The Lords of the Realm Read online

  “ENLIGHTENING AND

  PROVOCATIVE.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A MUST-READ FOR BASEBALL FANS and for anyone who would like to know how the very wealthy and the very ambitious manage the business of America’s national pastime … Helyar takes us inside the most intimate meetings at some of the most crucial moments in baseball history.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “A LUCID, COMPELLING ECONOMIC HISTORY OF THE GAME … A labyrinthine tale fueled by money and driven by a zany cast of characters that only baseball seems able to produce … Helyar not only covers a lot of ground, but, more important, he places all of the events and people into a coherent context.”

  —Booklist

  “ONE OF THE MOST ENTERTAINING SPORTS BOOKS OF THE YEAR. [Helyar] deftly weaves the financial facts with in-depth and entrancing profiles of many major league owners.… [His] investigative skills make the book informative, while his sincere interest in the sport allows even the casual fan to read this work with great enjoyment.… Captivating and insightful … Highly recommended.”

  —Library Journal

  Also by John Helyar:

  BARBARIANS AT THE GATE (with Bryan Burrough)

  Copyright © 1994 by John Helyar

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

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 93-41944

  eISBN: 978-0-307-80142-5

  This edition published by arrangement with Villard Books, a division of Random House, Inc. Villard Books is a registered trademark of Random House, Inc.

  v3.1_r1

  To Betsy and Johnny

  and in memory of Daisie Helyar

  “The magnate must be a strong man among strong men, else other club owners in the league will combine in their own interests against him and his interest, and by collusion force him out of the game.”

  —A. G. SPALDING,

  Chicago National League owner, 1890

  “The great trouble with baseball today is that most of the players are in the game for the money that’s in it—not for the love of it, the excitement of it, the thrill of it.”

  —TY COBB, 1925

  “Baseball was made for kids, and grown-ups only screw it up.”

  —BOB FELLER, pitcher

  “You go through The Sporting News for the last one hundred years, and you will find two things are always true. You never have enough pitching, and nobody ever made money.”

  —DONALD FEHR, executive director,

  Major League Baseball Players Association

  “Gentlemen, we have the only legal monopoly in the country and we’re fucking it up.”

  —TED TURNER, owner, Atlanta Braves

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Acknowledgments

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Acknowledgments

  This book has its origins on a summer night in 1960, when my father took me to my first baseball game. It was at Fenway Park; Ted Williams got a double; I was hooked.

  Baseball has since given me some of life’s best moments (the Impossible Dream Red Sox of 1967) and its worst (the impossible agony of the ball going through Buckner’s legs). As a college student, I minored in baseball, in the Fenway bleachers. As an adult, I’ve spent a glorious week at Grapefruit League exhibition games with the same set of friends every year since 1981.

  As an adult, too, I sometimes wondered whether there was some strange law of compensation at work in baseball. Why was the grace of the game between the lines so precisely matched by the gracelessness of its off-field conduct?

  The Wall Street Journal gave me the opportunity to find out. Norman Pearlstine lured me back to the newspaper in 1990 by offering me a beat covering the business of sports. I did several stories on baseball, and one in particular led to this book. I looked into what really happened during a three-year period when the owners froze the free-agent market.

  What I found was less a price-fixing conspiracy than a fascinating group-dynamics study. It was a reaction to years of wrenching change in baseball and an effort by the owners to seize back control from the players. I found I couldn’t examine the “collusion” era of 1985–1988 without understanding the events of the previous two decades. That was what provided the genesis of this book, a study of this quintessential American institution in transition.

  I appreciate the support of Barney Calarne, my boss, and Paul Steiger, the Journal’s managing editor and leading baseball savant. They allowed me to expend considerable time and column inches to tell a very old story, by daily-newspaper standards. My thanks as well to Norm Pearlstine, who hardly oversold the possibilities of the sports beat.

  I give my agent, Andrew Wylie, a world of credit for being the first to see the possibilities of a baseball book, and his colleague Deborah Karl a large measure of gratitude for aid and comfort along the way. At Villard Books, my thanks go to Diane Reverand, who brought this book into the world, and Peter Gethers, whose belief in the project and baseball knowledge sustained and improved it.

  This book is primarily based on interviews with more than two hundred people in the baseball business, many of whom I interviewed multiple times. Space permits me to acknowledge just a fraction of them, but my thanks go to all for sharing their memories and insights and especially to the following:

  Buzzie Bavasi, Peter Bavasi, Bob Boone, Charles Bronfman, Jim Bronner, Bryan Burns, Ruly Carpenter, Bob Costello, Doug DeCinces, Don Fehr, Steve Fehr, Ed Fitzgerald, John Gaherin, Phil Garner, Bill Giles, Bob Gilhooley, Ray Grebey, Clark Griffith, Sandy Hadden, Randy Hendricks, Lou Hoynes, Bob Howsam, Larry Lucchino, Andy MacPhail, Lee MacPhail, Tim McCarver, Joe McIlvaine, John McMullen, Andy Messersmith, Ken Moffett, Dick Moss, Chuck O’Connor, Gene Orza, Dick Ravitch, Tom and Sam Reich, Jerry Reinsdorf, Lauren Rich, Robin Roberts, Barry Rona, Ken Schanzer, Bud Selig, Ted Simmons, Tal Smith, Jeff Smulyan, Joe Torre, Tom Villante, Dick Wagner, and Bill White.

  In addition, Rich Levin and Jim Small of the commissioner’s office kept extending me credentials and other courtesies despite my persistent failure to give them adequate notice.

  A number of books were also essential resources for me, topped by Marvin Miller’s A Whole Different Ballgame and Bowie Kuhn’s Hardball. Despite their sharp difference and taken as complementary perspectives, they were useful primers on the baseball business. I am grateful to Marvin Miller in particular for elaborating at length on certain events, despite having only recently covered the territory in his memoirs.

  I drew on the treasure trove of Dodgers literature to assist in my portrayals of Walter O’Malley, Branch Rickey, and Larry MacPhail. Of most note were Bums by Peter Golenbock; The Lords of Baseball by Harold Parrott; Rickey & Robi
nson by Harvey Frommer; The Roaring Redhead by Don Warfield; The Dodgers Move West by Neil J. Sullivan; and The Boys of Summer by Roger Kahn.

  Some fine biographies aided other parts of the book, including The Man to See (Edward Bennett Williams) by Evan Thomas; Collision at Home Plate (Bart Giamatti) by James Reston, Jr.; and Under the Influence (Gussie Busch) by Peter Hernon and Terry Ganey. Three books were helpful in portraying the early Ted Turner: Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way by Christian Williams; Ted Turner: The Man Behind the Mouth by Roger Vaughan; and We Could’ve Finished Last Without You by Bob Hope.

  The memoirs of several players—Don Baylor, Curt Flood, Catfish Hunter, Reggie Jackson, and Dave Winfield—proved useful in presenting various events of the past twenty-five years. So did the trilogies of historians Harold Seymour and David Voigt in describing baseball’s early days. Lee Lowenfish’s The Imperfect Diamond provided a good historical perspective on baseball’s labor relations.

  Only a brave few baseball-beat writers have well chronicled the business side, and their contemporaneous accounts of events proved most helpful. Murray Chass of the New York Times did terrific blow-by-blow reportage of all the major labor confrontations described herein. Jerome Holtzman’s year-in-review pieces in The Sporting News Guides of the 1960s and 1970s proved reliable and repeatedly useful. Tim Wendel of USA Today’s Baseball Weekly gave me a wonderful eyewitness account of events at the Kohler, Wisconsin, revenue-sharing summit. And I would be remiss not to mention the late Dick Young, who coined the term The Lords of Baseball.

  I was aided, along the way, by several good souls who read the manuscript while in progress and offered helpful suggestions: Bryan Burrough, my onetime collaborator and invaluable sounding board; John Huey, who demanded to look at new chapters and drove me on; Bill Gannett, my friend and longtime baseball companion; and Betsy Morris, my wife, my most demanding reader, and my dogged protector during the project’s final harried months. Special thanks also to Deborah Hannula, who kept my son at bay and our house in order while I was holed up on this project.

  The contributions of all of the above have shaped this book. Any of its deficiencies are mine alone.

  —JOHN HELYAR

  Atlanta

  November 1993

  1

  BEFORE IT WAS ever a business it was a game.

  It came out of the 1840s, when teams from New York first crossed the Hudson River to Elysian Fields, laid out a diamond, agreed upon the rules, and played a game they called “base,” later lengthened to “baseball.”

  It grew in the 1850s and 1860s, but it remained a gentleman’s sport. Teams rode to their games in decorated carriages, singing their team songs. In country greens and city parks, thousands of young men played. It became too popular to remain amateur for long, in the young entrepreneurial nation.

  In 1871, the first league was formed of teams who played for pay. It was called the National Association of Professional Baseball Players, and it was a slapdash thing. Over its five-year life, teams came and went with dizzying rapidity—twenty-five of them in all. So did players. The best ones, called “revolvers,” jumped around between teams for the best offer.

  But if it wasn’t a stable business, it was well on its way to becoming the national pastime.

  “Like everything else American it came with a rush,” wrote John Montgomery Ward, a star player of the day. “The game is suited to the national temperament. It requires strength, courage and skill; it is full of dash and excitement and though a most difficult game in which to excel, it is yet extremely simple in its first principles and easily understood by everyone.”

  The changing landscape of the country had much to do with baseball’s hold on America. As people moved from rural farms into urban tenements during the emerging Industrial Revolution, the game kept a nation in touch with its roots. Baseball was played on vast swatches of green in the middle of dreary, gray cities. Baseball celebrated the rugged individual within a team game. It came to be called the National Pastime, not just because it was played and watched by so many people but because it so resembled the national character.

  Albert Goodwill Spalding tried to export baseball to other countries. The owner of a team and of a sporting-goods empire, he saw vast worldwide sales of bats and balls. In 1888, he even sponsored a globe-trotting tour of exhibition games that visited Hawaii, Australia, Ceylon, Egypt, Italy, France, England, and Ireland. In one far-flung locale after another, America’s top players were watched with profound indifference. The game took root only in America.

  Like the pioneering country still being settled, this game valued both brute strength and daring ingenuity. It also countenanced a certain amount of cheating. Baseball was beautiful but tough, a sport not unlike the Chicago of Nelson Algren: “… where the bulls and the foxes live well and the lambs wind up head-down from the hook.”

  So too would baseball mirror the period’s epic struggles in commerce. Robber barons were coming to the fore and business was not polite. Disputes between labor and management were solved not by federal mediators but by Pinkerton thugs. Baseball would have its own early bare-knuckle fights for control of the game and business. Then the owners would seize it for a hundred years.

  In the same spring when Sitting Bull swept Custer at the Little Big Horn, the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs was created. The year was 1876, and the enterprise was better known as the National League. It ushered in a new way of doing business in baseball: a central office in New York and an aim to curb the chaos that afflicted the previous league.

  By 1879, its eight teams had developed a compact. At season’s end, each would “reserve” five players, making them off-limits to any other team. The players were not told about this agreement. They’d simply discover that they couldn’t catch on with any but their own team.

  Thus the “reserve clause” was born, and the original was only a modest version. When another “major league,” the American Association, began in the early 1880s, the compact was extended to them and the annual “reserve list” grew to eleven players. It was on its way to encompassing every player.

  The first recorded owner’s wail over salaries came in 1881. “Professional baseball is on the wane,” declared Albert Spalding, owner of Chicago’s National League team. “Salaries must come down or the interest of the public must be increased in some way. If one or the other does not happen, bankruptcy stares every team in the face.”

  The first recorded salary cap came in 1889. The owners set top pay at $2,500, with a tiered pay scale ranging downward from there. The lowest classified players would have to sweep up the ballpark or take tickets.

  The Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players, a union formed in 1885, rebelled against the pay scale and the cap. It formed the Players National League, to begin play in 1890.

  “There was a time when the League [that is, the original National League] stood for integrity and fair dealing; today it stands for dollars and cents,” said John Montgomery Ward, the star player and union president. “Players have been bought, sold and exchanged as though they were sheep instead of American citizens.”

  Noble words, but the Players League lasted just one season. When the American Association went out of business too, the National League had the majors all to itself. It would until the turn of the century.

  Then a man named Byron Bancroft Johnson, who was running a minor league in the Midwest, decided to capitalize on National League players’ discontent with their $2,500 salary cap. He unleashed the owners in his Western League to sign the major-leaguers, and they attracted more than a hundred, including star second baseman Napoleon Lajoie. Then they moved the franchises into bigger cities and renamed themselves the American League.

  They were soon outdrawing the National League. The new Boston Pilgrims, for instance, paid $4,000 to star third baseman Jimmy Collins to defect from the rival Boston Beaneaters. The Pilgrims picked up several other prominent National Leaguers, including Cy Young, from St. Louis.
With the legendary pitcher winning thirty-three games, the new team attracted 527,000 fans in 1901, more than double the Beaneaters’ draw.

  At a “peace meeting” in 1903, the two leagues agreed on an end to raiding, a common reserve system, and a single ruling National Commission. It would consist of the president of each league, plus a third member to be agreed upon by them.

  Baseball boomed in the early 1900s. From 1901 to 1909, the combined leagues more than doubled their attendance to 7.2 million. That growth closely tracked the rise of urban America. In 1900, 40 percent of the country’s population lived in cities; by 1910, 46 percent. In 1920, it would reach 50 percent. Increasingly, the centerpiece of those cities was their major league ballparks. Filled by 30,000 and more cheering fans, they created a sense of community for the newcomers—whether from abroad or from the countryside. From 1909 to 1913 alone, six classics came on line: Philadelphia’s Shibe Park, Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, Chicago’s Comiskey Park, Boston’s Fenway Park, and New York’s Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field.

  These great houses brought people together, in an age when cities had been splintered by industrialization and immigration. They created heroes for the waves of new immigrants, whose hopes and identities were wrapped up in players like Honus Wagner (for the Germans), Stan Coveleski (for the Poles), and Ping Bodie, born Francesco Stephano Pezzolo (for the Italians). Earlier, when Irish immigrants dominated baseball, stars like Mike “King” Kelly performed the same function.

  As baseball grew into a bigger commercial enterprise, money dominated headlines and the public consciousness. When pitcher Rube Marquard was a dud for the Giants, after being bought for a princely sum, he became known as “the eleven-thousand-dollar lemon.” A man named David Fultz, who had organized a new union called the Players Fraternity, spent much of his time disputing stories about overpaid players. Some of them didn’t even make $1,000, he pointed out.