BfHerbie: Pulling the Strings

Dodgers

For me it's the image of the strings. A pitcher would pitch, trying to hit a target, through strings tied horizontally and vertically, but for me the strings are like images themselves, an image of golf carts driving through street named after stars long passed. An image of a car crash that crippled their greatest ever catcher, the salt and pepper hair of their most famous player ever, Jackie Robinson, who changed the very fabric of the society I live in. It's the stance I learned from my favourite player, Steve Garvey, one whose card I never was able to find, a colour bluer and shinier than I can scarcely remember. It's a pitcher looking to the sky just before striding to home-plate. It's the family atmosphere, traveling from Jupiter to Kissimee and landing in Vero Beach.

It's the Dodgers if you haven't guessed already. They have been my personal cross I bare, never replaced or supplanted. I was there when they won their last World Series. The World Series. When Kirk Gibson, and his Natural moment, beat the steroid A's in the most unlikeliest of decisions. I saw over 40 games that year twice a week for every week of the Dodger season. I gave up a summer, two semesters from college to see my team that year. I knew something was happening. I met my wife that year, nothing would ever be the same again, a bright and shiny summer leading into the sharpness and clarity of autumn. I was married in October. I spent more time watching the World Series than what I should have been doing.

The strike years came and I tried to leave the game, but the game isn't just something you can put away, lock it up and skip across the pond. The game was passed down to me, my two uncles took me to my first game in Havana, Cuba. The place was dark, noisy, smelly and everything I remember on black and white television, the shiny helmets and the incomprehensible rules. Almendares Alacranes, Leones, the myths of my homeland replaced by Giants, Yankees, and of course Dodgers.

I learned geography, how to speak English, how to count and fill out a scorecard. I learned how to curse out the umpires and I learned about dealing with loss and disappointments. I learned that fair-play was not an abstract ideal but the best path for civilized men.

More than anything I learned how to be the person I am today because of it. 

Fehr

This week the Baseball Player's Union announced that head satanic advisor Donald Fehr is finally giving up his post for a nice sunny beach on Tierra del Fuego after ruining half my childhood with his personal vendetta against the Baseball owners. Yes, I can trace my pathetic existence to the moment that I first asked my Uncle Memo, before the arrest and conviction for selling meth, or as my Mom used to tell at the time, "Oh, he's just going away for a few years because he had illegal fireworks", no really, I would have totally believed her but I wondered what the smell in his basement was all those years ago, but I digress, I loved my uncle at the time and I asked him why baseball, that internal clock by which I had measured my Springs, Summers, and Autumns, wasn't starting on time and he as he quite succintly put iit, "Mijo, they've got a guy who wants to ruin the game calling the shots." Not a big fan of the working man my Uncle Guillermo Popnecker there. Nor of Donald Fehr.

He joined the association in 1977 and named executive director in 1985, succeeding Beelzebub himself Marvin Miller, but that doesn't tell you much of the story.

I imagine him as a young attorney in Kansas City, played by Keanu Reeves in the movie (give me some license) and Miller would be of course played by big Al Pacino hisself (hoo-rah!), call it a sequel of sorts to The Devil's Advocate, where he's asked to work on the landmark Messersmith-McNally free agency case: the one that changed the entire landscape; gone would be the day of the reserve clause, where players played basically on a signed perpetual contract.

"Do this for us and you shall get the keys to it all!", Pacino says, right before going off on the solliquoy about Charlize Theron's neck. Then here's a montage of Keanu (as Fehr) a la Forrest Gump getting L.A. Dodger Andy Messersmith a brand spanking new contract from the Atlanta Braves. How cool is that for a 9 year old Dodger fan like me, huh? Come on. Then we get action shots of Keeanu/Fehr running after Dave McNally, the other name on the ruling, who had essentially retired from baseball, was not going to pitch again in Montreal, had run off to a cattle ranch in Billings, Montana, and then suckered into joining in the litigation. Arbitrator Peter Seitz then rules that the two litigants can become free agents since neither one had played with a signed contract the year before. This gives Reeves keys to the Pacino's MLBPA Ferrari. In the movie he goes off to play golf at Augusta, or something like that, a right place for the right sort of diabolical antagonist, but in real life Marvin Miller stayed on as one of Fehr's closest advisors well into elderly dotage. Real life is much more interesting than a Keanu Reeves movie.

Donald Fehr served as the players' chief negotiator in collective bargaining against Major League owners. In 1990, he successfully negotiated the $280 million settlement of the free agency collusion cases. The 1972 strike got at the player's pension payments increased. A total of 153 games were lost in the span of 12 days in April. In 1980 and 1981 free agency was a target because teams wanted limitations to it, a core group of players to protect from free agency, and the union struck. The strike lasted for practically 6 weeks in June and July and a weird split season with two champions was created to accomodate the lack of games. In 1990, the owners proposed a salary cap for players and to beat the players to the punch, they locked them out before they could strike. It lasted for 32 days in February and March and ruined the start of the season. The worst of all was the 1994 strike. It lasted 232 days at the tail end of the 1994 season, lost 920 total games, cancelled the World Series, and threatened the start of the 1995 season. Other than my marriage; it was the greatest tragedy of my entire life.

Put that on your resume and that might get you vilified by the villagers with pitchforks but Fehr didn't stop there. He fought and beat MLB for 3 separate counts of collusion in the late 1980's for close to 280 million dollars in damages but that wouldn't be the last of his "positive" legacy.

He opposed mandatory drug testing during a time in Major League Baseball that drugs were rampant. His leadership stalled on the issues of privacy, notification and punishment but then so did Major League Baseball. We all know what Baseball became in the 1990's and Donald Fehr's leadership or lack of it allowed it to happen. An entire generation of Baseball players under his watch have been labeled the Steroid Generation. Statistics and Records, the lifeblood that runs Baseball and connects it with the sport of our fathers and grandfathers have been compromised.

Now Donald Fehr's retiring before a new round of labor talks can begin next year. The sport is at a cross-roads. It's closer to what I remember as a kid. Not at all what I remember from before the accident. Will the MLBPA choose a less confrontational tact to save the sport or will more people like me, jump off the bandwagon again, because billionaires can't get along with with millionaires over the slice of the Baseball Apple Pie.

What is the most valuable lesson your father taught you? Bonus points if you show us your dad.

Manuel Cueto

When Pops Popnecker was sober enough to make sense he used to tell me about the time his uncles used to take him to see Almendares Alacranes (the Scorpions from the Almendares River region) in the old Cuban League. Havana Stadium. 1941. They took first place on the year he was born. They took 13 titles until the Revolution brought the hundred year old Cuban league to a halt finally, replacing the dinosaurs: elephants, scorpions, lions and tigers with grapefruit cutters, crocodiles, low-landers, guerrila fighters, industrials, shrimpers, roosters, and cowboys.

No wonder he, like the island from which he sprang, lost his way. There is a simple beauty in a one city, 5 team championship: a winter league open to the best of American big-league baseball, now closed to the west and bowdlerized to an amateurish, decrepit mess. Sure, Cuba can beat up on U.S. amateurs, college seniors who aren't managed by Tommy Lasorda, but put them in a World Cup of Baseball. See what happens when they deal with 'roid rage from 'round the world. These are old school purists, holdovers from a forgotten age of baseball, an era of the bunt, the sacrifice, taking the extra base, the double steal and the feint-to-third and throw to first. Not a white-washed throw some sweet chin music if the batter gets too comfortable with your plate.

In other words. The most valuable lesson my Dad taught me is, "Keep running, either way I'm gonna hit ya!" I know it's cruel and in these parts it seems that these time tested lessons of familial cruelty are frowned upon, but other than a slight twitch when someone sticks out their hand in friendship, I'm not any worse for wear from the severe beatings I took on the chin and in the pocketbook over my time.