A unique perspective

Sporting News, The, Sept 5, 1994 by Gene Collier

Among the antagonists in this sordid, atrophied baseball season, anything that could possibly be described as poignant is so coated in bile as to be indistinguishable amid the game's toxic politics.

So a little sequence of events inside the visitors' clubhouse at Three Rivers Stadium six hours before the strike will have to do. It might not have been poignant in any strict sense, but it had some dignity and some caring respect, thanks to a noble conduit named Felipe Alou.

Alou, 59, the proud old lion who has calmly sculpted the 1994 Expos into the best team in baseball, ambled out of the manager's office into a team meeting that was convening reluctantly in the pregame clutter.

"I just want to tell you all that I am very proud of you," said Alou, an 18-year organization man with the Expos and the first Dominican Republic-born manager in major league history. "I want to thank you for your efforts this year. I hope that you will be back to finish a fine season."

Alou harbors nothing but respect for the 1/28th of the players' association that he directs and little but admiration for the balance of a work force he says makes "the quality of the game" better than ever.

"We may not have a Babe Ruth or a Joe Dimaggio today," he says, "but there are more good players now than ever."

Yet even from that set of sincere precepts, Alou appreciates the absurdities of baseball's ruptured society.

" Sometimes," he says in the quiet of his office. "I think, |Oh, these salaries!' I have a son (Moises) in this game, and he's going to make more money in one year than I made in my life. My entire life."

Alou's feelings place him on a tiny island in the strike, joined by a pocket of managers who, like him, almost don't know whether to be proud or bitter.

Rockies Manager Don Baylor knows where he stands among players and owners. "I am somewhere in between," he says, "and I've got nowhere to go. I knew the strike was coming, and I knew there was nothing I could do about it."

Alou, Baylor, Cardinals Manager Joe Torre, Brewers Manager Phil Garner and others like them trust the players and engender reciprocal trust, and they respect the players' skills like perhaps no one else on the management side. But they also remember the tremendous political risks they took as players, risks the modem player can't imagine or, worse, won't bother to, and they saw firsthand a kind of sinister arrogance by management.

"I probably trusted (management) to a fault," Torre says of his playing days. His 35 years in baseball have been pretty much evenly divided between years of owner control of the game and a violent backswin of the pendulum by the players. "We knew in |72, the first strike, which was over pension payments, that in St. Louis we probably had more to lose than any other team because we had a great owner, Gussie Busch. We were the only club with rooms to ourselves on the road. At the same time, there were ballclubs that were only letting a player use one towel, a lot of nickel-and-dime stuff like that. So you knew what you were doing was risky, uncomfortable, but for the whole of baseball, what you were doing was necessary."

The impetus for Torre's becoming a stalwart in the game's early labor movement had probably come about two years before the '72 strike, when teammate and outfielder Curt Flood, rather than accept a trade to the Phillies, sued the industry, contending that the reserve clause thatbound players to teams violated federal antitrust laws.

"You started realizing, 'If I don't want to go somewhere, why do I have to?' And the answer always came back, |It's the way it's done,'" Torre says. "Well, there's no doubt that was the answer, but was the answer right? It was just never questioned. But what really bothered me was the way baseball just dismissed Curt Flood. Just tried to ignore the whole thing.

"That really bothered me."

Flood was out of baseball within 18 months of filing the suit, and yet that act would dwarf Flood's exquisite play, his seven Gold Gloves and .293 average in 14 seasons. Flood had run legal interference for the players all the way to the Supreme Court, which, though it upheld the reserve clause by a 5-3 vote, did so with a constricted interpretation that cleared the way for the eliminatation of baseball's system of serfdom.

But the notion that major league players were in any way exploited didn't play any better to the mass audience a generation ago than it does today. Torre made $1 10,000 in 1971, a good amount of money by any standard, but a good amount of money for which the Cardinals in return received a ton of production. That summer, Torre lashed 230 hits, including 34 doubles and 24 homers, drove in 137 runs and hit a league-leading .363. To many fans, the stats didn't matter.

"I was MVP in '71, and when Opening Day finally came in '72, after the strike, the fans in St. Louis booed me," Torre says. "That really hurt. I let it affect me. I wasn't hateful or anything about it, but it bothered me."

Torre was viewed as a militant unionist, and later so were Baylor and Gamer, especially Garner, who says the label requires some revisionist history.