In Baseball, It’s Spend, or Pay the Piper

It has long been a kind of game among the dedicated aphorists. For centuries they have been jogging their intellects for the most graphic, the most exquisite and most definite description of money and its uses.

Among the preferred offerings that have come down through the ages: “Money is an obedient servant.” . . . “Money is a good soldier.” . . . “Money is an Aladdin’s lamp.” . . . “Money is the ace of trumps.” . . . “Money cures melancholy.” . . . And the worth of money as offered by Benjamin Franklin: “If you don’t know the value of money, try and borrow some.”

This is being related to introduce one of baseball’s favorite proverbs long accepted as gospel, to wit: “Money can’t buy pennants.” And the reaction now is “Oh yeah?”

Ever since the game and its traditions underwent a sea change and witnessed the era of free agents--free of club owners with a plantation mentality who had enslaved the players with their self-perpetuating contracts--there has been a difference. It came with the decision of a California judge in 1976 that the reserve clause was unfair, contemptible and illegal. It was the equivalent of baseball’s Emancipation Proclamation, permitting the players to breathe free.

The accepted adage that money can’t buy pennants was sourced mostly in the long-recognized futility of the two richest club owners in baseball: Philip K. Wrigley and Tom Yawkey. For all their ambition and all their spending, Wrigley’s Cubs and Yawkey’s Red Sox left their owners painfully pennant-poor.

In the past 65 years the money-rich Cubs could buy their way into only one pennant (the wartime year of 1945), and for 26 straight years (1919-1945), Yawkey’s millions were also unfruitful. In later years Wrigley sold the Cubs to the Chicago Tribune, also with deep pockets, but whose spending has been unproductive.

All of this is by way of noting the historical upheaval since the free-agent age with players able to follow the money trail and affect the pennant races as never before. This season, particularly, has underscored the power of the purse in baseball.

Who are those teams leading their divisions? Mostly those who have unburdened their checkbooks. The Yankees, the team with the biggest payroll (average player making $1,825,706), are out in front in the AL East, closely pursued by the No. 2 team in the paycheck department, the Orioles. Cleveland and the White Sox, Nos. 4 and 5 in the high-salary list of the 28 teams, are making a race of it in the AL Central. Texas, No. 7 in league pay, rules the AL West.

Atlanta, with the game’s third-biggest payroll, dominates the NL East. Exceptions are San Diego in the NL West and Houston in the NL Central, both on top in their divisions. But Houston is leading the poor-rent division, none of whose teams had been playing .500 ball until Houston edged above that percentage the other day.

As thumping evidence that money is making a difference, consider a contest between the top-hole Yankees, whose average pay is $1,825,706, and the hopeless Kansas City Royals, who were 12 games out of it by the end of May.

When David Cone, the Yankees pitcher, took the mound and beat the Royals awhile back, it was a stunning illustration of the disparity in the fortunes of the leagues’ haves and have-nots. K.C., trying to get by on the cheap (27th in total payroll among 28 teams), was a club with a collective salary of $18,470,750. This is less than the $19 million-plus amount the Yankees are paying one man, Cone, who is working on a three-year pact--but, now injured and likely out for the season.

If there’s truly a pathetic team in the American League, and there is, it is the Detroit Tigers, 20 games beyind the lead at this early date in the AL East, with their $877,640 average salary. That is approximately one-third of the Yankees’ average salary.

The Tigers have the low figure of 23rd on the 28-team pay chart despite the presence of the highest-paid man in baseball, first baseman Cecil Fielder. He boasts an all-time one-year salary record of $9,237,500, meaning that otherwise the Detroit players are being paid a comparative pittance, with all signs saying the club’s destiny is in the pits.

Having the second-biggest man in the salary department hasn’t worked out well, either, for the San Francisco Giants, who are paying Barry Bonds $8,416,667 for this year’s work, allotting to him 25% of their payroll. Like the Tigers, who are devoting nearly 42% of their payroll to Fielder, it appears to be a cock-eyed strategy, a judgment that is reflected also in the Giants’ current address: next to last in the NL West.

An exception to the salary-success ratio has been the Montreal Expos, who for years have been a welfare case in NL society. The Expos, whose average pay is the lowest in both leagues, a mere $616,620, are now in second place in the NL East and even held the division lead for a spell.

So it is quite significant that all five of the top-pay teams--Yankees, Baltimore, Atlanta, Cleveland and the White Sox--are leading their divisions or close to it. As for those suffering, laggard clubs hoping to get by on the cheap, there could now be a temptation to ascribe their fate to a paraphrase of the adage: “The lack of money is the root of all evil.”

And the new doctrine seems to be that, in baseball’s new age of free agency, which has reverenced the dollar sign and made the difference, pennants can, indeed, be bought.