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The Yankees went on to win the game 11-4, but their inaugural moments were a fright. Starting Pitcher Rudy May walked the first Minnesota Twin to face him on four pitches, and then saw his fifth knocked over the left-centerfield fence by Dan Ford for the new stadium's first home run. With that an annoyed patron released a live piglet onto the field. But then Lefthander May, who was born in Coffeyville, Kans., and once went to a psychiatrist to cure his pitching woes, wound up and delivered a high, tight "moving" fastball to the Twins' Rod Carew, who was born in Panama on a train. Carew, who hits a baseball more consistently, though not farther, than any man alive, swung ineffectually and grounded out, and the day soon righted itself for the home team.
May's pitch was by no means epochal, but like the approximately 505,400 other fastballs, curves, sliders, sinkers, spitters, straight changes, screwballs, blooper balls and knucklers that will be thrown this year in major-league games, it was an assertion of the baseball season's venerable rhythms, which have been springing up around April and falling off around October for more than a century. It was also a useful pitch, both functional and decisive. It takes something of an artist's bravery and knowledge to throw major-league pitches. A fan savors the lines they draw in the air and the effects they produce, even if they are not fraught with drama.
But all such pretty nuances were nearly overwhelmed this spring by a tide of events that is sweeping through big-time professional sport. A mood of emancipation has changed the basic player-owner relationship. Pro football, basketball and hockey—under legal pressure—are all in various stages of changing the traditional serfdom in which owners have held players.
In baseball, the tie that binds has been the reserve clause, which states that even if a player does not agree to terms, his team automatically has the right to renew his previous contract for another year. This has always been construed to mean that the club can keep on renewing indefinitely, a unique condition of servitude that has prevailed largely because of a 1922 Supreme Court decision that baseball is a sport, not a business, and therefore exempt from vast reaches of the law. But now, in the case of Andy Messersmith, the courts have upheld the ruling of a baseball arbitrator that if a player plays out his option—performs for a full season without signing—the contract cannot be extended again by the club. Thereupon the player becomes what none of the former greats of the game could ever hope to be—a talent who can sell himself to any owner willing to meet his price. (The celebrated Catfish Hunter case of 1974 was different. Hunter was declared a free agent by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn because Oakland, in declining to pay part of Hunter's salary to a company he had designated, failed to live up to its contract with him. He signed a $3.5 million contract with the Yankees.)