This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, March 30, 2011 - On Aug. 15, 1934, Cardinals pitching star Dizzy Dean got his comeuppance from fed-up fans who'd had enough of their hero's shenanigans.
According to John Heidenry's 2007 book "The Gashouse Gang," Dean and his kid brother Paul were holed up in the Forest Park Hotel listening to a fan-on-the-street interview on the radio. If the pitching duo had been expecting loyalty and support over their dispute with the team, they got, instead, criticism -- for acting selfish, spoiled and ungrateful.
Their blow-up with team management started over fines the Dean brothers refused to pay for skipping out on an exhibition game in Detroit; the refusal escalated into a stalemate, with the duo suspended. But Heidenry writes that the dispute was actually fueled by Dizzy's dissatisfaction with their salaries. He was being paid $7,500 for the season and Paul, $3,000. Together, the Dean boys didn't collect what the top-salaried pitcher on the team earned, even though they were bringing home the lion's share of Cardinals wins.
"Ballplayers were so poorly paid back then, for many of them to survive, they played throughout the off season on minor league teams. Dizzy Dean would go out and play with Satchel Paige in the Negro Leagues," Heidenry said.
Several days into their standoff, Paul Dean caved, paid his fine, made up with team management and went back to work. But Dizzy dug in.
Cardinals player/manager Frankie Frisch publicly took his stubborn ace to task, mindful of the tough economic times. It was the fifth year of the Great Depression.
"There are 10 million people out of work in this country, yet Dizzy Dean is willing to sacrifice the daily income of approximately $50 to fill the role of playboy," Frisch told reporters.
The dispute was eventually settled by Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis who ruled against Dean.
Dizzy, a likable goofball who was notorious for his antics on and off the field, paid his fine and the cost of a couple of uniforms he'd torn during a tantrum. In return, Cardinals management benevolently reduced his 10-day suspension to get him back on the mound.
The Deans reclaimed their fans' hearts -- and those of their teammates -- by winning 49 games between them in 1934, helping the Cardinals snatch the National League pennant from the New York Giants and the World Series from the Detroit Tigers.
Heidenry believes the incident was the first time a baseball player had staged what was, in effect, a walkout in professional baseball. And during a heated pennant race, no less.
But the son of a sharecropper was determined to fight what he saw as exploitation. In a sense, Dean's demands for higher wages mirrored the nation's labor strife, though his version of working-class struggles played out on the city's field of dreams.
"Dizzy Dean was an original -- he was a kind of a Woody Guthrie guy in my mind,'' said Heidenry, a founding editor of St. Louis magazine, who now lives in Hoboken. He is the author of several books, including "The Boys Who Were Left Behind" about the 1944 all-St. Louis World Series between the Browns and the Cardinals.
Heidenry said Dean, like Guthrie, saw himself as one of the people.
"He didn't sing or play a guitar. He played baseball. But it was with the same kind of egalitarian verve and vitality," said Heidenry.
The 1934 Cardinals team, which history would come to know as "the Gashouse Gang," was a tough and scruffy group that included dirt-poor players like the Deans and third-baseman Pepper Martin -- guys who had worked themselves up through the baseball ranks, Heidenry said. Few were formally educated, like Frisch, who had attended Fordham University and outfielder Joe Medwick, a high school graduate, who had been courted to play football by some of the nation's top colleges. Team owner Sam Breadon was a wealthy St. Louis automobile dealer.
"And then you had Leo Durocher who thought he had class because he liked to wear diamond tiepins and go to nightclubs and rub shoulders with gangsters. And [general manager] Branch Rickey was an educated man but also a very religious man who never attended games on Sunday,'' said Heidenry. "But even back then it was a very wealthy team owner -- and that's the original class divide in baseball: wealthy owners and players, many of whom were born under the very poorest circumstances."
Dean would die a millionaire but that had to do as much with his financial shrewdness as with any benevolence on the part of baseball owners, Heidenry said. After his playing career ended, Dean "slud" into broadcasting and became known for his folksy play-by-plays.
'It's Also a Job'
More than three-quarters of a century have passed since the Gashouse Gang hustled its way into the World Series, and America's pastime has changed as much as it has remained the same. Some critics argue that the sport now ranks second to football in fan popularity.
Tell that to Cardinal Nation.
Despite the nation's continued economic doldrums, the Cardinals drew more than 3.3 million fans in 2010, the fourth best attendance in Major League Baseball. Credit the loyalty of fans who stuck by their team during a rocky season that was over before it was over -- or to the savvy marketing and a new ticket-pricing strategy by the team -- but the Cards regular-season attendance was outpaced by just three major-market heavyweights: the New York Yankees, Philadelphia Phillies and Los Angeles Dodgers.
The One Constant
It's just as the character Terence Mann promised in "A Field of Dreams" (the second-best baseball movie ever made): "It'll be as if they dipped themselves in magic waters. ... People will come, Ray. The one constant through all the years, Ray, has been baseball. America has rolled by like an army of steamrollers. It has been erased like a blackboard, rebuilt and erased again. But baseball has marked the time. This field, this game: It's a part of our past, Ray. It reminds us of all that once was good and it could be again.''
Even with the magic waters, the best fans in baseball are carrying some serious baggage through the Busch Stadium turnstiles this season: Will No. 5 re-sign as a Redbird after the season? Will the Cardinals owners come up with the bucks -- millions and millions of them -- to keep the best player in baseball? Will Albert Pujols follow in Stan "The Man" Musial's footsteps and play his entire professional career in the Gateway City?
Pujols and the Cardinals might not be talking about it until the season's over, but that doesn't mean the fans and the sports analysts can't. And won't.
Along with the hopes and hoopla of St. Louis baseball -- and nobody celebrates tradition better than Cardinal Nation -- true students of the game are quick to remind the loyal that this is, after all, a business.
"You and I and every other fan can afford to be romantic about the game," says Chuck Korr, a professor emeritus of history at the University of Missouri-St. Louis who has written extensively on sports. "But a player, whose livelihood and future depend upon it, can only afford periodic doses of romanticism. And every once in a while he has to wake up to the reality that his career might be over with the next twinge he feels in his elbow. There are X numbers of young guys in the farm system or in the Dominican Republic whose sole goal in life is to take his job away from him."
It's really this simple: Team owners make money, and players want their fair share before their arms get sore and their legs give out, Korr said.
A savvy pitcher who grew up picking Arkansas cotton recognized that reality way back in 1934, even if the fans didn't see it that way at the time.
Remember that quote from Annie Savoy in "Bull Durham'' (the other second-greatest baseball movie ever made): "Baseball may be a religion full of magic, cosmic truth and the fundamental ontological riddles of our time, but it's also a job."
Let's all think about that for a while.
From Where I Sit ...
If you are looking for easy class analogies in baseball or any other sport, for that matter, the obvious place to start is with the structure of a stadium: from the cheap seats in the bleachers and nosebleed sections to the luxury boxes -- and the vast "middle class" of seats in between.
But in truth, fans don't seem to get hung up on the levels of seating, Korr says. And that includes people who might get annoyed at the difference in class perks afforded on airliners.
"I doubt they get anywhere near as upset about somebody being in a luxury box as they do about being able to have more leg room on a plane,'' Korr said. "When I go to a game, I never once think of it in those terms. When I was a kid I paid attention to the fact that someone could afford to sit in a box seat right over the dugout. And would I like to be there? Sure. But once you're within the confines of the park, those distinctions tend to disappear for most people.''
In fact, he adds, the team loyalty of sports fans seldom has anything to do with the business end of baseball.
"I never watched a baseball game and thought once about what ownership was trying to do,'' said Korr, who is a Phillies fan because he grew up in Philadelphia. "Your reaction to baseball is an emotional response. I didn't make a check list: Should I be a Phillies fan?"
It is their emotional attachment to a team that leave fans unsettled when the talk turns to big salaries or the possibility of star players leaving for better deals elsewhere.
Korr said the battle for players' rights -- collective bargaining and free agency -- was a hard-sell, even among players whose careers and earning power were stymied by the reserve clause adopted by owners in the late 1870s.
"It took players nearly 100 years to get over the 'Aw shucks. Gee whiz. I'm so glad to wear the uniform and I'm so happy to be a player I would almost play for nothing,'" Korr said. "And it took a concerted effort by a group of players and an incredibly talented labor leader in Marvin Miller to finally bring the players into coming to terms with the realities of the world -- and the reality that baseball has never been just a game. It's always been a business.''
Today's megamillion dollar salaries are a product of the marketplace -- a concept that altruistic fans find distasteful, particularly if it means a star might wear a different jersey next season, Korr said.
"I've been doing research on this and writing about it for more than 20 years now, and the easiest way to get a rise out of an audience is to start out by saying that there is no such thing as an overpaid ballplayer -- which I believe, by the way. And they look at you and say, 'But so-and-so is making so much money.' OK. How many of you are going to go into your boss and say, 'Well, you're paying me X amount, and I really don't think I'm worth it. Why I don't I take a pay cut?"
In his 2002 book "The End of Baseball as We Knew It," Korr details the evolution of the Major League Baseball Players Association, as it grew into a powerful labor union that altered professional sports in the U.S.
"Dizzy Dean's generation of players -- and players right down to the mid-1960s -- would have never supported the idea of a strike," Korr said. "The one team that voted to go on strike in 1946, they didn't get enough players to vote to do it. And none of the players on the other teams would have supported them if they did."
Korr said players had grown up with the idea that they were not "workers." They were baseball players, and that made them special.
"Look at the vocabulary of the people who pay them: They are the owners. They owned the franchise, and in reality they owned the players," he said.
'I Would Play for Nothing'
Cardinal centerfielder Curt Flood earned his place in sports labor history when he refused to accept a trade to the Phillies, following the 1969 season. Though Flood lost his challenge against the reserve clause in a case that went all the way to the Supreme Court, Korr said it was evidence that baseball was beginning to reflect changing times in America.
"The only way to look at Flood is in context of what was going on in America in the 1960s and 1970s," said Korr.
Flood's letter to Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn said, in part, "I do not feel I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes."
"This is a black man talking about what he thinks is a form of involuntary servitude,'' said Korr. "And when reporters, mainly white reporters, asked how could there be a $90,000 slave, the answer was that a slave is a slave no matter how much you pay him. If you don't have a right to sell your services where you want -- which is what the reserve system was all about -- then by definition you're in servitude. It's a class issue. It's a race issue. It's an issue of individual freedom. It's an issue about what the fundamental tenets of the American free market is all about."
Korr said that popular mythology has transformed Flood into a heroic figure, but at the time he was vilified by an overwhelming majority of fans and the news media.
"This is a guy who is getting paid to play baseball, for godsakes. He's been on two pennant winners and he's making 90,000 bucks a year. Who the hell does he think he is?'' Korr said. "In that respect, it cut across class lines. I don't think workingmen had any greater appreciation for what Flood was doing than any other part of the American economy. It's a tough sell to try and convince people that not only do you get paid to play a game, but you have the right to market your services wherever you want, and the right to tell the owners 'I ain't gonna play.' That's what strikes are all about: changing the relationship between management and labor. Except in baseball, you don't call it management and labor, you call it owners and players."
But the times, they were a-changin' -- and the reserve clause was abolished in 1975. Players had finally ditched the 'aw shucks' factor, as Korr calls it, although baseball fans have never quite let it go. Sometimes they seem to take for granted the unique talent required to hit a fastball at 90 mph -- or to throw one.
"They'll say, 'I would play for nothing if I got a chance to put on a Cardinals uniform. I'd go out and play for the sheer joy and honor of it.' The answer to that is the reason you'd play for nothing is you ain't worth them paying you," Korr said, chuckling. "Nobody's going to go and pay 40 bucks a ticket to watch [Cardinals owner] Bill DeWitt take a swing."
Athletes have the talent, but "ownership" of the game belongs to, well, the owners.
And in very few cases -- perhaps, say, the iconic Musial -- do players and management cross the line to friendship, says Heidenry.
"It's very hard to conceive of a wealthy man, particularly during the Depression, holding onto a losing franchise. There would be no cachet, no financial incentive. I think it's a fair assumption to say that if you own a team, one way or the other, you're making money in addition to any other gratification," he said.
"Sometimes ballplayers are pawns. Sometimes they're prized pets. Sometimes there may even be genuine friendships," he added. "It's how the human race is. But, by and large, even when you are a prized player, you're still not on the same social level as the man who owns the team. There's always going to be that class divide in my opinion."
Reporter's note: The best baseball movie ever made is "The Natural," but the author of this story could find no way to work in a reference to "Wonderboy."
