The wage theories of big-league baseball players have always been as uncomplicated as the appetite of Oliver Twist. What they want is more. What they will get, announced Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick last week, is exactly that. For the privilege of broadcasting the next five years All-Star and World Series games on radio and television, NBC has promised to pay a whopping $16,250,000. And, since 60% of the profits is already earmarked for the nine-year-old Annuity and Insurance Plan, retirement benefits for retired baseballers may soon jump to $300, perhaps as high as $500, a month. Today, men with ten years service in the majors can look forward to $100.
Artist & Asset. Such promise of security has not long been a part of the game. In a solemn and scholarly study published this week (The Baseball Player; Public Affairs Press; $3.75), the University of Alabama's Economics Professor Paul M.
Gregory does his academic best to analyze the major-leaguer, to understand him both "as an artist and as a business asset." The measure of Professor Gregory's success is that his hero remains a baseball player, a big man playing a boy's game, an economic pawn hemmed in by a code of law that is "like an old lady's will amended by a maze of codicils."
For all his criticism of the code—with its reserve clause, its waiver rule, its draft, which all hamper the individual's bargaining power—Professor Gregory feels that baseball would die without it. "As a sport," he says, "baseball, like the Army, must be authoritarian, with a definite chain of command." That players have improved their status so steadily is a tribute to their stubborn pursuit of the dollar and the support of their fans, which has given baseball "a significance quite out of proportion to its size."
Gift of Gab. Time was when pro ballplayers were "tobacco-chewing rowdies" who ran out their brief careers with little to show for their days on the diamond. Of the nine regulars on the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, first big-league team of all, only Shortstop George Wright went on to become a successful businessman (Wright & Ditson, sporting goods). The rest stayed only a pitch or two ahead of the bill collectors. One died in a San Fran cisco poorhouse; sentimental fans saved another from a pauper's grave. Growing prestige, says Professor Gregory, has opened a new world of post-retirement opportunities for the once-forgotten ballplayer. So many of them have turned to radio and television sportscasting* that the good professor concludes: "Old players never die, they just gab away."
To the ballplayers' credit, they have also slowly learned to gab in their own behalf while still in uniform. Though they have never really joined organized labor—four separate unions have flopped, and they have never managed a successful strike—each team has its player representative. If trivial requests have failed (one Philadelphia muscleman thought dugout benches needed foam-rubber cushions), earnest efforts to improve conditions have built the pension system and boosted minimum salaries to $6,000.