Episode Transcript
[00:00:05] Speaker A: Welcome to the MLBPA Stitch by Stitch podcast where we talk to current and former players about union history, baseball and the bond that players share across generations. In this episode we catch up with Larry Durker who has become synonymous with Houston baseball after nearly four decades in the game as a player for front office member broadcaster and manager Dirkker's wind
[00:00:32] Speaker B: up pitch to Jorgens ground ball. Watson's got it, it's all over and Gurker has the no hitters.
[00:00:38] Speaker A: Not many ballplayers get to celebrate their 18th birthday as members of a major league club, much less as that day's starting pitcher. But Larry did just that when the hard throwing ready faced the San Francisco Giants on September 22, 1964.
[00:00:55] Speaker B: When we got out there, they staged me blowing out candles on a birthday ca with a bunch of players around me.
[00:01:02] Speaker A: It was the perfect place to begin our conversation with Larry sharing his recollection of what it was like to face a certain future hall of Famer barely three months removed from his high school graduation.
You broke into the big leagues, if I'm correct. I think you were 17 when you signed and you made your debut. You were 18 on your birthday. I'm pretty sure correct.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: Yes.
[00:01:28] Speaker A: I did have to ask.
You struck out this guy Willie Mays in the first inning.
[00:01:34] Speaker B: Yeah. Where do you go from there?
[00:01:36] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah. And then. And then he got on the next time and I think you picked him off.
What do you remember about that day and that encounter, you know, with Willie Mays?
[00:01:48] Speaker B: Mostly I just remember being amped up. They did everything they could to make me even more nervous. They sent a TV crew over to my hotel room to interview me for the news. And then we got out there. They staged me blowing out candles on a birthday cake with a bunch of players around me. And so if I wasn't nervous before those things, when I started warming up, I realized it was different. I just, when I tried to throw anything slow, when I tried to throw a change up or a curveball, it just went straight in fast.
I was able to throw a slider because it's a, it's a power pitch.
And I was able to get the ball over well enough to see for myself that if I threw good pitches that even major league hitters would make outs. I got into a couple of games after that on the last road trip of the year. The last one was, last city was Los Angeles, which is where I grew up. So I was pitching late May, early June for Taft High School in Woodland Hills. And in September, I was pitching at Dodger Stadium against the Dodgers. So I had family there, obviously. Also some of my high school baseball teammates were there. So there was no guarantee I was going to get in the game. I was in the bullpen at that stage. But the Astros were a rebuilding team that came on the scene with the Mets in 1962, and they were trying to prove, as were the Mets, that they had some good young talent in the system. And so guys like me and Rusty Staub and Joe Morgan and Jimmy Wynn, Doug Raider, Bob Watson, a lot of guys came up between 65 and 70, and all of them had legitimate major league tools. Of course, we didn't have as many players or as many experienced players. So we still were never in the race, but we were good enough that people were paying attention.
[00:03:49] Speaker A: You were a so called bonus baby.
What was your bonus?
[00:03:56] Speaker B: Well, I was a bonus baby. And actually it was. It was the only time in my life I was ever a free agent because 64 was just for the major league teams. I could go out and sign anybody wanted to. It was. You were a free agent, you, if you were an amateur. And the two teams that were really interested toward the end were the cubs and the Colt 45s. I had some college scholarship offers. My dad insisted that if I didn't get $30,000 or more that he was going to insist that I take those scholarships or one of them. I didn't mind that. I didn't mind school. It was, you know. But I really wanted to play pro ball. So the Cubs called and they offered me $30,000.
Then the Cubs scout said, if you would just promise me one thing, that you won't sign with the Colt 45s before tomorrow, because I think they're going to offer more. I'm afraid that we won't get you and you need to be with the Cubs. We got a good young team and we're going to be competing and you're going to be in Chicago real soon. The Colt 45s called, offered me 35. I told them what the Cub scout said, and they called back about half an hour later and offered me 40.
And then about another half an hour it was 45 and then 50 and then 55. And they were only bidding against themselves. But they didn't know what the Cubs offered or were going to offer if the scout got permission to offer more.
So that was pretty cool. They offered me a Mustang.
And that was in 64. And it was the first year of the Mustang. So had I treated that car with kid gloves? It'd be worth a lot today, but I didn't.
It was either take the car or take an eight year college scholarship, which was worth $1,000 a semester. And so I kind of looked at my dad and said, yeah, I guess I better take the college.
And that turned out to be a good decision because the car that I bought with the bonus was a hot rod too.
And I blew out the clutch on that in about a year and a half.
And it all worked out really well.
[00:06:06] Speaker A: So it was 55,000 in a college scholarship, I guess. Is that what it.
[00:06:10] Speaker B: That was a lot. Some teams were offering $100,000 to players, and I don't know who signed in 1964 or how many stories like mine are around, but I would imagine there's a few.
You see us compete on the field, but the competition, it doesn't end there, between general managers and scouts and owners. And there's a lot going on behind the scenes, and those guys are just as competitive as we were.
[00:06:40] Speaker A: What do you remember about the way sort of business was done in the big leagues? 64 and 65. And then all of a sudden you had this union. How did things change for you and other players?
[00:06:54] Speaker B: The union was a bigger thing for all of us. And I didn't last long enough. My last active year was 77, and I could have been a free agent at that time, but the year before, I dislocated my shoulder throwing a pitch in the bullpen and it was just never the same. So I. That was the end of it. And I was one year short of becoming a free agent. And I was 31 years old and had 100, roughly 140 wins. So I would have been worth a lot as a free agent if I had a healthy arm. But it all came back to me in the end, which probably was preferable. I don't know what I did to that first car, what I would have done if I had a lot more money, but the money came later, which was in the form of a pension. And so the union, Marvin Miller and all those lockouts, strikes and actions and acrimony and all of that ended up serving me better than a big bonus would have because now I get a monthly check and it's a good one.
[00:07:57] Speaker A: Do you remember your first time you met Marvin coming to spring training or talking to players? What was it like then when he was trying to organize everybody?
[00:08:09] Speaker B: He went around, you know, he went to Florida and he stopped in everywhere along the way to talk to players. And then he went to Arizona and talked to all the players that trained there. The thing that I remember most was he had a very soft speaking presentation.
And even though I wasn't as deaf then as I am now, I had a strain to hear him.
So when you put that together, he was a small guy. He had some sort of a physical problem with his hand that was noticeable. Yet when it came to wielding power, he was as good as it gets. He knew how to bring down the hammer.
[00:08:51] Speaker A: How receptive were the players to what Marvin was talking about with starting a union? Since baseball never had a union, Was everybody on board or did he have to sell players?
[00:09:03] Speaker B: I think so. We didn't really have anything to compare it to, I think, because it was the first. There were a couple of attempts to do it that failed in the 50s, maybe early 60s, but this one didn't fail, and it was enormously successful from the union standpoint. And of course, for all of his players, because of the, you know, we didn't have any health care. He got everything. So anything that anybody had ever mentioned about union rights and workers rights was he was selling that, and he was very successful at it.
[00:09:39] Speaker A: People now talk about luxury tax thresholds and revenue sharing and all those kinds of things. How important at the time were things like health care, pension? Were those big topics of discussion? And for you as a player, what were the most important issues in your mind? As a young player in the 60s,
[00:10:03] Speaker B: I didn't even imagine that we could become free agents. I guess Kurt Flood was the first one to test that by refusing to be traded to the Phillies. And he never got back into baseball. Then I think the next one was Catfish Hunter. Of course, you had Charlie Finley, who was a maverick owner, and the owner's position was that if you don't sign, we can just sign you for whatever amount of money we want to, and you can either play or you can quit. And so I had a big year in 1969, my only really big year. So I really tried hard to get a big raise, and it didn't quite work out that way. I didn't go to spring training. It was not uncommon during those days for players to just not report for spring training if they weren't happy with their contract.
But the owners said, we can renew it, and the union challenged that, and Catfish became a free agent. Later, Andy Messerschmid, same way he went from the Dodgers to the Braves. So there was already some movement in that direction. But as a young guy, really, I can't remember thinking about it very much.
Checks over to first base again. Now Warwick stretches that lead. Here's the pitch to Boyer. Ground ball to short. Lillis back in the hole. Go to second.
[00:11:26] Speaker A: It's all over. And Houston wins it three to two.
[00:11:29] Speaker B: And Gurker has his first complete game of his major league career.
[00:11:34] Speaker A: So you were 1969, you went 20 and 13, made the All Star team, had a 2.33 ERA, 305 innings pitched. Did you get a big raise that year?
[00:11:48] Speaker B: So I, I thought I got a big raise. I think I held out for about two weeks and the last conversation we had, I think I made 27,000 the year before and I wanted to double that. And I think I was only 22 or 3 years old, so that would have been a good time to be a free agent. We got stuck at about 47,000.
So the general manager said that he would give me $1,000 a win for everyone above 16. I ended up getting 16 wins, which I ended up thinking I was maxing out. But you know, he prepared a letter and we both signed it and he said, I'm going to put this in your file. And he put that letter in there and somehow it disappeared. So when I went to the following year, when I wanted to get the extra money that I wasn't getting as a part of my payroll of 47,000, the letter was lost and gosh, what a surprise, I ended up with 47,000, no bonus for wins. And then later, after the multi year contract started coming and the money started getting big, they negotiated the, the owners, I think, I think the owners in the union were they, they weren't that opposed to each other when it came to performance bonuses. So it was no longer possible to say you can, if you win this number of games, you can get that or saves or if you hit 300. And so there were some people that were trying to promote incentive performance based contracts, but I don't think the union was trying that hard to stop that part. For me, I was, I was happy I had the, the incentive because I didn't really pitch anywhere near as well the next year. But I think I won my last four games thinking that I was getting $1,000 a game for the win. I don't know if I would have gotten those four wins if I didn't think I was pitching for something because we were out of the race.
[00:13:46] Speaker A: So you got 16 wins, so I don't know if you would have gotten anything extra anyway. Right. Because it was.
[00:13:52] Speaker B: Yeah, right.
[00:13:53] Speaker A: Nowadays players have agents and when you would go in and negotiate Your contract in the 60s, how did that work? You just go in to see the general manager yourself, and he'd kind of say, take it or leave it, or how is it different?
[00:14:10] Speaker B: Oh, you know, you try to negotiate. I have a friend who was on the Federal Reserve Board. He had married a lady that I knew in Houston, and so he helped me with the negotiating, you know, with the tactics. Each time I went in, he'd give me some things to say, and he said, you don't want to have put your best argument out front. You've got to wait till you get close. And my best argument was I went through the box scores for the season, and it turned out that we averaged about a thousand more per game in the Astrodome, the home games, when I was pitching, than we did at all the other games. So I could say, here's a thousand more people every day for 18, however many games I pitched at home. So you've got the money to pay me.
The last time I went to negotiate, I mentioned that about the attendance. The general manager took a cigar out of his pocket, lit it up and turned his back toward me and looked at the wall and didn't say anything. And finally, after a minute or two, I started talking, which I shouldn't have done because I couldn't say anything. That was a stronger argument than I'd already made. So then afterwards, I mentioned to this guy what happened, and he said, okay, next time you go in, bring a cigar.
[00:15:36] Speaker A: So you became a player rep, I guess.
[00:15:39] Speaker B: Well, how did you get.
[00:15:40] Speaker A: How did you get involved in the union? Were there veteran guys who kind of brought you along?
[00:15:45] Speaker B: Well, I think there was some concern that anybody who accepted the job of being a player rep was not going to be treated as well as the other players. And there may have been something to that, but Denny lemaster was our player rep. So he told me that he didn't want to do it anymore, but he was going to have to do it this year, whatever it was. When he found out that the winter meetings were going to be in Hawaii, he decided to be player rep for another year. So he went to Hawaii, and then we went on strike. And so I was the assistant, or the vice president, whatever you might call it. I was the backup player rep, which he had to have because a guy could get traded. And so he got. He went to Hawaii and I went on strike and was.
Let's just say that that wasn't popular among the fans. And so I took a little hit on that one. But, you know, if you if you keep performing just as we learned after 94, with the mother of all strikes that cost us the World Series and the next spring training, if it weren't for Sosa and McGuire, I don't know if the fans ever would have come back after that one. So I got myself in that position for a while, and I got myself out of that position when I found out that the next meetings were going to be in Palmdale or somewhere. I'm not sure where.
[00:17:15] Speaker A: You didn't want to go there, I guess.
So you mentioned that, like, getting blowback did by being the union republic.
Maybe you'd be quoted in the paper or they identified you with the strike. How did that.
[00:17:29] Speaker B: Yeah, well, they interviewed me, so I would be on TV and radio talking about what it was we were trying to accomplish and that we felt that it was well deserved and hoping that it would be resolved soon.
But I still don't think it was not accepted in the spirit there.
I think that others that have worked in other industries and been represented by unions, I think that maybe people like that could have empathized. But I think in general, the universe of baseball fans, it was not kosher to ask for more money when you already were getting a lot of money for just playing a sport.
[00:18:14] Speaker A: Did you get booed or did people yell stuff at you on the road? Like, how did you see it as. Is that. That guy,
[00:18:25] Speaker B: the funny one, happened to me one year at Shea Stadium. He didn't yell anything about the strike, but there was a fan right up on the rail. I had the ball I was going to warm up with in my hand, and I was walking down toward the bullpen, and this guy was up against the rail, said, hey, Becca, give me that ball, you bum.
That's New York. It could happen in Philadelphia, too.
[00:18:49] Speaker A: You, you did feel that maybe you were a little bit of the focus of fan anger as somebody who stood up for the players as a union
[00:18:58] Speaker B: rep. Well, coming around to the stage that I'm in now, I.
When I say that I'm not perfectly pleased with the way unions and the owners have negotiated, that leaves us in the position that we're in right now where it's like the players have the hammer now. And if there's only a, you know, a handful of free agents at any given position and a lot of teams that need somebody at that position, well, you. You know what the salaries are like now. And I'm not saying that that's necessarily the worst thing, because if you considered professional sports at the major league level, Any sport, The amount of money these guys are making, it's not that much out of line for a rock star or movie star.
Others in the entertainment field are making way more money than professional athletes.
[00:19:58] Speaker A: So you were part. You. You lived through the first strike, right? In 1972, they went on strike for two weeks.
What do you remember about that? Just in terms of how did the players stick together through that thing and
[00:20:13] Speaker B: how rough was it, the player reps, you know, around opening day, when we didn't play, player reps were all flown up to New York to meet with Marvin Miller and his staff. So we were going to fly in there and fly back the next day. But what happened? What was in process?
We were flying in and, you know, maybe we were about to make a breakthrough and get it settled. But then once we got there, it turned out that we didn't. But they thought it was close, so they said, we're going to keep you guys here for another night. And so we ended up thinking we were going home and coming back the next day. Nobody packed to be staying in New York for four or five days, but that's what we did. And what I remember about it finally getting solved was Charlie Finley again, the maverick, the guy who just wouldn't always go along with the other owners. The owners were basically trying to break the players and render the union harmless by not letting us play. And I think a lot of us probably would have said, oh, you know, come on, let's play.
But what we wanted was that there was a lot of money in the benefit plan, and one of the benefits had to do with the pension, and another one had to do with disability.
And so after the union had been perking along for four or five years, they found that they were.
They just weren't using any of the money that was set aside for disabilities. And so what the players union was asking for is to take money out of that portion of the benefit plan and add it to pensions, because they could see which way that was going, and they were going to need more money in the pension part than they did in the disability. So it wasn't costing the owners one penny. And Charlie Finley didn't even come to the meetings. When he finally came, four or five days after everything started, he said, what are we doing? This isn't anything to argue about. Let's play ball. Let them take the money and put it in another part of their plan. He was an insurance GU guy, you know, he knew the business, and he thought it was stupid to not play because the Rest of the owners were not going to allow us to take our own money and move it from one part of the plan to the other.
[00:22:36] Speaker A: So you got through this thing. You survived the strike. People, when they look back, always seem to say that the baseball union has been stronger than the other sports unions. You know, they've stuck together.
[00:22:50] Speaker B: And that might be one of the reasons that may be is that we hired a professional negotiator that was well aware of everything, that everyone in every industry around the country, what kind of benefits were in the benefit plan for the players. So we had Marvin Miller.
[00:23:08] Speaker A: It seemed like the longer he went, the stronger the union got and the more the players believed in him as their leader.
What were the qualities that allowed the union to get stronger with Marvin at the helm?
[00:23:25] Speaker B: Well, I think what he did was he sold his dream.
He came up with what he thought we should get, and he did a very good job of explaining it both to us verbally and also in written form. And then he sent us back to the cities where we played, and then we can get all the players around, and we'd say, this is what Marvin said. And here's summarized in his letter. So he just did an excellent job of keeping all the players together, because in subsequent strikes, there were guys who were going to say, well, you guys may not want to play, but I missed this money, and I'm. I'm going to play. And that's what their owner's strategy was the whole time was to break the union.
[00:24:16] Speaker A: In the early 70s, when you guys went into these things, you knew that owners thought that if they took a hard line that they would break you guys. Right? I mean, how.
It seems like it was pretty obvious that was the tactic and that was what you were up against.
[00:24:34] Speaker B: Well, I can just say that Marvin was very, very effective. One of those years, Leo Durocher was our manager. I think we may have been. Houston may have been his last stop.
He was at the point where he couldn't really remember very much, and so he was a disaster as a manager at that point. We were in West Palm beach spring training to play the Braves, and I think they were not going to let us go in our locker room and meet with Marvin. And so Marvin said, okay, you guys gather around me out here on the warning track.
So we go out, the whole team in uniform, and we're out near the warning track in left field, and Leo comes out of the dugout with a fungo bat, and he starts hitting balls into the grouping of players that were out There listening to Marvin.
[00:25:24] Speaker A: Really?
[00:25:25] Speaker B: Yes, really.
[00:25:27] Speaker A: So he was the manager, but he was anti union and he, he was representing.
[00:25:32] Speaker B: He was the manager, representing management.
[00:25:35] Speaker A: Do you think that if owners had their druthers and there had been no union, is it basically just we tell players, here's the way it is and you like it and that's the way it is?
Is that what it boils down to?
[00:25:50] Speaker B: That's what it is. That's what it was. They had the power to do whatever they wanted to do, and the power was there. The club they wielded was basically saying, okay, if you don't like it, quit.
[00:26:12] Speaker A: You mentioned having the, the pension. As somebody who's now in your, what, late 70s? Yeah, that was an early thing that really was fought for.
Looking back. What does that meant to you personally, having that pension?
[00:26:28] Speaker B: It meant pretty much everything because after I finished playing, I got a job as a analyst, color man to broadcast on mostly TV and later radio.
So I wasn't making a fortune. It was kind of like it was playing that they take it or leave it. But I loved it, so I didn't leave it. And so I never made very much money playing or broadcasting by any standards. Today is not even close, but even 10 years later. So all the time that I was working after I was finished playing, I made a plan that was basically based on the pension. And So I was 31, I think, when I was finished, and if I waited until I was 62, I could get the maximum amount because the amount you got in your pension was tied to how many years you played. And if you played 10 years, that was max. If you played 20, you didn't get any more than if you played 10. And the other formula had to do with your. Your three years best salary compared to those same three years by your peers, other players throughout both leagues. And so my salary was like $10 more than what I needed to get in the top category for the pension. And so I maxed out. And I've talked to a lot of players. A lot of guys had great careers and for some reason or other they had.
They went into business, for example, and then they had a problem in the business and they needed money and they took their pension because I was just working as an employee and getting a check, you know, I wasn't running a business.
And I just made up my mind.
Whatever they pay me, that's what we're going to live on until the age of 62. Well, I'm 78 now, and almost every single year for those last 16 years, the pension, which was almost twice as much as I ever made as a player, I kept getting a raise. It seems like they have a cost of living thing, which is what you find a lot of times if you're reading things about the government and in negotiations with labor unions, et cetera, et cetera.
One of the things was, is we have to keep up with the cost of living. So now I'm in the highest bracket and getting a raise every year.
So it worked out real well for me. But I had to have the discipline to live at my means, which meant that I never had a new car when I was a broadcaster.
[00:29:11] Speaker A: For the younger players who are involved in the, you know, the negotiations and are going to be playing for the next how many years. If. If one of those kids came up to you and said, tell me about the strikes and the lockouts and what you guys went through, what would you want to convey to them to let them know about the union's history and guys like you who were involved in the ground floor and what you had to go through to get them what they have now?
[00:29:40] Speaker B: I think if I had time to prepare and it wasn't just some guy walking up or I was having to speak extemporaneously, I would try to give the players an example of how the business part of baseball, hospitalization, pensions and all that stuff was similar to the. The competition on the field. So it would be something they could relate to, because a lot of these guys wouldn't. I don't think they would really understand unless you were able to do what Marvin did, which was explain it and explain it in a way that.
That it would be accepted.
[00:30:23] Speaker A: But it definitely made a difference in your life, right? I mean, if. If it hadn't.
If there hadn't been a union, if you haven't hadn't had all those things financially, in a lot of ways, your life would have been different, right?
[00:30:37] Speaker B: I would have figured out a way to do something. I promised my dad when I signed that I would go to college during the off seasons, and I did.
I didn't quite finish, but it would have taken me a year to finish college, but then I would have had a degree in English, so I didn't want to be an English teacher.
So I started going to real estate school, and by the time I was finished playing, I had a broker's license, so I would have either been in real estate or something else. But I think one of the reasons I got the broadcasting job was because of going to college, taking English Classes, taking speech classes, doing things to try to prepare for whatever was going to come next.
[00:31:21] Speaker A: You mentioned Curt Flood. You were around in 69 when he started his fight and then basically ended his career.
How much of a big prize. What can you say about the sacrifice he made and maybe what players should think about in terms of his place in history and what they owe to him?
[00:31:44] Speaker B: If it weren't for Kurt Blood, you'd be playing one year to the next, and the owners would be playing, paying you whatever they wanted to pay you. You know, you probably wouldn't be making hardly any money at all compared to what you're making now without Kurt Flood.
[00:31:59] Speaker A: And do you think that he basically sacrificed his career for that? What he did?
[00:32:06] Speaker B: I think he did, but I think he hoped that he would win his action against the owners. And he was supported by Marvin Miller. And Marvin told him going in that he was going to have a hard time winning it because of the facts as they are and the contracts as they read that the owners have the right to do. And if you want to, you know, if you want to nail yourself to a cross, this might be it.
And it was.
[00:32:36] Speaker A: And as far as The Messer, Smith, McNally decision and catfish, like those guys, you. You got out of baseball right about the time the free agency went crazy. Crazy. But how much did everything just change in that period with those guys, those three guys?
[00:32:56] Speaker B: I think it was gradual because the benefits that Marvin and later, Donald Fair, everything they negotiated for was incremental. So each time they called it the basic agreement, which is a contract between players and owners, and each time it came up for renegotiation, they were trying to get more. And so because it was incremental, I'm not sure that they really noticed. I don't know, maybe it's sad to say, maybe it's just human nature, but I think as long as most guys were making as much money as they felt like they deserved, that they weren't going to think that much about getting more or going out on strike.
And yet, you know, they did.
The big one 94 was like no other. I hope we never have to go through that again.
[00:33:50] Speaker A: Your name is actually on One of the CBAs, one of the collective bargaining agreements, one of the labor agreements.
[00:33:57] Speaker B: I don't remember signing it.
I have a letter from Dave Justy, who was a great relief pitcher for the Pirates, but he was with us when I came up, and he was a player rep, and I had. I have a letter explaining everything and with maybe another document signed by Marvin Miller and. And this one was Dave relating to us what was going on. That kind of.
It's a sentimental thing, maybe among some of the stuff I kept and I didn't keep very much. But to have the those two documents, one with the player rep and one with Marvin, was something that I'm glad to have.
[00:34:45] Speaker A: Thank you to Larry Durker for the fantastic conversation. We thank the Houston Astros hall of Famer for his time and his dedication to his sport. This has been an episode of the mobpa Stitch by Stitch podcast, connecting players from the past, present and future.
