Posted on 08/07/2002 1:04:34 AM PDT by BluesDuke
Information Bankruptcy
The Owners Ponder Reviving A Bomb
by Jeff Kallman
Have you seen Sports Illustrated's thumbnail review of owners-vs.-players issues? With memory decent enough, and a baseball library full enough, the final item listed will make you feel like a dog. The kind who earns his Alpo sniffing for bombs.
"We want a way to verify offers made to free agents," say the owners, as SI translates their brief for the so-called Information Bank. "This is the only way we can get a true handle on what the market is so we won't overspend on free agents." Actually, what they want among other things is for an awful lot of people to turn up with an awful lot of memory loss.
For the Information Bank of which they speak was in fact incorporated after the 1987 season and required less time to achieve insolvency than the most mal-managed of the decade's incredible shrinking savings and loans. And the players know it, too.
"No, no, no," SI translates the players' position. "This used to be called collusion. It's just a way of conspiring to keep salaries down. What if you have two employers fighting over a player? It's not in the player's interest that each knows what the other is offering."
The salary question, however, was (and is) a subtext to the prime question: the right of an employee to choose for whom he might work, on mutual agreement between the employable and the employer, if and when the employable is no longer bound under incumbent and active contract.
The Information Bank's concept, wrote John Helyar in The Lords of the Realm: The Real History of Baseball, was allowing the owners an end-run around collusion charges of which an independent arbitrator had found them guilty concerning the free agent class of winter 1986. "The idea," he wrote, "was to stimulate the market enough to blunt charges of collusion while at the same time keeping a rein on the market."
A team reported its free agent offers to the owners' Player Relations Committee, and learned who bid what on whom by "withdrawing" the information from the PRC. Presumably, that would protect the owners' against any labour practises complaints that they were still conspiring to rig or suppress the players' job market. "It did create the appearance of a more active market," Helyar continued, "thought it...amounted to just churning."
Consider: California Angels pitcher Mike Witt received a $1.3 million offer from the Oakland Athletics - who knew already, thanks to a withdrawal from the Information Bank, that the Angels had already offered Witt $1.4 million. The Los Angeles Dodgers made offers to third baseman Gary Gaetti of the world champion Minnesota Twins and to Dave Righetti of the New York Yankees - knowing well enough what the Twins and the Yankees had offered each player, and either matching or underbidding the incumbents.
This was what the Players' Association called "tight range bidding." According to Helyar, the apparent masters of the range were the Cleveland Indians. Two deals they offered two pitchers typified the technique. They offered Houston Astros pitcher Danny Darwin less guaranteed money but more potential incentive dollars; they offered San Francisco Giants pitcher Atlee Hammaker more guaranteed money but less potential incentive dollars.
"It was...the sort of bidding that continued to funnel players back to their old clubs," Helyar continued. "After a flurry of bidding activity, the incumbent team usually prevailed if it wanted the player." Righetti ended up taking an arbitration offer from the Yankees, and Witt, Gaetti, Darwin, Hammaker, and others went back to their incumbencies.
Just like a savings and loan bound by investments and structures of dubious foundation, the Information Bank held its own and collusion's collapse within its own composition. "Clubs were often late to report bids, prone to underreport bids, known to use the Bank to outright hoodwink other clubs," Helyar wrote. "They were, in short, starting to revert to their old self-interested selves."
What shoved the Information Bank toward its first death was the movement involving one player who customarily preferred to strike fear into the hearts of opposing pitchers rather than his own teams: Jack Clark, whose September 1987 ankle injury ended a season that saw him smash 35 home runs, drive in 106 runs, bat .286, slug .597, and roll up a .459 on-base percentage in only 131 games. How valuable he was could be seen when, without him, the St. Louis Cardinals lost the 1987 World Series to the Twins.
The first baseman was a free agent after the season but not entirely anxious to leave St. Louis - he was (like most Cardinals) fond of manager Whitey Herzog (who often took him fishing to help him blow off steam during slumps) and the region in general. According to Herzog's incandescent enough memoir-cum-scolding, You're Missin' A Great Game, he advised Clark shortly after the 1987 World Series not to leave town until the two could buttonhole the Cardinals' administration and get the deal done.
Herzog swears Clark agreed to that advice but never acted on it, with the White Rat having little clue why, other than the Cardinals' administration perhaps hammering the "bullheaded son-of-a-gun" as "one dimensional" before getting him signed. According to Helyar, though, Clark and the Cardinals were agreed on the salary and incentive dollar terms but the Cardinals hardballed the first baseman by looking to make a $250,000 loan he was repaying the club part of the new contract.
Jack the Ripper hit the ceiling and asked his agent, Tom Reich, to get him out of St. Louis post haste ("I'll go anywhere," Helyar quotes Clark as saying then). Herzog learned the hard way in December (by picking up the Rocky Mountain News while vacationing in Colorado, he says in his memoir) that he had just lost his only proven power hitter...to the Yankees, whom Reich called almost the second Clark hung up, seemingly.
George Steinbrenner, itching for a 1988 pennant run after a respectable enough 1986 run but a 1987 fadeback, was only too interested in any righthanded power hitter who could clear even Yankee Stadium's formidable-yet left to left center field depths. Steinbrenner told Reich he would not negotiate money explicitly, meaning he would only match the Cardinals' offer to the last penny and detail. That was just fine with Clark himself. But Steinbrenner, conveniently, did not bother reporting his proposal to the Information Bank just yet, while Reich with equal cunning told the Cardinals only that someone else had Clark's ear.
The Cardinals could have applied the rubber hoses and not pried the someone else out of anyone else, seemingly; even the Yankees' then-general manager, Bob Quinn, denied the Bombers were talking to Jack Clark. And, according to Helyar, Quinn was not lying: Steinbrenner had told none of his own people what he was doing with Clark and said nothing to the Information Bank, not until he had Clark signed and sealed. And he had a deal sweetener of his own to blend in. "(He) neglected," Helyar wrote, "to mention something else: a side letter promising a third year on the contract or, if things didn't work out in New York, a trade."
Only then did the Cardinals pounce in a desperation bid to keep their lone power hitting threat; they proposed pushing the $250,000 loan out of the talks entirely and offered to make the deal so good Clark couldn't possibly say no. Except that Clark could only say no by then; his signature on the Steinbrenner bottom line meant New York would soon enough anticipate what sports page wags were already calling "The Clang of the Yankee Ripper."
The clang reverberated even before the Ripper hit his first bomb in the fabled pinstripes. The Yankees tried to pull a Clark on the Angels and hustle Mike Witt out of their uniform, not reporting their actual bid for the pitcher. The Dodgers, it turned out, tried likewise on the Twins over Gary Gaetti. "The Lords," Helyar wrote dryly, "were reverting to form."
By the time leg-lame Kirk Gibson - one of 22 "second-look" free agents declared in the arbitrators' collusion rulings against the owners - smashed Dennis Eckersley's slider into the right field bullpen to win the first game of the 1988 World Series, the Information Bank was as bankrupt as Jack Clark himself would be, shockingly enough, four years later. (Bad investments involving real estate and his automotive passions drove Clark to file for bankruptcy protection while hanging on as a Boston Red Sox designated hitter.)
What does it say, then, that the Information Bank - conceived in a bid to suffocate a reasonably construed job market; exposed only too soon as machinery that could be and was undermined and abused, by the very people who invented the specious enough thing in the first place and would only soon enough return to their usual "stop us before we overspend, misspend, or malspend again" style - may have returned to the table as one of the owners' hopes, if not demands?
"A fight, a big one, lies ahead," says Sports Illustrated, "if the owners are serious in trying to push this." Indeed. Just try to imagine how far the CEO of a failed S&L would get, if he were only thinking about resurrecting his sunken trust.
"We want a way to verify offers made to free agents," say the owners, as SI translates their brief for the so-called Information Bank. "This is the only way we can get a true handle on what the market is so we won't overspend on free agents."
Oh yeah, that sounds believeable. [/sarc]
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