Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126) (5 page)

It was not a surprise that the two of us, coming up the way we had, playing as hard as we did, would butt heads over the course of a long season. But we made it up, put it behind us, and went back to playing great ball. I appreciated the spirit that Billy brought.

What made him so feisty was what made him such a good ballplayer. Dick Williams said he was the only guy he ever saw strut onto a championship team, and it was true, he made us better, we won the World Series again.

We’d have fights. And when we got done, we’d play baseball. We played together, we played hard, and we played as a team. We pulled it
together when we had to. And in the end, we always bonded together against our owner, Charlie O., and the rest of baseball, as a team.

Once you played for Charlie Finley, you could deal with anything. At least I thought so before I came to New York.

There was always something going on with Finley; he was always fighting with somebody, always pulling some stunt. Always trying to save money. The craziest was probably when he hired M.C. Hammer to be vice president of the club. He was just Stanley Burrell then, a poor young kid growing up in Oakland. Finley saw him dancing for money with a boom box in the stadium parking lot. He hired him to be a clubhouse assistant and batboy because he liked his style. That was Charlie, he went with his instincts.

Stanley was just eleven years old at the time. I was the one who first gave him the name Hammer, because he looked so much like “Hammerin’ Hank” Aaron. Rollie Fingers started calling him Pipeline, because Rollie believed he was a clubhouse snitch for Charlie Finley. Charlie made him his executive vice president, this eleven-year-old kid. He was running around with a hat that read “Ex VP.” You’d see him sitting up in the owner’s suite, watching the game while he was on the phone with Finley, who was back in Chicago or somewhere. Finley would call him on the speakerphone and have Hammer tell him what was going on. How’s that for 1970s technology?

Hammer would report back on everything he heard in the clubhouse. But we didn’t really care. You know, that was life with Charlie. If the manager didn’t win the pennant, or do what Charlie wanted, he was fired. Mike Andrews, he made those errors in the World Series in 1973; Charlie put him on the disabled list, claimed he was injured. Stuff like that went on all the time.

He traded Dave Duncan in spring training 1973, a deal I didn’t like because Dave and Joe Rudi were close to me in the minors. Dunk was my close friend, and it just broke my heart. I cried; we were close as kids in the minors. Dave was a very dear friend, and he helped me. I remember Dick Williams giving me a dad’s hug during some tough times like that. He gave me the day off; it helped me get through it.

But mostly, we just let it roll off us. If I didn’t do something at home my father wanted done in some way, I got whupped. In baseball, the owners couldn’t whip you in public. Maybe they wanted to, but all they could do was make it tough for you or trade you. It didn’t scare us.

We were a bunch of kids who didn’t know much about the big money; we didn’t know anything about the media. We didn’t know much about anything. We were all twenty-three, twenty-four, twenty-five. Nothing bothered you at that age. You just lived your life, helped your family, and played good baseball, and everything was all right.

It’s pretty much the same as baseball is today. If you play well and win, everything is fine. People think it’s a happy clubhouse that makes a winner, but it’s not. It’s the other way around. You win,
then
you have a happy clubhouse. You’re not winning, the owner’s not happy. The general manager’s not happy; the manager’s not happy. Nobody’s happy.

That’s what life is. That’s the sociology of sports. It builds on itself. You’re winning, the clubhouse gets happy, everybody’s having a good time. Everybody stays loose. What’s the saying Al Davis had? “Just win, baby.” But if you’re
not
winning, and you have a happy clubhouse, you’re accepting losing. If you’re a losing team, the clubhouse
needs
to have unrest. That’s proof that you care. It sounds crazy, I know, but that’s how it is.

In Oakland, we didn’t
let
ourselves lose. Nineteen seventy-five, we won more games than we had in four years. We lost the league championship series in three games to the Red Sox, but they were all close games most of the way, and Boston had a great team that year. The core of our team was still pretty young. We were still in our twenties, save for Campy and Bando, who were in their early thirties. And every year, we were adding terrific young players—guys like George Hendrick, and Phil Garner, and Claudell Washington, who would go on to become stars.

We could’ve gone on winning for years and years. The only trouble was that free agency was here—and Charlie Finley didn’t have any money to keep up with the “haves.”

I
REMEMBER IT
was in spring training when I knew it was all going to change. The first couple years I was with the Athletics, we had our training camp in Bradenton, Florida, but starting in 1969 we moved to Mesa, Arizona, which was great. I always loved it down there, that big sky, the dry heat, the Superstition Mountains in the distance. I had a house down there at the time; I’d liked it ever since I first went to Arizona State, just one town west in Tempe.

It was a nice lifestyle there, lots of nightlife, plenty of restaurants. I would meet and have dinner with Willie McCovey, Billy Williams, and Fergie Jenkins—three Hall of Famers. I always enjoyed being with them. We would go and eat out in Scottsdale, usually at a place called the Fig Tree restaurant, on Indian School Road. One of those guys would pick up the check, because they were older, they were making more money than I was then. They were always schooling me in what to say, how to act. They always told me to be careful what I said in public—and they were right!

I remember picking up Willie McCovey to go out to dinner one night, and I was driving a 1973 Pontiac T-top—a brand-new Pontiac I’d been given. McCovey and Willie Mays would get a free car from Chrysler every year. But I had this Pontiac, and it started raining buckets from above, and the T-tops started leaking. It was coming inside, dripping on McCovey’s pants, and he was saying, “What’re you doing, driving this car? This ain’t no star’s car! It’s raining inside!” I’ll never forget that. LMAO.

I had a condo there, and it was closer to home than what I had in Oakland. I liked it more than Florida.

What I didn’t love was spring training. I never much liked to go to spring training; it was too long. Unlike most ballplayers of the time, I knew how to take care of myself. I worked out all year long. I didn’t go to spring training to get in shape. I showed up in shape. I was ready to play ball for real a couple days after I arrived.

I especially didn’t want to go that year, 1976. That off-season, I’d been in arbitration with Charlie Finley and lost. I was making $140,000 a year at the time, which is what now? About a third of the minimum major-league salary?

I thought I’d had a pretty good year in 1975. I tied for the American League lead in homers with George Scott. Had 104 ribbies, led the league in extra-base hits, was second in total bases. We won the West Division for the fifth straight season, and I’d been an all-star every year since 1971.

I asked for a raise from $140,000 to $168,500. A raise of $28,500.

Nowadays, you don’t even hear about raises like that. Nowadays, that’s what you tip the clubhouse guy for a year.

I lost.

The team’s argument in arbitration was that I struck out too much. And that we’d only won the division title, not a fourth straight World Series.

After that, I just didn’t have it in me to go to camp on time. I was berated so much in that arbitration case I was harboring bad feelings. I showed up about a week late; that was my protest. And when I did, Charlie Finley comes up to me, and he gives me a check for $2,500. He tells me, “I know you lost in arbitration, but here’s $2,500.” He didn’t want it on my official salary, because if we wound up in arbitration the next year, he didn’t want me starting off with $142,500.

That was Charlie O., nickel-and-diming you on something all the time. Back in 1969, my second full year in the majors, I hit forty-seven home runs. I was twenty-three years old, making $20,000 a year. When I asked for more money, he offered me a $10,000 raise. I held out to get more for six weeks, until April 2, while he leaked his side of negotiations to the papers, turned the writers and the fans against me.

I had no idea of how to handle the fact that whatever was said to the papers, they would write it as the truth. I had no idea what to do.

In the end, I got him up to $40,000 for 1970, plus a rent-tree
$750-a-month apartment on Lake Merritt for the year—big money for those days. But I had to go in cold, no spring training at all, missed the first week of the season; the fans were on me all the time. There were threats of sending me to the minors and numerous belittlings by the owner. I had a bad year in 1970, hit .237 with twenty-three homers—and Charlie cut me $2,000 for 1971.

I was shocked and hurt that Finley turned out not to be the father figure he had presented himself as. But anytime you get ready to sign a contract, everybody’s in love. Five, ten years later, you’re ready for the divorce. It can get bitter, contentious; things turn sour. With Finley by then, it was “My way or the highway.”

You had to put up with that then, because we still had the reserve clause, which had applied to all players in the majors since the 1890s. Under the reserve clause, you had a choice. You could take what they offered you, or you could stay home. Whoever owned your contract controlled you for as long as you chose to play organized baseball, unless they decided to trade you or sell you to another team, like a piece of property. It didn’t matter when the contract expired. Your “owner” still held the rights to you. Forever.

That began to change once the Players Association hired Marvin Miller as its executive director, just before I came up to the majors. He helped us to build the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) into one of the strongest unions in history. You could tell things were changing because we
had
an impartial arbitrator. For the first time in the history of the game, we could take contract disputes to an independent outsider. The players’ union was changing things for the better for the players.

But the owners still fought us every step of the way. We had to go on strike for two weeks in 1972, just to get arbitration and additional pension money, among other benefits. As a business, baseball was doing well. Attendance was going up; TV money was going up. But the average ballplayer was still making less than $45,000 a year.

Then came the Messersmith case. Near the end of 1975, Peter Seitz, the independent arbitrator, ruled that the contracts Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally had with their teams had expired and that they were now free agents, eligible to sign with any club they wanted.

Naturally, the owners took it to court, forget about the independent
arbitrator. They’d been fighting every case like it for more than fifty years. They ran Curt Flood out of baseball, rather than give in when he sued. He never got the credit he deserved for challenging the reserve clause all the way up to the Supreme Court. He stepped up years before everyone else. His timing wasn’t right, and he paid a terrible price for that. He got kicked to the curb, died a broken man. It was really a tragedy, and nobody came to his rescue. He just didn’t get the support from his own fraternity, us players.

But now, in 1975, the owners lost. I remember it was right before we reported to spring training a federal judge upheld the decision by Seitz. McNally retired, but Messersmith signed a three-year deal with Ted Turner and the Braves, for a million dollars. Ooh—one million clams!

The owners couldn’t believe it. They had no choice; they had to deal with us now. For the first time in more than eighty years, ballplayers had the same right that every other American citizen enjoys. That is, when his contract expires, he can go and work for whoever he pleases. It’s as simple as that—some still can’t accept it!

Of course, the owners appealed again. It wasn’t until July 1976—mid-season—that we had a new agreement in place, setting up exactly how the free-agent system was going to work. But once that court ruling came down, we knew the world had changed forever.

Under the agreement, you had to have six years in the majors to become a free agent. Marvin Miller put that in himself. Charlie Finley wanted to let everyone become a free agent every year. He was the smartest guy on the owners’ side at that time, because he knew that would have driven the price down. It would have been like Rotisserie baseball every season!

Marvin was afraid the owners would go for that, but they didn’t. That meant Charlie Finley and the A’s just didn’t have the money to compete with the really deep-pocketed owners, people like the O’Malleys in Los Angeles, or Bronfman in Montreal, or Tom Yawkey up in Boston—or George and his Yankees. Charlie had a small-market
team that didn’t draw well even when it won, and small cash reserves—hardly any local TV or radio revenues. He couldn’t keep the team together any longer.

You knew intellectually what would change, but still you weren’t prepared. I knew what the arbitrator’s ruling meant; I knew what the court decisions meant. I knew what getting rid of the reserve clause meant. But I still didn’t expect it to change anything for me. I was in spring training; I was still ticked off at losing in arbitration and Charlie Finley giving me that $2,500 off the books, like he was tipping the groundskeeper. I was preoccupied with that and getting ready for the season.

Then, a week from Opening Day, it came down. I remember it was the first or second day of April. I was driving in my car, and I heard it first on the radio. Me, Kenny Holtzman, and a young pitcher named Bill VanBommel were traded to Baltimore for Don Baylor, Mike Torrez, and Paul Mitchell.

Finley had started unloading his players, and Kenny and I were first. Before two more seasons had passed, we were all gone—Rudi, Campy, Sal Bando, Vida Blue, Tenace, Garner, Washington, Billy North. And almost every one of us went to teams that went on to win still more rings, or that at least became contenders overnight. It was like we were the magic A’s.