Part I: Baseball History and the Individual
From the construction of the American and National Leagues as Major League Baseball in the beginning of the 20th century (with the World Series at season’s end), sixteen Major League teams and their Minor League franchises formed a business association. They had a contract condition with their players called the ‘Reserve Clause.’ Once a player signed with a team, no other team could ever hire him. Early in the 20th century, the Supreme Court settled a legal challenge by declaring that Major League Baseball was a collective private enterprise legally entitled to make its own contract rules and regulations with its employees. Except for a few prizefighters, no professional athlete ever made ‘big money.’
After WWI, two exceptions arose. Harold ‘Red’ Grange, the ‘Galloping Ghost’ of the Illinois University football team, for several years signed a contract with the Chicago Bears that paid him thousands of dollars per game because the Bears could make thousands of dollars in ticket sales in Chicago where ‘Red’ Grange attracted tens of thousands of fans who had bought tickets when he wore number 77 for the Illini.
In baseball, a teenager named George Herman Ruth from a poverty-stricken family in Baltimore had been ‘farmed out’ to a Catholic orphanage as a wild child whose father could not afford to pay for the broken windows and such that the boy caused and still feed and clothe and shelter the rest of the large family. While still a child at the orphanage, he learned to play baseball and was so superior at both pitching and hitting that the local minor league team, the then Baltimore Orioles, signed him up with that reserve clause intact.
The Orioles were then an independently owned Minor League team, completely unaffiliated with any of the sixteen Major League teams. Around 1914, while Ruth was still in his teens, the financially successful entrepreneurial owner of the Red Sox paid an enormous sum of money for Babe Ruth’s exclusive contract with that ‘Reserve Clause’ justifying the investment. Because the ‘Babe’ was such a superior pitcher and hitter, the Red Sox won three World Series in the next half-decade.
A year or two after WWI, the owner of the Red Sox sold Babe Ruth’s contract to the beer company magnate who owned the New York Yankees for $100,000 cash and a much larger amount of a securitized loan to pay for his Broadway plays.
Babe Ruth was such a superior hitter that he stopped pitching altogether so as to hit so many home runs that sold so many tickets that made the Yankees grow richer than any other team. To see those home runs, the numbers of paying baseball fans grew into the millions. Even at road games, the ticket sales grew massively – although the home team always kept all the money.
During this great expansion of baseball ticket sales, one or two new leagues were formed. There was a Federal League and/or a Mexican League claiming to be an equivalent to Major League Baseball. Some Major League players were overpaid to join a rival league. This violated the ‘Reserve Clause.’ When the new league or leagues had failed, the players who had violated the ‘Reserve Clause,’ were banned forever.
Although I cannot recall for certain, this is likely the time when the Supreme Court ruled that the ‘Reserve Clause’ was legally legitimate.
When gamblers ‘fixed’ the 1919 World Series, one of the ten greatest players in history, ‘Shoeless’ Joe Jackson was banned for life as a participant in Major League baseball.
Except for a handful of ticket-selling big stars, no player got rich playing baseball. Babe Ruth made $80,000/year for his later career years. When he met President Coolidge after the 1927 World Series sweep, the President said: “Babe, you made more money than I did.” Ruth shot back: “I had a better year than you.”
For some years, before WWII, Lou Gehrig was paid the enormous sum of $47,000/year. That all came to an end in 1939 when he got sick with that awful disease that carries his name.
In 1935, the young Joe Di Maggio starred for the St. Francisco Seals, who, like the Baltimore Orioles of 1913, were an independently owned Minor League team and had full rights to the ‘Reserve Clause.’ Although Joe Di Maggio was the best player in baseball following the 1935 retirement of Babe Ruth and perhaps also Lou Gehrig, he had an uncorrectable ‘bad knee.’ Only the Yankees could afford the risk of the $100,000 sale price with the ever-present ‘Reserve Clause’ as the incentive.
Joe Di Maggio sold so many tickets after three or four consecutive World Series Champion years that he demanded the unheard-of amount of $100,000/year. The owner said to him: “But Lou Gehrig only makes $47,000.” Joe Di Maggio shrugged his shoulders and phlegmatically said: “That’s Gehrig’s problem.” He held out for as long as it took the owner to realize that it was more financially beneficial to pay him that amount than to go without him.
Several years after WWII, Ted Williams of the Red Sox and Stan Musial of the St. Louis Cardinals were also eventually paid an annual salary of $100,000.
During the 1950s, Jackie Robinson and Roy Campanella of the Brooklyn Dodgers and Yogi Berra of the New York Yankees made the enormous sum of $50,000/year. By the late 1950s, Mickey Mantle of the Yankee and Willie Mays of the New York Giants (the best baseball player I ever saw) matched the Ted Williams and Stan Musial $100,000 mark. I think Whitey Ford of the Yankees and Duke Snider of the Dodgers made $47,000 – matching Lou Gehrig’s previous salary.
No one else came close.
[Carl Furillo, a great Brooklyn Dodger player, after ten years of playing for the Dodgers, had a contract salary of $28,000/year. When he was injured, the then lawyer-owner of the Dodgers Walter O’Malley refused to pay him his salary. He had to hire a lawyer, at his own expense, to get his money. Many old baseball fans like me, subsequently, read that Carl Furillo worked making sandwiches across the street from Yankee Stadium and had also worked installing elevators at the World Trade Center.]
No one made ‘big money’ except for a few exceptional prizefighters. The greatest hockey player, Gordie Howe, topped out at $22,000 back in the 1950s. Bob Cousy was the highest paid NBA player also at $22,000/year. At the end of the 1950s, Wilt Chamberlain got $100,000 to leave the touring Harlem Globetrotters where he played for one year after leaving Kansas University one year before his class graduated and he then became eligible for the NBA. Professional football also required the four-year college class waiting period – although the Philadelphia Warriors had drafted Wilt Chamberlain four years earlier when he had graduated high school.
Nobody in professional football made big money until the 1960s. The best player in that era was Jim Brown of the Cleveland Indians. Starting in 1957, with pretty good annual raises, by his last season in 1964 or 1965, he was paid $70,000 in real money. Football players’ salaries sounded very large because the NFL and the AFL could each bid against each other. Million-dollar salaries were a myth. It might take 20 years to pay the whole thing but the Public Relations Million Dollar press releases were never clarified. When Charles ‘Sonny’ Werblin left the movie industry where he had been one of the two most successful agents, he put a financial group together, bought out the Harry Wismer-owned bankrupt New York Titans and invested a fortune in players starting in 1964 and renamed the team the New York Jets. He signed Alabama University super-star Joe Namath to a 3-year contract at $100,000/year with a $100,000 signing bonus. With growing TV money and other marketing profitability, football salaries and other sport salaries grew very rapidly during the 1960s and beyond.
At that time, Hockey and basketball each had a ‘Territorial Draft Right’ so that a local hero could bring his fans to his professional team. The four-year college class waiting period existed well into the 1960s or even into the 1970s in both basketball and football because, unlike baseball and hockey, the major league franchises had no costly subsidized ‘minor league’ system to develop players for major league quality play.
Quite a few colleges made an appreciable amount of money from football and basketball ticket sales – maybe even from trademarked merchandise sales too. However, college hockey and baseball were no substitute for developing player talent to the Major League Baseball and National League Hockey systems until late in the 1960s.
In baseball Charles O. Finlay, owner of the Athletics franchise that he had bought in Kansas City and moved to Oakland, ran a unique baseball business. Instead of building up a minor league development system, he signed college baseball stars to big contracts starting in the 1960s. Apparently, baseball scholarships to a few colleges created a profit-making college baseball business. This turned out to be Charles Finlay’s opening. By the end of the 1960s, he built highly competitive teams. He was so good at it, the Oakland Athletics won the 1972, 1973 and 1974 World Series.
By then the ‘infallible’ Supreme Court had reversed their prior authorization for the ‘Reserve Clause.’ Everything changed. Money and ‘broadcasting rights’ and auxiliary sales of clothing, etc. with the obligatory Investment Banking debt-ridden massive Capital Structure has made my first sports love of baseball and every other Professional Sport uninteresting to me while the whole world seems to have headed in the opposite direction.
This entire pedantic Sports History is presented as an introductory analogue to the contemporary standard ‘Political Vetting’ process.
Part II: Political Vetting Today vs. Individual Tribal Loyalty
[The idea of ‘vetting’ someone is to do your best to guarantee that you can trust the ability and integrity of the individual being ‘vetted.’]
I think President Donald J. Trump is almost as objectively smart as Elon Musk, the arguably most objectively intelligent man in the world; however, neither of these geniuses understands what causes the preponderance of their difficulties trying to restore the Constitutional Principles of ‘American Exceptionalism’ and Individual Civil Rights and Civil Liberties. The whole ‘Social’ aspect operates so much more like ‘Tribalism’ than the search for merit.
Let me begin with a baseball analogy. Joe Di Maggio had a non-medically-correctable, at that time, ‘bad knee’ during his entire Major League baseball career and WWII Navy service from 1936-1951. The old-fashioned baseball that I had loved so much into the 1960s had ‘STARS’ who stood out above the rest in performance, but still got the same social treatment as everyone else. There was a genuine Social Equality among the entire team. Whoever you were, if you hit a home run, even if you were Joe Di Maggio, you lowered your head, ran around the bases and went back to the dugout. Any ‘showboating’ would get the hitter at his next at bat, and sometimes even the next hitter in the lineup, a pitch aimed accurately at his ear. They did NOT wear helmets or body armor to lean over the plate. (Sandy Koufax broke Lou Brock’s arm for leaning over the plate.)
Whenever a young Yankee came up to Joe Di Maggio’s Yankees and failed to run out any ground ball, he got a dirty look from Joe and an insultingly explanatory lecture in the dugout from the other players. No one dared make that mistake twice. Winning the game was the goal. Today the ‘high-five’ group ‘celebration on the mound’ for a meaningless home run with a 10-run disparity between the teams makes me sick and yet the rest of the world cheers and celebrates and the ‘achievement’ can be highlighted on the moronic ESPN.
In a world of Individuals, group LOYALTY is trivial compared with the higher requirement of Individual Integrity. In a world of TRIBES, Tribal Loyalty is paramount and individual ‘distinction’ is exclusively in the context of Tribal Group Loyalty.
The critical factor in forming a political administration in a Tribal World is Loyalty. True Individuality of Integrity can be dangerous – even fatal. The critical Vetting Factor today does not exist for the Popular Front – Left-Wing Worldwide Tribes of today. If their members had not been individually ‘Vetted’ by high school, they certainly had been by college, graduate school, law school, etc. in this perverse academically-dominated world of phony and meaningless’ credentials.’ Their entire lives are predicated on Tribal Loyalty. Morons get superior jobs, higher income and near zero vulnerability for whatever they turn into FUBAR for the rest of the world.
If you are capable of taking a realistic look at the four year American and worldwide disaster of the Biden Administration from the perspective of pre-Tribal-Loyalty American Exceptionalism right on up to today, all you can really see is total Tribal Loyalty. From the very first phony ‘press conferences’ with pre-determined questions and answers on index cards and teleprompters through the putatively mere ‘BAD OPTICS’ of living human beings accidently broadcast ‘live’ from Afghanistan falling to their deaths from commercial jets right on through the final two years of the Loyal Tribe publicly and uniformly declaring Joe Biden is definitely ‘NOT INFIRMED,’ there is absolutely nothing real about it. All of it!
Tribal Loyalty today is strikingly analogous to the quasi-religious ‘Cult Movement’ of the 1970s. To trust the integrity of anyone who has been in the Cult or Tribe outside that structure would require long-lived public repudiation of the ‘escaping’ individual with a full public explanation of how and who had previously recruited and led them when Tribal Loyalty was their Prime Directive of life.
The old-fashioned Baseball Analogy is that the Academic History constitutes the ‘minor league’ training grounds for almost all of today’s Tribal Political Activists and Careerists. All around the leading figures of the WWSOG-BOG, you find personally privileged phonies who know each other from their graduate school experiences. It is as if they have all come out of the same mold. They perform as highly tuned thespians. The men are all impeccable attired in the same suits. The women dress in the same tailored suits or suit dresses with identical hairdos Only a lengthy public history of such personal repudiation would ever persuade me to trust the ‘integrity’ of any applicant for a job in my version of the Trump-47 Administration.
Being thoroughly non-Tribal practical Individuals, Donald J. Trump (and also Elon Musk) are unlikely to ever arrive at that conclusion.
I have heard that when Donald J. Trump was in High School, like me, my wife and just about everyone that we each knew back then, a full-time Summer job was the standard order of the day. I most assuredly do NOT mean anything even remotely associated with politics or government.
Although his father was a rich hard-working real estate tycoon who sent his boy to military school for discipline, when the Summer break came, each year young Donald took a manual labor skilled building trades apprentice job to completely understand how things functioned in the construction of large profit-making buildings. He worked then and forever after with Common People who were without family and Social ‘Connections’ making things easy for them.
In contrast, in the glory days of the Soviet Union – a quintessential classical Tribal Loyalty world – they decided to build a large hotel for foreign visitors. Naturally, only totally loyal Commissars were in total charge of everything. When it was finally ready to open, only then was it noticed that the Tribal Loyal Commissars in total charge had forgotten to include bathrooms and the rest of the plumbing. I feel certain that lots of Common People non-college-educated workmen knew what was being done, but not one took the publicly Disloyal Risk of trying to stop the disaster.
