Everything They Had (22 page)

When the world was changing on them in terms of free agency and the owners could have worked out a good deal with the players, they were too full of themselves, and too arrogant to see what the new structure of baseball was going to mean. Later, when they still had a chance to work out some kind of deal, they were too divided among themselves to be strong. Which is where we pick them up today—not that smart, and not that visionary, and not that unified.

The owners went from an age of authoritarian power—the players were in a condition of complete economic servitude—to a new age that demanded nuance, wisdom, economic self-control, and respect for their employees. Not surprisingly, they have been floundering ever since. They have lacked at the very core, vision, a sense of how to measure their pie honestly among themselves, and then how to seek a means of sharing that pie with the players.

What the NFL and NBA have figured out in very different ways is how to balance the interests of the players with the interests of the owners. Baseball owners for a variety of reasons have failed at this. They cannot deal equitably with the players because they have not figured out how to deal equitably with each other.

It's not the Yankees who are ruining baseball—it's other owners who bought in and thought they could run the game to their own specifications, and found, once in the game, that they were wrong, that the old authoritarian era had changed, and that it cost more than they thought to be a member of this particular rich man's club. They don't like the price of poker now that they're in the game. (Remember Wayne Huizenga, one of my all-time favorite owners—he came in, bought a pennant and a World Series championship and then, not liking the balance sheet, completely dismantled his team. Now there's a franchise rich in history for you—a modern dynasty so to speak—one more likely to be studied at Harvard Business School than by baseball historians.)

The truth about George Steinbrenner is that for all his flaws and his bombast, he has become a rather smart owner in recent years, and he has maximized the rules for his own best interest and that of a team in the media capital of the world. He finally has learned about the importance of pitching, he has not traded his young talent away, and he has left a gifted manager alone.

Unlike his counterpart in Texas, Steinbrenner did not spend $252 million on one position player, however talented, without upgrading his pitching staff. And as for the position player in question, he gives us a certain insight into the mentality of the players—maybe he's a great person and a great young man, and certainly everyone seems to like him, but the truth is, facing a very short career like any athlete, he has severely limited his chance to test his real greatness because he has truncated the chance to play at moments of maximum competition when greatness truly matters, in postseason. He left a wonderful team with great fans in a city where he was immensely popular, to play for a team that is at the moment only 19½ games out of first place with almost no prospects for an improved pitching staff and a disillusioned owner who is talking about pulling back from high salaries.

(At the very least what A-Rod has done is to give a warning to any broadcaster who's inclined to say what a great competitor he is—maybe he is, and maybe he isn't but he's voluntarily taken himself out of the highest level of competition for some time.) Maybe A-Rod should be the chief negotiator for the players' union. Mike Hampton, coming off a marvelous year with the Mets two years ago and choosing to go with free agency to Colorado, yes Colorado (I'm not talking about it as a state for the young at heart who love the outdoors, I'm talking about it as a state for baseball pitchers), can be his deputy.

As for Steinbrenner, he's hardly the richest owner in baseball. And he's right when he points out that when they've taxed the more successful owners on behalf of the smaller markets in the past, the smaller-market owners have not been very quick to put that money back into players' salaries.

In the past when there was a strike, my sympathies were fairly clear. I tended to side with the players. So in a way this is more of a warning to Donald Fehr and the players, because I'm never on the side of the owners. But Fehr should know that in this economy and in this country right now, almost no one is on his side. They might not be against him, but they sure as hell are not for him.

This time, like most fans I know, I have a plague-on-both-your-houses attitude. If they strike, I'll do other things. The morning paper will be a little less interesting—like many males of my generation, I read it back to front, starting with the sports page. But the world will go on without baseball. I'll definitely miss it in October. I like the game, and maybe, slowly warily (very warily) I'll come back if they ever see fit to play again. But I've invested a lot in caring about both New York and Boston this year, and I don't like investing my emotions and not getting something back, and being cheated when it finally matters, at playoff time. If they can walk it or shut it down, I can walk it and shut it down, too.

Sure, I've enjoyed watching this season. I've enjoyed watching Pedro Martinez come back from his arm troubles, and Nomar come back from his terrible season, and I've enjoyed watching Alfonso Soriano, with the great elasticity in his muscles, explode into greatness. I've been impressed by the graceful way Giambi has handled a double whammy, a huge contract and move to the center of the New York spotlight and never flinched.

One of my great pleasures has been a surprising one—the simple delight I take in listening to Jim Kaat, as he broadcasts the Yankee games. Quietly with no blather and bombast, he gives what is one of the most enjoyable and thoughtful ongoing seminars on pitching I've ever heard. Jim Kaat, you're right up there for my MVP.

There are, remarkably enough, and hard for all of the people who dominate baseball to believe, other things for us to do in the summer—movies to go to and books to read. Me, I like to fish.

My friend Richard Berlin and I had just spent four marvelous days on the Tabusintac in New Brunswick, fishing for large oceangoing brook trout. The lodge where we stayed was beautiful, the fish were, if not plentiful, certainly abundant and very tenacious, and on the last day there, I had caught a 6-pounder and a 5-pounder, and Berlin, a vastly superior fisherman, had done even better. Those are, by the way, given the species, very nice-sized fish. The truth about fishing is that there are good days and bad days, but even the bad days are almost always good days, and while I have had days when I did not catch a single fish, I have never known the fish to go out on strike.

I sat there in my Manhattan apartment, watching the parade with great pleasure. In some ways, not altogether surprising, Manny Ramirez was the hero of the parade, MVP on a team that did not have an MVP (unless it was that famous and extremely popular and ever-versatile first baseman-DH-left fielder Manny Ortiz). In the parade, Manny was holding up a sign making fun of Derek Jeter, Jeter the golfer, and on this day everyone loved both the holder and the sign. How hard it has been all these years to mock Jeter, the otherwise unmockable. It was the best sign in the parade—and Manny had it. Manny, of course, reflected the season: Manny the unwanted at the beginning, Manny the MVP at the end. Again, that is not so surprising: When I think of him, I think of him as a double-edged Manny, as in Live-by-the-Manny, Die-by-the-Manny.

That was a quality brought home most painfully in the first game of the World Series, when in a space of two innings he got a critical hit, applauded himself so enthusiastically that he did not turn it into a double, and then belatedly tried for second. Only Cardinal fielding even worse than his base running kept him from being thrown out. That in turn was followed by two unforgivable fielding errors in two innings. But he kept getting hits and he kept on being Manny, and his lapses, such as they are, were forgiven; to love Manny is to forgive the unforgivable. In the end we all loved him and his Mannyisms; and he, wonderfully happy on the day of the celebration, was the star of the parade.

Is this the beginning of a great and most unlikely cultural accommodation between player and fan base, the Mannyization of New England, or will it be (a bit less likely) the New Englandization of Manny? Will it last a long time? How deep goes this love affair? Stay tuned.

The great curse of the gods of baseball is gone. With all respect to my great pal Dan Shaughnessy, I never thought it was a curse. Not even a milder hex. A shadow maybe, but not that of the Babe. The shadow of Willie Mays, when the Sox did not sign him back in 1949 when they had first shot at the then-18-year-old Mays because he played in Alabama for the Birmingham Black Barons in the park of the Birmingham (white) Barons, a Sox farm club, and they had been tipped by the (white) Barons owner to Mays's greatness. The Sox' talented regional scout George Digby told me that he was possibly the best player he had ever scouted, but the Red Sox management wanted no part of him.

A shadow like that can last a long time, and the damage it can do is immense, especially at a time when the great new talent bank was first black, and then black and Hispanic.

But I thought it was a good—and on occasion a great—team, a franchise that all too often had an ownership that was never quite as good as it should have been, and as such the team came up just a bit short. The teams were almost always competitive and fun to watch, and those great World Series expeditions are worth pondering: four trips, 1946, 1967, 1975, and 1986, 28 games played, further than that you cannot push it. Teams that are cursed do not go to seven games in October. Teams that are cursed disappear in October.

Everything about them was attractive: the ballpark with its sense of living history; the deeply knowledgeable fans, singularly loyal if a bit wary; the sportswriters, who were, for a long time, possibly the best in the country. Thus there might be a shortfall in pitching, but there would never be a shortfall in critics. And, of course, the harsh winter, so much time to talk about so little else. All these things mean that they matter.

In the past, the ownership tended to come up just a bit short, usually in pitching. In 1949, in that extraordinary pennant race that went down to the last game of the season, it was Raschi, Reynolds, and Lopat for New York, soon to be joined by Whitey Ford (and with, of course, Joe Page, the rare great reliever of that era), against Parnell and Kinder. That has been true right up to this season, when it has become ever clearer that George Steinbrenner, his team less and less a product of his farm system, has involuntarily come up with a new philosophy of putting together a pitching staff: Buy old, and buy high. In recent years the teams have been almost exactly even, with the Yankees commanding a slight edge in starting pitching and having the one player who was critical to the franchise's success, Mariano Rivera.

The new Red Sox ownership seems to be the smartest the city has ever had: John Henry may not be from New England, but he strikes me as someone who is acutely aware that in baseball terms he owns one of the jewels in the crown, and that though it is a private company, the Red Sox are, in all real ways, public property, that his accountability, in this case an almost mystical thing, is to something larger than baseball, to an institution that, as much as anything, encompasses an entire region and, more than anything, binds it together.

As such, the owners responded to last year's shortfall in precisely the ways that their predecessors rarely did. They added a desperately needed starter in Curt Schilling; they junked the bizarre closer-by-committee and got Keith Foulke as their closer. They were in a difficult position on the Nomar front, but they handled a complex and painful situation with considerable skill.

And so it happened. They finally won. And they won in a marvelous way: Three down to the Yankees, they then went on to win eight in a row against two of the best teams in baseball. It was like putting an exclamation point at the end of the last sentence about the season. And that brings us to the final, haunting question. Will success spoil Red Sox Nation? Will the magic be gone? Was the real bond a sure sense of eventual failure?

I don't think so. As someone who has traveled the country and has heard a great many confessions from fans all over the map, stories of love and disappointment, but above all stories of faith, I think it is important that there are two quite separate parts of Red Sox Nation: There are the Category One, faith-based people, the homegrown fans, the children of New England, the most rooted of fans, no matter where they live today, whose loyalties go back generations—weaned on stories of the young Ted and the aging Jimmie Foxx and Lefty Grove (fans for whom Yaz, at 65, remains something of a newcomer); and there are the Category Two fans, the people out there who root for the Red Sox because they are the main obstacle to the success of the dreaded Yankees. I should point out that on occasion Category Two fans become Category One fans, but the process is by no means automatic.

I have no doubt of the durability of the Category One fans. That's because it's in the DNA, much, much deeper than with most fan bases, built on the resonance of the game in the region and an unusual living connection to the past, on memories passed on lovingly, generation to generation. I never thought these fans rooted to be disappointed. Instead, they rooted in a very personal way, as if by proxy for those who had gone before them in their own families, and who had always been disappointed. Theirs was a special connection, one of enduring love mixed with a profound foreboding.