Commentary : Can Toughness Win a Pennant?

On Friday, God and Mike Port (who are sometimes interchangeable) willing, Bob Boone will be able to resume his place behind home plate at Anaheim Stadium.

The reason Bob Boone isn’t now wearing an Angel uniform is that 1987 is the year the people who run baseball decided to take a hard line with their personnel in the name of more efficient business management. As a result, such blue-chip players as Tim Raines, Rich Gedman, Bob Horner, Ron Guidry and Boone--among others--are playing catch with their kids in the backyard instead of plying their trade. Until recently, Cy Young award winner Roger Clemens was one of the disaffected. Only the direct intercession of baseball Commissioner Peter Uberroth got him back in the fold--a rather remarkable bit of sophistry since Uberroth is also the principal mover and shaker in this year’s tough-business approach.

The new line goes like this: until last year, baseball owners were generally lousy businessmen. Therefore, the time had come to apply the same kinds of efficiency yardsticks to baseball that govern other successful businesses. And although it wasn’t stated, because the specter of collusion hovers just overhead, it was certainly implied that the days of high-priced free agents and gratuitous six-figure raises for mediocre performance were gone forever.

The Angels got a headstart when Mike Port took over as general manager three years ago with instructions from owner Gene Autry’s wife, Jackie, and presumably the owner himself, to cut down the Angels’ payroll and look within the organization for a strong foundation of young players on which to build the team. Well and good. Expensive free agents had not served the Angels especially well--or at least had not brought a pennant--and the new approach was highly productive, turning up such fine young players as Wally Joyner, Gary Pettis, Dick Schofield, Kirk McCaskill, Devon White, Mark McLemore and others.

But in the process, Port never learned a lesson that most modern businessmen outside of baseball know instinctively: that toughness, alone, can be counterproductive. Efficiency also means dealing with employees in an evenhanded, equitable and reasonably civilized manner. Business practices that destroy morale are not efficient over the long pull, particularly in a field where performance can vary as widely as it can on a baseball diamond.

Consider several cases in point:

Although Port had five months following the end of the last baseball season to negotiate contracts with his players, he refused to open discussions with some key players until spring training was under way. Then he put an arbitrary closing date of March 5 on negotiations, in effect saying to top-quality players whose requests were modest, “Take it or get out.”

Port also waited until the last minute to negotiate with the Angels’ eligible free agents. As a result, he lost the services of the man in large measure responsible for the emergence last year of the Angel pitching staff--catcher Bob Boone--over a difference of $10,000. For this tiny investment, Port could not only have bought insurance for his pitchers but a lot of good will as well. That’s a high price to pay for a $10,000 stroke of Port’s ego--and we can only hope it will be corrected this week.

Port likes to talk tough. He consistently puts down players under the guise of straight talk.

He should be required to read every morning something Joyner told The Times when he was under duress to sign at the Angels’ spring training camp: “It doesn’t make sense. If they’re trying to show their power, fine. But the attitude from the negotiations is, ‘I could care less how you feel when you go out on the field or what you think of the California Angels.’ ”

The argument that major league ballplayers are overpaid crybabies and need to be treated as recalcitrant children is irrelevant. They are the best at what they do, and they are paid what the market dictates. If it is good business to turn a player like Joyner against the organization by stiff-arming him as a negotiating tactic, then Lee Ioccoca should be censured by the Chrysler board of directors and traded to Ford or GM. Or Mike Port should be enrolled in Psychology I at the nearest junior college.

Along with millions of other Americans, I look on the opening of the baseball season each year as a kind of renewal of life--an annual promise of immortality. The people who run baseball have been given a tightly held monopoly over a game that is unique because it touches so many of us in such deep ways. Baseball is enjoying its greatest era of popularity, but if it starts alienating its best players by excessive displays of arbitrary toughness, the fans will eventually react. Peter Uberroth understood this when he intervened in the Clemens case. But so far the lesson seems lost on a lot of baseball’s general managers, including Mike Port.

If Port thinks there is no connection between his brand of “tough” business and employee morale, then he doesn’t deserve a winner. Only trouble is, I don’t get one either.