SALON

Baseball

Thursday, Jul 18, 2002 11:57 PM UTC

Bud Selig’s buddies

Even good writers are doing bad stories on the issues behind the looming baseball strike. Why is the media peddling the owners' line?

By

I’ve been covering sports business — which by definition means mostly baseball business — for 22 years now. There have been times when I’ve been amused, surprised, peeved and angered by the coverage of labor problems in the sports press, but 2002 is the first time I’ve ever felt disgusted. A collective insanity seems to have spread into nearly every corner of sports media, and in some of those corners — I’m thinking of talk radio as typified by the hosts on WFAN — it’s a form of hysteria.

As I write this, it looks very much as if Major League Baseball is going to have another strike. In point of fact, it has been looking this way for more than two years, or ever since commissioner Bud Selig came up with the idea for a “Blue Ribbon Panel” to evaluate baseball’s economic situation. That was the first sign that Selig was planning a war, and the panel actually had some limited success in winning over the press and public. Even the New York Times supported its conclusions in an editorial. Amazingly, no one in the press seemed to notice that the panel contained not a single representative of the Players Association or even of the Society for American Baseball Research, SABR, the organization that baseball trusts with its Hall of Fame research.

Why was SABR excluded? “Because,” says Doug Pappas, editor of Between the Lines, the SABR newsletter, “Selig knew very well that our figures (about the economic state of Major League Baseball) weren’t going to jive with their figures.”

The figures that Selig has been tossing around are in fact believed by almost no one, but the constant and dire predictions of economic disaster, always just around the corner, have been enough to stir a significant portion of the press and public into a heated backlash against the players and the Players Association. Worst of all have been the chorus of “A plague on both your houses!” comments from veteran sportswriters like Sports Illustrated’s Frank DeFord and the Washington Post’s Tom Boswell, writers who have all been around long enough to put the issues in perspective but who prefer to take the easy way out by fanning the flames of fan anger and resentment.

What are the issues involved in this year’s labor problems? Exactly the same ones that have been involved in every work stoppage since 1972. And every single one of those stoppages was preceded by the owners’ making new demands of the players — demands that would restrict their hard-won right to free agency — while the players were prepared to accept the status quo.

Please read that sentence again carefully before proceeding. Got it? OK.

The next logical question would be: Why do these things keep happening in baseball? And the answer is, They keep happening because the baseball owners remain exempted from antitrust laws, which means, in practical terms, that unlike management in other labor discussions, the baseball owners don’t have to actually negotiate. They can simply stall, stall, stall, finally declare an impasse, and try to impose their own conditions on the players. This got them in trouble with the National Labor Relations Board in 1994, but it’s a Republican administration with an unproven court this time around, so Selig feels he has nothing to lose by testing it.

Now, let’s review the issues involved and see how the media has gone about dropping the ball on each one. Here are the four biggest points of contention in ascending order of importance:

1. Drug testing. This is also a phony issue, and it’s no secret that it has exploded into a public issue at the same time the owners are putting pressure on the Players Association. The owners have every reason to want to clamp down on drugs like cocaine, which devalue their property, the players; they have no strong desire to see performance-enhancing drugs banned so long as the players who are using them are helping them to sell tickets. Does anyone really think that, say, the owners of the San Francisco Giants want to have their star slugger tested at random and then suspended for using steroids just before say, the start of the playoffs?

Drugs are a potentially big issue, and one that has to be taken seriously by both labor and management. If there was not threat of a strike, it would probably be allowed to grow into the major issue in baseball. But there isn’t the slightest sign that the owners regard steroid testing as an issue worth going to the barricades for. There are many reasonable ways to approach the subject of steroid testing, and the owners haven’t tried any of them. For the time being, we can reasonably assume that this is simply something with which they hope to distract the Players Association at a crucial moment.

2. Contraction. This is a non-issue and as such doesn’t deserve our attention, except to explain why it’s a non-issue. In point of fact Selig has never been clear about why the Twins and Expos or any other two teams should be eliminated, or why, if they were, it would alleviate what he regards as the disastrous financial situation in Major League Baseball. Fans should understand (and writers should be ashamed of themselves for not understanding) that even if Selig was not bluffing about eliminating these two teams, it has nothing to do with their actual financial state. In other words, Selig wasn’t saying that the Minnesota Twins were about to go bankrupt; what he was saying was if they and another major league team were eliminated, there would be more revenue sharing money from the “luxury tax” pot to go around, as well as more money from the national television contract. Which is nonsense, of course, because the national TV contracts were signed with the explicit agreement that Major League Baseball would represent a certain number of cities and that if it no longer represented these cities, the contract or contracts would have to be renegotiated and, well, contracted to allow for MLB’s smaller market.

Contraction was a silly idea, not just as a workable program — from that perspective, it’s impossible, since Major League Baseball simply does not have the power to “contract” anything, much less a privately owned business — but from the point of view of a labor ploy, which it was intended to be in the first place. Selig’s obvious motive was to threaten to cut 50 jobs from the union rolls; it never seemed to occur to him that some fans might also object. Oh, yes, I almost forgot, the threatened contraction of the Twins was also a ploy to wrangle a new stadium out of Minneapolis taxpayers.

3. Competitive balance. This has been turned by the owners into the key issue, the one that must be redressed if baseball is to have a future. The big market teams, they say, are dominating the game; the Yankees’ continued success is killing off the hopes of fans of teams in smaller markets because they can’t begin the season with any reasonable expectation that their team can go to the World Series.

How correct is this assessment? For the most part, the owners’ contentions about competitive balance are correct — the Yankees have been in the World Series five times in the last six years and won four times. On the whole, richer teams such as the Yankees and Braves have a far better chance to win than do Pittsburgh, Montreal, Kansas City and a handful of other small market teams. This is the owners’ trump card, and they have used it to whip the press and public into an egalitarian fit worthy of a Parisian mob during the French Revolution.

But there are several problems with the owners’ competitive balance argument that the press seems happy to overlook. First is the question, almost never addressed by anyone in baseball management, about what constitutes a “big market” or “big revenue” team. There is no denying that the Yankees, the Mets and Dodgers and probably the Red Sox and White Sox fit into both categories, but Selig and the owners have consistently sought to blur the lines regarding nearly everyone else. For instance, a couple of years ago the Baltimore Orioles, because of Camden Yards, were supposed to be one of the big market teams. Then, when a disillusioned Mike Mussina left the Orioles for New York, the Yankees became the rich bullies victimizing the little guy, the Orioles. The Cleveland Indians, who went to the World Series just seven seasons ago, were regarded as a big market team because of the lure of Jacobs Field. Now when the Yankees play the Indians, the New York Times can blare out, as it did on July 3, “Free Spenders Clobber Cost Cutters.” In a couple of seasons, the Indians have gone from big market bully to small market victims — though the victimizers in several situations would seem to be the owners themselves, who are choosing not to put the money back into their teams, but into their own pockets.

The Atlanta Braves, of course, play in a very small market but are one of baseball’s two or three highest revenue teams because of their TV network, a fact that further blurs the lines. The Seattle Mariners have been the American League’s winningest team over the last three seasons and are frequently cited as a big revenue team because of their handsome new stadium. But before the Mariners entered into this unparalleled era of success, who regarded them as a “big market” team? Remember, they were supposed to be the small market victims who couldn’t hold onto superstars such as Alex Rodriguez, Ken Griffey Jr. and Randy Johnson. It seems to have been good business for the Yankees to acquire superstar players of this caliber; it has been equally good business for Seattle to lose them. It’s also worth noting that the San Francisco Giants have the best record in baseball from 1997 through 2001, behind the free-spending Yankees and Braves, though their payroll ranks them in the middle of the pack. (They’ve been between 16th and 11th in payroll over those five years).

The questions continue: Clearly the Los Angeles Dodgers are both a big market and big revenue team, but why are the Anaheim Angels, who share most of the same market with the Dodgers, regarded as a “small market” team? And where does one rank the Philadelphia Phillies? The Phillies play in what is regarded as the fourth largest market in Major League Baseball, a market that they don’t have to share with anyone else. Yet the Phillies are constantly ranked with the small revenue teams. At what point, a Phillies fan may legitimately ask, does mismanagement enter into the question of what constitutes a big market and big revenue team?

From Major League Baseball’s perspective, the answer to the question “What is a big revenue team?” would seem to be “A winning team.” We’re all holding our breath to see if the supposedly contraction-bound Minnesota Twins end up the season as a big or small revenue team.

But there are larger, more important questions about “competitive balance” that are not being asked, or rather, a few brave souls are asking them and too few in the mainstream media are picking up on them.

For instance, in the July 5 Seattle Post-Intelligencer, Leonard Koppett noted that from 1919 to 1922 the Yankees “Bought Babe Ruth and nine other players, plus the manager, from the Red Sox, who had won four World Series from 1912-18 and finished second twice. The Yankees won six pennants in eight years while the Red Sox fell into the second division for fifteen consecutive years, eight of them in last place … All of that without free agency. … Free agency’s full effect wasn’t felt until 1982. Up to then, teams based in New York, Chicago, Philadelphia, and Los Angeles finished first 87 times, while Cleveland, Detroit and Washington did so 14. Since 1982, of the 30 teams (some younger than 10 years old), 26 have placed first at least once including Arizona, San Diego, Baltimore, Boston, Cleveland, Oakland, Seattle, Texas, Atlanta, Cincinnati, Houston, and St. Louis. Which era seems more competitively balanced to you?”

One might ask which sports that have salary caps and more revenue sharing than baseball are more competitively balanced? The NBA? Professional basketball has been dominated by a few powerful teams when the owners were in complete control (the Boston Celtics), when the players and their agents were in complete control (the Los Angeles Lakers, the Boston Celtics, the Chicago Bulls), and when management gained the upper hand (the Houston Rockets, the Bulls, and now, the Lakers again). The Lakers’ domination of the NBA over the last three seasons has been greater than the Yankees’ at any time in the last six years.

The NFL? The NFL has had a rare period of competitive balance over the last three seasons, but let’s wait and see before making any firm judgments. Over the last 22 seasons, 18 different NFL teams have played in the Super Bowl. Over the same period, 20 different teams have played in the World Series.

In other words, compared to other sports, baseball’s record of competitive balance is pretty good. And compared to baseball in earlier times, the last couple of decades have been the most competitive in the game’s history. Yes, the Yankees have won four World Series in the last sixth years, but except for 1998, they didn’t dominate the opposition. In all of their other pennant-winning seasons, there were other teams as good or better than the Yankees; in fact, in the 2000 season the Yankees had the ninth best record in all of baseball.

Finally, we are entitled to ask exactly when the issue of competitive balance became one worth ruining an entire season over. As we near the start of the college football season, for instance, we know well in advance that a handful of teams — Miami, Florida State, Michigan, Nebraska, et al. — are going to dominate the national scene, beat the crap out of nearly all the other teams in their conferences, and turn the hunt for the national championship into their own private party. We all know that these football factories are fueled by wealthy alumni and TV appearance money that, no matter how it’s shared, leaves a few powerhouses sitting at the top. That’s the way it’s always been for 100 years and the way it’s going to be for 100 more.

Is anyone out there screaming that college football is going to be in trouble if it doesn’t establish some kind of competitive balance? Can anyone name any American sports at any time, baseball included, that ever suffered from lack of competitive balance?

4. Revenue sharing. In David Mamet’s play “Speed The Plow,” an established movie producer tells an aspiring movie producer that “There are three things to remember about this business. Number one is always get gross, never get net.” The aspiring producer asks, “What are the other two things?” “Never mind the other two,” says the producer, “just remember the first. Always get gross, never get net.” Revenue sharing is the “gross” of the baseball labor issues. Forget the others. If the strike comes, this is the issue it will be about.

The owners say they want more “Revenue Sharing” between so-called rich and poor teams in order to bring greater competitive balance to baseball. Selig’s greatest triumph has been to turn the phrase “Lower salaries for players” into the slogan “Revenue Sharing.” In the world you and I live in, revenue sharing would mean something along the lines of sharing revenue. Every morning, newspaper columnists can be read in support of Selig’s revenue sharing plan without having the slightest notion of what it actually means.

It does not mean that Selig and the rest of the baseball owners want richer teams like the Yankees, Dodgers, Braves, and Red Sox to share more revenue with smaller market teams such as Pittsburgh, Kansas City, Oakland, and Montreal. That’s already happening.

Over the last six years, more than $674 million of revenue from so-called richer teams has been doled out to so-called smaller teams. This money is produced by what is known as a “luxury tax” in which a team exceeding its payroll limit must hand over 20 percent of that money to a pool to be distributed among the relative have-nots. Selig wants that percentage to be raised to 50 percent.

Why are the players against this? For the very simple reason that with the tax at 20 percent, an owner, say Steinbrenner, will still buy an expensive free agent like Jason Giambi and happily pay the tax if he thinks that the player will bring in enough revenue to more than cover his cost. But at 50 percent, not even Steinbrenner would cover the player, because not even Babe Ruth or Sandy Koufax will bring in enough extra revenue to cover that high a tax. How then would a 50 percent tax succeed in redistributing money from rich to poor? It wouldn’t. What it would do is hold down players’ salaries, which was Selig’s purpose in proposing the 50 percent tax in the first place. Thus, when Selig says “revenue sharing,” the players correctly hear “lower salaries.”

So far, only the Daily News’ Bill Madden and the Yankees’ radio announcer, John Stirling, have correctly pointed out that “revenue sharing” has not been used by the poorer teams to help redress the issue of competitive balance since most teams have simply pocketed the money, rather than use it to boost payroll. The owners have not even denied this, with good reason: It’s a simple matter for the Players’ Association to keep tabs on salary increases, and it’s clear that most teams that have benefited from revenue sharing have not increased payrolls. As Madden wrote on July 7, “In 1990 baseball owners took in $1.3 billion in revenues and spent $495 million of it on players’ salaries, leaving $805 million to spend on everything else. Last year, those figures had nearly tripled — with $3.6 billion in revenues, $2 billion spent on players, leaving $1.6 billion for the clubs themselves. Yet, we are told a fifth of the teams are on the verge of bankruptcy … where did it all go? Obviously not on players’ salaries (see: Minnesota Twins, Kansas City Royals, Milwaukee Brewers), which is the only way to directly affect competitive balance … So who’s kidding who here when it comes to more revenue sharing addressing baseball’s competitive balance?”

If the strike that the owners are forcing was really about “competitive balance” and “revenue sharing,” they would approach the Players Association and say, “If you agree to loosen up your control over our revenue sharing — a control, by the way, which you only have because we offered it to you during negotiations — then we promise that all of the newly distributed revenue will go to players’ salaries.” (Exactly how this would be proven would lead to some nasty squabbles, but nothing like we’re seeing now.) If Selig did say something like this, the threat of strike would vanish from the horizon faster than the impression made by the last Britney Spears commercial.

But Selig has not said this because he knows very well that the purpose of this work stoppage isn’t to distribute money from rich teams to poor teams, but to redistribute it from the players back to the owners. It’s sad that the media, which should know better, is letting him get away with it.

Allen Barra's next book is "Mickey and Willie -- The Parallel Lives of Baseball's Golden Age," from Crown. More Allen Barra.

Tuesday, Apr 10, 2012 10:30 PM UTC

Guillen’s pro-Castro candor

The Miami Marlins' manager is lucky to get a suspension. Not so long ago, he might have received a car bomb.

By A contrite Miami Marlins manager Ozzie Guillen gestures at a news conference on Tuesday. (Credit: AP/Lynne Sladky)

There’s not much reason to doubt that baseball manager Ozzie Guillen admires Fidel Castro. He said so five years ago in an interview with Men’s Journal. When asked to name the toughest man he knew, Guillen replied, “Fidel Castro. He’s a bull—- dictator and everybody’s against him, and he still survives, has power. Still has a country behind him. Everywhere he goes, they roll out the red carpet. I don’t admire his philosophy; I admire him.’’

No one cared about that macho thought because Guillen was skipper of the Chicago White Sox at the time. As the newly hired manager of the Miami Marlins, Guillen repeated the notion to Time last week–”I respect Fidel Castro,” he said. “You know why? A lot of people have wanted to kill Fidel Castro for the last 60 years, but that [expletive] is still there”–and he found himself on the brink of unemployment.

As Miami’s Cuban-American talk radio hosts whipped up a storm of protest, the Marlins denounced Guillen and suspended him for five games. On Tuesday the chastened manager repudiated his statements, said Castro was a bad man, and apologized “on my knees.” With Guillen’s job hanging in the balance, most sportswriters attributed the controversy to his big mouth: He is known for insulting gays and admitting he likes to get drunk often.

But Guillen’s real problem is Cuban Miami, where enforcing the anti-Castro party line is a more popular pastime than baseball, not the least because the Marlins owners arranged to stick the city’s taxpayers with the bill for their new $640 million ballpark in Little Havana while depriving local residents of legal parking spaces. The combination of Guillen’s candor, Miami politics, and the Marlins’ arrogance is what has brought the Cooperstown-bound skipper to the brink of being fired.

The city has never shown much tolerance for people who say nice things about Castro. In 2000, Jim Mullin, editor of the city’s alternative weekly New Times, compiled a chronology of violent intolerance that has few parallels in modern America. In 1975 a Cuban American man was murdered after advocating closer relations with Castro’s Cuba. In 1978, an anti-Castro talk radio host had his legs blown off by a car bomb because he dared criticize his fellow exiles for resorting to violence. In 1983, the Little Havana branch of a Miami bank was bombed because one of its executives had negotiated with the Castro government for the release of 3,600 political prisoners. In 1998, a bomb threat emptied a concert hall during a performance by Compay Segundo, a 91-year-old musician made famous by the movie “The Buena Vista Social Club.” All told, Mullin found more than 40 instances of bomb threats and explosions directed at people who had somehow offended the anti-Castro orthodoxy.

A 1994 Human Rights Watch report on the sorry state of free speech in Miami concluded,  the city is “dominated by fiercely anti-Communist forces who are strongly opposed to contrary viewpoints.” The HRW reports linked these forces to “acts of repression ranging from shunning to violence.” The reports found “significant responsibility” by the government at all levels, including “direct harassment by the government and government support of groups linked to anti-free speech behavior.”

That tradition continued this week when two local politicians injected themselves into the controversy by calling for Guillen’s firing. The call was echoed by a vigilante group known as Vigilia Mambisa, which describes itself as “a hard-line, right wing, Anti-Castro, Anti-Communist group of dedicated Cuban-American demonstrators … known for their rapid response to calls for protest aired on Miami Spanish-language stations.”  The group is calling for a boycott of the Marlins until Guillen is fired.

The problem is Miamians are already boycotting the Marlins. The team ranked 28th out of 30 major league teams in attendance last year. Dario Moreno, a professor of political science at Florida International University, said, “I don’t think this is a free speech issue. There’s a lot more tolerance than there was 30 years ago.” Moreno noted that south Florida’s three Cuban-American congressional representatives and the state’s Cuban-American senator have not called for Guillen to be fired.

“This has more to do with the Marlins and a community that invested large sums of money in their stadium over the objections of lots of people,” Moreno said. “The promise was that they would bring the community together and give us something to be proud of. It’s not working out very well.”

Moreno says he thinks Guillen may be able to keep his job if the Marlins muzzle Guillen (good luck with that) and reach out to the community. “The baseball fans are willing to let this one go by if he just promises to not talk politics,” Moreno said.

“As a Christian, I accept his apology,” said Alberto Muller, a former newspaper columnist who spent 15 years in a Cuban prison. “But in Miami, not everybody is a Christian.” Muller thinks Guillen will be fired.

A Miami Herald online reader survey found 57 percent of 2,500-plus respondents saying Guillen’s five-game suspension was sufficient punishment. If Guillen only loses his job for expressing admiration for Fidel’s toughness, it will be a sign of civic progress. Not long ago, he might have lost his legs or his life.

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Jefferson Morley

Jefferson Morley is a staff writer for Salon in Washington and author of the forthcoming book, Snow-Storm in August: Washington City, Francis Scott Key, and the Forgotten Race Riot of 1835 (Nan Talese/Doubleday). More Jefferson Morley.

Monday, Apr 9, 2012 12:00 AM UTC

The year of the baseball book

From a treatise on Yankee hating to a "people's history," a number of great books covered the national pastime

By , Barnes & Noble Review
This article appears courtesy of The Barnes & Noble Review.

A simple and unsettling calculation reveals to me that this year marks the 40th anniversary of my coming to New England and setting up shop as a Red Sox fan. How innocent I was in that distant day: how little I understood the faces etched with pain, the haunted eyes, the lips that writhed in uttering “Yankees.” It did not take long to become afflicted by the same symptoms and, in my time here, certain Yankee-related events have been so traumatic that they are best designated by numerals alone: 1978 and 2003. The ALCS of 2004 (when the Red Sox came from a 0-3 game deficit to vanquish the evil ones) changed the region’s mental landscape — as, of course, did the subsequent World Championship(s). Since then, Yankee hating has become more of a pleasant pastime than a crippling mental and spiritual disorder.

Barnes & Noble Review
It is in this happier frame of mind that I turn to “Damn Yankees: Twenty-Four Major League Writers on the World’s Most Loved (and Hated) Team,” edited by Rob Fleder. Among the two dozen pieces is the funniest consideration of Yankee hating I have ever read. “Take Me Out to the Oedipal Complex” is illustrator and writer Bruce McCall’s confession that, because his father was a Yankee fan, he himself embraced hating the team, leaving little anti-Yankee pamphlets of his own making around the house for his father to stumble upon. It was his own “unique form of patricide” and constituted his identity: “We Yankee-haters, by God, knew who we were. We were losers. We also knew that the devoted Yankee fan, wallowing in his smug prosperity, betrayed a contemptible character flaw. He was not only a front-runner but also a weakling and a sissy and a stranger to the humiliation and failure that toughens the spirit, readying you for more humiliation and failure.”

All-out Yankee attacks are actually few in this book, Frank Deford’s may be summed up succinctly: Y$a$n$k$e$e$s, and Nathaniel Rich’s more forlornly: Mets fan. Charles Pierce, though a Red Sox supporter from birth, writes sympathetically of the proud ethnic divisions in his native Worcester, which — thanks to Joe DiMaggio — put an island of Italian-American Yankee fans in the middle of Massachusetts. Among the other contributors, who range from Jane Leavy to Colum McCann, are Peter Dexter with a mean-spirited, humblebragging consideration of Chuck Knoblauch, and Dick Telander with an appreciative one of Jim Abbott. Economist James Surowiecki provides an excellent assessment of George Steinbrenner’s contribution (marketing genius). Derek Jeter has two big fans in Roy Blout Jr. and Tom Verducci, while Bill James asks the question that may — or may not — have given you sleepless nights: “Did you ever find yourself wondering which season was the greatest ever by a Yankee catcher?” I will reveal the season (1950) and the player (Yogi Berra) because that is only the beginning. James, a driven man, pushes on, with amusing commentary, to rank the 100 best seasons for Yankee catchers.

The catcher who appears most often in high places on that list is also the costar of Harvey Araton’s “Driving Mr. Yogi: Yogi Berra, Ron Guidry, and Baseball’s Greatest Gift.” Guidry, who had played for the Yankees during Berra’s time as a coach and last tenure as manager, has, for over a decade, picked up the ancient backstop every spring at the Tampa airport to drive him to the Yankee training camp. Around that annual journey are spun a number of tales including the story of Berra’s mighty fourteen-year umbrage at a highhanded George Steinbrenner, which was finally resolved in a July 1999 celebration of Berra’s return to Yankee Stadium. The event was elevated by the perfect game pitched that afternoon by David Cone — triumphantly bringing back the memory of Berra’s own role in Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series. We find here too the introduction of frogs’ legs by the Louisianan Guidry into Berra’s diet and a sense of the deep friendship between two great baseball men.

The title of Tim Wendell’s “Summer of ’68: the Season That Changed Baseball, and America, Forever” is one that could be used, mutatis mutandis, as we say around the farm, for any number of seasons. Nonetheless, outside the park, 1968 was a doozy, marked by assassinations, riots, an increasingly unpopular war, and a violent Democratic Convention in Chicago. The effects of this were felt inside the park as racial tensions increased and a number of players had to interrupt their time on the field for military training. As for the game itself: it was a season of phenomenal pitching, with the magnificently fearsome Bob Gibson emerging with a preternatural 1.12 ERA (and 1.67 in the World Series). Alas, the season’s hurling greatness changed the game forever: the next year saw the mound lowered by six inches and the designated hitter appear in the American League. The book includes excellent photographs and is strongest when it concentrates on baseball.

The “gentlemen’s agreement” that banned black players from organized profession baseball was struck behind closed doors toward the end of the nineteenth century. In “Conspiracy of Silence: Sportswriters and the Long Campaign to Desegregate Baseball,” Chris Lamb shows that the ban was maintained in great part by its existence never being acknowledged. The book is a chronicle of bad faith, on the part of owners and organizational big bugs, and of a press that remained generally silent on the subject. It is also an absorbing account of how that silence was finally broken. Key to this were a few white sports reporters, a few black ones from the black press, and the (Communist) Daily Worker, a paper that, until the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 was far more influential than most of us can quite take in today. The entrance of the United States into the war against a racist regime made baseball’s own racial hypocrisy increasingly untenable, which fact was increasingly reflected in the formerly circumspect mainstream press. In the largest sense, Lamb shows how pivotal the desegregation of baseball was to that of the nation as a whole.

Mitchell Nathanson claims that “A People’s History of Baseball” “is baseball history from an alternative point of view,” and to that end it visits some of organized professional baseball’s most notorious institutions and episodes, among them segregation; the Reserve Clause; the banning of players from the game without due process; the blind eye turned by club owners to “performance-enhancement drugs” and subsequent scapegoating of a few players; and the battle over who owns baseball statistics. Nathanson’s goal is to reclaim baseball and its story from those who have spun a falsely uplifting version, first among the guilty being Henry Chadwick (a.k.a. the Father of Baseball), who promoted ideologically skewed statistics (in Nathanson’s opinion) and offered baseball as an edifying example of individual sacrifice and teamwork (bad). To offer Chadwick as villain is a real stunner to my way of thinking, but in this case even more so as his success in making statistics integral to baseball made possible what Nathanson considers — most eccentrically — to be the means of restoring the game to both players and fans. That is fantasy baseball: the game that takes the actual game out of baseball.

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More Katherine A. Powers.

Tuesday, Nov 15, 2011 1:00 AM UTC

The Marlins’ bizarre new look

The team's revamped logo involves a whimsical rainbow swoosh. The effect is anything but intimidating

By , Imprint

So far the biggest story to come out of baseball’s early off-season isn’t some splashy free agent signing or the abrupt retirement of St. Louis Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa, but that of the logo and uniform redesign of the Florida Marlins. The new look was officially announced on Friday, and if you haven’t seen them already, you might not believe your eyes. In fact, when some of the images of the new logo were leaked there was such shock and disbelief by the baseball world, most people assumed it was a farce, calling the look everything from “Hawaiian Shaved Ice” to “Push-up Pop” to “Rainbow Bright.”

Florida Marlins

The rebrand was planned as part of the team’s big move to their new stadium, New Marlins Ballpark (which also sports a logo with a rainbow motif), a baseball-only park with a retractable roof to keep the tropical rains away. With a name like New Marlins Ballpark, the powers-that-be decided the team needed a new identity as well. So not only are the uniform colors radically different, but the team will now be called the Miami Marlins.

Gone is the teal, silver and black color scheme the team has worn since its inception in 1993 (and in which it won two World Series), and in its place, as you can see, is a curious combination of oranges, yellows, blues and assorted other bright hues. Gone too is the detailed illustration of the eponymous fish, bursting around and through the logo with furious determination. Instead there is now a whimsical suggestion of a marlin swooshing from some unclear source out of the Aztec-influenced M letterform. Whatever its origin, one thing is sure: The overall effect is anything but intimidating.

In addition to the new logo and color scheme, new uniforms will also be revealed. Again, this look isn’t certain to be the one unveiled on Thursday (and in light of all the backlash, it’s entirely possible the Marlins’ design team has gone back to the drawing board) but this is what has been floating around the ether and seems to make sense based on the logo. White home jerseys with black caps. Away grays with a radically out of place blue cap (that strangely echo the original Tampa Bay Devil Rays uniforms). And some assortment of combinations for Fridays and other games.

Apparently the team’s (and stadium’s) colorful new look is meant to reflect the multicultural heritage of the many diverse ethnic groups living in the area. But you have to wonder if the Marlins’ head honchos learned nothing from the atrocious Houston Astros uniforms of the mid-1970s (known as the “rainbow era”) that made even Nolan Ryan and J.R. Richard, at left (two of the era’s most dominating pitchers), look a tad sheepish.

Not to say orange is a bad choice for a sports team (the Giants, Orioles and Tigers pull it off pretty well), but it does require some tasteful design skill and a healthy grasp of workable color palettes.

Perhaps it’s not the worst logo ever (for some ideas on that front click here); there are always the Chicago White Sox shorts and collared unis from the ’80s to claim that distinction. But if this is indeed the look of the new Miami Marlins, my guess is it won’t be around long.

Copyright F+W Media Inc. 2011.

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Tuesday, Oct 25, 2011 5:15 PM UTC

Exonerating Bill Buckner

25 years after the Red Sox infielder's infamous World Series error, we look at what really happened that October

By (Credit: AP)

Bill Buckner’s error in the 1986 World Series – 25 years ago today, a day of infamy for Red Sox fans — is one of the two most famous plays in World Series history. (Willie Mays’ catch in the 1954 fall classic is the other.)

Like Mays’ over-the-shoulder catch, Buckner’s booboo is entrenched in American folklore. Jimmy Fallon’s Red Sox fanatic in “Fever Pitch,” distraught over breaking up with his girlfriend, watches Buckner’s play over and over on his VCR. During congressional hearings in 2008, U.S. Rep. John Yarmuth, D-Ky., called former Treasury Secretary John Snow, then-SEC chief Christopher Cox and former Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan “three Bill Buckners.” On “Curb Your Enthusiasm” this season, Larry David loses a softball game when a ball rolls between his legs; his coach screams, “You Buckner-ed me!”

Everyone knows that Buckner lost the 1986 World Series for the Red Sox. But what everyone knows is wrong.

At the time, the Red Sox were burdened with 68 years of frustration; their last championship was in 1918. Leading three games to two against the New York Mets, Boston was ahead by a score of 5-3 in the bottom of the 10th inning. Red Sox pitcher Calvin Schiraldi got two quick outs. In the Sox locker room the champagne was iced, and the scoreboard flashed “Congratulations Red Sox.”

Gary Carter, Kevin Mitchell and Ray Knight all singled, and the score was 5-4 with Mitchell on third. Reliever Bob Stanley came into the game to pitch to Mookie Wilson and threw a wild pitch that brought Mitchell home and tied the score. But it’s the next play that still has Red Sox fans screaming in the middle of the night.

Stanley threw a sinker-ball, designed to produce ground balls to infielders. What was supposed to happen did happen—Mookie Wilson tapped a slow grounder at Buckner at first base. But the ball rolled between Buckner’s legs, and the Mets won in the most incredible finish to a World Series game ever. (See it with commentary by the inimitable Vin Scully.)

Buckner’s career changed in an instant. Up to that moment, he was one of the game’s great unsung hitters. He’d batted better than .300 seven times in his career, winning the 1980 American League batting title. He led the league four times in assists. During that crucial September 1986 playoff run, he carried the team, hitting .340 with eight home runs. All that was soon to be forgotten.

The scholar Stephen Jay Gould (in Natural History magazine) called him “a gallant first baseman and a veteran with a long and distinguished career.”

“For weeks,” wrote Gould, “manager John McNamara had been benching Buckner for defensive purposes during the last few innings of games with substantial Red Sox leads, but after a long and hard season, Buckner’s legs were shot … he could hardly bend down.”

Plagued with chronic ankle soreness—he was the first player to wear high-top baseball cleats to ease the pain— Buckner had been relieved in three previous series games by Dave Stapleton. Why was he still playing when Wilson hit the ground ball? Because McNamara was sentimental; he wanted his regulars on the field when the Red Sox won the series.

But Buckner’s error did not lose the championship for the Red Sox; it didn’t even lose Game 6 for them — the Red Sox had already blown their two-run lead. Two nights later, with another chance at the ring, Boston lost 8-5.

(Buckner, incidentally, had two hits in four at-bats and scored a run in Game 7.)

Red Sox fans cried “Curse of the Bambino”—the punishment Boston supposedly merited for selling Babe Ruth to the Yankees in 1919—but the focus of the curse that season was Buckner. Yet Buckner did not put the tying runs on base. He didn’t throw the wild pitch that made it 5-5. He did not make the decision to keep his defensive replacement on the bench. Had he made the play, the Red Sox could have lost the game anyway.

When so many others contributed as much or more to the Red Sox defeat, why has history made Buckner the goat? Perhaps Gould said it best when he suggested that in the collective minds of Red Sox fans, “If Buckner fields the ball properly, the Sox win their first World Series since 1918 and eradicate the Curse of the Bambino. In this scenario, Buckner’s miscue marks the unkindest bounce of all, the most improbable trivial little error sustained by a good and admired man. What hath God wrought?”

What God wrought, perhaps, was a curse on both teams. The New York Mets have not won another World Series since; their greatest stars on that 1986 team —pitcher Dwight Gooden and slugging outfielder Darryl Strawberry—saw their careers cut short by drug abuse. In 2007 and 2008, the team crumbled down the stretch and missed the playoffs. And this year, the Red Sox, who seemingly broke the Curse by winning the World Series in 2004 and 2007, suffered the all-time worst collapse in baseball history, losing 20 of their last 27 games.

But that was kid’s play for what God had in mind for Donnie Moore. Red Sox fans were quick to forget that they never would have had a crack at their own little tragedy had it not been for Donnie Moore. Boston made it to the World Series by beating the then-Anaheim Angels in the American League Championship Series. After four games, they were in better shape against the Red Sox than the Red Sox ever were against the Mets.

On Oct. 12, 1986, playing in Anaheim, the Angels were up three games to one with a 5-2 lead going into the top of the ninth. Then, a real curse revealed itself. Don Baylor hit a two-run homer to make it 5-4. Moore had been a fine relief pitcher that season, tallying 21 saves. With two outs and the tying run at second, Moore got two strikes on Dave Henderson, then tried to slip a fastball by the Red Sox outfielder. The pitch changed his life. Henderson slammed it to deep left field for a two-run homer. On TV, Al Michaels screamed, “Unbelievable! Astonishing! With one strike away Anaheim Stadium was one strike away from turning into Fantasyland! You’re looking at one for the ages here!”

Like Buckner, Moore was damned for losing the big one. What was forgotten is that the Angels came back to tie it, and Moore, still in the game, induced Jim Rice to ground into a double play. But in the 11th, the Red Sox scored another run off Moore on a sac fly by – of course – Dave Henderson. The Angels lost 7-6.

But that still left them with two chances to win their first-ever pennant and trip to the World Series. The Sox blasted the Angels pitching for 19 runs over two games and went on to meet their destiny against the Mets, without the slightest thought that they owed a great big ugly debt to sheer luck – one that would soon be repaid with interest.

Still, to Angels fans, it had all come down to the pitch that Donnie Moore threw to Dave Henderson. All the subsequent chances that they lost were the evil spawn of that one pitch.

For the next two years, Moore couldn’t walk out on the field without being booed, crushed and heckled. When he left the ballpark, fans were lineup to scream insults, even when he won. Moore began to drink heavily and his talents eroded. On July 18, 1989, Moore got into a shouting fight with his wife at their home in Anaheim Hills. He went to his closet, got an automatic pistol and, in front of his children, shot his wife and one of his daughters. The daughter drove herself and her mother to the hospital; they survived. Moore did not. Back in the house, with his son pleading for him to drop the gun, Moore shot and killed himself.

Now that is tragedy. That puts Bill Buckner’s error in perspective. It’s only a game, unless you choose to regard it as something more.

Meanwhile, the infamous Buckner ball, once owned by Charlie Sheen, is up for auction on eBay, asking price $1 million. The bid will close at the exact minute of the 25th anniversary of the play.

Now a successful businessman, Buckner has lived down the error by turning the joke on himself. On “Curb Your Enthusiasm,” he won the cheers of a New York crowd by catching a baby dropped from a burning building.

In 2008, he threw out the first pitch of the Red Sox home opener and got a standing ovation from the sell-out crowd. Somewhere, one has to feel, the Bambino himself was applauding.

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Allen Barra's next book is "Mickey and Willie -- The Parallel Lives of Baseball's Golden Age," from Crown. More Allen Barra.

Friday, Sep 30, 2011 11:01 AM UTC

What baseball tells us about racism

Most home-plate umpires are white -- and they seem to be hurting the careers of minority pitchers

By

Despite recent odes to “post-racial” sensibilities, persistent racial wage and unemployment gaps show that prejudice is alive and well in America. Nonetheless, that truism is often angrily denied or willfully ignored in our society, in part, because prejudice is so much more difficult to recognize on a day-to-day basis. As opposed to the Jim Crow era of white hoods and lynch mobs, 21st century American bigotry is now more often an unseen crime of the subtle and the reflexive — and the crime scene tends to be the shadowy nuances of hiring decisions, performance evaluations and plausible deniability.

Thankfully, though, we now have baseball to help shine a light on the problem so that everyone can see it for what it really is.

Today, Major League Baseball games using QuesTec’s computerized pitch-monitoring system are the most statistically quantifiable workplaces in America. Match up QuesTec’s accumulated data with demographic information about who is pitching and who is calling balls and strikes, and you get the indisputable proof of how ethnicity does indeed play a part in discretionary decisions of those in power positions.

This is exactly what Southern Methodist University’s researchers did when they examined more than 3.5 million pitches from 2004 to 2008. Their findings say as much about the enduring relationship between sports and bigotry as they do about the synaptic nature of racism in all of American society.

First and foremost, SMU found that home-plate umpires call disproportionately more strikes for pitchers in their same ethnic group. Because most home-plate umpires are white, this has been a big form of racial privilege for white pitchers, who researchers show are, on average, getting disproportionately more of the benefit of the doubt on close calls.

Second, SMU researchers found that “minority pitchers reacted to umpire bias by playing it safe with the pitches they threw in a way that actually harmed their performance and statistics.” Basically, these hurlers adjusted to the white umpires’ artificially narrower strike zone by throwing pitches down the heart of the plate, where they were easier for batters to hit.

Finally, and perhaps most important, the data suggest that racial bias is probably operating at a subconscious level, where the umpire doesn’t even recognize it.

To document this, SMU compared the percentage of strikes called in QuesTec-equipped ballparks versus non-QuesTec parks. Researchers found that umpires’ racial biases diminished when they knew they were being monitored by the computer.

Same thing for high-profile moments. During those important points in games when umpires knew fans were more carefully watching the calls, the racial bias all but vanished. Likewise, the same-race preference was less pronounced at high-attendance games, where umps knew there would be more crowd scrutiny.

Though gleaned from baseball, these findings transcend athletics by providing a larger lesson about conditioned behavior in an institutionally racist society.

Whether the workplace is a baseball diamond, a factory floor or an office, when authority figures realize they are being scrutinized, they are more cognizant of their own biases — and more likely to try to stop them before they unduly influence their behavior. But in lower-profile interludes, when the workplace isn’t scrutinized and decisions are happening on psychological autopilot, pre-programmed biases can take over.

Thus, the inherent problem of today’s pervasive “post-racial” fallacy. By perpetuating the lie that racism doesn’t exist, pretending that bigotry is not a workplace problem anymore, and resisting governmental efforts to halt such prejudice, we create the environment for our ugly subconscious to rule. In doing so, we consequently reduce the potential for much-needed self-correction.

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David Sirota

David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More David Sirota.

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