By Edward Thoma
Free Press Staff Writer
MANKATO —
George M. Steinbrenner III joined the exclusive club of major league owners in 1973.
That’s so long ago the reserve clause was still in effect. There are generations of baseball fans who don’t remember the game before free agency, who don’t remember baseball when a player was bound to his team as long as the team wanted him bound.
There were a lot of people involved in tearing the shackles off the players in the 1970s: Marvin Miller, Curt Flood, Andy Messersmith, Dave McNally, Peter Seitz ...
And George Steinbrenner, who died last week at the age of 80.
Steinbrenner wasn’t actively on the side of the union in that dispute. He probably thought he was on the side of management.
But he declined to be a party to any gentlemen’s agreement on free agent players.
When Catfish Hunter was declared a free agent after the 1974 season (Charles O. Finley, then the owner of the Oakland A’s, failed to make a deferred payment on time), Steinbrenner offered a contract totaling $3.75 million.
That’s unimpressive by today’s standards, but it opened a lot of eyes in the mid ’70s. When labor arbitrator Seitz ruled the following winter that the reserve clause was only good for one year, the Hunter deal meant two things:
1) Players’ salaries were artificially low;
2) At least one owner was willing to raise those salaries to sign star players.
If one team would do it, others would follow. And they did, with Steinbrenner leading the way.
In a sense, he was only doing — in a different way and under different rules — what the Yankees had done for most of the previous half-century: Using their superior financial power to maximize the talent on the team.
The Yankee dynasties of the 1920s, ’30s, ’40s, ’50s and early ’60s were built primarily on their ability to sign young players on the open market and buttressed with the ability to buy proven talent from cash-strapped operations.
It ran aground first because an earlier ownership group cut back on scouting and development (saving money to make the balance sheet look better before selling the team to CBS), and then because the amateur draft, which took effect in the mid-60s, removed competition for unsigned talent.
Viewed in that light, the seven World Series the Yankees won in 37 years under Steinbrenner’s ownership isn’t so impressive.
After all, previous Yankees owners won 20 World Series in 39 seasons (1923-1962).
Steinbrenner spent a lot more money to win less often. He wasn’t as efficient at using his team’s inherent market advantages as his predecessors.
He did make a lot of players rich. That is probably the real reason so many of them this week called him the greatest owner ever.
Edward Thoma is a Free Press staff writer. He is at 344-6377 or at ethoma@mankatofreepress.com. He also has a baseball blog at www.mankatofreepress.com.
