Replies

I'm a professional writer but not by trade a sportswriter, although I have now begun writing a book about the Cubs and the Red Sox. The collusion issue hurt the owners pretty seriously, but the salaries were spiraling out of control because of salary arbitration long before collusion was even an actuality. It will probably have to be a combination of adjusting or even eliminating salary arbitration (remember - that was the owners' own dumb idea, the players weren't even looking for it when free agency was first born in earnest, as it should have been: the so-called reserve clause should never have been allowed to be used as the owners had done so for all those years prior) and making for sensible revenue sharing.

This may be hindsight at its best, but did you know that, of all people, Kenesaw Mountain Landis actually had an idea which, had it been adopted, might have a) brought about the demise of the misuse of the reserve clause and b) made the worst of the free agency boom impossible? Here it is: Landis once proposed, after a 1928 case involving future Hall of Fame outfielder Earl Averill (he's the one whose batted ball off the toe prompted Dizzy Dean's ruination, after Dean changed his motion to favour the injury and blew his arm out): the Indians bought him from the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League for $50,000, for the 1929 season. Averill refused to report at first when he learned he wouldn't see a penny of the money, made it public, and got Landis's attention. Landis actually said that Averill's demand sounded reasonable enough: Landis in fact proposed that baseball as a whole take up a rule by which a player got a cut of the action if he was sold, rather than traded; or, if he'd been traded for cash as well as player(s), he get a cut since the cash was part of the package to get him.

Say whatever else you will say about Landis, who made an awful lot of dunderheaded decisions (like his stubbornness in refusing to allow the colour line to be rebroken in his lifetime; that's why Bill Veeck was refused a chance to buy the moribund Phillies in the 1940s - Veeck had let slip that he'd sign a black player or three and Landis quashed the deal; it's no accident that Branch Rickey went scouting the moment Landis croaked, Rickey had been looking to re-break the colour line for years), but that one just might have saved baseball a lot of grief. The Messersmith decision might still have been necessary (and it was), but there might have been far less ramifications if, say, when the Giants sold Dave Kingman to the Mets in 1975 for $200,000, Kingman himself had been cut in for, say, $75,000 of the money?

Better yet - had the Landis plan been in place, could Bowie Kuhn have pulled his absolutely dunderheaded move of blocking Charlie Finley's selling of Joe Rudi, Rollie Fingers, and Vida Blue? Finley was the ass he's been portrayed but that doesn't mean you block, in effect, every baseball team's right to deal in sale of contracts over it. So Charlie Finley was an ass? Yo, Bowie, get a clue: you still could have had it stuck to him if the Landis plan had been in effect, because whatever you sell those guys for, Rudi gets his cut, Fingers his, Blue his...

Worth thinking about - hard.

Great stuff, thanks....

The image of Bowie Kuhn sitting in the seats at Yankee standium during the WS, in just a suit, while it was snowing, and the temperature was in the 20's...is a classic....almost as good as the ones of all the apartment buildings burning from the riots around the stadium in the 70's...

I grew up in the Bronx, about 2 miles from the ballpark, and used to go all the time as a kid...all those day games.....right field bleachers were awesome...people forget before the renovation that the r.f. porch was only 296 feet, and that the seats were LEVEL with the field..the railing was only three feet high, and is was a mesh....so you'd sit there and the r.f'er....Skowron, Berra, would be ten feet infront of you, and he'd talk to you all during the game......in those days, you could get a ticket for 50 cents with your G.O. card and it was a great way to spend an afternon, and then, there were the double headers......