He’s Raised the Roof as Wage Earner

Orel Hershiser IV may look like something that just walked off the cover of The Saturday Evening Post, Norman Rockwell’s idea of what a major league pitcher should look like. “He’s all Adam’s apple,” a scout once reported to the front office, “but his curve can go around buildings.”

You’d know just looking at him that his name wouldn’t be “Joe” or “Butch” or “Chuck.” “Ichabod,” maybe. Or, of course, “Orel.”

But Orel the Fourth has already become a historic figure in our era. He’s done something probably nobody in our culture ever did before--not Commodore Vanderbilt, J. Pierpont Morgan, J. Paul Getty, Diamond Jim Brady, any Rockefeller, the House of Rothschild, the Sun King of France.

Orel got a $788,000 raise in pay in one year. He went from $212,000 a year to a million.

Now, you have to figure that is a world-record raise in income, that no one ever did that before. Thomas Edison had to invent the light bulb, the phonograph and the moving picture before he got up in that bracket. Fulton’s steamboat probably didn’t inspire that quantum leap in his prospects.

This was hardly a cost-of-living index increase. They weren’t helping Orel keep up with inflation. People used to have to build railroads or corner the market in wheat to put up those kinds of numbers in one year in their bank accounts.

It was so unprecedented that the non-sports community even had to take notice.

The newspaper humorist Russell Baker, who admitted, not to say, boasted, in print that he hadn’t followed the Dodgers since they left Brooklyn, was moved to break his taboo and comment on the extraordinary increase.

Baker was not complaining. He thought Hershiser was setting a nice precedent. Paving the way for the rest of us, so to speak.

“When a worker does a good job he deserves a nice raise, and $788,000 seems just about right to me,” Baker wrote.

He felt the Hershiser raise should be a model for all others and that, when an employer would agree to a raise and say, “Suppose we say $10 a week?” Baker could counter “Suppose we say $15,153.84 and 1/2 a week?”

Orel Hershiser won 19 games and lost only 3 in 1985. He had an earned-run average of 2.03, he had 5 shutouts, 157 strikeouts and only walked 68 in 239 innings. He got $212,000. That comes to $11,158 a victory. As piece work goes, not bad.

The Dodgers knew he was entitled to a raise. Mop-up pitchers get 200 grand today. They thought $600,000 was a nice round figure--$33,158 a victory, if he duplicated 1985.

Hershiser thought $1 million was nicer and rounder. “I don’t know if anybody is worth a million a year,” he admitted as he sat in a dugout at Dodger Stadium the other night. “But I wanted to be paid what my peers are paid.”

Arbitration, which he describes as “a kind of harsh process,” ensued. “One man, the arbitrator, has to decide in a short period an issue involving hundreds of thousands of dollars,” Orel explains.

“In a day?!” wondered an interviewer. “How about in three hours?” countered Hershiser. “One hour for your side, one hour for their side and one hour for rebuttals.”

The arbitrator can rule only for the ballclub or the ballplayer. No compromise. The arbitrator ruled for Hershiser. Orel may not be America’s Pitcher. But he got America’s Raise.

The figures were dazzling. So much so that they made not only the sports pages but the front pages.

Years ago in this country, when it was in the grip of a Depression, it was the custom in the papers to print the ultimate in escape literature--the annual salary list of the top wage-earners in this country.

Usually, Louis B. Mayer, of MGM, and Alfred P. Sloan, of GM, would head that list. Their salaries ran around $752,000, and they used to be read by people who were wondering where they could find 5 cents to buy a loaf of bread.

Today, a pitcher gets a raise bigger than their salary.

Hershiser is aware of the anomaly. “But when I got that raise, there were only 13 players getting a million,” he said. “Now, there are 52. I was only the second pitcher to get it, now there’s 13.”

It’s still an astonishing turn of events for a pitcher the Dodgers didn’t know what to do with only three years ago. They didn’t know whether to make a starter out of Orel, or a reliever--or a truck driver.

The trouble was not that his pitches didn’t look tough enough. It was that he didn’t.

A relief pitcher in particular has to look ferocious, like something off a post office wall--or the crew of a pirate ship. He has to have this blue beard or bristling mustache, a permanent scowl and, preferably, a scar running down his cheek. Hershiser looked like something off the crew of the Good Ship Lollipop.

He had everything but braces on his teeth. If he was any paler, he wouldn’t be able to see himself in the mirror.

But his curveball cracked like a bullwhip over a mule team. His sinker disappeared. He may have looked like a librarian, as his pitching coach, Ron Perranoski, used to complain, but he threw the ball like a guy assaulting a machine-gun nest.

He got out of the bullpen when the Dodgers sent him down to the Dominican Republic, where Manny Mota started him every game--and he came up with an 8-2 record and an ERA of 1.6.

He still wasn’t scaring anybody. He won 19 games against guys who couldn’t wait to get to the plate.

All that may be changing. Making a million dollars and getting a $788,000 raise may have done for Orel Hershiser everything that growing a beard, getting a scar, or wearing an earring or a parrot on his shoulder or knife in his teeth may have done--gotten him the respect his pitches deserve.

He’s no longer a baby-faced kid with a hard sinker. He’s at one with the great robber barons of our financial history. It’s one thing to come to bat against this pale, skinny kid who looks like a rural schoolteacher.

It’s another thing to come up against a guy who made more money faster than any stock manipulator or cartel operator who ever lived. You not only expect to get struck out by a guy who got a $788,000 raise, it’s kind of an honor.

It’s like getting your train robbed by Jesse James or your bank by Willie Sutton.

That’s not some nerd who can’t get a dollar-an-hour raise out there. That’s a guy who should have a statue in every union hall in the country, a guy who got more money for one arm than John L. Lewis used to get for a whole union.