Warning! This is a non-baseball post. If movies are not your thing, feel free to tap your delete key. Otherwise, please stay tuned for a report on what Rita calls the “Sport of Extreme Sitting.”
This post is given the number “80” in honor of Mike Maloney and Hollis Hanover who both turned 80 this month. And yes, it also is the first post after Hot Stove #79, but don’t tell them. Fresh out of law school in the 1960’s, the three of us toiled together at the Popham firm. We now have a monthly lunch to reminisce (tell lies) about the good old days.
I am bringing in a guest writer for part of this post – my long-time law partner Tim Sear. Tim was raised in Dubuque, Iowa, and the town once had a Pittsburgh Pirates minor league team. Tim’s family made annual trips to see the Pirates play the Cubs in Chicago. Tim’s hero, to this day, is Roberto Clemente. Tim often calls me to complain if he thinks I have missed some opportunity to inject Roberto into a Hot Stove post. “Obsessive” is as kind as I know how to say it.
Rita and I have just returned from Eastern Europe. The primary purpose of our journey was to visit the homeland of my grandparents – to breathe the air of my ancestors. My fraternal grandparents (Shalton, as Americanized) were from a village near Vilnius, Lithuania, and my maternal grandparents (Lukomski) were from a village near Lviv, Ukraine. They came to the states in 1907 and 1911. They didn’t speak English and had no money or special skills. Just dreamers with a willingness to work hard and become patriotic Americans. They are my heroes.
[Hot Stove Sabbatical Note – Rita and I will be in Eastern Europe for the first half of July (Riga, Vilnius, Warsaw, Krakow and Lviv). So it may be August before a new Hot Stove hits your inbox.]
For the third season in a row, Rita and I signed on for a week-long bus tour of major league baseball stadiums. In 2016, we saw five stadiums on the East Coast and last year another five in California. This year, we added four in the Midwest and Atlanta. All three trips have been with Triple Crown Travel – they take care of the hotels, tickets, bus, etc. All you have to do is show up with your suitcase, and trip leader Darren Zinser takes care of the rest.
I am taking my Hot Stove editor to dinner on Wednesday night. It will be our 37th Wedding Anniversary. To further celebrate, Rita has arranged a baseball stadium tour (June 18-24) that will take us to Pittsburgh, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Nashville and Atlanta.
My thanks to those Hot Stove readers who got through my three (long) installments on baseball collusion. Despite the best efforts of my editor/wife Rita, I still often drift to posts that fit the dreaded TLDR designation. I had not heard of that term until last week when Hollis Hanover filled me in. It is internet shorthand for “Too Long. Didn’t Read.”
So I’m going to make a change. This long post will be about rock ‘n’ roll.
I thought my collusion topic would be good for one post. But I kept getting intrigued by side stories. Oliver Wendell Holmes. Curt Flood. Catfish Hunter. Kirk Gibson. Andre Dawson. All those commissioners. Marvin Miller. The Brothers Fehr. Others who you will see below. So it has taken three posts. I don’t know what the next post will be about, but it won’t be this. Perhaps the Royals will surge.
As we left Part One, the players had won free agency status in the Messersmith case, leading to the owners and players entering into a collective bargaining agreement (CBA). One of the key CBA provisions required that free agency be an individual right so that players could not band together for leverage (as Don Drysdale and Sandy Koufax had done in their joint holdout in 1966). The owners were likewise to act independently – that is, they were prohibited from colluding to hold down salaries.
The sports pages and news pages are filled with “collusion” talk. But the Russians are not coming to Hot Stove. Just baseball.