Lords of the Realm:
The Real History of Baseball
By John Helyar
Villard, 576 pages, $24
The “great men” theory of history may be out of fashion these days, but not for the history of baseball, as business reporter John Helyar shows in “Lords of the Realm: The Real History of Baseball.” Ever since the first professional leagues were organized, well over a century ago, the course of major league baseball has been set by a number of uncommonly headstrong men whose deeds truly have made a difference.
The problem is that there are no Abraham Lincolns or Martin Luther Kings among the men of baseball ownership. However forceful they may be, Helyar argues, too often they expend their energies on self-defeating projects. As for their attitudes, what the public knows about the likes of George Steinbrenner and honorary great male Marge Schott is just the tip of the iceberg.
How bad is it? Helyar takes us to Kohler, Wis., last August for what was billed as the most important owners’ meeting since Charles Comiskey led a delegation to hire Judge Landis. It was at the Kohler meeting that baseball might well have taken a quantum leap toward revenue sharing, arguably the era’s most pressing issue-and progress was being made. But, Helyar reports, acting comissioner Bud Selig “had been too cheap to book the American Club hotel a third night. The owners would have to clear out regardless of where the talks stood.” Thus a potential 11th-hour agreement wound up as an agreement to do nothing.
Whether old patricians or self-made mavericks, the lords of baseball certainly have earned that label. Sometimes their behavior is hilarious, sometimes it’s disgusting, but it certainly gives Helyar what he needs to tell a good story.
During baseball’s early days, self-styled “sportsmen” owned many of the clubs, just as they owned stables of racehorses. But these old aristocrats themselves could be herded, or even ridden, as was proved by a leader of a later generation, Walter O’Malley. The shrewd operator who moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles, O’Malley worked every angle “when most of his peers just played with their team as a hobby.”
O’Malley made baseball more businesslike but at the expense of attracting the wrong kind of businessman-George Steinbrenner, for example. Finally, in the new-money 1980s, an entirely new class of ownership asserted itself-entrepeneurs who were “used to hands-on action” but were woefully ignorant of how the business of baseball should be conducted.
Over the years ownership made blunder after blunder. O’Malley, for example, was able to snooker Phil Wrigley out of his territorial rights to Los Angeles (Wrigley owned the Los Angeles triple-A team) by playing on Wrigley’s anger at the Los Angeles County Board of Supervisors, who had asked the state to buy Catalina Island, which Wrigley also owned, and turn it into a park.
Enraged at players’ attempts to organize a union, Gussie Busch of St. Louis in turn enraged his players (and Curt Flood in particular) with his steel-gloved paternalism and wound up helping the cause of unionism far more than he could have hoped to hurt it. (It was Flood, of course, who would file the lawsuit that challenged baseball’s reserve system, which tied players to the teams that had signed them.)
If there is a success story in “Lords of the Realm,” it is that of the Players Association. But much of the association’s good fortune can be traced to ownership’s undying commitment to shooting itself in the foot.
First the owners tried to stonewall the association. Then they hired the wrong kind of lawyers-reactive, legalistic types rather than pro-active labor lawyers who might have been able to form a strategy. When good legal minds finally were brought on board, their advice was not taken and their efforts were often sabotaged by internal squabbling.
The story of these ongoing disasters reads more like a slapstick comedy than bitter farce. And that makes sense, because baseball is a pastime, not the type of business that, when conducted improperly, causes markets to collapse and millions to be put out of work. For that, one must look back to Helyar’s account of the attempted takeover of R.J. Reynolds, “Barbarians at the Gate.”
Unless you’re a ballplayer you can laugh at Ted Turner’s idea for settling the players’ strike, which was to “do what God did: put two of ’em in a boat and drown the rest.” It’s also amusing to learn that the man in charge of the Texas Rangers isn’t George Bush, the former president’s son, but “a Dallas sharpie who’d made a fortune short-selling stock.” (Does Bush know he really doesn’t run the team? a reporter asks a Rangers official. “No,” is the reply, “and don’t you dare tell him.”)
And how nice it is to see the statements about baseball of late commissioner A. Bartlett Giammati correctly assessed as “densely romantic”-not only because Giammati could hold forth in print “on the Homeric roots of home plate” but also because he was committed to seeing ballplayers as “noble savages” performing “a valuable social rite” rather than as “professional entertainers and members of a bargaining unit.”
Indeed, if there’s an outright bad guy in Helyar’s bunch, it would be baseball’s commissioner. Not one of them or all of them, but rather the type of person serving in such a role. Though each commissioner made claims that he was independent, each has been in his own way a creature of the owners who hired him-a walking, talking contradiction who, in the long run, often tends to realize the worst of all possibilities.
As Helyar tells it, Fay Vincent was the most unconscionable comissioner of all. For example, during his attempt to permanently ban pitcher Steve Howe for his seventh drug-related offense, Vincent virtually ordered Yankee executive Jack Lawn to contradict his testimony that lifetime suspensions for drug use weren’t always appropriate.
“I only testified in accordance with my conscience and principles,” said Lawn to Vincent, who replied: “You should have left your conscience and principles outside the room.”
Without painting a rosy picture of White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, who led the coup against the commissioner, Helyar makes it painfully clear why Vincent had to go.
Yet baseball goes on and miraculously thrives. Helyar guesses that it’s because the game itself is so central to our national myth. Maybe having fools in charge at the top is a vital part of the myth as well.
