Andy Messersmith: He Changed Baseball Forever

I was a young kid and a devoted Dodger fan. For some reason Andy Messersmith became my favorite player sometime in 1974. He was acquired by the Dodgers from the Angels after several successful seasons in the American league.

I remember one day when I was sitting in our family seats at Dodger stadium on the Field level: (Aisle 18 row W); Messersmith had just left the game after pitching well enough for 7 or so innings. He had taken a shower and, though the game wasn’t over, he had walked from the clubhouse and accessed the Field level above where he came out among the fans wearing a Hawaain shirt and wet hair…he was heading to his car, an orange Volvo wagon parked right outside the entrance on the first base foul poul entrance, just a few spaces from where my dad always parked. He was my favorite player so I watched intently as he left the stadium unnoticed (almost) and headed back to his Corona Del Mar home.

He was an extraordinary athlete. One of the best pitchers of his, or any era in terms of difficulty to hit and Earned run average (the ultimate gauge of a pitcher’s effectiveness). He won 20 games in both leagues and pitched in 5 all star games and a World Series for the Dodgers in 1974. He won the gold glove award twice for being the best fielding pitcher in the league. He was a great baserunner as well…reportedly one of the fastest players on the team. I once watched him on TV in a game at Candlestick Park where he had (3) doubles against the San Francisco Giants. The hits all reached the wall. Messersmith’s career was riddled with injuries that kept him, I feel, from being a Hall of Fame pitcher. His trajectory was definitely to be in the HOF. Unfortunately, Andy had one mishap after another to his pitching arm and shoulder. He finally retired in 1978 at age 33. Still, only (5) starting pitchers since 1920 have lower career ERA’s.

He was soft spoken and he appeared to be humble and low key. In 1974 he was coming off of a great season where he came in second in the Cy Young award voting. His contract was up and he decided he would ask for a no trade clause (He was given a raise from 100,000/year to $115,000). Andy didn’t want to leave Los Angeles. He went to high school in Orange County, played college ball at Cal Berkeley. He was an avid surfer who lived at the beach and he felt that his steady high caliber performances had given him the leverage to ask for a no trade clause. The problem was that the Dodgers and owner Walter O’Malley did not give “no trade” clauses…to anyone; not to Koufax, not to Drysdale, not to Jackie Robinson, not to anyone; Such was the totality of control that O’Malley (and all major league owners) had over all of “their” players. Dodgers managament agreed to the pay increase but refused the no trade clause. A “no trade clause” was a contractual arrangement between player and ownership whereby a player could not be traded to another team unless that player agreed to the trade.

In a move that probably dampened and shortened his career Messersmith decided that he would challenge the most fundamental and foundational tenet of professional sports: The Reserve Clause. The Reserve clause said that a player once drafted was the sole property of team ownership and therefore had no ability to negotiate a contract nor was he entitled to any bargaining rights. He could, of course, refuse to play but then he was forbidden from playing for any other team. Baseball was a good life, even then, but you were a form of property over which team management had dominion.

In 1965, following a World Championship season Dodger pitching stars Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale collectively decided that they would not play the 66’ season unless they received a significant raise in salary; one that was not forthcoming. Koufax was the best pitcher in baseball and he was paid 85k for the 65' season. He was offered 100k for the 66’ season but Koufax felt that he should earn more and he and Drysdale (another star pitcher) both “held out", or threatened to that effect. As the story goes they were prepared to retire from the game on that principle. They started entertaining offers to do movies in Hollywood after leaving baseball. In an act of pure panic and only after much negotiation the Dodgers finally gave in and paid Koufax 120k and Drysdale 105k for the 1966 season. As some may know Sandy Koufax retired after the 66' season (after winning 27 games and the Cy Young award) due to severe arthritis in his throwing arm. He was only 31.

Faced with the Dodgers refusal to offer him a no trade clause, Messersmith played without a contract in 1975. The Dodgers, by virtue of the existing rule could pay him whatever they wanted for that year if there was no signed contract. In a year that was “highly stressful” for Messersmith he performed at his peak, his best year ever. He led the league in innings, shutouts, complete games, and was 2nd in ERA. At the end of the season there were more negotiations and offers by the Dodgers (none with a no trade clause) but Andy and his agent decided on a de facto revolution. They put their hopes into an arbitration agreement that would have an independent arbitrator rule on the sustainability of baseball’s Reserve Clause. MLB ownership was biting their collective nails to see if their suppression of baseball salaries was going to remain their protected legal prerogative. Perhaps fearful of losing in arbitration, the Dodgers offered Messersmith a contract in which he would earn $480,000 over three years. Messersmith turned down the offer, saying “I’ve come this far. I need to see it through. There’s no reason why a club should be entitled to renew a player’s contract year after year if the player refuses to sign and wants to go elsewhere. I thought about it for a long time and I didn’t do it necessarily for me, because I’m making a lot of money. I didn’t want people to think, ‘Well, here’s a guy in involuntary servitude at $115,000 a year.’ That’s a lot of bull. But then, when you stop and think about the players who have nowhere to go and no recourse … this isn’t for a guy like me or any other established ballplayer unless you’re having problems with your owner or something like that. It’s more for the guy who is sitting on the bench and who believes he hasn’t been given a chance.”

In a highly anticipated decision the arbitraror ruled in favor of Messersmith and against MLB and from that point on baseball was on a new playing field. It was a titanic restructuring. The players union, with Messersmith’s indispensible leadership, had blown the doors off the wall. The players holding the ball would now be able to “shop” their services and skills to the highest bidder. They would now be able to negotiate as free agents. The money would be flowing into the pockets of the players (and their agents) from now on. It would have happened eventually but not in 1976 without the courage and resolve of Andy Messersmith. It’s been said that athletes like Larry Bird and Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods are owed royalties by all future players due to the roles they played in provoking a meteoric rise in popularity in their respective sports. Andy Messersmith changed the sport of baseball in a different, yet equally powerful way. Every baseball player from 1976 owed him some gratitude. He “took one for the team”.

Perhaps not surprisingly, after the ruling Messersmith and his agent found that many teams were unwillingly to bid on his services. They didn’t want to reward the player who had ended the one sided power between owner and player. It took awhile but eventually he signed with Ted Turner’s Atlanta Braves for what was a 3 year deal worth 1 million. Messersmith and the players union had won in the courts but the stress and push back from the media and the fans took a toll. There were hostile fans, some furious at the man they saw as the foremost of “greedy ballplayers,” and Dodgers supporters who felt abandoned by a favorite player for money. He got hate mail, was subjected to obscene insults, was hit by a thrown bottle, and was punched in his pitching arm by a spectator. Some players ripped him in the press. “I’m emotionally drained,” Messersmith conceded. “It goes back to playing without a contract, back to arbitration, to the bidding, to the farce with New York and the Angels, to the demands on my time since (joining the Braves). The whole thing has taken a lot out of me.”

Due to the delays Messersmith missed all of spring training in 1976 and he showed up in Atlanta unready emotionally and physically for the upcoming season. Still, after a slow and rocky start he made the All Star team pitching brilliantly in June and July. Messersmith got injured before the 1977 season and his effectiveness was greatly diminished. It would be his last season in Atlanta. He had multiple surgeries, a stint with the New York Yankees that looked promising (Billy Martin said Messersmith had “the best stuff in baseball”) but one final injury while falling to cover first base turned out to be the end of a brilliant 12 year career.

Messersmith moved to Soquel, a quiet canyon community adjacent to Santa Cruz, California. There he could live a quiet live with the surf close by. A private, introspective man, he frequently said that when he was done with professional baseball he wanted to live in the mountains and grow his own food. Messersmith remarried and had a son. He said that raising his son “was the best job he ever had.”

"In 1985 and 1986 Messersmith’s name was put forth in the voting for enshrinement in the Baseball Hall of Fame, principally as a symbolic gesture for his pitching prowess and his role in the establishment of free agency. His career won-loss record of 130-99 was not up to Hall of Fame standards, even though his other statistics were as good as or better than those of some starting pitcher contemporaries who made it into the Hall (Steve Carlton, Ferguson Jenkins, Catfish Hunter, Phil Niekro, Jim Palmer, Gaylord Perry, Tom Seaver, and Don Sutton). Among this group, Messersmith had the best hits per nine innings and ERA, the second best won-loss percentage, the third best in shutouts per 40 games, and the third best WHIP. However, Messersmith started only half as many games (290) as his Hall of Fame contemporaries. That they had greater longevity is the reason they are in the Hall and Messersmith is not. But despite his abbreviated career, Messersmith was clearly a top-notch pitcher, held back in part by the multiplicity of injuries to his throwing hand, elbow, and shoulder." (NYTimes)

As difficult as it was for Messersmith to challenge the baseball establishment, he did not regret doing it. “It needed to be done,” he said a decade after his career ended. “I had gone through a couple of negotiations that were very one-sided and it (free agency) became a principle thing to me. The owners kind of had us in a corner. The players need to get some respect.”

Messersmith had virtually no contact with baseball in the first 10 years of his retirement. Then in 1986 he accepted an offer to coach the baseball team at Cabrillo College, a community college near his home. As he put it, “All of a sudden I’m head baseball coach, head groundskeeper, head nose-wiper.” The players referred to him as some face on an antique baseball card. About his coaching Messersmith said, “I’m not the world’s greatest coach but I enjoy it. I love the interaction with the kids at that age, making the transition from high school to adulthood. That’s a real special time.”
Messersmith wasn’t grooming his players to be professional athletes. He was teaching them to see that “if you give 100 percent, no matter what you do, sooner or later you are going to find something in which you will be a success.” Messersmith served two stints as baseball coach at Cabrillo, from 1986 to 1991 and from 2005 to 2007, when he retired at age 63.

Messersmith summed up his coaching experience this way: “There’s a major difference between professional and the level I’m coaching. When you work as a professional athlete, you`re very selfish, especially as a pitcher. You don`t worry about anybody else, really. You have tunnel vision. With this, you have to share everything." Messersmith helped students find their way and for him that’s what it all was about: “Knowing I’m serving life. Letting people know I care about them. I try to motivate on love. I don’t think there’s anything else that gets it done like love. I’ve been learning that life serves those who serve it. When I played I was serving only myself."

“I loved playing the game,” Messersmith said. “If we could have played it in the backyard I think I would have played every day.” As for the business of baseball, he remarked, “In professional baseball there wasn’t any fun. There were too many egos. It was too serious. Guys didn’t have a good time. I believe you can have fun and play … you can have fun and win."

Messersmith said he hoped to be remembered as a good pitcher, although one who didn’t last too long, and as “a guy who believed in standing up for what he thought was right."

Messersmith has refused to be a part of any commemorative events at Dodger Stadium. He has refused any invites to make appearances as an ex Dodger or California Angel star pitcher. He hasn't revisited Dodger Stadium since his last playing day in 1978. He did attend a 25th anniversary celebration at the Cal Berkeley football stadium before a game in 1991 commemorating his college career there that ended in 1966. Only coincidentally I happened to be at that game.

In some ways the story of Andy Messersmith is a sad and somewhat bitter one. Upon closer inspection we see a story of triumph and principle over “me first” mentality. We see an extraordinary athlete, a man, who ultimately chose “love” over all else. That became the guiding principle of his post baseball life.

“I don’t think that anything else gets it done like love”.

Andy Messersmith was the favorite baseball player for this teenaged kid. That’s a very common story in sports and not too much to write about. In the final analysis, though, this “favorite baseball player” ends up becoming a profound inspiration for the power of love and selflessness. To be sure Messersmith has some profound legacies; the legacy that most transcends for me is the legacy of love. I never saw that coming when I was focused in the early 1970’s on his ability to throw a baseball. What a beautiful trajectory.