych presented the cla.s.sic profile and demeanor of a very young hurler-long legs and a skinny, pleasing gawkiness (he is six-three); a pre-delivery flurry of overexcited twitches, glances, and arm-loosening wiggles; and a burning anxiety to get rid of the ball, to see what would happen next, to get on with this, man! The results were something altogether different. His pitching was wholly cool and intelligent, built around some middling-good fastb.a.l.l.s and down-slanting sliders, all delivered with excellent control just above or below the hemline of the strike zone, with an ensuing five strikeouts, one walk, and innumerable harmless fly b.a.l.l.s. Fidrych also showed us some of his celebrated eccentricities-sprinting to the mound to start each inning, kneeling to pat down the dirt in front of the mound, applauding plays by his teammates, and shaking hands with some of his infielders after an important out-but his pitching outweighed his oddities. After the game, The Bird performed again with grace and flakiness, this time for the Gotham scribes. One reporter had noticed that he always tossed the ball back to the umpire after an enemy base hit, and asked why. "Well, that ball had a hit in it, so I want it to get back in the ball bag and goof around with the other b.a.l.l.s there," Fidrych said. "Maybe it"ll learn some sense and come out as a pop-up next time." Another writer, thinking ahead to the enormous salaries and lucrative commercial endors.e.m.e.nts that now instantly reward young sporting pheenoms, asked, "What"s come your way so far, Mark?"

Fidrych thought for an instant and then smiled almost shyly. "Happiness," he said.

Another happy pitcher was the Mets" Jerry Koosman, who won twenty-one games and lost ten-his first twenty-game season ever. He was 124 after the All-Star break, and finished just behind Randy Jones, the Padres" sinkerball artist, in the Cy Young Award balloting. (Koosman is on everybody"s All-Good-Guy first team.) The only other twenty-game man in the Mets" annals, Tom Seaver, wound up this time at 1411, in spite of a league-leading 235 strikeouts and an ERA of 2.59. No runs was the reason. During a typical outing of his in late July, I watched him shut out the Pirates for ten innings, fanning ten and allowing no one to reach third base-all literally for naught, since the Mets went scoreless, too, and eventually lost in the thirteenth. They played so badly in the first two-thirds of the season that their fans fell into the habit of booing them in the middle innings-booing quietly and resignedly, more out of principle than out of pa.s.sion. But the Mets came on like an express train in the late going, winning twenty-five of their last forty games, taking third place, and playing a small but deadly part in the NL East pennant race. The Phillies, who led their division by fifteen games on August 27, quickly lost eight straight games, and an eventual sixteen of twenty-one, thus permitting Pittsburgh to close to within three games on September 17. The next day, however, the Mets beat the Pirates 62 (Seaver pitched); the day after that, they beat the Pirates 76 (Dave Kingman hit two home runs); and the day after that they beat the Pirates 54 (rookie outfielder Lee Mazzilli hit a two-run homer with two out in the ninth). The Pirates never recovered.

The true feat of this past baseball summer-a development far more startling than a World Series sweep or a sudden batting t.i.tle or any other miracle afield-was the drafting and acceptance of a revolutionary four-year pact between the owners and the players, which was drawn up, in memorandum form, on July 12 and subsequently affirmed by the Players a.s.sociation, by the owners" Player Relations Committee, and, eventually, by a binding majority of seventeen of the twenty-four major-league clubs. Very little public attention was given to the significance of this event at the time, because the headlines and news accounts concentrated on the most unusual and most immediately interesting of the doc.u.ment"s subclauses, which was a system establishing the drafting and readmission to the game of free agents-players who would sever their connection with their existing clubs at the end of this season. Such a system, to be sure, was urgently necessary, since the pool of coming free agents-there were twenty-five of them in the end-included a number of the game"s most expensive stars and prime talents, such as Reggie Jackson, Bobby Grich, Don Gullett, Joe Rudi, Rollie Fingers, and Dave Cash. The "reentry draft" (a terrific s.p.a.ce-age locution) that took place just after the World Series at the Plaza Hotel in New York, thus began the most interesting redistribution of talent in the history of the game.

The reentry draft, however, was only one part of the pact, which was in fact a four-year renewal of the Basic Agreement governing every aspect of player-owner relations, including salary minimums, salary arbitration, retirement benefits, and so on-and, most significantly, free agency and trading rights. The new provisions in the last two areas call for immediate free agency, on request, for any player who has completed six years with a major-league club, and establish his right to demand a trade after five years" service with one club. "Repeater rights" also establish a player"s privilege to proceed from trade demand to free agency, from free agency to free agency, and so forth, in various spans of five years or three years. The system appears straightforward and almost unarguably fair to all parties, and yet these are precisely the issues that profoundly divided the owners and the Players a.s.sociation last winter and spring, and ultimately led to the bitter, owner-enforced lockout that delayed the opening of the spring-training camps by about three weeks last March. The signing of this agreement is a cause for rejoicing.

The accord was reached because the rival negotiators-Marvin Miller, who is the executive director of the Players a.s.sociation, and John J. Gaherin, a professional labor negotiator retained by the clubs" Player Relations Committee-had begun to sense that after months of almost continuous desultory or impa.s.sioned bargaining, with frequent intervening consultations with their larger bodies, they were on the very brink of a formal impa.s.se, an eventuality that ultimately would force the parties into court, with unforeseeable but chaotic results. Unwilling to face such risks, the two men, accompanied only by the league presidents-the National League"s Charles S. Feeney and the American League"s Lee MacPhail-met on July 6 in a small conference room at the Hotel Biltmore, in New York, to begin a series of informal but highly intensive negotiating sessions. These Biltmore Talks, as they are now referred to, more or less in the style of the Diet of Worms or the Treaty of Ghent, at last broke through the acc.u.mulated barnacle crust of suspicions and postures, and led to hard, precisely detailed, but non-acrimonious bargaining. At the end of four days, the basic memorandum had been hammered out, with the central agreement coming after Mr. Gaherin, for the Player Relations Committee, accepted free agency for the players after six years" service (the owners had been holding out for nine), in return for a five-year span before a player could again achieve free agency, instead of the three years that the Players a.s.sociation had wanted.

Described in these terms, the accord sounds like a simple and civilized accommodation of differences, but the truth is that both sides had to travel an enormous distance over extremely b.u.mpy terrain to arrive at a meeting place. Marvin Miller, for the P.A., had retreated from the basic "one-and-one" rights (free agency at the end of a player"s current contract plus one year"s additional service) that he appeared to have secured for the players after the Messersmith decision of last winter, which upset the reserve clause. He did so, one may surmise, in part because unlimited free agency seemed likely to destroy any form of player development or long-range team planning by the owners, and also because the cessation of the reserve clause (which had forbidden free agency) had been determined by an arbitrator"s ruling but never tested all the way up to the Supreme Court level-a long, costly fight for both sides, with an impossible final verdict for one litigant or the other.

Mr. Gaherin, for his part, had perhaps an even more horrendous task, which was to persuade first the six-man Player Relations Committee and eventually most of the twenty-four club owners or presidents that the agreement was an essential doc.u.ment, and that it represented what so many of those owners had, in varying degrees and to various excruciating lengths, squirmed and shuddered and shouted to avoid: a fair accommodation. It was, by any measurement, a triumph for him and his employers. Faced with the real possibility of total free agency, he had come up with a solution to the slippery problem of readmitting free agents to the ordered hierarchy of the clubs, and had also arranged matters so that in all likelihood each long-term major-league player would achieve free agency only once in his career. Mr. Gaherin-a slim, pale, precise man of sixty-two, who has an unsettling resemblance to James Joyce-has worked for the Player Relations Committee for nine years, and is thus fully accustomed to the burdens of multi-employer labor work, but his treatment at the hands of the owners on this occasion must have startled him a little. Early in August, he and the National League president, Feeney, were vilified in an unbridled statement to the press issued by Gussie Busch, the owner of the Cardinals, who said that the clubs had been "kicked in the teeth in the labor matter," and demanded that the two men be dismissed. Since then, the owners in both leagues have held private ballotings that resulted in an expression of no confidence in Mr. Gaherin-a movement toward his dismissal that was only halted by Edmund B. Fitzgerald, who is chairman of the board of the Milwaukee Brewers and also the chairman of the Player Relations Committee.

The work of translating the memorandum of agreement into the full language of a formal Basic Agreement is not yet near completion, mostly because of the owners" attempts to redraft it or alter it unilaterally, but the memorandum itself was signed, and is thus a binding doc.u.ment. Since it came as the result of extensive bargaining, it is expected to be a strong instrument that will withstand any future court tests. It is true that Mr. Gaherin (along with Mr. Fitzgerald) was the planner and promulgator of the player lockout last spring, but it is also true that he and Marvin Miller, who somehow kept his youthful, scattered six-hundred-man union informed and unified through two years of unrelenting hostility and pressure from their employers, came out at the end with an agreement that looks like a Gibraltar in the churning seas of big-time American sport.

A somewhat more lighthearted view may be taken of the summer"s other great off-diamond dustup, which was Commissioner Bowie Kuhn"s abrupt action in June to stop a multimillion-dollar sale of three of Charles O. Finley"s celebrated chattels. The deal, it will be recalled, would have delivered Joe Rudi and Rollie Fingers to the Boston Red Sox for one million dollars each, and sent Vida Blue to the Yankees for one and a half million. After a meeting with Mr. Finley, Commissioner Kuhn announced that he was ordering the players back to the Oakland roster under powers ent.i.tling him to "preserve the honor of the game," and said that "public confidence in the integrity of club operations and in baseball would be gravely undermined should such a.s.signments not be restrained." Mr. Finley stated that "Kuhn sounds like the village idiot," and filed a ten-million-dollar lawsuit against him for restraint of trade. He also refused to allow the returned merchandise to go on playing for his team-a ban that lasted for two weeks and was lifted by him only in the face of a strike by the other members of the A"s.

Two interpretations of Mr. Kuhn"s motives may be postulated: (1) He was truly concerned about maintaining the compet.i.tive balance of the leagues, and felt that the sale of such famous stars to well-heeled contending clubs would breed cynicism and despair in the heart of American fandom. (Footnote: The chart of Mr. Kuhn"s concern may be plotted with some precision, since he had offered no let or hindrance to a just previous deal involving the sale of Minnesota pitcher Bert Blyleven to the Texas Rangers for three hundred thousand dollars.) (2) He and his employers, the owners, were truly concerned about a sale that would establish such a high price tag for free agents on the open market-a market in which most of the clubs would have to deal at the end of the season. (Footnote: The major-league clubs, by a vote of twenty-two to two, pledged to make good any financial buffeting the Commissioner"s office may undergo as the result of a judgment in the Finley suit. The nay votes were Baltimore and, of course, Oakland.) The Red Sox never thrived after the opening of their season, but the vivid symbol of their fall from grace this year came in the bottom of the sixth inning in a game at Yankee Stadium on May 20, when Boston catcher Carlton Fisk took a marvelous peg from right

Prev List Next