A Curt Flood Award? The first should go to Andy Messersmith

[EasyAce]

The pitcher who finished what Flood began deserves to be remembered, too.
By Yours Truly
https://throneberryfields.com/2020/10/19/a-curt-flood-award-the-first-should-go-to-andy-messersmith/


“Curt Flood stood up for us. [Catfish] Hunter showed
what was out there. Andy showed us the way.”
—Hall of Fame catcher Ted Simmons.

My first notice came when I saw San Francisco Chronicle writer Susan Slusser’s

praise: “How wonderful! The [Major League Baseball Players Association] is instituting a Curt Flood Award for the Oakland native whose efforts helped bring about free agency and allow players to, eventually, be paid their worth on the open market. It will be handed out for the first time Thursday.”

I know who should receive the first Curt Flood Award, and I hope to God the Players Association thinks likewise. The first Flood Award ought to go to Andy Messersmith.

Flood’s Christmas Eve 1969 letter to then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn was the Second Shot Heard ‘Round the World. “After twelve years in the Major Leagues,” he began, “I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes.” Flood fired his gun from the same city in which a certain former slave proclaimed that living now on free soil made him thus a free man.

Small wonder that George F. Will would nickname Flood Dred Scott in Spikes. “[Scott] was not the last time,” Will wrote in 1993, “that the Supreme Court would blunder when asked when a man can be treated like someone’s property . . . Six years later—too late to benefit him—[Flood’s] cause prevailed. The national pastime is clearly better because of that. But more important, so is the nation, because it has learned one more lesson about the foolishness of fearing freedom.”

Flood’s was the groundbreaker that didn’t quite make it. But the graceful center fielder kicked a door open just wide enough for further pressure. Catfish Hunter kicked it a little further open in 1974, after Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley reneged on a contracted-for insurance payment to the Hall of Fame pitcher and Hunter was thus awarded his free agency.

The Hunter case didn’t challenge the reserve clause itself. The bidding war to follow for his services was won by the team who actually offered him the third-highest dollar-worth amount among the suitors but the division of the dollars Hunter wanted most, including an annuity to guarantee his children’s education. But it shone a light his fellow players had only suspected might reveal platinum on a fair, open job market.

The official name of the case to come would be John A. Messersmith vs. Los Angeles Dodgers. (Messersmith preferred to be known as Andy, though his middle name was actually Alexander.) The official net result of his almost unexpected 1975 challenge was to finish what Flood began. Almost unexpected?

Messersmith first emerged as a California Angels comer with a bristling fastball, a deadly changeup, a 2.77 ERA, a 3.04 fielding-independent pitching rate, and an upbeat personality that didn’t mind crossing the line to periodic flakiness. The Angels traded him to the Los Angeles Dodgers in November 1972, in a multi-player swap that made a somewhat temporary Angel out of Hall of Famer Frank Robinson.

He was just as good and stubborn on the mound with the Dodgers, finishing fifth in the 1973 National League ERA race (2.70), then becoming one of the league’s two 20-game winners with a 2.59 ERA in 1974 for a pennant-winning Dodgers aggregation. He also finished second to his relief pitching teammate Mike Marshall in the Cy Young Award voting.

“He’s one of the best competitors I’ve ever managed,” said his manager, Walter Alston, before that World Series. “He can do it all. He can pitch, field his position, has a good move to first . . . Andy is the kind of guy who wants the baseball. He wants to pitch and that’s why I put him up there with the other great pitchers I’ve had the good fortune to manage.”

Andy was also the kind of guy who proved to be just as stubborn talking contract as getting hitters out. He reported unsigned to spring training 1975, the original issue being not whether he’d get a well-earned raise from the $100,000 he earned in 1974 but how much of a raise. Then, according to Wall Street Journal writer John Helyar in The Lords of The Realm: The Real History of Baseball, the Dodgers’ then-general manager, Al Campanis, screwed the proverbial pooch:

As they sat in [Campanis’s] Vero Beach office . . . Campanis infuriated the pitcher. Quite apart from how well the pitcher had performed, quite apart from how much the Dodgers could allegedly afford, he injected a deeply “personal issue.” (Even eighteen years later, the matter cut so deep with Messersmith he wouldn’t elaborate on it.”)

Two things happened. One, Messersmith severed talks with the GM. “This is way out of the boundaries of negotiations; this is something else,” he told Campanis. “I’m not going to deal with you anymore.” He insisted on shifting the talks to Peter O’Malley, the club’s president. The other thing to emerge was a new non-monetary demand. No way, Messersmith decided, would he let Al Campanis be in a position to dictate his career. He’d already had to change teams once when he crossed his first GM, the Angels’ Dick Walsh. Now he wanted a no-trade clause in his contract. “I’m going to have some control of my destiny,” declared Messersmith.

O’Malley was more to Messersmith’s taste but no more amenable to a no-trade clause. “We’ve never given one,” he said, “and we aren’t going to start now.”

So Messersmith refused to sign a new contract and pitched 1975 without one. “At the start,” he’d say later, “it was all personal. Al Campanis had stirred my anger, and it became a pride issue. When I get stubborn, I get very stubborn.” The National League’s hitters got a not-so-friendly reminder. Messersmith led the league with forty starts and seven shutouts, and finished second with his 2.29 ERA, and the hitters only hit .213 against him.

“Every time he took the ball,” Hall of Fame catcher Ted Simmons said, “everybody in management wanted him to fail and everybody from the players wanted him to succeed. He was doing it for us all.”

By August, however, Messersmith found himself pitching for something above and beyond the need to stuff Al Campanis. The union’s original executive director, Marvin Miller, called him. By that time baseball had only one unsigned player on active duty—Messersmith himself. Miller wanted to know if Messersmith would consider filing a grievance seeking free agency if he finished the season unsigned.

The Dodgers didn’t make it simple for him. Neither did the near-constant questions from sportswriters Helyar summed up as, “So how ’bout that contract, Andy?” They kept hiking the money the longer and the better Messersmith pitched. Come September, Helyar noted, the offer was three years and $540,000 total. But the offer still excluded the no-trade clause that was Messersmith’s most unbreakable demand.

“We had no intention of trading Andy Messersmith,” O’Malley insisted. “He was a quality individual, a quality performer, and a delight to have on the team.” Messersmith took one look at Campanis still in the front office and decided there was no dollar amount able to buy him off.

“When Peter came up with the dough, I was adamant,” Helyar quoted Messersmith remembering. “The money was incredible, but they wouldn’t bring the no-trade to the table. I’d gotten stimulated by Marvin and [union general counsel] Dick [Moss]. Now I understood the significance of what this was all about. I was tired of players having no power and no rights.”

Miller’s only concurrent worry was whether the incredible money would back Messersmith off the grievance track. The union director thus enlisted pitcher Dave McNally, technically unsigned but contemplating retirement following persistent arm soreness. McNally agreed join a grievance. Messersmith had no intention of backing away from it. “I’ve come this far,” he said. “I need to see this through.”

There’s no reason why a club should be entitled to renew a player’s contract year after year if the player refuses to sign and wants to go elsewhere. I thought about it for a long time and I didn’t do it necessarily for me, because I’m making a lot of money. I didn’t want people to think, ‘Well, here’s a guy in involuntary servitude at $115,000 a year.’ That’s a lot of bull. But then, when you stop and think about the players who have nowhere to go and no recourse … this isn’t for a guy like me or any other established ballplayer unless you’re having problems with your owner or something like that. It’s more for the guy who is sitting on the bench and who believes he hasn’t been given a chance.

When the hearings in the case finally took place before arbitrator Peter Seitz, Messersmith stood his ground. And the earth moved under his feet.

After first flattening Kuhn—especially the commissioner’s staggering bid to claim that the end of the reserve clause would mean corrupted or thrown games—Moss delivered a knockout punch with the least likely glove---Minnesota Twins owner Calvin Griffith, courtesy of a Minneapolis Star story from March 1974: “If [a player] doesn’t sign by March 10, I can invoke the option clause. If I do that, I can cut him as much as I want up to 20 percent. Of course, he would then be playing out his option. At the end of the season he would be a free agent.”

In other words, for decades the owners used the strict language of uniform players contract Section 10(A) unlawfully, agreeing among themselves not to sign players who refused their incubment teams’ offers. Seitz, who preferred (and indeed all but begged) that the owners and the players negotiate and settle themselves, was left no choice after the owners’ Player Relations Committee leader John Gaherin told him, “There’s no change in our position. So turn the crank.”

Seitz turned the crank. Miller signed “assent” and Gaherin signed “dissent” on the document aboard which Seitz ruled in favour of Messersmith. (And McNally, though it was understood if often forgotten that the former Baltimore Orioles standout had signed onto the case strictly as a human insurance policy.) Gaherin promptly and almost apologetically handed Seitz a letter firing him as baseball’s arbitrator.

“Curt Flood stood up for us,” Simmons said. “[Catfish] Hunter showed what was out there. Andy showed us the way. Andy made it happen for us all. It’s what showed a new life.”

It would also have been nice and in the spirit of Flood and Messersmith if the union had thought concurrently to finish what former executive director Michael Weiner began in 2011, and bring complete and final pension redress to what remain 600 plus short-career major league players frozen out of the 1980 pension re-alignment.

Weiner and then-commissioner Bud Selig made possible their current stipend of $625 per quarter for every 43 days’ major league service time for up to four years. The bad news: those players can’t pass the stipend on to their families should they pass on before the stipend ends. They also can’t be part of the players’ medical plan. Miller himself is known to have said that failing to review and revamp that 1980 pension realignment while he led the union was his biggest regret.

But if there’s a better inaugural recipient of the Curt Flood Award than the man who finished what Flood began, I’m unaware of him. Baseball players since have known what they owe Flood. They don’t always remember what they owe Messersmith, too. Giving him the first Flood Award would remind them powerfully.
-------------------
@Polly Ticks
@AmericanaPrime
@andy58-in-nh
@Applewood
@catfish1957
@corbe
@Cyber Liberty
@DCPatriot
@dfwgator
@EdJames
@Gefn
@goatprairie
@GrouchoTex
@Hoodat
@Jazzhead
@jmyrlefuller
@libertybele
@musiclady
@mystery-ak
@Right_in_Virginia
@Sanguine
@skeeter
@Skeptic
@Slip18
@Suppressed
@SZonian
@truth_seeker
@Wingnut

[Hoodat]

He was just as good and stubborn on the mound with the Dodgers, finishing fifth in the 1973 National League ERA race (2.70), then becoming one of the league’s two 20-game winners with a 2.59 ERA in 1974 for a pennant-winning Dodgers aggregation. He also finished second to his relief pitching teammate Mike Marshall in the Cy Young Award voting.

“He’s one of the best competitors I’ve ever managed,” said his manager, Walter Alston, before that World Series. “He can do it all. He can pitch, field his position, has a good move to first . . . Andy is the kind of guy who wants the baseball. He wants to pitch and that’s why I put him up there with the other great pitchers I’ve had the good fortune to manage.”

And then the Braves paid him a boatload of cash, just to see his ERA balloon to 4.40.

[EasyAce]

And then the Braves paid him a boatload of cash, just to see his ERA balloon to 4.40.

@Hoodat
Not even close to that simple. The 4.40 ERA happened in year two of the deal. Stick around for the story of why.

Messersmith spent the entire winter 1975-76 receiving only three serious contract offers, none of which included the no-trade clause that was the number one reason he pitched without a 1975 contract and then took the grievance to arbitration. The Braves finally offered him the no-trade clause he wanted . . . two days after the season began. Messersmith had to rush to get into pitching shape and it backfired with him suffering assorted leg injuries, not to mention being drained emotionally by both the worry that nobody would sign him before the Braves did and by unconscionable and unjustifiable fan abuse. (Such fans probably let themselves be whipped up in large part by sportswriters who really didn't understand or couldn't have cared less about the actualities of reserve abuse and saw only "disloyal" players---as if the owners had shown "loyalty" for all those decades in which they could trade or sell players at will with the players having no choices except leaving the game.) The abuse sometimes got physical as well as mental. (One fan even approached Messersmith off the field and punched him violently in his pitching arm.) He also admitted, humanly enough, that he was trying too hard, despite all that to live up to his new deal.

The boatload of cash was $1 million for three years, or, half of Catfish Hunter's money per season. (I should note that Hunter's contract involved a lot of deferred money for the life of the deal.) And somehow, despite the leg issues and the pressures both external and internal, Messersmith had a 3.03 ERA for Year One with a 3.31 fielding-independent pitching rate and he had the second-highest wins above replacement-level on the entire team, behind only Hall of Famer Phil Niekro. In fact, you could argue Messersmith was the best pitcher on the Braves that season---his ERA and FIP were under Niekro's and nobody else on the staff had an ERA under 3.30. (Niekro's was 3.29.) Messersmith also finished seventh in the league in ERA+ (adjusted for park factors), and remember he was now pitching in a hitter's paradise: his 1976 ERA on the road was 2.43. (He pitched one more game on the road than he did at home.) The 1976 Braves were a mediocre offensive team and their pitchers worked with little enough real run support and a lot of hard luck.

In year two of the deal, age 31, Messersmith was already dealing with continuing leg trouble when he suffered an elbow injury when he fell right on his pitching elbow while making a fielding play. He underwent surgery and had to miss the rest of the season. At the end of the season, then-Braves owner Ted Turner decided it was time to go on an economy kick and sold Messersmith's contract to the Yankees. In spring training 1978 Messersmith began finding his old form and impressing one and all . . . until he suffered a shoulder separation on another fielding play.

Writing at that time, Phil Pepe---then the Yankee beat writer for the New York Daily News---wrote this after interviewing Messersmith shortly after the injury:

You couldn’t help feeling for the guy. He had come off elbow surgery, battling the odds and the skeptics and even the doctors, but he had come back. He worked harder than the rawest rookie, and he impressed his new teammates with his desire and determination, and he impressed his coaches and manager with his pitching. He had come back, all the way back, and that by itself was a minor miracle, but now . . . Andy Messersmith cried out of frustration and the next day he said he almost flipped out. "That day was the lowest part of my life," he said. Of my baseball life,’ he corrected.

Messersmith rehabbed his shoulder diligently enough but rushed back to the mound; he probably needed more than ten weeks to recover fully. When he returned, he still wasn't the same pitcher he once was. He was only able to pitch 22.1 innings the rest of 1978. Ironically, after his deal expired following 1978, Messersmith and Peter O'Malley got in touch. O'Malley told him no hard feelings and---wait for it!---signed him to a two-year deal that including the very thing over which Messersmith went to arbitration and ended the reserve clause in the first place: a no-trade clause.

The bad news: the injuries finished taking their toll, and two months into a struggling season Messersmith suffered an inflamed pitching arm nerve and required surgery yet again. He missed all of July, the Dodgers released him in August, and Messersmith decided to retire.