Lords of the Realm: The Real History of Baseball

"The great trouble with baseball today is that most of the players are in the game for the money that's in it - not for the love of it, the excitement of it, the thrill of it."
That quote does not come from Fay Vincent or Bud Selig in the 1990s. Nor was it said by Marge Schott in the 1980s. Nor by Bowie Kuhn or Calvin Griffith in the 1970s or Walter O'Malley in the 1960s. Those prophetic words were uttered by none other than the great Ty Cobb - in 1925.
John Helyar, reporter for The Wall Street Journal and co-author of the number one bestseller Barbarians at the Gate, says in Lords of the Realm, "Before it was a business, it was a game." But as Helyar discovered, and as he shows in his extraordinary new book, baseball has also been a business for a long, long time.
Lords of the Realm is not a sobersided look at the problems of high salaries and free agency. It's also not a romantic homage to the heroes of the game. It is a penetrating, take-no-prisoners look at the hundred-year history of what's become a billion-dollar machine, a cutthroat industry that, while supposedly capturing the soul of America, is and has always been dominated by such greed, back-stabbing, and double-dealing that it puts the insanity of the RJR Nabisco takeover to shame.
As Richard Moss, a baseball agent, has said about his chosen line of work: "There's so much money and so many good people. Why does this work so badly?" After hundreds of interviews and several years of research and digging, John Helyar knows the answer to Moss's question - and lays it all out before us in a way that is both horrific and hilarious.
From the despotic lunacy of Gussie Busch, George Steinbrenner, and Peter Ueberroth and the maverick antics of Branch Rickey, Charlie Finley, and Ted Turner to the chaotic, yet near-heroic rise of the union, the ever-more-mysterious dealings that baseball maintains with television, and the murky back-room maneuvers behind collusion, expansion, and the battle for and against profit-sharing, Lords of the Realm is an utterly compelling, picaresque epic that perhaps does discover the real soul of America.

Helyar ( Barbarians at the Gate ) presents a history of player-owner labor relations that dissects baseball for the big-business it is. As background, he shows how the owners intimidated players into accepting low salaries and prohibited their movement through the reserve clause, which made the player the property of his team forever. The central character of the book is union organizer Marvin Miller. Helyar relates how Miller overcame anti-union feelings of the players, and how he succeeded in overturning the reserve clause with the cases of Catfish Hunter, Dave McNally and Andy Messersmith. He scored another win after the strike of 1981, when he hood-winked the baseball owners into salary arbitration, which grossly inflated salaries. We're shown the commissioners: pompous Bowie Kuhn; Peter Ueberroth and his disastrous "collusion" policies that caused the owners to pay millions of dollars in retribution to players for restricting their free movement; and Fay Vincent, whose tenure was soap-operish. This enlightening and provocative book may be too legalistic for the casual fan. Major ad/promo; author tour.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Wall Street Journal reporter Helyar (coauthor of Barbarians at the Gate, 1990) colorfully argues that baseball has been run poorly from its humble 19th-century beginnings to its current status as a multibillion-dollar enterprise. A brief passage near the end of Helyar's book has already sparked a controversy. In an almost offhand quote, New York Mets owner Nelson Doubleday allegedly refers to two of his fellow owners as ``Jew-boys.'' Doubleday denies the quote, but an equally plausible reaction would be ``Why me?'' Helyar's book is filled with statements from owners past and present that range from the deeply offensive to the just plain stupid. It is impossible to read this book and not marvel that baseball survives despite 125 years of blundering by many of the people who have owned its teams. One also also comes away with an altered perception of the sport's problems. Baseball players have taken the brunt of the blame, but Helyar shifts the onus almost entirely to the owners. Prime examples: the owners' near total absence of self-restraint in bidding up players' salaries and the refusal of large-market clubs to share the riches with their poorer colleagues in a revenue- sharing plan. Helyar takes us inside the most intimate meetings at some of the most crucial moments in baseball history. The book's major fault is that Helyar gives few inklings of his fly-on-the- wall sources, and readers must accept legions of offending and revealing quotes--like Doubleday's--on trust. But it is this same gossip-column quality that makes a thick tome on the business of baseball read like a suspense novel. A must-read for baseball fans and for anyone who would like to know how the very wealthy and the very ambitious manage the business of America's national pastime. (Book-of-the-Month Club selection) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

For fans normally too addled, or unmoved, by the business side of baseball to follow it in their sports pages, John Heylar offers a lucid, compelling economic history of the game. In the spirit of his Barbarians at the Gate (1990), coauthored with Bryan Burrough, the Wall Street Journal reporter spins a labyrinthine tale fueled by money--in this case, from TV--and driven by a zany cast of characters that only baseball seems able to produce. From the early 1960s through the 1993 season, all the game's landmark, business-related events are detailed: the haphazard formation of the players' union, the Curt Flood and Andy Messersmith cases that tested the reserve clause, the strikes of 1972 and 1981, league expansions, and the signings of individual stars (and nonstars) that ticked baseball's salary scale ever upward. Heylar not only covers a lot of ground, but, more important, he places all of the events and people into a coherent context. No group comes off too well here--from autocratic commissioners to myopic owners to pampered players--but they do seem all too human. And, as in other morality tales, some principals even emerge as genuine heroes. Heylar's general conclusion: Major League Baseball remains a thing of beauty in spite of, not because of, those who manage it. Alan Moores

Heylar (coauthor with Bryan Burroughs of Barbarians at the Gate, LJ 1/90) develops the business history of baseball into one of the most entertaining sports books of the year. He deftly weaves the financial facts with in-depth and entrancing profiles of many major league owners. The author's treatment of such mavericks as Bill Veeck, Ted Turner, and Charlie Finlay are captivating and insightful. The beginning chapters illustrate the sport's innocent age, when the players partook for the enjoyment of the game and the owners saw their athletes more as their children than as employees. Later chapters are devoted to the players' union movement and the owners' inability to act with restraint. Heylar's investigative skills make the book informative, while his sincere interest in the sport allows even the casual fan to read this work with great enjoyment. Highly recommended.
Jeffrey Gay, Bridgewater P.L., Mass.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.