by Mark Frost
It should not surprise anyone to learn that the first person to lose his job as a result of this ruling was Peter Seitz. Major League Baseball immediately filed an appeal with what they thought would be a sympathetic district court in Western Missouri, but on February 4, 1976, Judge John Oliver upheld the Seitz Decision. When the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals followed suit shortly thereafter, Major League Baseball ran out of legal options; the Seitz Decision now stood affirmed as the law of the land. Paralyzed since Seitz’s initial ruling, the owners responded by locking players out of spring training, and players answered by saying they wouldn’t show up anyway without a new Basic Agreement that incorporated the seismic ramifications of the Seitz Decision; the 1976 season, and the future of baseball itself, appeared to be in jeopardy. After the players rejected what the owners threatened would be their final offer, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn ordered both sides to shut up, sit down, and figure it out—and show up for work in the meantime until they did. Both sides—thanks to the credibility and influence of a more or less “independent” commissioner—complied. The lockout ended and the games began again, as the brutal negotiations between management and labor to craft a new Basic Agreement that incorporated these radically altered legal dimensions into baseball dragged on until after America celebrated its two hundredth birthday in July. But in the interim, this new reality remained beyond dispute: Any player under contract in 1975 who now played through the 1976 season—the so-called “option year”—without a new signed contract would at the end of the season immediately become a “free agent”—a freshly minted term that now dominated the lexicon of baseball—and would possess the right to then offer his services and negotiate freely with any team for any price he could get for the 1977 season. Teams tried to circumvent the issue by scrambling to sign their best players to multiyear contracts, but before the Basic Agreement could be hammered out, nearly sixty players—all now represented or advised, many for the first time, by professional agents—announced that they intended to take advantage of the Seitz Decision and enter the 1976 season unsigned. As far as baseball’s twenty-four owners were concerned, this was a doomsday scenario: Their employees had been granted the right to a level playing field. The inability, or stubborn unwillingness, of many of them to accept the game’s new social and economic paradigm would soon consign many of its franchises to disaster.
None more notably than the Boston Red Sox and the Cincinnati Reds.
FIVE DAYS AFTER America celebrated its bicentennial with the most lavish and elaborate nationwide party in its history, Tom Yawkey passed away in his sleep at New England Baptist Hospital, early in the morning of July 9, 1976. The flag flew at half-mast in Fenway Park that night, John Kiley refrained from playing his usual version of “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” when the Red Sox took the field, and the home crowd observed a reverent moment of silence before the game. The eulogies in Boston’s papers elaborately detailed Yawkey’s four decades of devotion to the city’s beloved team. Much was made of his legendary kindness to players, past and present, and tributes poured in to honor his accomplishments as a philanthropist, conservationist—he designated that most of his vast South Carolina estate should become a natural game reserve—and “gentleman sportsman,” an archaic term that with Yawkey’s passing had lost one of its last connections to the current age. Tom Yawkey had been nearly the last of a vanishing breed in professional baseball, the individual owner who wrote all the checks because he loved the game more as a pastime than a business. If his team lost money through the lean years, and there were many, so be it, Yawkey’s fortune could well afford red ink, and the good years, the pennant runs, the three World Series they’d fought their hearts out for in his accounting more than balanced the ledger. The two stars with whom he’d been the closest—Ted Williams and Carl Yastrzemski; he always called them his “two sons”—were both moved to tears as they recollected the years they’d spent in Yawkey’s company and employ. Yaz recalled the particular kindness that Yawkey had shown his mother, Hattie, during her own battle with cancer the previous year, when he had seen to it she was treated by the best doctors available, even giving up his seat in the owner’s box in Cincinnati for Game Five so Hattie could be closer to the field.
Tom Yawkey took his leave from life and the game he loved at a moment when baseball was about to become unrecognizable to him. He had moved far beyond the restless rich dilettante who’d bought the team as a shiny new toy in the depths of the Depression, the silver spoon tycoon who had so desperately craved the company and friendship of the working-class athletes on his payroll. He had been raised in strange and splendid isolation, a multimillionaire many times over since his teenage years, and had only grown steadily richer, through no visible effort of his own; nothing had ever been denied him but a parent’s love, and perhaps that’s the Rosebud at the heart of America’s sporting Citizen Kane, a soft, shy puzzle of a man with no apparent gift for intimacy, or interest in a family life, who’d received or expressed most of the affection he’d known with people on his payroll. After carefully selling off over half of his diverse holdings in the months before he died, and distributing their worth to his heirs in order to avoid estate taxes, Yawkey still bequeathed a fortune in excess of $50 million to his widow Jean. The ownership of Fenway Park and the Red Sox he also passed, through the instrument of a complicated trust, to the control of Jean Yawkey. Tom Yawkey’s only daughter, Julia, from his first marriage, received $10,000.
Based on the last few negative statements he issued about the game’s dawning age that he was about to miss—the gold rush frontier of free agency—Tom Yawkey never grasped the irony that he had, in many ways, set the table for this new era with his own spendthrift pursuit of superstars during his first decades with the Red Sox. George Steinbrenner was about to seize center stage in baseball as the newly installed, bellicose, free-spending monarch of the New York Yankees—buying them back into championship form through free agency with the flowing coffers of his cable television revenues—and Steinbrenner’s brash, buccaneer attitude toward his fellow owners resembled no one so much as young Tom Yawkey tossing his wallet on the table in 1933 and daring his colleagues to sell him their best players. He couldn’t legitimately complain now about other teams’ players fighting for whatever wage the market would bear when he’d been coddling and overpaying his own men since day one, a grudge that his sport’s fellow owners had perpetually held against him. The awkward truth about Tom Yawkey’s record-setting tenure at the helm of a single sports franchise—not only the longest in baseball history, but the longest in any American sport spent without capturing a championship—was that he’d never been particularly good at building or sustaining a team. He’d constantly packed his front office with big-talking, egotistical former stars who he’d once admired as players, most of whom clearly had no executive discipline or eye for talent. The Red Sox teams they assembled had coalesced into a pennant winner just three times in forty-three years, but each time almost accidentally—in spite of the owner and his cronies—and each time, just as quickly but for different reasons, the team had settled back into its familiar pattern of colorful but consistent mediocrity.
Let it also be noted that the grief of Ted Williams, and Carl Yastrzemski, and countless others who had been the beneficiaries of his many acts of kindness was as genuine as Tom Yawkey’s generosity. If he seemed unable to verbalize his deep feelings for the people around him, he clearly emanated those feelings in a way that they understood and appreciated. Ask Carlton Fisk, with Yawkey’s hand on his shoulder at the end of a heartbreaking pennant race, or Bernie Carbo, when the personal check that allowed him to buy a house for his family landed in his locker. Perhaps what Yawkey had learned by life’s end—we’ll never know for certain—was that in his final reckoning those moments of personal connections were more valuable to the unloved boy he’d been than a room full of championship trophies. Add that to the boundless affection he’d received from those grateful fans in Boston as he roamed th
e stands and city during his final seasons, and perhaps he’d found some measure of what he’d always needed, if not the actual prize he thought he’d been seeking from the start.
The last baseball decision that Tom Yawkey took an interest in, a few weeks before his death, epitomized the new freewheeling, school’s-out-forever atmosphere of the game, and presaged the dismantling to come. After their glorious fall of 1975, the Red Sox struggled out of spring training during the tumultuous early months of the 1976 season, despite some strong front-office moves during the winter to bolster what was already a roster laden with talent. They had acquired All-Star starting pitcher—and future Hall of Famer—Ferguson Jenkins from the Texas Rangers for the little-used Juan Beniquez, some prospects, and cash, to further strengthen their solid starting rotation. Just before spring training, closer Dick Drago, the first man from the ’75 roster to move on, had been traded to the California Angels; his place in the bullpen would be taken by Jim Willoughby and a left-hander they then acquired from Atlanta—for the unfortunate, inconvenient Roger Moret—named Tom House. Most importantly, Boston had a healthy Jim Rice back in their everyday lineup, alongside Lynn and Evans, Fisk and Yaz, and a revived Cecil Cooper, a wrecking crew to rival even the mighty Cincinnati Reds. On paper, no other team in the American League matched up.
But trouble resulting from the game’s new rules would lay waste to these best-laid plans. During the off-season Fred Lynn and Rick Burleson had joined Carlton Fisk—who’d hired the same man two years earlier—as clients of Jerry Kapstein, one of the first and most aggressive baseball agents, and as the regular season approached, all three of Boston’s brightest young stars remained unsigned. Kapstein had spurned all of the Red Sox offers, counseling his players to wait and see what riches this strange new marketplace might offer for his potential “free agents,” or at the very least until a new Basic Agreement was reached defining the contractual parameters of the game from that point forward. Kapstein also made it clear to Boston’s front office that this was a package deal; there had to be satisfaction for all three of his players or not one of them would sign, a sharp negotiating ploy and as blunt an instrument as anyone had ever wielded against the famously player-friendly Red Sox. And so all that a shocked and weakened Tom Yawkey could perceive from his hospital bed was insubordination and disloyalty in these surrogate sons: Hadn’t he always taken special care of his “boys,” gone above and beyond to make them feel like part of the family? Yawkey took their strictly business decision as a personal affront, raging in Lear-like isolation at their betrayal, a blow to his heart and soul that some around him claimed hastened his decline. But Red Sox fans around New England shared Yawkey’s dismay. Unimaginable only eight months earlier when these players had been cheered as demigods in Fenway, all three of the team’s holdouts were booed in the early weeks of the ’76 season, and trade winds bearing their names—probably at Yawkey’s request—began to blow.
Expectations still soared in Boston as the season began, but amid all this high backstage melodrama the Red Sox stumbled out of the gate, losing their opener to the Orioles on a Jim Palmer shutout. By late May the team was laboring at 13–16, already six games behind George Steinbrenner’s first-place Yankees. Red Sox fans’ historical hatred of the Yankees, dating back to the Babe Ruth debacle and the pinstripers’ four subsequent decades of dominance, had lain dormant during the Yankees’ mediocre last decade, but with the revival of the Bronx Bombers under the ruthless management of Billy Martin, a genuine ill-will between the two franchises resurfaced. Bill Lee, the Red Sox union representative who had spent an eventful spring engaged in the ongoing MLB negotiations, had yet to win a game when he started the opener of their first series of the season against the Yankees, on May 20. The Sox trailed by a run in the sixth, when a nasty collision between Yankee outfielder Lou Pinella and Fisk at home plate erupted into a bench-clearing brawl. After trading punches with him, Lee was tossed to the ground by New York’s third baseman Graig Nettles; the impact tore a ligament in his left shoulder and afterward Lee angrily branded the Yankees “Steinbrenner’s brown shirts.” The fight seemed to finally wake up the Red Sox, who after falling behind in the game, came back to win on two Yaz home runs, but Lee, their only effective left-handed starter, would be lost for two months. The Red Sox ended up splitting the four-game series with the Yanks, gaining no ground.
Two weeks later the next wheel fell off: Fall Classic hero Bernie Carbo, who had been largely confined to the bench with the return of Rice and the resurgence of Cecil Cooper, was traded to Milwaukee for reliever Tom Murphy and outfielder Bobby Darwin. When he heard the news after a night game, Carbo went ballistic, careening his car recklessly out of the players’ parking lot and straight into a hot dog vendor’s stand before speeding away, fortunate that no one was injured or worse in the incident. The fragile, despondent Carbo couldn’t bring himself to report to the Brewers for a week. As the June 15 trading deadline approached, rumors abounded that Lynn, Fisk, and Burleson—still playing without contracts—would now be moved as well. Yawkey, desperately ill and entirely removed from the public eye, remained silent. On the morning of the 15th, while on the road for a series in Oakland, Red Sox general manager Dick O’Connell instead announced that an astonishing deal had been reached with the A’s cantankerous owner Charlie Finley. A notorious cheapskate, Finley despised the impending idea of free agency with every fiber of his excitable being. His players, almost to a man, loathed Finley in return, and although the A’s began play in 1976 with the same roster that had recently won three straight World Championships largely intact, the majority of his stars had decided to enter this pivotal season without signing their contracts. Finley had already traded away slugger Reggie Jackson and left-handed ace Ken Holtzman, both unsigned, to the Orioles, and had no intention of stopping there: Finley had determined he would rid himself of every unsigned player on his team before they walked away without giving him any value in return.
The deal was this: The Red Sox would acquire All-Star outfielder Joe Rudi, and the league’s best relief pitcher, Rollie Fingers, for two disposable utility players and $2 million in cash. Finley also announced the same morning that he was sending his best starting pitcher, Vida Blue, to the Yankees for a million and a half. A flurry of other similarly motivated trades involving potential free agents throughout both leagues—although none as patently suspect as Finley’s—crowded the transaction wire that day; entire teams that had remained intact for years exploded in minutes. But, for their part, Boston fans and writers rejoiced at the deal, unwilling to look this gift horse in the mouth, certain that the stunning move guaranteed another pennant. The Red Sox immediately initiated negotiations to sign both Rudi and Fingers with their agent, who just happened to be the ubiquitous Jerry Kapstein. Before the game that evening in Oakland, both Rudi and Fingers moved their gear over to the Boston locker room, dressed in their new uniforms, and joined their new teammates in the dugout, but Red Sox manager Darrell Johnson—who later claimed both men had asked him for a rest, worn out by their emotional ordeal, a version of events that both players later denied—used neither of them in that night’s game. If they had actually taken the field as Red Sox, it’s easier to imagine that what happened next might never have occurred, but Johnson, as had so often been the case during his tenure in Boston, felt more comfortable doing nothing.
“It’s all beyond my comprehension,” said Johnson after the game, summing up the day’s manic events better than anyone in baseball.
The bubble burst early the next morning, when Commissioner Bowie Kuhn—who had been determined to act like the only grownup in the room since the Seitz Decision—declared that Finley’s latest fire-sale deals were null and void because they violated the best interests of baseball. A meeting of all the principals except Yawkey followed in Kuhn’s New York office, but the commissioner refused to yield. Two days later, when the Red Sox left Oakland for a series in Anaheim, neither Joe Rudi nor Rollie Fingers were on the flight. Along with
Vida Blue, they ended up staying in Oakland and playing out the season as A’s, and as they had threatened to do from the start, Rudi and Fingers moved on a few months later as part of the first wave of free agents. An outraged Charles Finley brought a $10 million vanity lawsuit against his own commissioner; nothing came of it but billable hours. Tom Yawkey, worn down and disgusted by the entire affair, took no action at all.
Veteran Red Sox third baseman Rico Petrocelli, who had decided on his doctor’s advice to come back for one last campaign with his Boston teammates, watched all of this chaos unfold with dismay. “The whole game has gone completely crazy,” he told the Globe’s Peter Gammons.
Three days after Tom Yawkey died, on the day before the All-Star Game was to be played in Philadelphia, Major League Baseball announced that terms of a new Basic Agreement had been reached with the Players’ Association, which included these first codified definitions of free agency: Any player who had spent six years on a major-league roster could declare for free agency. Any free agent could then be drafted by up to twelve teams, in reverse order of their finish in the just concluded season to try and skew the benefit to less successful franchises; all teams were restricted to signing a maximum of two free agents, or as many as they themselves had lost. The new Basic Agreement would take effect on August 9, and any players signed before that date would still have an option year tacked onto the end of their contracts; any that signed afterward would not.