Beyond these failed attempts to organize against the reserve clause, players’ struggles against the rule were conducted piecemeal, mostly by individual players who made futile attempts to hold out for better contract terms. Honus Wagner, the greatest player of his era, held out for more money from his team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, way back in 1908. And twenty-one-year-old Ty Cobb did the same that year with the Detroit Tigers. Edd Roush, who held out nearly every year of his career in an ongoing quest to get better contract terms from his team, the Cincinnati Reds, took the extreme step of holding out for the entire season in 1930. Even widely beloved Yankees slugger Babe Ruth famously held out—seeking money in keeping with his fame and impact on the game and threatening not to play if he did not get it—in 1919 and 1930. (As did Joe DiMaggio in 1938, Ted Williams and Stan Musial in 1948, Mickey Mantle in 1960, and on and on.)
It wasn’t until the early 1950s that a journeyman Minor League player, George Toolson, took the unusual step of challenging the reserve clause directly in court. Toolson’s battle went all the way to the Supreme Court, where justices, unfortunately, reaffirmed the shaky legal basis for the reserve clause. In the mid-1950s a handful of players made a proposal to the owners that would have allowed a kind of limited free agency to be phased in over six years. As one of these players, Robin Roberts, put it, “For the owners, it would have been a chance to loosen up on control. They didn’t give us any satisfaction. It was short-sighted on their part. . . . They were so used to having complete control, they were out of control.”13
Despite all of these failures, each new step emboldened players who were seeing signs of change throughout the society outside of baseball. By the 1960s—the era of massive public protests in the free speech movement, the civil rights movement, Vietnam War protests, and so on—only the truly out-of-touch baseball fan was unaware that the reserve clause was doomed.
So what happened in 1976 that led, after one hundred years of struggle, to the fall of baseball’s loathed reserve clause? Today, many baseball histories point to a single figure, outfielder Curt Flood, as being the key to the reserve clause’s demise. Flood was a star outfielder who had been traded against his will from the Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies after the 1969 season. Because Flood did not want to leave St. Louis, where he ran several businesses and had built a comfortable life, he took the advice of Marvin Miller, who was in his third year as director of the Major League Baseball Players Association (the fifth, and ultimately successful, attempt at a player’s union), and brought an antitrust suit against Major League Baseball. As important a step as this was in communicating to owners how seriously the players, and the fledgling players association, took the reserve clause, the Flood case did not directly kill the rule.14
A more complete understanding of how baseball’s reserve clause was overturned requires a look at, of all teams, the highly conservative and tradition-minded Los Angeles Dodgers. The Dodger outlook and image in the era leading up to free agency were more fixed and unchanging than almost any team in baseball. Because of this particular character—the focus on tradition, the unwavering commitment to the Dodger Way of playing the game, a rigid approach to the game—the Dodgers became, in the 1960s and ’70s, a fulcrum around which rotated an increasing amount of activity intending to change baseball’s status quo. Most important were two particular episodes that involved the most traditional aspect of the tradition-minded Dodgers—that is, their pitching. These events, which occurred ten years apart, in fact straddled the Flood case, and each had nearly as crucial an effect on the case against the reserve clause as did Flood’s lawsuit. The first event involved two of the greatest pitching stars in the history of the Major Leagues, and the second event involved a more recent Dodger pitcher, whose stance against the reserve clause (and the team) would make him the first true free agent in baseball.
The first episode unfolded this way: In the off-season prior to the 1966 season, as the Dodgers were basking in the glow of another World Series victory in 1965, two of the team’s top players—indeed, the two key cogs in the team’s ongoing dominance of the National League, pitchers Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax—had made an accidental, offhand discovery. That winter Koufax had come to the team offices at Dodger Stadium, as usual, to negotiate a new yearly contract with Dodger general manager Buzzie Bavasi. And afterward, as fate would have it, he went to a dinner meeting with his friend Drysdale.
Koufax, the 1965 World Series MVP who had nearly single-handedly beaten their opponent, the Minnesota Twins, by winning Games Five and Seven on just two days’ rest, told Drysdale he had been bothered by the meeting. “You walk in there and give them a figure that you want to earn,” Koufax said, “and they tell you, ‘How come you want that much when Drysdale only wants this much?’” Upon hearing this Drysdale immediately exclaimed, “I’ll be damned. I went in to talk to them yesterday for the first time and they told me the same story. Buzzie wondered how I could possibly want as much as I was asking when you were asking for only this.”15 Both pitchers were flabbergasted by the team’s dishonesty. And both were well aware that their worth to the team was of far greater value than the money they were earning. They were, after all, the best pitching duo in the Majors. No two-player tandem had as much standing in the league at the time or affected their team as much at these “Big Two” did. Not only had Koufax and Drysdale been responsible for fifty-two victories during the 1965 season and World Series run, they drew fans, a lot of fans, to the ballpark—according to the Dodgers’ own estimates an average of ten thousand more fans than average came when Koufax pitched, and three thousand more came when Drysdale was on the mound.16 It was no wonder the discovery of Dodger deceit was so highly upsetting to the two great Dodger stars.
It was Drysdale’s wife of the time, Ginger, who first suggested that her husband join forces with Koufax and meet the Dodgers head-on. “If Buzzie is going to compare the two of you,” she reportedly said, “why don’t you just walk in there together?” So the two pitchers joined forces to negotiate their contracts, thereby becoming the first collective-bargaining unit ever in baseball. To Bavasi, Koufax and Drysdale said that neither pitcher would sign for the 1966 season unless the Dodgers met their joint contract demands: a three-year, no-cut (that is, guaranteed) contract for each pitcher to be valued at $500,000 apiece (or a total of $167,000 per year, which would have been by far the richest yearly salaries in baseball at the time). Further placing the tandem in no-man’s-land was the fact that Koufax’s entertainment lawyer, J. William Hayes, had agreed to advise the two on their collective negotiations. “It was a radical step,” said Marvin Miller, who had just been elected, in the spring of 1966, to direct the Major League Baseball Players Association, “and it got more radical as it went.”17
During that year’s spring training, as Koufax and Drysdale held out and Miller introduced himself for the first time to players at their various camps, he was asked over and over about the two Dodger pitchers. Miller, wisely, used the opportunity to push the value of collective bargaining, and many players thus became open, for the first time, to the very idea of joining forces with their fellows. This change in player attitude, plus Miller’s savvy negotiating and fund-raising skills, would eventually make it possible, at last, for a players union to establish itself.
By policy the Dodgers and O’Malley steadfastly resisted signing multiyear contracts, negotiating with player’s agents, or allowing any precedent that could weaken the reserve clause. So the team, predictably, rebuffed Drysdale’s and Koufax’s requests and began fighting a public opinion battle in the press. All through winter and into spring training, as many in the baseball world noted, the two pitchers held firm in the face of unrelenting pressure. In the end the pitchers did negotiate a compromise deal: a one-year $125,000 contract for Koufax, $110,000 for Drysdale. And though this fell far short of their demands, it was more than the team had originally offered (and more money than either pitcher had ever made). The damage was done. The Koufax-Drysdale
holdout had planted an important seed: there was value in collective bargaining.
Flashing forward ten years, past the solitary stand of Curt Flood, it makes sense considering the legacy of Drysdale and Koufax that the first true free agent was a Dodger pitcher, Andy Messersmith. The mechanism by which Marvin Miller and the players association finally broke the reserve clause with Messersmith was through a technicality that came as an unexpected offshoot of the Flood case. During arguments against Flood, perhaps sensing the rising tides against the reserve clause, baseball owners had somewhat desperately argued that baseball’s contractual language was not a matter for the courts to decide but instead a collective-bargaining issue best settled by arbitrators.
Miller, seeing the small opening left by this argument, shrewdly waited for the right moment to exploit it. In 1975 Peter Seitz, the chairman of the arbitration panel that baseball’s owners had established after the Flood case, voided the contract of Jim “Catfish” Hunter. A pitcher for the Oakland A’s at the time, Hunter claimed his contract was invalid because the A’s owner had not paid an insurance premium, as had been stipulated in the contract. Seitz declared Hunter a “free agent” as a result of the invalid contract, and Hunter, a top-notch star at the time, signed with the New York Yankees for $3.75 million over five years—by far the richest contract baseball had ever seen. While Hunter’s free agency terrified owners and baseball traditionalists alike, the case still did not establish a firm legal precedent against the reserve clause—since it had occurred because of a technicality.
Andy Messersmith, meanwhile, had been an All-Star pitcher for the Dodgers in 1974 but had grown disillusioned with the team after asking that a no-trade clause be placed in his contract in 1975. Like Flood, Messersmith was a proud man, and he was tired of being treated like chattel. While Walter O’Malley offered Messersmith more money and a longer-term deal, he refused—as per Dodger policy—to acquiesce on the subject of a no-trade clause. As a result Messersmith decided to play the 1975 season without a contract, intending, with Marvin Miller’s encouragement, to challenge the validity of the reserve clause in front of the arbitration panel after the season.18 “It was less of an economic issue at the time than a fight for the right to have control over your own destiny,” Messersmith told The Sporting News a decade later. “It was a matter of being tired of going in to negotiate a contract and hearing the owners say, ‘OK, here’s what you’re getting. Tough luck.’”19
In 1975, in advance of the pending arbitration hearing, baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn nervously proclaimed that widespread free agency would open the door to “potential anarchy” and could conceivably lead to the total destruction of the sport. Frantic owners, meanwhile, argued that baseball’s arbitration panel couldn’t consider a grievance involving the reserve clause. But Peter Seitz—who had, amazingly enough, been retained by the owners despite ruling in favor of Catfish Hunter—cited the owners’ arguments in the Flood lawsuit and prepared to arbitrate the case. On December 23, 1975, Seitz made a monumental ruling, declaring that the reserve clause in the uniform player contract bound a player to his club for only one year, not indefinitely, as previously understood. Because Messersmith and his coplaintiff, Dave McNally, had played the 1975 season without signing contracts, the ruling granted them immediate free agency.20 McNally stayed home in Billings, Montana, but Messersmith signed a three-year contract with the Atlanta Braves for $1 million. As a result of the Messersmith-McNally case, the reserve clause was dead. And when owners signed a new basic agreement on July 12, it officially and formally established the terms of free agency in baseball.
The Dodgers ended their 1977 stay in Florida on Wednesday, March 29, recording a 7–6 victory over the St. Louis Cardinals to bring their spring record to 13-6, tops in the Grapefruit League. Don Sutton got the win after a solid seven-inning effort in which he scattered five hits and three runs and at one point retired thirteen in a row. The game was a textbook look at how the Dodgers wanted to play this season. In addition to their traditionally solid pitching, all of the Dodger starting position players, including an improving Dusty Baker, appeared in the game. And several of them—Reggie Smith, Steve Garvey, and Rick Monday—were productive, knocking in the bulk of the team’s runs. It was a victory for a team that was learning to work together, to pull on the same rope, just as Lasorda had envisioned.
Before the game against the Cardinals, the Dodgers had announced, to the surprise of none, that Don Sutton would be the team’s opening-day starter when the season began on April 7 at home against the San Francisco Giants. It was not a point Lasorda dared leave up to discussion—not with Sutton’s notorious prickliness, not with the current contract issues dogging his clubhouse. Even so, it could be argued that Tommy John and the team’s reticent right hander Burt Hooton had both pitched better than Sutton during the spring. Even the oft-overlooked knuckleballer, Charlie Hough, whom Lasorda was eyeing as the team’s closing reliever this season, had seemed more solid than ol’ Black & Decker. But Sutton was the obvious opening-day choice because the pitching-proud, tradition-minded Dodgers always sent their nominal “ace” to the mound on opening day.21
After the final game in Florida, on Wednesday evening, the remaining Dodgers left Vero Beach and flew home to Los Angeles, Dodgerland, where skies were mostly sunny and a cool wind blew down from the canyons. The weekend promised seasonable warmth and sunshine across the metro area, as it did almost every year at this time. Just south of L.A., down in Anaheim, the Dodgers’ crosstown American League rivals—the California Angels—had just returned from their own spring-training stint in Tempe, Arizona. Having signed a number of free agents during the off-season, California had competed well in the Arizona League, and the team, and its free-spending owner, cowboy-entrepreneur Gene Autry, harbored their own postseason hopes for 1977. Both teams looked forward to their upcoming three-game exhibition showdown known locally as the “Freeway Series,” an early test of how the coming season might go.
8
But You Can Never Leave
The golden epoch that gave rise to the California dream began when America, disillusioned over the loss of its hero President, looked west for spiritual renewal. On the edge of the horizon it found California. . . . [Here] while think tanks scanned the future, aerospace technicians outfitted adventures to the moon. There was a flourishing journalistic “underground” and an archipelago of multiversities that bristled with post-modern architecture. . . . “Do your own thing” was the golden rule; ambivalence was its only sin. . . . California was the future, and it worked.
—Time, July 18, 1977
Even beyond its place-names—Los Angeles, San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Francisco—and the widespread proliferation of clay roof tiles, Spanish culture and history have long influenced the Golden State, California. Early in the state’s prehistory, for example, the Spaniards thought of California as their “El Dorado,” a mythic desert espejismo, or “mirage.” This association with El Dorado became something of a wish fulfilled after gold was discovered in the state in the mid-nineteenth century, setting off the frenzy of California’s Gold Rush.1 Still, by 1968, when California adopted “the Golden State” as its official nickname, some might have suggested a more fitting figure from Spanish literature to represent what California had become: Alonso Quijano—better known as the somewhat deluded knight-errand Don Quixote de la Mancha.
There was always an element of fantasy behind the rise of California to the country’s richest, most populous state. In 1923, for instance, a downtown financial firm with an obvious vested interest in the economic welfare of the city published an illustrated brochure called Why Los Angeles Will Become the World’s Greatest City. The publication described the appealing natural beauty of the region—its verdant foothills, lush flora, wide-open skies, and, most important, its sun-drenched valleys. “Los Angeles,” the brochure’s copy effused, “has touched the imagination of America. She has become an idea . . . A longing in men’s breasts. She is the symbol of
a new civilization, a new hope, another try. . . . Can there be any doubt but what Los Angeles is to be the world’s greatest city . . . greatest in all the annals of history?”2
As a result of such efforts people flocked to the state’s propaganda like moths to flickering candlelight. “Los Angeles,” noted historian David L. Clark in 1977, “grew because people wanted what it had to offer, or because they saw in it the chance to fulfill their dreams and fantasies.”3 Of course, for much of the twentieth century, this wish-fulfilling vision—the California Dream—was also fueled by one primary source: Hollywood. Filmmakers had first scouted then wide-open and sun-drenched Southern California as the location for western films as early as 1909.4 In 1910 D. W. Griffith filmed a short seventeen-minute film in Hollywood. In 1911 the Nestor Motion Picture Company completed the first full-length Hollywood film, set in the middle of orange groves located just off Hollywood Boulevard. In the next few years four major production companies moved out to Hollywood from back east, drawn by sun and cheap land. By 1915 the majority of American films were being made in Hollywood.
Southern California was a perfect partner to the movie industry, as each added to the other’s mythology and appeal. “Hollywood is a particularly American state of mind,” Jack Slater wrote in a June 1976 Los Angeles Times feature called “Possessed by the Hollywood Dream,” “a city that has become a national yearning or a kind of mental landscape devoted exclusively to the manufacture of the American Dream.”5 Profiling a dozen or so souls who had come west to follow their Hollywood dreams, Slater captured the clear sense of ordinary Americans’ enduring fascination with the California Dream. These were young ordinary people who were willing to risk a life spent as stagehands, car salesmen, or restaurant servers just for the chance to break in as actors, directors, or screenwriters in Hollywood. Slater described these “perpetually optimistic” California dreamers as “artists and would-be artists [who] still come here not only to become immortalized in celluloid make-believe but to become the Dream itself—to personify it in much the same way that movie stars, America’s only real heroes, have personified the dream for the past 50 years.”6 Thanks to these dreamers who flocked to the city, Los Angeles became the City of Lights, the City of Angels, the magical Lotus Land where it was possible to find happiness and contentment within sight of the Hollywood Hills.
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