Baseball players who balk at signing contracts are as much a sign of spring as the first shoot of onion grass. Dealing from grand isolation, the holdouts usu ally settle, after a few ritual parries, for quite a bit less than they want. Some thing new has come along that could forever upset that balance. For the first time in baseball history, two players have teamed up to hold out as a unit.
The players are about the hottest numbers in the business: Los Angeles Dodgers Pitchers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale. They are negotiating as an inseparable matched pair for a three-year contract that would total $1,000,000, or $167,000 each per season-$42,000 more than baseball's highest-paid player, Willie Mays, is getting.
Dynamic Duo. The reason that they feel they have a chance is that without them the Dodgers have a pitching staff that puts fear only into the hearts of teammates who must stand in the way of the batted balls. By week's end, the 1965 World Champions had lost their first six spring-training games, giving up 33 runs and 55 hits. The Dodgers have offered $105,000 to Koufax (who made $70,000 last season) and $95,000 to Drysdale (who made $75,000), are willing to haggle some more on money. On the other two issues, they feel that they cannot afford to yield. No one gets more than a one-year contract in baseball, largely because it is impossible to know how long any player will last. As for the tandem negotiating, Dodgers Owner Walter O'Malley says:
"Those two boys are splendid fellows, but once you sign two players as an entry, what is to stop the entire team from negotiating on a collective basis?"
Without the Dodgers, of course, Koufax and Drysdale cannot play baseball -unless they are traded. Nonetheless, the "dynamic duo," as sportswriters like to call them, so far are not budging. In fact, they claim that they are not even training, which means that they could not be ready to play until well past the season opener next month. Last week, in a display designed to prove that failure to eat out of O'Malley's hand does not mean starvation, they signed with Paramount Pictures to work in a movie (Drysdale as a TV commentator, Koufax as a detective) through the first few days of the season. There is even talk of a baseball-clinic tour of Japan.
To End the Gossip. The boys will probably reach a compromise with O'Malley eventually, but harder heads than theirs will dictate the terms. The man advising them is J. William Hayes ("As you go through life," warns a weary Dodger official, "beware of a guy who has an initial for his front name"), a Hollywood gent who usually business-manages more professional actors. The background shows. Explaining why Sandy, with his better record, went in with Don on the parlay, J. William smoothly confides that "they figured the way to end all gossip about rivalry between them would be to go as an entry." The Dodgers know what he really means: a dual holdout means a bigger holdup.