The Mouth That Roared (12 page)

There was another dimension to Flood’s refusal to join the Phillies. He, like Allen, was black, and Flood questioned whether Philadelphia treated its black ballplayers well. It’s true that some of the attacks on Allen in Philadelphia had a racial component. It’s also true the Phillies were the last National League team to integrate. But I think Flood crossed the line with his insinuation that Philadelphia fans were racist. I would have wholeheartedly endorsed his sentiment that our fans were an angry and hostile bunch during this period, but that was because the Phillies were a lousy baseball team. Every town has its racists, and unfortunately some of them go to ballgames. But in my opinion, most Philadelphia fans booed black and white players with equal enthusiasm.

Flood appealed the trade to Major League Baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn. With the backing of the players union and its leader, the late Marvin Miller, he asked Kuhn to void the deal and declare him a free agent. He argued that he should have a say in where he played and not be bought and sold against his will.

Kuhn denied the request, so Flood took the fight to federal court. He lost his lawsuit, but the players union was galvanized by his efforts. Before long, Miller negotiated a change to the reserve clause that allowed players to become free agents.

Rather than report to the Phillies, Flood sat out the entire 1970 season. As compensation, the Cardinals sent us two minor leaguers, including Willie Montanez, who went on to have a few nice seasons for us. Knowing Flood would continue to boycott us, we traded him to the Washington Senators after the 1970 season.

Flood took his unwillingness to play for the Phillies and turned it into a larger cause. The controversy provided an early glimpse of the players union’s growing clout. I never imagined the case would have such a ripple effect.

Less than a decade earlier, I was the Phillies’ player representative and a believer in the importance of fair pay, pensions, and better working conditions. But now that I worked in the front office, I found myself toeing the party line. That wasn’t usually my style, but I saw no point in opposing general manager John Quinn, who hated the union. On top of that, I needed time to sort out how I really felt about these shifting dynamics in baseball.

*

My first season in the Phillies executive offices was the last season for Connie Mack Stadium. The North Philadelphia ballpark, which was built in 1909, had seen a lot of baseball as the longtime home of the Phillies and the old Philadelphia A’s. But the park had become a relic. Following the lead of owners in Houston, Pittsburgh, Atlanta, and Cincinnati, the Carpenters arranged to move the team into a modern facility in a less congested area of town.

I had a lot of affection for Connie Mack Stadium. I grew up listening to Phillies games on the radio, keeping score as I rooted for the home team. I had the thrill of playing parts of six seasons in the place. It’s where the Phillies played in the World Series in 1950, where the team experienced a historic collapse in 1964, and where millions of baseball fans had spent summer afternoons and evenings.

On the last day at Connie Mack, we played the Montreal Expos in a game to decide which team would wind up in the National League East cellar. Only a couple thousand fans showed up for the first two games of the series, but our largest crowd in several years flocked to see the stadium’s swan song.

As the game wore on, the crowd turned its attention to souvenir hunting. Pope, Quinn, and I watched from our box as fans started ripping seats out of the concrete. The extra-inning game provided them with a little extra time to plunder. When we scored a run in the 10
^th
to win, the fans took to the field. A lucky few got bases as souvenirs. The others made due with handfuls of sod. I stayed and watched the proceedings, which included men walking out of the stadium carrying seats and urinals.

As everything that was and wasn’t bolted down left the stadium, I sat there and cried.

The next season we moved into brand-spanking-new Veterans Stadium, a huge facility that also became home to the Philadelphia Eagles. The opening of the Vet gave Bill Giles, our vice president of business operations, his chance to shine. Bill was a real marketing genius. For a long time, baseball in Philadelphia hadn’t generated a lot of excitement. But capitalizing on the new stadium, Bill looked for ways to get casual fans to come to games.

That was an effective short-term strategy. But we all knew that winning was the key to hooking fans on our product.

*

A new stadium and new pinstripe uniforms could not make the Phillies a winning team. Curt Flood didn’t want to play in Philadelphia, and neither did a lot of other star players. To compensate for our inability to lure this type of talent from other organizations, we set out to cultivate it from within.

Pope became the scouting director just a month before the first amateur draft in 1965. Within a few years, Pope’s way of doing business had already taken hold. It centered on hard work, thoroughness, and a passion for the game. Pope demanded his scouts hit the road and produce detailed reports on every player we thought might wind up on our draft board. He taught me the importance of reading every word of every report generated by our scouts. And he spent countless hours quizzing our staff on every conceivable aspect of a player’s mental and physical make-up.

Pope had all the qualities of a successful general manager, and it appeared only a matter of time before he got the job. In June 1972, with the Phillies in the throes of another dreary season, Pope replaced Quinn, who left behind a mixed legacy. He had helped turn an awful team into a winning one in the early 1960s, but after that, the Phillies slipped a lot. At least Quinn got to go out on a high note. In his last trade as general manager, he swapped pitchers with the Cardinals. In exchange for Rick Wise, we got Steve Carlton.

We were at a draft meeting in New York when Pope got the call to return to Philadelphia. His promotion meant the Phillies needed a new director of minor leagues and scouting. Though I had been his assistant for only two and a half years, he had no qualms about appointing me to the post. Together, he believed, we could build a winner.

Just a few weeks after naming Pope as general manager, Bob Carpenter fired manager Frank Lucchesi. Frank had managed 14 years in the Phillies’ minor league system before finally getting a shot in the big leagues. But his brief tenure in Philadelphia didn’t produce winning results. We all felt terrible for Frank. He was exactly the kind of guy we wanted working for us, a good baseball man who was fiercely loyal to the organization. But it just wasn’t working out with him as manager. Frank cried when Carpenter told him he was being let go. But he shook it off soon enough and stayed in the organization as a front office adviser.

Pope got the manager’s job on an interim basis. At that point in the season, the team was 26–50 and well on its way to another last-place finish. Bob Carpenter asked Pope to spend the remainder of the season evaluating every player on the team to determine who should stay and who should go.

I would find myself in a similar position seven years later.

*

Baseball matters occupied all my time at work. And back at home, the game was the cause of a major family incident.

I was at spring training in 1972 when Sylvia called and told me about the drama unfolding in our hometown in Delaware. She said our nine-year-old daughter, Kim, might be facing “nine men in black robes” pretty soon. I didn’t have time for riddles, so I asked her what she was talking about. She said she was referring to the United States Supreme Court.

It all started when Kim and two of her friends went down to Little League baseball tryouts in Eastburn Acres, only to be told that girls weren’t allowed to play in the league. The girls were upset about being turned away. Kim took it especially hard. She had been a bat-girl in the league the year before, biding her time until she felt she was ready to play on a team.

Sylvia was upset, too. She knew how much Kim enjoyed baseball and had no doubt she could compete with boys her age. If they had given her a chance to participate in tryouts, everyone would have seen that.

Sylvia conducted a little research and found that a New Jersey judge had ruled a few months earlier that Little League teams there had to accept girls. But other states didn’t have the same requirement.

Sylvia could have just let it go and found another sport for Kim to participate in. But that wasn’t what Kim wanted. She had always played baseball with her older brother, John, and didn’t understand why she couldn’t play on an organized team.

It turned out that one of Kim’s elementary school teachers was very active in the National Organization for Women. She approached Sylvia about pursuing the matter through the courts. The feeling within NOW was that a recently passed federal law called Title IX made it illegal to ban girls from education programs. And I guess they hoped Little League could be considered an education program.

Sylvia was never one to get involved in causes, but this situation was different, because the cause involved her daughter’s happiness. She publicly voiced her support for an ACLU lawsuit against the league.

The national media jumped all over the story. Kim appeared on
The Mike Douglas Show
and hit some baseballs in the studio. When reporters asked me about the situation, I said I supported my daughter’s right to play. But I added that I felt girls would eventually decide baseball wasn’t the game for them.

The lawsuit hit a road block, but the publicity surrounding the issue ultimately motivated Little League to allow girls to play. That decision came too late for Kim and her friends, because that year’s team had already been chosen. So, Sylvia and some other parents put together an allgirls team. They won their first eight games and finished with a record of 8–4.

Kim never gave up her love of baseball but she eventually gravitated toward field hockey, the sport that got her a scholarship to San Jose State University.

On the topic of women in baseball, I think back to Pam Postema, who set out a couple of decades ago to become Major League Baseball’s first female umpire. All of us in the game knew she probably wasn’t going to make it, but not because of her physical attributes or knowledge of the rules of the game. It can get rough on a baseball field. And it can get personal. Any umpire needs a very strong psyche to put up with all the berating from players, managers, and fans. It’s not something most people would want to subject themselves to. More so than her male counterparts, a woman in that position needs unbelievable poise and discipline to withstand the barrage of insults that come her way.

Pam worked her way up through the ranks, which impressed me a lot. The life of a minor league umpire is terrible, considering all the travel and the low pay. She got to work a couple of major league exhibition games, but that’s where it ended for her.

Years later, another young lady close to my heart, my granddaughter Christina-Taylor, followed in Kim’s footsteps by playing Little League baseball in Arizona. I admire the Christina-Taylor Greens, Kim Greens, and Pam Postemas of the world who took chances and served as role models for other girls and women.

Some promising young players in our system gave the Phillies hope for the future.

One of them was Mike Schmidt, who made his major league debut at the end of the 1972 season. A year earlier, Paul Owens used our second-round pick on Schmitty, a shortstop whose history of knee problems at Ohio University scared off other teams. In addition to hitting 26 home runs and knocking in 91 runs at Triple-A Eugene, Schmitty also learned to play third base masterfully.

During Pope’s tenure as minor league coordinator, we also drafted Greg Luzinski and Bob Boone.

In 1972, my first year in control of our draft board, we took Larry Christenson, a high school pitcher from Marysville, Washington, with the third overall pick. L.C. quickly reached the majors and stayed there for more than a decade.

The following year, I took a hard-nosed catcher named John Stearns in the first round. But he wasn’t in the organization long before Pope used him as trade bait.

At baseball’s 1974 winter meetings in New Orleans, Pope set his sights on Tug McGraw, whose career many thought was on the downturn after a rough season with the Mets. The price for Tug included Stearns and Del Unser, the Phillies’ starting center fielder. Manager Danny Ozark and I opposed the trade, but Pope insisted we needed a closer if we hoped to break into the upper echelon. Stearns became a four-time All-Star with the Mets, an impressive individual accomplishment. But Tugger helped solidify our team.

In the following years, Pope followed up that trade with deals that brought in Garry Maddox from the Giants, Manny Trillo from the Cubs, and Bake McBride from the Cardinals. The free agent signing of Pete Rose in 1978 further helped build a championship-caliber team.

Pope also showed smarts in the trades he didn’t make. In ’74, we had a chance to swap catchers with the Detroit Tigers. We would have sent Bob Boone, then an unproven young catcher, to Detroit for Bill Freehan, who had already been selected for 10 All-Star Games and been awarded five Gold Gloves. But Pope’s instincts told him to hold on to the younger backstop. After the multiplayer deal fell apart, Detroit general manager Jim Campbell fumed to the Detroit media, “I’ve never had an experience like that before. We wasted three days holding up players we might have been able to move someplace else. Then, bang! They pulled the rug right out from under us.”