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Raines was able to negotiate with his own team, the Expos, on May 1st, and signed immediately. Manager Buck Rodgers put him in the lineup against the Mets, in spite of the fact that Raines had not faced live Major League pitching since the previous season, having missed all of Spring Training. I was in attendance that day, working on NBC’s national Game of the Week, and was fortunate to witness Raines turn in one of the greatest individual efforts I have ever seen. He had four hits, including a triple and the game-winning home run. In his first five games, Raines batted .400 with three homers and seven RBI. If that didn’t send a message to all the general managers that had passed on him, I don’t know what would have caught their attention. The media—and the fans—focused on the storyline of Raines’ ability to play without benefit of spring training more than the deeper issue of Raines groveling back to his old team. The feeling was that players made too much money. It might have been wrong what the owners were doing, but Raines and the others were still making good wages.

And then there was Andre Dawson, Raines’ teammate on the 1986 Expos. Dawson was thirty-one years old, coming off a season in which he was plagued by chronic knee problems. Dawson had just twenty homers and seventy-eight RBI for the Expos, on the last year of a contract that paid him more than $1 million. His injuries affected his ability to play on turf, and he wanted to switch teams so that he could play most of his games on grass (this was in an era where more than a third of teams played on Astroturf). Dawson felt that he would be a good fit for the Cubs, and hoped they would sign him to a contract. He told Chicago general manager Dallas Green that he would sign a blank contract, and that the Cubs could fill in the amount. On March 9, Dawson signed with the Cubs, allowing himself to take a hefty paycut ($500,000 base and incentives). He would go on to win the 1987 National League MVP award for Chicago, hitting a careerhigh forty-nine home runs and driving in a whopping 137 runs.

The owners had accomplished their goal. For the first time since the start of free agency, the average Major League salary declined. Free agent salaries went down 16% in 1987, despite the healthy attendance at the ballparks.

THE CONSPIRATORS

Commissioner Peter Ueberroth takes the biggest hit here, but he’s an obvious and easy villain. The much beloved successor to Mr. Ueberroth, A. Bartlett Giamatti, was also on the Executive Council in 1985, and is not above suspicion. And then there were the culpable owners, made up of the old guard as well as newcomers to the game. The O’Malley family held ownership of the Los Angeles Dodgers for decades. The Boston Red Sox were still in the control of the Yawkey family in the 1980s. Tom Yawkey had been the sole owner of the team for forty-four seasons. After his death in 1976, his wife Jean became the general partner and president of the team (the Yawkey estate sold the club in 1978 to an ownership group that included Mrs. Yawkey, Haywood Sullivan, and Buddy LeRoux). Gene Autry had owned the California Angels since their inaugural 1961 season. Bud Selig has been the Milwaukee Brewers’ President and CEO since 1970, their first year. There were also new ownership groups replacing the longtime baseball people. In Minnesota, the Twins were sold on September 7, 1984 by the Griffith organization. Cal Griffith and family had been connected with baseball for nearly a century. The Twins were sold to Carl Pohlad, a civic, business, and banking leader in the Twin Cities. Richard and David Jacobs purchased the Cleveland Indians on December 9, 1986.

These owners were in violation of the labor agreement they had signed in 1981, in which they agreed not to conspire to fix salaries. All it would have taken was for one or two renegade owners to crack, and gain a competitive advantage on their opponents by signing some of the free agents to big money contracts. A competitive nut like the Yankees’ George Steinbrenner,