Cooperstown Confidential (17 page)

And one recalls the appropriate reference to the “World Serious,” attributed
to Ring Lardner, Sr.; Ernest L. Thayer’s “Casey at the Bat”; the
ring of “Tinker to Evers to Chance”; and all the other happenings, habits,
and superstitions about and around baseball that made it the “national
pastime” or, depending upon the point of view, “the great American
tragedy.”

Even leaving aside the misspellings (“Comiske”) and Black-mun’s omission of the racial integration of baseball in his chronicle of the game’s notable “happenings,” this was a bizarre note to strike in the most powerful courtroom in the world. Some of the concurring justices dissociated themselves from Blackmun’s preface. Thurgood Marshall, the Court’s only African-American, reportedly demanded a new, more diverse preface. As for the decision itself, it was clear: the reserve clause would stand. Once more, the U.S. Supreme Court had proven unwilling to subject Major League Baseball to the rule of law.

The court of public opinion, though, ruled in favor of Flood. Major League Baseball couldn’t continue to argue that its players had no rights and were merely chattel property. In 1975, it dropped the reserve clause and promptly turned its players into millionaires.

Flood himself didn’t gain much. He was branded a traitor and a radical by the owners, and ostracized from the game.

The Veterans Committee was invented for a man like Curt Flood, whose contribution can best be appreciated in the fullness of time. In 2007, the committee had eighty-four members, a majority of whom were Hall of Fame players. Some of them were multimillionaires because of Flood’s courage. They gave him exactly fourteen votes.

In 1972, Marvin Miller led the players out on strike over pension benefits, and the baseball establishment was scandalized. Cards owner Gussie Busch told the press that the owners were unanimous. “We’re not going to give them a goddamn cent. If they want to strike, let them strike.” “Walter O’Malley, the owner of the Dodgers, called me a ‘little Jewboy from Brooklyn,’ ” Miller recalled with a smile.

A few baseball journalists like Red Smith and Leonard Koppett supported the strike, but most took the side of management. The
Sporting News,
which represented the BBWAA consensus, had opposed the integration of the game in 1947. Now its editor, C. C. Johnson Spink, called the players’ labor action “the darkest day in sports history.” Spink added that “the whole idea of pensions for major league players may have been a mistake growing out of a misconception over what constitutes a career.”

In the cities where major-league baseball was played, journalists, including the baseball journalists, were themselves members of the guild, and sometimes went out on strike. But the idea that baseball players had the same rights struck the traditionalists (which included nearly all of the writers) as subversive, even sacrilegious.

The players went out for thirteen days. Eighty-six games were cancelled. The own ers lost about $5 million, the players around $600,000. The strike was settled more or less on the union’s terms, but its significance was greater than money: it marked the first time the players had taken on the owners and won.

The balance of power was permanently tipped. Miller established the principle of arbitration, which undermined the reserve clause and brought about free agency. Players were now able to negotiate and sign with the highest bidder. The average baseball salary had, by 1979, reached $113,558—more than five times what it had been when Miller started.

In 1981, the owners demanded that a team which lost a free agent be compensated by the signing team. This was an obvious effort to undermine free agency and the players struck again, this time for more than six weeks. A third of the season was lost. A compromise was finally reached, and Miller called it the players’ finest hour. “Unlike in 1972, almost all the players had nothing to gain,” he told an interviewer. “They were striking for free agency rights for players to come.”

Miller had taken a collection of unsophisticated, often suspicious jocks and molded them into a real union.

Miller retired in 1983, but he remained a powerful figure in the union. When the owners attempted to roll back salaries through collusion, Miller was the lead witness for the players. Three lawsuits in the eighties cost the owners upward of $280 million. Some of the teams were barely able to make their payments. It was a terrible financial blow, and it left the baseball establishment furious at Marvin Miller.
*

A Hall of Fame vote was coming up at the end of 2007, and there had been a lot of speculation that Miller would be selected by the Veterans Committee. “People call up and tell me I’m a sure thing, and it makes me laugh,” he said. “I’m not going to be chosen. The people who run Cooperstown still haven’t forgiven me.”

I found this hard to believe, and politely said so. Miller had been retired for twenty-five years. Sure, he had cost baseball teams a lot of money, but the game was now more profitable than ever. Yes, own ers and traditionalists had hated Miller’s guts in the old days, but he was a living legend now. How long could they hold a grudge?

“I’ll tell you a story,” Miller said. “The year before Roberto Clemente died, he contacted me. He was negotiating with Joe Brown, the Pirates general manager, and Roberto was asking for a very large percentage of the money in deferred payments. He had a premonition that he would die young, and he wanted to make sure his family would be taken care of.

“I asked Roberto how much interest the Pirates were offering on the deferred money. He said that Joe Brown hadn’t mentioned any interest on the deferred payments. In other words, the team would hold and use Clemente’s money for free.

“The next time I saw Roberto he told me, ‘Boy, was Joe Brown mad when I asked him for interest on my money. He wanted to know where I had heard about interest. I told him I talked to you.’ ”

“What does that have to do with the Hall of Fame?” I asked.

Miller gave me an indulgent smile. “For twenty years, Joe Brown was chairman of the committee that picked Hall of Fame executives. His deputy was Bob Broeg, a St. Louis baseball writer who was viciously anti union and wrote that the only way I’d get into the Hall of Fame was through the janitors’ entrance. They didn’t even allow my name on the ballot. I was told by a member of the committee that Brown and Broeg had refused to even put me on the ballot. They said I didn’t qualify as a baseball executive.”

“Well,” I said, “that might explain why you didn’t get in before, but Brown and Broeg aren’t there any more. Right?”

“There are twelve members of the committee, and to get elected you need nine votes,” Miller said. “Seven of the twelve are former management people. Don’t worry, I’m not going to be elected. I’m retired, but I haven’t forgotten how to count votes.”
*

I left Miller’s apartment that day feeling happy to have met him, but a little sad, too. The man had been a great visionary in his time, but now he was living in the past, imaging that he was haunted by the ghosts of long-dead enemies. I decided I’d call him after the election to congratulate him. When I got to the car, I opened my date book, to write myself a reminder, and saw the note I had written for that morning’s interview: “Marvin Miller. 10:00.”

On December 3, 2007, the Hall of Fame announced the members of the class of 2008. Three executives were selected: Barney Drey-fuss, who owned the Pirates between 1901 and 1932; Walter O’Malley; and former commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Ewing Kauffman came in fourth. John Fetzer came in fifth. Miller finished in a tie for sixth with Bob Howsam. He got three votes.

Fay Vincent, a former commissioner of baseball who had his own battles with Miller, wrote, “The members of the committee that elected Bowie Kuhn and passed on Marvin Miller should be ashamed . . . they almost surely believe that Miller and the union won the war, but they refuse him the honor of victory. This is a set of actions by little men making small minded decisions. Electing Kuhn and Miller together might have been a tolerable result. But electing Kuhn alone is intolerable . . . These are old men trying to turn back time, to reverse what has happened. Theirs is an act of ignorance and bias. I am ashamed for them. I am ashamed that they represent our game.”

Vincent spoke for most of the serious baseball thinkers in the country; choosing Kuhn and not Miller was like putting Custer in the Little Bighorn Hall of Fame instead of Sitting Bull. Miller dismissed it as “degrading,” and baseball experts agreed.

Jane Forbes Clark, however, begged to differ. “There was no concerted effort other than to have very qualified committee members evaluate very qualified candidates,” she said in a press statement. “There was a very open and frank discussion about each of the candidates. Everyone on that committee knows Marvin and respects what he did for the game. And that showed in the discussions.” And in their vote.

When I next saw Miller, shortly after the result was announced, he didn’t remind me that he had forecast the outcome. He would have preferred to be wrong. It would have been a thrill for him to belong to the same club as Dazzy Vance. But Marvin is a realist. A few people had tried to console him with the thought that he would get in next time, but he wasn’t having any of that. In May, he wrote a letter to Jack O’Connell, the secretary of the BBWAA and one of the chief coat-holders of the Hall of Fame establishment:

Dear Mr. O’Connell,

Paradoxically, I’m writing to thank you and your associates for your
part in nominating me for Hall of Fame consideration, and, at the same
time, to ask that you not do this again. The anti-union bias of the powers
who control the Hall has consistently prevented recognition of the
historic significance of the changes to baseball brought about by collective
bargaining.

As former Executive Director (retired since 1983) of the Players’ Union
that negotiated these changes, I find myself unwilling to contemplate one
more rigged Veterans Committee whose members are hand picked to reach
a particular outcome while offering the pretense of a democratic vote. It is
an insult to baseball fans, historians, sports writers and especially to those
baseball players who sacrificed and brought the game into the 21st century.
At the age of 91 I can do without farce.

Sincerely,

Marvin J. Miller

In his introduction to Marvin Miller’s book
A Whole Different Ball-game,
Bill James wrote, “If baseball ever buys itself a mountain and starts carving faces on it, one of the first men to go up is sure to be Marvin Miller.” But, as usual, who gets remembered depends on who owns the mountain.

* And for good reason. The spirit of those judgments hovers over Barry Bonds’s collusion case.

* The committee, appointed by the Hall, included two former players: Harmon Killebrew, who works for the Twins as a broadcaster, and Monte Irvin, a long-time associate of Bowie Kuhn. Executives were Bobby Brown, former president of the American League; John Harrington of the Red Sox, with whom Miller tangled over the free agency of Carlton Fisk; Bill Giles and Andy MacPhail, Miller’s adversaries in the collusion cases of the 1980s; David Glass of the Kansas City Royals (a se nior executive of Wal-Mart); Jerry Bell of the Twins and Bill DeWitt of the Cards; and baseball writers Paul Hagen, Rick Hummel, and Hal McCoy.

NINE . . .
Lost in Translation

I
n 2002, the Hall of Fame museum launched its first traveling exhibit, “Baseball as America.” More than five hundred baseball relics, many of which had never left Cooperstown, were dispatched on a four-year run to fifteen museums around the United States. They included an 1860 lithograph of Abraham Lincoln playing baseball; a picture of A. G. Spalding’s world-touring all-star team arrayed on the face of the Sphinx; and the first known photograph of a women’s team, the Vassar College Resolutes, circa 1876. There was also a recording of Roy Campanella, Phil Rizzuto, and other stars of the fifties singing “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” a copy of Ted Williams’s 1966 Induction Speech on the need to put Negro leaguers into Cooperstown, Andy Warhol’s painting of Tom Seaver, and a host of other trea sures.

The mission statement of the exhibit was clear. “Baseball as America,” as ambassador for the museum in Cooperstown, was mounted to celebrate “enduring American values of freedom, patriotism, opportunity and ingenuity.”

These are great values, but they don’t always go together. When the Hall took up the issue of Hispanic baseball, “freedom and patriotism” crashed rudely into “opportunity and initiative,” and it cost Dale Petrosky his job.

Petrosky was the president of the Hall of Fame, but he wasn’t one of the monks. He came to Cooperstown in July 1999 from an executive job with the National Geographic Society. His background was po-liti cal: he had served as a deputy spokesman in the second Reagan administration.

Petrosky, in his early fifties, looks like a local TV anchorman and carries himself with the wholesome self-assurance of the suburban high-school quarterback he once was. He didn’t have any par ticular background in baseball (although, on the plus side, he is a Tigers fan); presumably Jane Forbes Clark hired him for his administrative and fund-raising abilities. It didn’t hurt that Petrosky, like Clark, was a Republican. America was changing, and the Hall had to change with it—the decision to induct seventeen Negro-leagues players was an example of that change—but there was no point in getting carried away. Petrosky was the sort of man who could be counted on to protect Clark family values. Or so she thought.

In 2003, Petrosky caused a stir when he disinvited actor Tim Robbins from a Cooperstown event honoring the fifteenth anniversary of the baseball film
Bull Durham.
Robbins had been an outspoken critic of the war in Iraq; Petrosky’s letter to him, which soon became public, noted, “Public figures, such as you, have platforms much larger than the average American’s, which provides you an extra-ordinary opportunity to have your views heard—and an equally large obligation to act and speak responsibly. We believe your very public criticism of President Bush at this important—and sensitive—time in our nation’s history helps undermine the U.S. position, which ultimately could put our troops in even more danger. As an institution, we stand behind our President and our troops in this conflict.”

Robbins responded with a letter of his own: “I’m sorry that you have chosen to use baseball and your position at the Hall of Fame to make a politi cal statement. I know there are many baseball fans that disagree with you, and even more that will react with disgust to realize baseball is being politicized.”

It turned out to be a public relations disaster. Petrosky wrote an apology to Robbins. “I wish I had a do-over on that one,” he told me ruefully. It was a manful per formance, but nobody who knows the Hall of Fame believed that Petrosky had stiffed Tim Robbins on his own. Insiders conjecture that such a letter could not have been sent without the approval of June Forbes Clark.
*

Just about the time Dale Petrosky arrived in Cooperstown, the Hispanic Heritage Baseball Museum was founded in San Francisco. The Hall did not want a repeat of its racial fiascos. Hispanics were rapidly becoming the largest ethnic group in America, and many were huge baseball fans. It seemed essential to connect to them—without, of course, losing the traditional American values and ideals of the Hall of Fame.

Baseball first came to Latin America in 1866, when a Cuban named Nemesio Guilló returned from his studies in the U.S. with a bat and ball and founded the first team in Havana. Within a decade, skilled Cuban players were looking for work on American diamonds. Among the Hall of Fame’s most trea sured possessions is a baseball used in an 1871 contest between the New York Mutuals and the Troy Haymakers of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players. Esteban Bellán, the first Hispanic in professional baseball, played third base in that game. There have been Latino players ever since. The first such major-league star was pitcher Adolfo Luque, who broke in with the Miracle Braves in 1914 and compiled a 194– 179 record in twenty National League seasons. Luque was light-skinned enough to be given the benefit of the doubt in the Jim Crow era. So were forty or so other Cubans who played in the majors before integration. They got called “Cuban Niggers” by fans and bench jockeys, but they benefited from the Desi Arnaz Exception: straight hair and pale skin could make a Cuban racially acceptable, even as the husband of the red-headed Lucille Ball.

The racial integration of baseball opened the door for darker-skinned Cubans. In 1949, the definitely black Orestes “Minnie” Mi-noso signed with the Cleveland Indians. He was already in his mid-twenties, a star for the New York Cubans in the Negro leagues.
*
Goose Tatum, the great Harlem Globetrotters star, played baseball with Minoso and brought him to the attention of Globetrotters own er Abe Saperstein. Saperstein, in turn, brought Minoso to his fellow super-promoter Bill Veeck of the Cleveland Indians, who signed him shortly thereafter, and then hired him again when he moved to the Chicago White Sox in 1951.

Minoso has a special place in the hearts of Hispanic players. “Minnie Minoso is to Latin players what Jackie Robinson is to black ballplayers,” writes Orlando Cepeda in his autobiography,
Baby
Bull
. “As much as I love Roberto Clemente and cherish his memory, Minnie is the one who made it possible for all of us Latins. Before Roberto Clemente, before Vic Power, before Orlando Cepeda, there was Minnie Minoso . . . He was the first Latin player to become a superstar.”

Minoso was, unlike most American Leaguers of the stolid fifties, an exciting player. Three times he led the league in steals and in triples. Perhaps as a result, he was the perennial leader in getting hit by pitches. He was also a good outfielder who won three Gold Gloves. And he was a lifetime .298 hitter.

Minoso cut a flamboyant figure in Chicago and around the American League. He drove a green Cadillac, sported diamond rings and wide-brimmed hats (his nickname was “El Charro Negro,” the black cowboy), and was known as a soft touch. Minoso was married, but he wasn’t a fanatic about it. On the other hand, he was cautious. Unlike his fellow Latino All-Star Vic Power, he didn’t flaunt relationships with white women. The writers approved of that, and when he got hit with a paternity suit by an African-American waitress in Chicago, they kept it out of the papers.

Minoso led the way for an influx of Spanish-speaking players. Like Minoso, many were furnished by their teams with American names. Roberto “Beto”Avila, a Mexican who led the American League in batting average in 1954, was christened Bobby. Antonio Oliva Lopez Her-nandes Javique became Tony Oliva. Vic Power started out as Victor Pellot. And Roberto Clemente’s early baseball cards identified him as Bob Clemente. Ted Williams didn’t need renaming, because nobody had the slightest idea that he had a Mexican-American mother and a whole family of Spanish-speaking relatives back on the West Coast.
*

After Fidel Castro came to power in 1959, Cuba became inaccessible as a source of major-league talent. It was replaced by Puerto Rico, Mexico, Panama, Venezuela, the Dominican Republic, and other countries that produced stars like Cincinnati Reds shortstop Davey Concepcion, Pirates catcher Manny Sanguillen, and Dodgers pitcher Fernando Valenzuela. Then, in the mid-eighties, baseball experienced a great wave of Latino excellence that continues to roll in today. First came Rafael Palmeiro and Jose Canseco, followed by Roberto Alomar, Omar Vizquel, Juan Gonzalez, and Sammy Sosa. Within a decade, they were followed by Vinny Castilla, Bernie Williams, Ivan Rodriguez, Pedro Martinez, Manny Ramirez, Carlos Delgado, Alex Rodriguez, Mariano Rivera, Edgar Renteria, Nomar Garciaparra, Vladimir Guerrero, Magglio Ordonez, Miguel Tejada, Carlos Guillen, Carlos Beltran, Alfonso Soriano, and Albert Pujols. This was an explosion of ethnic talent unequaled since the arrival of Mays, Aaron, Robinson, and the other black superstars of the post-integration years.

For more than a hundred years, baseball was the American Game. Teachers from the U.S. brought it to their students in Tokyo in the 1870s. After a stay in the U.S., Cuban Nemesio Guilló founded the first team in Havana in 1866. In 1887–88, A. G. Spalding took a professional squad around the world. Babe Ruth barnstormed Japan with a team of major-leaguers in 1934. (The trip, billed as a goodwill tour, was a short-term success, but it was also a lesson in the limitations of international public relations; seven years later, the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor.) The United States was an exporter of baseball and baseball players to the Cuban and Carib-be an winter leagues, Mexico, and Japan.

But by the start of the twenty-first century, America had become an importer of talent. In 2006, the first World Baseball Classic was held, pitting national teams against one another. The U.S. sent its best players, and lost to Mexico in the second round. Japan beat Cuba for the gold. The spin was that the Americans weren’t really in game shape, but the results demonstrated what many in the U.S. had feared for years: American-born baseball players were no longer necessarily the best in the world.

Some Americans have found this disconcerting. It seemed like a reversal of the natural order, an echo of what happened back when Honda and Toyota started beating Ford and General Motors. In the summer of 2007, CBS commentator and syndicated columnist Andy Rooney put it into words: “I know all about Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig, but today’s baseball stars are all guys named Rodriguez to me. They’re apparently very good, but they haven’t caught my interest.”
*

The BBWAA doesn’t publish demographic information on its members (actually, it doesn’t publish a list of members, period), but the best estimate is that no more than 3 percent are Hispanic. Most writers no longer quote Latinos in pidgin English, as was customary a generation ago, or make mocking remarks about the imagined characteristics of Hispanics. But the same demographic and cultural gap that frustrated Roberto Clemente and other Latinos forty years ago still exists, and it very much affects the reputations of foreign players.

There were baseball writers who believed Latino players were bringing more than foreign-sounding names to the game. In 2006,
Newsweek
reported that eight of the twelve major-league players who tested positive for ste roids in the previous season were Hispanic, and that half the positives in the minors were Latinos (the magazine didn’t mention that about half the
players
in the minors were Latinos, too). “The data raise a troubling possibility that few in baseball would like to address head on: are players from Latin America simply too driven to succeed?”

The
New York Times
sent a reporter to the Dominican Republic and found that anabolic ste roids were readily available there without a prescription. “Strength coaches in the major leagues say players often obtain ste roids while playing winter ball in Latin America.

“Young ballplayers at San Pedro de Macorís, a town that has produced many major league players, said it was common to find aspiring baseball players shooting up ste roids. Some Dominican players said their colleagues who used ste roids have often resorted to veterinary drugs, which are even easier to obtain.”

The self-proclaimed “godfather of steroids,” Jose Canseco, is a Cuban-American whose best-selling book
Juiced
made his name virtually synonymous with performance-enhancing drugs. Canseco has admitted to introducing steroids to at least two all-American heroes—Mark McGwire and Roger Clemens—and has, in his opinion, been demonized for it. “I remember one time Harmon Killebrew was doing commentary for a game between the A’s and the Twins,” he writes. “When I came to bat he said: ‘I saw Canseco in the minor leagues and I’ve never seen a player change so much so drastically.’ What a joke. How about Mark McGwire? He went through an even more dramatic change than I did . . . But nobody ever cared what McGwire was doing.” Canseco’s conclusion is that McGwire got a pass because he was an Anglo.

Canseco isn’t the only Hispanic ballplayer who suspects that there is a certain amount of nativist sentiment behind reports of the Latino Connection. In the summer of 2007, Chicago White Sox manager Ozzie Guillen complained about it to the Associated Press. “I meet with, like, five people [investigating ste roids in baseball]. The only thing that made me upset was they tried to mention too many Latino players. I think they try to put Latinos to be the bad cloud in this thing . . . everything they asked [was] ‘Do you ever see this in Venezuela?’

“They were like, ‘You never see any of the players bring this thing to the States?’ ” Guillen said. “I said, ‘Wait a second, BALCO is not [in] Venezuela, is not [in] Puerto Rico, is not Dominican, is not [in] Mexico. BALCO is in California. Then why do you keep blaming players from Latin America for the problem that we have in the States?’ ”

It wasn’t just old grouches like Andy Rooney and suspicious reporters who had a problem with the Latino invasion: a lot of African-Americans nodded in agreement with Gary Sheffield’s observation that baseball was using Hispanics as cheap replacement players.
New
York Times
columnist William C. Rhoden wrote, “At a time when immigration is a searing topic, Sheffield raised a crucial issue about a delicate subject: the competition for jobs between African-American and Latino players in Major League Baseball.”