The 1970s saw a continuation of the trend toward new stadium construction that had marked the 1960s and may well have triggered that decade’s batting drought, as hitter’s havens like Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds, and Sportsman’s Park fell to the wrecker’s ball. The 1960s had brought new ball parks to nine cities—San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York (NL), Houston, Atlanta, Anaheim, St. Louis, Oakland, and San Diego. In 1970-71, baseball bade farewell to old friends Crosley Field, Forbes Field, and Shibe Park as new stadiums—artificial-turf clones of each other—sprang up in Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and Philadelphia. Other new parks were built in Arlington, Kansas City, Montreal, Seattle, and Toronto (the latter two, expansion franchises added to the American League in 1977), and Yankee Stadium underwent a massive facelift.
All this construction activity seemed to bespeak the game’s profitability. Indeed, attendance was climbing in almost all major-league cities, as heroes like Henry Aaron, Johnny Bench, Reggie Jackson, and Pete
Rose, to name but a few, gave the fans plenty to cheer about. And the controversial adoption of the designated hitter innovation by the American League in 1973 gave a further boost to hitting while giving fans much to argue about, which after all is one of the game’s great pleasures.
But the game’s financial health was imperiled by rising player unrest and owner intransigence over labor issues, centered on the reserve clause which bound a player to his team in perpetuity while denying him the opportunity to gauge his worth in the free market. The reformulation of the relationship between players and management became the hallmark of the decade and sorely tested fans’ devotion to the game.
It began with the momentous case brought against Organized Baseball by veteran outfielder Curt Flood in 1970, challenging the legality of the reserve clause (“I am a man,” Flood said, “not a consignment of goods to be bought and sold”). The Supreme Court ruled against Flood the following year, but the tenor for the 1970s had been set. A thirteen-day player strike delayed the opening of the 1972 season, and arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled in 1975 (in what has come to be known as the Messersmith-McNally case) that a player could establish his right of free agency by playing out his option year without a signed contract. The writing on the wall was clear: free agency was the wave of the future.
Big-name players like Jim Hunter, Reggie Jackson, and Rich Gossage migrated to New York and lesser lights like Wayne Garland and Oscar Gamble signed elsewhere for figures that seemed incredible. In the race to sign available talent some owners spun out of control while others like Minnesota’s Cal Griffith, without corporate coffers behind them, had no choice but to sit on the sidelines. Player movement among stars jeopardized fan allegiances, pundits alleged, as Gossage and Jackson played for three teams in three years and championship teams like the Oakland A’s and Boston Red Sox were broken up through trades that were forced by the specter of impending—and uncompensated—free-agent departures.
(Comfortingly to the historian, all this hubbub had occurred in very much the same way in 1869-70, before the advent of the reserve clause, when Henry Chadwick was fulminating about the perniciousness of players “revolving” from one team to another simply to advance their fortunes. Also, baseball’s first avowedly professional team, Harry Wright’s Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869-70, were roundly abused for constructing their powerhouse team with “mercenaries” from other states—thus scorning baseball’s core appeal to civic pride.)
What actually compromised fan loyalties in the ‘70s was not player movement—it took Yankee fans, oh, maybe, ten minutes to regard Reggie as a born pinstriper—but player salaries. When the major-league minimum was under $5,000 or so and only a Mantle, Williams, Musial, and DiMaggio made $100,000 a year, fans saw with their heroes as, by and large, working colleagues who had the supreme good fortune to play ball for a living. If a star made a splendiferous salary, that was socially useful as a proof that any worker could make it big if only he had sufficient ability to emerge from the pack. But when stars began routinely to command seven-figure salaries, and more importantly the annual wage of the average major leaguer rose to six-figure levels, many adult breadwinners struggled to remain fans.
That they succeeded is testament to their love of the game, for fans have had a difficult assignment in reshaping their views of baseball players along the lines of media stars. The princely compensations of actors and pop musicians have long been accepted by the public as the verdict of the marketplace. If the movie The Godfather makes hundreds of millions of dollars for its studio and distributor, then Marlon Brando’s multimillion-dollar fee for the film seems not out of line. Analogously, if the Dodgers were fabulously lucrative for ownership, then a lofty salary for Steve Garvey ought not to have given rise in the 1970s to resentment among the fans. This sort of reeducation is by no means complete, but barroom banter about baseball by, say, 1989, was not as bitterly one-note about “greedy players” as it had been ten years ago. And you didn’t hear a peep about pro football replacing baseball as the national game.