Triumph and Tragedy in Mudville

by Stephen Jay Gould

  As much as traditional trade unionists may take heart from this success, special circumstances prohibit a translation into more conventional workplaces. We are, after all, speaking of a few hundred “workers” (major league players) in a market that brings in billions of dollars a year for the exercise of their talents. The average person in an office or on an assembly line simply cannot generate such resources for potential sharing. As Gene Orza, general counsel of the Players Association, once said to me: “Workers vs. bosses just can’t be the rhetoric any more. I would rather talk of playing capitalists vs. entrepreneurial capitalists.”

  I do not generally believe in “great man” theories of history, but I cannot think of a better case for the importance of a single person. The Players Association owes its success to good sense and good fortune in not hiring a management shill to lead a nascent association that would have become a company club (the previous history of players’ “unions”), but in bucking baseball’s “in-house” tradition and appointing Marvin Miller, lifelong trade union professional, chief economist for the United Steelworkers of America, and a brilliant, persistent, patient, and principled man (also an old Dodger fan from a Brooklyn boyhood).

  Miller, who created an effective union out of the Players Association and served as its executive director from the mid-sixties to the early eighties, has finally written his long-awaited account: A Whole Different Ball Game: The Sport and Business of Baseball. The jacket copy by the great announcer Red Barber (voice of the hated Bums and later the beloved Yanks in my youth) states with all the one-sided strength of the genre, but with undeniable justice and accuracy:

  When you speak of Babe Ruth, he is one of the two men, in my opinion, who changed baseball the most. He changed the construction of the game, the construction of bats as well as the ball. And the second most influential man in the history of baseball is Marvin Miller…. Miller formed the players’ union. And from the union we have free agency, we have arbitration. We have the entire structure of baseball changed—the entire relationship between the players and the owners.

  If we ask how such a radical change could occur so quickly, two factors stand out. (Though we should, following recent events in the former Soviet Union, recognize that complex systems, when they change at all, tend to transform by rupture rather than imperceptible evolution.) First, the new revenues of our TV culture provided a gargantuan pie to divide; no matter how much power players gained, they could not have achieved their current economic might from gate receipts. Second, players had to start very far down in order to rise so far—and we must ask why they were so oppressed (or, rather, “underempowered,” if oppressed seems too strong a word for stars in the entertainment industry, whatever their exploitation).

  Why, then, did players have so little power in the pre-Miller era? Why were they so underpaid, so devoid of influence over their own lives and futures? Why could the owner’s pawn, first commissioner of baseball Kenesaw Mountain Landis, ban Shoeless Joe Jackson and the seven other Black Sox for life—without trial and without any hope of redress—after a court had dismissed charges against them of throwing the World Series? Why did the stigma stick so strongly, and permanently, to yield this, the most poignant of all baseball stories: Jackson ended up behind the counter of a liquor store in his native South Carolina. One day, more than thirty-five years after the Black Sox scandal, Ty Cobb stopped by. Cobb brought some bottles to the register, but Jackson just looked down, said nothing, and began to ring up the transaction. The puzzled Cobb exclaimed: “Joe, don’t you recognize me?” “Of course I do, Ty,” Jackson replied, “but I wasn’t sure you wanted to know me.” (Only Cobb and Rogers Hornsby had lifetime batting averages higher than Jackson’s. Cobb himself was widely suspected, probably correctly, of consorting with gamblers and occasionally throwing games.)

  Shoeless Joe Jackson, circa 1919. Credit: Corbis

  The reasons for this underempowerment are complex, but consider two intertwined aspects. Owners played an effective game of “divide and conquer” against a group of mostly young and uneducated players (Rube, the nickname of so many early players, reflected a common background). Hardly any of the early players went to college and few finished high school. Baseball, for all the mythological hyping, really took root as a people’s sport in America, while football remained a minor pastime for a collegiate elite. Owners nipped any fledgling attempts at organization among players by providing a few paternalistic scraps and then invoking the same bogeymen that stalled unionization in more fertile fields of factories and mines—“not real baseball people,” “trying to undermine the game,” “radicals,” “outside agitators.” A grizzled miner with twenty years in the pits, a huge debt at the company store, and thousands of compatriots might see through the bluff; an eighteen-year-old farmboy, with no one to represent him and only a few hundred colleagues, might never think of mounting a challenge. Moreover, owners had great success in invoking the hoary and elaborate mythology of baseball as a “game” and a “national pastime”—the same line that the Supreme Court has bought three times. “How can you even raise a question about salaries?” owners would intone: “Where else could a person actually get paid for playing a game? Thank your lucky stars, shut up, play, and don’t complain.” The ruse worked for nearly one hundred years.

  This interplay of baseball’s sporting mythology and its commercial reality fascinates me more than anything else about the game as a social phenomenon in America. Each year’s flood of baseball books can be neatly partitioned into these two basic categories. I shall call them H-mode and Q-mode, for hagiographical and quotidian reality. Such a division seems especially well marked in this season of anniversaries. Miller tells us that he chose this year to publish (in Q-mode) because he wished to launch his book on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the founding of the Players Association in 1966. As for the H-mode, you would have to live in the same hole previously mentioned not to know that 1991 is the fiftieth anniversary for the greatest achievements of two baseball saints—Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak and Ted Williams’s .406 batting average (no one has exceeded .390 since then). The New York Times has run a box in every issue this season detailing Joe and Ted’s daily accomplishments in 1941. President Bush invited DiMaggio and Williams to the White House on July 9, and then flew them, with baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, up to Toronto aboard Air Force 1 to take in the sixty-second All-Star Game. Bush, who had entertained Elizabeth II in Washington just a few days before, stated: “I didn’t think I’d get to meet royalty so soon after the queen’s visit.”

  I will therefore devote this year’s World Series–time review of baseball books to a contrast of the H-and Q-modes, in particular to a comparison of Miller’s anniversary with books devoted to three milestones in the hagiographical tradition—the story of a career (Ted Williams on the fiftieth anniversary of his greatest achievement), a season (Mickey Mantle’s favorite 1956 campaign on its thirty-fifth anniversary), and even of an incident (Bobby Thomson’s most famous of all home runs, on the fortieth anniversary of its few-second trajectory from bat to the left-field seats). (The mills of the gods may grind exceedingly fine but the microscope of hagiography probes even more minutely.) I may also cite another, and more immediate, reason for choosing to contrast Miller’s book with three different representatives of the hagiographical tradition. The existence of the myth—particularly its unfair, but clever exploitation by owners—made Marvin Miller necessary.

  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:

  Don’t think for a moment that any player is under the slightest illusion that, in any absolute sense, his performance is worth the money he receives. The point is that we are members of the entertainment industry, a particularly crazy enterprise. What we do generates this money, primarily through TV and radio contracts. Either we get it or the owners get it; and since we are doin
g the playing, we might as well get our fair share.

  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.