An American Lion

"A Bitter Cup of Coffee" by Doug GladstoneI recently received an E-mail about the injustice done to a vast number of Major League Baseball players who played before 1980. By arbitrarily selecting a questionable metric, over 800 players were eliminated from receiving a pension or health care benefits.

Now, I know what you're thinking--how could this E-mail have been anything other than a request to help Prince Akamabooboo transfer some cash from Pomerania to Illyria so that his dead father, who was murdered by the dastardly finance minister of Togo, could be avenged? When people send me E-mails, I often hear about how Peej has deleted them. I don't go through them myself. Mr. Peej is my gatekeeper. I get a lot of hate mail. A lot. Mother Bear, stop sending me pictures of your you-know-what. And all of you college boys? I'm not the one who called the Dean on your sorry asses.

The E-mail that I received from a Mr. Doug Gladstone went into the do something now pile because we're all baseball fans in this home.

Anyway, here's a better summation of what Mr. Gladstone's book is all about:

A Bitter Cup of Coffee tells the story of a group of former big-league ballplayers denied pensions as a result of the failure of both the league and the union to retroactively amend the vesting requirement change that granted instant pension eligibility to ballplayers in 1980. Prior to that year, ballplayers had to have four years service credit to earn an annuity and medical benefits. Since 1980, however, all they have needed is one day of service credit for health insurance and 43 days of service credit for a pension. Talk about a sweetheart deal!

As Dave notes, "Fixing this inadvertent injustice can be done, if both the owners and the players decide to do it. It will cost them marginal money to do so. They say they’ll look at it in their next 2011 (collective bargaining ) negotiation, but they should stop looking and start acting now. A simple side agreement could be executed anytime.

I doubt that it will ever get fixed. The current commissioner of baseball, Mr. Bud Selig, is inherently corrupt and incapable of doing the right thing. If doing the right thing were his own ass, he couldn't find it with both hands. Probably a lovely man. Probably kisses babies and hugs ugly women and goes to church. Who knows? But a leader he ain't.

Out there, all across the land, there are players who are not getting their due. This is some serious bitterness:

“My memories, my experiences, I’d never trade anything in the world for them,” said Steve Grilli. However, as priceless as his memories are to him, Grilli is still steamed that he’s not getting a pension. “I paid union dues when I played, and now we’re told that the union doesn’t owe us representation,” he fumed. “I’m a victim of circumstance, all because three decades ago either somebody forgot to write us into that collective bargaining agreement or they didn’t want to write us into the contract at all.

“I feel like I’m just being swept under the carpet,” Grilli continues. “You know, I didn’t make a whole lot of money when I was playing, my first contract in the big leagues was for only $16,500, and that’s because I played in an era when the pendulum was swung in favor of the owners.” Money was so tight that Grilli says he used to siphon off gas from a used car lot just to avoid having to fill up at the pump.

It's not all superstar contracts and bags of money, and it never has been. When I was graduating from Princeton, invariably, there would be talk about "professional football" and what it meant to us. For students at schools in the Midwest, it meant a chance to continue playing the sport if all they had to look forward to was the Army or working in a granary or making poor people make widgets in a tumbledown factory.

For those of us graduating from Ivy League schools, it was a chance to go broke in a few years trying to make ends meet on the heavily-taxed proceeds from a paltry professional sports contract. Let's remember that taxes in the 1940s and 1950s were exceptionally high, and even these relatively reasonable sports contracts weren't really worth much. So if you hear that a player made $20,000 a year back in the day, remember: that player paid one heck of a lot of taxes on their income. If a player made huge money, they could expect to pay most of their salary to the government in taxes.

I had a chance to go to work for Father, and make good money. I didn't have an offer to play defense for the New York Giants, but if I had been given that chance, the money wouldn't have been half of what Father was promising to pay me, and it still would have been taxed at a very high rate. I want to say 70% of the income would have been confiscated for taxes. Sound right?

In the old days, you didn't get rich playing sports unless you were iconic and unbelievable. You might have done alright, but if you had a chance to go into business, that's where you went. I played against and alongside a number of very good players who would have scoffed at what they were paying the position players for a team like the Baltimore Colts.

Anyway, Doug Gladstone has compiled a wonderful series of interviews and facts together to make a book that should shame baseball and cause someone to move quickly to fix this oversight. Knowing what I know about Mr. Selig and the sport, I'm sorry but these players have a better chance of winning the Nigerian lottery via E-mail.