Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville (26 page)

Miller’s fascinating story
testifies to the power of patience, giving a productive twist to the old Roman maxim for a life of pleasure:
festina lente
, or make haste slowly. Miller held all the cards; after all, how can feudalism be justified or maintained in a democratic age with at least some legislated safeguards? Baseball’s owners had prevailed by bluff and force, but they had also become complacent in the absence of any effective challenge for so long. They may even have believed their own rhetoric.

But, as Moses learned, seeing the promised land is one thing, and getting there another. Miller knew that he could win if only he could forge solidarity and union consciousness among players. But how could an intellectual, Jewish, professional union man from Brooklyn prevail on a terrain inhabited by so few of the above? How could techniques for organizing workers succeed in a world where most people viewed “union” as a dirty word? The answer can only be: quietly but forcefully, a step at a time, and, above all, with respect for the intelligence and background of players (something the owners had never learned). Miller’s triumph is a credit both to his own skills and to the virtues of professionalism.

Miller’s two greatest successes, won sequentially and with help from the arsenal of labor legislation, included the establishment of impartial arbitration for settling contract and other disputes, and the invalidation of the reserve clause, which, as the owners correctly noted, had been the bulwark of their unjust system. None of this could have been accomplished without Miller’s success, powerfully abetted by dependable stupidity among owners, in bringing about solidarity among players. Miller can pay no finer compliment than his statement, coming from a man who helped to lead some of the most important industrial actions of the twentieth century, that the players’ strike of 1981 was the most principled he had ever seen—for older players, fighting for nothing personal but only for benefits to younger colleagues, held firm, and management eventually collapsed after more than fifty days (following their original prediction that the players would crumble within five).

The story of the reserve clause, and the winning of free agency, best illustrates Miller’s method: speak softly and gain little by little. Step 1: by raising consciousness, you can win through losing—the Curt Flood case, previously discussed. Step 2: win a case even if it doesn’t establish the general principle. Irascible A’s owner Charlie Finley had reneged on a provision of Catfish Hunter’s 1974 contract. Miller filed a grievance, went to arbitration (previously established as a first great victory), won his watertight case, and had Hunter’s contract voided. The case established no principle, since the outcome only punished Finley for a contract violation, but Yankee owner George Steinbrenner then paid millions to sign Hunter, and the dam broke. Steinbrenner surely made a good move, and Hunter’s classy pitching was indispensable in Yankee championships of 1977 and 1978, their first since 1962.

Step 3: take all the marbles. Miller had always insisted—and plain reading seemed to support his view—that the standard language of the reserve clause, as always written, only bound a player to his team
for one additional year
if no contract agreement could be reached. Owners insisted that they could pile on “additional years” in perpetuity. In the famous Messersmith-McNally case (also an arbitration) of 1975, Miller won the principle, and the war. Players, if unable to reach agreement with their owners, could play out their one additional year and then become free agents, able to negotiate with any team.

Miller’s book is one of the most important ever published about baseball, but I wish he had done even better. Ironically,
A Whole Different Ball Game
suffers from two features that, above all else, Miller never introduced into his successful negotiations as executive director of the Players Association: some bad organization and a little mean-spiritedness. Miller can’t seem to decide whether to write his book as a chronological story or a series of portraits—and you can’t have both. For example, an early chapter on Bowie Kuhn (Miller’s nemesis as commissioner of baseball) describes in detail the entire history of their relationship, but later chronological chapters go through the same material again.

As for the second problem, a less than optimal generosity of spirit, books just don’t work well as devices for settling scores. There is a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up. Besides, who but you really cares about all the details of potential ingratitude? I didn’t mind the harshness about Bowie Kuhn, for he and Miller were serious sparring partners for years, and Kuhn had already gotten his licks in with a previous book. But why go after so many players, including Carlton Fisk, Catfish Hunter, and Dennis Eckersley, for later downplaying the work of the association that had won their benefits? Miller is probably right in his unhappiness with them, but people do lapse into the H-mode as they get older and further from the battles actually fought. They can be reminded gently, and with humor.

Marvin Miller remains one of my heroes, but he is anathema—and quite unfairly—to many baseball fans because they vent upon him their anger and puzzlement about the assault of Q-mode reality upon their H-mode image of the game. How can I uphold the Field of Dreams when salaries and agents get more press coverage than sandlots and extra innings, and if stars, paid in millions, add insult to injury by charging my kid fifteen bucks for an autograph at a card show?

While I can
understand and even defend the current salary levels, I do acknowledge some real problems. First, anyone who has a piece of graph paper and knows the meaning of “extrapolate” will easily realize that something has to give. Current trends cannot continue, lest Roger Clemens’s salary exceed the GNP. But what can stop a runaway machine fueled by positive feedback? (Remember that “positive feedback” is a technical term for more leading to still more, not a statement about ethics or fairness.) Evolutionary biologists, more than most people, understand that legitimate advantages sought by individuals (tail feathers of a peacock leading to greater mating success) can foster the extermination of collectivities (the entire species becomes vulnerable because such extreme specialization makes adaptation so difficult when environments change). Advantages to individuals and benefits to species need not coincide, and may directly conflict.

Secondly, baseball will be in difficulty if arrogance bred by financial success seriously erodes public sympathy and affection for players. I do not think that this will happen, but sometimes I wonder, especially when I sense that an issue, resolved in financial terms, really isn’t about money, but about something so juvenile as “who is king of the mountain.” Two years ago, within a week, baseball’s three premier pitchers, Dwight Gooden, Orel Hershiser, and Roger Clemens, played leapfrog over one another to become, in sequence (like “king for a day” or “famous for fifteen minutes”) the highest-paid player in baseball. (They signed three-year contracts worth between six and eight million dollars; this year, to continue the spiral, Clemens signed a new four-year contract worth 21.5 million!) Can six vs. seven million possibly matter, since either figure should comfortably set up an extended family for life? Is this not a public debate over status, using money as a token? Cash is an awfully expensive token for such an issue. Won’t medals do? Or how about pieces of paper proclaiming degrees and written in Latin?

But how can we blame the players, and Marvin Miller, for something entirely of our creation? We have made the world of these gargantuan salaries, and they that have sown the wind…shall reap the whirlwind. We want our television programs; we watch the advertisements and buy the products. We turn the people we admire into objects called “celebrities” we think we own pieces of them, and can deny them the most elementary right of privacy. Sure it’s nasty to charge a kid fifteen dollars for an autograph; but when you know that every proprietor in town is hiring kids to get free signatures on large numbers of cards for later resale at enormous profit, do you not feel used and exploited? We are paying out the money that goes to these salaries. What are the players supposed to do? Dig a hole and bury the cash? Give it to the owners? Marvin Miller did a limited and entirely admirable thing: he forced an equable distribution of funds available.

Bruce Bochte, former first baseman of the Oakland A’s, helped me to understand this when he said to me:

You can’t blame Marvin Miller for the nature of the system he was hired to work within. Miller did his job consummately, with principled honesty and superlative effectiveness. Don’t castigate him because our nutty economy (in a world of poverty) provides so much money in such places.

In this special
year of so many H-mode anniversaries, I must ask whether the solution to a fan’s distress at Q-mode antics lies in willful abandonment of an admitted partial reality for a home in the bosom of warmth and hope. No real fan can do such a thing for two reasons. First, you cannot even construct an adequately comforting H-mode without an unacceptable degree of fictionalization—for honorable Q-and H-modes are not fact vs. fiction, but two styles of
truth
à la
Rashomon
. Indeed, we must even fictionalize fiction to get the “pure” H-mode of
Field of Dreams
. In Thomas Kinsella’s fine novel, J. D. Salinger is the cynic taken to the ball game. In the film version, James Earl Jones plays the part and, in a moving scene, makes a speech about the beauty of baseball and then disappears with the old players into the Field of Dreams. They had to use a black man to perfect the H-mode; in no other way could baseball’s greatest sin be expiated. In life, most of those older players were racists, and none ever played in the majors with a black teammate. Don’t get me wrong; I loved the film. But
Field of Dreams
doesn’t tell the whole story; we need
Eight Men Out
(the story of the Black Sox) for symmetry.

Second, a restricted dose of H-mode books soon becomes both dull and limiting. I like all three of the books I have chosen for my H-mode counterpart to Marvin Miller—Teddy Ballgame’s career on the fiftieth anniversary of his greatest year (
Ted Williams: A Portrait in Words and Pictures
, by Dick Johnson and Glenn Stout); Mickey’s finest season thirty-five years ago (
My Favorite Summer 1956
, by Mickey Mantle and Phil Pepe); and Bobby’s transcendent moment of 1951 (
The Home Run Heard ’Round the World
, by Ray Robinson)—all well written, accurate, and fun to read.

But the sameness of the genre begins to wear thin after a while. The two books that treat a specific time (Mickey in 1956 and Bobby in 1951) both begin with a scene-setting chapter in standard form: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.” The books are eerily similar. We learn what was on TV, who topped the charts of pop music, the content of newspaper headlines, the price of a hamburger. All three books then proceed in chronological fashion, for hagiography is a form of narrative, while criticism is analytical and tends to focus on issues rather than sequences.

But the books also differ in some ways.
Ted Williams
is full of well-chosen (and well-reproduced) photos and other pictorial memorabilia, and the biographical chapters include short essays written by some of baseball’s literary groupies, including David Halberstam, Donald Hall, George V. Higgins, and, as I must admit, yours truly (on the statistics of Williams’s .406 season).
My Favorite Summer
is particularly well constructed. The 1956 season was Mantle’s triumph, climaxed by Don Larsen’s perfect game (including Mantle’s saving catch) in the World Series. But the chronology of old seasons cannot be as interesting as the usual stuff of drama, and I would have thought such a format difficult to sustain. Phil Pepe, Mantle’s “as told to” writer, solves this problem by deftly following a chronological sequence, but using each major incident for a well-paced digression. Mantle’s batting in the All-Star Game with Williams prompts a little essay on his reverence for the greatest of all hitters; the introduction of Don Larsen, one of most committed of old-time drinkers, provides an occasion for a discourse on Mantle’s own legendary, late-night escapades.

For those benighted
enough not to know the context of
The Home Run Heard ’Round the World
(though I don’t know why I bother, for such folks can’t be fans and probably abandoned this essay long ago), the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers maintained the greatest of all rivalries (I loved the Giants and hated the Bums; their joint departure for California in 1958 began the serious decline of New York City). In 1951, the haughty Bums were thirteen and a half games ahead in mid-August and the race seemed over. But the Giants fought back and tied the Dodgers at the end of the season, prompting a three-game playoff. They split the first two games, and the entire year hinged on the finale. The Giants entered the ninth inning behind 4–1, and all seemed lost. But they scored a run and had two men on when Bobby Thomson came up, unfurled his bat to October’s breeze, and hit the pill heard ’round the world. Russ Hodges, the Giants’ announcer, broke into joyous babbling. Red Barber, the Dodgers’ man, simply broadcast: “It’s in there for the pennant.” Red Smith wrote in his next morning’s column: “The art of fiction is dead. Reality has strangled invention.”

If a season seemed implausible, you wouldn’t think that a moment could fill out a whole book. But Ray Robinson prevails, particularly for New Yorkers like me who lived through the event with maximal passion. Predictably, most of the book fills out the entire season, the personalities, and the finer points of baseball’s deepest rivalry. But several final chapters treat the moment itself, and Robinson does not run out of things to say. I particularly enjoyed the “where were you when?” final chapter, where many celebrities and ordinary folks recall their spot—for my generation knows this as well as the next remembers where they were on November 22, 1963. I, at age ten, was glued to our newly purchased first TV, home alone after school. I have never known a greater moment of pure joy in my life.