BASEBALL PREVIEW : 8-18=$6.35 Million; Do the Dollars Make Sense?

On Feb. 28, 1894, Edgar McNabb of the Baltimore Orioles checked into the Eiffel Hotel on Smithfield Street in Pittsburgh, closed the door to his room and shot himself dead. He remains the only known left-handed pitcher in major league baseball history to commit suicide.

Is it any wonder? McNabb apparently was despondent over a lover’s quarrel, not his fastball. Rest assured he didn’t pull the trigger based on his 1893 rookie season, in which he won eight games. As a rule, left-handed hurlers don’t check out early.

Case in point: 96 years later, Matt Young matched McNabb’s eight-victory total (losing 18) for the Seattle Mariners and parlayed it into a three-year deal with the Boston Red Sox worth $6.35 million.

Looking down the gun barrel this time was management.

Young’s signing sent shivers through the industry. He became torchbearer for a glut of baseball salary increases that has shaken clock-punchers coast to coast. Consider that in an eight-year career, Young has lost 27 more games than he has won and has a 4.29 earned-run average.

First, this public service announcement: It must be mentioned that Matt Young is my brother-in-law by virtue of my marriage to his sister, a left-hander whose last three-year contract averaged $6.35 per hour. So, there is a conflict of interest here; the conflict of weighing certain facts against the interests of one’s mother-in-law.

My first thoughts as the ink dried on Young’s contract were: What’s in it for me? In 1989, after all, it was moi who yanked the garden shears from his hands the time Matt helped lay sod in our yard. Remember Bob Ojeda? Good thing someone did. Back then, Young appeared a washed-up pitcher recovering from serious tendon-transplant surgery in his throwing elbow. Remember Tommy John?

Little did we know.

The rest is baseball history, or shame, depending on your perspective on the state of salaries. While some of us applaud a free-market society, others rail against a system run amok with owners who wantonly make millionaires of sub-.500 pitchers and .200 hitters.

“It’s not like I held a gun to someone’s head and said ‘Pay me or else,’ ” Young explained recently. “I had multiple offers, that’s scary. Who wouldn’t take the money? Let’s get real. Who wouldn’t take the money?”

Mother Teresa?

Young pleads guilty only to being a member of the Fortune 650, the privileged few on this orb talented enough to work the baseball business. He also admits to having the impeccable timing of, say, a Rolex with gold trim and a narrow band. The going price for left-handers and other baseball artworks was established last winter when Bud Black knocked the game on its backside by signing a four-year deal with San Francisco for $10 million. Black’s career record? A rather black-and-blue 83-82.

The line formed there. Catcher Darren Daulton, who batted .208 in 1988, .201 in ‘89, and .268 last season, checked in at $6.75 million for three years with the Philadelphia Phillies. The Dodgers signed pitcher Kevin Gross, 9-12 in 1990, to a three-year deal worth $6.4 million. Gross is right.

When the gold dust settled, 40 players joined the $3-million-per-year club. Moreover, some of these guys could actually play.

Tim Leary, who pitched on the same UCLA staff with Young, was pulled from the Yankees’ rotation late last year to spare him the embarrassment of perhaps losing 20 games. He finished 9-19, signed a three-year deal for $5.95 million, and now gets three more shots at 20.

The ticket price for two former Bruins who finished 1990 with a combined 17-37 record came to $12.3 million, or about $3 million less than the United States paid France for the Louisiana territories.

No matter. Millions flow from baseball’s cup like words from Don King’s mouth. Owners cry poor, while players bask in the riches of an open market they claim (and the courts agreed) was artificially depressed in recent years because of owner collusion.

Less than 20 years after Curt Flood’s challenge led to the dismantling of the Reserve Clause, which bound players to their teams for life, baseball has exploded into a free-market madness that threatens the fabric of the game, some fear. The pendulum has swung, but how far is too far?

“Today, players are motivated by money,” said Buzzie Bavasi, a former general manager with the Dodgers, Padres and Angels. “Mr. (Branch) Rickey said this to me in 1948: ‘Once players are motivated by money, we’re in trouble.’ I think we’re in trouble.”

Bavasi has worked both sides of the Reserve Clause. In the 1940s, he tutored under the master penny-pincher, Rickey, who ruled the Brooklyn Dodgers with an iron wallet. A player once remarked that Rickey would “go into the vault to get change for a nickel.”

Bavasi said the entire payroll of the 1955 world champion Brooklyn Dodgers was $555,000. On today’s Dodgers, that buys you less than one-third of relief pitcher Jim Gott’s contract ($1.725 million). And Gott has arm problems.

Bavasi thinks the trouble is not free agency but rather lack of common sense. While general manager of the Angels, Bavasi readily jumped into the open market to pursue free agent Reggie Jackson, then offered him 50 cents on every ticket sold after 2.5 million for the season.

“Everyone said we were crazy,” Bavasi said. “But we drew 2.8 million, and he paid for himself in one year.”

Shelling out big money for superstars is a time-honored tradition. In his prime with the New York Yankees, Babe Ruth earned more than President Herbert Hoover, to which Ruth replied, “I had a better year.”

The same cannot be said for Seattle Mariners’ catcher Dave Valle and President George Bush in 1990 when Valle doubled his $485,000 salary despite a .214 batting average, while Bush at his $200,000 annually guided a nation through that tricky Persian Gulf business.

In 1990, the Oakland Athletics signed Rickey Henderson to a four-year deal worth $12 million, making him baseball’s richest player. A year later, his country at war, Henderson had dropped out of the top 30 and thought twice about showing up to spring training.

Barry Bonds and Bobby Bonilla of the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Cash Brothers, grieved like widowers after “losing” arbitration hearings that fixed their 1991 salaries at $2.4 million and $2.3 million, respectively. Or is that disrespectfully?

“I don’t think the public resents players getting money,” Bavasi said. “What they resent is when the player says $3 million isn’t enough.”

The payout to marginal players, pitchers in particular, is far more disturbing to Bavasi. Twenty-five years ago, Bavasi presided over the Great Dodger Holdout of 1966, when Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale made a stand for the ages when they demanded the unthinkable sum of $125,000 each.

In leading their team to the World Series title in 1965, Koufax was 26-8 with a 2.04 ERA, Drysdale 23-12 with a 2.77 ERA. The holdout lingered into the spring and finally was settled when Koufax signed for $125,000 and Drysdale $110,000.

The major league minimum today is $100,000. When Bud Black signed for $10 million, Bavasi almost fell out of the 619 area code.

“That one shocked everyone,” he said.

Then Matt Young stepped up to the plate.

“Now, you’re making me sick to my stomach,” Bavasi confessed. “Who are these people?”

The Reserve Clause notwithstanding, Bavasi said owners didn’t have the money then to make millionaires of the entire roster.

“But the game was better,” he said.

“Pee Wee Reese once told me, ‘We don’t make a lot of money, but they can’t take our memories.’ ”

No one, for instance, can remember the Iron Horse, Lou Gehrig, walking out of the Yankees’ camp in 1927 when he was earning $8,000, a fraction of Ruth’s $70,000.

One of Bavasi’s Dodger first basemen, Wes Parker, once turned down a pay raise.

“We offered $25,000, he wanted $22,000,” Bavasi said. “There were boys like that.”

Some modern players, on the other hand, have succumbed to the old adage, “I am not hungry; but thank goodness, I am greedy.”

Young admits the whining of modern-day superstars, who demand that their contracts be renegotiated every time the winds shift, doesn’t help the game’s image.

“People look at Rickey Henderson and Barry Bonds and want to group all ballplayers in that same group: selfish players who are trying to rape the public and the family of four that has to spend $100 to go to a game,” he said. “I don’t like what Rickey Henderson is doing, but if he feels that strongly, he has only himself to please.”

Bavasi argues that big money produces better businessmen, not better players. What’s become of the game? Rarely do players spend entire careers with the same team any more. When the Dodgers released pitcher Fernando Valenzuela, teammate Mike Scioscia became the only major leaguer remaining with the same team since 1980.

Free agency and television revenue, of course, have changed the spending game forever. CBS and ESPN paid $1.5 billion for the rights to broadcast major league baseball through 1993. Yet some clubs insist that’s not enough to keep up. Oakland Athletics General Manager Sandy Alderson contends his team will finish $2 million to $5 million in the red this season because the team’s payroll has tripled since 1988 to $36 million.

Some paint a gloomy picture. First-year television ratings were poorer than expected, with CBS and ESPN estimating losses at $150 million. Yet, at the same time, the New York Yankees can cut a $50-million local cable deal, while major league owners can expect to share $95 million in entry fees, per expansion franchise, in 1993. Oh, don’t forget baseball attendance has increased 27% the past decade.

Yet, the game’s commissioner, Fay Vincent, said recently he thought baseball was poised for catastrophe. Welcome to To Tell the Truth. This much seems clear: If television ratings don’t improve, expect a slowdown in the salary wars after 1993.

“When the new contract expires with CBS,” Bavasi said, “people will sit down and come to their senses, on both sides.”

While it can be argued that money hasn’t changed the game aesthetically, it certainly has altered the way baseball is being watched and covered.

Big money raises the stakes.

Just ask Matt Young, who has endured a rash of criticism in Boston before throwing his first regular-season pitch.

“I’m the goat in every newspaper article in the United States, or the world as we know it,” he said recently from Boston’s spring complex in Winter Haven, Fla.

Reading from a story about himself in the Lakeland (Fla.) Gazette, Young reported: “Matt Young, who underwent reconstructive surgery, signs a contract for $6.4 million. Apparently the surgery didn’t take. He was 8-18.”

Bob Ryan, writing for the Boston Globe, sums up Young’s future in Fenway Park as such: “You know and I know, that Matt Young has no idea what he’s in for should he even so much as fall behind on a count.”

Ouch. Young can’t defend his 51-78 lifetime record or the $6.35 million, only suggest that he didn’t just fall out of bed and into the major leagues.

“Think about the odds of a Little Leaguer making the big leagues,” he said. “It’s not that people are jealous of me, but here I am doing something I love to do, something I’ve dreamed of doing as a little kid. Should I be criticized for that?”

Young knows what pressures await in Boston. This is the franchise, remember, that once traded Babe Ruth and hasn’t won a World Series since 1918.

Into this den of wolves Young walks, hopefully not with bases loaded.

“At least give me the chance to fall on my face before you tell me I’m going to,” Young said.

Despite an 8-18 record, Young said it has rarely been written that he was among the league leaders in innings pitched, strikeouts, complete games, opponents batting average against him, all while receiving little run support in Seattle.

Young understands the outrage over his salary.

“Just about everybody played Little League,” he explained. “Everybody still thinks they can play baseball. You go to a game and say, ‘Why can’t he throw the thing over the plate?’ It seems like a simple game. When people think about football, they think about getting stuck, and it doesn’t feel good. In basketball, they see a bunch of 6-8 guys, and they figure ‘I’m not tall enough to do that.’ But they see that 5-5 guys can play baseball. Some guys look like Saturday afternoon softball players.”

Which is what Matt Young might soon become if he so much as falls behind on a count in Fenway.

Ouch. So much for dinner tonight. And too bad about Edgar McNabb.

THEN vs. NOW Jose Canseco worth 5.16 times more than baseball immortal Babe Ruth? You might not think so, but according to salary figures adjusted for inflation based on the Consumer Price Index as calculated by the Federal Reserve, Ruth’s New York Yankee $70,000 salary in 1927 factors out to $542,299 for 1991. Canseco is being paid $2.8 million by the Oakland A’s this season. BOB FELLER vs. ROGER CLEMENS Yearly salary: Feller 1940, Cleveland: $27,000 Feller adjusted*: $259,971 Clemens 1991, Boston: $2.5 million Games Won Feller 1939: 24 Clemens 1990: 21 Strikeouts Feller 1939: 249 Clemens 1990: 209 ERA Feller 1939: 2.85 Clemens 1990: 1.93 Game-Winning Bucks Using his 1940 salary, Cleveland Indian pitcher Bob Feller was rewarded $1,125 for each of his 24 victories in 1939. Roger Clemens was paid $119,048 per win in 1990. First $100,000 Player: Joe DiMaggio was baseball’s first $100,000-a-year player, the New York Yankees paying the Yankee Clipper an even $100,000 in 1949. ROY CAMPANELLA vs. LANCE PARISH Yearly salary: Campanella 1957, Brookyln: $45,000 Campanella Adjusted*: $215,872 Parrish 1991, Angels: $2.5 million Home Runs Campanella 1956: 20 Parrish 1990: 24 Runs Batted in Campanella 1956: 73 Parrish 1990: 70 Batting Average Campanella 1956: .219 Parrish 1990: 268 $100,000 Dodgers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale were the first Dodger players to make more than $100,000 a season. After their celebrated 1966 spring-training walkout, they were signed for $125,000 and $110,000 respectively. LOU GEHRIG vs. GEORGE BRETT Yearly salary: Gehrig 1927, N.Y. Yankees: $8,000 Gehrig Adjusted*: $61,997 Brett 1991, Kansas City: $1.5 million Home Runs Gehrig 1927: 16 Brett 1990: 14 Runs Batted in Gehrig 1927: 107 Brett 1990: 87 Batting Average Gehrig 1927: .313 Brett 1990: .329 First $100,000 Angel Frank Robinson, coming over from the Dodgers, was the first Angel to collect better than $100,000 for a season, earning $160,000 in 1973. BABE RUTH vs. JOSE CANSECO Yearly salary: Ruth 1927, N.Y. Yankees: $70,000 Ruth Adjusted: $542,299 Canseco 1991, Oakland: $2.8 million Home Runs Ruth 1926: 47 Canseco 1990: 37 Runs Batted in Ruth 1926: 145 Canseco 1990: 101 Batting Average Ruth 1926: .372 Canseco 1990: .274 Dollars per Homer Using his 1927 salary, Babe Ruth was paid $1,489 for each home run hit in 1926. Using his 1991 salary, Jose Canseco was paid $75,676 for each home run hit in 1990. JACKIE ROBINSON vs. WADE BOGGS Yearly salary: Robinson 1952, Brooklyn: $40,000 Robinson Adjusted*: $203,472 Boggs 1991, Boston: $2.7 million Home Runs Robinson 1951: 19 Boggs 1990: 6 Runs Batted in Robinson 1951: 88 Boggs 1990: 63 Batting Average Robinson 1951: .338 Boggs 1990: .302 * Salary adjusted using Feb. 1991 CPI index Source: The Ultimate Book of Sports Lists, Major League Baseball Players Assn.