Playboy's 1995 Baseball Preview

They Killed the World Series. Now the afterimage of a good season is not Seattle's Ken Griffey Jr. wristing another home run at the moon; not the White Sox' Frank Thomas, with his hammer-thrower's swing, joining Griffey and San Francisco's Matt Williams in the chase toward 61 homers; not lonesome Padre Tony Gwynn hitting .394; not Atlanta's sleepy-eyed Greg Maddux defying hot hitters to spin one of the best years a pitcher ever had; not six pennant races promising a Series that might have been as retro as Yankees-Dodgers or as bizarro as Indians-Expos. Instead we remember a Milwaukee car dealer named Bud Selig standing at a podium, announcning that he and his fellow team owners were killing the hostage.

Selig swore the owners didn't plan it that way. He said they had bargained in good faith only to be foiled by greedy players, and he said there was no joy in baseball. He was right about the joy part.

The World Series was 90 years old. It was the grand opera that rewarded fans for paying attention to the Muzak of a 162-game season. The spindly spitfire Casey Stengel, famed for doffing his hat and releasing a sparrow, won two Series games in 1923 by homering against Babe Ruth's Yankees. Three years later, Ruth killed his team's chances by crazily trying to steal second base with two outs in the last inning of the last game; he was thrown out. In our time, Kirk Gibson gimped off the Dodger bench to hit a Ruthian homer. Jack Morris, at the age of 36, threw ten shutout innings to stop the Braves in 1991. In 1993 Toronto's Joe Carter defined a seven-month season in a quarter of a second against Mitch Williams. The 1994 World Series would have made moments and heroes and goats of its own, but it was called on account of Selig's reign.

By then Paul Molitor, Blue Jays player rep and 1993 Series MVP, looked sick. He had seen polls showing that in the latest labor dispute fans either supported the owners or hated both sides. "Frankly, I'm not sure anybody much cares if we play again," Molitor said. But hadn't fans proved themselves already by filling the seats all summer--50 million baseball fans, a record-setting average of 32,000 per game? The trouble with the game was never with the people who played it or followed it. The trouble was with the ones who owned it.

Modern baseball began in 1975, when an arbitrator ruled that players were not bound forever to teams that employed them; they could be free agents. The owners fired the arbitrator, but the decision stood. Salaries rose, but team profits (and franchise values) rose faster, until three years ago, when the game's billion-dollar TV contract expired. With no network bidding anywhere near a billion, owners had to make do with far less dough.

In 1992 the owners signaled their desire to take the difference out of the players' hides. First they ousted commissioner Fay Vincent, saying the game didn't need a commissioner. It has needed one since 1920, when federal judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis took over to save the sport after a thrown World Series, but now Milwaukee Brewers owner Selig gets to play commish. He does it with pals like White Sox boss Jerry Reinsdorf whispering in his ear. They assure fans they're ever ready to compromise--unlike the greedy players.

In last year's on-again, off-again meetings the players argued for the status quo. The current arrangement made everyone rich, they said. Selig said the status quo wasn't good enough. Players' salaries were ruining the game. He said that clubs such as his Brewers would soon have no chance against wealthy big-city teams. Never mind that small-market teams have won ten of the past 12 World Series. Never mind that the Mariners, the worst-run team of the Eighties, had increased in value from $13 million to $120 million. Never mind that the Padres--cynically stripped of talent to save cash while they were offered for sale--brought a multimillion-dollar windfall to an owner who had driven the franchise into the ground. Never mind that the owners had been fined $280 million for colluding to lower salaries. The players were the problem, the pseudocommissioner said, and there would be a salary cap or else.

Selig said he saw no reason to become directly involved in the meetings. And when negotiations died, he killed baseball with a press conference. The two sides' spokesmen spoke volumes. Cecil Fielder wanted to save "the beautiful game of baseball." Red Sox owner John Harrington said, "We have deadlines to consider."

After Selig and the rest ended the 1994 season, they could take the next step in their long-term agenda: replacing major-leaguers, whose average pay is $1.2 million, with guys who would play for a tenth of that.

In December the owners capitalized on their immunity from antitrust laws and unilaterally imposed a salary cap. If the men Cincinnati owner Marge Schott called "million-dollar babies" wouldn't play by the owners' new rules, there would be guys willing to scab for $125,000. Schott, Selig & Co. figured fans either wouldn't care or couldn't tell the difference. They're wrong. In their desire to get even with players for past defeats, owners underestimated everyone else in the sport. Their scab scheme not only showed deep contempt for the fans, it also showed that owners don't understand the game.

Baseball is all context. Nobody watches Griffey for the sheer pleasure of seeing a white dot carom off a cheap seat. We watch because we have some sense of how hard it is to homer against big-league pitchers. Most fans knew Griffey, Williams, Thomas and a few others were chasing Roger Maris' all-time mark of 61 home runs. Many fans knew Maris had exploited pitching staffs thinned by expansion when he topped Ruth's holy record of 60 in 1961, just as Griffey, Thomas and Williams did in challenging Maris last year. Many recalled that the strain of the task made Maris' crewcut fall out in patches. They wondered how Griffey might react if he had 59 on October 1.

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More than most sports, baseball rewards fans in proportion to their attention. It is not mere numbers that connect Matt Williams, Maris and Ruth; it is the fact that each earned his numbers battling the finest baseball talents of his time. We can argue forever about who was the best hitter, but the superiority of big-league competition remains a constant in this century. It's what gives meaning to comparing Williams and Ruth. It's what ownership mocked with its plan to send fantasy campers into Ruth's house and call them major-leaguers.

Even the best have to fight to make it there. Mike Pizza owes his Dodgers career to nepotism. Matt Williams' nose used to mess up his swing. It's good to know such stuff--to marvel at Piazza's becoming an All-Star after being drafted in the 62nd round purely as a favor to his brother's godfather, Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda. It's fun to tell your buddies in the cheap seats that Williams went from 20 homers in 1992 to 38 in 1993 and 43 in a truncated season only after hitting coach Bobby Bonds told him to turn his head more toward the pitcher so his nose wouldn't block his right eye. Trading anecdotes about scabs ("He hit ten homers for Cornell") would suck. Only the best belong in the most difficult game.

Last season brought a lesson in difficult. Two men who might be the two best jocks on earth played ball, and they weren't very good at it. Deion Sanders is football's best defensive player, if not its best player period, while in baseball he is not quite so valuable as Tony Tarasco. He began 1994 by homering on opening day and was among the leaders in stolen bases most of the year. But when the Reds called to offer .300-hitting Roberto Kelly for Atlanta rookie Tarasco, the Braves saw a chance to rid their clubhouse of neon. "Not Tarasco," they said, "but you can have Deion." The greatest player in football batted .283 with four homers. Sanders was last seen zipping through Riverfront Stadium on his motorbike, dragging an angry policeman.

Michael Jordan batted .202 with three homers for the Birmingham Barons. History's greatest basketball player was a potent box-office draw, but he was useless on the field. Air Jordan described his swing. He was a token of Reinsdorf's disregard for the game, no more deserving of a roster spot than Mike Ditka or Oprah. Still, Jordan took extra batting practice while other Double-A players were trolling the malls. He asked kid teammates for hitting tips. Jordan's stats revealed that he couldn't hit a big-league pitch if you pinned it to his bat. But the year also bared his character. Go figure: He got in on a pass--an insult to every true baseball pro--and proceeded to honor the game with his humor, grace and dedication.

The context of baseball made enemies of Jordan and Jack McDowell, another of the game's admirable men. McDowell is a proud, prickly Don Quixote who is armed with a mean split-finger fastball. Black Jack went 22--10 in 1993 to win the American League's Cy Young Award. A Stanford graduate, a rock musician admired by his pal Eddie Vedder, a baseball purist like his mentor Carlton Fisk, McDowell was offended by the Michael Jordan circus. "Hey, I didn't ask to join the Beatles when I started in music," he said dryly one day in Sarasota. It never made the papers, but McDowell promised teammates last spring that he would get a hit before Jordan did--tall talk coming from an AL pitcher who never batted during the season. As newspapers ran breathless accounts of Jordan's long struggle for his first hit of the spring, McDowell doubled to the center field wall in his second at bat.

From there until the end, the game was as tense and goofy as ever:

• The Blue Jays, coming off consecutive Series victories, spent much of the (concluded on page 148)Baseball(continued from page 116) year in last place. So did their 1993 Series foes, the Phillies, but at least the Phils fell with the team name spelled correctly on their uniforms. Joe Carter played a Jays game in a jersey emblazoned Torotno.

• Montreal outfielder Larry Walker vapor-locked in April when he caught a fly ball, flipped the souvenir to a fan and coolly jogged toward the dugout. Too bad there were only two outs. Seeing base runners sprinting and his teammates waving for the ball, Walker ran, resnatched it and fired it to the infield. Score that play 9-fan-9-5.

• Minor-league manager Mike Goff mooned the umpire during an argument at home plate.

• Cleveland's basher Albert Belle, formerly nicknamed Joey, used a doctored bat and may now be called Corky.

• Mitch Williams, the Wild Thing who saved 43 games for the Phils in 1993 but will be remembered for the dead-armed fastball that lost the 1993 Series, quit. He tried to help Houston in 1994 but had nothing left. In June. Williams retired to his spread in Texas. Like Lou Gehrig, who ended by saying, "Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth," Williams left us with a memorable farewell quote: "It's time for Mitchy-poo to take it to the ranch."

Last winter it looked as if the national game was heading to the ranch as well, Owners were signing scabs, imposters, Oil Can Boyd and assorted tomato cans. But as George Bush, the Texas Rangers owner's dad, said when Saddam Hussein crossed the wrong foul line, "This will not stand."

Scab ball was doomed from the start; it could never succeed because baseball fans are purists. Otherwise we would not drive for hours for the privilege of sitting on hard seats, buying $4 beers and waiting to see if Bonds can find one bangable pitch in the assortment of scooters and darters Maddux gives him. Only purists care whether Cal Ripken passes Gehrig's iron-man record this summer, and how long the newly unretired Mitch Williams can survive on guts and an 80 mph heater. But any of that, as any fan knows, means infinitely more than anything scab ball could offer.

This year, when real baseball returns, the Braves, Yankees, Jays, Orioles, Indians, Reds and both Sox should be the best teams. Even without an official salary cap, there will be de facto caps because many clubs have overspent in recent years. That will lower salaries for all but the most stellar players. Baseball's economy will mirror real society: zillions for superstars, with the middle-class Jody Reeds of the world squeezed ever closer to the minimum salary. That's how it should be.

Owners will get richer as another round of expansion in this growth game brings $125 million to $150 million apiece from two new teams, only four years after the expansion Marlins and Rockies paid $95 million each, and they'll rake in even more when inter-league play creates new rivalries by 1998 or 1999. Owners will always get richer. That's what owners do. But the game is the players, and only the best will do. Anything less is meaningless.