Other Side of Joyner’s Pay Hassle

Wally Joyner is a 25-year-old man who makes more than $300,000 a year and thinks of his employers as cheapskates.

Can you blame him? No, probably not. Joyner’s public, certainly, seems to be on his side in his current salary argument with the Angels.

The folks who populate Wally World want their favorite player to be paid every penny of what he is worth, and they are determined to see that he gets it, particularly since they do not have to pay him themselves.

Joyner obviously believes he is getting the short end of the bat, because, for one thing, he is well aware of what some of the game’s other top hitters are making. For another thing, he was a business major in college. This guy understands the bottom line far better than some other ballplayers, who think the bottom line is the one in the box score that reports the attendance.

Wally knows that compared to other outstanding American League first basemen such as Don Mattingly or Eddie Murray or Kent Hrbek, he is being paid salted peanuts. Mattingly makes $300,000 in a month. Murray’s contract extends to the year 2525, or something like that. Hrbek is a millionaire--and that’s in Minnesota, where a buck goes considerably further than it does in Orange County.

Angel fans consider Joyner to be in their class, and also consider him to be the franchise, the one man Anaheim cannot do without, the indispensable player. Wally Joyner is as good a first baseman as you will find on a major league roster, although if the Dodgers had him, they’d probably ask him to play third.

Joyner also is enough of a team player that he came to camp before this money matter was settled. His other option was to say that he was in no mental shape to play--a tack taken by a certain Anaheim football player a few months ago--and hope to emotionally blackmail his employers into putting a popular athlete back where he belongs, back where his adoring fans want him.

Joyner, who so far is handling this thing in a very classy manner, is in Arizona, running and sweating and working his halo off.

I feel sorry for young Wally, at least as far as sorry goes in this case. It is not as though I am going to ask every Angel baseball fan to send me $1 to stick into a fund for the first baseman, because that would truly be pathetic. There are enough economic troubles in the world without our aiding a wealthy person in his war against someone even wealthier.

Is Wally Joyner getting a raw deal? Yeah, probably. The guy’s got 56 homers in two years, and two 100-RBI seasons, and has not hit lower than .285 in the majors.

He made Angel fans forget Rod Carew overnight, and supplied the team with power just when Reggie Jackson finally lost most of his. Joyner was the best thing to come along at Anaheim Stadium since that concession stand that sells baked potatoes.

But if fans would stop thinking like fans for just one minute and conduct themselves like business-people, they might realize that Joyner has been in the big leagues for only two seasons, and that if General Manager Mike Port must pay through the nose for more experienced players who have free agency and arbitration for ammunition, he must hold the line with younger players, who have to show enough durability to qualify for the really big bucks.

This business about keeping Joyner happy, about paying him to keep his loyalty, about a happy ballplayer being a better ballplayer, is the biggest bull since Charles Oakley.

It goes back, once again, to the old theory that when one side calls it a business, the other side calls it a game, and when one side calls it a game, the other side calls it a business. Wally Joyner does not need to be happy to do his work. If he wants that, let him go clean house for Snow White.

The time will come, if he keeps on playing the way he can play, when Joyner will have the legal and contractual leverage he needs to bleed the Angels dry. Although it is pretty clear that we have ourselves a hell of a ballplayer here, you would think that with all the one-season and two-season phenoms who have come along over the years, all the overpaid free agents and damaged-goods Bruce Sutter types who received more than they were worth, we would wise up and stop throwing money around.

Yet, we repeat, this is not a big deal to baseball fans, because it is not their money.

Somebody is going to try to feed you the old line about the fans paying the players’ salaries, by virtue of buying tickets. People haul that one out the same way they sometimes bug policemen by saying, “I pay your salary, Buster.”

Well, if you do pay the players, why are you so eager to keep raising their pay, which in turn will lead to higher ticket prices, which in turn will lead to accusations that management figures are greedy pigs?

The general manager of the Angels is not exactly Ebenezer Port if he is trying to hold off paying Wally Joyner a million dollars before he absolutely has to.

On the other hand, it certainly didn’t kill him to stick one of those Jeffrey Leonard incentive clauses into his contract that offers him 100 grand for becoming the American League MVP, another 50 grand for becoming most valuable player of the league championship series and another 50 grand for being MVP of the World Series.

I like incentive clauses.

They smell like, well, victory.