He Has Bunted His Way Into Big-Hitters’ World

It is the 25th anniversary in this alligator nest of baseball’s most celebrated holdout.

In 1966, Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale conspire to resist in tandem the blandishments of the Dodgers, demanding, between them, the shocking sum of $350,000.

Management is calm. Down the line, it promises, the two pitchers will make a lot of money. But, at the moment, they get the back of its hand.

In the end, Koufax comes in for $135,000. Drysdale bags $110,000. And the argument so disrupts the rhythm of Koufax that all he can do that season is win 27 games.

Same spring training location, different year. Brett Butler is no holdout. He comes in coolly for $10 million for three seasons, laughing that connoisseurs should resent such wages for a 33-year-old who mostly bunts and runs.

“The world belongs to the big boppers,” says Brett, recently transferred to Los Angeles from San Francisco. “Bunting isn’t macho enough. There is also a stigma to getting a walk. I walked 90 times last year. I also bunted safely 20 times. Am I embarrassed? You’ve got to be kidding.”

Maury Wills, enlisted by the Dodgers to teach baserunning, studies Butler, who spends an hour a day bunting.

“When I was playing,” recalls Wills, “I bunted safely three times one night. The next morning, a guy is reading the sports page at the hotel. He says to his friend, ‘Wills went three for four last night.’ There was no asterisk for bunts. As far as the box score is concerned, I could have hit three screamers.”

“Then you don’t feel a bunter need suffer guilt taking $10 million?”

“A bunter and base stealer--Butler is both--demoralizes the other side more than a slugger who belts one out,” Wills says. “A team that is bunted on is embarrassed. And a guy who bunts and steals compounds the insult.”

It develops last year that Butler steals 51 bases. “Maybe it is immodest for me to say it,” Butler says, “but I was the second-best leadoff hitter in baseball last year. Only Rickey Henderson was better. And that’s because he also could hit the home run.”

“Why did the Giants allow you to drift?” he is asked.

“They claim it was a misunderstanding. They signed Willie McGee to play center field. I don’t know the answer, but it’s kind of consistent with what has been happening to me in baseball.”

Butler ponders this a moment, then continues: “All my career, I have heard, ‘Butler is not a complete player. He has never made the All-Star team. He has never won a Gold Glove.’ At Cleveland one year, I made one error in 152 games. The Gold Glove vote is taken. I finish ninth.”

A listener would conclude Brett is getting a lot of money for one that unskilled, except he bats .309 last year, gets 192 hits and, performing in 160 games, strikes out only one time in 10.

The Dodgers have an interesting collection of entertainers, many of whom have been gathered from other armies.

They are paying this group about $30 million, meaning they are buying themselves a winner, or about to discover that a mercenary force doesn’t always put it together, irrespective of wages.

You ask a manager if he would rather go with players raised in the system or with celebrities captured from outside the system and, generally, you will be told the home-growns are preferable.

This is especially the case when mercenaries dominate the roster.

But buying players through free agency is a short-cut that can work or fall on its hairstyle, meaning, of course, the Dodgers are rolling the dice.

On this silver anniversary in camp of the Koufax-Drysdale holdout, you pause to wonder what would happen today if players of that stature banded together in their negotiation.

We will tell you what would happen. The Dodgers would sue them for conspiring to regulate salaries.