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.
OPENING DAY!
“There is no sports event like Opening Day of baseball, the sense of beating back the forces of darkness and the National Football League.” George Vecsey, New York Times.
Themes for Hot Stove posts often come quite by accident. This one was sparked by the Winter Olympics, a Ted Williams story and the death last week of David Ogden Stiers. The common denominator: Korea.
In 1995, Jerry Seinfeld did a bit that went like this:
“Loyalty to any one sports team is pretty hard to justify. Because the players are always changing, the team can move to another city, you’re actually rooting for the clothes when you get right down to it. You know what I mean, you are standing and cheering and yelling for your clothes to beat the clothes from another city. Fans will be so in love with a player but if he goes to another team, they boo him. This is the same human being in another shirt, they ‘hate’ him now. Boo! Different shirt!! Boo.” [click here to see the video]
Royals pitchers and catchers reported to spring training today. Game on.
And as we wait to see how that works out…
Rita and I head to Phoenix later this week to visit friends of long standing, Diana and Larry Brewer. Sixty years ago this month (that would be January of 1958), the #1 record that Diana and I and our classmates were dancing to at Van Horn Teen Town was “At the Hop” by Danny and the Juniors. Three years later, I fixed Diana up on a blind date with my college fraternity brother Larry Brewer. They are still dating (and long married). Continue reading