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"Sure I would have been tempted to play out my option," DiMaggio told TIME last week. "After my fourth season I asked for $43,000 and General Manager Ed Barrow told me, 'Young man, do you realize Lou Gehrig, a 16-year man, is playing for only $44,000?' I said, 'Mr. Barrow, there is only one answer to that—Mr. Gehrig is terribly underpaid.' And then there was the season I hit in 56 straight games [1941]. When I came in to talk contract, I was offered a $5,000 cut."
"Ed Barrow was the toughest man I ever met in my life," says another former Yankee star, Shortstop Phil Rizzuto. For the "Scooter's" first big-league season, the Yankees offered $5,000. Rizzuto got an audience with Barrow to complain: "I went into his office and he was sitting there, a big burly guy wearing a sweater with holes at both elbows. He was eating a ham sandwich. He looked up and asked me what I wanted. I told him I thought I deserved more money. He stared at me, then said, 'Sign it or get out.' What could I do? I signed."
In 1949, his fourth season with the Yankees, All-Star Yogi Berra was paid $14,000. The by then immortal DiMaggio made $89,000, Rizzuto $37,700. The whole roster's salaries totaled $413,000. This year's Yankees—a team that most experts figure will finish third in their division—make $1,305,000.
The bargaining position for today's athlete is much stronger but more complicated. The top players are too sensitive, too proud and have too much economic clout to be told to take what they are offered or leave it. They also tend to think of themselves as special cases who should be taken care of rather than as tough horse traders dealing in their own flesh. "I have other alternatives," says Reggie Jackson. "I have a real estate business, a Pontiac dealership, a television contract, and obligations to people who work with me. Life has more to offer than hitting a ball over a fence. 'Come to me and let's talk,' I say. Let the Baltimore Orioles and Reggie Jackson hammer out something that's amicable to both sides. They must listen to what I have to say. Treat me like a human being. Treat me like a man. But in such a way that it isn't all business. In such a way that I still have some little boy in me, still some rah-rah in me, so I can play my game." That is a tall order for any negotiator.
"When it came to negotiating, what I wanted was someone to go in there and knock heads," says Messersmith. "If an athlete who has been pampered ever since he was a kid is inserted into a heavy business situation, he gets chewed up." Like many other stars, Messersmith negotiates through an agent, Herb Osmond, who enables his client to confine his pitching to the field.
Messersmith is a tough, hustling player and easygoing beach lover who looks a bit like Ryan O'Neal. He was a jock at the University of California in 1964 at the time of the Free Speech Movement there, and he searched out Mario Savio and had a talk with him "to see what the guy had to say." Now Savio is a schoolteacher and Messersmith is the revolutionary who broke the back of baseball's reserve clause.