Becoming Mr. October (9780385533126) (6 page)

But we would never play together again. Just like that, everything we’d done, everything we built, was over. It broke my heart. I was still in the prime of my career, didn’t know what “traded” meant! You can still see it in the pictures of me at the time. I had no idea what was going to happen; Finley never said a word to me. I was walking around in shock.

As I look back, I can see he was trying to protect his investment. But ultimately, Charlie still wasn’t able to hang on to his team—and it still didn’t make me feel any better.

I wasn’t an old man yet. I wasn’t thirty-five or forty, I was still twenty-nine, and I thought, “What’s the matter with you, trading me away?” I drove over to my agent’s office, Gary Walker, who was also one of my best friends at the time and still today, and we just sat and talked. I didn’t know what to do. I’d been with the A’s since I was
twenty years old. I had played together with all those guys, and now we were all leaving. And I was going first.

I was so upset that I just went and hid out for a while. I went to Hawaii, stayed at this hotel I liked on Waikiki, the Rainbow Hilton, where I used to go and do the commentary for the old
Superstars
sports shows they used to have. I wanted to get away, and I didn’t want to go back. Nothing against Baltimore, it was just that the A’s were the only team I ever played for. I knew nothing else. I was depressed or in shock, take your pick!

And it was there that I figured, “Well, if that’s how it’s going to be, that’s how it’s going to be.” I knew then that I had them in a bind. They had just traded two pretty good players for Kenny Holtzman and me. And I took a cold, calculated attitude, just as I felt their attitude had been toward me.

Charlie Finley got some good young players instead of just losing us to free agency. The Orioles got Kenny and me to help them make a pennant run. It worked out all around, and everybody’s happy—except for the players. Nobody asked us what
we
wanted. So I just felt, “Okay, you’re gonna trade me and not tell me about it beforehand, and do whatever you feel like doing? I’m good with that. If you’re going to do it this way, here’s how I’m going to do it. I’m gonna stay out here in Hawaii until you feel like doing what I want to do. Now we all good!!” I was okay with that.

The Orioles wanted me to report right away, but I drew a line in the sand. I told them right up front I wanted the money I lost in arbitration. And more. I wanted a contract for $200,000. I knew that was what Dick Allen was making with the White Sox. He was the highest-paid player in the game at the time. I felt I deserved the same. I was going to either make that or sit out. Gary Walker listened to what I wanted, and he said I could get it. It would take time. But I could get what I wanted if I held out. He said to just stay out of the papers.

So he started talking to Hank Peters, who was the Orioles’ general manager at the time. He was a good man—and if I had talked to him, I would probably have given in. But Gary kept me away, and kept the pressure on him, and kept me informed.

I hung out in Hawaii, and Gary negotiated. They had never dealt with a player this way before. Nobody had in baseball, at least not
since Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale held out together on the Dodgers, back in the mid-1960s.

I came back from Hawaii, stayed around the neighborhood where I was living in Berkeley. Worked out, stayed in shape, made a couple of trips down to Arizona to talk to Gary there. He kept negotiating with Hank Peters, who was a wonderful man, and in the end they got the deal done. I got the $200,000, minus the time I missed. That came out to $190,000, so I was the second-highest-paid player in baseball.

I flew into Baltimore on May 1, 1976. Held a press conference, suited up, and took batting practice that night. They put the lights on in the stadium for me, and I hit until 11:30 or midnight. Dave Duncan was on the Orioles, too, by then, he gave me his number 9 so I could wear it. That’s the kind of guy he was. Next day, I started the second game of a doubleheader against the A’s, drove in a run, and we won.

I still felt like I was behind on the season. I just plunged in and kept taking extra batting practice until my hands bled.

The only thing was, I didn’t understand the consequences of what I had done. I was still twenty-nine years old, and I didn’t pay attention. I thought, “If you’re tough enough to trade me, then I’m tough enough to do this,” and that would be the end of it.

But there were articles; there was a negative reaction from the fans. Nobody understood how this would work out yet. Nobody understood how baseball was a business, because the owners didn’t want the fans to look at it that way. Nobody published what
their
revenue was every year—the owners—but they published our salaries, and sometimes more, to exaggerate. I didn’t know,
nobody
knew how the fans were going to react to our treating this like a business, too, and getting the money we could.

After all, the American pastime was a game that we got to
play
. The focus was on how we got paid to play this
game
. It wasn’t thought of as our job.

Once I got to Baltimore, I had a good year. I stole twenty-eight bases, my career high. I knocked in ninety-one runs, hit twenty-seven home runs. I could’ve been a thirty-thirty man—thirty home runs, thirty stolen bases—if I hadn’t missed that first month of the season. Back then, that was something that only three men in baseball history had ever done.

At the time, numbers like that weren’t emphasized as important. So you didn’t take the chance of getting injured to pad your stats. I remember on two occasions meeting Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays in 1988, when José Canseco became the first “forty-forty” man. Both Mickey and Willie said, “Gee, if I’d ever known it was such a big deal, I’d have done a fifty-fifty season.”

We came in second, but you knew we were going to get better. I loved playing for Hank Peters, loved playing for Earl Weaver, the Orioles’ manager. Weaver told his front office, “If you sign him, we can win pennants.”

He was right, too. The next year, Eddie Murray came up to the big leagues with Baltimore. A few years later, Cal Ripken came up, and they were already a contender. They always had good pitching. They had Jim Palmer still, and Mike Flanagan, and Denny Martinez. They would pick up Steve Stone a couple years later, and Scott McGregor and Tippy Martinez came over from the Yankees in 1976—all those arms. That gave you a Hall of Famer for your number one pitcher, in Palmer, and four other number two pitchers behind him, with Flanagan and Denny Martinez probably being number ones on most other teams.

I loved playing for Earl Weaver. He was just an East Coast Tommy Lasorda. Just a lovable guy who loved the game. All his players loved playing for him. He was one of those characters who would get so mad that he was almost funny. Cussin’ like a sailor. As coarse as it is, Lasorda’s swearing sounded like a poem. He’s a YouTube star today because of it. Earl Weaver was the same way. When he cursed, it was like a melody.

I liked Baltimore, too. It was a great baseball town. My family was living there, including my sister and my mother. Baltimore was a city that didn’t
feel
like a city. It was a city that felt like a community. It was in the South, but it had lots of Middle America in it. It was more of a plain, folksy kind of place, full of a lot of country folks. Because of that it felt a little more comfortable to me. They didn’t have a lot of newspapers, didn’t have a lot of skyscrapers, more two-family homes. I liked Baltimore and its fans.

I loved playing there with Jim Palmer, who was a longtime friend. I loved playing with Brooks Robinson, who was still in the organization.
I loved playing with Lee May and Bobby Grich, who were both outstanding players. We all worked well as a team—good history, good record of success. It was all very comfortable.

Hank Peters, the general manager, was like a dad to me. Jerry Hoffberger, who owned the team, nice man, nice family. Lou Gorman was there, as the assistant general manager. Tom Giordano was there, as the director of scouting and player development. These were great baseball people, who had built a great baseball organization.

I liked it so much I would just as soon have stayed in Baltimore.

I even made them an offer in August 1976. I’d spoken to Gary Walker and we came up with an idea of taking care of my future like any other businessperson. The first move I made wasn’t greedy, wasn’t full of demands. I made the Orioles a very reasonable offer: a $1.5 million contract, for five years. Thirty thousand of that would go to my father every year, another twenty thousand a year to my mother. Break it down, that would’ve come to just $250,000 a year for me, personally, and I was already making $190,000 a year. All I was really asking for was a good raise, without ever testing the market.

They turned it down.

Knowledgeable as the men running the Orioles were, no one had the foresight to see around corners and understand where salaries were going. Just like Oakland, the Orioles didn’t have the capital to compete for most players in the open market. They weren’t going to sign free agents; they were going to lose them, guys like Bobby Grich and me.

Baltimore was a great team and could have been a better team than the Yankees in that period of 1977–81. The clubs were close enough that there were any number of players on both teams—maybe Jim Palmer, Eddie Murray, Mike Flanagan on the Orioles, or on the Yankees, maybe Thurman Munson, Rich Gossage, Ronnie Guidry, or
me
—who might have changed the history of the American League in those five years if they had changed teams. They were
that close
.

It wasn’t just me who could have made the difference. But I
was
the only one of those players who switched teams.

I
KNOW ALL
the stories about how I said they’d name a candy bar after me if I played in New York. How I was longing to come and play on the big stage and become Mr. October.

Most of it is just that—stories. I was already a star before I came to New York, and I was going to take my star with me anywhere I went. In fact, New York was about the last place I thought I would end up.

The way they did free agency that first year was different from how it is now. They set up a draft where up to twelve teams could draft you—plus the team you were already on. I was one of only twelve players who were selected by the maximum thirteen teams. And as it turned out, I was the very first player picked, in the very first free-agent draft, by the Montreal Expos.

The number one pick—at last! And nobody asked about what color my girlfriend was. I guess that was progress.

In a quiet moment, after this all went down, I mentioned to my agent, Gary Walker, how I could only laugh inside. It did feel good. It was symbolic of how slow the social progress was in our country and in our game. But at least the social mores were forced to adapt.

If a team hadn’t drafted you, it wasn’t allowed to negotiate with you. But that still left me with a lot of choices. I’ve read all kinds of things telling me where it was that I wanted to go. But my real first choice was the Dodgers.

To me, the Dodgers made perfect sense. They were a good team. I played in the World Series there in 1974, and the ballpark felt small to me. I hit a ball out of there to left field off Andy Messersmith, hit a couple doubles to right center off Don Sutton. I always hit very well there. I always loved the environment there. It was a beautiful, attractive facility—and it still is today, almost forty years later.

They had a manager who was full of energy in Tommy Lasorda. They had a great farm system, great ownership in the O’Malleys. I always admired the family: They were minority conscious, and they had always been community conscious. They were the team that signed the first black player, Jackie Robinson—they had a great history. Their values were something you wanted to be around.

On the field, they always had great pitching, guys like Tommy John and Don Sutton and Messersmith. And they had a lineup that was almost all right-handed. Davey Lopes, Steve Garvey, Dusty Baker, Ron Cey—all right-handers—and then Reggie Smith, who was a switch-hitter. It would have been perfect—for them and for me. They were going to get right-handed pitching coming at them all the time. I could have feasted!

Los Angeles was a good spot for me in many ways, on and off the field. It was just three hundred miles from my home. My mother had moved to California by then, two of my sisters were there, my brother was there. And I knew the Dodgers wanted me. Al Campanis, their general manager, was always trying to get me in a trade. A small ballpark, in a fastball league. It was the place, dude!

Los Angeles picked me in the free-agent draft. But then they didn’t make an offer. I don’t know what they were waiting for, but they moved late. They had Maury Wills make the first call to my agent, but by that time it was too late. Things were moving too fast for them. They laid back—I never did find out why.

By then, I already had a big offer from Montreal. On behalf of the Bronfmans, John McHale, their general manager, offered me $5 million—$1 million a year for five years, with the possibility for that to go up with bonuses, incentives. They made mention of me wearing number 7, because they owned Seagram’s 7.

It would have been interesting to go to Montreal, too. The Expos
already had some terrific young talent and more on the way, guys like Tim Raines, Steve Rogers. They were an expansion team, but they wound up being a contender within another couple years. Hitting between a couple of righties like Andre Dawson and Ellis Valentine, I might’ve made the difference, and they had just hired my old manager from Oakland, Dick Williams, who I always got along with and respected.

But I don’t know, I just wanted to stay in this country. America just seemed … more like major-league baseball. I just thought it was important for me to play in the United States. And while I was considering the Bronfmans’ offer, my agent, Gary Walker, told me, “There’s a lot more money in New York than in Montreal.” He said, “With your career, and your skills, you should play with the Yankees. It’s a franchise with a great legacy. Ruth, Gehrig, DiMaggio, and Mantle. Yogi and Whitey. You should play in New York.”