Economic History of Baseball, Part 3: The Reserve Clause Never Did What They Said It Was. Just ask The Yankees

 

By the time Curt Flood’s case against the reserve clause was making its way through the Supreme Court, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, and the owner’s major argument against was that if it was dissolved, the richest and most powerful teams would get all the best players. It is rather amazing that all of those owners – certainly most of those in the American League – were able to make that argument with a straight face.

Because up until just a few years before Flood’s lawsuit began, that’s exactly what was happening in baseball anyway – and it’s indeed the whole reason the Yankee dynasty began in the first place.

For the record Babe Ruth was not the first player infamous Red Sox owner sold to the Yankees, just the most famous. While Ruth was setting his first home run record of 29, Frazee had already sold off pitching mainstays Ernie Shore and Dutch Leonard and halfway through the season sold Carl Mays to the Yankees for $40,000 against the express wishes of American League President Ban Johnson. After Ruth was sold, Frazee continued to sell his best players to the Yankees – indeed, almost the entire pitching staff of the 1927 Team was made up of former Red Sox and three other pitchers – Mays, Joe Bush, and Sam Jones had helped the Yankees win their first three pennants and their first World Championship. Indeed, those first three years of Yankee pennants were subway series against John McGraw’s New York Giants, which would end up doing the Yankees one better by winning four consecutive National League Pennants. When Walter Johnson was helping lead the Washington Senators to their first ever pennant in 1924, most of the nation was rooting for the Senator, half because they wanted to see Johnson finally pitch in a World Series and all of them because they wanted to see some team that wasn’t based in New York win the World Championship again. (The Senators did so that October.)

Even by that point, much of the baseball was beginning to become sick of New York’s dominance of the game. For the first twenty years of the 20^th Century that frustration was directed at the Giants who won six N.L. Pennants. After Ruth went to the Yankees, that hatred left the Giants and went entirely towards the Yankees.

The first sixty years of the existence of the World Series – from 1903 to 1964 – the Yankees would win 29 Pennants and 20 world series, the Giants would win 15 pennants and five world championships and Brooklyn (yes for these purposes they count) won nine pennants and one World Championship. Combined the state of New York accounted for 53 pennants and 26 World Championships. Of the four other cities that had two teams, the second highest was Philadelphia which managed to win a total of eleven pennants and five World Championships (nine of them were the Philadelphia Athletics, and their last pennant was in 1931).

Many of Major League Baseball’s changes over that period only came about either to compete with New York teams or to keep up with them. Putting numbers on uniforms only became official in 1929 when the Yankees did so in order that their fans could identify Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig easier. Night baseball, originated by Larry MacPhail when he owned the Cincinnati Reds in 1935, only really became part of the standard once he took over the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1938. Radio broadcasts had been around since the early 1920s, but because the Yankees did not want it cutting into their revenue, most teams took a pass on it. MacPhail had championed it for the Reds and when he moved to Brooklyn Red Barber came with him. Soon after every team was doing it. The farm system – Branch Rickey’s inspiration when the general manager of the Cardinals to set up a system of minor league teams to develop stars for the team – was essentially developed to compete against the rich teams such as the Giants and when it became successful, Yankee GM Ed Barrow hired George Weiss to help make one for the Yankees.

Even Rickey’s decision to sign Jackie Robinson in 1947 for Brooklyn had a major effect on how New York baseball was played – though not necessarily always for the better. Weiss, as I mentioned in an earlier article, was a racist who believe Yankee fans wouldn’t want to see ‘those people’ wearing pinstripes. He spent years delaying even as protests grew from sportswriters and the African American public. Finally he signed several players for the minor-league teams, traded most of them away, and reluctantly brought Elston Howard up to play in 1955. Because of his racism, the Yankee dynasty would begin to dry up near the middle of the 50s and eventually collapse by 1964. More importantly, the American League followed the guidance of the Yankees, and was slower to sign African-American prospects than the National League, eventually lead to the NL becoming the more dominant league for quite some time.

Winning with the Yankees, for the record, did not come with adequate financial compensation or even appreciation by ownership. Babe Ruth, who one year made more than Herbert Hoover, was by the standards of the crowds he drew vastly underpaid. And management refused to even consider him as manager of the Yankees even when the team was not winning pennants. Eventually they traded him to Boston, and then they – and baseball – were basically done with him. When Ruth wrote the Yankees asking for tickets to the 1936 World Series, management said: “Sure…just send a check.”

For decades the most successful team in baseball had no problem playing its biggest stars as little as possible, justifying it by saying that they had to be ‘hungry for that World Series check.” Because management had all the cards, they had no trouble arguing that when players held out, they were being greedy and selfish. In 1938, Joe DiMaggio who had just hit 46 home runs and driven in 167 runs, demanded $40,000 for his 1938 salary. Ed Barrow said: “Lou Gehrig has been with the Yankees since 1925 and is only making $25,000. What does that tell you?” DiMaggio replied: “That Mr. Gehrig is a very underpaid player.” I don’t really like or respect DiMaggio, but he was dead on when he said that.

And because Yankee management argued that players were money-hungry instead of caring about winning, Yankee fans who expected excellence from their players had no problem effusively booing them. DiMaggio was booed immensely at Yankee Stadium until his 56 game hitting streak. Mantle was booed the first half of his career mainly for not being Joe DiMaggio. It wasn’t until Roger Maris challenged Ruth for the home run record in 1961 that fans began to cheer Mantle – and boo Maris. Only Gehrig seemed to escape condemnation, and that’s probably because most fans didn’t notice him until he was about to die.

And it’s not like Weiss and Barrow didn’t have any problem trading all the great players around these stars when they didn’t produce any more or meet the ‘Yankee standards.’ Indeed, when you hear people like Doris Kearns Goodwin saying that when she was growing up players ‘stayed with the team that loved you rather than pursuing money’ this is 1)ignorance based on the fact that players couldn’t pursue money, and 2) the only reason the Brooklyn Dodgers spent her childhood intact was because they were always winning pennants. And it wasn’t like O’Malley or the front-office wasn’t trading players that were basically unimportant or that the players she loved weren’t traded when they became to old for the Dodgers. The reason she may ignore that is, of course, by the time that happened the Dodgers weren’t in Brooklyn anymore.

This actually brings me to a larger point about New York’s sense of entitlement regarding baseball overwhelming nostalgia.  There has always been some kind of subtle and not-so-subtle idea that to be a truly great athlete you must play in New York. There’s a decent argument that some of the weakest players who were inducted into Cooperstown all got in because they played for New York teams. Many New York Giants of the 20s and 30s got in because of superficial hitting statistics and because two of their old teammates Frankie Frisch and Bill Terry were on some of the committees during the 1960s. Gil Hodges was at best an above average hitting first baseman whose numbers were well below players such as Rocky Colavito and Boog Powell, but because he played for Brooklyn and managed the Miracle Mets, sportswriters and fans kept pressing them for years and they finally gave in. And Phil Rizzuto would never have been the subject of so much pressure to get into the Hall of Fame if he had played for Detroit or St. Louis or any other team than the Yankees.

Similarly there has always been a nostalgia factor for baseball in the 1950s. (Ken Burns even referred to this era as ‘The Capitol of Baseball’ and basically spent two and a half hours only talking about New York teams in that era.) I imagine it was great to live in New York and be a baseball fan, but probably not so much if you lived anywhere else in the country that had baseball. I’m pretty sure that if the Dodgers had kept up their winning ways another season, they would have been granted with cries around the National League saying: “Break up the Bums.”

And all of this brings to be the biggest economic point of all and something New York fans don’t seem able to get over: the Giants and Dodgers leaving New York in 1957, abandoning the city that leaved them for bigger profits or California, ripping a hole in the heart and soul of baseball, symbolizing the end of innocence.

I say this with all the respect of someone whose lived in New York for thirty years: What entitled crap.”

All of these fans who make this argument seem to have forgotten the fundamental reality of baseball in the 1950s. It was in trouble. Affordable air travel and an interstate highway were making people leave crowded cities for the suburbs and the West Coast. Television was finally starting to cut into revenues for every team – even all three New York based ones. Well before 1957, teams were leaving their home seasons and relocating – the Braves left Boston for Milwaukee in 1953, the Browns left St. Louis in 1954 and went to Baltimore and the Athletics left Philadelphia for Kansas City in 1955. If you were listening to radio back then, a fan had to know these things were going on, so this is  less ‘a loss of innocence’ then ‘it can’t happen here'.

In that documentary, Stephen Jay Gould scoffs at the moving by saying: “Both (the Giants and Dodgers) were profitable. There were just more profits to be made in California.” That’s pretty big talk for someone who roots for the Yankees.

First, neither team was profitable. Both teams were struggling financially and that was with one of the greatest players of all time, Willie Mays starring for the Giants, and the Dodgers who had won four pennants in five years. Many people want to cast Walter O’Malley as the villain who managed to con a hapless Horace Stoneham into moving his Giants to San Francisco. Chub Feeney, in that same documentary, makes it very clear that they were going to leave New York regardless of O’Malley’s actions – they were just planning to go to Minneapolis.

Second of all, this takes place from the rose-colored glasses of decades past. When Stoneham announced the move in 1957, he said he hated to disappoint the kids of New York, but he hadn’t seen a lot of their parents at the Polo Grounds. You can’t run any business – and baseball is a business – if no one’s buying your product.  Were the Giants and Dodgers supposed to stay in New York playing to half-empty stadiums out of some kind of civic loyalty?

And why is it somehow this entitlement should only be the property of New York and Brooklyn. Immediately after the Braves went to Milwaukee, they became a contender and dominated the National League standings for the next decade. For reasons not worth going into here, they eventually relocated to Atlanta and struggled for twenty years until basically the present day. Meanwhile during that era, the Red Sox barely contended and didn’t break their eighty-six year old curse until the Braves had won two world championships in two different cities. Why does no one write peons to what Boston lost?

For all the problems the A’s have had financially, when the moved to Oakland they became one of the more dominant franchises in the American League. Why does no one mourn what Philadelphia lost? And for all the talk of New York being ‘The Capitol of Baseball’, Washington D.C. is the actual capital. Yet they lost the Senators twice and had no baseball until the Expos collapsed and relocated to D.C. Why was their pain somehow worse than New York’s?

And before you get to something of ‘loyalty,’ one of the things that Goodwin tells us after the Dodgers relocated was that neither one of them transferred their fandom to L.A. Keep in mind, in this documentary she later says that players today aren’t loyal to their teams. Well, pardon me Doris but if the team is all that mattered, why didn’t you root for the Dodgers when they moved to LA? Most of the players who were on last Brooklyn team in 1957 were still on it in 1958. If your loyalty is to your team, doesn’t that mean the team, not the city that has it? Duke and Hodges and Furillo and Koufax and Drysdale were still there. Reese stuck around for another season. They didn’t stop being Dodgers, they just moved to another side of the country.

And just for the record, what about the rest of the country? For the first half of the twentieth century, Major League Baseball geographically began in Boston and went as far west as St. Louis. Fans in Indiana and Iowa had no problem rooting for the Cardinals and the Cubs even though they might never even see them play. Boston might have been New England’s team, but its hard for me to imagine a fan in 1913 New Hampshire going to Fenway Park for a game. People had been fine rooting for their teams from a distance no matter how far away they lived. Even now, millions of fans don’t live near their closest team and still have no problem rooting for them.

Basically, all of this nostalgia and sense of the end of innocence is nothing more than a sense of bitterness and entitlement. Why should New York fans have to share their Giants and Dodgers with any other state? Sure we didn’t come out to see them play when they were there, but we were comfortable having them around. And if we can’t have them, then anyone else who enjoys them is a loser and an enemy.

And so New Yorkers did what they do so well: they whined and moaned until Major League Baseball gave in and gave them something that Philadelphia and Boston and St. Louis never did: another major league team. Part of me really believed that the reason so many people turned out to what the Mets in the early 1960s had nothing to do with them being ‘lovable losers’ (I’ll argue against that concept in the next piece) but to show L.A. and San Francisco lost. “See, we’ll turn out for the worst team in history over you winning West Coasters. Nya nyah.”

Then in 1969, something terrible happened to the Mets. They miraculously won the World Series. And in New York, once is never enough. Every year since, they have been under just as much pressure of every other team in baseball if not more so.

Because a losing franchise is not a business model that works for long, and it can’t work in New York. Nothing but excellence is acceptable and it has to happen every year. When the Yankees won fourteen pennants in sixteen years, the year they lost the pennant in 1959 the fans booed them unmercifully from the beginning of the season to the end. Casey Stengel, who won ten pennants in twelve years and was beloved by the fans was essentially forced out by management after losing the 1960 World Series. The Mets hired him basically to draw attention from the Yankees because symbols of excellence will do for awhile instead of actual excellence. Because New York will only tolerate the best – even if means no one else can have anything else. It’s still true today – it just hasn’t produced the same results in a while.

Perhaps because the Yankee dynasty had collapsed in 1964 and the Mets were struggling through the 1970 season, Major League baseball had forgotten their history. Hell, maybe they actually thought that if kept things going the way they were, they could make sure it stayed that way. But it did not help that just about the time the Yankee dynasty collapsed the players, who as a group had been more or less docile, were about to wake up and join the sixties. In the next article in this series, I will give an example as how the owners of baseball was about to learn the hard way that the times, they were a changin’.