Spahn's Bad Move

| 17 Feb 2015 | 02:04

    It's November-free-agent season, a time for George Steinbrenner to open his vault andgo afterthe game's best available talent. If a 34-year-old relief pitcher can command $10 million a year on the open market, can you imagine what the Boss would pay if a 31-year-old left-hander with 116 victories over the past six seasons came on the open market? How about if he was a war hero? Can you imagine what George Steinbrenner would have offered Warren Spahn in the winter of 2005? The bidding would start at $15 million a year.

    In the winter of 1952, though, Spahn could not shop his services around. MLB's reverse clause gave him no rights other than to withhold his services.Big-leaguers had to play by the owners' rules, or not play. With no competition from other teams or other countries for players, Spahn still almost broke the bank that winter.

    Spahn was coming off a poor season by his standards in 1952-14-19, with a 2.98 ERA, for a Boston Braves team that finished with a 64-89 record. Not only did the Braves do poorly on the field, but the team sold only 281,278 tickets at Braves Field.

    The Red Sox were marginally better on the field, going 76-78, but 1,115,750 people paid to see games at Fenway Park.

    Braves owner Lou Perini claimed he lost

    $500,000 operating the team in 1952. While Perini thought Boston was no longer a two-team city, he was prepared to stick outthe 1953 seasonin New England. Buton March 18,Perini asked the National League owners for permission to move to Milwaukee. Perini was familiar with the city, as he ownedtheBraves' Triple-A Milwaukee farm team.

    He also knew that St. Louis Browns owner Bill Veeck was looking to move, and Perini had to act quickly. He wasfacing a money-losing season in Boston and a fan boycott of hisminor-league games in Milwaukee if the American League prevented Veeck from setting up shop in the 35,000-seat County Stadium, the firsttaxpayer-fundedballpark built in the United States, and one designed to attract amajor-league team.

    Perini had guessedthat baseball in Milwaukee would be a box-office smash, and he was right. Without the benefit of an off-seasonto sell tickets, Perini's Milwaukee Braves set an attendance recordby drawing1,826,397 fans.

    It took Milwaukee just 13 games to eclipse the Boston attendance of 1952. For Spahn, though, the move to Milwaukee cost him nearly $200,000.

    "It was a contract dispute in Boston," he recalled in 1990. "The ball club had offered me an incentive of like 10 cents on a ticket over 400,000. I didn't want that; I wanted to sign a contract and get to work. It turned out we went to Milwaukee and we drew a million eight. So I would have gotten $180,000 plus my salary, which was big money in those days.

    "So be it. Probably there would have been something in the contract that said that contract was with the Boston Braves and this is the Milwaukee Braves. It could have been nullified, but I don't know that. Hey-I was a lucky son of a gun to play as long as I did, I pitched until I was 44."

    The Braves drew more than two million fans annually between 1954 and 1957. By 1961, Milwaukee's love affair with the Braves ended, and the team was moved to Atlanta in 1966.

    Spahn never did get the big money that mediocre starters today demand and get. Pitchers like Billy Wagner will never have to decide between taking a straight dollar figure deal or an incentive deal that paid them more money by the customer. That's baseball.