Baseball demands extraordinary talent, and baseball talent is difficult to judge. Ron Fraser, baseball coach of the University of Miami Hurricanes, says that only 5 percent of all drafted players make it to the major leagues. Of the 258 first-round picks in the ten years through 1986, just 55 percent made it to the major leagues. The picks most likely to be well-picked were pitchers, because their talents can be more reliably judged than those of batters using aluminum bats. (However, when the young Sandy Koufax was given a tryout by the Giants at the Polo Grounds the catcher told him, “Make sure you get a good college education, kid, because you won’t make it in the majors.”)
Today there are choruses of people lamenting the large salaries earned by players. This moralizing makes no economic sense. The salaries are earned: The players make more for the owners than the owners pay in salaries. But the belief that large amounts of money must be bad for players is nothing new. A 1914 editorial in a baseball magazine advised players to ponder the terrible swiftness with which players become men in the crowd: “It is, as a rule, a man’s own business how he spends his money. But nevertheless we wish to call attention to the fact that many men do so in a very unwise manner. A very glaring instance of this among baseball players is the recent evil tendency to purchase and maintain automobiles. Put the money away, boys, where it will be safe. You don’t need these automobiles. The money will look mighty good later on in life. Think it over, boys.”
Baseball has come a long way since the days when, on road trips, players slept two to a bed. (Rube Waddell’s roommate made manager Connie Mack put a clause in Waddell’s contract to prevent him from eating crackers in bed.) In 1988 a Honus Wagner baseball card issued in 1910 sold for $110,000. It was issued by a cigarette company and Wagner, a passionate foe of smoking, demanded that the company stop issuing it, and thus few of the cards ever existed. The 1988 value of $110,000, adjusted for inflation, was approximately equal in value to the $10,000 Wagner earned in 1910. In 1929 Lefty O’Doul hit .398 with 254 hits—a National League record never surpassed. It earned him a $500 raise. In 1932 he hit “only” .368 and his salary was cut $1,000. A player in the Pacific Coast League in the late 1940s was summoned to the St. Louis Browns but refused to report because his salary in the major leagues would have been less than half of what he was making in the minors. In 1976 the average salary was $52,380. In 1989 the major league minimum salary was $68,000, more than 100 players earned at least $1 million, 20 earned at least $2 million and the average salary was about $513,730. In 1990 several will earn more than $3 million. Hershiser worries that today’s stratospheric salaries will have the effect of making it harder than it used to be to keep players around baseball after their playing days. “Baseball will lose a lot of knowledge because players will make enough money that they will not have to stay in baseball. In the past a lot of players stayed in baseball because it was their only asset.” Maybe, but many of them would have stayed in the game anyway because the game was in their blood, as it is in Hershiser’s. He was baseball’s best-paid player in 1989 and I will wager that he will be in baseball, perhaps as a general manager, long after he retires.
Many Cassandras said that money, combined with the sudden arrival of a substantially free market in talent, was going to make a shambles of competitive balance. There still are grounds for anxiety. The fresh infusions of broadcasting money could become important to baseball’s competitive balance because of the inherent inequalities among teams regarding the value of local broadcasting rights. Around the time Ueberroth was finalizing the national agreements, the Yankees were finalizing a local cable agreement giving them $41 million a year for 12 years. The Milwaukee Brewers, who compete against the Yankees in the American League East, will get about $3 million a year from local television revenues. The $38 million differential is worrisome. But as the Yankees (and Atlanta Braves) have recently shown, the absence of baseball acumen in the front office can be a great leveler, regardless of financial assets.
So far, the Cassandras have been wrong. The end of the reserve clause did not bring on an era of Sturm und Drang and ruinous imbalance. All the talent did not wind up on the two coasts, in the New York and Los Angeles markets, leaving a wasteland of mediocrity in the middle. A few crazed owners, like Ted Turner of the Braves, did not ruin competitive balance by building checkbook dynasties. There was some Sturm und Drang; there was no competitive imbalance. In fact, the coming of free agency coincided with the demise of the last of the dynasties, the Oakland Athletics and Cincinnati Reds of the early and mid-1970s. In the first decade of free agency, all 12 National League teams and 11 of the 14 American League teams (all except Cleveland, Seattle and Texas) won division championships.
Pennant races are more riveting than ever because there are so many fresh faces in the races in any five-year span. In the great National League pennant race of 1964, when in late September the front-running Phillies lost 10 in a row and the pennant, the Giants were not eliminated until the next to last day of the season—and finished fourth. But that was before divisional play, so six teams finished below the Giants. Today it is possible to have four races for first places. Those races are remarkably open these days. We live in an era of baseball equality. Not perfect equality, of course, but the thrill of victory has been spread around.
Of the original 16 major league franchises, the Phillies were the last to win a World Series. That was in 1980, by which time there were 26 franchises. The St. Louis Browns only got to the World Series by dashing through the yawning gaps that World War II had made in baseball by 1944. The Browns lost the Series. The Browns had gone to Baltimore and become the Orioles when the franchise won its first Series, in 1966. In 1988 the Cubs broke the St. Louis Browns’ record of 43 consecutive seasons without winning a league championship. (After 1989 their record was 44.) But nowadays any team can hope to win, if not right now, then soon. Through 1989 there have been 221 division or league champions in modern major league history. Only 30 of them won after a losing season the year before. But nowadays the mighty are not mighty for long and the losers can reasonably expect to rise through the falling debris of one-shot winners.
On an August afternoon in 1984, when the Cubs were sweeping a doubleheader against the Mets in Wrigley Field en route to their first divisional championship, Salty Saltwell of the Cubs’ front office was asked why the Cubs were doing so well. He replied, without hesitation, with the explanation that comes naturally to baseball people: “We’re playing way over our heads.” Indeed they were. The 1984 Cubs were 96–65. The 1983 Cubs had been 71–91, finishing fifth. The 1985 Cubs finished fourth, 77–84. Saltwell’s assessment was as much a deduction as an inference; it was as much the application of a general principle as a judgment of the particular players. It is axiomatic nowadays that teams win division titles, pennants and World Series because a number of their key players have what are called “career years.”
It was not always that way. For many years a few teams dominated baseball year in and year out. From 1926 through 1964 the Yankees had 39 consecutive winning seasons, including 26 first-place finishes. The closest any clubs have come to that achievement is not even close. The 1968–85 Orioles had 18 consecutive winning seasons. The 1951–67 White Sox had 17. Through 1989 the team with the longest such streak was the Toronto Blue Jays with 7 seasons. Between 1903 and 1964 there were 61 World Series and a team from New York appeared in 39 of them. In 13 of those Series both teams were from New York. In 1951 all three New York teams finished first. (That year the city had six 20-game winners.) From 1949 through 1953 the Yankees won 5 consecutive pennants. If the Dodgers had won two particular games—the last game of the 1950 season against the Phillies and the third and final game of the 1951 play-off (the game won by the Giants’ Bobby Thomson’s home run)—the Dodgers, too, would have won 5 pennants in those 5 years, and for half a decade all World Series games would have been played in New York. The Dodgers and Yankees also won pennants in 1947, 1955 and 1956. In the decade 1947–56 the Y
ankees won 8 pennants, the Dodgers 6. In the 11 seasons from 1946 through 1956 the Yankees won 90 games 10 times, the Dodgers 9 times. The Yankees won 1,061 games, the Dodgers won just 20 fewer. The Yankees finished second in 1954 although they won 103 games. (The Indians set an American League record that year with 111 wins.) If 103 wins had sufficed, as it usually does, to win the pennant, the Yankees would have been in 10 consecutive World Series.
More recently there has been wholesome turmoil. The 1977–78 Yankees were the last World Series winners to repeat. From the 1979 Yankees through the 1989 Dodgers (and excluding the 1981 strike season) defending champions have averaged 12.7 fewer wins the next season. For most teams in major league history, life has been a mild roller-coaster ride. Most teams that improve their record from one season to the next suffer, in the third season, a decline of about one-third of what they gained in the second season. Only one team in history, the 1937–42 Dodgers, has increased its winning percentage in 6 consecutive seasons—an achievement that almost presupposes starting from a deep hole. (The 1937 Dodgers were 62–91.) Today, when there are no dominating teams, everyone is riding the roller coaster. Since the Yankees and Dodgers met in the 1977 and 1978 World Series, only La Russa’s Athletics of 1988 and 1989 have played in two consecutive Series. In 1987 the Twins became the tenth team in 10 years to win the World Series. In the 1970s the Reds and Pirates each won 6 division titles. But the Reds and Pirates were the only National League teams not to win division titles in the 1980s. In the 11 seasons from 1979 through 1989, 4 divisional championship teams won 100 or more games in a season and then failed to repeat as division winners the next year. In the 1980s only 3 of 40 division winners (8 percent) have won their division the next year. (They were all in the American League: the 1980–81 Yankees, the 1984–85 Royals, the 1988–89 Athletics.) Forty-two percent of the division winners had losing records the next year. On the other hand, 13 teams in the 1980s won division titles a year after finishing in the second division or below .500. The participants in the 1982 World Series, the Cardinals and the Brewers, each finished 11 games behind in 1983. In 1986 the teams that were in the 1985 World Series (the Royals and the Cardinals) finished a total of 44 Vi games out of first. Three of the 1986 division winners tumbled in 1987 to below .500. These days a world champion one year can win more games the next year and do worse. Because of the 1988 Athletics, the Twins became the first team in history to win the World Series (1987), then win more games the next year but not finish first. By the end of the 1988 season the Mets, who did not even make it to the World Series, were the closest any team could come to claiming to be a “dynasty.” They had won 90 or more games 5 seasons in a row. No other team had won 90 games in both 1987 and 1988. But in 1989 they won just 87 and finished 6 games behind. So much for the Mets’ dynastic pretensions. The Athletics won 203 times in the 1988 and 1989 seasons. By the time the dust had settled from the Athletics’ 1989 post-season performance—the dismantling of the Blue Jays, 4–1, in the LCS and the sweep of the Giants in the World Series—it was arguable that the Athletics were just one more World Series season away from being rightly denoted a dynasty. La Russa said flatly that neither the 1927 Yankees nor the Big Red Machines of 1975 and 1976 were better than the 1989 Athletics. Two retired Reds, Johnny Bench and Joe Morgan, thought their teams were better. For the record, here are some of the offensive records:
The 1989 Athletics had much better pitching, starters and relievers, than those Reds teams had. At least regarding the 1989 Athletics and the 1975–76 Reds, I think La Russa is right.
However good today’s best teams are, there are no really awful teams today. The original Mets of 1962 were awful. They won 40 while losing 120, finishing tenth, 18 games out of ninth. But they were a lot better off than the 1916 Athletics. Victimized by Connie Mack’s fire sale of talent after the team lost the 1914 World Series to the manifestly inferior Braves, the 1916 team sagged to eighth, 54 Vi games out of first, with a 36–117 record. But the 1916 Athletics were better than those 1899 Cleveland Spiders, who were 20–134. If the season had not ended when it did, there is no telling to what depths of sorrow the Spiders could have sunk. They lost 40 of their last 41 games. Through 1989 only the Seattle Mariners had failed to reach .500 for a season in the 1980s. But they are special: By 1990 they were two short of the record of 15 consecutive losing seasons set by the 1919–33 Red Sox (right after they sold you-know-who) and the 1953–67 Philadelphia and Kansas City Athletics. But if there are no terrible teams, neither are there any great teams. The Elias Bureau has produced a table that expresses today’s volatility numerically. In the 1980s division winners had winning percentages of just .529. Furthermore, in the seasons immediately before those in which they won their division titles, these teams finished, on average, nearly 8.7 games out of first. This is not the way it used to be. This Elias table lists, by decades, the average winning percentages of division and league champions, and the average number of games they finished out of first place in the seasons immediately prior to winning their titles.
YEARS PCT. MARGIN
1900–09 .624 + 1.81
1910–19 .580 -8.30
1920–29 .584 -4.05
1930–39 .593 -3.17
1940–49 .583 -6.15
1950–59 .595 -2.68
1960–69 .548 -8.14
1970–79 .575 +0.55
1980–89 .529 -8.69
The “0.55” for 1970–79 reflects the existence of that vanished species, the dynasty, which roamed the land then in the form of the Oakland Athletics and then Cincinnati’s “Big Red Machine.”
There has not been so much volatility since the 1940s, when a world war siphoned off most of the talent. The fact that there is no dominant team today causes some people to conclude that baseball has less talent. But equality does not mean mediocrity. The fact that there is no great team does not prove that baseball is not as good as it was when there was a dynasty such as the Yankees once were. On the contrary, the volatility is evidence of the wide dispersal of excellence.
Most track and field records have been improving rapidly for decades. The size and balletic skills of players have made today’s basketball a game that would be virtually unrecognizable to a Rip Van Winkle who fell asleep 40 years ago watching a basketball game in the late 1940s. (Falling asleep was easy to do at a 1940s basketball game.) The best college teams of the 1940s would not survive—or even get to—the first round of today’s NCAA basketball tournament. Football, too, has been transformed. In fact, the kinetic energy involved in 6-foot-8 linemen who have a sprinter’s speed in 20-yard bursts has made football too dangerous for creatures constructed with human knees and necks. Given the general improvement, often constituting radical change, in so many sports, it does seem reasonable to conclude that baseball, too, must be much better than ever.
However, the fact that extraordinary improvement has characterized sport generally does not itself compel us to conclude that the same must be true of baseball. The difference is that baseball is more difficult. Or, to put the point in a way perhaps slightly less annoying to partisans of other sports, baseball is difficult in peculiarly demanding ways. Baseball involves so many situations that must be mastered mentally, and so many skills involving that mental mastery, and so much anticipation, and so much execution within extraordinarily fine tolerances. Thus the fact that there is abundant and obvious improvement in the performances in other sports does not demonstrate that baseball, too, is better.
It is better. However, many fans are reluctant to receive this good news. Baseball fans are generally a cheerful lot, at least between late February and late October. (Literary critic Jonathan Yardley says there are only two seasons: baseball season and The Void.) However, human beings seem to take morose pleasure from believing that once there was a Golden Age, some lost Eden or Camelot or superior ancient civilization, peopled by heroes and demigods, an age of greatness long lost and irrecoverable. Piffle. Things are better than ever, at least in baseball, which
is what matters most. And the reason for the improvement says something heartening about life. Stephen Jay Gould teaches biology, geology and the history of science at Harvard. His special interest is evolutionary processes. As a student of life’s long-term trends, he has pondered the extinction of the .400 hitter (none since 1941) and he concludes that the cause is not, as you had feared, “entropie homogeneity.” Rather, the reason is that systems equilibrate as they improve. While the highest averages have declined, the average batting average has remained remarkably stable over time. It was around .260 in the 1870s and is about that today. (It was .255 in 1989.) But the highest averages have declined because narrowing variation is a general property of systems undergoing refinement. Variations in batting averages—the gap between the highest averages and the leagues’ averages—shrink as improvements in play eliminate many inadequacies of the majority of pitchers and fielders. Today’s “just average” player is better than yesterday’s. Gould says major league players meet today in competition “too finely honed toward perfection to permit the extremes of achievement that characterized a more casual age.” As baseball has been sharpened—every pitch, swing and hit is charted—its range of tolerance has narrowed, its boundaries have been drawn in and its rough edges smoothed. As Gould says, Wee Willie Keeler could “hit ’em where they ain’t” (to the tune of .432 in 1897) partly because “they”—the fielders—were not where they should have been. They did not know better. Today’s players play as hard as the old-timers did, and know much more. Try the following experiment in filling up nine positions. A team assembled just from players who entered baseball since 1945 (which would exclude, for example, Williams, DiMaggio and Musial) would not be demonstrably inferior to a team drawn from all the players who played during the first half of the century.
Men at Work Page 43