With the baseball season right around the corner and the Dodgers recently coming to a record contract agreement with a reigning Cy Young winner, this is a great time to look back on the efforts Sandy Koufax (Judaism in Big Lebowski Walter’s estimation encompases “3,000 years of beautiful tradition from Moses to Sandy Koufax”) underwent in an attempt to get a pay raise at the peak of his powers. This essay will not attempt to argue that the current financial structures in Major League Baseball and Minor League Baseball are good, equitable or even moral. They are, however, significantly better for players than they were 55 years ago.
Following the 1965 season, Sandy Koufax was unquestionably at the top of the proverbial mountain. And I’m not just talking about that infamous early-60’s mound at Dodgers Stadium. Koufax was fresh off his second Cy Young Award winning campaign in three seasons. Extra impressive when you consider that only one such award for top moundsman covered both leagues’ hurlers at this time. Using the statistical lens of the day, Koufax was coming off a three year stretch where he won 25, 19 and 26 games (twice leading the league). He also had led the league in strikeouts in three of the previous five seasons. His 1965 total of 382 strikeouts broke Rube Waddell’s modern Major League single season record. That figure is currently the second highest single season punchout total behind only Nolan Ryan’s 1973 figure of 383. Koufax also had a legendary 1965 World Series performance in which he threw two complete game shutouts and had 0.38 ERA with 29 punchouts against five walks in 24 innings. All this after legendarily refusing to pitch game one due to a conflict with Yom Kippur. Koufax was unquestionably the top pitcher in the league, a hero cresting at a peak arguably higher than any hurler this side of Old Hoss Radbourn.
Enter our villain: Buzzie Bavasi. In fairness, a holistic, modern reading of Bavasi’s life includes many stories in which he wears the white hat. Bavasi caught collegiately at Division 3 DePauw University, where he roomed with and was a close friend of Fred Frick, the son of National League President and future Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick. Bavasi also won a Bronze Star for rescuing a soldier from the battlefield as part of his duties as a machine gunner in Italy during WW2. Following a brief minor league career, he got a job in the Brooklyn Dodgers front office. There, under the leadership of Branch Rickey, he smoothed the path to the majors for the likes of Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella and Don Newcome. As manager of the Nashua, New Hampshire affiliate, Bavasi responded to an opposing manager’s racial slurs by challenging him to a fight. Bavasi was a moral, principled and complicated man of his time. While racially and socially progressive, he also lamented changes within the game, particularly economic ones. His decency and humanity are obviously more important to the overall story of baseball and America, but for this story he will appear regressive and obstructionist. An embodiment of the economic realities of the time. I’m sorry to Buzzie and all his fanciers.
To provide fuller historical context, the MLB Player’s Association was conceived in 1953, yet the first Collective Bargaining Agreement was not signed until February of 1968. Players did not win access to free agency until 1975. This means that Koufax narrowly missed out on the benefits of an economic landscape shaped by Marvin Miller (who assumed the Executive Director of the MLBPA position in July 1966). Marvin Miller is the hero of many stories. He fought with hero Curt Flood, ended the reserve clause and created the type of free agency that subsequent generations of ballplayers richly benefited from. However, in the early months of 1966 when Koufax was negotiating his raise, none of those mechanisms were in place. Koufax played a role in the economic progress that he unfortunately did not get to benefit from. But we are getting ahead of ourselves.
Heading into the 1966 season, Koufax decided to negotiate in partnership with star teammate Don Drysdale. They went into their negotiation with General Manager Bavasi with several revolutionary techniques that are now so commonplace to not even warrant mentioning in modern player contract discussions. First, they negotiated together. Miller spent most of the 1966 Spring Training unofficially galvanizing the players to the idea of a union, as the idea of negotiating collectively was far from en vogue. Koufax and Drysdale, however, astutely recognized that they had far more leverage together than individually.
Next, the players demanded representation by an agent in their negotiations (Sandy’s lawyer was Bill Hayes). Bavasi was roundly opposed to the idea of agents. In a 1967 piece for Sports Illustrated written by Buzzie himself, he noted that agents would “bring awful pain to General Managers for years to come, because every salary negotiation with every humpty-dumpty fourth-string catcher is going to run into months of dickering.”
And the last revolutionary demand was for a three-year, guaranteed, no-cut contract for both future Hall of Famers. Again, Bavasi found this notion ludicrous. Quoting from the SI piece again, Bavasi noted that as athletes they sell their “physical ability, and how can you guarantee your physical ability three years in advance?” Adding that “not even Cassius Clay could make a guarantee like that.” The multi-year contract was easy to dismiss by ownership at the time who were buttressed by the abhorrent reserve clause. This leads to a wormhole worth exploring to appreciate the brilliance of Marvin Miller in battling unjust capital on behalf of labor. In short, MLB teams owned players in perpetuity through a series of one-year contracts. There was no free agency or anything resembling a free market for players to maximize their value. Wage suppression that would offend such disparate thinkers as Karl Marx (“The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” from The Communist Manifesto) and Adam Smith (“No society can surely be flourishing and happy, of which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable” from The Wealth of Nations that developed the concepts critical to a free market).
Koufax and Drysdale were critical to the Dodgers success, with Bavasi even acknowledging “without them we would be in real trouble.” These top pitchers with as much performance-related leverage as anyone could possess requested a joint sum of one million dollars for the three-year contract. That would be a little over eight million dollars in 2021 dollars. Total! For two, in-their-prime, future Hall of Famers! For three years! Over an order of magnitude below what anyone of that ilk would even entertain today!
Initially, discussions were not going well. Bavasi was typically a genial, self-deprecating General Manager, once claiming “running a ball club is 10% skill, 40% having the right men working for you and 50% dumb luck.” He recognized the pickle that these negotiations were turning into. Bavasi knew that neither a multi-year structure nor the per-year figures the stars asked for would get approved by owner Walter O’Malley. O’Malley might well be the real villain of this story, albeit in an evasive, behind-the-curtain, indirect way.
Knowing that the Dodgers (via MLB writ large) had a Supreme Court exemption from antitrust laws, the reserve clause and fan-support (a hopefully antiquated characteristic of all similar financial stories involving professional athletes), Koufax and Drysdale felt pressure to generate leverage themselves. The duo decided to lean on their dashing, leading-man good looks by publicly agreeing to act in an upcoming major Hollywood movie. They even had support from former major leaguer turned cowboy-actor Chuck Connors, who said, “They’ll be sensational.” Leverage of this kind seems absurd for a modern athlete to pursue, but for a Van Nuys High School classmate and teammate of Robert Redford as Drysdale was, this seemed a natural fit. A career on the big screen reduced the opportunity cost of not resigning with the Dodgers.
Spring Training started without Koufax and Drysdale. How much leverage their movie making threat generated is hard to quantify. But as the season approached, Bavasi felt the urgency to re-sign his two future Hall of Famers. A deal was ultimately reached at Nicola’s, an Italian restaurant near the ballpark with Drysdale negotiating for the duo. Bavasi still felt defeated, colorfully noting his “blood-stained cashbox.” While dismissive of the multi-year contract and use of an agent, Bavasi was impressed with the collective bargaining tactic. Bavasi noted that “Donald got a $30,000 raise {$110,000 total} and Sandy got a $40,000 raise {$125,000 total} and neither would have commanded that much money negotiating alone.” That said, the players signed for less than a quarter of their original, all-in asking price. There were no guarantees beyond the 1966 season. Their contracts worked out to approximately one million dollars each in today’s dollars. By modern accounting, this is an offensive, miserly sum for the services of a pitcher of either peak Koufax’s or Drysdale’s caliber. Not to mention they used revolutionary techniques that soon became industry standard.
Koufax and Drysdale deserve praise for the risks they took to balance the scales of labor against capital. Much thanks are owed to these men among many others (chiefly Marvin Miller, Curt Flood, Andy Messersmith, Dave McNally) for accepting risks required to move the economics of the game forward. This is not to say that we have reached any kind of equitable balance. The economic hurdles faced by players, especially amateur, foreign and minor league players, are real and those stories need their own heroes. Sandy Koufax, armed with the left arm of God and a more than qualified side-kick at their individual physical apexes with promising alternative careers on the silver screen awaiting whilst using creative, forward-thinking strategies was stymied by salary anchors that would only budge so far. The fact that the current economics of baseball are as pro-player/labor as ever is only by comparison to the appalling low baseline of the not so distant past.
Essays by Cameron 