The Lords of the Realm, page 2
Baseball’s growth and profitability ultimately drew backers for a new league in 1914. It was called the Federal League, and it was the best thing to happen to the players since the days of the “revolvers.” The average salary, $3,800 in 1913, rose to $7,300 in 1915. Stars used the rival league’s threat to ratchet up their pay. Ty Cobb nearly doubled his salary, to $20,000. Tris Speaker got an unheard-of two-year contract that totaled $36,000. The owner of the Philadelphia Athletics, Connie Mack, unwilling to meet such prices, sold off much of his pennant-winning 1914 team, including the famous “hundred-thousand-dollar infield” (for such was the sum his star infielders fetched).
The players finally had some leverage and the leagues grudgingly recognized the Players Fraternity. Fultz was able to win a few modest gains, like getting the teams to start paying for players’ uniforms and giving ten-year veterans the right to an unconditional release. (Players were previously in the position of Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, a top pitcher for the Cubs for years, whom they sold to a minor league team when they had no more use for him.)
Yet the Federal League, for all its vigorous bidding, still could land only a handful of established players. The Federal owners sued the established leagues in 1915, charging they’d blocked the newcomers from the player market, restraining free trade and violating antitrust laws. They endeavored to get the case before a Chicago judge they thought would lend a sympathetic ear.
Kenesaw Mountain Landis had been named for a promontory outside of Atlanta. His father, a Union Army surgeon, had been tending to wounded troops during Sherman’s assault on that city when he himself was shot. For some reason, he wanted to remind himself of it through his son, who was born just after the war.
Young Landis grew up in Ohio and Indiana. After dropping out of high school, he drifted through a series of jobs, including one as a court reporter. He liked what he saw in that setting and went to a Chicago law school, despite his previous lack of education. Then he hung out his shingle in that prosperous city.
He was appointed a federal judge at age thirty-nine, thanks less to a brilliant legal career than to political connections—he had managed a failed congressional campaign. The unsuccessful candidate was offered a judgeship by President Teddy Roosevelt. He turned it down but recommended Landis in his stead. That was in 1905. By 1907, Landis had made a name for himself as a Rooseveltian trust-buster. He found Standard Oil guilty of violating the Sherman Antitrust Act and fined the company a whopping $29.2 million. Landis was overruled on appeal—a frequent occurrence in his judicial career—but he won renown.
He became even better known for a zealous brand of courtroom patriotism during World War I. Landis issued a summons for Kaiser Wilhelm II to answer for the sinking of the Lusitania. He found prominent socialist Victor Berger guilty of “impeding the war effort” and gave him the maximum punishment; and he would later observe: “It was my great disappointment to give Berger only twenty years in Leavenworth. I believe the law should have enabled me to have had him lined up against a wall and shot.”
The Supreme Court reversed the decision, agreeing with Berger’s lawyers that Landis’s remarks about German-Americans (“their hearts are reeking with disloyalty”) betrayed a prejudicial mind-set.
With his penchant for playing to the gallery, Landis was an utterly unpredictable jurist. The Federal League thought, however, that they had found in him an authentic trust-buster. What they got, rather, was a baseball devotee. Landis was that rare Chicagoan, a fan of both the Cubs and the White Sox. He interrupted the trial at one point to declare, “Both sides must understand that any blows at the thing called baseball would be regarded by this court as a blow to a national institution.”
The trial concluded, but eleven months later Landis still hadn’t made a ruling. He was hoping the parties would settle out of court, and he put the Federal League up against it. Unable to gain the sweeping court victory they needed, the Federal League settled for a modest cash settlement and quietly went out of business.
It had produced only three things of lasting importance. One was Wrigley Field, which was built for the Federal League’s Chicago team. Another was the end of the Players Fraternity, spelling the end of any meaningful players’ union for fifty years. The third was the coming of Kenesaw Mountain Landis.
In 1920, when baseball was under a dark shadow, the owners returned to their favorite judge. Eight White Sox players had played ball with gamblers out to fix the 1919 World Series. No matter that the players’ reason was that they were embittered at owner Charles Comiskey, who, like other club operators, had screwed salaries back down after the folding of the Federal League. No matter, either, that the accused were actually acquitted in court of throwing the Series. The “Black Sox” scandal had raised serious doubts about baseball being on the level.
The worst part was that baseball had no leader to restore its good name. Its governing three-man National Commission was a warren of politics. The two leagues were at one another’s throats again. It was decided that only an outsider of impeccable integrity could do the job.
A delegation of owners was appointed to approach Judge Landis. They were to meet him in his chambers one day but found, when they arrived, that he was still hearing a case. As they filed into the back of his courtroom, he scowled and intoned, “Unless that noise ceases, I shall have to clear the court.”
Landis took the job, on the condition that he have absolute authority to act in “the best interests” of baseball. His first action was to banish all eight of the “Black Sox.” “Baseball is something more than a game to an American boy; it is his training field for life work,” he told one writer. “Destroy his faith in its squareness and honesty and you have destroyed something more; you have planted suspicion of all things in his heart.”
Landis looked like God, or at least his cousin, with a jutting jaw, a high forehead, shaggy white hair, and a stern countenance. Operating out of a Chicago office with one word—BASEBALL—written on its door, he acted like God as well. In his first decade in office, Landis would banish eleven more players for gambling-related offenses and even go after the great Babe Ruth.
Landis forbade the Yankees star to go on any more postseason barnstorming tours. This was a lucrative venture for Ruth, who did it anyway and suggested that Landis could “go jump in a lake.” Replied Landis: “It seems I’ll have to show somebody who’s running this game.” He suspended Ruth for the first forty games of the 1922 season.
Under Landis, the morals of baseball were purified—and the business of baseball was ossified. The deeply conservative Landis had the same answer for anything new: no.
That’s what he said when the Cincinnati Reds’ president, Larry MacPhail, proposed installing lights at Crosley Field. “Not in my lifetime or yours will you ever see a baseball game played at night in the majors,” thundered Landis.
That, again, is what he said when a beer company wanted to advertise on World Series radio broadcasts. Landis was slow even to secure revenues for baseball’s broadcast rights—all the way into the mid-1930s—and when he did he was still more preoccupied with the moral than the financial implications. (Landis also had approval of World Series announcers and he turned down Dizzy Dean, citing his diction as “unfit for a national broadcaster.”)
Landis said no frequently and vehemently to a man named Branch Rickey, when he came up with something called the “farm system.” Rickey’s St. Louis Cardinals came to own or control dozens of minor league teams and thereby avoided having to buy minor-leaguers’ contracts. It was a brilliant idea, since a low-budget team like the Cardinals couldn’t compete otherwise for minor league talent with a rich team like the Yankees. By developing and controlling their own players, they could.
Landis thought locally owned and operated minor league teams were an essential part of America’s fabric. He railed against the farm system as “chain-store baseball” and threatened to punish Rickey vigorously if he caught him stepping over the line on the rules. This he did when he discovered that the Cardinals controlled entire leagues of minor league teams. Landis declared 163 Cardinals farmhands free agents in a two-year span.
Landis was no doubt right in his reading of Rickey, who had a remarkable ability to be at once pious and devious, but his frame of reference was askew. The minor league system he was trying to preserve was an anachronism in an urbanizing America. His actions did, however, enable him to portray himself as the champion of the players without actually ruffling anyone’s feathers but the Cardinals’. On the subject of the reserve clause, he was at his most conservative. When a young Turk named Bill Veeck wrote him a letter saying that the reserve system was “morally and legally indefensible,” Landis condescendingly replied, “Somebody once said a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and your letter proves him to be a wizard.”
The reserve system—and everything else about how baseball operated—had been upheld by the Supreme Court during Landis’s second year in office. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote that baseball was exempt from antitrust laws on the grounds that “exhibitions of baseball are purely state affairs.”
This was a piece of fiction, one that would grow sillier with each passing year. But it undergirded everything about the way baseball operated. The players were bound to one team for life—or at least for as long as it suited the team. The baseball owners answered to no one but Judge Landis. The business of baseball could operate just as archaically as it wanted. It was the only game in town.
It meant that Philadelphia Athletics slugger Jimmie Foxx could win the batting Triple Crown in 1933 and still have to fight a salary cut. (His owner, Connie Mack, wanted to reduce him from $16,670 to $12,000. He had, after all, slumped from fifty-eight homers to forty-eight.) Lou Gehrig, when he did the same in 1934, suffered similarly: he had to battle to stay at $23,000.
Baseball, in fairness, was struggling through the Great Depression like every other industry. Its attendance slipped back to levels of twenty-five years earlier. The St. Louis Browns drew only 81,000 fans all year in 1935. But even later, in better times, star players could get shafted. Ralph Kiner’s salary was cut by 25 percent after he’d just led the National League in homers for a seventh straight season. “We finished last with you,” Branch Rickey announced. “We could’ve finished last without you.”
Interestingly, when it came to salary disputes, popular sympathy was almost always with the owners. Fans and writers saw it as a privilege for a man to play ball for a living. When Joe DiMaggio held out in 1938, after his first big season, for $40,000, the press scalded him for not accepting the proffered $25,000. The writers agreed with the Yankees’ owner, Colonel Jacob Ruppert: “Why, $25,000 is enough to make him financially independent for the rest of his life.”
Conditions were still ripe for an occasional run at organizing the players. In 1946, a Boston lawyer named Robert Murphy started a union he called the American Baseball Guild. He was appalled that even in the mid-forties some players made as little as $3,500. He thought it disgraceful that the great Jimmie Foxx was now penniless in retirement.
Murphy planned to make Pittsburgh his launching-off point. It was a good union town and the team seemed to be receptive to unionization. The guild had to be approved by two-thirds of the players to be certified as their bargaining agent. The vote was to be held before a mid-season game, and feelings ran high. Just beforehand, veteran pitcher Rip Sewell gave a fiery antiunion speech and owner William Benswanger reminded everyone that he’d “never hurt” them. (Taking no chances, however, he had a replacement team ready to take the field.)
The Guild drew twenty of thirty-six votes, just shy of two-thirds. The union never got back on track, and Murphy disappeared, but he did have an effect. Mindful that Murphy had come close with the Pirates, and fearful of raids from a new Mexican League, the owners handed the players a sop. They pledged to create a pension, set a minimum salary of $5,500 and a maximum pay cut of 25 percent, and pay spring training expenses of $25 a week. The stipend would forever be known as “Murphy money.” (One player got a little something extra: Rip Sewell was presented with a gold watch by Commissioner Happy Chandler.)
Establishing a union beachhead wasn’t hard only on account of management opposition. A lot of the players themselves resisted. As a group, they tended to think more like Judge Landis than John L. Lewis. They were heartland conservatives who chewed tobacco and hated Communists. They’d gotten to the majors on their individual initiative and talent. Such people didn’t embrace group political action.
Mostly they wanted to play ball. It was a privilege to be there, and a precarious one. There were only sixteen teams and 400 major league jobs, with 8,000 minor-leaguers clamoring for them. The major league life was good, if not the pay: Pullman sleepers, Porterhouse steaks, clubhouse camaraderie, and a shot at glory.
The scale of the business and the preoccupations of the players were such that it still seemed an age of innocence. During the 1952 World Series, one inning ended with Jackie Robinson, the second baseman, catching a pop-up in front of Gil Hodges, the first baseman. General Manager Buzzie Bavasi glanced into the dugout between innings and saw Robinson and Hodges having a heated argument. He didn’t like it and told Hodges so in his office the next day, when he made his daily stop in the office.
“This is the World Series,” said Bavasi. “You shouldn’t be carrying on like that. What was it about, anyway?”
“Well, I don’t like to catch pop-ups,” Hodges began. That was true; he was a converted catcher who never had gotten comfortable under a plummeting ball. “And I had a deal with Jackie. I paid him five dollars for any pop-up he caught in my territory. Well, he caught that ball and then he said the rate was ten dollars for the Series.”
The dispute had been resolved, he assured Bavasi. “We settled on seven-fifty.”
Forty years later, Bavasi laughed as hard as he did that day.
“You didn’t have the money then,” he said. “That was the fun of the game.”
In 1951, the average salary was $13,000, and even above-average players took second jobs. That winter, Robin Roberts, a twenty-one-game winner for the Phillies, sold cardboard boxes in the off-season. The Yankees’ Yogi Berra and Phil Rizzuto sold men’s clothing at a store in Newark. The Dodgers’ Carl Furillo was a hardhat and teammate Jackie Robinson worked in an appliance store.
In the time-honored tradition, players groused about salaries, but nobody had outsized notions of what they should be. One season in the late forties, Bill Veeck left twenty-five blank contracts on his desk and told each of his Cleveland Indians to fill in an amount. He fought with a player over just one: Ken Keltner had cut his own pay by $5,000.
The top of the pay scale was $100,000 (first reached by Hank Greenberg in 1947), and players—as surely as owners—had to feel worthy of accepting it. “I don’t deserve it,” said Al Kaline, reminding Detroit general manager Jim Campbell he’d only hit .278. “Give me the same thing as last year, $93,000. Then I’ll have a good year and make you really pay me.”
Decades later, that story is still told with horror at the players’ union. But it was a stance that reflected the values of the time and relationships with management. Many players had warm relationships with their owners, who, in the words of one baseball man, “would do anything for them but pay well.”
When Phillies infielder Eddie Waitkus was shot by a deranged woman in 1949, owner Bob Carpenter paid for his winter-long rehabilitation in Florida, sending along the team’s trainer. When Brooks Robinson lost a bundle in a sporting-goods business, Orioles owner Jerry Hoffberger bailed him out. General managers spent half their time getting players out of scrapes, though sometimes they wondered why. The Dodgers once provided counsel to a pitcher facing a paternity suit. When the plaintiff entered the courtroom, the player eyed her up and down and declared to his lawyer, “Boy, I’d like to bang her again.”
The favors weren’t all in one direction. Late in the 1947 season, Yankees players held a pregame ceremony to give team president Larry MacPhail a sterling silver set. All their names were inscribed on the tray with the message: “To Larry MacPhail, greatest executive in baseball, whose zealous efforts were a major factor in our nineteen-game streak and the winning of the American League pennant. From his Yankees, 1947.”
MacPhail wept unashamedly.
Branch Rickey bought all the Dodgers players Studebakers after the 1946 season, when they improved vastly and only lost the pennant by a whisker. The players, in return, chipped in to buy Rickey a boat. They even made jokes about their futile trips into his office—known as “the cave of the winds”—from which they emerged, if they were lucky, with meager raises.
The players could take comfort in one thing: although they didn’t make much money, neither did the owners. The Cubs, for instance, could meet their payroll out of concessions revenues (“I used to say the players were playing for peanuts,” said Cubs business manager E. R. “Salty” Saltwell); but they also had the cheapest seats in baseball—one dollar for the bleachers until the mid-seventies—and held back 17,000 of them for walk-up sale each game.
“Mr. [Phil] Wrigley never took a penny out of the ball club, never took a dividend,” said Saltwell. “He didn’t care much about profits; he just didn’t care to subsidize losses.”
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That fairly characterized the prevailing attitude in baseball. Some teams were operated as a family business—the Senators by the Griffiths, the Giants by the Stonehams, the Athletics by Connie Mack. But more were owned by wealthy individuate—self-styled “sportsmen.” There was money involved, but it was a hobby, akin to horseracing. (Indeed, Pirates owner and real estate baron John Galbreath owned a horse named Roberto as well as a ballplayer of the same name, and the two meant about the same thing to him.) Phil Wrigley himself pretty much summed it up in the early fifties when he said, “Baseball is too much of a business to be a sport and too much of a sport to be a business.”
