Floodlights and Touchlines by Rob Steen

Author:Rob Steen [Steen, Rob]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781408181379
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Collusion

A scarcely credible ruse that ultimately and justly netted the players a far from insubstantial fortune in back pay, the appalling saga over collusion stemmed from the baseball owners’ collective refusal to sign any free agents between 1985 and 1987. The aim, no doubt, was to give the uppity players’ union, and Miller especially, a bloody nose; in effect, argued Miller, what the owners actually did was refuse to strengthen their teams, thereby agreeing, in effect, to pre-determine the destiny of the season’s spoils. A fix by any other name.

This so disgusted Andre Dawson, a star outfielder with the Montreal Expos whose knee problems had made him desperate to leave the Stade Olympique’s unyielding artifical turf, that he told the Chicago Cubs he would play for them in 1987 for whatever they fancied paying: he accepted a one-year salary of $500,000, less than a third of what he would otherwise have been worth as a free agent. Livid, the players’ union filed a formal grievance in February 1986, then again in February 1987 and again in January 1988.

Thomas Roberts, the original arbitrator, and George Nicolau, his successor, pored over the mass of evidence culled from 71 days of hearings. As a precedent, the players were reliant on the 1977 Collective Bargaining Agreement, in which they had agreed not to work together to put pressure on an owner, thus averting a repeat of the joint-walkout before the 1966 season by Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale, the celebrated Los Angeles Dodgers pitchers; in return, the owners had agreed not to collude among themselves. Roberts and Nicolau both found for the players. When the case was finally settled in 1987, the owners paid a suitably dear price: $280m.

The issue resurfaced after both the 2002 and 2003 seasons, when, according to the authoritative website baseball-reference.com, players alleged that there were “improprieties in the negotiation of certain free agent contracts that pointed to collusion among owners”.72 In 2006, the owners agreed to make a lump-sum payment of $12m, drawn from luxury-tax funds, to settle dozens of claims and pending grievances. Nothing came of subsequent allegations but the damage had been done. In a lengthy examination of collusion in The Wayne Law Review, published in 2008, Marc Edelman quoted Fay Vincent, the former MLB commissioner: “The effects from collusion so thoroughly polluted the whole relationship between the union and the owners that the impact is still being felt.” Vincent made especial mention of his successor, Bud Selig, and Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of the Chicago White Sox, “two ringleaders of collusion”, for being “adamant in saying [baseball] owners need to violate the [Collective Bargaining Agreement] and take away from players what they had fairly bargained to have”.73

Not that collusion was remotely new. As Miller claimed in his trenchant autobiography, A Whole New Ball Game, a book as important as any ever written about the competitive arts, it had long been “an everyday part of baseball”. Witness salaries, he suggested. “There had been an unwritten rule for years

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