Episode Transcript
[00:00:06] Speaker A: If we're all involved, then we have a united front. We have much more strength than we do if we're fragmented about it. How do you have pride in your organization if you have no idea where you've come from, where you are, where you're going to be?
Knowledge is power. That's when unity, that's when solidarity all comes into the matter. That's how you get everybody on the same page.
[00:00:27] Speaker B: Welcome to the Players Association Stitch by Stitch podcast where we talk to current and former players about union and baseball history and the bond that players share across generations.
Our first episode features a conversation with the late Phil Garner, whose impact on the game spanned decades as a major league player and manager.
[00:00:47] Speaker A: I think the team that gets the breaks injury wise is going to be the team that perseveres.
A home run for scrap iron.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: Phil was around for free agency, collusion and the replacement spring of 1995. And he showed enough of a feisty side during one CBA negotiation that a certain big league owner referred to him as a, quote, communist, a characterization he rebuffed with his typical wit and good humor.
[00:01:14] Speaker A: Well, I'm not a communist. I'm actually quite the capitalist. And if you look at it from labor side, this, this is true capitalism here.
I'm holding out with some talent that I think was worth a certain amount of money. That is what capitalists do.
[00:01:29] Speaker B: The man known as scrap iron was truly one of a kind. Phil, you came out of the University of Tennessee, you broke in with Oakland in like 73. What do you remember about baseball at the time in terms of the union and where it was and just the things that bait people, players had achieved and things that they were fighting for?
[00:01:50] Speaker A: Well, it, I, I came in at a, at a good time, a good time for players and I had, my major in college was business. I enjoyed the, the labor classes, but I enjoyed them from the standpoint of management as opposed to labor. Now here I get into baseball and I'm on the labor side as opposed to the management side. And when I got into the, the minor leagues, obviously it didn't, there wasn't much talk about it. But as I got closer to the big leagues, when I got to aaa, I went up to the big leagues and I saw I'm playing behind Sal Bando and at the time the reserve clause is in full play.
Basically you sign a one year contract with your major league team and they have you for the better for the rest of your life, basically.
And so I, I felt like that was inherently unfair and I I had hoped that once I got to the big leagues I could get involved in the union and somehow help to affect change. So I started thinking about it when I was in the minor leagues. But I wasn't the only guy playing behind somebody like Sal Bando who wasn't going to get traded probably and who wasn't going to go anywhere. This is right prior to free agency. Now were started to be some rumblings about well, somebody's going to need to challenge the reserve clause. Well, if you were going to do that, you were going to lose your job in baseball. So the one thing that I would hope that the modern day player can go back and reflect on is what Andy Messer, Smith, Kurt Flood, those guys were the pioneers on this and they took the brunt of the hell that was dished out by challenging the management, the owners of baseball, which were all powerful at that time. And it was a disadvantage for the players, a holy disadvantage to the players when the reserve cause was challenged and it was struck down.
Meaning that a one year contract meant one year with a one year option. If it had a one year option. That's what it was in every business contract that you ever saw in those days. A one year contract with a one year option was a two year contract unless guys decided to opt in out after the second year.
The only situation where a one year contract with a one year option could go on in perpetuity without the player agreeing to it was in baseball the pendulum was way on the management side, owner side, and it needed to swing a little bit towards the middle. That was where the big challenge was and that was the crux of the Curt Flood, Andy Messerschmitt, all those guys, they challenged it and God bless them for doing it because they caught hell.
[00:04:39] Speaker B: You mentioned you were on a team with Reggie Jackson and Sal Bando and Joe Rudy and just like Vital Blue I think was on that team and Fingers. But it seemed like at a young age you became pretty involved in the union. You a little bit afraid for your sort of job security.
[00:04:58] Speaker A: Well, I, let me be honest, I, I think anybody that was, that got involved with the Players association, yes, you, you had, you were aware that you were going against a very established and in some cases cruel management, that they didn't like it when players stood up to the, whatever the system was in place of the day. So it wasn't an easy process. It wasn' wasn't something that like some of the reporters in those days said Marvin Miller tells the players what to do. And that's what's going to happen? No, it wasn't that way at all. That was a, that was totally irresponsible reporting. Marvin Miller was extremely good at making suggestions, but allowing the players to talk it out, to reason it out and to try to come up with a solution. And that's why Marvin Miller was so powerful and he was able to lead and not force anything onto the players. When the players decided to do something, the players had made the decision. Marvin might have suggested something, but the players made the final decision. The next negotiating period. When it came down, I was, had been traded, which I think every player that was on the negotiating team was traded. That was to show, hey, we're still in charge. Ownership saying, we have the ability to trade you and we're going to do it whether you're a good player or not. So a lot of good players got traded and I got traded to Houston. And our owner was John McMullen who was a fiercely against unionizing. And he told me he's just communist, you guys are just communists. And I kept telling him, I said, john, your problem is not free agency. You have the ability to either pay or not plan free agency. Your problem is going to be arbitration. And you better look at arbitration because that one is, is going to hammer you. While ownership can pay what they want to or not what they want to in free agency, it's arbitration where they, you know, you got a young player that's a good young player and you look like he's going to be better and better and all of a sudden that, that player jumps out of the million dollar salary into the $10 million salary before he can become a free agency. And that you almost have to pay, you can't, you don't want, you don't want to trade the players. So it was exciting, there's no question, because I found labor and management relationships exciting. Most players didn't, they didn't want to care about that. All they want to do is go play ball. All that stuff will take care of itself. These things were not easy, especially after the first negotiations when the Messer Schmidt decision was handed down. Those were serious and tough fought in negotiations. And the Players association doesn't come out on top unless we have Marvin Miller.
[00:07:51] Speaker B: Now Garner will come in. The umpires quickly interceding here.
[00:07:57] Speaker A: Not a bad blood between these two ball club. Here we go.
[00:08:00] Speaker B: They're coming in.
[00:08:01] Speaker A: The managers are going at it.
[00:08:03] Speaker B: Yep, those meetings could get pretty spirited, couldn't they?
[00:08:06] Speaker A: It sounds like they definitely got spirited. And most of it Was.
Was Mike Marshall, because Mike Marshall did not want to give up the 1 and 1. Marvin had a kind of an open door. If you were anybody, any player, anybody could come in and could listen to the discussion. A lot of players chose not to, but some chose to come in.
We had Steve Rogers that was critical on it. We had other players there that were extremely helpful in bringing up ideas. But most of the players and the. Most of the negotiating team felt like that a compromise would. Was going to work out better for the players. Marvin had a. Have a. Had a great saying that I have used so many times since then. He would say, boys, let me remind you that a rising tide lifts all boats.
And so what he was. What he was referring to is when we were discussing about giving up the one in one and it became obvious to some of us who were sort of, you know, when I say amateur economist, I really. I had a couple of economic courses in college and I realized I was real stupid when it came to economics, but I still fashioned myself as somewhat of an amateur economist. Some things made sense to me. There's a lot of things when you get deep in the woods in economics that are hard for me to understand, but I can understand this. When you've got 10 apples on the shelf and you got one buyer for one apple, the price of the apple is going to go down. If you've got 10 buyers for one Apple on the shelf, the price is going to go up. That is economics, and that's human nature. It's what's going to happen. And I. I have a ranch and I have hay on a. I, I produce hay. And on a year when nobody has hay, the price of my hay will double because nobody else has it and people need to have hay.
Last year we had a lot of rain, and I still have 150bales of hay that I haven't been able to sell because nobody needs the hay. That's economics. So apply it to baseball players. We had a meeting with Buoy Kuhn and Bui Coon said, boys, that can't work. Baseball will go down the tubes. It'll. It'll die. It'll never work. And what we need is 10 years to free agency. We immediately threw that out the door because we had already discussed in our backroom meetings that 10 years to free. We knew, kind of knew that that's where they were going to go with this, but we knew that wasn't going to fly well. So we go back after that. Offers on the table and we sit in the Room.
And so now the discussion becomes, okay guys, what do we do with players that we, if we agree to six years, we've just taken away their right to become a free agent. What do we do for him? And Marvin Miller said arbitration.
And he also said, you got to have the ability to equate what a free agent market suggests a player is worth to what an arbitration, an arbitration guy needs to be able to be. Used that as a comparison.
Now fast forward, because when John McMullen, the owner told me that, that they had to do something about free agency and I told him that arbitration was killing him, he said, well, we got to do. He said arbitration was never meant to.
For an arbitration player to equate himself to a free agent. And I said, John McMullen, you're dead wrong on that. That's exactly what that was meant to do because that's how we got all the players to get on board, including Mike Marshall, not to sue us because we allowed arbitrary. We said arbitration can go in there and that way a player can. He's given up the right to be a free agent, but he has a right to go to arbitration and make somewhat close to a free agent salary level. The good news is that I think that the players associations has always had good players and smart players that have stood up in these times and made good suggestions and have provided great leadership that have benefited the players immensely. And I would hope that the modern day player understands that you, everybody from
[00:12:34] Speaker B: that era always talks about Marvin, just your personal encounters with him. How did you meet him? Do you remember? And what was it about him in terms of his personal style, his way of dealing with players that made him a Hall of Famer.
[00:12:50] Speaker A: The first time I had met him was in spring training. Marvin always made the rounds to every team in spring training and he was, he never wanted the players association to become bloated. He always wanted it to be small and he always wanted it to be starving lawyers that were working there because he felt like that was the union's calling. He felt like if I'm leading this union, I need to stand with the players. If they go on strike and they don't get money, I'm on strike, I don't get money. He was enduring to guys like me who felt like you got a lot of bang for your buck with, with Marvin. He, he understood your plight, he was going to live your plight with you. But also his style was, he was extremely soft spoken.
I never ever saw him, he get red in the face in these negotiations with Owners, which you knew he was getting upset, but I never saw him raise his voice. He never got up on the table and pounded his fist. Now players would do that. I would see Steve Rogers do that every now and then and saw Doug Desensions do it. But I never ever saw Reggie Jackson one time, you know, got all, all revved up, but I never saw Marvin get all, all upset. So he had this beautiful way of communicating with you. Like I say that my wife is really good at this.
You know, if, if we're having an argument and we, and we're going full steam ahead, but we hit a brick wall, I have a tendency to want to put my head down and keep beating my head against that brick wall until I think I'm going to knock it down. Meanwhile, I'm bloody in myself, you know, and to the point I can't see Marvin hit the brick wall. He'd bounce over to the side a little bit and hit the brick wall. He'd bounce over here until he found a way to get around the brick wall. And so that I learned from Marvin, there's always a different way to approach some of these problems. So that became an endearing trait. But what I, in the beginning, let me go back to when Marvin would have these meetings with the Players association, with the players on the field. He always started off with about a 30 minute rendition and a lot of players fell asleep. And I have to admit in the beginning I found it somewhat boring. But he always gave a history of the Players association, how it started, some of the trials and tribulations it had, and how it had gotten to where it was at that point in time.
And after a couple of years I began to see the value in that and started paying attention and started realizing, wait a minute, what Marvin is doing here is he's, he's establishing a culture. And what you have to see is the culture is not Marvin Miller. The culture is the, are the players.
The players are what make this happen. And without the players and without the overwhelming majority of the players being on board with what the management of the Players association want, you're not going to get anywhere. So contrary to what the press always said about Marvin Howe, he was the dictator of the Players Association. Whatever Marvin Miller told the players to do, the players did that was so false and so wrong, it couldn't have been any, any worse reporting any in any of the world. So he never tried to force anything down us. It was always about the players.
[00:16:24] Speaker B: I got to get back to this. So you actually had John McMullen called you a communist.
[00:16:30] Speaker A: That's true story. Yeah.
[00:16:32] Speaker B: Did you have other hostile exchanges where they said something where you're like, they really don't, they really don't like the fact that we're organizing through the years?
[00:16:45] Speaker A: Well, the, the other owner when I was in Pittsburgh was, was Dan Galbraith. Now let me say this about ownership. I felt like the owners of the teams that I, Charles Finley was a, an eccentric owner. He was different than everybody else, but I felt like Charles Finley was an extremely interesting character. And I, you know, some stories about Charles and I, how we went, Mr. Finley and I, how we'd go back and forth on our negotiations were really kind of interesting. This is, this is when I did not have an agent because he didn't have an agent. So we dealt individually each other and it was pretty interesting, but it didn't have anything to do with the Players association. But, but my owner was, was at the time when all this was going down while I was originally with, with Oakland and then promptly traded to Pittsburgh after I stood up to, to Charles Finley. He didn't like that too much, so he traded me to Pittsburgh. And John Galbraith was the old owner and the original owner, not the original, but the longest running owner at the time, the Pirates. And then his son Dan Growler took over. Great owners, great, great ownership. I don't, I, I, I, I respected him a great deal. We just disagreed on, on the free agency part of all this. And that's an honest disagreement. Dan Galbraith or John Galbraith, but Dan Galbraith at one time he called a meeting to me because I was the player rep for Pittsburgh as also the assistant player rep during all these negotiations for the National League. So he asked to have a meeting and during the meeting he, he said to me, he said, I don't understand what's going on with you players.
Why can't we get to six years with, with some form of arbitration?
And I was stunned. And I said, well, Dan, that's kind of where the players positions are. The owners aren't there yet. Well, it became obvious to me at that moment that the owners had not communicated as well with their negotiating team as Marvin Miller's negotiating team had committed, had communicated with the players because he was suggesting something that we had on the table and he was a little, he was taken back by it. You would see he was a little bit stunned about it and he cut the meeting short very quickly.
But it was, it was a little bit tense in the meeting because you're dealing with a somewhat hostile environment. We're going. We're on strike. Players are losing money, Owners are losing money. And. And it was, it was against the American ideal for baseball players to go on strike. We caught hell from a lot of fans who, who, hey, we're never going to watch another game. You guys don't have the right to strike. There were a lot of people in America that felt that way, and we heard from them. I got letters from them. And people would see you on the street, if they recognize you, then they'd say, you guys are in the wrong. You need to go back to work.
It was. It was some difficult situation. And then I got, you know, right after that happened, I got traded to Houston after those negotiations were settled. And then when the next negotiations came up, the owners were trying to take back what. What they had given up on or what we had given up, actually. They wanted to move free agency to eight years, and they wanted to eliminate arbitration and all this kind of stuff. And that's when, John, my mother said, you're just a communist. You're a communist. You know, you're that union guy, and you're a communist. I said, john, well, I'm not a communist. I'm actually quite the capitalist. And if you look at it from labor side, this is true capitalism here. I'm. I'm holding out with some talent that I think was worth a certain amount of money. That is what capitalists do. If I own a piece of land and it has oil underneath it, and you're an oil company, and you come to me and want to negotiate for the rights of my asset, for my oil, I start negotiating with you. Well, that's what I'm. That's what baseball players are doing. They have a talent. You need the talent.
[00:21:06] Speaker B: They.
[00:21:07] Speaker A: You're negotiating with us. This is the American way. So he didn't buy into that, but
[00:21:12] Speaker B: that's, that's the way we argued the 1981 strike. Phil, I was young then. I wasn't covering baseball. But they did split the season in two, and you had, like, two months off in the middle of the season. And I believe it was related mostly to, like, free agent compensation that you would attach compensation to free agents, and that would really dilute and weaken free agency. But that seems like kind of the mother of all strikes, given. Except for 94, given that it just cut the season in half and you lost two months.
[00:21:50] Speaker A: Yeah, that was.
That was really, really hard. Those of us that were in negotiation felt like it was the only thing to do. We had to go on strike. We had to. We had to hold our ground because we'd already given up the one and one. We weren't going to give up anymore, like the ownership on it. So we felt like we had to go on strike. It was a contentious deal. It was really, really tough. The players stuck together and eventually won. Now you can say it's a black eye in baseball. If. And I wouldn't disagree with you. It was something I wish that didn't happen. Let let's face it, baseball, when you look at it, is entertainment. That's basically what we're selling. Yeah. For those that are playing. We want our numbers. We want to see guys that are truly great players go into the hall of Fame and they're all remembered by what they're doing on the field. They're not remembered by negotiation tactics and whether we had free agency or not. This is entertainment business. But there is a business side to it and the business side has to be taken care of. The players hung strong and eventually won because we didn't go backwards to, to what we'd agreed to on the six year free agency. And I think that the system kind of works.
[00:23:06] Speaker B: We've talked about Marvin a lot. We do in history. But Don Fear was the head of the PA for a long time.
Several years when you were at the end of your career. When you look back on his place in PA history and your dealings and experiences with him, how would you like him to be assessed?
[00:23:24] Speaker A: Number one, when you got to follow an icon like Marvin Miller, it's hard to do you. You don't want to be the player that comes along as a catcher behind Johnny Bench. You don't. You just don't want to be the guy that takes over center field when Judge decides to retire because you're going to be compared to those guys. So Don Fear, who had been a longtime assistant for Marvin's, is a guy that takes over. And I felt like he did a brilliant job. He maintained the integrity of the Players Association. He carried through Marvin's culture, his.
The way. The way he did things. Even though Marvin stayed on as a consultant for a number of years, Don Fer was the guy that was running it for a number of her. 20. Was it 20 something years in there that Don stayed in as the, the head of the association? I think he was brilliant.
I think he deserves all the accolades that anybody could possibly give him.
[00:24:21] Speaker B: 94. I think you were a young manager with the brewers then. Correct. You were like in your third year
[00:24:27] Speaker A: I think that's correct.
[00:24:29] Speaker B: And they go to spring training and you're the manager, and they say, we're going to bring in a bunch of replacement players.
What was that like for you, as a hard, staunch union guy, to just go through that whole thing and how difficult was it?
[00:24:44] Speaker A: While I was very much pro union, there were a lot of things about the union that I. I opposed. When I lost my argument, I went along with what everybody else had decided. So I was with the Milwaukee brewers, and Bud Selig was the owner of our team. He was also the interim commissioner, and in the winter, when he told me that's what they were going to do, and Bud had said, look where we're going to do. We're going to bring in replacement players. And I said, oh, but don't do that. That. That is. You're going to lessen the value of our product. He said. He said to me, in this situation, he said, people won't know the difference because the whole thing will be of lower talent rate. So if. If talent B is playing against talent B, you don't. You don't see the difference because talent A is not on the field. You just don't see that. And I said, bud, that's not true. When you don't see a Reggie Jackson on the field, you don't see Sal Bando on the field, and you see somebody that's been out of baseball for two years on the field, it's not the same. It's not the same product. Yeah, I understand. Trying to bust the union, that makes. That makes sense to me if I were on your side of the fence, but this is not the way to do it.
[00:25:56] Speaker B: Bill, how long do you think owners have been saying Jesus to be great, to break the union?
[00:26:03] Speaker A: Well, since the beginning of time. Although I think some owners are maybe a little more pragmatic. And they say.
They say, okay, I'm not going to be able to break the union. How am I going to maximize my profits and my ability to make money?
[00:26:21] Speaker B: So pretend we're a room of young players.
You're in a clubhouse, and I say to you, why should I care about this stuff? Why should I care about the history and what you guys have been through? And that includes, you know, even maybe things like benefits or pension or that sort of thing. Talk to us about we're the next generation. And I'm saying, why should we care?
[00:26:46] Speaker A: Jerry, that's a great question. And.
And I think everybody should address that. I hope that when you talk to these people, first let Me talk about the pension, because the modern day player doesn't consider the pension. When you're 28 years old and you're making $10 million a year, you don't think about the pension. But I am stunned, stunned at the number of players that have made 20, 30 million dollars in their career. And when they get to be 40 years old, they don't have any money.
The pension is critical.
Don't change the pension. Don't fool with it. Keep it as a defined benefit program. Keep your health program there because you're going to need it. I'm going through cancer. I just noticed on my bill the other day, one chemo treatment, $33,000. I paid $15. And by the way, I've had about 30 of those chemo treatments. The second reason you need to follow this is, is because all of this that the players have now was fought for, blood, sweat and tears. What you got today was built on by guys who, some of them lost their jobs, some of them had to go on strike and lose a lot of their income and some of them never got it back. There were hardships along the way. To get to where you are today. Don't ever forget that. And I would hope that the Players association is absolutely dedicated to force feeding the history of the Players association and players. Because whether you want to hear this history or not, you need to hear this history. Because in one negotiating session, all of it can go away. Only one. It's all it takes, just one. So don't go through the heartache again. Maintain what you have. Don't give it up for the pension, which you're not thinking about now, for health care. Will you believe me? My sons and daughter trying to have insurance, I'm just talking to them about it this morning. Their insurance is outrageous and it's not anywhere close to what our insurance is. Don't give those things up. Those things are important.
So all of this is important and the history is what brings it into real life today. And you have to pay attention. You don't have to delve into labor management relationships like I did or like Bob Moon did or somebody else. But you need to be aware of what's going on. That would be my message to a modern day player.
[00:29:17] Speaker B: The baseball world suffered a devastating loss in April when Phil Garner died of pancreatic cancer at age 76.
Phil leaves behind a loving family, a legion of friends and admirers, and a passel of stories that attest to his kindness, his humanity and his rare ability to dispense with the bullcrap and get right down to business.
Phil was a tireless advocate for the union and never lost sight of his responsibility to make things better for future generations.
This podcast is the product of a lengthy interview with we did with Phil several months before his passing. It is our tribute to the extraordinary life he lived and his enduring impact on the baseball community.
This has been an episode of the MLBPA Stitch by Stitch podcast, connecting players from the past, present and future.
