My whole career tells me that people love baseball, when they do love it, because it shows them a good, fair test of ingenuity and skill. What made it satisfying up until fifteen or twenty years ago was that it was the fairest test in all of sports. Every team played the same schedule; after 154 or 162 games, when your ballclub finished on top and played in the World Series, you knew you had one of the two best teams. Fans knew it, too. When they saw the October Classic, they knew how much the clubs had gone through to get there. Those teams had put all their baseball knowhow together and used their resources the best. A whole year's worth of big leaguers fighting for victories and jobs had weeded out everybody that hadn't. The rules put excellence at center stage.

Over the past ten or twenty years, that's changed. The rules on the field haven't changed much; if you'd gone to a game forty years ago and came to one now, you'd still know what was going on, something you can't say for some other big-time sports. But the situation off the field has changed so drastically that it's affected every other facet of the game. And three very, very big things have gone wrong.

First, if Willie Wilson were playing today, he wouldn't have to listen to Whitey Herzog. He could try to stuff my ass in a clubhouse trash can and he'd still be making $4 million a year in the big leagues. That's how many more teams there are now, how many more jobs, how much less talent there is relative to demand. Second, only two teams used to get to the big dance at the end, but so many clubs get in the playoffs now that the fans don't know whether they're seeing the best. In some divisions, you can barely top 500 and you'll win; someday we'll have a division champ with a losing record. When I managed the Cardinals against the Minnesota Twins all the way back in the 1987 World Series, Minnesota had the fifth-best record in the American League. They won the Western Division, but four ballclubs in the East -- all playing the same schedule as the Twins -- had more victories. I said so in the papers at the time, and they gave me so much hell you'd have thought I shot the pope. All you had to do was look at the standings; I was just saying it like it is! What did it tell fans that not only did Minnesota get in the Series, but proceeded to kick our ass around that lunatic Homerdome, where you can't see a pop fly or hear it come off the bat? Excellence got whiffed. It's only gotten worse since.

Third, everybody in the big leagues today knows, before a single pitch is thrown, that the teams in the smaller markets -- the Kansas Citys, Oaklands, Pittsburghs, and Montreals -- have no chance of competing for a pennant anymore. It ain't going to happen. The fans know it, the writers know it, the players know it. Those teams' budgets -- which only two years ago ranged from the Pirates' $9 million to maybe $20 million -- can't get them enough quality big leaguers to be competitive. What's worse, the rules we have in place prevent those teams from improving themselves and getting back in the hunt. How the Pirates, A's and Expos do on the field, even if they play to the absolute best of their abilities, makes no difference. And the Atlanta Braves, with their $65 or $70 million payroll? They can play lousy baseball day in and day out (as I have seen them do) and still win their division by eight to ten games. It doesn't matter if your scouts are sharp or stupid, if your manager is Humpty Dumpty or the second coming of John McGraw. Brains, hustle, and good, sharp play -- those don't matter. One thing matters and one thing only: money.

Don't believe me? Take a look at the last few World Series. Going back six or seven years now, I've never seen so many baserunning mistakes, botched throws, and mental screwups in my life. The showcase of the sport looks like eighteen monkeys making love to a football. If this is the best our game has to offer, why am I changing the channel to the NBA? And if the rules don't change, we'll never see a team in the big show again whose payroll isn't in the top five. That really came to pass in 1996, when the Braves ($65 million) and Yankees ($60 million) bought themselves a party. A year later the Florida (Blockbuster) Marlins got to play the big-budget Cleveland Indians. Both years, same thing: four-hour games, horseshit throws, teams kicking the ball all over the field. Somebody lost; that's all that proved.

Baseball's rules today don't promote what's best about the game: the fairness and integrity that give every team a chance to win if they use their abilities right. If there's no incentive to show the game respect, why should anybody? Would you? Good play is a lost art. Nobody's saying that or writing it anyplace, but I'm telling you, that's the biggest story in the sport. And unless we make some basic changes soon, it's going to get worse.

Things do look better than they did five years ago. In towns like Cleveland and Baltimore, where they have nice ballparks that respect the game's history, and where they can afford to pay for teams that are going to win, it's good. Players like Piazza, Griffey, McGwire, and Chipper Jones would have been standouts in any era. But you know what? I'm still thinking of that scene in the movie Titanic: The boat's clipped the iceberg, but nobody really knows it yet. The band's still playing, the chandeliers are up, the drinks are flowing. The man who built the ship checks the hull and tells everybody they're going to sink. They laugh it off. And before they know what hit 'em, they're all swimming in the North Atlantic.

from the Introduction »

Copyright © 1999 by Whitey Herzog. Excerpted with permission.