Feb. 16, 1915—Connie Mack, forced to rebuild his artfully constructed dynasty, further dismayed
fans of The Philadelphia Athletics by announcing at the team’s annual banquet that Frank “Home Run” Baker (pictured) would be retiring. What really
had happened, though, was that the slugging third baseman, still at the height
of his ability but unable to renegotiate a contract he had signed the year
before, had simply refused to show up at the team’s spring-training camp in
Jacksonville, Fla.
The fallout from this clash of wills in one of
baseball’s first labor-management disputes was immediate and unfortunate for
both parties. Baker, a smooth-fielding, .321 career hitter at the time, never
reached the heights he had achieved earlier. Mack, with nobody promising or
even particularly adequate to replace his star infielder, saw his team--World Series champs three of the last four years-- stumble
through a 43-109 campaign—not only 58.5 games out of first place, but an
appalling 56 games off their pennant-winning
pace of the year before.
I’m writing this particular post because of a
conjunction of events and longstanding interests of mine. I have long wanted to
post something about Mack, a genteel figure who bestrode several generations of
baseball history. Then, the curious case of Alex Rodriguez (see this post of mine from the other day)
made newly relevant the question of whether a star third baseman, after being
forced to sit out an entire season, could ever return to anything like his old
form.
At the time of this contract dispute, two forces—one
restraining player freedom of movement, the other loosening it—were in direct
opposition to each other, in a way they would not be again until the 1970s, when the free-agent system came into being.
The reserve clause, started in 1879, went far beyond the standard one-year contracts
signed between player and team. In essence, a player was bound, in perpetuity,
to a team, which was free to play him or trade him wherever it wanted, with no
input by him into the matter. In their desire to control payroll costs, owners
not only were circumscribing players’ ability to choose the employer of their
choice—a restriction that no other industry exercised at the time—but dooming
many long-suffering fans to long-term mediocrity, or worse.
In response, all that players could do was employ a
weapon of mutually assured destruction: the holdout. But by 1914, the Federal
League had formed, creating a third major league—and another option for players
seeking more money. Its specter haunted the American and National Leagues,
including the A’s, two of whose players, Eddie Plank and Chief Bender, jumped
to the new circuit.
This new force caught Mack in a financial vise. A
quarter-century before, as a 28-year-old catcher, he had been among those
players opposing the National League’s salary cap and reserve clause. But now,
as a part-owner of the A’s, he had become far more cognizant—and self-interested—about
the other side of the financial ledger.
Even despite winning the pennant for the fourth year
in a row, the A’s were only fifth in the American League in attendance. The
fans had become spoiled by having a dynasty, Mack figured (though the impact of
a 23-month national recession also couldn’t be discounted). Moreover, a giant
scoreboard across from City Hall, put up by The
Philadelphia Record, was enabling fans to catch the action for free outside
the stadium. Now his players were clamoring for more pay. What should he do?
The course that Mack chose will be familiar to teams
today in secondary markets: bite the bullet, economize and rely on the same eye
for talent that had built one championship contender to create another.
That meant trading second baseman Eddie Collins,
threatening to bolt to the Federal League, to the Chicago White Sox, and
releasing Jack Coombs—who, though a World Series hero just three years before,
was now 32 years old and coming off two straight seasons of illness and injury.
But Mack still had three-quarters of his infield left and, with an older but
cheaper Nap Lajoie, an all-time great who would adequately replace Collins.
At this point, he heard noise coming from Baker’s
Maryland farm—and it wasn’t from the livestock.
While Baker didn’t mind Lajoie making $9,000 per
year, he couldn’t help comparing the older man’s situation with his own: a
40-year-old on the downside of his career, vs. a 28-year-old just hitting his
prime—but only making $6,666 per year.
Baker wanted his salary upgraded—but it covered three
years rather than one. Mack was not ready to renegotiate. Still, at the banquet
where he made the announcement, the manager sought to spin the situation: “He’s
just sick of traveling and he wants to settle down for good on his Maryland
farm. His wife has been at him for years to quit and it has been a tussle to
make him sign each season…The boy isn’t dissatisfied. He doesn’t want more
money, and he isn’t flighty.”
Of course, “more money” was exactly what Baker
wanted. He was certainly willing to give Mack a hometown discount off what other
teams might offer, but he did want to see an improvement.
But, for all his courtliness (he would never
embarrass anyone before the press or even teammates), Mack had limited sympathy
for the players’ point of view. Forced into a Dickensian job cutting soles in a
shoe factory during his teen years, he, like many Irish-Americans of the
Victorian Era, regarded baseball as a ladder out of poverty. Ballplayers should
regard the game as a privilege, not a business.
The wound that Mack felt from Baker was personal, as
well: the manager had believed in the raw young ballplayer when others did not.
Bow-legged and awkward-looking in the field, Baker had convinced other
experienced baseball hands that he would never make it. But Mack sensed that
part of the reason behind the player’s ungainly lunges and off-balance throws
lay in hyper-aggressive defense. Mack stuck with his gut. Baker might make more
errors than others at his position, but, covering far more ground, he also had
many more chances and outs at the hot corner.
For the first several years he was under contract,
Baker rewarded Mack’s patience by becoming the best third baseman of his age.
His defense, fine baserunning, and excellent batting average would, by
themselves, have made Baker a cornerstone of Mack’s “$100,000 infield.” (The
other members were first baseman Stuffy McInnis, future Hall of Famer Collins, and
shortstop Jack Barry.)
But his power, especially in clutch situations, is
what propelled Baker into legendary status. It is jaw-dropping nowadays to
think that it took only 11 homers for Baker to lead the league in this category
in 1911. But he led the league in homers for four straight years—and belted round-trippers off the majestic (and
previously untouchable) Christy Mathewson in the World Series. A 46-ounce bat
only added to the mystique created by the Boys in the Press Box of “Home Baker”
Baker.
Fundamentally modest, even shy around strangers,
Baker still knew what he was worth, and dug in his heels against Mack. Players
wrote to him but received no answer back. A month passed, then Opening Day
arrived.
At this point, Baker showed up—but not to play.
Would Mack mind if he opted out of his contract and played semipro ball, he asked? Not at
all, Mack said, so long as he played nowhere near Philly.
And that is how things went for the rest of the
year. Baker didn’t get much beyond his farm on the semipro circuit, playing
only Saturday and holiday games. Mack tried 14 different players at third base
for the A’s in 1915, with very little luck. Wally Schang, the team’s catcher in 1914, who had never played third base before, got the most work,
playing 43 games and making 18 errors, with Larry Kopf not far behind at 42
games. As the team’s misfortunes worsened, so did Mack’s mood, to the point
where the normally mild-mannered skipper announced that he didn’t want to hear
Baker’s name mentioned from then on.
With his holdout for the year over, Baker sat down with
his lawyer and Mack after the 1915 season in the brewery office of New York
Yankees owner Jake Ruppert and signed a three-year, $36,000 agreement. It was a
healthy raise from what he was making with Mack, but his best batting average
for a season, .306 in 1918, was still off his career pace with the A’s. Moreover, he was forced to sit out yet another
season (1920), this time because the death of his wife from scarlet fever left
him with the responsibility of his two young girls. The one consolation was that in his final two seasons, he made it back to the World Series, on the shoulders of a power hitter more prodigious than he or anyone could have imagined: Yankee teammate Babe Ruth.
Bill James, in his New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract, took due note of the impact of Baker’s two lost
seasons: “It is certainly possible, and I might even argue that it is likely,
that had he not done this [i.e., sat out two seasons], he would rank still
today as the greatest third baseman of all time.” Even so, Baker ranks number 5
on the baseball stat maven’s list of all-time great third basemen, behind Mike
Schmidt, George Brett, Eddie Mathews and Wade Boggs. (He would go on to be elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1955.)
The one player missing among these third basemen is
Alex Rodriguez, who at the time of the book’s publication (2001) was still a
shortstop. Now, the question becomes whether A-Rod, like Baker, is fated to
experience a decline after a year’s layoff.
The answer, I think, is simple: The Yankee third
baseman had already been mired in a decline for several years before his
season-long suspension. The real question now is how quickly the end comes for
him. He could, like Jason Giambi, stick out several more seasons with radically reduced productivity, simply for love of the game. Or--my guess--some combination of injuries and dismay over fan resentment might drive him out sooner.
Of course, there are second acts in baseball, and few
perhaps as lustrous as Mack’s. More than a decade after he had dismantled one
dynasty, he had put together another, featuring more Hall of Famers like Baker and Collins: first baseman
Jimmie Foxx (discovered by Baker), leftfielder Al Simmons, catcher Mickey
Cochrane, and starting pitcher Lefty Grove. A 1996 Sports Illustrated cover story posited that the 1929 squad, not the
1927 Yankees “Murderers’ Row,” was the best baseball squad of all time.
Again, though, Mack decided that the combination of
escalating player salary demands and straitened economic circumstances required
him to tear apart his dynasty. This time, there would be no comeback for the
team. The Great Depression devastated attendance for the A’s far more—and for
far longer—than the 1913-14 one recession had, and, unlike competitors such as
the New York Yankees and the Brooklyn Dodgers, Mack was slow to recognize the
value of investing in a minor-league system. The A's became perennial cellar-dwellers.
When Mack retired, after half a century as a manager
and seven decades in pro baseball, following the 1950 season, “The Tall Tactician”
was celebrated as the Grand Old Man of the national pastime—an unusual figure who dressed
not in a uniform but in a business suit featuring a high starch collar, and who
made field adjustments with a wave of his scorecard. But he stayed too long at
the fair, not only unable to arrest his team’s long-term decline but having
left no clear figure to succeed him. By mid-decade, the A’s had left Philly for
Kansas City, then onto Oakland.
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