Cooperstown Confidential (10 page)

“That’s not the end of the story, though,” Spencer told me. “One day, one of the curators walked in with a ten-minute silent film called
His Last Game
, from 1909. It was based on Walla Tonka—one of the first baseball movies ever made.”

After twenty-eight years on the job, Spencer is still excited when fragments come together like this to form a bigger picture. “After World War II, the War Department gave permission for returning [ballplayer] veterans to wear a special patch on their [baseball] uniforms,” he told me. “A circle with an ea gle in the center. A few guys wore it, but most of them didn’t, and I never knew why. Then one day one of our staff people up here was going through a big box of National League material, just randomly, and discovered the minutes of a meeting on the veterans’ patch.

“Turns out, the owners were against it. See, a lot of players had baseball injuries that kept them out of the army, and the owners thought it would be unfair to them. The public might think they had been draft dodgers or slackers. The league didn’t prohibit the patches, but it definitely discouraged them.”

One of Spencer’s great curatorial successes was sparked by an article he came across in the
Los Angeles Times
in 1986. Written by Janice Mall, it was the story of the nearly forgotten All-American Girls Professional Baseball League. The AAGPBL was established during World War II by Phil Wrigley, the own er of the Chicago Cubs. American men were serving in the army, and women were taking their places in factories and farms and other parts of the economy. Baseball, without its stars, was slumping at the box office. Wrigley thought there might be a profit in a baseball version of Rosie the Riveter.

The AAGPBL started out as a softball league, with underhand pitching and eighty-five-foot base paths. Soon it changed to hardball, and adopted most of the standard rules of baseball—on the diamond. Off the field, it was a different story. Girl players were required to wear skirts and lipstick at all times and to keep their hair long enough that they didn’t raise uncomfortable questions about their extracurricular lives. They were strictly chaperoned on the road. Even at home, they were forbidden to drive a car beyond city limits without permission from their (male) managers. If al Qaeda ever starts a ladies’ baseball league, the AAGPBL rulebook will come in handy.

Women’s baseball was a good idea whose time never fully arrived. The league limped along for a decade in midwestern cities like Muskegon, Peoria, Kalamazoo, and Rockford. When it folded in 1954, few noticed, and no bona fide successor has arisen. Girls who want to play ball don’t have to wear skirts and lipstick any more, but they better be able to pitch underhand.

When the
Los Angeles Times
article ran, Spencer was looking for ways to delve into unexplored corners of baseball history. The Hall wanted to attract female visitors (and make wives and mothers more willing to accompany the menfolk to Cooperstown). The story about the lost ladies’ league seemed to fit. He reached out to AAGPBL alumnae and offered to host a reunion in conjunction with an exhibit. Hollywood producer Penny Marshall attended and filmed scenes from the event, some of which were used in
A League of their Own.

The film came out in 1992. Starring Madonna, Rosie O’Donnell, Geena Davis, and Tom Hanks, it remains the biggest-grossing baseball movie of all time. It also had a very powerful effect on Coopers-town. “We usually get ten, twelve letters when we put up a new exhibit,” says Spencer. “This was completely different. I stopped counting the letters after two hundred, and that was just in the first month.” Mothers came to Cooperstown with their daughters. And in the wake of the women fans came women ballplayers.

I met a couple of these Girls of Summer at Induction Weekend, 2007. I found them sitting in the back of a Main Street memorabilia emporium selling autographs at five dollars a pop and fending off an elderly gent with a bottle of Budweiser in his hand who, it appeared, was some sort of geriatric groupie. He focused his attention mostly on Ruth Richard, who was played in
A League of Their Own
by Geena Davis.
*

“Ruth was always the glamour puss,” said Alice Pollitt Deschaine. She said it in the bantering tone that ballplayers of every time and gender use in lieu of actual communication.

“Aw, nothin’ of the sort,” said Richard. “I never went in for that stuff.” Richard was one of the great players in the AAGPBL, a catcher who made the all-star team six times as a Rockland Peach.

Pollitt was a slugger. When she was with the Racine Belles, in 1951, she tied for the home run crown. That year she got married. Her son was born in 1954, just as the league folded, and she spent the rest of her life as wife and mother until the Hall of Fame rediscovered her. “Rosie O’Donnell played me,” she said.

“You were both something,” the old guy with the Bud said. “Still are.”

Pollitt brushed the flattery away. She had money on her mind. “I heard Madonna’s uniform from the movie is worth fourteen thousand bucks,” said Alice.

“Really?” said Ruth. “I didn’t hear that. I should have saved my old uniforms, I guess.”

“I bet you looked better than Madonna,” the groupie said. What’s the male equivalent of a Baseball Annie, I wondered? A Baseball Andy?

A young man approached the signing table and bought an autograph. Both women appended “HoF” to their signatures. Only members of the Hall are allowed that honorific. Women ballplayers might have an exhibit in the museum, but you won’t find any in the plaque room. When I pointed this out, I got a couple of hard looks in return.

“That’s how we sign,” said Alice. “That’s it.” I tried, and failed, to imagine her as a young woman asking a manager’s permission to drive her car beyond the city limits.

The following summer, Dottie Collins died at age eighty-four. She was the Bob Feller of the AAGBPL, a 20-game winner in four straight seasons who, in the underhand pitching era of the league, struck out 293 batters in one season. Collins was instrumental in setting up the league’s alumnae association, and she collaborated with Spencer in trying to collect AAGBPL memorabilia for the Hall of Fame (despite their efforts, most of the good stuff, including MVP trophies, has wound up at the Northern Indiana Historical Museum in South Bend). Collins was devoted to the Hall. “Being accepted at Coop-erstown was the greatest thing that happened to any of us,” she told a reporter in 1992. But she was never really a member. The
New
York Times
gave her a long send-off, but it didn’t include a statement by the Hall of Fame. Brad Horn, the spokesman, told me that the Hall only says official good-byes to certified HoF inductees and members of the board of directors, such as Tim Russert, who died two months before Collins.

Dottie Collins was a second-class citizen of baseball, ineligible for a plaque. But that could change some day. Once nobody dreamed about Negro leaguers in Cooperstown, either. The Hall deals with ethnicity, race, and gender when group pressure creates a cultural moment. No one wants to talk about it at the Hall of Fame, but even after women get their due, there is still at least one big locker left to open.

Americans of my generation, and Spencer’s, could no more have imagined a gay baseball player than a gay archbishop. We now know better. Some percentage of big-league players, like some percentage of the population, were, and are, homosexual. In an era of gay pride, gay marriages, and gay identity politics, homosexuality has become both a politi cal cause and, for many, an identity. Sooner or later, gay parents will want to use the Hall to connect generations, just as straight parents do. It has been widely rumored that at least two of Hall of Famers are gay, and there is speculation about at least one player who will be a first ballot choice. Maybe one or more of these guys will step forward, or others will on their behalf; one way or another, it seems likely that something about gay ballplayers will wind up on YouTube.

This is one parade the Hall of Fame does not intend to lead. “It’s a subject we don’t discuss,” Spencer told me. “If it gets to be an issue, if it reaches a certain point, we’ll have to deal with it.” He said this with the sangfroid of a man due to retire within a few months. On his watch, he dealt with blacks and women. New claimants to a portion of the baseball heritage will be somebody else’s problem.

* Schechter’s appearance on the show was rescheduled for February 2008, taped, and aired in April. He won $20,000, and his fellow monks threw him a party in the Hall’s Grandstand Theater, where the show was screened and coffee and cake served.

* In his book
Great Jews in Sports,
Robert Slater attributes this punishment to Pike’s manager, who made him a “scapegoat” for the team’s poor play. Some other scholars believe that Pike was guilty of not trying his hardest in contests on which money was being wagered.

* Spencer says that the Hall of Fame is contemplating an exhibit of some kind on Native Americans in baseball. According to
The Baseball Almanac
, forty-seven full-blooded Indians have played in the majors. The first was Louis Sockalexis, a Penobscot who played for the Cleveland Spiders.

The most famous Indian baseball player was Jim Thorpe, who won both the decathlon and the pentathlon in the 1912 Olympics but was stripped of his medals because he had played semipro baseball in 1909–10. Thorpe was a great football player but only an average outfielder in a six-year major-league career.

There are two full-blooded Indians in the Hall of Fame: left fielder Zack Wheat (Cherokee) and pitcher Charles Albert “Chief” Bender (Ojibwa). In the good old days, baseball writers referred to Indians as “Chief” in the same automatic way that Jewish players were dubbed “Moe.” Other Hall of Famers who claim some Indian ancestry are Johnny Bench, Early Wynn, and Willie Stargell.

* I later learned that the derivation of the characters in the film is a matter of some dispute. According to Alice “Lefty” Hohlmayer, Geena Davis’s role was modeled on Lavonne “Pepper” Paire Davis.

SIX . . .
The Haul of Fame

I
n January 2008, Jane Forbes Clark and the BBWAA convened a press conference at the Waldorf, in Manhattan, to introduce the only player who had been elected that year: journeyman relief pitcher Goose Gossage.

In his prime, Gossage threw a hundred miles an hour, clocked. He made a career out of intimidating brave men and, at fifty-six, some of that swagger was still there. When I got to the Waldorf, there were TV trucks parked outside, and a crowd of writers, baseball officials, and hangers-on filled the Empire Room. As always at these Hall of Fame events, almost everyone was white, male, and middle-aged. People milled around, trading offseason gossip.

Jack O’Connor, as secretary of the BBWAA, called the proceedings to order and read the election results. Five hundred and forty-three writers had voted and Gossage had been mentioned on 85.8 percent of the ballots, easily clearing the 75 percent hurdle. It had been a long slog—this was Gossage’s fifteenth and last year of eligibility. In his first year, he had gotten only 33.3 percent—and he had grown increasingly, audibly, impatient over time. Now, though, he was at ease, and he thanked all present in their native language, Baseball Cliché. He was “totally in awe” of being picked. It had been “special” to pitch in New York with its wonderful fans. He was only sorry that his mother hadn’t lived long enough to see this moment.

A short Q&A session followed. A reporter asked Gossage what he thought of players who used ste roids. “Their records mean nothing,” he snapped. “I don’t think you guys are going to vote them in.” Later, when an intrepid journalist (okay, it was me) asked Gossage if he, himself, had ever used amphetamines, Goose denied it with strenuous sincerity.

Overall, the ste roid issue made Jeff Idelson, president of the Hall, nervous, but there was a silver lining. “At least they didn’t ask about Pete Rose,” he said. “This is the first time they haven’t asked about him.”

After the press conference, Gossage, accompanied by an entourage of Hall of Fame officials and business agents, hopped into a black Escalade and headed for the studio of MLB.com. Everybody had a cell phone and they were all going off at once. Gossage was talking to Joe Torre, who had called from Hawaii with congratulations, as we stopped at a light on the corner of Fifth Avenue and Twenty-seventh, across the street from the Museum of Sex.

“Wonder what the curator does there?” said Idelson, who spends a fair amount of time on the road, chasing memorabilia.

“Maybe he collects famous G-strings,” someone said, and we all laughed.”
*

Idelson’s phone rang. “Brett wants to talk to you,” he said, handing Gossage his BlackBerry.

“Hey, George, I was just talking about your tired ass,” Gossage roared. “I was telling some people that you were the greatest hitter I ever faced. I should have hit you in the neck a couple times.”

Gossage laughed. Presumably Brett was laughing on the other end. The agents and officials chuckled, too, third parties to some genuine Hall of Fame banter. When he hung up, Gossage shook his head and said, “I really should have hit that motherfucker in the neck, I ain’t lying.” The agents laughed more loudly. This was great. A big personality, like Gossage’s, would be salable, along with his walrus moustache and his cool, old-timey nickname. An HoF membership is a get-rich-quick card and an annuity. The Goose had laid a golden egg.

Idelson said, “Gary Carter called again while you were on the other phone. He’s called ten times already, to congratulate you. And Paul Molitor wants to say hello. I’m just telling everyone you’ll get back to them.”

On the street in front of the MLB studio, people called Gossage’s name and waved. The staff looked up from their computers when he walked in and gave him a round of applause. It had been many years since the Goose had elicited this much excitement in the big city, and he was beaming.

The MLB.com newsroom is a cyber-age facility built as a monument to baseball’s recent discovery of modern business and marketing. For decades, most teams, and MLB itself, had the attitude (common in monopolies) that their product would sell itself—and if the public didn’t like it, tough. Illustrative of this high-handed approach was the refusal of onetime Yankees general manager George Weiss to hold a free hat day at the Stadium. He explained that he didn’t want to cheapen his brand by having kids walk around town wearing Yankees caps. This sort of marketing acumen didn’t keep Weiss out of the executive wing of the Hall of Fame.

In those days, baseball was run as a collection of family fiefdoms—the Griffiths, the Yawkeys, the Wrigleys, the Macks, and so on. These barons were capable of collusion, as demonstrated in the gentleman’s agreement that kept blacks out of the game, but rarely cooperation. Their old-fashioned rivalries and backward understanding of business ended up costing them a lot of money and, ultimately, their franchises.

After a post–World War II jump, baseball attendance dipped. The teams made terrible tele vi sion deals, refused to share revenue, did nothing to encourage competitive balance, and failed to grasp the most basic principles of modern marketing. In the mid-sixties, when New York Jets owner Sonny Werblin gave rookie quarterback Joe Namath a $400,000 contract, baseball people laughed. How many games would the young quarterback win? Werblin was going to wind up paying, what, $50,000 a victory? Who was worth that? They didn’t understand that paying more than necessary was an investment in public relations that would be returned manyfold in the glamour that sells tickets and builds tele vi sion ratings.

The arrival of younger, hipper own ers changed the attitude, but slowly. In 1975, shortly after buying the Atlanta Braves, Ted Turner tried to explain the realities of the media age to his counterparts. “Gentlemen,” he told them, “we have the only legal monopoly in the country and we’re fucking it up.” Turner was a promoter of the Sonny Werblin variety; he gave Andy Messersmith a three-year contract for $1 million and then suggested that his pitcher adopt the nickname “Channel” and wear number 17, to promote Turner’s Atlanta-based TV station.

The arrival of young owners like Turner and George Steinbrenner, who bought the Yankees in 1973, ushered in a new consciousness—baseball did, indeed, enjoy a monopoly. Teams might be rivals on the field, but they were partners in business. It was this realization that eventually led to the creation of MLB.com, a joint entity that broadcasts games and streams them over the Internet and developed a dedicated baseball network that started in 2009. It is also the biggest source of MLB gear. These days, the Yankees
want
kids to wear their caps; and if they buy them online via MLB.com, all the teams get an equal portion of the proceeds.

Gossage waved at the staff and huddled with two broadcasters, Billy Sample and Harold Reynolds, both former major-leaguers. They swapped anecdotes while the agents, BlackBerries in hand, gathered in a nearby conference room and fielded offers and business opportunities. Before his election, Gossage’s speaking fee had been between $7,500 and $10,000. Andrew Levy, Gossage’s agent, was hearing new numbers now. “Goose is getting offers that are triple his rate,” he told me happily, between calls. “Twenty, twenty-five thousand. For the first year at least, everything will triple.”

Jeff Idelson’s phone rang. Jim Rice was on the line. Rice almost got in this year, and he was now entering his final year of eligibility. “Damn, buddy, fuck this,” Gossage told him encouragingly. “You’ll make it next year for sure.”

Gossage hung up and shook his head. “Rice ought to be in the damn Hall, and so should Bert Blyleven. Bert was
filthy
,” he said in admiration. “And I’ll tell you who else. Rickey Henderson. He’ll go in on the first ballot. He was the best leadoff hitter ever. Nobody even came close.”

Everyone nodded, even the agents. (Gossage was right, of course; Henderson and Rice were inducted in 2009.)

“But tell you what,” Gossage said. “I didn’t
like
his ass.”

Gossage finished an interview with MLB and headed for the Letterman show where he was scheduled to read a top-ten-reasons list of why he should be in the Hall of Fame. He shook hands with Sample and Reynolds and headed for the Escalade.

At the door, he paused with a final thought about Henderson.

“Tell you one thing about Rickey,” he said. “He was great, but I really hated that motherfucker.”

Even in this knowing age, many baseball fans don’t want to think about the monetary aspect of getting elected to the Hall of Fame. Virtue is supposed to be its own reward.

But like everything else in Major League Baseball, the Hall of Fame is a business opportunity. The days when Grover Cleveland Alexander ruefully said that you can’t eat a plaque are long gone.

There are four basic ways that retired baseball stars make post-career money: speaking engagements, memorabilia signings, products endorsements, and public relations gigs. An HoF after your name is a major economic-force multiplier for every one of them.

Not all Hall of Fame members are equally commercial. Tier one superstars—Willie Mays, Stan Musial, Hank Aaron, Sandy Koufax, Yogi Berra—will cash in with or without an HoF. But for the less obvious choices, it can be a life-changer.

“Take a guy like Robin Roberts,” an executive at Steiner Memorabilia in New York told me. “He had a great career, but it was a long time ago, and it wasn’t in a major market. But because he’s in the Hall, his annual baseball income, not counting his pension, is probably in the low six figures, counting his signings, his regional corporate gigs in Philadelphia, and what ever else. That’s not bad money.”

“Guys like Cal Ripken and Tony Gwynn, superstars who played not so long ago, had lots of speaking engagements before they got inducted,” says Jonathan Wexler of Playing Field Promotions, a Denver-based speaker and endorsement company. “But after making the Hall, their fees went up thirty to forty percent, and they were expensive to begin with. Gwynn was getting about thirty thousand dollars for a speech. Now it’ll be fifty. And he’ll have many, many more engagements.”

Gossage was closer to the Robin Roberts model than the Ripken/ Gwynn first tier. The Goose was a nine-time All-Star, but he also played for nine teams in his twenty-two-year career. Transcendent stars don’t usually move around that much.

Plus, Gossage was almost exclusively a relief pitcher. Only once in his career did he pitch more than two hundred innings in a season—for the White Sox in 1976
*
—and his record that year was 9–17 for the last-place Sox. It’s not that Gossage doesn’t belong in the Hall of Fame. It’s just that he doesn’t necessarily
have
to be there. Neither do Jim Bunning or Bill Mazeroski or quite a few other guys. Jim Bunning, for example, was a fine pitcher for the Tigers of my youth, and later on for the Phillies. But he wasn’t really much better than his 1963 Detroit teammate Mickey Lolich. Their careers were similar. Bunning pitched a no-hit game, but Lolich won 3 games in a World Series, a much rarer and more important achievement.

The difference was that Mickey Lolich was an overweight, happy-go-lucky guy who rode his motorcycle to Tiger Stadium and hung out with the fans. His motto was “The only thing running and exercising can do for you is make you healthy.” After he retired, he opened a donut shop in suburban Detroit, and he sometimes went into the kitchen to bake his own batches. Bunning was an intense, ambitious college graduate who retired from baseball at age thirty-nine, went home to Kentucky, and entered politics. When he was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1996, he was already a five-term Republican Congressman with an eye on the Senate. The Hall of Fame credential didn’t hurt him with Kentucky voters. And having a man on Capitol Hill was a lot better for baseball than having a guy in a donut shop in Detroit.
†

If Bunning’s induction stemmed at least partly from po litical interest in the establishment, the election of Bill Mazeroski was a labor of love, the result of a years-long push by a single fan named John T. Bird. Mazeroski was a second baseman for the Pittsburgh Pirates, a great fielder and an unassuming guy who averaged .260 at the plate. His great moment of glory came in the 1960 World Series, when his home run won the series for the Pirates. Beating the Yankees made him a working-class hero, but one great moment isn’t usually enough for immortality. If it were, Don Larsen and Bobby Thomson would be in Cooperstown.

The writers never took Mazeroski seriously. His BBWAA vote peaked at 42.3 percent in 1992. That was before John T. Bird came along.

“I grew up near Forbes Field,” Bird told me. “I loved watching Maz, and
I
thought he belonged in the Hall of Fame. One day I had an epiphany. I realized that if I didn’t do something, he would never get in.”

Bird is a literary gent, a Dartmouth graduate who now lives in Birmingham, Alabama. At one time, he was Warren Buffett’s editor. He didn’t know Mazeroski or anyone in baseball. For an outsider like him to be taken seriously, he would have to build a case.

Bird went to Cooperstown, sat in the library, and researched Maze-roski’s career. Then he traveled the country, interviewing old players who admired Maz. In 1995, he wrote and self-published
The Bill
Mazeroski Story
, a three-hundred-page brief for his candidate, and sent a copy to every committee member.

Bird used sabermetrics, and he got some top statistical historians to help him convince the electing public that Mazeroski was a good candidate—at least as good as his American League contemporary Nellie Fox of the White Sox, then seen as Maz’s biggest rival for induction. After Fox beat out Mazeroski in 1997, Bird stepped up the pressure with a four-minute campaign video he made at his own expense. He also traveled to Tampa, Florida, where the old fifteen-member Veterans Committee met, to lobby for his man.