A What-If Fantasy
I recently received an eight-page letter from an Oakland A’s fan disgruntled with the leadership of A’s GM Billy Beane. At times he mixed up his arguments a little bit, arguing one moment that Beane was arrogant and the next moment that he was a poor judge of talent. His long list of Billy’s mistakes would give one the impression that the A’s probably hadn’t made the playoffs since Connie Mack died. Having said that, his writing was clear, his research exhaustive, his use of the language varied and impressive, his presentation flawless. He gave every impression of being a highly intelligent, organized, successful person who happened to be powerfully disenchanted with Billy Beane’s stewardship of his favorite baseball team. There was, unfortunately, nothing whatsoever that he could do with his irritation other than write letters to other people who couldn’t do anything about it either.
I’m not here to argue about Billy Beane; if Billy were on trial on a charge of arrogance I wouldn’t want to be his lawyer, and if he were on trial for his ability as a GM he would scarcely need one. What struck me about the letter was the ironic impotence of it: That here you have this man, who is probably just as intelligent as Billy Beane or anyway just as intelligent as most General Managers, who cares passionately about his subject, who wants the Oakland A’s to succeed, and yet who has no access whatsoever to the levers that control his team. I got to thinking: wouldn’t it be interesting if he DID have a way to seek power within the organization? What if he could simply declare himself a candidate for the Oakland A’s General Managers’ position, present to the Oakland fan base the arguments that he has presented to me, and stand for election against Billy Beane?
Philosophically, I believe that almost everything that exists is an accident of history. . .that we could as reasonably run the bases clockwise as counter-clockwise, that there could as easily be seven bases as four, that the pitcher could as reasonably throw from 150 feet as from 60, that umpires could as easily wear gold as blue, that the roster limit could as easily be eleven as twenty-five and that the Dodgers could just as easily play in New Orleans as in LA. Fundamentally, there is very little about the game that has to be the way it is. This article is an examination of the alternative universe fantasy suggested by the gentleman’s letter.
The Union Democratic Association was founded in 1968 by an unhappy Chicago Cub fan living in Indianapolis. John Adrian Folger had made a fortune from a 1946 patent on disposable diapers, and had spent much of the 1960s trying to purchase a major league baseball team—the Cubs, preferably, but that failing any team except the Cardinals. Although he was wealthy enough to buy half a dozen teams he could never seem to meet the right people at the right time. When a team was for sale he was always showing up a day late and a dollar long.
Finally, on May 18, 1968, he made the announcement of his intention to launch a competing league. How exactly the decision was made that each franchise should operate as a mini-democracy is a subject of some dispute. Certainly there are countless histories that associate this decision with the 1960s slogan “Power to the People”, but Mr. Folger was hardly a leftist radical, and it appears more likely that he was influenced by the mid-sixties dominance of the Green Bay Packers, a football team more or less publicly owned by the citizens of a small Wisconsin city. Folger had used Lamar Hunt’s courage in founding the AFL as an inspiration for his project, and also to convince prospective owners that they could succeed.
In any case it was decided that the professionals in each city were to be directly answerable to the fans. The Union Democratic Association consists of twelve teams—Indianapolis, Buffalo, Jacksonville, Charlotte, New Orleans and Memphis in the East, and Sacramento, Salt Lake City, San Jose, Las Vegas, San Antonio and Portland in the West. Each roster in the Association has twenty-two players, twelve of whom are employees of the team, and the other ten of whom are actually employed by the league, although assigned to play for the team. There is also a four-team developmental league centered in western Texas; more on that later.
The league starts play on or about April 1, with a pre-season tournament played out in three-game series. The teams that finished one and two in each division the previous year get first-round byes, and then the number three team in one division plays the number six team in the other division, while the number four team plays the number five. After that they play three more rounds of three-game series, always on the home field of the higher-seeded team. The winner of the tournament wins the Jefferson Cup, which is the league’s most prized championship. Very large bonuses are paid to the players and coaches for each series win in the Jefferson Cup games. A gigantic replica of a loving cup, more than sixty feet high, is displayed in the winner’s park throughout the season.
After that they take a two-week break to celebrate the Jefferson Cup series and cement the winner’s position in history, and then league play starts about May 10. They play a 135-game schedule (75 games in the division, 60 out), and wrap that up about September 25; each team is required to schedule at least ten double-headers during the season. Games that cannot be played when they are scheduled are never made up, except for the Jefferson Cup games; they simply disappear from the schedule, so that sometimes, before the development of modern drain-through surfaces, teams would complete their schedule having played less than 120 games.
After each season there are a series of three elections to steer the course for each franchise. On October 15 there is a referendum on the manager. The manager (unless he resigns) runs unopposed, in an up or down vote of the fans. If he fails the vote of confidence, the responsibility to hire a new manager falls to the General Manager—the incoming General Manager, not the outgoing General Manager. Almost 90% of managers win the vote of confidence and are retained for the following season, but this is true in large part because those managers whose jobs would be in jeopardy generally resign rather than face defeat at the ballot box.
The General Manager stands for election one week after the national election day—the second Tuesday after the first Monday in November. Anyone can stand for election as General Manager—anyone. There is no clearing committee, no age requirement, no experience requirement; anyone can run. Often these elections turn into wild, rambunctious contests involving dozens of participants. Many times people campaign for these positions for years, or even decades. Kevin Neulander, current GM of the San Jose Tremors, starting running for election to that position in 1974, when he was sixteen years old, and stood for election every year until 1983, never earning more than three percent of the vote. He started his own business in 1984, sold the business in 1998 for $182 million, and was elected GM of the Tremors in 2000. He was ousted by Peter Melton in 2003, but won back the position in 2004.
To be elected GM you must win an actual majority of the vote. If no one wins a majority of the vote in the first round there will be a second round vote the next day. The same people will be on the ballot the second day, except that candidates who received less than one percent of the vote are eliminated. This can result in the second-day ballot being the same as the original ballot, although it rarely does; there are almost always people on the ballot who no one really wants to see as the GM. After the Wednesday vote the lowest vote-getter is eliminated from the ballot, and, if necessary, they vote again on Thursday, and on Friday and on Saturday.
In general, however, the election is almost always decided by the second or third day. It may be, for example, that on the first day of the election a not-very-popular incumbent GM will win 38% of the vote in a field including several former players from the team, none of whom wins more than 20%. But on the second day of the vote almost everyone who wants to throw the bums out will coalesce behind the leading vote-getter among the ex-players, and he may have a majority. People who get less than five or ten percent of the vote in the first round often drop out at that point, and in fact it is not uncommon for the incumbent GM to resign if he gets less than 35% in the first round, since experience has shown that an incumbent GM almost never gains significant ground after the first-round vote. Although there was once an election which took eight days to complete, in Jacksonville in 1993, more than ninety-five percent of elections are over by the third day.
The final election, the vote on the players, is staged sometime shortly after New Year’s Day, also on a Tuesday. First, the players are asked to file whether they would like to return to the same team the next year. Ordinarily the great majority of players do file to return to the team, since the “Full Team” positions are better paid than the “League Staff” and “Team Staff” positions. All 22 members of the team are eligible to stand for election to the ten Full Team positions. The fans vote “yes” or “no” on each player who files to return, and the ten highest vote-getters win the Full Team positions.
Initially the Full Team positions were paid $13,000 a year, while the League Staff positions and the two Team Staff positions paid $10,000 a year. As salaries have exploded over the years the numbers have gone up to $1 million and $1.3 million, but the same ratio has been retained, so that you don’t have superstars in the league making seventy times as much as their teammates, as you do in the National and American leagues. A player can make another $500,000 more if his team wins the Jefferson Cup, but that, again, is the same for all the members of the team.
After the Players Election the General Manager can elect to retain two more players from his team, the “team staff” positions, so that each team retains at least twelve players from year to year. As a consequence of this there is much more stability in the association than in the National or American League. Many, many players remain with one team for fifteen or twenty years. It does sometimes happen that a popular veteran will be re-elected for several years after his playing skills have diminished, and this is thought to be a weakness of the association system. Veteran players who file to return to the team but don’t win a position in their mid-thirties often retire at that time, rather than returning in a League Staff position that could see them playing in some other city, far from their home. In this way the league is thought to be better for a family man than the so-called “Organized Baseball” leagues. There are no trades in the league, so an established player will not have his life disrupted in that way.
Anyway, twelve players are designated to return to their team by the end of January, ten by election and two by selection. The league then hires another 200 players, 120 or whom will eventually make the roster of a team, and the other 80 of whom will go to the developmental program operated east of El Paso. In the first week of February there is a reverse-order draft of these 200 players, the weakest team from the season before getting the first draft pick. Each team picks 16 or 17 players, and each team then goes to spring training with 28 or 29 players, from whom the 22-man roster is chosen. The Full Team and Team Staff players have the team made, and the others compete for the ten League Staff positions on each roster.
Those who make a roster will earn $1,000,000 a year; those who go to the developmental program will earn $100,000 a year, but will still accumulate service time in the pension plan at the same level as those chosen for a roster. For those players, the value of the pension benefits often outweighs their salary. It is not uncommon for players to retire (or be released) after fifteen- or seventeen-year careers, spent almost entirely in the developmental program.
After the rosters are announced on March 25, there will be one opportunity each month for the General Manager to adjust the roster. After the game is played on the last day of each month, April through August, the General Manager may release one League Staff player back to the developmental program, and claim one player from the developmental program. These decisions are hotly debated on the talk shows around the Union cities, and thousands of fans from every team will make the journey to west Texas to personally check out the available players. The General Managers, unless they have great faith in their scouts, basically live in west Texas the last week of each month. And there is an old saying in the league: You don’t want to slump in August. If a player is released at the end of July, he may be picked up at the end of August by a team that has abandoned the pennant chase and is re-stocking for the following year. But if a player is released to the developmental program at the end of August he is not on anyone’s roster at the end of the season, and thus cannot file for a Full Team position.
In the first year of the Union’s play, 1969, total attendance for the league was 2.1 million fans, or about 175,000 fans per team. It was less than 2,000 per game. There might have been less than a thousand core fans for each team, but those thousand got to be involved in the decisions of the team, and so they tended to stay involved, and to draw others in around them. Attendance grew to 189,000 per team in 1970, to 483,000 per team by 1980, 1,1 million per team by 1990, 1.9 million per team in 2000, and 2.7 million per team today. In cities like San Jose, which compete pretty directly with the American and National Leagues, attendance at the Union games has exploded whenever Organized Baseball has gone on strike.
There are 20,000 “seats” available on each team; league rules limit them to 20,000, and all twelve teams have long since sold out. The 20,000 seats are season-ticket holders, and they are the voting block in the elections. No one can hold more than one, and the right to a seat cannot be transferred from one person to another; only from the team to the individual. Those who own seats do, however, have the right to re-sell tickets to individual games, and there are some fans who own seats but never or virtually never go to the games; they just sell off the “game passes”, as they call them, and retain the voting rights. You can’t leave the seat to someone else in your will when you die—all lawsuits on that issue were decided in the league’s favor—so there are always some seats available each year. Seats on the popular teams have sold for as much as $450,000. The sale of new seats reduces the annual cost to the established seat holders.
The money from the “seats”—the season tickets—goes to the teams, and the team is responsible to pay the full salaries of the Full Team players, as well the team General Manager, the scouts, the ticket managers, the manager and coaches, the Team Staff players, the promotion directors, the PA announcer, etc. The team is responsible to procure a stadium to play in. There are no “owners” in the Union, anymore; there were original owners, but the system was set up so that the original owners would be gradually “bought out” by the seat holders—bought out at a nice profit, but once each team had sold out the 20,000 seats, the ownership position disappeared.
The money from the sales of “game passes”—that is, tickets beyond the 20,000 “seats”—is split evenly between the home team, the visiting team and the league. All broadcasting revenue beyond expenses goes directly to the league, and the league is responsible for paying the salaries of the League Staff players, the players in the developmental program, the umpires, league officials, and, interestingly enough, hotel rooms. The transportation costs are borne by the teams, but the league maintains hotel rooms or apartments where visiting players stay. The league pays for promotional events, and the league maintains press boxes. The league, not the team, controls access to the press box.
What is perhaps most interesting about the Union Association is the way that these different operating arrangements have shaped the ethics and behavior of the people who are in the Union. Perhaps most striking is the attitude of the Union Democratic Association Players toward hustle and showboating. The things that you see sometimes in the other leagues, where players may stand and watch home runs leave the park or take thirty seconds to round the bases after a home run. ..these things would simply never happen in the Union. The Union players clearly understand: anything that will get you booed will get you fired. Anything that causes the fans to dislike a player is not tolerated not only by the fans but by the other players. The players are very well paid, but they are not well enough insulated that they can forget who is paying their salary.
There is a certain range of anti-fan attitudes among the major league players, and I don’t mean to make this seem worse than it is, because many sportswriters do in fact exaggerate these failings by the players, and do represent them as much worse than they really are. But there are certain levels of insensitivity toward the fans, among the players, that are notably absent in the Union. There is a thing the players sometimes, if you are (let us say) a Dodger fan and you are talking to a Dodger player and you refer to a game that “we” won, the player may say, “You got a mouse in your pocket?” Meaning, who is this “we”; you don’t play for the team.
It’s very rude, and it’s very common. That would never, ever happen in the Union Democratic Association, because it really is “we”. The fan is a part of the team, a part of the decision-making process. There is a sense that we’re in this together. The players rarely hear boos. The players are much, much more co-operative with the media, because they are, in a sense, always running for re-election.
But at the same time the media is a little less judgmental, a little less harsh, because they’re not dealing with arrogant and hostile players, and also because their fan base has different expectations from the media.
The managers in the Union Democratic Association actually have more power than they do in the other leagues. In part this is because the General Manager can’t fire the manager ; the new manager is hired by the GM, but once hired he serves at the pleasure of the fans. That’s not the only reason the manager has more power; there is a more subtle reason. The manager is one of the main information conduits to the public. The manager has his daily five-minute radio show, just as in the AL and the NL, he has his post-game briefings and all of the other everyday chances to talk to the press.
In the other leagues managers sometimes talk about being a “players’ manager”, and they will speak about this as if it was something to be proud of. There is no such thing as a players’ manager in the Union Democratic. What they mean by being a “players’ manager” is that he covers up for the players’ failings. The manager in the Union doesn’t do this, and wouldn’t be expected to do this. It wouldn’t be tolerated by the fans, to whom the manager must answer, and also, the manager, through his press contacts, is shaping the roster of the team for the following season. If he pretends a player is hustling when he isn’t, he is helping to keep that player on the roster the following year. There’s no percentage in that. If he pretends that a player is a defensive star when he isn’t, he may help that player get re-elected to the team, and then he has to live with him another year. Ultimately, it will cost him his job.
The behavior of players across the board is just better. If a player gets a reputation for being out on the town at all hours of the night, the reputation may cost him his job before the effects show up on his batting average. The players know this, so behavior that in the other leagues is tolerated if not encouraged by the community of players is frowned upon by the players in the Union. Community service by the players is much, much more important—in fact, virtually every player, within weeks of joining a new team, will be active in a handful of community efforts.
The level of effort—hustle—is controlled not only by the teams, but also by the league. In the other leagues, a young player can behave pretty much however he wants to behave if he has enough talent, because the team, in their constant effort to maximize their talent, cannot afford to severe ties with talented players over anything less than major behavioral issues. Lesser talents, of course, have less rope, but the teams cannot be seen as using one set of rules for the stars, another set for the ordinary players, so the effect is that the team has very little ability to enforce standards of behavior.
But if the league doesn’t like a particular young player or doesn’t approve of his behavior when he is in the developmental process, they can simply release him; they’re not under much pressure to keep the very best players in all cases, since the league doesn’t care who wins. If a player doesn’t hustle in the developmental leagues, he’s gone—regardless of how much talent he might have. A player who is elected to Full Team status is safe—he’s answerable to the fans, not the league—but only 120 of the league’s 464 have that protection. The rest of them, if they don’t behave in an appropriate fashion, are simply not offered contracts for the following season.
To an extent, this does reduce the talent level of the players in the Union Democratic Association. There’s still a lot of competitive pressure to improve, but it isn’t as constant or unrelenting as the pressure on the front offices of the teams in the other leagues.
In the other leagues you have “revolving door” managers and “revolving door” general managers. This rarely happens in the Union. Because the teams have longer histories with a more limited set of players, they tend to hire new managers from among their former players. General Managers fired by one set of fans are rarely able to get themselves elected somewhere else.
Because front offices are constantly open to being taken over by outsiders, they are much, much more open to new ideas than are the American and National League front offices. Sabermetrics was generally embraced by the Union Democratic Association teams by 1990. At the same time, as front offices are more open they are less professional. Teams are taken over sometimes by “outside agitator” GMs who really have no idea what they are doing once they take over. On the other hand, the GMs have much less power than in the other leagues. GMs don’t negotiate salaries, the salary structure being set by the league in negotiations with the players’ union. They can’t make trades, they can’t fire the manager and they can’t release more than half the roster. They can’t sign amateur free agents. Their job is still important, but they do play a more limited role.
There was a fear early on that the league would be racist, but that hasn’t happened; the percentage of black Americans in the Union is far higher than it is in other leagues, in part because there are very few foreign-born players in the Union. There was a fear early on that the fans would be irresponsible, and would perhaps fire the manager every year, but that hasn’t happened. What happens when you give people responsibility is what happens to fathers when their children are born: they become more responsible. The responsible elements in the fan community step forward; the irresponsible ones are generally pushed to the side.
I don’t want to make it appear that the Union Democratic Association is a sort of Baseball Utopia, where everyone behaves better and no problems are allowed to develop. The league has politics, lots and lots of politics, and politics is not the most attractive of human activities. The campaigns for the General Managers’ positions, which go on virtually the year around, are often annoying and sometimes extremely unpleasant. The quality of play sometimes suffers because the fans protect a popular washed-up veteran, and there is no way to get him off the roster until the next election. Worse yet, the battles for Full Team positions sometimes turn ugly. You may have, for example, a talented young player who is not well liked by the veterans, competing for a Full Team berth with a fading veteran who has been on the team for years. The veterans, at times, will say things to the media about the young player that are not conducive to good relations in the clubhouse, things that they would never say in the other leagues. The players in the other leagues call the Union the Phonies Association, because the players do try to curry favor with the fans. In the other leagues the players sort of see themselves as a special class of people, entitled by wealth and talent to make up their own rules, but required to cover for one another within those rules—sort of like the Kennedys. In the Union the players are more inclined to see themselves as answerable to the fans, and to hell with the other players. On balance, it has been a very interesting experiment.