The Cold Draft

"The first call for the right of negotiation belongs to Kansas City," said Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick.

"Robert James Monday," responded the Athletics' Farm Director Hank Peters, "outfielder from Santa Monica, Calif., a sophomore at Arizona State University in Tempe."

And so it began last week in Manhattan's Commodore Hotel--baseball's first "free agent" draft, which, in effect, stripped away the bargaining rights of the country's young hopefuls and put them on the block like so many sides of beef. To hear some of the clubs talk, it was the greatest boon to baseball since Happy Chandler returned to politics. "I've been pushing for this thing for 20 years," crowed the Cleveland Indians' vice president, Gabe Paul.

Under the new ground rules, no ballplayer can play one $100,000 bonus offer against another. When a player is drafted, the team choosing him has exclusive rights to negotiate with him for six months, and can be as generous or as miserly as it wants. If the player says no, back he goes into the pool, and comes up for the next draft--an older and presumably wiser man. Unlike the pro football draft, where a player retains some competitive bargaining power through rival leagues, he can either like it or lump it. And where a pro football player can play out a year's option and then be free to deal for himself, the baseball draft could theoretically bind a player to one team for life.

Understandably, many of the richest teams see the draft as a threat to their power. No longer will such moneybags as the New York Yankees and Los Angeles Dodgers be able to sew up the brightest prospects. The last-place team each year gets first crack, and so on up the line. Yankee Vice President John Johnson called it "immoral"--though the seventh-place Yanks had better watch their language.

The draftees themselves were silent --even Arizona State's "Rick" Monday, who had better cause to wail than most. The word was that Kansas City was offering him $100,000 to sign. But Rick is only 19, and his season average was .396, with nine homers and 45 RBIs in 48 games this spring. That would have been worth at least $200,000 in the good old days. However, if the draft seems too cold, there is always the Peace Corps.

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