John Feinstein - Play Ball: The Life and Troubled Times of Major League Baseball

Copyright 1993 by John Feinstein

All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions Published in the United States by Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Villard Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Feinstein, John.

Play ball: the life and hard times of major league baseball/John Feinstein.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-0-307-80094-7
1. BaseballUnited States. 2 Major League Baseball (Organization) I. Title.
GV863.A1F45 1993
796.357640973dc20

92-53820

v3.1_r1

O n the night of October 18, 1992, a baseball fan named Francis T. Vincent, Jr., sat down in his Greenwich, Connecticut, home to watch Game Two of the World Series. He had missed Game One the previous evening because he had been at a wedding reception and, like a lot of fans, was curious to see whether the Toronto Blue Jays could bounce back after having lost the opener to the Atlanta Braves.

Vincent watched for four innings. Then he turned off his TV and went to bed. I tried to watch the game and just see the players and what they were doing, he said. But I couldnt. Everything seemed to remind me of the owners. After a while, I just couldnt take it anymore.

In a sense, Fay Vincent spoke for all baseball fans. The fact that he had been the games commissioner for three years before being hounded out of office in September explains the animosity he felt toward his former employers. But even for someone who has never run baseball or, for that matter, worked in or known anyone connected to the game, it has become increasingly difficult to turn on the television or go to the ballpark and enjoy the simple pleasure of the national pastime.

Like Vincent, fans do not just see Cal Ripken or Kirby Puckett; they see men making six million dollars a year. You pay for your ticketat higher and higher pricesand realize what you are doing is handing your money over to a group of men who, for the most part, could not care less about anyone involved in the sport except themselves. You want to get excited about your teams prospects for 1993, but with all the free-agent signings and switches, you dont even know who the hell is on your team, Or whether your team will even be playing at all.

Owning a baseball team makes you a part of the most exclusive club in the country, says Don Fehr, who has run the Major League Players Association for almost ten years. Its more exclusive than the U.S. Senate and its like no other club of sports owners because baseball is exempt from antitrust laws. Because of that, these are people who honestly believe that the rules of the world do not apply to them. These are people who extort millions of dollars from cities to build them stadiums and then are voted Citizen of the Year. When someone does call them on something, they are shocked and angry.

Fay Vincent was fired because he called the owners on something. In no uncertain terms, he told them that they were fools if they went to war with the players union again. Their chief negotiator, Richard Ravitch, the new $750,000-a-year kid on the block, told the owners not to listen to Vincent, that there was nothing wrong with war. He told them they could win a war. But, he added, Vincent had to be removed from the picture.

And so Vincent was fired. Only once in history has one nation bombed another into submission, Vincent says. And that was in 1945 when the weaponry was unique. The owners cant win this war, but they want to fight it anyway.

The owners, led by their newly appointed mouthpiece, Milwaukee Brewers owner Bud Selig, vehemently deny wanting anything but peace with the players. And yet, on December 7a fitting datethey announced that they would reopen the union contract a year early. It should be noted that the last seven negotiations between these two groups have resulted in a work stoppage. In other words: war.

Cheap billionaires fighting with whiny millionaires is how the public will see this, Vincent says. It will be a disaster if it occurs. Fehr, who had hoped until the last minute that the owners would reconsider their hard-line position, agrees with Vincent. If you take away the thrill and expectation of baseball games for an extended period of timeagainyou will hurt the game greatly, he says. Because I think at this point in time there are people who wont come back.

Fehr knows that has been said before. And he believes that, ultimately, baseball will survive. Baseball always survives. As Tony LaRussa, the manager of the Oakland Athletics, says, The game is better than all of us.

No doubt it is. But these are ugly times if you love baseball. If you arent reading about Marge Schott and her racist, bigoted comments, youre reading about a possible lockout. Or about franchise shifts. Or player shifts (during one three-day period in December no fewer than thirty-five free agents signed with new teams). Or the dire problems teams will face in 1994 when the TV golden egg becomes a lot less golden.

If you live in New York, you wonder what will happen when George Steinbrenner regains control of the Yankees on March 1. Will Buck Showalter, the bright young manager, still be around in July? If you live in Seattle, you wonder if you will ever see a contender. In San Francisco you wonder if there will ever be a new ballpark. In St. Petersburg you are almost convinced you wont live to see a major-league team arrive, no matter how many times youre told it will happen. In Baltimore, after going through a joyous eighty-nine-victory season in a gorgeous new ballpark, you wonder why owner Eli Jacobs refuses to spend a nickel to improve the team. The answer to that one is easy: Jacobss other businesses are going bankrupt and he is loath to touch the $20-million profit he made with the Orioles. In all likelihood, he will be forced to sell the team.

And yet, amid all the predictions that baseball will kill itself off, you know better. Twenty-five years ago, following the 1968 Year of the Pitcher, when no one could score a run, the doomsayers said baseball was done for, that football had replaced it as the national pastime, that baseball would sink into gradual oblivion. Now, games take much too long, pitchers cant throw strikes, postseason games start so late that no baseball-crazed kid (the next generation of ticket buyers) can possibly stay up to watch, and owners refuse to police themselves, so the doomsayers are rampant again. This time, it is basketball that is replacing baseball and the impending oblivion will befall us quickly rather than gradually.

Oblivion wont happen, though, because as usual, LaRussa is right.

Is Barry Bondss $43.75-million contract the ceiling that salaries inevitably must reach? Perhaps, perhaps not. But skyrocketing salaries are not the real problem in the game (the Boston Red Sox, New York Mets, and Lost Angeles Dodgers warmed the hearts of purists in 1992 by spending over $40 million apiece to win seventy-three, seventy-two, and sixty-three games respectively). The problem is the lack of a level playing field. Over the long haul, teams in Seattle and Cleveland and Milwaukee simply cannot compete with teams in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Atlanta until and unless there is revenue sharing.