The Hardball Times -- Jon Daly http://www.hardballtimes.com/main Baseball. Insight. Daily. en studes@hardballtimes.com Copyright 2013 2013-06-19T08:32:15+00:00 Gashouse Hillbillies http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/gashouse-hillbillies/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/gashouse-hillbillies/#When:09:15:15 Joe DiMaggio, an Italian ballplayer from San Francisco, won the American League MVP Award in 1941. (But Ted Williams was The Sporting News Player of the Year.) Dolph Camilli was the other MVP winner that year. He was another Italian San Franciscan. Camilli captured two legs of the Triple Crown, leading the Senior Circuit in home runs and RBI and leading his Brooklyn Dodgers to the pennant. Teammate Pete Reiser took the batting crown. Dolph was of the MVP species "clutch slugger on a pennant winner" like Justin Morneau.

He had an older brother named Francisco who was also an athlete. He boxed under the name Frankie Campbell*. Eleven years before Dolph was the MVP, Campbell’s career and life came to a tragic end when injuries suffered in the ring during a bout against Max Baer killed him.

*This wasn’t the first boxer-baseballist combo from San Fran. Gentleman Jim Corbett had a brother who played baseball at St. Mary’s, then appeared in the majors.

Max Baer was once heavyweight champeen of the world—back when that meant something. If you saw Cinderella Man, he was the guy that Braddock had to beat to win the title. The Campbell fight was early in his career, but he went on to the top of the heap and defeated Primo Carnera. Max went Hollywood. He appeared in some films, like Abbott and Costello’s Africa Screams, along with his brother Buddy Baer. His son, Max Baer Jr., went on to become an actor as well.

Buddy Ebsen wanted to be a doctor, but the Depression curtailed his studies. He got into vaudeville instead and would have been the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz* except for an allergy. He couldn’t handle the aluminum dust that was part of the Tin Man’s getup. He wound up getting other roles on the big screen and the small screen. Then he appeared in Blake Edwards’s Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

*I tried watching The Wizard of Oz while listening to Dark Side of the Moon. I also tried syncing that album to Full Metal Jacket. I liked that better. Supposedly, Animals syncs well with Casablanca and The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. The Wall works with Alice In Wonderland and Apocalypse Now. I don’t think that it’s synchronicity. I think that these movies are structured similarly and Pink Floyd just happens to be a cinematic band with a cinematic sound. So is Radiohead, apparently. Kid A is supposed to sync well with some movies.

Paul Henning was a writer for radio. He did scripts for such shows as Fibber McGee and Molly and Burns and Allen. Broke into television and created The Bob Cummings Show. It was a time of rural comedies like The Andy Griffith Show (which Henning sometimes wrote for.) Television had reached flyover country—emphasis on the word country—and it was an untapped market.

Leo Durocher was a western Massachusetts product who started out with the Yankees during their first glory days. Skipper Miller Huggins took a shine to him, but he was nicknamed "The All-American Out." I’m not going to tell you that much about Leo the Lip. If you want to read more, seek out Nice Guys Finish Last.

A good fielding shortstop without much of a bat, he moved around. Played with the Cardinals when they were the Gashouse Gang.* Got into managing and took over the Dodgers. He was manager the year Camilli won his MVP.** Anyways, Durocher fell out of favor in Brooklyn and went on to manage the Giants. But then he returned to the Dodgers as a coach. He was with them in LA and The Lip wound up doing some guest shots on TV.

*Between Pepper Martin and the Dean brothers, the Gashouse Gang were a pretty rustic bunch themselves.

** The Camillis must have had some athletic genes. I forgot to mention this earlier, but in addition to Dolph and Frankie, Dolph had a son named Doug who was a catcher during the 1960s.

Stuntcasting Los Angeles sports personalities on sitcoms was common in the 1960s. Larry Granillo mentioned a clip of Durocher on Mr. Ed. Just from the 1965 Dodgers, many of the players earned TV credit playing either themselves or other roles. Mr. Ed also had John Roseboro, Willie Davis, and Sandy Koufax. Don Drysdale and Wes Parker appeared on The Brady Bunch. Jim Lefebvre and Lou Johnson were on Gilligan’s Island; as was Rudy LaRusso of the Lakers.*

*Before there was Curt Flood, there was Rudy LaRusso. Rudy was a tough power forward; half-Italian, half-Jewish who hailed from Brooklyn and went to James Madison High. From there he went to Dartmouth before being drafted by the then Minneapolis Lakers. Red Auerbach had territorial rights to him, but passed. He was an All-Star, a Don Rickles fan (according to one news story), and must’ve been something of an enforcer. In my research on him, I found a number of boxscores that said “Fouled Out – LaRusso.”

In January of 1967, LaRusso was part of a three-way trade that would send him to Detroit. But he refused to go to the Pistons and retired. He had established himself in the Los Angeles area and had a day job as a stockbroker in Beverly Hills with McDonnell and Company. The league suspended him. LaRusso’s attorney filed an anti-trust suit and sought compensation for the balance of his contract plus any future basketball income. But the forward and the NBA never went to trial.

1967 was also the year that the American Basketball Association started. One of the franchises would be the Oakland Oaks (Pat Boone would be a part owner.) They hired Bruce Hale as head coach. Hale’s son-in-law was Rick Barry. Barry would jump across the Bay from the San Francisco Warriors to the new team (more on that in a future edition of this series.) The NBA was also expanding that year, and SF also lost Warrior-poet Tom Meschery. They needed a forward. So head coach Bill Sharman talked ownership into trying to see if LaRusso would be interested in going north. The 6-9 Ivy Leaguer said that he’d "rather pursue a career than a lawsuit" and SF purchased his rights from Detroit.

Leonard Koppett and David Halberstam have written about different events involving the NBAPA, but I didn’t see anything by them about LaRusso. So I worry that I may be overstating the significance of him here. But two years later, there were a number of baseball players who were traded that balked at the deals; Donn Clendenon, Hawk Harrelson, and, ultimately, Flood. Were they inspired by LaRusso?

Lefebvre was also on Batman. Maury Wills guested on Get Smart. Willie Davis and Don Drysdale were on The Flying Nun. Don Drysdale was on Leave It to Beaver, which means that the Bradys and Cleavers were in the same universe.

Leo the Lip had Hollywood connections. He was pals with Frank Sinatra. Manager Walter Alston wasn’t exactly actor material. Alston did have a non-speaking role in The Geisha Boy, but didn’t have the charisma of a Durocher.

It was an era that had rather unrealistic, absurdist TV shows* and the Lip was on a few of them. In addition to Mr. Ed, Durocher appeared on The Munsters, and The Beverly Hillbillies. It was in the last of these where he appeared alongside Max Baer Jr. (aka Jethro Bodine.) The show was a Paul Henning creation and starred Ebsen, Baer, Irene Ryan and Donna Douglas. The episode "The Clampetts and The Dodgers" aired April 10. 1963. Durocher plays golf with the Clampetts and finds out that Jethro has a live arm. The problem is, he can’t throw the ball without loading it up with possum fat. And far be it from Durocher to cheat.

*The Clampetts may have had a John Steinbeck-meets-Marcel Duchamp vibe but they were more plausible than many of their TV counterparts. There was Gomer Pyle who, like Beetle Bailey, remained stateside despite the war in Indochina. POWs were running Stalag 13. Samantha Stevens was a bewitched Betty Draper before there was a Betty Draper. Then there were Jeannie, My Favorite Martian and My Mother the Car, not to mention a flying nun and a talking horse. TV goes through these phases. Seinfeld got bizarro towards the end. "The Butter Shave," anyone?

Did they talk about Max’s dad beating to death the brother of one of Leo’s more valuable players? Who knows? The conversation would have been 47 years ago and I doubt Baer remembers it. And Durocher didn’t mention it in his memoirs. Max Jr. wasn’t born yet when it happened, but said that while he was growing up his father would cry about Campbell’s death.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jon Daly 2010-11-09T09:15:15+00:00 Fear and loathing in Cooperstown http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/fear-and-loathing-in-cooperstown-abner-doubleday-has-cashed-his-check/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/fear-and-loathing-in-cooperstown-abner-doubleday-has-cashed-his-check/#When:05:01:15 testosterone cypionate, some transdermal patches that Conte sent us, enough hGH to make Hal Bodley young again, a couple of bottles of nuxated iron, and a jar filled with a galaxy of uppers: vivarin, greenies, ketamine, ephedrine, pseudoephedrine – you get the point.

The only thing that worried me was the nuxated iron. There is nothing in the world more helpless and irresponsible than a man in the depths of a nuxated iron binge. And I knew we’d get into that rotten stuff soon. We had to. It was an atavistic trip. Not only were we driving 150 or so miles to Leatherstocking Country, we were also going over 100 years back in time to the 19th century.

Flash back 24 hours. I was hanging out in the Boiler Room when a man who looked like Eddie Gaedel approached me, cellphone in hand. I placed it to my ear and listened. It was Studes. He wanted me to go to Cooperstown and cover SABR’s 19th Century Committee conference, which was being held that weekend. For years, SABR’s Deadball Committee would have a spring training event called Boiling Out in Hot Springs, Ark. Paul Wendt suggested that the Nineteeners do something similar. Boiling Out has petered out over the past couple of years, but this was an inaugural conference for this group.

I’d been meaning to go to the Giamatti Research Center anyways. My buddy The Wig had a theory that Bowie Kuhn was happiest when he was researching the paranormal and pseudoscientific. For example, during the 1981 player strike, Wiggy thinks, Kuhn left the country on an expedition in search of the Loch Ness Monster. Wiggy also smokes a lot of banana peels and watches reruns of Kolchak the Nightstalker, but I’ve been meaning to check out the Kuhn file. Now I could do it on an expense account.

We rolled into town about noon and stopped at the Doubleday Café. I had the sweet sausage sandwich before heading over to the Hall of Fame library. When I got there, it was packed. Paul Dickson was there. In addition to looking at the voluminous files on Commissioner Kuhn, I was also researching Thomas Lynch. He was a fin de siècle personage who umped in the Gay Nineties before become NL president in the aughts. There were three Tom Lynches, apparently. The last file was the one I was looking for.

Afterward, there was a chill icebreaker reception at Cooley. I talked to Bob Tiemann, Peter Morris, Gerrold Casway, Frank Vacarro and Cliff Blau. Vacarro and Blau are working on a project that identifies every field captain in baseball history. This is a vestigial position nowadays, but was essential in the early days that were the weekend’s topic of discussion.

I also talked to Blau a bit about evaluating 19th century players. This was of utmost interest to Joe W. We were a couple pitchers of Old Slugger Ale deep, but I think that Blau said that modern methods of player evaluation didn’t work as well for early players. For one thing, there were so many errors. Due to this, a few stats are more important for evaluating 19th century players than they are for modern ones.

For example, pitcher wins are more important; up to a point. And runs scored for batsmen likely gave a clearer picture of their offensive contributions than most other stats. This is a subject near and dear to Joe W’s heart. He is part of a subcommittee that put together a ballot of 19th century legends overlooked by Cooperstown. The committee as a whole will vote in June on Ross Barnes, Pete Browning, Bill Dahlen, Jack Glasscock, George Gore, Paul Hines, Bobby Mathews, Tony Mullane, Harry Stovey and Deacon White.

I also talked to my old friend Bill Ryczek. Bill’s been a hero of mine of sorts since I read an article about him back in ’01 in the local paper. A mild-mannered banker by day, he’s spent his nights writing books about sports in the 1860s and 1960s.

But the local eye candy wasn’t that sweet and Cooperstown rolls its sidewalks up early except during the summer. Joe W was starting to get the munchies around 10, but nothing was open except Cooley’s and Sherman’s Tavern, another watering hole across the street. I just went to my room at the Tunicliff Inn and listened to a triple play of Bad Company on WOUR (Utica-Rome’s Classic Rock Connection with Gomez and Dave in the Morning!) before turning in. I was looking forward to Saturday.

The Inn had a breakfast buffet, but the crowd there was giving me a bad vibe. So I went back upstairs and called room service and ordered in. I requested identical twins from SUNY–Oneonta to serve me in bed while decked out in PVC. The front desk did not disappoint. About 20 minutes later, two blonde sisters arrived. They were sharing a jimson weed spliff and served me four Bloody Marys, two grapefruits, a pot of coffee, Rangoon crepes, a half pound of corned beef hash, eggs Bruce Benedict, a slice of lemon meringue pie, two margaritas, and six lines of the finest Bolivian marching powder for dessert. Breakfast is my psychic anchor, a ritual as important to me as High Mass is in Canterbury. Studes is probably wondering why I’m writing over a hundred words on breakfast instead of The Meaning of Abner Doubleday, but I’m trying to stay faithful to the notes I took over that weird weekend.

Leading off the conference was Jerry Casway. Jerry is the author of a book on Ed Delahanty and is an expert on Irish history. He talked about Ted Sullivan and Charlie Comiskey. I knew about the Old Roman; although I knew of him more as the Black Sox owner. I was dimly aware of him going through the ranks as a player and manager before becoming a magnate. He wasn’t unique in this respect. Spalding, Montgomery Ward, McGraw and Mack, among others, all had this career path. Sullivan, I probably heard of, but my brainsponge didn’t really absorb him. He was a bon vivant and a raconteur. According to Casway, Sullivan invented the term fan and the phrase “the show.” (Dickson wasn’t as confident about this.) Sullivan was sort of a Branch Rickey figure. He and Comiskey influenced Ned Hanlon and John McGraw and their influence still can be felt today.

After this, we viewed a DVD titled Baseball Origins. They screened this in Cleveland, but I’m not sure where I was when that was on. Anyway, it’s a documentary that looked at the British origins of baseball, following author and historian David Block around the English countryside looking at some related games. They showed rounders and stoolball but the most interesting one was a pub game called bat and trap that they play in Canterbury.

The DVD also discussed some early American history of the game. It covered the discovery of an ordinance in Pittsfield, Mass. from 1791. Ball players were breaking church windows and the parson was upset. It also talked about Doubleday and Cooperstown. I never realized this, but a movie back in 1939 depicted the invention of the game. A snippet of it was shown and it looked as hokey as you’d expect. When Doubleday was named the inventor of the sport he was conveniently dead and unable to refute the story. But it’s as American as George Washington and the cherry tree.

Lunchtime. I grabbed Casway and asked him about the Irish influence on the game. He was thinking about making a comment after the DVD. He told me that the Irish felt comfortable batting because it was a similar to using hurling sticks. Like baseball, hurling requires hand-eye coordination. Handball, another sport that requires hand-eye coordination, was also Irish in origin. Alas, he felt that a lot of the evidence about Irish recreation was destroyed over the years. We ate at a place called Templeton Hall. John Thorn was the keynote speaker. His remarks are here.

Afterward, we returned to the Bullpen Theater; site of the conference. There was a panel discussion led by Fred Ivor-Cambpell that included some authors and publishers. I’ve mentioned Morris, Ryczeck and Thorn. The other panelist was Gary Mitchem from MacFarland. This part was kind of dry shop talk, so I won’t bore you with the details. However, Thorn did talk about how he was once Rick Reilly’s editor or publisher; I forget which. He thought that Riles was a good stylist, but that he wrote about nothing.

Paul Dickson was up next. He’s written numerous books. Most importantly, for our purposes, he is a baseball lexicographer and just released the third edition of his dictionary. He wrote the first edition because his son was asking him about some baseball terms while watching an Orioles game. When he went to the library, he realized that there was no such animal as a baseball dictionary, so he wrote one. It took him a few years to collect the 5,000 entries. Ten years later, Harcourt Brace and Jovanovich republished it. This time, it contained 7,000 terms.

It is now10 years later and another edition (10,000 entries now) has come out. Over the years, sabermetric, Spanish and Japanese terms have been added to the lexicon. A couple of tidbits: Jazz was a baseball term four years before it was used to describe a musical genre. Grand Slam came from bridge and didn’t appear in baseball lingo until the 1920s. Think tank was a term for someone’s skull used by a sportswriter in 1893. I get the impression that Dickson has spoken before audiences before.

Rounding out the conference was Ben Robinson, who just received his masters in History at Guelph University. His thesis was about the differences between the National League and the American Association and he gave us an excerpt from that. I sat next to his parents at lunch. Nice folks. Hey, they are Canadian. Peace, Order and Good Government and all that jazz.

We stayed longer in Cooperstown than we planned. At least I did. Joe had to get back to Connecticut early Sunday morning and left me there—just me and a massive hotel bill that I knew I couldn’t pay. And I couldn’t wire Studes for the money. In the current financial situation, the Hardball Times didn’t have access to the quick and easy credit like it used to. (Oh, the bills that Gleeman used to run up!

But that’s a story for another time.) So I did what any responsible Doktor of Journalism would do. I broke into the Hall of Fame early Sunday morning, lifted Highpockets Kelly’s plaque, hocked it at the first pawnshop I saw, rented a Vincent Black Shadow and got the hell out of there.

Before we left, Peter Mancuso, the committee chair, talked about having another conference next year. St. Paul was mentioned as a possible site, as were a couple other ones in the Northeast. I’d like to cover it again, as long as it isn’t in Cooperstown. Chief Nicols probably has given her polizei orders to shoot me on sight, should I ever set foot in their fair village again.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jon Daly 2009-05-01T05:01:15+00:00 The commissioners we deserved http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-commissioners-we-deserved/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/the-commissioners-we-deserved/#When:05:06:15
I’m not Nate Silver. There are plenty of folks better than me at gathering data and using them to make forecasts. What I am good at is biographical research and I’ve written several short biographies for SABR. I’ve covered players and managers. One of my future victims will be an executive. I’ve been studying Bowie Kuhn for almost a year. After reading stories about him ad nauseam in books, magazines and news articles, I want to put together some original content about him. My short piece “Hardball Diplomacy” in these pages was one example. But this is more ambitious. I’m trying to see where he ranks among baseball executives.

Folks, especially followers of Bill James and other baseball iconoclasts, tend to compare Kuhn to Marvin Miller, which is fine. But he also needs to be compared to other baseball execs, football execs and even entertainment biz types like studio heads and their trade association head. I am not a fan of one-dimensional ranking systems. So I was intrigued when I heard about The Leaders We Deserved.

This is a recent book that ranks the American presidents in six categories; character, competence, vision, economic policy, foreign and military policy, and expansion and protection of liberty. The author, Al Felzenberg, is something of a Ted Williams Republican, but he doesn’t care if you come up with the same conclusions as him. His intent was to open up the presidential ranking game to the intelligent layman as well as the Arthur Schlesingers of the world.

I decided to use a similar analysis of sports executives. The first three categories aren’t job-specific, so they apply here as well. I supplement them by asking three questions:

1. Did they help their game and league grow?
2. How did they handle player relations?
3. Were their policies fan-friendly?

Some, like the late Jerome Holtzman would consider only the first question pertinent for commissioners. Others would view commissioners akin to self-regulatory agencies like FINRA (the former NASD). Remember, originally Judge Landis was a commission of one. For brevity’s sake, what follows is a quick look at the highlights and lowlights of Kuhn and his contemporary league heads. They were competing with Kuhn and baseball for fans and dollars and I don’t see much discussion of them in the baseball discussions that I read.

Pete Rozelle


Alvin “Pete” Rozelle was a single parent for a few years. His first wife had a drinking problem and after they divorced, he had custody of their daughter. This was rare for a man in those days. He’s often seen as the Platonic ideal of the modern sports commissioner and not without reason. He was very competent; an able consensus builder. The first national TV contract he signed was seen as a master stroke. He got the teams to share the TV revenues. It was an idea that he got from Branch Rickey via AFL founder Lamar Hunt. (And it can be traced further to Bill Veeck, but Rozelle had to cajole Congress and the Kennedy White House to approve it.)

This wasn’t in the best short-term interest for the New York Giants and Chicago Bears, but it did help the competitive ecology of the game. Football was seen as the now sport, but I have a theory about that. The flight to the Left Coast by the Dodgers and baseball Giants coincided with an uptick in the fortunes of the football Giants. New York, especially Madison Avenue, noticed Giants like Frank Gifford. Even old Charlie Connerly was a Marlboro Man for a while. These were the tastemakers of the era.

In any event, by the time Super Bowl X was played, Super Bowl Sunday was a de facto national holiday. It was around this time that football opened up its passing rules. The Competition Committee added an extra official to protect pass receivers and offensive linemen were allowed to protect the quarterback more effectively.

But there was a Dark Side to Camelot.

Rozelle’s high water mark was somewhere in the mid-'70s. League Think, as the owners’ cohesiveness was sometimes called, was a product of the old guard of ownership. Old time sportsmen like Art Rooney, George Halas and Wellington Mara shared urban ethnic Catholic values. As new owners came from the old AFL, through expansion, or otherwise, owner solidarity weakened. For example, it took years for the league to agree on overtime for regular season games. Why is it sudden death overtime? It wouldn’t surprise me that the reason is because when it was first proposed the Bears still played at Wrigley Field and there were no lights there. They wanted to finish the game before sunset. And the language in the proposal was never changed.

A number of teams relocated to the suburbs. The Cowboys moved from Dallas to Irving. The Patriots had a new stadium built in Foxboro. The Detroit Lions played in Pontiac. The New York Giants crossed state lines into New Jersey. Carroll Rosenbloom swapped the Colts for the Rams with Robert Irsay in a tax deal. Irsay gutted the franchise (with the help of GM Joe Thomas).

Rosenbloom started some dominoes falling when he moved the Rams to Anaheim. The L.A. Coliseum sought a new tenant and found a willing one in AL Davis of the Oakland Raiders. The league did not approve of the move but Davis did it anyway and the NFL didn’t have a leg to stand on. Unlike baseball, the football owners weren’t exempt from anti-trust laws. “Franchise Free Agency” followed. Irsay moved the Colts to Indianapolis under cover of night. The Cardinals would later move to Arizona.

Meanwhile, the NFL players didn’t have this freedom. The NFL didn’t have a reserve clause, but the Rozelle Rule allowed a team that lost a free agent to another team to receive players or draft picks of equal value. This stymied free agency. There were training camp work stoppages in 1970 and 1974 as well as in-season strikes in 1982 and 1987, but the NFLPA lacked solidarity. Labor peace wasn’t achieved until 1993, well after Rozelle resigned. Former lineman and current author Michael Oriard considers player relations to be Rozelle’s Achilles Heel.

One role that commissioners assume is that of guardian of the game’s integrity. Early on in his tenure, Rozelle suspended Paul Hornung and Alex Karras one year for betting on games. In 1973, the NFL banned greenies. Rozelle fined eight Sand Diego Chargers for amphetamine use in one of the first public sports drug scandals. Team physician Dr. Arnold Mandell was prescribing them.

The league had a steroid problem as well as a painkiller problem. By 1983, football writer Paul Zimmerman felt that recreational drug use was the league’s biggest problem. Programs were put in place to combat all of these, but many felt that the NFL had a tendency to pay lip service to solving problems. After all, Rozelle got his start in public relations.

Walter Kennedy and Larry O’Brien


Both Kennedy and O’Brien were politicos. Kennedy was the mayor of Stamford, Conn., before leading the NBA. O’Brien, who succeeded him, was an operative for JFK. He later was a victim of the Watergate burglary when he chaired the Democrat National Committee. During the 1969-'70 season, the New York Knicks helped the NBA burst onto the scene. Elliot Gould, Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford all were photographed at Madison Square Garden. But the draft made it difficult for teams to sustain success. One great player makes that much of a difference in hoops.

By 1975, the NHL was outdrawing the NBA in 14 of the 20 cities they shared. The basketball league expanded into white collar, service industry, Sunbelt cities quicker than other sports did. Part of the reason was that owners looked to maximize season ticket sales and the people in places like Portland or Phoenix were more likely to buy season tix than folks in the Rustbelt. Sometimes this wasn’t well thought out. Basing the New Orleans Jazz in the cavernous Louisiana Superdome wasn’t wise. Why pay in advance when plenty of walk-up seats will be available? David Halberstam felt that expansion and the rival ABA diluted the talent level of the game, but he felt the same way about football. However, Roone Arledge also felt that the league overextended itself.

Arledge may have been the most powerful man in sports during the ‘70s. As head of ABC Sports, he changed how television covered sports from a low-key, almost reverential, style to one that focused on human interest story lines. A colleague considered him everyman, the casual fan. His network covered the league from the middle of the ‘60s until 1973. Ratings increased, but Madison Avenue preferred college hoops.

For one thing, marquee player Kareem Abdul-Jabbar was anathema to advertisers as a Muslim who boycotted the 1968 Olympics. The owners didn’t embrace TV anyway. They wouldn’t give ABC marquee matchups. Walter Kennedy was all set to renew the contract with ABC, but Lakers owner Jack Kent Cooke led a revolt and the league signed a deal with CBS.

Arledge got back at pro basketball. Wide World of Sports was already running on Saturdays. He ran installments on Sundays along with the Superstars competition and promoted the crap out of both. CBS covered only a handful of teams out of the 22. The network wouldn’t cover the NBA at all until football ended. After Portland beat Philly for the world title in ’77, CBS immediately switched to the Kemper Open. CBS Sports head Frank Smith was a golf fan.

In 1979, General Motors pulled its advertising from the NBA on CBS. (People forget, but GM used to be a big company.) Subaru stepped in, but paid a fraction of what GM did for spots. The league had an image problem of overpaid druggie players dogging it until the last two minutes of the game. Some of this was no doubt racial. And it was an unfair criticism, as Abdul-Jabbar said in "Airplane!." “Tell your old man to drag Walton and Lanier up and down the court for 48 minutes.”

Things change with the emergence of Larry Bird and Magic Johnson, but it took a while. In 1980, the Finals were shown on tape delay running against Johnny Carson. By 1982, there was talk of contraction and the All-Star Game had thousands of tickets that almost went unsold. Enter David Stern.

Stern sought corporate partnerships for the NBA. Rozelle was able to forge these, but none of the other commissioners did. Stern was the power behind Larry O’Brien’s throne. (By the way, both Stern and future NFL commissioner Paul Tagliabue took the Bowie Kuhn career path to the top of their sports. Both started as outside counsel for the leagues. The difference is that both had more marketing savvy than Kuhn.) O’Brien objected to the slam dunk contest during the All Star Game weekend. He thought that it was a sideshow worthy of the vanquished upstart ABA, but he deferred to Stern.

O’Brien was brought in after Walter Kennedy retired to consummate the ABA-NBA merger. He did succeed at that, but was considered a weak and ineffective commissioner as well as a poor spokesman for the association. His strength was as a behind-the-scenes pol. Walter Kennedy was also considered a weak commissioner. According to David Halberstam, the owners were contemptuous of him.

The NBA Players Association was ably led by a young attorney named Larry Fleischer. The Tommy Heinsohn and Bill Russell era Celtics were the heart of the union. Red Auerbach was somewhat of a skinflint. In 1964, the players threatened to boycott the All-Star Game over a pension dispute. In ’67, they threatened to strike the playoffs. Kennedy got the owners to negotiate with Fleischer.

The rival ABA started up around then and it raised the specter of a salary war. Rick Barry played out his option and jumped to the junior circuit. The NBA tried to merge with its competitor in 1970, but the union blocked it. The NBA had a rule similar to the Rozelle Rule with regard to free agent compensation. Compensation was dropped in 1980. Due to cocaine scandals, Bob Lanier and the NBPA agreed to a drug test policy in 1982. At the same time, the union agreed to a salary cap in exchange for 53 percent of the league’s revenues. Unlike baseball and football, there was peace on the basketball labor front during the Kuhn Era.

Clarence Campbell and John Zeigler


I know less about hockey, so bear with me. Campbell and Zeigler were NHL presidents, but their duties were similar to the other commissioners. Campbell was convicted of bribery. Player union head Alan Eagleson did more to promote the game than Campbell by promoting the Canada Cup. The rival upstart World Hockey Association was more responsible for introducing non-Canadians to the player pool.

Despite lack of U.S. TV coverage, the NHL outdrew the NBA in cities that the two leagues shared. The NHL was mossbacked compared to other leagues. Syndicate ownership existed in that league in the 20th century. Hockey didn’t have a collective bargaining agreement until 1975. French Canadians had a history of not being union-friendly. Eagleson had all sorts of conflicts of interest. He was also a player agent and tight with the owners because he kept salaries down. He later went to jail for defrauding some of his clients.

Now let’s move on to Kuhn.

Bowie Kuhn


Bowie Kuhn had a thing for a young wife and mother who traveled in the same social circles as he did when he summered in the Hamptons as a young professional. When her husband was killed in a car crash, Kuhn took care of her. The two eventually married. When Joe Reichler was his assistant and was caught selling memorabilia that belonged to the Hall of Fame, Kuhn stood by him.

After he was voted out of office, Kuhn started a law firm with Harvey Myerson. Myerson defrauded clients. While Kuhn was a rather conservative Catholic, he worked with AIDS patients in New York City back when it was considered a gay man’s disease. And he didn’t resort to collusion like Peter Ueberroth.

After Bob Short moved the Senators, Kuhn envisioned baseball’s return to the District of Columbia. His other goals included unification of the AL and NL and interleague play. While the league offices moved to New York and he assumed some of the traditional roles of the league presidents, these ideas didn’t really come to fruition until Bud Selig was the commissioner. Kuhn simply didn’t have the consensus-building skills of a Rozelle or a Selig. In particular, the NL owners were a thorn in his side. One reason the owners asked Spike Eckert to resign early is because they wanted to reorganize the commissioner’s office and unify some functions under him, but the NL steadfastly maintained its autonomy.

Baseball changed its rules to encourage more offense, as the NFL would several years later. But most of these changes were voted in before Kuhn was elected, except the introduction of the DH in the AL. He did bring the postseason to prime time and television revenues increased tremendously over his tenure. But this happened for all sports as Madison Avenue started to use sports as an advertising vehicle for products such as cars, shaving cream, life insurance and beer; especially beer. The Miller Brewing Co. and Anheuser Busch were locked in a ferocious battle over the light beer market. The sports leagues benefited immensely.

Kuhn would sometimes side with a player; especially if his employer was Charlie O. Finley. He intervened when Donn Clendenon was traded from the Expos to the Astros. But generally speaking, he battled with the MLBPA and often lost to Marvin Miller and the players. The owners knew that the day would come when the Reserve Clause would have to be modified, yet they didn’t do anything until they were forced to by arbitrator Peter Seitz.

During the 1981 strike, the darkest hours of his reign, Kuhn was pretty invisible. He may’ve claimed that his hands were tied; that the PRC or the league presidents should deal with the players (Lee MacPhail eventually did.) But Kuhn showed the capacity to act independently when he felt like it. For instance, He punished Fergie Jenkins and other recreational drug users. Some say that this soured the MLBPA on agreeing to test for steroids and other performance enhancers and is partly to blame for the mess that baseball is in right now.

Kuhn’s mantra was “integrity of the game.” That’s why he sought to distance it from gambling. For instance, he ordered some owners to divest their positions in Parvin /Dohrmann; a company that owned a few Las Vegas casinos. He even kept Mickey Mantle and Willie Mays out of baseball because of their PR jobs for casinos. His stance was almost puritanical by today’s standards. Nowadays, Foxwoods advertises heavily on baseball broadcasts in the Northeast and the Connecticut State Lottery sells Yankee and Red Sox themed scratch tickets.

Kuhn nixed Oakland’s fire sale in 1976 because it wasn’t in the best interest of the game. People can point to Connie Mack doing similar sales with Philadelphia A’s. They can also point to Harry Frazee’s player sales that rendered the Red Sox moribund until Tom Yawkey purchased them. Incidentally, the Buffalo Braves dumped Bob McAdoo to the Knicks not much later in a cash deal. NBA commish Larry O’Brien did not intervene.

Finally, Kuhn avoided the commercialization of the game that became widespread in later years. His was a time when the outfield walls weren’t as cluttered by advertising, although the Brut sign at Yankee Stadium shows up in many baseball cards of that era.

Rozelle was the best of this lot; especially for his employers—the NFL owners. The players, fans and cities didn’t fare as well under him. Football is a brutal game and many players suffered debilitating injuries. That’s a subject for another day. But it was Rozelle’s bête noir, Al Davis, who had a lot to do with increasing teams’ bottom lines. He showed them how to play cities off against each other.

I can’t see anything that would put O’Brien and Kennedy over Kuhn. Despite Kuhn’s warts, baseball and football prospered more than the NBA until David Stern arrived. Zeigler remains a cipher to me, but the NHL as a whole seemed shady. Part of this is because I’ve read much more about the business of baseball and football than I have of the other two sports.

Most of you are familiar with at least some literature on the business of baseball. For the other sports, I recommend Brand NFL: Making and Selling America's Favorite Sport (Caravan Book) by Michael Oriard, America's Game by Michael McCambridge, Searching for Bobby Orr by Stephen Brunt and The Breaks of the Game by David Halberstam.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jon Daly 2009-03-06T05:06:15+00:00 Hardball diplomacy http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/hardball-diplomacy/ http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/hardball-diplomacy/#When:05:05:15 Bob Uecker might say, his pitch was juuust a bit inside.

In 1999, Peter Angelos arranged for a home and home series between the Orioles and a Cuban team. It was the first time a major league club had played in Cuba since the Dodgers and Reds played two games 40 years prior. But this delay wasn't due to a lack of effort.

Let's go back in the history of sports diplomacy. In April of 1971, the United States Table Tennis team and accompanying journalists became the first American sports delegation to set foot in the Chinese capital since 1949. The Chinese team visited America a year later and a new term was born: Ping Pong Diplomacy. Russian and Canadian hockey fans may remember their Summit Series of 1972.

Less than a month after the table tennis team visited Beijing, San Diego Padres manager Preston Gomez told reporters that he wanted to have a Cuban tour of major leaguers. It would be an opportunity for players such as Tony Oliva, Tony Perez and Tony Taylor to visit their homeland for the first time in a decade. (Incidentally, Gomez's given first name was Pedro, but there were a handful of Pedro Gomezes in Cuban baseball at the time, so a sportswriter hung Preston on him. Preston was the name of a sugar mill in his hometown. It'd be like naming a Detroit–area player Buick McKenzie.) Gomez said that Kuhn was on board but that they were awaiting State Department approval. Reportedly, the trip was eventually canceled because of protests by Cuban exiles in South Florida.

To say that the two countries hadn't seen eye to eye since the Cuban Revolution is an understatement. There had been no diplomatic relations since 1961. In the late '60s and early '70s, it was practically a fad to skyjack planes to Cuba. In 1969, there were 70 successful skyjackings worldwide; 58 went to Cuba. In 1970, 54 hijackings—31 to Cuba. In 1971, 22 hijackings—13 to Cuba. In November of 1972, three men successfully hijacked a Southern Airways DC-9 from Birmingham to multiple locations in the United States, one Canadian city and finally to Cuba with $2 million and 10 parachutes. At McCoy Air Force Base in Orlando, the FBI shot out the tires and the plane finally landed on a partially foam-covered runway in Havana. The three hijackers were seized by the Cubans, as was the $2 million. This incident led to a brief treaty between the U.S. and Cuba to extradite hijackers.

In late September of 1974, Senators Jacob Javits and Claiborne Pell landed in Havana. As young TV producer Barry Jagoda watched footage of this, he had an idea. If ping pong diplomacy helped open up China, why not try baseball diplomacy with Cuba? He discussed this idea with his friend and fellow producer Richard Cohen. Cohen liked the idea, and they spent over $10,000 of their own money to try and bring this idea to fruition.

One of their first steps was to take this idea to Bowie Kuhn. Jagoda expected Kuhn to be like his media image: a stuffy conservative type. But he was pleasantly surprised at the commissioner's enthusiasm for the idea. He agreed to look into it.

At a dinner party hosted by NBC president Herb Schlosser around the holidays, Kuhn approached Secretary of State Henry Kissinger about a possible Cuba-US game. (Interesting aside: later that year, Kuhn and Schlosser would watch the very first episode of Saturday Night Live together as they stayed in Boston for the World Series. It took a while, but the episode eventually had the commissioner laughing. Thought Schlosser, "Well, if he liked it, it's going to have a wider audience than most people think.") Kuhn then sent a follow up letter to Kissinger. Kuhn had some connections in the State Department. He knew Assistant Secretary of State for Inter-American Affairs William D. Rogers. Both were Princeton alums and Rogers had worked at Arnold & Porter with Paul Porter, who was one of Kuhn's legal idols.

Preston Gomez had a hand in the planned trip, acting as a go-between between Kuhn and Cuba. Meanwhile, Jagoda and Cohen were doing some negotiating of their own. They traveled to Havana by way of the Czechoslovakian Embassy and met with officials from INDER, the Cuban sports governing body. The two of them borrowed a typewriter and typed up a proposal under a palm tree outside the Hotel Nacional.

The process moved forward. Kuhn met with the Cubans in Mexico City, who wanted to play a game in Havana on March 29. Kuhn thought that Cuba was open to letting their players eventually play in the majors. Back in the State Department, however, Kissinger was against the Cuba trip, though he wanted to hear staffer Lawrence Eagleburger and Rogers' arguments for it. Rogers argued that a baseball game against Cuba would be similar to ping pong diplomacy. The US would also have a chance to win—America's record against communist sports teams wasn't good at the time. Kissinger nixed the idea, thinking that the game would be politically inappropriate.

In 1975, Cuban/American baseball relations took another tentative step forward when Luis Tiant's parents attended the World Series. This visit came about because George McGovern passed a letter from Senator Edward Brooke to Fidel Castro when the erstwhile presidential candidate met the Cuban leader in May. Luis Sr. (a former Negro League pitcher) and Isabella arrived in Boston in August and stayed in the United States until they passed away a day apart the next December. They saw their son pitch a major league game for the first time in his career that started in 1964. Two more fruitful results of the meeting that McGovern held was an invitation for a baseball team to come to Havana and the return of $2 million to Southern Airways.

Kuhn again asked Rogers for permission for a game in '76 in light of Castro's invitation for an American team. A game in Santo Domingo was also discussed as part of the trip. Kuhn proposed a game in Havana in the last two weeks of March in 1976. Players would come from the 17 teams that train in Florida. Most likely, there would have been 14 American Leaguers selected by Lee MacPhail and the same number of National Leaguers selected by Chub Feeney.

Rogers argued for the trip. He felt that it would be a nice gesture after Cuba returned $2 million in Southern Airways ransom money. After a few weeks without hearing back from him, Kuhn prodded Rogers and hoped that Kissinger could announce the Cuba trip two weeks later at the All-Star game in Milwaukee.

Meanwhile, through their television connections, Jagoda and Cohen were able to meet with Roone Arledge of ABC. Arledge was interested in buying the rights to at least one game and showing it on "Wide World of Sports."

In October, Kuhn met again with INDER officials Jorge Bango and Fabio Ruiz in Mexico City for another attempt at an international game. But the game was overtaken by international events. It was canceled by the State Department because of Cuba's involvement in Angola, support for Puerto Rican independence, and their support of an Arab-backed UN resolution calling Zionism racism. With an upcoming primary fight against Ronald Reagan, President Ford didn't want to be seen as soft on Cuba.

But private parties tried to keep hardball diplomacy alive. Thanks to diplomatic connections, an Albany, New York travel agent named Vince Bytner was able to get folks to and from Cuba. Bill Veeck was interested in going to Cuba to scout for the Chicago White Sox in October of 1976. Bytner had friends at Cuba's UN mission who thought that it was a misconception that the Cubans wouldn't allow their players to play in America, and Preston Gomez thought that there were at least a dozen a major league-level players in Cuba. These claims always need to be taken with a grain of salt, but Barbaro Garbey turned out to be one. He was one of the Cubans allowed to flee in the Mariel boatlift after his involvement in a run-shaving scandal.

Because of the trade embargo, Cuba switched from wooden bats to aluminum bats after the 1975 season. Barry Jagoda told me that foul balls were thrown back on to the field due to an embargo-induced shortage. Veeck went to Cuba in 1977 and was convinced that the Cubans wouldn't allow their players to go pro.

In February of 1977, Bill Moyers interviewed Castro for "60 Minutes." Castro expressed a desire to see the New York Yankees come to Cuba to play. But Kuhn nixed the Yankee trip. Baltimore GM Hank Peters said that other teams didn't want the Yankees to get their foot in the door first. McGovern said that the Dodgers were interested in an island trip. Later, Gabe Paul, George Steinbrenner and Whitey Ford traveled to Cuba. Steinbrenner thought that a Cuba-US game would be more of a cultural exchange than an opportunity to scout the Cuban players. According to him, the Cubans wouldn't free their players for another 10 years.

George McGovern met again in April with Castro. Castro was pliant regarding his previous position that he wanted the Yankees to visit Cuba. Upon his return to the mainland, McGovern called the commissioner and extended Castro's invitation to Kuhn to send an All-Star team to Cuba in the fall or next spring.

Kuhn returned once again to Mexico City with the State Department's blessing to meet the Cubans. According to Ruiz, Kuhn never said that it would be a deal breaker if the Cubans wouldn't allow their players to become professionals. Ruiz said that the Americans had known since 1975 that the Cubans wouldn't allow their players to go to the bigs. That wasn't the impression that Kuhn gave William Rogers back then.

Regardless, Kuhn vetoed a plan to send an All-Star team to Cuba because Castro won't make Cuban players eligible for the draft. Two congressmen (Downey and Richardson of NY) criticized Kuhn's cancellation. Others didn't want it to happen in the first place. Preston Gomez was leery of a Cuba trip because of what Cuban exiles in Miami might do.

That was the last serious attempt to send a team of major leaguers to Cuba for many years. In November of 1977, some players and coaches of the Houston Astros went to Havana and gave a clinic to Cuban players, but no games were played. The next spring, the Cleveland Indians looked to play a Cuban team in Tucson. Kuhn referred them to the Executive Council and nothing happened. Hall of Fame umpire Jocko Conlan wrote a letter to The Sporting News calling Castro a murderer and protesting the Indians' plan. There were talks to bring a Cuban team to Montreal to play the Expos in August, but those went nowhere. Finally, in March of 1982, the Seattle Mariners had scheduled an exhibition series against a Cuban all-star team but it was canceled due to Cuban-American protests.

Major leaguers probably would have played in Cuba 21 years before the Orioles' trip were it not for Kuhn's veto. Nevertheless, Jagoda said that he understood why Kuhn, a corporate lawyer by trade, called the trip off. Kuhn was a businessman, not a diplomat. But imagine if a series had happened. Never mind the political ramifications—Americans might have had a chance to see players like Antonio Munoz, Wilfredo "El Hombre Hit" Sanchez and Changa Mederos.

Click here to learn about THT's download subscriptions.]]> Jon Daly 2008-11-26T05:05:15+00:00