CHICK HEARN IS DEAD

Well I can tell you from my personal knowledge and experience with Chick Hearn, that he was about as humble a person as you will ever find. He didn't have an egotistical bone in his body. A true gentleman. He made professional basketball what it is today. When the Lakers came to LA in 1960 and hired Chick Hearn, Los Angeles much less the USA, didn't know what or care anything about professional basketball and Chick Hearn went around the city personally selling tickets to Laker games. Attendance to Laker games increased dramatically due to the announcing of the games by Chick Hearn. He was the ambassador of professional basketball and no one did more to promote professional basketball than Chick Hearn. He was the best! PERIOD!

Hopefully, you'd:
A) scrap the DH in the AL.
B) scrap interleague play. (It's destroying both the World Series and the all-star game).
C) scrap the wild card, and go back to two divisions per league.
D) outlaw artificial turf.
E) institute a salary cap (I'm against revenue sharing).

You must have been reading some of my previous writings on the subject; I have been advocating A-D for what now seems years. I oppose a salary cap, however - it is not player salaries that have done the damage to the game (unless you include salary arbitration - which was the owners' own bright idea in the first place, in 1974-75 - which has caused some significant salary inflation), no matter what baseball's mandarins and their trained media parrots would have you believe. Consider: In the 1995-2001 seasons, while baseball's mandarins led by Alleged Commissioner Bug Selig himself, have been crying the poverty blues:

1. Baseball has actually had $2.1 billion in additional revenues per season.
2. Less than half of that money went to the players.
3. The rest of those additional revenues in fact went to places having little or nothing to do with baseball-related or baseball-specific operations.

So said the Society for American Baseball Research's Business of Baseball Committee, shortly after last winter's Forbes magazine analysis of Selig's and baseball's dollar figures on the what and what nots of the game - and I found it extremely interesting, too, to learn that of all the people or resources that were invited to partake of membership in Selig's so-called Blue Ribbon Committee analysing the economic state of the game, SABR was distinctly not invited to join in the fun. Probably because SABR, in the mid-1980s, went even farther than independent analysts otherwise did in skewering the mandarins when they did open the books at then-Commissioner Peter Ueberroth's insistence...and discovered a number of nifty little shuck-and-jive shell games the mandarins were playing with their revenues, real and alleged. (Two examples: the Atlanta Braves were claiming low revenues - but that was because, it turned out, they were not counting their WTBS superstation revenues from around the country, just counting the station's local figures; and, the St. Louis Cardinals were assigning revenues generated by contractors who handled parking and concessions at Busch Stadium to businesses having nothing to do with the Cardinals.)

I have my own questions about the revenue sharing issue, and they only begin with a critical one: Why the hell haven't the two major leagues knocked it off with the B.S. and gone to a gate receipt sharing that comes to 60-40 (60 for the home team) or thereabout, instead of, what, the 80-20 or 85-15 they use now? If they went to that, and learned finally how to market and promote their teams, I could almost guarantee that you'd hear a lot less whining about revenue sharing and redistributing wealth.

And, while I'm at it, people should knock it off with blaming the Yankees for the bulk of the trouble. You don't have to be a Yankee fan to finally admit that, think what you will of them or their owner, but George Steinbrenner finally learned his lesson and, since returning from suspension in 1992-93, has done it the way everyone likes to yap about how it should be done: he brought in some brains to run his baseball operations, he has mostly let them do what they're qualified to do, what he hired them to do, including rebuilding the formerly badly depleted Yankee farm system and trading intelligently as well as bagging a free agent or two when the occasion allowed; and, reinvesting the preponderance of his profits back into his ball club. Combine that with the Yankees actually having the audacity to develop some of their own revenue streams - now, gee! How come the other teams, instead of yapping about those big bad imperialistic Yankees, don't get some brains of their own and think about developing their own new revenue streams, rebuilding their farm systems, and reinvesting a preponderance of their baseball profit revenues back into their clubs? My God. It just might mean their survival.

You know, I wonder sometimes: Whenever I hear other people talk about bringing back the "good old days" of the reserve clause, aside from wondering whether they really want to restore an era in which baseball players were treated like chattel and in which "player loyalty" didn't mean a damn thing to most of the old-line mandarins (owners like William Wrigley of the Chicago Cubs and Tom Yawkey of the Boston Red Sox were notable and noble enough exceptions) who traded or sold them at will, I wonder if they even know what the actual reserve clause was and actually said. If they even know that the actual clause called for one secured season, one further season at the club's option, and that's all, folks! - and, if the old owners had ever applied the clause properly and rightly, rather than abusing and fudging it to bind players to their teams for life or until the owner decided to sell or trade him, it would actually have meant players had a right to free agency after two seasons at the maximum, and after one if the club chose not to exercise the one option year?

Or, if the reserve-clause resurrectors know that what I have just written ended up proving the lynch-pin in the case which really brought on the advent of free agency, the Messersmith case - and that it was one of the most notoriously skinflint owners of them all, Calvin Griffith of the Minnesota Twins, who admitted it, in print, in a Minneapolis Star-Tribune interview that Andy Messersmith's representative brought into the evidence at the hearing which named him a free agent and the reserve clause dead. (While I'm at it: how many remember that the issue that originally provoked Andy Messersmith to challenge the reserve clause - he pitched a season without a contract, after his previous one expired, and pitched magnificently to boot; he was one of the best pitchers in the majors - was about "player loyalty": Andy Messersmith wanted a no-trade clause in his next contract, and the Los Angeles Dodgers declined. That, ladies and gentlemen, was what got the iron into Andy Messersmith's spine.)

And, now that I'm thinking of these things, I wonder what would have been different and what could have been avoided if an idea once posited by, of all people, Kenesaw Mountain Landis himself had been taken up:

If the name Earl Averill is familiar to you, he was the player who provoked the idea. (Averill, for those who don't know, is a Hall of Fame outfielder who may be remembered best for hitting the All-Star Game ball that broke Dizzy Dean's toe, prodded Dean to change his pitching motion to favour the injury until it healed properly, and ended up ruining his arm.) Averill had been a Pacific Coast League star with the San Francisco Seals, until the Cleveland Indians bought him for, I think it was $50,000. Averill actually asked how much of that sale price was going to be his. Told that none of it would be, Averill refused to report to the Indians. The outfielder and the Tribe argued vociferously enough about the matter that it caught Landis's attention - and Landis sided with Averill.. Landis's powers did not include ruling on policies involving player trades or sales, but he did say, for publication, that he saw no reason why, if a player was sold for cash, the player himself should not receive a decent percentage of the proceeds. As it turned out, Averill ended up being offered a bonus to end the argument (it was $5,000, a decent chunk of change in the early 1930s) and reported to the Tribe. But you have to wonder what could have been avoided if Landis's view had ended up becoming policy after all. Not to mention, what might have happened to a few players following Averill - like St. Louis Cardinals backstop star Walker Cooper, whom the New York Giants bought for $100,000 in the mid-1940s. And would that have ended up proving a difference when came the case that caused the end of straight cash deals - Charlie Finley's attempted fire-sale of his championship Oakland A's teams?

Unfortunately, we will never know.

I guess Chick needed a new fridge every decade or so.

He would have needed a new one to start the coming season, had he lived, believe it...or not. One of the Los Angeles radio stations this afternoon replayed Chick Hearn's call of the final five minutes of the final game in the Laker sweep of the New Jersey Nets. The game came down to the Lakers holding a fat enough lead in the final minute...and Chick forgot to put the game and the season in the refrigerator! I'm willing to bet a few people couldn't wait to point it out to him...and that he probably had a good laugh over it.

Vin Scully was a football announcer for the NFL playoffs in the '80's, not the '70's, and I thought Scully was as great an announcer for football as he was for baseball.

For basketball, though, Chick Hearn was the best announcer, in my opinion. He'll be missed.

Three years late BUMP to an icon. Had the pleasure of meeting him, wife Marge, and broadcast partner Stu Lantz when I worked at the Forum in 1989/90.

Los Angeles fans have been greatly blessed with sportscasting talent. Witness:

Basketball: Chick Hearn
Football: Dick Enberg, Bill King (Raiders, recently deceased)
Baseball: Vin Scully
Hockey: Bob Miller